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Richard Potter, Celebrity Black Magician of the 19th Century

Richard Potter, the son of a former slave, won fame and fortune with a bag of magic tricks and a voice that spoke from ladies’ purses and gentlemen’s pockets.

Born during the last year of the American Revolution, he trained as a magician and ventriloquist. He traveled the world entertaining enthusiastic audiences and settled on an estate in New Hampshire. The traces of Richard Potter’s life can still be found in an Andover, N.H., train station, in the pages of the novel Peyton Place and in the magical arts.

John Hodgson, who wrote a biography of Potter, called him the first black celebrity, the first American ventriloquist and the most famous performer in the United States.

Successful, wealthy, well-liked—all those words describe Richard Potter. So does another: tragedy.

Richard Potter

He was born in Hopkinton, Mass., in 1783 to a black mother and a white father. His mother, Dinah, worked as a servant in the estate of Sir Charles Frankland, a descendant of Oliver Cromwell and collector of the Port of Boston. Frankland had fallen in love with Agnes Surriage, a beautiful tavern wench in Marblehead, Mass. He paid for her education and kept her as his mistress. That did not sit well with Boston society, and so Frankland bought land in the distant town of Hopkinton. There he built a showplace mansion.

By the time of Richard’s birth, Sir Charles had died and the estate started to decay. Some people thought Richard’s father was Sir Charles’s son. But it was George Stimson, a randy revolutionary war veteran. Stimson, according to church records, had “made attempts on the chastity of several women.”

One of those women was Dinah. Slavers had captured her on the Guinea coast and sold her on a Boston pier. But in 1769, a slave in Cambridge, Mass., brought suit against his master. He won his freedom and payment for his work. Soon after, Frankland’s estate freed Dinah and her children and paid them for their work.

Youth

Richard Potter spent the first 10 years of his life between the Hopkinton estate and Frankland’s townhouse in Boston. He learned to read at the Hopkinton District School. At the age of 10 he went into service for two years with Isaac Surriage, Agnes’ brother. Then he engaged himself to a Boston merchant. At around age 16, he took a trip to Europe with the merchant’s son-in-law. There Richard, always nimble and quick, picked up skills as a ropedancer and tightrope walker.

A ropedancer

From there the outlines of his life get muddy. He went to work at the New Hampshire Hotel in Portsmouth. An Italian tightrope walker named Signior Manfredi brought his show to that city, and Richard Potter may have joined him then as a minor performer in the troupe.

Somehow, probably in Boston, he met a Scottish magician and ventriloquist named John Rannie. By 1804, he had a job as Rannie’s stage assistant.

19th-century Portsmouth

John Rannie

Rannie swallowed razors, turned a bottle of water into Madeira wine, smashed watches then restored them. He made voices talk from under furniture and gentlemen’s pockets. In one gruesome trick, he cut off a chicken’s head and reattached it. It then ran off unharmed. One of Richard’s jobs was to find two chickens with identical markings.

John Rannie had spent a month in an Inverness jail for his role in a food riot (called “meal mobbing”). Authorities then banished him from Scotland, and so he went on an extended tour of the United States with Richard Potter at his side. They performed from Maine to the West Indies to New Orleans.

The Exchange Coffee House

Rannie retired in Boston, then returned to Europe in 1811. Richard Potter took to the stage on his own with many of Rannie’s tricks, including ventriloquism. He often played Boston at such venues as the Columbian Museum, the Exchange Coffee House, Concert Hall and Julien Hall.

Richard Potter’s Act

“He intends to give an evening’s brush to sweep away dull cares,” proclaimed his handbills. He called himself “Mr. Potter, the Ventriloquist and Comedian, from Saddler’s Wells (London).” Many Bostonians considered the theatre disreputable, but Sadler’s Wells was a respectable house patronized by fashionable Londoners. Richard’s nod to the English theater told people he put on a sophisticated, European-style show.

Sadler’s Wells

In 1808, he married Sally Harris, described as “beautiful and graceful.” They lived on Beacon Hill, a tight African-American community with a meeting house, a school and Underground Railroad stations. In 1811 Potter joined Boston’s African Lodge No. 459, the first black Masonic lodge in America. Another well-known African-American belonged to it: David Walker, who advocated the violent overthrow of slavery in his incendiary pamphlet, An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World.

But there was nothing incendiary about Richard Potter. One of the few black performers of his day, he presented himself as well-mannered, modest, charming. He dressed fastidiously in a neat frock coat, cravat and waistcoat with lapels, along with a flowing blue robe adorned with Masonic symbols.

“While other magicians catered to the enlightened and up-to-date, Potter presented a family entertainment,” wrote Paul A. Johnson. He played to children, who he admitted for half price. Those children included Oliver Wendell Holmes and George Hill, who became a comedic actor known as Yankee Hill. Both fondly recalled Potter’s shows later in life.

George Hill

The Magic

Richard Potter promised “100 curious but mysterious experiments” in the broadsheet advertising his show.

He did card tricks, made coins pass through wine glasses, broke eggs into a hat and then turned them into pancakes. One of his most popular acts was the enchanted egg, which magically traveled from one hat to another and then to his shoulder.

Map mmarked with the Columbian Museum, one of Potter’s Boston venues.

He threw his voice into a teapot, mimicked birds and animals, made a child speak from a ladies purse. So strange and startling were his effects they sometimes caused people to faint.

He also acted out scenes from plays like the Wag of Windsor with his wife. They sang comic songs like “Giles Scroggins’ Ghost” and “Barney Leave the Girls Alone.” Sally sang “The Nosegay Girl.”

Playing with Fire

For seven years he played mostly before audiences in New England and the Hudson Valley. He earned as much as $250 a day, worth about $3,000 in today’s money.

By 1819, his act evolved to include knife throwing and playing with fire. He appeared in Providence as the “Anti-Combustible Man Salamander,” bending a red-hot iron bar with his bare feet and drawing it over his tongue. He walked on hot coals in his bare feet, plunged his hand into molten lead and climbed into an oven where meat was roasting—always emerging unscathed.

His reputation grew with his fame, and it was said he could crawl through a solid log. Some believed he and Sally had performed the Hindu Rope Trick—throwing a rope up into the open air, then climbing it and disappearing.

Advertisement for a reproduction of the trick by stage magician Howard Thurston.

In 1820, he embarked on a four-year grand tour that took his show to the South, the West, Europe and the Caribbean.

Discrimination

Surely he knew of the dangers of travel for a black man. Sometimes he wore a turban when performing, suggesting he came from the West Indies or even India.

Once, in Mobile, Ala., Potter got kicked out of a hotel because of his race. He moved to another hotel, played for 12 nights and took in $4,800 in silver, which he carried in a nail cask. Upon his departure he learned highway robbers planned to waylay him. So Richard Potter let it be known he was going one way the next day, then left that night in the opposite direction.

Word of a planned slave uprising preceded his arrival on the eastern seaboard. Dozens of plotters, including Denmark Vesey, were arrested and executed. Richard Potter decided to bypass Savannah, Ga., and Charleston, S.C., lucrative venues but dangerous for a free black man.

He faced discrimination in the North as well.

In a New Haven hotel, the proprietor wouldn’t let him into the dining room because of his skin color. But when the host started to carve the roast pig for dinner, Potter threw his voice so the pig seemed to squeal.

New Hampshire

In 1814, he bought 175 acres in Andover, N.H., a small town on Ragged Mountain. He may have chosen Andover because of his friendship with Benjamin Thompson, a tavern owner who traveled with him as his assistant. The town of 1,800 had only 17 black residents in 1830, but he won the respect and trust of his neighbors. One described him as “public spirited, honorable in business, prompt to pay, a kind neighbor and trusted friend.”

Ragged Mountain

Richard Potter built a large, ornate house on his property and hired laborers to farm it. He only lived there intermittently, until about 1823. The Potters entertained frequently. One night, a guest complained about the alcohol served at dinner. So he broke the bottle and presto! He produced a baby chick—then made it speak.

The house no longer stands, but the neighborhood is still known as Potter Place. Richard and Sally Potter are buried on his former property, and the Andover Historical Society planted a garden where his house once stood.

Family Trouble

At some point, Sally stopped performing with her husband. She begin to drink and spend extravagantly. Richard Potter returned from the road in 1825 to encounter debts and lawsuits caused by his wife. He almost lost his house. The sheriff did seize his livestock, furniture and hay and oats. Potter published a notice saying that only he could buy anything on his account.

Tragedy, however, had already followed Richard Potter. He and Sally had two sons and a daughter. Their son Henry died at age seven in a wagon accident.

Daughter Jeanette was described by a local historian as “a half-idiot, given to uncontrollable lewdness.” She died in 1831 at age 16.

Their son Richard, Jr., took after his mother, turning to drink and squandering money.

Richard, Sr., died on Sept. 20, 1835 at 52, leaving an estate worth $6,000. Richard, Jr., took over the Andover farm and cared for his mother. Sally died a year later, on Oct. 24, 1836. Richard, Jr., ran up debts and auctioned off the farm in 1837. He had his father’s magic kit and knew his act, so he went on the road as “Little Potter.” He failed and returned to Andover only to face lawsuits for unpaid bills. Then he mortgaged the magic kit. When it was seized for nonpayment, Richard, Jr., stole it back and disappeared from the historic record.

Potter Place railroad station

Remembering Richard Potter

He may have been forgotten elsewhere, but New Hampshire remembers Richard Potter. The village in Andover where he had his estate is still known as Potter Place, and a train station bears the name.

In 1965, the Manchester chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians officially name themselves the “Black Richard Ring.”

New Hampshire writer Grace Metalious modeled a character after Richard Potter in her novel Peyton Place: Samuel Peyton was a wealthy black man who built a castle on a hill in a small New Hampshire town.

For years, a magician named Robert Olson has re-enacted Richard Potter’s magic show. See it here.

Much of Richard Potter’s early life was an enigma. In 2018, John Hodgson cleared up a lot of the mystery in his 2018 book, Richard Potter: America’s First Black Celebrity. You can help independent bookstores and the New England Historical Society by buying it here.

With thanks also to Playing with Race in the Early Republic: Mr. Potter, the Ventriloquist by Paul E. Johnson, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 2016), pp. 257-285. Image of Ragged Mountain By Tom Morgan – Self-photographed, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5121853. This story was updated in 2022.

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When John Winthrop Jr. Doctored the Connecticut Colony. For Free.

Though he wasn’t even a doctor, John Winthrop Jr. diagnosed and medicated hundreds of New Englanders in the latter part of the 17^th century. He actually had another job during most of that time — governor of the Connecticut colony.

John Winthrop Jr.

He ministered to an estimated one-tenth of Connecticut families. At the time, the colony had only about 5,000 inhabitants, and John Winthrop, Jr., tried to heal at least 500 of them.

Few physicians lived in Connecticut in those days, and they had scant medical knowledge. John Winthrop Jr., for example, concocted remedies that seem bizarre by today’s standards. To cure the plague, he burned and pulverized toads.

His remedies also seemed weird by 19^th century standards. Oliver Wendell Holmes, a physician, studied Winthrop’s papers and tried to figure out what he had given people. Holmes concluded he concocted his favorite remedy, rubila, from nitre (saltpeter) and some antimony (also known as kohl).

“A little salt of tin may have been added, and there are hints of the presence of powdered ‘unicorn’s’ horn’ (narwhal tooth),” Holmes wrote in a medical essay. “One can imagine yet other horrors.”

John Winthrop Jr.

John Winthrop Jr. was born Feb. 12, 1606, in Suffolk, England, the son of the Puritan leader John Winthrop and Mary Forth, who died before he turned 10. He studied at Trinity College in Dublin and briefly studied law at the Inner Temple in London.

Winthrop apparently didn’t want to practice law, and he had a keen interest in science and in travel. Before he followed his father to Massachusetts in 1631, he went to western France and to the Near East. Winthrop also attended medical lectures at the University of Amsterdam.

Today, people know John Winthrop Hr. as the founder of the Town of Ipswich and the Saugus Iron Works in Massachusetts. In Connecticut, he founded Saybrook and New London. For most of the years from 1657 to 1676, he served as governor of Connecticut.

But, as Holmes pointed out, John Winthrop Jr. was as much a physician as a magistrate.

New London gristmill built by John Winthrop Jr. in 1650 as it appeared in 1910.

Dr. John Winthrop Jr.

From about 1650 to his death in 1676, post riders along the Boston Post Road routinely carried Winthrop’s diagnoses and medications from his home in New London.

A Boston Post Road rider

Walter W. Woodward described John Winthrop Jr. as ‘one of New England’s leading practitioners of alchemical medicine.’

Sick people inundated him with medical requests. In his book, Prospero’s America: John Winthrop, Jr., Alchemy, and the Creation of New England Culture, 1606-1676, Woodward wrote,

New London became a hospital town to which patients came from all over New England seeking cures for a host of medical conditions. To help meet the New England-wide demand for his medicines, Winthrop distributed them through a network of female practitioners, elite wives who incorporated Winthrop’s color-coded packets of medicines into their own healing services.

His female practitioners included Elizabeth Davenport, wife of John Davenport, the Puritan minister who co-founded New Haven; Anna Mason, wife of John Mason, Winthrop’s deputy governor, and Mrs. Newton, probably the wife of Roger Newton, Milford’s minister.

Even Roger Williams in Rhode Island wrote to John Winthrop Jr. seeking a cure for a parishioner’s daughter.

Strange Medicine

In the 17^th century, doctors considered purging a remedy for all kinds of illnesses. John Winthrop Jr. used his reddish powder, rubila, to stimulate powerful diarrhea and vomiting.

He tried to cure plague, smallpox, fevers, king’s evil (scrofula), insanity, falling sickness, broken bones, dislocations and burning with gunpowder. For inflammations, he recommended blood letting. For fevers, fasting in the early stages.

And then there were his medications. Holmes classified them as simple, mineral and mystical. “Simple” included herbs like St. John’s wort, Clown’s all-heal and parsley.

His rubila belonged to the category of mineral drugs, such as lime, saltpetre, Armenian bole, crocus metallorum, sulphuret of antimony and nitre. Nitre, wrote Holmes, was a pretty safe medicine in moderate doses, ‘and one not likely to keep the good Governor awake at night, thinking whether it might not kill, if it did not cure.’

And then John Winthrop Jr. had his mystical drugs. He called his chief mystical drug his black powder. It supposedly cured the plague, smallpox and all sorts of fevers. He made it by putting live toads into an earthen pot so as to half fill it. He then baked and burned them in the open air until he could pound them first into a brown, then into a black powder.

Eels and Good Wine

He got a truly bizarre recipe from Sir Kenelm Digby for curing fever and ague: “Pare the patient’s nails; put the parings in a little bag, and hang the bag around the neck of a live eel, and put him in a tub of water. The eel will die, and the patient will recover.”

Another cure was a little more straightforward. Good wine, he wrote to a friend, was the best medicine for the friend’s wife.

John Winthrop Jr. died on April 6, 1676.

This story was updated in 2020.

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The Great September Gale of 1815

When the Great September Gale struck New England in the fall of 1815, few could remember the last time such a devastating storm had hit. That was the Colonial Gale of 1635, which almost killed Richard Mather, the influential Puritan minister.

Historians place the September Gale of 1815 somewhere between a Category 3 and a Category 4, with winds that gusted up to 156 mph.

New England has experienced only three other Category 3 hurricanes since the colonists arrived: the September Hurricane of 1869, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol in 1954.

The September Gale of 1815 damaged crops, buildings and ships, killed livestock and people, toppled forests and caused a water shortage for as long as six months in some places. Only the New England Hurricane of 1938 was more destructive.

But, unlike the other hurricanes, the Great September Gale of 1815 ushered in a second devastating weather event: the 1816 Year Without a Summer.

No wonder New Englanders began migrating west in great numbers.

Artists’ rendering of the Great September Gale of 1815.

The Great September Gale

It began on September 22 as a nor’easter, with torrential rain falling along the Atlantic coast for 24 hours. Then a fierce tropical hurricane collided at right angles with the rainstorm and made landfall on Long Island. It proceeded to wreak havoc in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and the eastern half of New Hampshire.

Some people noted a respite between the two storms, then a hot, heavy wind that began to blow. In Abington, Mass., a sailor from the West Indies started frequently as if he knew what was coming. When asked why, he said there was a crackling in the air, just the way it had before a terrific wind.

John Farrar, science professor at Harvard, experienced the September Gale in Cambridge, Mass., and described it in a scientific journal.

He wrote that between 9 am and 10 am on Sept. 23, the hurricane began to cause alarm as it toppled chimneys and trees and hurled flying missiles – shingles, slates and wood fragments — down the streets.

“The Charles River raged and foamed like the sea in a storm, and the spray was raised to the height of sixty or one hundred feet in the form of thin white clouds, which were drifted along in a kind of waves like snow in a violent snow storm,” he wrote.

Howling Wind

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., experienced the storm as a seven-year-old living in Boston. Later in life he recalled ‘a general impression of a mighty howling, roaring, banging and crashing, with much running about, and loud screaming of orders for sudden taking in of all sail about the premises and battening down of everything that could flap or fly away.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

Nine-year-old John Peabody was standing near the edge of the mill pond in Boxford, Mass., when a gust of wind picked him up, carried him 30 feet and dunked him in the water. His family rescued him.

The wind blew so strongly that people couldn’t keep fires lit inside their homes. It wiped out all kinds of structures from churches to sheds and uprooted orchards and forests.

Falling trees killed some people, while others drowned in shipwrecks along the coast. An estimated 38 people died in the storm, but the death toll was probably much higher.

The tempest smashed vessels from Eastport, Maine, to New York.

It swept away wharves, blew down steeples, destroyed 60 vessels in Boston Harbor and drove a schooner up Main Street in Cambridgeport, Mass.

In the port of New Bedford, the winds drove every vessel but two ashore. The newspapers reported they didn’t have enough room to record the maritime losses.

The wind knocked down 5,000 apple trees in the town of Dorchester (now part of Boston), destroyed the Neponset River Bridge and ruined the First Parish Meeting House beyond repair.

In Danvers, Mass., the Endicott pear tree, planted by Gov. John Endecott around 1630, lost half its branches.

Providence

The September Gale hit Providence hardest, as the wind blew directly up the Providence River. The storm surge caused an extraordinary tide 12-14 feet above high water. Stores and houses reeled and tottered, then plunged into the floodwaters.

The September Gale strikes Providence.

Boats and scows struggled against the churning waters to rescue panicked women and children as the water reached their windows. Vessels smashed against the bridge connecting the two parts of Providence until it swept it away.

The tide forced the ship Ganges against the third floor of the Washington Insurance Building. It drove a brig loaded with livestock onto a wharf, where it stuck. The trapped crew finally took the risk of abandoning ship and crawled along the roiling debris toward buildings still standing. Some people dragged the sailors into their homes through the second-story windows.

The September Gale completely destroyed 500 buildings in the city and left tangled heaps of furniture, lumber, candles, flour, cotton bales, coffee, grain and wrecked boats. When the storm ended, 300 armed men were stationed in Providence to prevent looting.

A Mr. Webb found a sloop standing up at his front door, while Gen. Lippett found a ship in his garden

Salt and Sand

The September Gale drove saltwater 40 miles into the country side. Houses turned white, and the leaves on the trees seemed lightly frosted. Wine grapes harvested in the aftermath of the Great September Gale tasted like salt.

Along the coast and in some places inland, the September Gale caused a shortage of fresh water for weeks, even months.

In Buzzards Bay, the tide rose so high that it covered farmers’ fields with sand. The saltwater made wells and streams brackish for months and killed corn, grass and trees in cedar swamps.

In Stonington, Conn., the tide rose 17 feet and deluged the town. It demolished the wharves, destroyed all 20 vessels in the harbor and left the town unrecognizable. Gardens and fertile fields turned into sandy beaches. The storm reduced a nearby island of several acres to a small rock.

The September Gale also caused considerable damage in New London, Groton and even Norwich up the Thames River.

No Angry God

By 1815, science was undergoing a transition. People began to pay attention to weather as a scientific phenomenon, rather than a reward or punishment from an angry god.

John Farrar was probably the first to write that the September Gale was a moving vortex and not, as previously thought, ‘the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere.’

Oliver Wendell Holmes made a more prosaic observation in his 1836 poem, The September Gale.

It chanced to be our washing-day,
And all our things were drying;
The storm came roaring through the lines,
And set them all a flying;
I saw the shirts and petticoats
Go riding off like witches;
I lost, ah! bitterly I wept,–
I lost my Sunday breeches!

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Boats, From Schooners to Submarines

Historic boats are as much a part of New England as Revolutionary battlefields and old taverns. The region has a fascinating maritime history — even in Vermont, which has the 110-mile long Lake Champlain.

Historic boats include everything from submarines to frigates, steamboats to schooners. The luxurious to the prosaic, Gilded Age yachts carried millionaires while workhorse schooners hauled coal and fertilizer.

We decided against including replicas such as tall ships, though we did include historic boats that have undergone extensive restoration.

Here, then, are six historic boats, one in each New England state.

Charles W. Morgan

The Charles W. Morgan in retirement

The Charles W. Morgan, a whaling ship built in 1841, is the oldest surviving merchant vessel and America’s only surviving wooden whaling ship from the 19th century.

She was designed to catch whales and harvest the whale blubber on deck for whale oil. The Charles W. Morgan made 37 voyages from her home port of New Bedford, Mass. They ranged from nine months to five years.

On her very first voyage, her crew caught and processed 59 whales for 2,400 barrels of whale oil. Over the course of her active lifetime, 1,000 men served as her crew and harvested 54,483 barrels of sperm whale oil. Some of her crew survived a cannibal attack in the South Pacific. She also sailed the South Atlantic and Indian oceans.

Difficulties bookended her career as an active whaling ship.

As she was under construction in 1841, the boatbuilders went on strike, demanding a 10-hour work day. Three weeks later the workers accepted a 10-1/2 hour compromise.

After harvesting whales for 80 years, it took 87 years to fully restore the old vessel. Mystic Seaport in Mystic, Conn., finished restoring the Charles W. Morgan in 2013. In 2014, she sailed her 38th voyage — touring New England.

75 Greenmanville Ave., Mystic, Conn.

Victory Chimes

Windjamming in Maine

The Victory Chimes, known as a shoal draft centerboard schooner, one of only three surviving examples of a three-masted schooner in the United States. Her owners used her in the Great Lakes, along the Atlantic Coast and the Gulf of Mexico. Today people call her a windjammer, and she carries passengers on pleasure cruises along the Maine coast.

Schooners carry cargo, wood, coal, fertilizer and grain; empty cans for canning factories; and goods for stores along lumbering rivers. The Victory Chimes, a Chesapeake Ram schooner, was designed for the shallow Chesapeake Bay and Chesapeake and Delaware Canal. Ram schooners earned their names because they butted their way through the other schooners on the canal.

Built in 1900 in Delaware, she hauled cargo along the Chesapeake until 1946 under the name Edwin and Maude. In retirement, she worked as a ‘dude schooner’ on the Chesapeake.

Windjamming had started in Maine in the 1930s when a man named Frank Swift of Bucksport came up with the idea. Maine investors bought the Edwin and Maude in 1954, renamed her Victory Chimes and repurposed her as a windjammer.

In 1984, Thomas Monaghan of Domino’s Pizza bought her and called her Domino Effect. In 1988, he refitted – and saved – her, using original techniques. She returned to Maine in 1989, bought by Capts. Kip Files and Paul deGaeta, who renamed her Victory Chimes.

Today, Victory Chimes appears as the windjammer on the back of the Maine state quarter.

Captain Spear Drive, Rockland, Maine

Old Ironsides

Old Ironsides

We simply couldn’t leave the legendary naval frigate Old Ironsides off our list of historic boats.

George Washington named her in 1797, and today she is the world’s oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat.

She defeated four English warships of the supposedly invincible British Navy during the War of 1812. On Aug. 19, 1812, she earned her nickname while quickly winning a one-sided battle with the Guerriere off the Nova Scotia coast.

The Guerriere began firing at the Constitution while she was largely out of range. As one shot bounced off her hull, a seamen reportedly shouted, “Huzza, her sides are made of iron!”

During the Quasi-War with France she had come to the rescue of Haiti’s revolutionary government. She besieged Tripoli in the Mediterranean during the Barbary Wars.

The U.S. Navy considered Old Ironsides a piece of junk in 1833, until a young Harvard student found out about their plans to use her for target practice and sink her.

An indignant Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a poem about her and sent it to the Boston Daily Advertiser. Old Ironsides begins:

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!
Long has it waved on high,
And many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky…

You probably know how the storm of protest saved the old warship. Today you can visit Old Ironsides year round at the USS Constitution Museum in Boston.

Charlestown Navy Yard, Charlestown, Mass.

Albacore

The Albacore in action.

The Albacore, once described as ‘the submarine that gave its body to science,’ today ranks as one of the most popular tourist attractions in Portsmouth, N.H.

The experimental sub’s most perilous voyage was her last – from Portsmouth Harbor to her permanent display site on dry land.

In Portsmouth, workers built a marine railway along which she could float to her final resting place. First, they had to remove a railway trestle and make a temporary cut across a four-lane highway. She struck bottom three times and then got stuck in the middle of the road. It took months to build a dam so she could be refloated. Portsmouth commuters were not amused.

During her active life, the Navy used the Albacore to test experimental features used in nuclear submarines. Built in 1952-53 at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, the Navy launched her on Aug. 1, 1953. For the next two decades she went through many changes as the Navy experimented with hull configurations, propellers, rudders, blow systems and sonar.

Like most of the other historic boats on our list, she is a National Historic Landmark.

Albacore Park, 600 Main St., Portsmouth, N.H.

Coronet

The Coronet back in the day.

Amazingly, Rhode Island has no historic boats listed as National Historic Landmarks. But America’s wateriest state does have the Coronet, one of the world’s oldest and largest schooner yachts. The word ‘yacht’ indicates a vessel built for sport or pleasure rather than hauling freight. And she is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Industrialist Rufus T. Bush had the Coronet built as a luxurious waterborne home and as a Gilded Age status symbol in 1885. She earned worldwide fame when Bush won a transatlantic race against the Dauntless in 1887. The New York Times devoted its entire full page to the race results. Bush then circumnavigated the globe in the Coronet. After he died, she passed through six owners, including the religious organization known as the Kingdom.

Since 2010, the International Yacht Restoration School in Newport has worked on restoring the Coronet. Coronet Restoration Partners manages the project.

449 Thames St, Newport, R.I.

S.S. Ticonderoga

The Ticonderoga, one of Vermont’s most historic boats.

The Ticonderoga, a side-paddle-wheel lakeboat, carried passengers and freight on Lake Champlain. She was built in 1906 on Lake Champlain in the Shelburne Shipyard. In 1950, the historic boat returned to Shelburne – to the Shelburne Museum, where she sits on dry land. The SS Ticonderoga was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1964.

At two-thirds the length of a football field, she required a crew of 28. In the early days, she met the evening train from New York in Westport and steamed to St. Albans carrying passengers, farm produce, livestock and dry goods. During both world wars she carried soldiers between Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Burlington. Later she ran from Burlington west to Port Kent, N.Y., and for a while she operated as a floating casino.

The museum restored her interior, with original furniture and appointments in the dining room, captain’s quarters, promenade deck and barber shop.

6000 Shelburne Rd, Shelburne, Vt.

Images: Charles W. Morgan By Rhvanwinkle at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15032247; Victory Chimes By Raphodon – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5516997. Old Ironsides By Yuhan Zhang – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73538648. This story was updated in 2021.

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How Scottish POWS Were Sold as Slave Labor in New England

As many as 400 Scottish POWS captured in the Battles of Worcester and Dunbar were shipped to New England in the 1650s as temporary slaves to work in iron mills, saw mills and farms.

The Great Migration of Puritans had ended, and the colonists badly needed workers. Across the sea, Oliver Cromwell’s new government had the costly and vexing task of managing thousands of Scottish POWs. One solution: deport them to New England, Virginia and Barbados.

Some of the Scottish POWs sent to New England were sold as a group to work in the Saugus Iron Works or the saw mills of Berwick Maine. Others went to York as servants. Still others were sold individually.

The Puritan minister John Cotton defended the practice. He wrote, “The Scots, whom God delivered into your hands at Dunbarre, and whereof sundry were sent hither, we have been desirous (as we could) to make their yoke easy. Such as were sick of scurvy or other diseases have not wanted physick and chyrurgery. They have not been sold for slaves to perpetual servitude, but for 6 or 7 or 8 yeares, as we do our owne [indentured servants] …”

As one historian noted drily, “Cotton’s sanction deadened the New England conscience.”

Cromwell Captures Scottish POWs

Cromwell and his Puritan followers executed King Charles I in January 1649. The Scottish people had largely sided with Cromwell, but they turned on Cromwell and declared Charles’ son king.

In the summer of 1650, Cromwell and his forces invaded Scotland. The Scottish Parliament, in response, conscripted thousands of young Scottish men between the ages of 19 and 25, though some were as young as 12. They clashed at the short, brutal Battle of Dunbar. Within an hour, 12,000 Parliamentarians defeated 11,000 Scots, killing as many as 2,000 while losing only 20 men.

scottish-pows-cromwell-dunbar-andrew-carrick-gow

Cromwell at Dunbar by Andrew Carrick Dow

Cromwell’s army released thousands of sick and wounded Scotts, but marched the Scottish POWs like cattle to Durham, 100 miles away. Many perished of hunger or disease on the march, though some escaped. Some were executed.

In Durham, the English imprisoned the Scottish POWs in the castle and cathedral. About 1600 died of dysentery, disease or starvation. The English had them buried in mass graves, only recently discovered.

The Unity

Two months after the battle, 150 Scottish POWs boarded the Unity and sailed to London, then to Charlestown, Mass. The shipmaster, Augustine Walker, paid five pounds for each man and sold them for 20 to 30 pounds.

Technically they signed contracts agreeing to ‘indentured servitude,’ but in reality most spoke Gaelic and many couldn’t read or write.

About 50 went to the Saugus Iron Works, the first successful iron works in the colonies. It produced much-needed iron bars for tools, building materials and cooking implements. The Scottish POWs worked 12-hour days at hard, dangerous labor. They worked as woodcutters to supply the wood to make charcoal, or as forge hands, as blacksmiths, as miners and farmhands.

Saugus Iron Works

Another 25 Scottish POWs were taken to the Newichwannock River, now the Salmon Falls River in Berwick, Maine. They went with an Englishman named Richard Leader, who got hold of an abandoned mill. Leader put the Scottish laborers to work sawing Maine white pine trees, needed for the British Navy.

Valentine Hill also bought some of the Scottish POWs from the Battle of Dunbar, and worked them in his sawmills at Durham Falls and the Lamprey River in New Hampshire.

Battle of Worcester

Exactly one year after the Battle of Dunbar, Cromwell’s much larger force defeated 16,000 mostly Scottish army at Worcester, England.

It was the last battle of the English Civil War. Three thousand men died in battle, and 10,000 taken prisoner.

The Battle of Worcester.

According to tradition, the English lined up the Scottish POWs in order to shoot every tenth man. A Highlander named Micum McIntyre saw his number would soon be up, broke rank and ran for his life. A horseman chased after him and wounded him, but spared his life.

The English then drove the Scottish POWs like cattle to London.

A witness described them.

…all of them [were] stript, many of them cutt, some without stockings or shoes and scarce so much left upon them as to cover their nakedness, eating peas and handfuls of straw in their hands which they had pulled upon the fields as they passed.

In London, the English confined them outdoors on artillery fields. Again, many died of disease, starvation and exposure while the government debated what to do with them.

John and Sara

About 275 Scottish POWs were sent to Boston about the John and Sara, where Thomas Kemble, a Charlestown merchant, took them on consignment.

Kemble found a ready market among planters and mill owners for the human cargo, as the news spread about the first shipment of Scottish POWs. So when the second shipment arrived, Kemble easily sold the Scottish POWs in the Massachusetts towns of Boston, Charlestown, Cambridge, Dedham, Concord, Hingham, Ipswich, Reading and Salem.

Kemble sold others in Exeter, N.H., and in Durham, where he partnered with Valentine Hill. So many ended up in York, Maine, that for years the town had the nickname ‘Scotland.’

Servitude

Some of the Scottish POWs were sold individually as servants. Alexander Gordon, for example, ‘agreed’ to seven years of slavery under Samuel Stratton of Watertown. Under his contract, he could never leave his master’s premises without his permission and he couldn’t marry. He had to do everything Stratton told him to do, so long as it was legal.

Gordon complained to the court of ill-treatment and petitioned for his freedom, apparently without success. A sawmill owner in Exeter, N.H., named Nicholas Lissen bought him and six other Scottish POWs. His slavery did end, however, and he married the boss’s daughter, Mary Lissen. Alexander Gordon died in Exeter in 1697, and his children had many descendants.

Daniel Blacke, who came over on the John and Sara, probably got sold to the son of the Rev. Zechariah Symmes, one of Charlestown’s most prominent citizens. In 1654, Blacke assaulted and beat up his master, and a court sent him to prison in 1654. Blacke apparently left prison, married and had children. New York Gov. Frank S. Black traced his ancestry to the Scottish POW.

Freedom for Scottish POWs

The Scottish POWs were all still of marriageable age when freed from bondage, and many did marry. Some married Irish housemaids, also brought to the colonies as slaves. Few ever returned home to Scotland.

The lucky ones married the bosses’ daughters, won land grants and appeared on tax rolls.

Seven of Valentine Hill’s Scottish POWs, for example, were listed as taxpayers in Dover, N.H., after their slavery ended.

David Hume, who came over on the John and Sara, settled in Dedham, Mass., where his name morphed into Holmes. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poet, was sixth in descent from him.

William Furbish (probably Farrabas, which became Forbes in Massachusetts) bought land in Kittery sometime before 1664, but was punished in 1681 for calling the King’s officials, ‘Divills and hell bound.’ Furbish apparently had not forgiven the English for the Battle of Dunbar. He had seven children and many descendants. Micum McIntyre, the Scottish POW who ran for his life, worked in Cocheco Mills and then got a land grant in Kittery, Maine.

2nd Class Citizens

The less lucky Scottish POWs drifted to Boston when their slavery ended, destitute and without jobs. Bostonians viewed them with scorn and classed them with African-Americans and Indians. On Jan. 6, 1657, several Scottish POWs formed the Scots’ Charitable Society for the relief of Scotsmen, the oldest charity in the Western Hemisphere.

By the 19th century, the Scots’ Charitable Society maintained the Scots Temporary Home in Boston and a burial plot in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Scots’ Charitable Society burial plot at Mt. Auburn Cemetery

Some of the Scottish POWs like David Hamilton survived Cromwell’s forces only to die at the hands of Indians. Hamilton came over on the John and Sara and got sold to a saw mill owner in Southern New Hampshire. Then he was moved to York, Maine, where he was killed on Sept. 28, 1691.

In 1656, Thomas Kemble spent two hours in the stocks for kissing his wife on Sunday. His daughter, Fanny Kemble Knight, took a famous horseback ride alone along the Boston Post Road.

End Notes

Note: We deliberately chose the words ‘slave,’ ‘slavery’ and ‘slave labor’ because we view any kind of forced labor as slavery. That includes sex trafficking, forced labor, debt bondage, domestic servitude or unlawful recruitment. There are tens of millions of slaves in the world today. If you want to comment that it’s racist to call white indentured servants slaves, we suggest a better use of your time would be to help one of the many anti-slavery organizations in the world today. A list of them can be found here.

Descendants of the Scottish POWs from the Battles of Dunbar and Worcester have a web site. The Saugus Iron Works is now a national historic site.

Images: Saugus Iron Works By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16192079; Mt. Auburn burial plot, By Bill Ilott from Boston, USA – https://www.flickr.com/photos/bostonphotosphere/4185723469/ Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, MA, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10902508. Battle of Worcester By Published by Machell Stace – http://www.learningcurve.gov.uk/civilwar/g5/cs2/s5/, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1943037. This story was updated in 2022.

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Men in Drag: The Hasty Pudding Theatricals

Some of New England’s most distinguished statesmen and jurists kept a part of their past quiet later in their careers. They had performed as drag queens in Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club theatricals.

An early Hasty Pudding chorus line

Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Club for more than 170 years has staged theatricals featuring silly plots, collegiate humor and men in drag. It started out as quite a departure for Puritan New England, which frowned on such frivolity.

Presidents from John Quincy Adams to John Fitzgerald Kennedy belonged to the club. But you won’t find photos of any former president, U.S. ambassador or Supreme Court justice in a gauzy dress and wig.

It’s hard to argue the drag performers didn’t know what they were doing. Boston had an emerging gay subculture in the late 19^th century, and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals had a reputation as homosexual influencers.

Hasty Pudding Club History

Twenty-one Harvard juniors founded the Hasty Pudding Club on Sept. 8, 1795 in the dorm room of an undergraduate named Nymphas Hatch. Harvard food was notoriously awful, so they mandated that “the members in alphabetical order shall provide a pot of hasty pudding for every meeting.”

James Russell Lowell

The Hasty Pudding Club merged with another called the Institute of 1770, to which John Quincy Adams belonged. For half a century the Hasty Pudding Club put on mock trials, debating such issues as Harvard presidents or mathematics.

In 1837, drag made its debut in the form of James Russell Lowell, who partied at Harvard more than he studied. He played Abby Roe in a breach of promise suit, and dressed from head to toe as a woman.

The Hasty Pudding Club held its first drag theatrical on Dec. 13, 1844, a tragic burlesque called Bombastes Furioso. Distaffina, the female lead, wore a low neck and short sleeves.

“On her introducing a fancy dance the applause almost shook the house down,” wrote Lloyd McKim Garrison in a club history. “Afterward they ate hasty pudding, the actors kept on their dresses and Distaffina was nearly bothered to death by her admirers.”

The Hasty Pudding Club stage, around 1876

A Charming Girl

Every year since then, the club has staged plays except twice during each of the world wars.

One early member nearly wiped out the Pudding’s treasury by paying $15 to the Boston Museum for his costume and wig. Garrison suggested it was worth every penny: “He looked a stunningly pretty girl in it.”

The actors sometimes kissed each other under protest, but one actor conceded, “Charles P. Greenough was a very charming girl. Up to that time, though, I had never been tempted to kiss any girl so much as Harry Williams of ‘65.”

By 1854, a critic called the first diva a ‘vision’ in “tights and a thousand gauzy skirts in a professional style.” In the 1880s, the Hasty Pudding Club took its shows on the road to New York and Philadelphia.

The Hasty Pudding cast of ‘Duenna’

The club launched many theatrical careers, including those of Alan Jay Lerner and Jack Lemmon. Lemmon performed under a pseudonym because he’d been placed on academic probation. It prepared him for the role of Gerald the double bass player who disguises himself as Daphne in Some Like It Hot.

Hasty Pudding makes news every year when it bestows its annual Man (since 1967) and Woman (since 1951) of the Year award to celebrity entertainers. Jane Fonda established a tradition of showing up for the award when in 1961 she came to Cambridge to accept hers unannounced. A parade, a banquet and a roast accompany the awards.

Many famous people belonged to the club, including William Randolph Hearst, Charles Francis Adams and Joseph P. Kennedy. Robert Todd Lincoln played an obese and cruel-hearted parent. Ironically, J. P. Morgan (Class of 1886) nearly bankrupted the Hasty Pudding Club during his tenure as business manager.

Men in Drag

Before he rose to eminence as a religious leader, Phillips Brooks (Class of 1855) played the huge Princess Glumdalka, Queen of the Giants, in Tom Thumb. Brooks became Bishop of Massachusetts, rector of Trinity Church and author of the Christmas carol, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., later a Supreme Court justice, played the “widow” in A Gentleman and Lady in a Peculiarly Perplexing Predicament in 1865. Holmes had returned to Harvard from the Civil War, where he was wounded. In the risque play, a man and a woman must reluctantly share a room in an inn.

Philosopher George Santayana (Class of 1886) famously wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Perhaps his experience with the Hasty Pudding theatricals inspired the comment. He played Lady Elfrida in Robin Hood in 1885. As Lady Elfrida, he fell in love with Allan-a-dale and was rescued from the arms of Sir Reginald.

I Am Willing

Henry Cabot Lodge, Sr., Class of 1872, played Imogene the Fair in Alonzo the Brave in 1869. He spooned at the male lead, uttering lines like, “Eyes so killing, looks so thrilling,” and “Cooing, billing, I am willing.” He might have done otherwise had he foreseen his future dignity as majority leader of the U.S. Senate.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a history major, played a chorus girl in 1903 in Catnippers, a comic opera set in India. A reviewer called the show “diverting” and “well staged” and noted the future president “got a good deal of fun out of it.”

Robert Benchley

Humorist Robert Benchley (Class of 1913) played the hairdresser Miss Mayme O’Brian in the Crystal Gazer. He wore a cheap costume that attempted to be stylish. “I may be only a hairdresser, but Heaven deliver me from ever being compromised,” Mayme declared.

William Weld played leading lady Vera Similitude in the 1966 Hasty Pudding production, Right Up Your Alley. He wrote his thesis underneath the stage during the show in between his scenes. His classmate Mitch Adams recalls him wearing a dress and wig with a legal pad on his lap. Weld also participated enthusiastically in the kick line during several Hasty Pudding shows. Later he won election as governor of Massachusetts.

Men and Women of the Year

In 1951, the Hasty Pudding Theatricals gave its first annual “Woman of the Year” award to English actress Gertrude Lawrence for her “lasting and impressive contribution to the world of entertainment.” The honorees leads a parade through Harvard Square, usually with the news media in attendance. The Pudding then treats her to a celebratory roast followed by a presentation of a Pudding Pot at Farkas Hall. Honorees have included Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Scarlett Johansson and Anne Hathaway. In 2023, Hasty Pudding actor Jennifer Coolidge won the honor.

In 1967, the Pudding added a “Man of the Year” honor, bestowing the tribute on Bob Hope. Since then, Tom Cruise, Paul Newman, Samuel L. Jackson and Robert DeNiro have won. In 2023, the Pudding gave the honor to Bob Odenkirk.

The 2023 show, Cosmic Relief, was scheduled to premier on February 5. For more information, click here.

This story about the Hasty Pudding theatricals was updated in 2023.

Images: Octavia Spencer By IceCreamForEveryone – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56453899.

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