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Orono

Joseph Orono, The Blue Eyed Indian Who Helped the Revolutionary Cause

The Penobscot sachem Joseph Orono died in 1801, too early to know about his consolation prize for losing his people’s land to white settlers.

He lived plenty long, though. He was said to have been born in 1688, which made him 113 when he died in 1801. If that’s true, Joseph Orono lived through every one of the French and Indian Wars as well as the American Revolution, in which he participated

A Penobscot chief

Five years after his death, Orono, Maine named itself after him. He probably would have preferred the land along the Penobscot River promised him, and then taken.

Joseph Orono

Historical accounts agree that Joseph Orono had reddish hair, blue eyes and a pale complexion. He spoke fluent French, English and Penobscot.

Accounts disagree about his lineage. Some say he had some relation to Baron de Castine, a French nobleman who married an Indian. (Castine also had a town named after him in Maine.) Perhaps Orono was Castine’s son-in-law, or grandson.

Joseph Orono himself said his father was French, and his mother half French, half Indian. A devout Catholic, he believed the Indians had suffered from war, and advocated peace. White people viewed him favorably, and described him as able, friendly and sagacious.

Revolution

In 1775, Joseph Orono and three other Penobscot chiefs went to air their grievances to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, as Maine then belonged to that colony. The Indian delegation stopped in Falmouth, now Portland, where the people gave them money, horses and a carriage to help them on their journey.

Two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill, they arrived in Watertown, Mass., where the Provincial Congress then met. It included Sam Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren.

On June 21, 1775, Joseph Orono addressed the Provincial Congress on behalf of the whole Penobscot tribe. As he spoke, the men inside could hear the groans of the soldiers dying of their battle wounds.

Orono said that if the Congress took care of his people’s grievances, the Penobscots would aid the rebels with their whole force. Those grievances consisted chiefly of trespasses by the whites upon their timber lands and cheating them in trade.

The committee responded warmly, and said the Indians’ complaints would receive their attention as soon as they could take a breath from the Revolution. Eventually, Massachusetts signed a treaty giving six miles of land on each side of the Penobscot river to the Indians.

Frigates

In 1779, the British built a fort in what is now Castine. Joseph Orono communicated intelligence about their activities to the patriots. Massachusetts then sent the Penobscot Expedition to Castine, and the Penobscot Indians fought with them. Whether Joseph Orono actually fought is unclear; he would have been 91.

The British routed the Americans in the worst naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. But Joseph Orono continued to help the cause, communicating intelligence to patriots in Machias and Halifax.

In 1780, Joseph Orono earned his Indian nickname, K’tolaqu. It means ‘frigate.’

Orono went to Newport, R.I., where French forces had landed before marching to Yorktown. His mission: to request a Catholic priest from the French consul. But he was so amazed by the French frigates in the harbor that he couldn’t stop talking about them afterword.

Island Life

Joseph Orono had often stayed and hunted with a friend on Deer Isle, a white settler named Seth Webb. After he broke with other Penobscots in 1783, he moved a small group of his people to White Island, off Deer Isle.

Penobscot wigwams

They established a little village with a Franciscan missionary, a Catholic chapel and wigwams. But they couldn’t live in peace there, either. In 1786, Joseph Orono complained to Massachusetts Commissioner Benjamin Lincoln, once a member of the Provincial Congress. People were chopping down his trees and burning the wigwams, he said.

A decade later, Massachusetts reneged on its deal to deed the land along the Penobscot River to Orono’s people. All they had left was the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

Five years after Joseph Orono died, white settlers near the Indian reservation incorporated, naming the town Orono. Today, the University of Maine has its main campus there. An island in Penobscot Bay also bears his name.

In May 2018, the University of Maine and the Penobscot Nation were scheduled to signed an agreement ‘formalizing their collaborations in the past decade to help manage the tribe’s cultural heritage.’

With thanks to Canoe Indians of Down East Maine, by Bill Haviland. This story about the Penobscot chief Joseph Orono was updated in 2022.

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Six Epic College Pranks

College pranks have been part of the college experience since at least the 13^th century, when Oxford students sent a prostitute to the cardinal in residence. The tradition of college pranks came to North America with the Puritans.

In the early 1800s, Harvard students thought it amusing to ring the bell in Memorial Hall during the wee hours of the morning. But at Brown, students preferred to muffle the college bell.

Over the years, college pranks have involved putting farm animals in inappropriate places. Pranksters often victimized prominent statues as well. Dartmouth students painted the statue of Harvard’s John Harvard green, Yale students painted him blue and others put him in women’s underwear.

Here we bring you six historic college pranks performed at New England institutions of higher learning. If you know of any other college pranks, please include them in the comments section.

College Pranks, Animal House Style

The Gardner Dow Field at Connecticut State, where students first paraded the ramnapped Ulysses.

There’s nothing like a sports rivalry to inspire college pranks, and the University of Connecticut and the University of Rhode Island, not 60 miles apart, are no exception.

In 1933, Connecticut State Agricultural College changed its name to Connecticut State College, and renamed its football team the Statesman rather than the Aggies.

It didn’t help the team. In 1934, the Connecticut Statesmen lost six out of their first seven games, while their opponents shut them out five times. Their final home game against the Rhode Island State Rams was likely to end badly for Connecticut.

Then Connecticut students learned that Rhode Island students planned to taunt them by bringing Ulysses, their ram mascot, to the game.

The Connecticut students stole Ulysses. During the 1934 game, Connecticut fans paraded Ulysses on the field accompanied by the marching band. As expected, Connecticut lost 18-0, Rhody fans tore down the goal posts and a fight broke out.

The next month, Connecticut chose as its mascot the Husky, a less kidnappable animal than the ram. For years afterward, Connecticut students ramnapped Ulysses and his successors. And for years afterward, the winner of the UConn-Rhode Island football game took home Ramnapping Trophy. When Rhode Island quit using live rams as mascots in 1974, the trophy was moved to the J. Robert Donnelly Husky Heritage Sports Museum on the UConn campus.

Streaking in Winter

University of Maine at Orono

College pranks took the form of streaking on college campuses starting in the early 1970s. Defined as running naked through a public place, streaking started out with solitary males running across campus or at sporting events. Women soon joined in the fun and streakers began running around en masse.

Some historians peg the beginning of the craze after newspapers began reported streakers at Florida State in January 1974. Despite the New England winter, University of Maine students quickly took up the sport at Orono.

The student government in March called a meeting at Memorial Hall to discuss how to handle the streaking epidemic. One streaker couldn’t resist temptation, and he streaked the meeting.

The state of Maine ended up enacting a law against streaking, but it proved ineffective. On Nov. 2, 2002, a police officer arrested two University of Maine undergraduate women for jogging naked through downtown Orono. A prosecutor charged them with indecent conduct. One of the women asked the police officer if he saw her genitals. He said no. The judge ruled a woman naked in the street is not an indecent act under Maine law because a woman’s genitals are primarily internal.

MIT Masters College Pranks

Smoot mark 364.4 on the Cambridge end of the Harvard Bridge. It says “+ 1 ear”, not “± 1 ear”, as it should.

The geeks at MIT have so perfected college pranks over the centuries that the MIT Museum once featured a Hall of Hacks.

The college pranks at MIT often display technical aptitude, something you’d expect at a university that teaches technology. MIT students once put a campus police car on top of the Great Dome, its lights flashing and its dummy inhabitant enjoying coffee and donuts.

Later, they put a subway car on the Great Dome and got it moving.

In the 1930s, Ken Wadleigh and four other MIT students welded a streetcar to its rails. They distracted the motorman and then set off thermite bombs to weld the wheels. Wadleigh became a dean at MIT.

In 1958, MIT students used undergraduate Oliver R. Smoot to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. They marked the bridge at every Smoot, and measured it as 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus an ear. When the bridge was renovated in 1964, the markings were restored, and they remain today.

Not all pranks involve technology. MIT students dressed the John Harvard statue as the Unabomber after the arrest of that Harvard alumni.

Cow-centric College Pranks

Thompson Hall at UNH

University of New Hampshire students have long taken to heart the admonition, “If at all possible, involve a cow.”

Students at UNH, a land-grant college, have access to farm animals for their college pranks. Over the years, students put pigs and sheep in places where pigs and sheep don’t belong.

In the 1930s, Alpha Gamma Rho brothers managed to haul a cow into the Thompson Hall tower. Somehow they got the cow down as well.

In 1951, students replicated the college prank by stashing a cow in the second floor of Ballard Hall. A poem written by the night watchman, Pop Marshall, recounts the episode:

“Now I’m willing to guard your property / And watch your buildings fine, / But teaching music to a cow / Is a little out of my line.”

Years later, UNH would be victimized by a more serious college prank of sorts when popular physics professor Kevin Yates turned out to be a college dropout named Marvin Hewitt. Read Hewitt’s extraordinary story here.

Messing With Messer

In the annals of Brown University, perhaps no administrator was so victimized by college pranks as Asa Messer. He became president in 1804, just when Nicholas Brown gave $5,000 to the College of Rhode Island and renamed it Brown. Under Messer’s tenure, the student body grew, but Brown’s bequest wasn’t quite enough to run the college to the student’s liking.

Asa Messer

Beloved tutors left Brown for other colleges, but Messer couldn’t afford to hire enough replacements to keep class size down.

Early in his presidency, students played harmless college pranks such as painting Messer’s horse or stabling it in his third-floor office.

Then the students’ pranks turned dangerous. They built a hut of kindling and set it on fire next to University Hall, endangering the building’s roof and Messer’s barn. Students damaged dormitories in University Hall and broke windows and doors of Hope College’s new chapel.

University Hall in 1792

Messer didn’t believe in sparing the rod and spoiling the undergraduate. He punished pranksters by rusticating them – sending them off to work on a farm. They called him a tyrant.

Messer believed the students aimed their vandalism at him personally, and he resigned.

Samuel Gridley Howe had attended Brown during those troubled times, and had once led Dr. Messer’s horse into the belfry. He also put hot ashes in his tutor’s bed.

After he founded the Perkins School for the Blind, Howe went to visit Dr. Messer. He apologized for his wayward youthful behavior. Messer replied, “Howe, I am afraid of you now. I am afraid there will be a torpedo under my chair before I know it.”

Panty Raid To End All Panty Raids

Vermont College of Fine Arts today

On the evening of May 24, 1963, carloads of cadets from Norwich University led a panty raid against the women of Vermont College (now the Vermont College of Fine Arts).

Vermont’s faculty and staff had an inkling something would happen that evening. A local store clerk said he’d sold out of women’s underwear that day. Vermont Dean Pauline Collins told her students she’d received a call from Gen. Ernest Harmon, who headed of Norwich Academy, warning about the panty raid. She told them to cancel their dates, return to the dormitory by 7:00 p.m., turn out the lights when the panty raid began and let no one into the building.

At dusk, cars carrying 300 Norwich cadets began to arrive, followed by the police and fire department. A hose truck stopped in front of the dorm, and the firefighters jumped out to hook up the hoses. A Norwich cadet commandeered the fire truck and drove it into a fountain. Girls shouted from the windows, “Come on Norwich! We want Norwich!” Firefighters then turned their hoses on the students in the windows.

Fighting broke out between police and cadets. Police Chief George Connor said, “We were knocked down, kicked, and trampled upon. It’s a miracle that no one was killed.”

In the end, Vermont’s president issued a denial that his students had participated at all in the hijinks.

Images: Smoot, By Denimadept – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6792703; Streaker, By Alex Kehr – originally posted to Flickr as #367, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3953923Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225. Vermont College By Hannahmorris – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24295961.

This story about college pranks was updated in 2022.

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Mexico, Maine? Rome, Maine? How Maine Place Names Came To Be

Many Maine place names are not like the rest of New England’s, with Bristols and Yarmouths and Portsmouths named after counterparts in England.

Maine has a Madrid, Mexico and a Peru, located just north of Denmark, Sweden and Norway. Belfast is near Frankfort and Vienna is near Rome and Belgrade. Calais sits on the Canadian border.

The famous sign showing Maine place names of foreign cities and countries.

It has to do with timing.

The English and Scots-Irish settled coastal Maine first. They named their early settlements after their birthplaces, with English and Scots-Irish place names like York and Belfast.

Quite a few Maine place names come from the Native American people, including Machias (“bad little falls”) and Ogunquit (“beautiful place by the sea”). Indigenous people also named Caribou, Damariscotta, Kennebunk, Millinocket, Orono, Penobscot, Saco and Skowhegan.

But Europeans settled Maine’s vast interior later than the rest of New England because the French and Indian wars made it too dangerous. Settlers didn’t put down roots in much of Maine until the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They incorporated towns when many people in foreign countries fought for independence. And so they named their towns after the freedom fighters they admired.

Maine Place Names

Mexico, for example, was originally called Holmanstown because Col. Jonathan Holman owned the land. When the pioneer settlers planned to organize into a town, they sympathized with the Mexicans battling the Spaniards for independence. So when the settlers incorporated in 1818, they chose the name to honor the Mexicans who won their fight for freedom in 1815.

Mexico, Maine, in 1905.

In 1821, people in Maine’s western interior decided to name their town Peru after the South American country that had just declared its independence from Spain.

Denmark, incorporated in 1807, was named in solidarity with the people of Copenhagen. The British Royal Navy attacked the Danish city in 1801 and 1807, much as it had attacked Falmouth in 1775. Eleven years later, Falmouth’s neck had grown into a shipping center. So that part of town broke off and gave itself the functional name of Portland.

Peru, Maine, in 1906.

In 1812, the settlers of Moscow, Maine, admired how the Russians had turned back Napoleon’s army. So they named the town after them.

Two decades earlier, the people of Township No. 4 felt gratitude toward the French for their help in the American Revolution. In 1793, they incorporated the town and named it Paris. Ironically, the land was originally granted as a reward to 60 men for their services fighting the French during the French and Indian wars.

Though Maine has few people of Italian descent, it has several towns named after Italian cities: Verona, Sorrento, Palermo, Naples and Rome. Maine Romans believed their town compared favorably with Rome, Italy, because they had seven times as many hills. They also had enough granite to rebuild the Italian capital.

‘Just Liking’ Maine Place Names

Some Mainers actually named their towns for non-British places they’d lived in. Swedish immigrants bestowed the Maine place names of New Sweden and Stockholm. Sweden, Maine, on the other hand, was given to Yankees who fought with John Lovewell during Father Rale’s War . No one seems to know why it became Sweden in 1813.

French and German Protestants originally settled a Downeast town they called Frankfort. In 1794. Lincoln County Probate Judge Jonathan Bowman renamed the town Dresden because he liked the sound of it.

The Poland Springs House

Similarly, Moses Emery named the Town of Poland, home of the famous Poland Springs resort. As one of the early settlers elected to the General Court, he procured the town’s incorporation in 1795. The town’s residents rewarded him by letting him name it. According to the Poland Historical Society,

He had always had a peculiarity for an ancient melody called “Poland,” found in most of the collections of ancient psalmody.
The melody must have been running through his mind the day he considered names for the town, for it was Poland he chose.

Japheth Washburn had the privilege of naming another town. He wanted to call it Bloomville, but the people of Bloomfield, 25 miles away, objected. They thought the names sounded too similar. So, like Moses Emery, he chose China, the name of one of his favorite hymns.

Unsolved Mystery

The origin of the town of Norway, incorporated in 1797, remains a mystery. Originally the town petitioned the General Court to be called Norage, an Native American word for “falls.” But then fire destroyed the town records in 1843, so no one knows how Norage became Norway.

Norway, Maine, in 1912

Given the precedent of Maine place names, the General Court may have thought ‘Norage’ was a misspelling of Norway.

This story about Maine place names was updated in 2023.

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Brownie Schrumpf, The First Foodie of Maine

Brownie Schrumpf was only 4’11” but she had a monumental impact on the way Mainers eat.

Over a 70-year career she was a diehard advocate of Maine food and simple Maine recipes. She taught classes, gave demonstrations, appeared on television and most of all wrote a much-loved cooking column for the Bangor Daily News.

Brownie Schrumpf

For years, her telephone rang off the hook in the newsroom with calls from people all over Maine who had questions about recipes and food.

When she died at 98 years old, she was remembered as ‘everyone’s neighbor.’

Brownie Schrumpf

She was born Mildred Gordon Brown on Jan. 24, 1903, on a farm in Readfield Depot, Maine, to Fred Brown and Nellie Mabel Gordon Brown. As a teenager, she won a Kennebec County 4-H canning contest. Her father took her to the University of Maine to enter the statewide contest. That trip convinced her she had to attend the university. Though her father had only an elementary school education, he agreed.

In 1925, she graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in Home Economics, the first in her family to graduate from college. Her first real job after college was as an assistant 4-H leader. She traveled around the state giving homemaking demonstrations.

She had to quit that job because she married William Schrumpf, an instructor at the University of Maine’s Agriculture Department. During the Great Depression, married couples couldn’t both be employed at the university.

Throughout the 1940s, she gave demonstrations and classes for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Extension Service and taught camp cookery to forestry students. She was proud of her service to the people of Maine because she felt it opened a bigger world for many farmwomen. She believed extension work helped change their lives.

Bangor Daily News

On Aug. 31, 1951, Brownie Schrumpf wrote her first column for the Bangor Daily News and would continue writing it for the next 43 years.

She was already well known in Maine by then. The column made her a legend.

In researching her column, she collected recipes from friends and neighbors and amassed a collection of 400 cookbooks, including 130 community cookbooks from Maine and Canada. She published two of her own cookbooks, The Flavor of Maine and Memories from Brownie’s Kitchen.

Though she was always on the lookout for new ways of preparing food, all of her recipes included ingredients you could find in a little Maine grocery store.

Typical of her approach to cooking was her 1987 critique of a cookbook with a recipe for baked beans. It called for powdered mustard, summer savory, cumin, coriander, maple syrup and brandy.

“True, many Maine homemakers use some of the ingredients,” she wrote. “But supper goers — especially summer visitors — look forward to the typical pot of beans baked with salt pork, salt, pepper and maybe an onion or an apple buried in the bottom of the bean pot.”

Postcard, Readfield Depot, 1909

Brownie Schrumpf traveled widely in Maine food circles and beyond. A fellow teacher once discovered her at an event enjoying a slice of cranberry nut bread. Brownie said, “This is wonderful. Where did you get the recipe?”

It was hers.

She served as a judge for the Bangor State Fair and the Pillsbury Bake-Off. She was chairman of the Maine Broiler Festival Chicken Barbecues and Luncheons, and she often headed teams that demonstrated Maine food at the Eastern States Exposition in Springfield, Mass.

The Brownie Controversy

On at least one occasion she overreached in her support for Maine foods, according to the Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink.

She championed the theory that brownies originated in Bangor, Maine. She based her argument on a brownie recipe in a cookbook published in Bangor in 1912.

But Fannie Farmer had already included a brownie recipe in her 1905 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.

There was reason for the confusion, though. A chocolate company, Walter Lowney, published a recipe for chocolate brownies called ‘Bangor Brownies.’

She maintained her strong ties to the University of Maine throughout her life, serving as class secretary for 40 years .

Brownie Schrumpf died in Orono on March 2, 2001. Her husband had died in 1976. Her obituary in the Bangor Daily News read, ‘Beloved ‘Brownie’ Schrumpf dies at 98.’

Photo: Postcard of ‘Readfield, Maine Circa 1909’ from the eBay store Web page. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Photo of Brownie Schrumpf By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49355534.

This story about Brownie Schrumpf was updated in 2022.

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