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Northampton Mass.

Calvin Coolidge Takes on Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray

Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray had pretty much run the White House the way she saw fit since she began her reign as the building’s major domo in 1909.

Then Calvin Coolidge and his wife, Grace, suddenly moved in during the summer of 1923, after President Warren G. Harding died in office. But Elizabeth Jaffray had no reason to think anything would change.

Elizabeth Jaffray

The Coolidges had never lived large before. They moved from an $8-a-night hotel suite to the White House. Before that, they’d lived in a $36-a-month duplex in Northampton, Mass.

Managing a large staff of servants would prove one of the president’s most vexing responsibilities. At least to some of the servants.

Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray as the head servant had come to view the presidents who came and went as mere transients. She lived in a permanent suite on the second floor overlooking the North Portico. Or at least she thought she had a permanent residence. Until Calvin Coolidge came along.

Elizabeth Jaffray

Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray was used to dealing with the first lady. So it came as quite a shock when the president began showing up in the White House kitchen.

He instructed the servants on how to cut meat, counted the hams and he inspected the ice box. He gave tips on economizing.

Official White House portrait of Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge was also a fussy eater who complained about the size of the pancakes. He said the cooks didn’t know how to make a custard pie and the corn muffins weren’t up to snuff.

Perhaps worst of all, he made Mrs. Jaffray run the daily menu past him.

White House seamstress Lillian Rogers Page wrote that she “was going out of her mind from the shock of it.”

Mrs. Jaffray couldn’t stand Calvin Coolidge, and after she left she retaliated with a tell-all, Secrets of the White House, published by Cosmopolitan magazine.

She began the chapter on Coolidge with, “He is a light eater.” And then she went on to describe how he rarely talks or smiles. She wrote that he seldom goes to the theater, he never plays games and he has more clothes than any President in the past five administrations has had.

“Never before has a President taken such a keen and active interest in small domestic affairs,” she concluded.

For his part, Calvin Coolidge had no use for Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray. He called her “Queenie.”

Another Detractor

Head usher Irwin “Ike” Hoover joined Elizabeth Jaffray in running down Coolidge in his own tell all, Forty-two Years in the White House.

Hoover called Coolidge the “least interesting” of the presidents he’d known, and he’d known them from Benjamin Harrison to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Coolidge, he wrote, was fussy, irritable and prone to sudden rages over trifles.

Hoover described how an admirer once sent the president two dozen chickens. Coolidge had them penned in Teddy Roosevelt’s former mint patch. When served at dinner, the chickens had an unusual minty flavor.

“We never knew whether he selected the mint bed on purpose or not,” wrote Hoover. “If he did, it was in keeping with many other odd things the president did.” Among those oddities: He had a pet raccoon named Rebecca that he took on evening walks. He rode a mechanical bull in his bedroom for exercise. On his last day in the White House, he refused to leave until a missing rubber was found.

Hoover also didn’t care for Coolidge’s breakfast meetings. He often held them with members of Congress, but he rarely said anything during the meal. Invited guests often declined, wrote Hoover.

“Those who did come would arrive rubbing their eyes,” he wrote. “It was always embarrassing at the beginning, for everyone looked to the president to start off conversation and he never did. The fruit course would be eaten before a word was said.”

Another Side of Calvin Coolidge

The servants called the president “Smily” because he almost never did. They called First Lady Grace Coolidge “Sunshine” because she brought it into their lives. She often bridged the gap between her socially inept husband and the servants.

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait. Both she and her husband were Salem witch trials descendants.

Together, the Coolidges formed warm (if unequal) friendships with some of the White House servants. On weekends, they’d take dinner cruises on the presidential yacht. They loved the food served by the steward and encouraged him in his restaurant endeavor after they left the White House. He in turn sent Calvin a birthday cake every year.

When the wine steward, Albert Brooks, fell ill, they took him on an Adirondack vacation with them because they thought the mountain air would help his health. It didn’t, and when he died, Coolidge was distressed. He called Brooks “one of the finest men in Washington” and “my cherished friend.”

The steward on the yacht, Lee Ping Quan, was Asian American. Albert Brooks was African American. And Coolidge strongly supported civil rights.

So he had a reason for disliking Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray.

One of her first acts on arrival back in 1909 was to segregate the servants. Until then, the black and white servants ate together. She ordered the white servants to eat at one table, the black servants at another. When they rebelled, she threatened to fire them all. Frightened of losing their jobs, they acquiesced.

The New York Times reported favorably on her innovation.

Exit, Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray

How, exactly, the Coolidges engineered the departure of Mrs. Elizabeth Jaffray is probably lost to history. But a record does exist of Grace secretly recruiting Ellen Riley to take over. A Coolidge friend who owned a high-end department store in Boston had recommended her because she managed the store’s cafeteria.

When Mrs. Jaffray left in 1926, Ellen Riley stepped in.

The Coolidges treated her like family. Coolidge liked her so much he gave her a raise and taught her the combination to the vault that held the gold and silver service. They invited Riley to change her clothes after state dinners to attend the musicales that followed. She also joined the Coolidge family watching White House movies.

Riley thought Coolidge was hilarious. She described how wild animals would appear on the screen, and the president would urge his dog, Rob Roy, to “go for them.”

Other servants thought him pretty funny too. His bodyguard, Edward Starling, wrote that he had an insatiable appetite for pranks. He liked to pretend there was a bug in his food. When the butler leaned over to investigate, he’d say to Grace, “I thought butlers weren’t supposed to eavesdrop.”

After he left public life, Coolidge was asked about his greatest disappointment as president. “The White House hams, they would always bring a big one to the table,” he said. “Mrs. Coolidge would always have a slice and I would always have one. The butler would take it away and what happened to it afterward I never could find out.”

No one will probably ever know whether he was joking or not.

Click on the image to buy the ebook from Amazon. Paperback version coming soon.

If you really want to know what a president and first lady were like, find out what they ate. The New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President, tells you about the six New England presidents, their servants, their families, their friends and how they struggled to make the White House presentable for public entertainment. Click here to buy the ebook; the paperback version is coming soon.

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Agrippa Hull, Race Under British Rule

After decades of neglect the common burial grounds of slaves are now being documented, honored and preserved from New York to Mississippi and beyond. But Agrippa Hull was buried among his white countrymen in a dignified distinct tomb, as the oldest surviving American Revolutionary War veteran in the quintessentially New England town of Stockbridge, Mass.

Agrippa Hull

He travelled a unique road.

Agrippa Hull

He lived during an extremely tenuous time for black people in America. Yet Agrippa Hull seems to have graciously navigated the dark clouds of prejudice. The revolutionaries demanded freedom and independence from colonial rule in a largely white context of self-determination. Yet as soon as he could, Hull took a determined stance by enlisting in the Continental Army. And every surviving anecdote and record confirms that Hull lived magnanimously, served effectively and was remembered fondly.

Today we can barely imagine the circumstances in which Hull lived. In the early 1700s the estimated number of slaves in the Massachusetts colony alone reached approximately 3.5 percent of the total population, or some 2,000. But Agrippa Hull was born in Northampton, Mass., to free African-American parents around the year 1759. Plagued by poverty, they had to give up their son at the age of six. They sent him to live with a family of free blacks that could better care for him in Stockbridge.

Agrippa Hull ultimately achieved a level of prosperity and respect that many other black Americans did not. As a Continental Army soldier, Hull witnessed the social and economic spectrums along which people of color lived in the 18^th century. And he distinguished himself by how he moved along that spectrum during his long lifetime.

Triangular Trade

Discordant views, policies and practices of bondage pervaded the colonies without any central authority over the issue. Slave-trading flourished in Triangular Trade: English traders carried manufactured goods to Africa and sold them there for slaves. Black men and women were bound then shipped to the New World. There the slavers exchanged them for such raw materials as lumber, furs, tobacco and sugar which in turn was exported to re-supply English factories.

People sometimes romanticize freedom of religion as the reason migrants left Europe for the New World. But with the growth of the new nation, people of faith did form coalitions which pressed authorities hard to end slavery. They were guided by the Bible’s Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

James Oglethorpe

In the southern colonies bondage was by no means universally accepted. Consider the policy of James Oglethorpe, the British governor of the colony of Georgia, created in 1732. In Great Britain, Oglethorpe had a reputation as a humanitarian and social reformer because he worked to improve the deplorable conditions in debtors’ prisons. From its inception Oglethorpe outright banned slavery in Georgia as incompatible with British common law. Not until Oglethorpe left Georgia in 1743 did planters and ship owners overturn his policy and introduce slavery.

England prohibited the keeping of slaves following a 1772 lawsuit known as Somersett’s Case. But outside of her borders hypocrisy ruled. The slave trade was tolerated and English merchants thrived.

Private Agrippa Hull

With the outbreak of war all 13 colonies desperately needed volunteers. The southern colonies, with the exception of Maryland, refused to enlist black men. New England units accepted volunteers regardless of race. Surviving muster roles show Agrippa Hull, at age 18, enlisted as a free black man with the Continental Army. In 2008, the book Friends of Liberty popularized the story of his service.

Continental Army foot soldiers.

Records show Hull as a private in the First Stockbridge Company on May 1, 1777. He was one of an estimated 5,500 men of color (black, native American and mulatto) from throughout the colonies who joined the American war effort. When posted to then-Brig. Gen. John Paterson’s brigade of the First Massachusetts Regiment, Berkshire County enlistment rolls give Hull’s physical characteristics as being “five feet seven inches tall; complexion, black; hair, wool.”

John Paterson

Without weapons training, it was military rank not race which demanded Hull serve Paterson as his valet (or “orderly” or “personal assistant”). In order to carry out his duties he had to depend on the cooperation, if not respect, of other white men of his own rank. In that first year of his service Hull stood by Paterson as he led troops in Saratoga. Then together they endured the brutal winter of Valley Forge to help assure Washington’s glory at Monmouth Court House in June 1778.

Kosciuscko

Later that year Paterson was put in command of the garrison at West Point. There the venerated engineer and tactician Tadeus Kosciuscko worked to fortify that strategic base along the Hudson River. Through interactions between the commander and the engineer, Kosciuscko is recorded as impressed by Hull’s wit and intelligence. As a gesture of goodwill, Paterson reassigned Hull to Kosciuscko’s camp as his valet in May 1779.

West Point ca 1831, from Phillipstown.

Travels with Agrippa Hull

Kosciuscko’s work on the defense of West Point added to his distinction. In 1780 Washington named him lead engineer in support of the southern army. Militiamen rarely served outside of their home region. Yet Hull volunteered to stay by Kosciuscko’s side. Detached from his Massachusetts regiment, he traveled hundreds of miles south into the Carolinas, where the most arduous fighting of the war took place. As the two men traveled farther from New England they increasingly witnessed people’s struggles with slavery.

Spanish Florida offered runaways freedom on two conditions: convert to Roman Catholicism and serve four years in the military. Most who successfully took up that offer settled in Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, just north of St. Augustine. There a fort was built, establishing the first legally sanctioned free black settlement in North America. In a counterbid to drive a wedge between abolitionists and slavers and to draw volunteers to their ranks, the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, adopted the Spanish policy of grating freedom to runaway slaves. The British offered emancipation to all who escaped and crossed over to their side.

Upon reporting in the Carolinas, Hull and Kosciuscko joined the battle-worn Americans serving under Gen. Nathanael Greene. Half were undernourished and no longer fit for duty. They then witnessed firsthand the desperate plight of enslaved, barefoot and shirtless blacks answering Lord Dunmore’s invitation, fleeing plantations for freedom. In fact, Dunmore’s scheme resulted in what historians recognized as the largest flight of slaves prior to the Civil War era.

The Battle of Eutaw Springs

In September 1781, another anecdote emerged to burnish Hull’s resume after the Battle of Eutaw Springs. Hull went to assist overworked surgeons laboring to save the lives of some 380 American wounded. And according to MassMoments, “the horror of amputations they performed stayed with [Hull] for the rest of his life.”

Home Again

At the end of the war in 1783 the Continental Army disbanded. To Hull’s great delight, on July 23 at West Point Gen. George Washington himself formally signed and dated his discharge papers. Returning home to Stockbridge, Hull promptly found paid work as a manual laborer in the household of a prominent lawyer, Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813). Sedgwick was the lawyer who in 1781 argued the case that freed Elizabeth Freeman – the first in which a black woman sued and won her liberty. For all practical purposes the case set the precedent for ending slavery in Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Freeman played an important role in ending the slave trade.

In order to qualify for a service pension, soldiers had to submit their discharge papers to verify their time. The patriot Agrippa Hull was so proud that Washington signed his discharge papers he refused to ever part with them. Writing to the pension board on Hull’s behalf, Sedgwick explained that Hull would “rather forego his pension than [give up] the discharge papers.”

By 1785 Hull had saved enough money to buy his own land and eventually became a prominent Stockbridge landowner in his own right. He established his own household and married a woman by the name of Jane Darby. It turns out that Sedgwick negotiated Darby’s freedom too, after she managed to escape her owners.

Theodore Sedgwick

Abolitionist strength and the force of Massachusetts law grew so much that the 1790 census shows no enslaved people in Stockbridge or anywhere in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Yet the colonial legacy of unbridled British commerce in slaves continued to corrupt America for decades.

A Stockbridge Anecdote

Hull’s life showed the absurdity of prejudice. Every surviving memoir describes him as a joy to work with and a man who served the cause of the Revolution with distinction. On February 17, 2015 the Berkshire Edge, a local news and features publication, printed “a favorite Stockbridge anecdote”:

“A haughty man attended church to listen to a discourse from a distinguished mulatto preacher. On coming out of church the man asked Hull, ‘Well how do you like that n[…] preaching?’ To which Hull is to have responded ‘Sir, he was half black and half white; …I liked my half, how did you like yours?’ ”

Gravestone of Agrippa Hull

Agrippa Hull died in 1848 at the age of 89 as the oldest Revolutionary War veteran in Stockbridge. A fresh American flag is placed at his grave every Memorial Day.

The author of this story, John E. Happ, has been immersed in the contrasting narratives of foreign cultures since college in Spain and speaks five languages. His varied assignments in Germany, Switzerland, the Philippines and Japan contribute greatly to his research and perspectives. Happ is a contributing author at the Journal of the American Revolution, has written for the web site The 75^th Artillery C.A.C During World War One and the adventure magazine, Atlantic Coastal Kayaker.

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Mary Bliss Parsons, the Witch of Northampton

The year 1656 wasn’t the first time Mary Bliss Parsons of Northampton was accused of witchcraft. Nineteen years later, in 1675, she was indicted for witchcraft and imprisoned for 10 weeks in Boston to await her trial. Some of the magistrates who sat in judgment of her went on to hear the horrific Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-3, the last hurrah for New England’s witch hunters. They had recognizable names: Thomas Danforth, Simon Bradstreet, William Stoughton and then-governor, John Leverett.

Simon Bradstreet

Mary Bliss Parsons

Mary Bliss was born in England in about 1627, most likely in Painswick Parish, Gloucestershire. She came to Mount Wollaston (now a part of Quincy) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1635 at the age of about eight. She sailed with her parents and four elder step-brothers.

By 1640 they, and many others, had followed the great Puritan divine Thomas Hooker to Hartford in Connecticut Colony and belonged to the first group of settlers there.

Thomas Hoooker and his people

Many extant records and a number of depositions explain the accusations of witchcraft against Mary. When the whole story comes out it all comes down to the jealousy of one woman. Sarah Lyman Bridgman convinced other townsfolk that Mary Bliss Parsons—with the help of the devil—had caused their hard luck, even the deaths of their babies.

Mary wasn’t afraid to take her complaints and opinions right to the source of her grievance. If she paid you to weave some yarn and you delivered it full of flaws, she wouldn’t stand for it. If you borrowed the family’s team of oxen to plough a field and she saw you whipping and mistreating them, she would march across the field and give you a talking to.

Joseph Parsons

Legend says Mary Bliss was a great beauty. To make herself even more enviable she married Joseph Parsons in 1646. He would become the wealthiest man in Hampshire County and, before he died, one of the richest in the territory. Joseph traded furs, owned a retail store and the sawmill and co-owned the first grist mill in Northampton. In 1661, he got a license to keep an ordinary, or tavern, there. He would become the largest land owner in the new settlement of Northfield, and in Boston he bought a house, a wharf and warehouses.

Joseph also served often as selectman and, because he knew the Indians through his trading enterprises, as liaison between the natives and the townsmen.

Early Springfield buildings

It was written that Mary Parsons was ‘possessed of great beauty and talents.’ She was not very ‘amiable,’ she had ‘haughty manners’ and was ‘exclusive in the choice of her associates.’ So, there she was, beautiful and rich with a mind of her own to speak.

As if that wasn’t enough to annoy all the other goodwives in town, she had an astoundingly successful birthrate. In the 17^th century, many women died giving birth, and many children did not survive childhood. For 25 years Mary got pregnant just about every two years. Her last child was born when she was a grandmother. She had 11 children, including two sets of twins. All but two of her children survived to adulthood. In a time when male children were valued above females (males were needed to run the farm) her first six babies were boys and then came five girls. It was just as if she had said, “Joseph, I have given you all the help you need. Now I will help myself.”

Sarah Bridgman

Sarah Lyman Bridgman was convinced Mary’s good fortune was a gift from the devil. Her gossip spread from town to town in the Connecticut River Valley. Many of Sarah’s friends and neighbors listened and wondered. They told stories. Several people saw Mary walking out at night wearing nothing but her shift. One man followed her and saw her walk on water. When he reported her, he said her clothes were not wet.

The Connecticut River

Because of her night walks, her husband installed a lock on the door to their house. He later complained to a friend that no matter where he hid the key, Mary would find it and go out in the night. Frustrated, Joseph forced her into the cellar and locked her in for her own safety. Alone and terrified Mary reported seeing spirits fly at her in the dark. All this happened during the early years of their marriage while they lived in Springfield during a witch scare. Another woman and her husband in Springfield were suspected of witchcraft.

While in church, probably during a sermon about doom and the devil’s presence in town, two ‘bewitched’ children (the minister’s young daughters) fell screaming to the floor under a witch-induced spell. Overcome by fear, Mary joined them on the floor clutching at her throat and crying out in terror. She had to be carried home. Mary Bliss Parsons’ strange behavior in Springfield aroused suspicions that followed her to Northampton.

No one knows why she was so disturbed during this time. She did lose both her second baby and her father in 1650. Springfield also experienced a witch scare at the time.

Jealousy

Both Mary and her enemy Sarah, had come of age in Hartford. Mary’s father, an average yeoman, had only six acres of land. Sarah’s much better off father had 30 acres. After their marriages, both young women moved with their husbands to Springfield. Some years later, when Mary’s husband decided to join in the settlement of Northampton in Massachusetts, Sarah and her family soon followed.

Poor Sarah had little good fortune. Her husband was not rich and not much involved in town government. He served as constable for a short term, and the other positions given him were unimportant. Sarah had eight births but only four children survived infancy—three girls and one boy. Three boys and one girl died at two months, four months, six months and nine months.

Sarah accused Mary of causing her only son a grave injury. He had gone into a swamp to fetch a wandering cow when ‘there came something and gave him a great blow on the head…and going a little further…he stumbled and put his knee out of joint.’ The healing did not go well even after the knee was set and, as a result, he suffered a lot of pain. In his delirium ‘he cried out that Goody Parsons would pull off his knee’. And then from his bed he said ‘there she sits on the shelf…there she runs away and a black mouse follows her.’

Sarah’s stories about Mary’s witchery spread to both Springfield and Northampton. When Joseph Parsons heard the gossip, he sued Sarah for slander and won his case, further damaging Sarah’s reputation.

The Trial

Sarah died in 1668 at about the age of 47, but the animosity she carried toward Mary Parsons lived on. In 1674 Sarah’s daughter, Mary Bridgman Bartlett, a young wife and the mother of her first child, died under suspicious circumstances. People said ‘she came to her end by some unlawful and unnatural means…by means of some evil instrument.’

Her husband, Samuel Bartlett, and father, James Bridgman, saw to Mary Parsons’ arrest, indictment, imprisonment and trial on May 13, 1675.

Depositions and testimony of this trial have been lost, but historians assume that many of the same charges brought against Mary during the slander trial of 1654 were aired along with the new charge of the murder by witchcraft of Mary Bridgman Bartlett.

Mary testified to her innocence and that she had committed no crimes. She said, “The righteous God knows of my innocency—with whom I leave my cause.”

Gov. John Leverett

A jury of 12 men found her innocent, and the governor, and magistrates of the Court of Assistants allowed her to go free. She went home to care for her children, the last of whom was still only two.

Karen Vorbeck Williams, the author of this story, is the award-winning author of My Enemy’s Tears: The Witch of Northampton, The House on Seventh Street, and Pretty: A Memoir.

Image of the Connecticut River: By I, Denimadept, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2417686. This story was updated in 2023.

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Connecticut’s Great Mulberry Mania of the 1830s

Two hundred years ago, dreams of riches from silk thread sparked mulberry mania throughout Connecticut. Tens of thousands of mulberry trees were planted during the 1830s as prices for the saplings soared to outlandish heights.

By 1840, Connecticut was producing three times as much silk as any other state.

Doctors, lawyers, merchants, even Daniel Webster got caught up in mulberry mania as it spread beyond Connecticut.

In 1830, the U.S. Agriculture Department received a report that “suddenly and by a simultaneous and spontaneous impulse the people of the United States have directed their attention to this source of national riches…Everywhere, from north to south, mulberry trees have been planted and silkworms raised.”

Though the fever for mulberry trees finally broke in 1839, silk manufacturing took hold for many years in parts of Connecticut and western Massachusetts.

Silkworm on a mulberry tree

History of Mulberry Mania

Mulberry mania began with the desire to develop a sustainable industry independent of Europe. Silk seemed ideal for Connecticut. The luxurious fabric commanded high prices. And the silkworms that produced it fed on mulberry trees, which thrived in the state.

In 1734, the Connecticut General Court passed a law awarding three pence for every pound of silk produced.

Ezra Stiles, president of Yale College, became obsessed with promoting the silk industry. He started raising silkworms in 1758, giving them names such as Oliver Cromwell and General Wolfe.

Stiles collected mulberry seeds and sent half an ounce to every parish in Connecticut. He asked the ministers to plant the seeds and distribute the mulberry saplings to families in the parish. Six years later, silkworm eggs and directions for raising them were sent to the tree growers.

Ezra Stiles

At around the same time, a horticulturist named Nathaniel Aspinwall began planting mulberry trees in New Haven and Mansfield, Conn. He also sold silkworm eggs to his customers.

Silk production became a cottage industry in Mansfield. Women and children raised the worms — kept in attics or bedrooms — reeled the cocoons and spun the silk into skeins. A silk mill, now at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village, was built to spin and twist silk.

By 1789, Mansfield produced 200 pounds of silk a year worth $5 a pound. Peddlers sold silk thread beyond the Mansfield area, while spreading the gospel of riches the stuff would create.

Manias

In 1832, Connecticut’s state government stepped in to encourage the silk industry, paying farmers $500 for every 100 trees tended for three years.

Also in the 1830s, a new species of mulberry arrived that grew faster than other species of the tree.

Prices skyrocketed from $4 for 100 saplings in 1834 to $30 in 1836. It was an era of agricultural crazes: merino mania for a Spanish sheep that produced fine wool; Berkshire mania for a hog that produced high-quality bacon; and the Rohan potato, which could produce 50 pounds of tubers from a single potato.

One Hartford nursery sold 100,000 mulberry trees in one year. At an agricultural fair, people entered 70,000 mulberry trees for prizes.

The financial panic of 1837 continued to fuel mulberry mania, as speculators thought trees were safer bets than stocks or bonds.

By 1839, the craze peaked with prices as high as $500 for 100 trees in some places.

Then prices plummeted. Speculators tore out mulberry trees or burned them. The mulberry blight of 1844 killed many of the survivors.

Young woman working in the Cheney silk mill, by Lewis Wicks Hine. Hine reported “favorable working conditions.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Silk Survivors

At the height of the craze in 1838 the Cheney Brothers – Ward, Frank, Ralph and Rush — built a silk mill in Manchester, Conn. They planted mulberry orchards in the town as well as in New Jersey and Ohio. They survived the crash when their brothers, artists Seth and John, bailed them out with cash.

The Cheneys found silkworms are finicky and silk production is complicated and labor intensive, as silkworm cocoons must be unraveled by hand.

They stopped trying to grow their own silkworms and processed imported raw silk from France instead. Their business grew and by 1870 they had 551 employees. By the end of World War I they owned three mills employing 4,000 people.

Nonotuck Silk Company mills

Samuel Whitmarsh stoked mulberry mania by selling seeds and seedlings from his orchard in Northampton, Mass. When his company collapsed, a utopian community of abolitionists including Sojourner Truth, bought his property. They tried to produce silk as an alternative to cotton. The company failed, but a member restarted the business as the Nonotuck Silk Company in the village of Florence, which imported raw silk. For many years it was Northampton’s largest employer.

Silkworm photo: By Gorkaazk – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10499473. This story last updated in 2022.

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Was Bundling in Winter Really Safer Than a Sofa in Summer?

The practice of bundling probably caused New England’s gentry more embarrassment than any other local folk custom.

City slickers and the upper class considered bundling something that unrefined rustics did. Brahmin Charles Francis Adams, grandson of John Adams, wrote in 1891 that “the practice of ‘bundling’ has long been one of the standing taunts or common-place indictments against New England.”

Bundling

A courting couple ‘bundled’ or ‘tarried’ by spending the night together in bed only partially clothed. They did it with the full knowledge and consent of the parents, according to Edwin Valentine Mitchell in It’s an Old New England Custom.

The mother and sisters often tucked the couple into bed, but took precautions: they wrapped the girl like a mummy, or tied her legs were together or placed a bundling board between them. They attached sleigh bells to the bed in case she needed to fend off her bundling partner.

The custom was widespread in rural New England, but unknown in the cities.

In 1828 (late in the Bundling Era), a young lady from Portland visited her aunt in rural Maine. A handsome young farmer invited her to bundle, which caused her considerable shock. She wrote a letter that included his description of the practice:

‘It is the custom in this place, when a man stays with a girl, if it is warm weather, for them to throw themselves on the bed, outside the bed clothes; if the weather is cold, they crawl under the clothes, then if they have anything to say, they say it-when they get tired of talking they go to sleep; this is what we call bundling-now what do you call it in your part of the world?’

The young lady replied to the young farmer that respectable people did no such thing.

The Bundling Controversy

The antique winter sport sparked controversy even in its heyday.

Jonathan Edwards

In the 18th century, the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards vilified bundling. He noticed an increase in births less than nine months after the wedding, and he denounced bundling as shameful and disgraceful.

But Connecticut minister Samuel Peters in 1781 defended bundling. In his General History of Connecticut, Peters characterized bundling as “certainly innocent, virtuous and prudent, or the Puritans would not have permitted it to prevail among their offspring…’

He noted that Boston, Salem and Newport banned bundling around 1756, finding a sofa a better place for courtship. But, he wrote, bundling had prevailed since 1634 with “ten times more chastity than the sitting on the sofa.”

Peters had three daughters and spoke from 40 years’ experience. He believed the sofa in summer was more dangerous than the bed in winter.

An Honest Man and a Virgin

Peters’ view of bundling was shared by whoever wrote the rhyme,

Let coat and shift be turned adrift,
And breeches take their flight,
An honest man and virgin can
Lie quiet all the night.

Charles Francis Adams. No bundling for him.

Charles Francis Adams tried to pin down the origin of the old Yankee custom in his paper, Some Phases of Sexual Morality and Church Discipline in Colonial New England.

Adams believed it hadn’t come from England, as had so many New England folk customs. No one had ever reported on it in England, he wrote.

Adams, though, needed to explain why bundling prevailed on Cape Cod. Cape Codders had the purest strain of English blood in their veins until about 1825, purer than in any English county. But the practice held out the longest on the peninsula.

Adams concluded the custom sprang from necessity during a “simple and comparatively primitive period.”

A young man interested in a young woman only had a brief window to court her: from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday, he wrote. In the sparsely settled community, he might have to walk 12 miles to see his girlfriend. Fuel cost a lot of money.

So if the young lovers wanted to stay up and talk they would have to do it in the cold and dark. They therefore preferred to bundle in a warm bed.

Wicked More Better

The Vermont Almanac and Register for 1799 carried an oft-told folk tale about the custom:

While the American troops were at Cambridge, 1775, an Indian chief from one of the western tribes, was on his way to visit them. It happened that he was detained a number of days at a gentleman’s house in –. While he was there the gentleman’s daughter received a visit from her suitor. One evening the honest native, thinking to divert himself a little in their company, went upstairs: But when he entered their chamber he stood in amaze, crying out, ‘Ho! bed-No do for me Indian!’ ‘Why (says the spark), we can be good here as well as anywhere.’ ‘Yes! yes! but you can be wicked more better!’

This story was updated in 2022.

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Buffy Sainte-Marie Fights For Her Indian People

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Known only as Beverly, she was adopted by a Wakefield, Mass., couple, Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, both of Mi’kmaq descent.

Buffy Sainte-Marie

She grew up in Massachusetts and Maine, but felt she didn’t fit in. “I wanted above all to be a blonde,” she told a Boston Globe reporter. “My ambition was first to be a cheerleader and then an airline stewardess–you know, like the average girl. Then I realized that as the average girl I was a failure, so I decided to be myself.”

She was nicknamed Buffy.and played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

At UMass she studied French and Hindi. She also began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. Still, she thought she’d become a teacher back on her reservation. She earned a degree in teaching and Eastern religion in 1962, and later a Ph,D, in Fine Arts from UMass.

But she had been playing with success on the Boston coffee house scene, where Joan Baez and Bob Dylan had played. Like other folk singers before her, she moved to Greenwich Village, where she wowed the New York City folk crowd with defiant protest songs and a skintight red snakeskin dress. She also played in Toronto coffeehouses, college campuses and Indian reservations.

Her songs emerged from her own experience and were daring for their day. One night in 1963 she was waiting in the San Francisco airport for a flight to Toronto when she saw U.S. soldiers carrying their buddies on stretchers. She talked to the soldiers and learned they were returning from Vietnam – at a time when the United States was denying involvement in the war. It inspired a protest song, Universal Soldier, that the English singer Donovan made a hit. In 1963 she also recorded Cod’ine, about her recovery from her addiction to codeine.

Spunky and Sexy?

In 1970, she was sending $300 a week to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

That year, Boston Globe writer Herbert Kupferberg described her in a way that wouldn’t get published today:

The best-known fighter for the American Indian since Geronimo is a spunky, sexy, 100-pound girl named Buffy Sainte-Marie.

Buffy, who’s a full-blooded Cree Indian herself, fights for her people with her voice, her personality, and her money. She’s got plenty of each, because she’s one of the most successful folk singers in the business, with particular appeal to the campus crowd and other young people.

It seemed during the ‘60s that she would rocket to the top along with fellow Canadian performers Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Billboard Magazine named her Best New Artist, she played at the Newport Folk Festival and appeared on national television programs like The Johnny Cash Show and The Tonight Show.

Blacklist

But her 1964 debut album, It’s My Way, did poorly in the United States. The recording included bold songs such as Now That the Buffalo’s Gone and The Incest Song along with Universal Soldier and Cod’ine. It did well in Canada, however.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said she’d been blacklisted in the 1960s because of her activism. She claimed the Johnson Administration ordered her records seized and pressured radio stations not to play her music.

“I was put out of business in the United States,” she said. She discovered letters that Lyndon Johnson had written on White House stationery 10 years earlier. They praised radio stations for suppressing her music.

Buffy Sainte-Marie performing at The Iron Horse in Northampton, Mass., 2013

Buffy Sainte-Marie on Sesame Street

Her career took a twist in 1975. Sesame Street producer Darcy Singer called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. She refused at first, but then realized the opportunity for Native-American programming. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

She is still best known for her songs. They including 1960s protest anthems, like Universal Soldier, love songs like Until It’s Time for You to Go, and rock anthems like Starwalker. A song she co-wrote, Up Where We Belong, became a hit when Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes sang it for the soundtrack to An Officer and a Gentleman.

Here’s Buffy Sainte-Marie singing Universal Soldier.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Buffy Sainte-Marie performing in Northampton By Michael Borkson – https://www.flickr.com/photos/protestphotos1/9053598741/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27093234.

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