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Moses Davis, The Maine Cabinetmaker Who Built a Fort

A wooden blockhouse that still stands by the Sheepscot River is the unlikely legacy of a cabinetmaker named Moses Davis who strongly disagreed with the purpose of the fort he helped build.

Davis was not just a cabinetmaker. He was a farmer, a lawmaker and a respected leader of the Town of Edgecomb, Maine. He also happened to own a piece of land that was perfect for a coastal fort.

Fort Edgecomb blockhouse, 1936. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

He was a pious and hardworking 27-year-old when he and his wife Sarah moved from Newburyport, Mass., in 1770 to a settlement across from Wiscasset. After Edgecomb was incorporated in 1774, Moses Davis was selected to represent the town in the General Court. The state selected him to serve as a delegate to the Massachusetts conventions that led to the Articles of Confederation in 1781 and that ratified the U.S. Constitution in 1788 (he voted yes).

Moses Davis: Farmer

In between conventions, Moses Davis worked his farm, reared six children and made furniture. He was a town selectmen and justice of the peace who married 183 couples over his lifetime.

On Sept. 11, 1783, he wrote in his diary that he ‘workt in shop on Capt. Dunton chest.’ He also worked on making a ‘Great plow,’ finished a chest for John Place, built a ‘standing stool’ for Mrs. Decket and helped build a kitchen in Wiscasset.

Fast forward 25 years. Wiscasset grew to a busy port second only to Portland. Ships had carried timber from Wiscasset to Europe and the West Indies, while a fishing fleet and merchant vessels had sailed in and out of the harbor. But President Thomas Jefferson’s wildly unpopular Embargo of 1807 had strangled commerce along the Sheepscot River.

Five Moseses

War with Britain was looming on May 21, 1808. On that spring day, 65-year-old Moses Davis received two visitors, Maj. Moses Porter and Moses Carlton. Porter, an engineer, had served under Henry Knox and was charged with building batteries from Castine Harbor to the mouth of the Kennebec River. Carlton was a local ship owner and businessman hired to handle the project.

Porter wanted to buy land from Moses Davis to build a fort that would defend Wiscasset and enforce the hated embargo. Davis’ farm – on Davis Island – was right across from Wiscasset.

Fort Edgecomb

On June 13, 1808, Moses Davis formally deeded over three acres on Davis Island for $300.00 to the United States government. The next day, Moses Porter moved in with the Davis family and set out boundary stakes for the fort.

For the next six months, he supervised the work while Moses Davis helped build the fort along with still two other Moseses: his son, Moses Davis, Jr., and his hired hand, Moses Dodge. Ironically, Moses Davis was just then petitioning the General Court for help in redressing the Embargo Law.

The two younger Moseses and other workers did most of the heavy lifting: hauling planks for the gun platforms and rocks, brick, timber and sod for the battery.

Race to the Finish

Workers finished the fort in time to celebrate James Madison’s inauguration as president. On Feb. 23, 1809, Moses Dodge had a team of oxen haul cannons to the fort. It was said the only time the cannons at Fort Edgecomb were fired was in salute of James Madison – that is, the end of the embargo.

Thomas Jefferson actually lifted the embargo three days before leaving office. Moses Davis happily recorded in his diary that seven or eight vessels went downriver to European and other ports.

The octagonal, 34-foot-high blockhouse still stands. Fort Edgecomb is now a historic site with guided tours in the summer. It represents America’s best-preserved blockhouse of the period and has a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Fort Edgecomb (color) By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28677991.

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The Ipswich Fright: Terror Strikes a Town Even When the British Aren’t Coming

In the days after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, a general panic seized the population around Boston. Would the British regulars march to other towns, murdering their inhabitants and burning their homes? Nowhere was the fear greater than on the North Shore, where a fast-spreading rumor caused the Ipswich Fright.

Hundreds of frightened Ipswich citizens fled their homes, filling the roads with carts carrying what household goods they could grab. Their panic spread to the nearby towns of Newbury, Newburyport, Beverly, Salisbury and even Haverhill, Mass., 20 miles to the west.

John Greenleaf Whittier

The rather ignominious show of fear might have been forgotten, save for John Greenleaf Whittier. He immortalized the Ipswich Fright in 1866 with a story about it in his Prose Miscellanies.

Whittier described the Great Ipswich Fright as “the way in which the woof of comedy interweaves with the warp of tragedy.”

The Ipswich Fright

Ipswich, in the days of revolution, was a steady, conservative town solidly behind the patriot cause, wrote Whittier. Midway between Salem and the ancient town of Newburyport,

…the traveller on the Eastern Railroad sees on the right, between him and the sea, a tall church-spire, rising above a semicircle of brown roofs and venerable elms; to which a long scalloping range of hills, sweeping off to the seaside, forms a green background.

The John Whipple House in Ipswich

On April 22, the able-bodied men and boys of Ipswich had marched off to Cambridge after the Battles of Lexington and Concord three days earlier.

Rumors flew that the soldiers would come out again, and they would burn, kill and destroy everything that came in their way. Coastal towns had special concern that the British would attack from the sea.

So on that morning, old men, women and children rushed to the village green to hear the news.

“A rumor, which no one attempted to trace or authenticate, spread from lip to lip that the British regulars had landed on the coast and were marching upon the town,” wrote Whittier. “A scene of indescribable terror and confusion followed.”

Carrying Off Goods

Thomas Franklin Waters reported that someone had seen two small vessels standing in the Ipswich River. “We may be sure there was fright with good reasons at the farms on Castle Hill and Castle Neck,” wrote Waters in Ipswich in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1917.

View from Castle Hill

People hid their valuables, piled their household goods into ox carts and headed north to New Hampshire.

Diarist John Tudor described the scene that followed. “[M]en and horses driving past, up and down the roads…People were in great perplexity; women in distress for their husbands and friends who had marched. …All confusion, numbers of carts, etc., carrying off goods, etc.

Contagion

The rumor quickly spread to Beverly that the enemy had massacred every man, woman and child in Ipswich. The scene repeated itself.

At mid-afternoon in Newburyport, the town had assembled to hear the details of the Battles of Lexington and Concord., according to a later account in the Newburyport Herald. Parson Carey was opening the meeting with a prayer when a rider named Ebenezer Todd rushed up. “Turn out, turn out, for God’s sake,” he cried, “or you will be all killed! The regulars are marching on us; they are at Ipswich now, cutting and slashing all before them!”

The people of Newbury ran to Salisbury, while the people of Rowley ran to Newbury. The people of Haverhill fled in boats across the Merrimack River to Bradford.

Many spent the night in empty houses in Salisbury. The houses were empty because their inhabitants had fled farther north into New Hampshire.

Woof of Comedy

During the Ipswich Panic, one woman threw her silver down her well. A man hid his private documents under a stone and stood guard in his home with a musket.

Another man put his family into a boat to find safety on Ram Island. Through the evening dusk he imagined the enemy pursued him. An infant started crying in the stern of the boat.

“Do throw that squalling brat overboard,” he said to his wife. “Or we shall all be discovered and killed.”

A woman ran four or five miles up the river. She stopped to take a breath and nurse her child, when she found to her great horror that she had brought the cat instead of the baby.

The Newburyport Herald also reported,

In another instance, a Mr. J. L. seeing Mr. C. H., a very corpulent man, standing at his door with his musket loaded, inquired of him if he was not going. “Going! No.” said he, “I am going to stop and shoot the devils.”

Not until the next morning did most of the refugees learn the truth. Some, however, found out earlier. According to Whittier, a young man from Exeter, N.H., happened to be staying in Ipswich.

[H]e mounted his horse and followed after the retreating multitude, undeceiving all whom he overtook. Late at night he reached Newburyport, greatly to the relief of its sleepless inhabitants, and hurried across the river, proclaiming as he rode the welcome tidings. The sun rose upon haggard and jaded fugitives, worn with excitement and fatigue, slowly returning home ward, their satisfaction at the absence of danger somewhat moderated by an unpleasant conscious ness of the ludicrous scenes of their premature night flitting.

Images: Whipple house By Elizabeth B. Thomsen – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28573446. View from Castle Hill By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11189622. This story updated in 2022.

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Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass

He rose from slavery in the South to international prominence as a writer, orator and anti-slavery activist. Frederick Douglass didn’t spend a day in school and only learned to read by a stroke of luck. That’s just one of the amazing facts about Frederick Douglass.

He was born in 1818 to a white father he never identified and to a black mother he barely knew.

Douglass escaped from slavery as a 20-year-old with the help of a free African-American, Anna Murray, whom he married as soon as he escaped.

After only a few years of freedom, abolitionists discovered the articulate young fugitive slave. But Frederick Douglass was far more than an abolitionist exhibit of a survivor of slavery. As an orator, he enraptured his audiences; as a polemicist, he caught the attention of presidents; and as a public intellectual, he influenced the debate about slavery, war, equality and opportunity.

Here then are seven fascinating facts about Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass

1. Why New Bedford

Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford in 1838 to get a job as a caulker, a trade he had learned as a slave in Baltimore.

When he escaped slavery and arrived in New York City, his rescuer, David Ruggles, advised him to go to New Bedford because he could get a job on the waterfront there. He could also fit into the large African-American community, which included both free blacks and fugitive slaves. He arrived penniless and with a new wife. Eventually he began to speak out against slavery at local abolitionist meetings.

William Lloyd Garrison, leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, heard him speak and decided to put him on the broader abolitionist circuit.

By the time Frederick Douglass left New Bedford, he was a rising star on the abolitionist lecture circuit, traveling as far as Michigan to speak against slavery.

He never did get a job as a caulker, though. White workers on the waterfront refused to work with him, so he had to earn a meager living doing common labor like hauling barrels of whale oil.

Nathan and Mary Johnson houses, where Frederick and Anna Douglass first stayed in New Bedford.

2. Columbian Orator

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln learned how to give speeches from the same book.

Published in 1797, the Columbian Orator sold 200,000 copies and went through 23 printings until 1860. The author, Caleb Bingham, was a radical egalitarian who believed the young United States needed educated citizens. He published the book to promote a dignified, classical style of speaking without any aristocratic pretensions.

Abraham Lincoln studied it as a young politician during a cold winter in Illinois. The Columbian Orator also influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Frederick Douglass bought the book as a 13-year-old slave living and working in Fells Point, Baltimore.

His mistress taught him to read, which was unusual (and forbidden). The boy made friends with a gang of white boys in Baltimore, and they showed him their schoolbook, the Columbian Orator. The book captivated him, and he spent 50 cents to buy it with money he earned polishing boots. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he said.

The full name of the book: Columbian Orator, Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules, Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence.

3. A Little-Known Fact About Frederick Douglass

One of the little-known facts about Frederick Douglass was that he took his name from a Scottish hero in a Sir Walter Scott poem.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he changed his name to Stanley, then Johnson, to evade capture when he fled Maryland.

But when he arrived in New Bedford, he and his wife Anna stayed with Nathan and Mary Johnson, black abolitionists. Nathan Johnson told him there were already too many Johnsons in New Bedford. He gave his houseguest the name ‘Douglass’ after the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake.

Frederick Douglass described what happened in one of his three autobiographies:

…unwilling to have another of his own name added to the community in this unauthorised way, after I spent a night and a day at his house, gave me my present name. He had been reading Lady of the Lake, and was pleased to regard me as a suitable person to wear this, one of Scotland’s many famous names.

In the poem, James Douglas feuded with King James V of Scotland, whom he had formerly mentored, and was himself a fugitive. He came from a line of aristocrats known as the black Douglases because of an ancestor’s dark complexion and ferocity on the battlefield.

Douglass later went on the abolitionist lecture circuit in Scotland, a country he loved. While there, he met a surviving relative of Sir Walter Scott.

4. Frederick Douglass Says No to John Brown

Three-and-a-half weeks before John Brown made his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass met with him in a stone quarry across the Virginia line in Pennsylvania. Brown, disguised as a fisherman, urged Douglass to join him in the attack.

Up until then Frederick Douglass encouraged and supported Brown, but he couldn’t go along with his plan to seize the federal armory. He tried to talk him out of the suicide mission.

After the attack failed disastrously, word got out that Douglass met with Brown just before the raid. The governor of Virginia ordered Frederick Douglass arrested, but he fled to Canada and then to Britain.

5. A Career Highlight With Abraham Lincoln

After the Civil War, Frederick Douglass criticized President Abraham Lincoln for his weak Reconstruction plan and failure to give black people the vote. Lincoln invited Douglass to visit him at the White House.

During their meeting – their second – the two men had a long and frank discussion while Connecticut Gov. William Buckingham waited at the door. Lincoln’s secretary interrupted Lincoln twice to tell him the governor waited for him, and Lincoln waved him off. He said, “I want to have a long talk with my friend Frederick Douglass.”

Douglass often retold that story.

6. Jim Crow in Lynn

He moved to Lynn, Mass., in 1841, after his involvement in one of the most famous Jim Crow incidents in history. Still living in New Bedford, he had taken the train from Boston for a speaking engagement in Newburyport, Mass. He boarded the train in Lynn and sat with three white abolitionists.

Then the conductor grabbed him by the collar and demanded he move to the Jim Crow car. Douglass said he would if the conductor gave him a reason. Other passengers began to chant, “Give him a reason.”

The conductor finally replied, “Because you are black.” The passengers surrounded the conductor, but soon a half dozen company thugs arrived and began to beat Frederick Douglass. He clung to his seat, but they pulled it up by the bolts and threw him and the seat out of the railcar and onto the ground. They threw his luggage after him as well.

The outrage shown by the people of Lynn helped persuaded him to move to the city, which had a large abolitionist community. He and his growing family lived in a small frame house on Union Street.

His wife helped support them by working as a shoebinder, a common occupation then in Lynn. He wrote his first autobiography (he wrote three) in Lynn, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Anna Murray Douglass

7. White Women

His friendships with white abolitionist women provoked severe criticism. In 1847, he caused a scandal when he traveled by steamboat down the Hudson River to an abolitionist meeting. Newspapers discovered he slept in a stateroom next to Lydia or Lucretia Mott (it isn’t clear which). He finally had to explain that he had two choices: to sleep on the deck in the cold because black men couldn’t buy cabins, or to have Miss Mott book an adjoining room.

Later, he developed close relationships – possibly romantic – with British abolitionist Julia Griffiths and German radical Ottilie Assing. Both women spent time living in the Douglass household, inspiring speculation and rumor.

But it was his marriage to white abolitionist Helen Pitts that caused a real firestorm of criticism. A descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1859. In her 40s when they met, Douglass hired her as a clerk and married her two years after Anna died.

Fast and furious came the denunciations. “The Venerable Colored Orator Takes a White Wife” screamed one headline. A Washington, D.C., newspaper called it a ‘national calamity.’ Many in the black community called him a traitor to his race.

To the criticism, Frederick Douglass replied, “This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.”

One of the most surprising facts about Frederick Douglass is that he married a white woman. Here he is with his wife Helen Pitts (seated); her sister, Eva Pitts, is standing.

End Notes to Fact About Frederick Douglass

Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass owes much to Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. This story was updated in 2023.

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J.P. Marquand, Sly Satirist of Proper Bostonians

J.P. Marquand mastered two literary genres. As author of a 1930s detective series centering on the international crime-solving detective Mr. Moto, he crafted a hugely successful potboiler mystery series from 1937 to 1957. Hollywood adapted the books for films and made Marquand a wealthy man.

J.P. Marquand

But he is more highly regarded as writer of literary satires, and his favorite targets were the Boston Brahmins. His books brim over with stories of unhappy blue-bloods trapped in their stifling lives while their bank accounts dwindle and their blood lines grow stultifyingly thin.

In an America growing ever more casual in the mid-1900s, Marquand’s characters still religiously dressed for dinner and knew how to eat bread. Yet they couldn’t master some of life’s more basic tasks, such as living within one’s means.

Not born wealthy, Marquand was, nevertheless, surrounded by wealthy New Englanders all his life. He attended Harvard (on scholarship) and Harvard elites figure in many of his works. He had a keen awareness of the differences between a public school boy who gratefully attended Harvard and the students from elite private schools who viewed a Harvard degree as their birthright.

The Literary Marquand

Marquand was such a popular literary figure, he made the cover of both Time and Newsweek in 1949. The pinnacle of Marquand’s success came in 1938 when The Late George Apley, published in 1937, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The book takes the form of a memoir written so slyly the reader never quite knows if Marquand’s overall intent is to mock or praise the values of Boston’s blue bloods.

J.P. Marquand on Time and Newsweek covers

J.P. Marquand on the covers of Time and Newsweek

In one passage, Apley offers an admonition to his son against frivolous spending of even the tiniest sums of money: “There is not much place in this world for personal gratification, nor is this particularly becoming to people of our position.” Apley the character was not ungenerous, however, encouraging support of charitable institutions.

In the book’s most famous anecdote, Apley’s grandfather builds a mansion in the newly fashionable South End. But he sees a man in shirtsleeves across the street. The sight so shocked him he sells his house the next day and moves to the Back Bay.

Scene from the film, The Late George Apley

Apley was adapted for the stage and film, but the story worked best as a novel. Marquand tells it as a memoir, pulled together by a writer who takes on the project after Apley has died and his family wants a better understanding of the man he was. On occasion, readers have stumbled on the work and taken it as fact rather than fiction. Marquand’s editor reported there were instances when visitors to the Museum of Fine Arts asked at the information desk where they could see the fictional “Apley Bronzes.”

Marquand saved some of his sharpest wit for his home town of Newburyport, Mass. and his own family. Marquand moved to Newburyport as a teen. He was raised there by two aunts. He attended Newburyport High School. And he inherited a part interest in a country estate there, which was shared by a large group of cousins – the Hales.

J.P. Marquand Invents Wickford Point

In 1939, the estate became the setting for Marquand’s novel, Wickford Point. The book tells of the relationship between a writer, Jim Calder, and his extended, old New England family that has fallen on hard times – the Brills. The Brills live at their house at Wickford Point struggling to pay their bills and mooching off Jim. The book opens with Jim visiting Wickford Point. He awakens to discover that one of his cousins has siphoned the gasoline from Jim’s car and used it to drive to the beach. The picture doesn’t get any more flattering as the story progresses.

In one scene Jim returns to the house to find his cousin Sid boasting about his ability to twiddle his thumbs, which he has perfected after an evening of practice. The scene was most probably directed at Marquand’s cousin Robert Beverly Hale. Hale was an artist who mastered painting human anatomy, becoming an expert at drawing hands.

The Hales

The whole Hale clan belonged to the family that included patriot Nathan Hale and the writer Edward Everett Hale. Robert was hardly the only Hale cousin who had a doppelgänger in the fictional Brill family. In the book, Mary Brill pursued love, and she would inevitably lose out to her prettier sister Bella. The two daughters most likely were drawn from real life Laura Hale and her half sister Renee Oakman, a model. Married four times, Renee’s exploits and adventures entertained a generation of gossip fans.

One highlight came when she accused her young companion of stabbing her. The New York Times dutifully reported: “Mrs. Renee Oakman Bradbury, 41-year-old former model and a descendant of Nathan Hale, was in serious condition tonight in North Country Community Hospital after having been stabbed in the neck with a steak knife at her home, 14 Bay Avenue, Sea Cliff, by a 25-year-old male companion.”

Other members of the family made appearances in the book, but the most pointed roasting was probably directed at John Brill, the Wickford Sage. John Brill, deceased by the time of the action in the book, was a poet revered by the family as an authority on all things. The real-life Wickford Sage was Edward Everett Hale, Unitarian minister, author and orator. Later generations of Hale children would recount that when they misbehaved, their parents would take them to the statue of Hale in the Boston Public Garden to scare them.

Statue of Edward Everett Hale

Denials and Lawsuits

Marquand denied that the Hales were the model for the Brills. But no one particularly believed him. Renee Oakman Bradbury would glibly introduce herself to a reporter from Life magazine, saying, “Why, I’m Bella the bitch.”

The Hales contemplated suing Marquand, but decided against it. Despite the unflattering portrayal, “we still like John,” they declared. The bonds of friendship would be sorely tested, however, in 1947 Marquand filed a lawsuit to break up the partnership that owned the 48-acre estate that was the basis for Wickford Point.

Marquand wanted the property sold and the proceeds divided among all the owners. He said the action was taken so that his father, who held a share of the property, could retire comfortably. The Hales and Marquand fought it out in court. Marquand hired a lawyer with impeccable credentials from one of the prestigious white shoe firms. The Hales hired a street fighter.

Marquand should have guessed how a fight between a blue-blooded lawyer and a street fighter would end. The Hales won. The judge ordered the property divided between Hales and Marquands.

Thanks to: The Late John Marquand: A Biography, by Stephen Bingham.

You may also enjoy this story about author John Updike, who also embarrassed some of his friends and neighbors with fictional treatments of them that were a little too exposing. Statue of Edward Everett Hale By Daderot – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69820917.

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Seven of the Best New England Hoaxes

The worst thing about the many hoaxes played upon New Englanders throughout history? How many people fell for them.

Though many hoaxes worked because of their victims’ greed, some were so preposterous it’s hard to understand how anyone could fall for them. One hoax in 1673 was aimed at inflaming religious disputes. Other hoaxes didn’t start off as hoaxes at all.

Here, then, are seven hoaxes that caused plenty of red faces throughout New England history.

The 1773 Old Librarians’ Almanac Hoax

Old Librarians Almanac, one of New England’s bookish hoaxes

The 1773 Old Librarians Almanack included Enoch Sneed’s recipe for cockroach poison and warnings against letting women near the books. It had a preposterous cure for rattlesnake bites and advocated the gallows for book thieves.

Librarian Jared Bean supposedly published the book in New Haven, Conn., following the traditional format of Poor Richard’s almanac. But rather than advice for farmers, Bean’s almanac contained advice for librarians about burning books, protecting books and setting rules for who should be allowed to take out books.

“Be suspicious of Women,” the almanac advised. “They are given to the Reading of frivolous Romances, and at all events, their presence in a Library adds little.”

One quick read through the Old Librarians Almanack and you might think: This is too good to be true. And you’d be right. The almanac was a work of satirical fiction written in 1910 by librarian and author Edmund Lester Pearson who was born in Newburyport, Mass., served on the library board of trustees there and later lived in New York.

The Outlook magazine, The Nation, The New York Times and the New York Sun praised the rediscovered gem. The Bulletin of Pharmacy even reprinted the snake bite remedy as historical fact. Pearson and his publisher, John Cotton Dana of Woodstock, Vt., disingenuously insisted they didn’t intend the librarians’ almanac as a hoax. R-i-i-i-ght.

To read more about the Old Librarians Almanack hoax, click here.

New England Gold Hoax of 1898

In December of 1897, the Electrolytic Marine Salts Company announced its plans to the world, along with offices in New York, Boston and London. Newspapers quickly spread the news that the company was accepting investors. Soon, it would harvest tons of gold from the sea.

A disillusioned Baptist minister, Prescott Jernegan relentlessly pursued investors among his former schoolmates and acquaintances. The money poured in, mostly from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York. The company set up shop and started operations in Lubec, Maine, mostly because of its remote location. There they leased a grist mill, constructed a series of underwater “accumulators” to harvest the gold and employed more than 100 men.

New England Gold Hoax Illustration, New York Herald

To entice investors, Jernegan would take them to the end of a pier and show them his special zinc-lined bucket. The investors would pour mercury into the bucket, and Jernegan would lower it into the ocean. He would then activate a battery that he said would produce the current to allow the mechanism to extract gold from the ocean water.

In actuality, Jernegan’s childhood friend Charles Fisher, a skilled diver, waited underwater. He would follow a line to the bucket and replace the investors’ mercury with mercury infused with gold.

By summer of 1898, the company had taken in nearly $1 million. Even counting the costs of the operation, Jernegan and Fisher were ahead by several hundred thousand dollars.

But when a co-conspirator ratted out Jernegan and Fisher, the jig was up. Fisher disappeared, but the authorities caught up with Jernegan. A good lawyer kept him out of prison, and he spent the rest of his life teaching school in the American West and in the Philippines.

The Secret of the Astor Fortune

Not all hoaxes start off as hoaxes. In 1892, a Chicago lawyer named Franklin Head published a fanciful story in 1892 about the true origin of John Jacob Astor’s fortune. He did it just for fun.

According to the story, the pirate William Kidd buried treasure on land in Deer Isle, Maine, owned by Frederick Law Olmsted’s ancestors. (The landscape architect actually did own land in Deer Isle, and spent one summer there at the end of his life.)

Some hoaxes aren’t really meant to be hoaxes.

According to the story, a trapper stole the treasure chest and, not knowing its actual value, sold it to Astor. William Kidd’s stolen treasure therefore became the basis for the Astor fortune.

In Head’s account, generations later the Olmsteds discovered the theft and sued Astor for compensation. That included back rent on all the Astor Manhattan real estate, which the family could not have purchased without the stolen treasure.

References to Olmsted ancestors Cotton Mather Olmsted and Oliver Cromwell Olmsted suggested the book was a fraud. Nevertheless, Liberty Magazine published the story as true, and it would be told and reprinted many times over the years.

The story surfaced again in 1926 when a California historian presented it as true, and it made its way into newspapers around the world. Not to be outdone, newspapers in the state of Maine even postulated that the state might entitled to recover the treasure, since it would be illegal to sell stolen goods.

The Great Diamond Hoax of 1872

Charles Lewis Tiffany (left), victim of one of the 19th century’s biggest hoaxes

Two con men came up with a simple ruse: They acquired some industrial grade diamonds and began showing them around as evidence that they had discovered a major diamond mine. As word spread, investors jumped aboard.

Typical of any Ponzi scheme, they took their first investors’ money, about $20,000 worth, and used it to buy more diamonds – scraps from the diamond cutting rooms of Antwerp.

The investors, eager to know exactly what they had found, sent the diamonds to Charles Lewis Tiffany for appraisal. He valued them at an astounding $150,000.

With this new information, the investors, who now included Tiffany himself, pressured the men to sell their mine. The two crooks went to a remote spot in Colorado and salted the area with more cheap diamonds, and then brought the investors to the spot. The investors watched with delight as they pulled diamond after diamond from the ground.

In the end, the investors paid $450,000 for the rights to the mine. By the time a government geologist made a survey and gave them the truth, the con men had long gone.

Though the investors recovered some of their money via the courts, the incident remained an embarrassment for Charles Lewis Tiffany. It was not damaging to his store, however, which remained a symbol of luxury. Read more about Tiffany, a son of Connecticut, here.

The Moon Hoax of 1835

On August 25, 1835, Springfield, Mass., native Benjamin Day began a series of articles in his New York Sun describing life on the moon. Richard Locke, a short, pock-marked editor at the Sun cooked up the idea. To give his stories the whiff of authenticity he claimed they were gleaned from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

Life on the moon, as depicted by the Sun in one of the more preposterous hoaxes ever

In his articles, Locke described the living conditions on the moon as seen through an enormous telescope constructed in South Africa. Sir John Herschel and Dr. Andrew Grant were the scientists who made the observations about life on the moon. Wildlife of all manner populated the moon, which contained lakes and fields. And all of it was overseen by a species of winged man-bat. The scientific inquiry came to an untimely halt when the great telescope the men used caused a fire in their observatory.

The story dragged on for six days, complete with illustrations, and Day’s news hawkers had quite an edge. While competitors were flogging slow news from the dog days of August, the Sun was selling an illustrated look at the moon. Other newspapers began reprinting the story, and it made its way across the country.

Several weeks after publication, the great moon hoax was exposed. But the Sun stuck to its story, never apologizing and never correcting the hoax. The newspaper retained a considerable edge in circulation as its loyal readers returned for more fantastic news. Read more about Benjamin Day and the New York Sun here.

The Roger Williams Portrait Hoax of 1844

In 1844, Daniel Jones published an article about Roger Williams in a Welsh-language journal, and along with it he published a print he said was a likeness of Williams. Thus a legend was born: While in England in 1644 Roger Williams had had a portrait painted of himself. Following the turmoil of the English Revolution, the portrait had made its way to America, along with other belongings of the Duke of York, and been auctioned in New York.

The so-called portrait of Roger Williams

Daniel Jones bought the painting, or so he believed, and offered to give it, along with $500, to any group that would also put up $500 to create a memorial to Roger Williams.

Jones, an enthusiastic admirer of Roger Williams, probably didn’t want to deceive people. Though his claims about the portrait were invariably questioned, it made it into a number of books about Roger Williams.

Rhode Island historian Sidney Rider had his doubts. He undertook an inquiry to examine the facts. Could the portrait be real?

Eventually, Rider and others concluded the painting was a hoax. The portrait undoubtedly celebrated Williams’ life; it showed him seated with the Rhode Island charter and had his books in the background. But a number of problems with the painting – including misspelling in one of the titles of his books – led them to conclude the painting was not authentic.

The painting was perhaps, some conjectured, a poor portrait of Benjamin Franklin that had been augmented with the background designed to make it look like a painting of Roger Williams. To read more, click here.

The Mysterious Death of the Rev. Josiah Baxter

In 1673, disturbing news reached London about the ruthless murder of the Rev. Josiah Baxter in Boston.

Baxter was an Anglican minister who had gotten caught up in a public debate with a group of Baptists over their interpretations of the Bible. Baxter had gotten the better of the argument, but his opponents would not let the dispute end there.

Four men followed Baxter to his home. They tied up his wife and children and tortured Baxter in revenge. They literally stripped the skin from his scalp and body until he died.

Benjamin Baxter was so appalled by the murder that he published a pamphlet about the crime to keep his brother’s memory alive in London and warn about the treacherous nature of Baptists.

Publication of the pamphlet triggered a shock wave in England, which was at the time going through wrenching debates over religious tolerance.

Parliament had stymied proposals to give dissenters greater freedom despite considerable support. The broadside against the Baptists reinforced the notion that these Baptists were a threat to civil society.

Two Bostonians arrived in London then, and told the mayor that not only had the murder not occurred, no one had been murdered in Boston. What’s more, the Rev. Josiah Baxter didn’t exist.

Samuel Parker, bishop of Oxford, admitted he published the pamphlet, but couldn’t produce Benjamin Baxter. He denied he had anything to do with any hoaxes, but only conceded he had accepted the story as true too quickly.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Six Oldest Synagogues in New England

The oldest synagogues in New England were built well after the first Jewish settlers arrived.

Touro Synagogue, the only surviving synagogue from the Colonial era, was consecrated in 1763, nearly a century after the first Sephardic Jews arrived in Newport, R.I.

Several synagogues in New England were built on bequests from Judah Touro, the son of the Touro Synagogue’s hazzani. In his will he left endowments to 23 Jewish congregations in 14 states—including Hartford and Boston. (He also saved the Bunker Hill Monument.)

New England’s oldest synagogues were all built in cities within walking distance of their congregation. Many of them have since been converted to other uses, as their members moved to the suburbs.

Here are the six oldest synagogues in each New England state.

Beth Israel, West Hartford

Charter Oak Cultural Center, formerly Beth Israel Synagogue. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Connecticut law allowed only the Christian religion until 1843. That year, Hartford Jews asked the General Assembly for the right to worship. Lawmakers passed a law that said, “Jews who may desire to unite and form religious societies shall have the same rights, powers and privileges which are given to Christians of every denomination.’

When the law changed, Connecticut Jews immediately incorporated two congregations: Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden and Congregation Beth Israel in Hartford (now West Hartford).

A small group of mostly German Jews organized Beth Israel as an orthodox congregation. For 19 years it was the only Jewish congregation in Hartford. In 1855, Judah Touro left in his will money for the congregation to buy its first building, a former Baptist church. After a fire destroyed the building, the congregation in 1876 hired an Irish architect to design what is now the oldest synagogue in Connecticut.

Beth Israel moved to its current building in 1936, leaving its synagogue to become the Charter Oak Cultural Center.

In 1991, the Connecticut Historical Commission and the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford conducted a survey of 46 historic synagogues in the state. By the mid-1990s, 15 of Connecticut’s oldest synagogues were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, more than any other state at the time.

21 Charter Oak Ave., West Hartford, Conn.

Shaarey Tphiloh, Portland

Shaarey Tphiloh’s first synagogue, Portland. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

In 1900, Portland had 80 Jewish families among its 50,000 residents. The oldest had arrived in the 1860s from Poland and Russia, and many were clothing and dry goods merchants. They had shops in the Lower Munjoy Hill area.

Up until 1900, three orthodox congregations worshipped in members’ homes, in rented spaces or at the Middle Street synagogue of the Sharith Israel congregation. The congregation ran a B’nai B’rith lodge, a Hebrew elementary school and a Jewish cemetery in Cape Elizabeth.

That year, the two other congregations decided to band together, build a synagogue and hire a rabbi. By 1904, the congregation raised enough money to build Shaarey Tphiloh, ‘Gates of Prayer,’ on Newbury Street. The first rabbi, Isaac Marcus, was a Russian who held services in Yiddish. Not until 1917 were services held in English.

Rabbi Marcus was followed by Rabbi Chaim Shohet, a distinguished Talmudic scholar who disagreed with the temple’s board of directors when it fired the cantor. The board then fired Rabbi Shohet, and according to legend moved his chair from the sanctuary to the bathroom. Some members of Shaarey Tphiloh followed him to Congregation Adas Israel on Middle Street.

Shaarey Tphiloh followed its congregation to the suburbs after World War II and built a new synagogue on Noyes Street in 1956. In 2016, the shrinking congregation moved to a smaller building nearby.

145 Newbury St., Portland, Maine

Beth Israel, Boston

The first Beth Israel synagogue. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Puritan Boston didn’t exactly welcome Jews or any other outsiders, so the city’s Jewish population remained tiny for its first two centuries. In the 1830s, Boston’s booming commerce attracted Jewish immigrants from the German provinces, as well as second- and third-generation Jews from other U.S. cities. They were peddlers, shopkeepers, merchants, opticians, furriers, jewelers and tailors.

Boston’s first significant Jewish congregation started when young Jewish families and single men gathered at a bris for the firstborn son of a Polish capmaker. They decided to organize, Ohabei Shalom, and elected a German jeweler and real estate trader as its president.

Ethnic rivalries eventually tore the congregation apart. The Poles, or ‘Polanders,’ lived in the North End; the upwardly mobile Germans, or ‘Bayards,’lived in the South End. Services had been conducted according to the more formal German customs, but the Poles soon outnumbered the Germans, rejected the Bavarian rabbi Joseph Sachs and began to conduct services their own way.

In 1854, 25 families from southeastern Germany broke from Ohabei Shalom along with Rabbi Sachs. They tried to keep the name Ohabei Shalom partly because Judah Touro had left money in his will to the congregation. A two-year lawsuit followed, and the dissidents lost. They called themselves Kehillah Kedosha Adath Israel, or Congregation Adath Israel.

(Rabbi Sachs, by the way, left Boston in 1869 to start a school in New York. His sons, Julius and Samuel, married the daughters of Marcus and Bertha Goldman. Samuel Sachs and Marcus Goldman founded Goldman Sachs.)

Massachusetts’ Oldest Synagogue

In 1885, Temple Israel built what is now the oldest synagogue in Massachusetts on Columbus Avenue. It was designed in a historic revival style, popular in German-speaking lands, called Rundbogenstil. With twin towers and a rose window, the synagogue reflected the growing wealth and prestige of its members. Today that first synagogue is the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

In 1906, the congregation built Temple Israel on Commonwealth Avenue as a replica of Solomon’s Temple. The congregation then moved to the suburbs and in 1967 sold the building to Boston University, which now uses it for large lectures and events.

Temple Israel began building another massive synagogue in 1926 near the Brookline border, but the stock market crash of 1929 put a halt to construction. Today Temple Israel, the largest Reform congregation in New England, holds services in its modern synagogue on Longwood Avenue near Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital.

600 Columbus Ave., Boston, Mass.

Temple Israel

Temple Israel Synagogue, Portsmouth, N.H. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

The first of New Hampshire’s Jewish synagogues was built in Portsmouth in 1905, though Jews had lived in the city since the 1790s. For more than a century they worshipped in private homes. They buried their dead in public cemeteries or in Jewish cemeteries in Dover and Somersworth.

Abraham and Rachel Isaac, Portsmouth’s first Jewish settlers, came from Prussia in 1789. He started out as an auctioneer, then opened a china shop. The Isaacs worshipped at their home on State Street, observed religious holidays and closed the store on Saturdays. They adopted a son, who moved away and married a minister’s daughter.

Abraham died in 1809: A local poet wrote his epitaph, including the words, “A faithful steward and an honest man.” Rachel moved away to be close to her son. For 50 years there was no record of Jewish people in Portsmouth.

By 1880, about 16 Jewish families lived in Portsmouth. By 1900 that number nearly doubled. In 1905 a Jew named Morris Port came from Newburyport and persuaded Portsmouth’s Jewish community to organize. By 1911 they had a rabbi, bylaws, the name of Temple Israel and a rented space in which to hold services. In 1912 they bought the old Methodist church on State Street and redecorated it in 1912.

The Jewish community grew around the synagogue in an area known as Puddle Dock, now Strawbery Banke. There were two kosher butchers, a Jewish bakery and three Jewish grocery stores.

Temple Israel renovated the building in 2007 and today congregants still sit on pews that date to 1827. A plaque stands outside Temple Israel, proclaiming it the first permanent Jewish house of worship in New Hampshire.

200 State Street, Portsmouth, N.H.

Touro Synagogue, Newport

Touro Synagogue. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Touro Synagogue, consecrated on Dec. 2, 1763, is the only synagogue built in Colonial America that still survives. Newport easily had the largest Jewish population in colonial New England, and Touro Synagogue is by far the largest and grandest of the early synagogues.

In 1658, 15 Sephardic Jewish families that escaped the Inquisition via Barbados arrived in Newport. They left a permanent mark on Newport by establishing a cemetery in 1677. Several more waves of Jewish families arrived from Curacao in 1690 and from New York in the mid-18^th century. For all that time, Newport’s Jewish population met for worship in private homes.

Many Jews prospered as merchants in the sea trade. What is now Bellevue Avenue was lined with Jewish shops. By 1758 the Jewish population had so grown in size and prominence a permanent house of worship was needed.

Newport architect Peter Harrison, born and trained in England, volunteered to design the synagogue. He planned a building with a plain Georgian exterior that hides an elaborate interior. (Harrison also designed the Redwood Library in Newport and King’s Chapel in Boston.)

Isaac Touro, born in the Netherlands, the synagogue’s first hazzan, or minister. Grateful for England’s protection, he was a Loyalist and stayed in Newport when the British captured the town in 1776. Three years later he moved with the British to New York, where he had to depend on charity. In 1782 he moved to Kingston, Jamaica and died a year later.

Two of Touro’s sons, Judah and Abraham, became quite wealthy and gave generously to Jewish and Christian causes. Abraham gave enough money to maintain Touro Synagogue and the cemetery.

Washington and the Oldest Synagogue

Many of the congregation had been Loyalists like Isaac Touro and left with him for New York. The Jeshuat Israel congregation dwindled and disappeared for a time, but in 1790 it was still functioning.

That year, George Washington famously visited Newport. Moses Seixas, a leader in the Touro Synagogue sent him a letter thanking God for a nation that did not tolerate bigotry.

Washington’s reply strongly supported religious freedoms for non-Christians. The government of the United States ‘gives to bigotry no sanction,’ Washington replied. The letter is recited annually at the synagogue.

The Jeshuat Israel congregation dwindled and turned Touro Synagogue over to a New York congregation, Shearith Israel. Jeshuat Israel reformed in 1903 and leased the building for $1 a year from Shearith Israel.

In 1946 the Touro Synagogue was designated a National Historic Site. Sixty-five years later, Jeshuat Israel tried to sell some of its historic artifacts. A lawsuit resulted. In an opinion written by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a federal court ruled the Shearith Israel congregation owned the Touro Synagogue. In August 2022, a judge ruled that Shearith Israel could not evict the Jeshuat Israel congregation. Jeshuat Israel then sought a long-term lease.

85 Touro St., Newport, R.I.

Ohavi Zedek, Burlington

The old Ohavi Zedek Synagogue.

Ohavi Zedek is the oldest Jewish congregation in Vermont, and its original synagogue is one of the oldest synagogues still standing in the United States.

Eighteen Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, mostly Lithuanian, founded Ohavi Zedek in 1876. The congregation built the synagogue in 1885, and later sold it to another congregation, Ahavath Gerim.

Most were Lithuanian peddlers who discovered Burlington when they were traveling between New York and Montreal.

In the 1950s, Ohavi Zedek moved to a larger building not too far away. Then in the 1960s, hippies moved to Vermont and more Jews – including Bernie Sanders – followed.

Corner of Archibald and Hyde Streets in Burlington, Vt.

Images: Old Ohavi Zedek By Mfwills; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:00, 24 October 2013 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29160508. With thanks to Becoming American Jews: Temple Israel of Boston by Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan, Susan L. Porter, Lisa Fagin Davis. Featured image of Touro Synagogue interior: By S.d.touro – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48760457. This story was updated in 2022.

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