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Peterborough NH

Six Oldest Libraries in New England

Identifying New England’s oldest libraries is no easy task. In the early days of European settlement, book collections took many different forms.

Many New England libraries evolved over time from private collections to public institutions. Philanthropists founded some, while collective town actions resulted in others.

Many New England towns claim to have the oldest libraries in their state. In New Hampshire, for example, the Portsmouth Athenaeum was founded as a private library in 1817, 16 years before the Peterborough Town Library. But Peterborough, funded by taxpayers from the start, claims to be the oldest tax-supported library.

We decided to exercise our editorial prerogative and limit our list to the oldest libraries that lend books. So Peterborough in, Portsmouth out.

Here are six of the oldest libraries in New England, one in each state. If you have a candidate for oldest library, please mention it in the comment section below this story.

Scoville Library

Connecticut’s oldest library is in Salisbury.

The Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury, Conn., started in 1771 when a local blast furnace owner named Richard Smith offered to buy 200 books from London. But the rest of the town had to chip in, and 39 people contributed. On the third Monday of every third month, patrons could borrow and return books. The library fined them for damaging books, usually by greasing – letting candle wax drip on the pages.

In 1805, another local philanthropist named Caleb Bingham donated the Bingham Library for Youth. Then Miss Harriet Church donated the Church Library. Town Meeting in 1810 voted to authorize selectmen to spend $100 to buy more books for the town library.

The library now claims to be the oldest publicly funded library in the United States.

Jonathan Scoville in the 1890s left $15,000 in his will to build a library for the town’s books, then kept in Town Hall. Miss Grace Scoville bought a tower clock, which still chimes on the quarter hour. Salisbury Cathedral in England sent the library a 15^th-century stone carving, which the library placed above the fireplace in the reading room.

The library has recently redesigned its interior and now has 30,000 items, including the original books, genealogy and history of the town. Incidentally, settlers came to Salisbury after the discovery of iron nearby, and during the American Revolution the government took over the iron works to cast cannon.

38 Main St., Salisbury, Conn.

Witherle Memorial Library

Maine’s oldest municipal library is in Castine.

The Witherle Memorial Library in Castine, Maine, began in 1801 as a private collection of books that only paid subscribers could use. The Town of Castine took over the library in 1827 and established it as Maine’s first municipal library in 1855.

Local ships chandlers George and Mary Witherle donated the money for the land and the building’s foundation. The building itself was finished in 1913. Today the library has more than 13,000 volumes and local history collections, including the story of Castine’s founder, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. It also includes the history of the Penobscot Expedition; books by and about Civil War journalist Noah Brooks; and the letters of Union Army soldier Henry Butler to his wife during the Civil War.

41 School St., Castine, Maine

Sturgis Library

Barnstable, Mass., has one of the oldest libraries in New England and the oldest US building used as a library.

The Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Mass., is the oldest building in the United States to house a public library. The original part of the library was built in 1644 as the house of Rev. John Lothrop (also spelled Lothropp or Lathrop).

Lothrop immigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634, having been imprisoned in England as an outspoken Puritan who advocated independence for congregations. He was pardoned after he agreed to leave for the New World. Lothrop landed in Plymouth and settled in Barnstable on Cape Cod in 1639, one of the town’s first settlers. In New England, Lothrop strongly supported the separation of church and state.

He married twice and had 13 children. Today his descendants number 80,000, including six U.S. presidents (the Bushes, Franklin Roosevelt, Millard Fillmore, James A. Garfield and Ulysses S. Grant).

One of his descendants, William Sturgis, made a fortune in the China trade. When he died in 1863, he bequeathed his family home, $15,000 and his books for a public library.

The first two rooms of the house were used for religious worship, so the Sturgis Library also has the distinction of being the oldest building in the United States used regularly for religious services. The Lothrop Room is quintessential early Cape, with wide pumpkin pine floorboards and a beamed ceiling.

It’s located on the Old King’s Highway, and has 65,000 books the Cape Cod History Collection, the most important collection of its kind in the United States; the Kittredge Maritime Collection, one of the finest maritime collections on the East Coast; and the Lothrop Genealogy Collection.

3090 Main St., Barnstable, Mass.

Peterborough Town Library

oldest libraries Town_Library,_Peterborough,_NH

Taxpayers started one of New Hampshire’s oldest libraries.

The Peterborough Town Library, founded in 1833, is the oldest taxpayer-supported free library in New Hampshire.

Unitarian minister Abiel Abbot had the idea for a collection of books owned by the people and free to everyone who lived in Peterborough. The State of New Hampshire made money available for it. A capital stock tax had been intended to build a state university, but it didn’t raise enough money. Hence, the state created a Literary Fund, and Peterborough decided to use it for books.

On April 9, 1833, Town Meeting approved the library on the principle that, like the public school, it deserved maintenance by public taxation. The people of the community should also own and manage it.

The town bought 100 books and put them in Smith and Thompson’s General Store, along with the post office. The postmaster acted as librarian until 1854, when the town appointed Miss Susan Gates to take care of the town library books. In 1873, the growing collection of books moved to Town Hall. Within two decades Peterborough had 6,000 books and not nearly enough room. So in 1893, the town gave the library own building designed by noted bridge engineer and summer resident George Shattuck Morison. The collection now includes more than 50,000 volumes.

2 Concord St., Peterborough, N.H.

Redwood Library

A great philosopher founded one of New England’s oldest libraries.

The Redwood Library and Athenaeum started off as a 45-member literary society founded by Bishop George Berkeley, the great Irish philosopher. Berkeley moved to Rhode Island in 1729 to start a college. The Company of the Redwood Library in Newport, R.I., was founded in 1747 for the purpose of ‘having nothing in view but the good of mankind.’

Newport merchant Abraham Redwood gave the library 500 pounds sterling to buy 751 used books from London.

When the British occupied Newport in 1776, they used the library as an officers’ club. Many of the books disappeared. In 1806, the library began advertising for their return, but didn’t get many back. In 1947, the library staff tried again and recovered 92 percent of the missing volumes or copies of them.

Peter Harrison, the first professionally trained architect in the United States, designed the building. He later designed Newport’s Brick Market and Touro Synagogue. Ezra Stiles, who later helped found Brown University and served as president of Yale, served as its most well-known librarian.

The Redwood Library and Athenaeum is the oldest community library still occupying its original building. Unlike the Peabody Library in Vermont, the Redwood is private. It began charging $10 for admission in 2016.

50 Bellevue Ave., Newport, R.I.

Peabody Library

Thetford, Vt., has one of the oldest libraries in New England because of George Peabody.

The Peabody Library in the Post Mills Village of Thetford, Vt., was built in 1867, making it the oldest active library in the state federation of public libraries. George Peabody gave it to the town as a gift.

In the first decade of the 19^th century, Peabody was a teenager from South Danvers, Mass., who wanted to visit his grandfather in Post Mills. Too poor to pay for a horse or carriage, he walked for 10 days He chopped wood for innkeepers along the way and slept in their stables. Once he arrived he then spent the winter with his grandfather and became close to his aunt and uncle.

By 1867 Peabody acquired great wealth and gave some of it away from his home in England. He gave the village $5,000 to pay for land, building construction and 1,500 volumes from a London book dealer. Peabody founded and endowed museums at Harvard, Yale, and Salem, Mass. He also gave a Peabody Conservatory of Music and Peabody Institute Libraries in Baltimore, Danvers, Newburyport, Mass., and Georgetown, Mass. The town of South Danvers renamed itself Peabody in his honor.

Today in Thetford the one-room library building still has a long wooden table and rows of white bookshelves. Two curved staircases lead to an open balcony. Everything in the building is original except for the carpet and the paint.

Today the library has 6,000 volumes, DVDs, audio, e-books and WiFi – which some people who don’t patronize the library use while sitting outside.

7922 VT Route 113 (Junction of Routes 113 and 244), Post Mills, Vt.

End Notes

Images: Scoville Library By Phinisi Stuart – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21632787; Sturgis Library By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22634220; Redwood Library, By slgckgc – The Redwood Public Library, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38248325; Peabody Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Post Mills, VermontUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29767643

This story about New England’s oldest libraries was updated in 2021.

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Six Churches (All Gorgeous) Designed by Ralph Adams Cram

Once the most famous architect of his day, Ralph Adams Cram designed many churches, schools and libraries throughout New England. He also planned much of Princeton University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the great cathedral St. John the Divine in New York City.

Phillips Church, by Ralph Adams Cram

Ralph Adams Cram

Cram was born Dec. 16, 1863, in Hampton Falls, N.H., to an old New England family. His parents named him for Ralph Waldo Emerson and John Adams.

He became not only a prominent architect but an Anglo-Catholic, or High Episcopalian. He also founded the Catholic magazine Commonweal. Cram headed MIT’s architecture department for seven years. In 1926, he made the cover of Time magazine.

Though an ardent advocate of Gothic Revival, Ralph Adams Cram also designed buildings in the Colonial Revival and Art Deco styles.

Cram died Sept. 22, 1942. Unlike his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, his fame has dimmed. The Episcopal Church, though, celebrates his birthday as a feast day.

Here, then, are six churches designed by Ralph Adams Cram, one in each state. If you know of another, please mention it in the comments section.

Seymour St. John Chapel

In 1924, The Choate School in Wallingford, Conn., had 339 male students and a pressing need for a chapel. (John F. Kennedy would later attend Choate.)

Then-headmaster George St. John wrote in his autobiography, “To run a school without a chapel seemed like running a line for light and power without a powerhouse.”

To raise the $100,000 to pay for the chapel, alumni, parents and friends contributed, as did students who sold bricks for $5.

Ralph Adams Cram designed the chapel in the Colonial Revival style. Choate broke ground for the building in May 1924 and dedicated it in 1925.

Choate merged with a girl’s prep school in 1971 and became Choate Rosemary Hall. In 1998, the school rededicated the chapel and renamed it after the Rev. Seymour St. John, headmaster from 1947 to 1973.

All Souls Congregational Church

In 1911, a great fire destroyed much of Bangor, Maine, including the First Congregational church, which overlooked the central business district. The Third Congregational Church also burned in the fire, so the two parishes joined together to build a new church on the site of the First’s old one.

The two parishes commissioned Ralph Adams Cram, who designed an exceptionally creative (some say odd) Gothic Revival church. He incorporated flying buttresses, a rose window, a slender copper-clad spire, a small bell tower and stone from the Third’s building.

The church, which occupies a city block, once faced a row of stately homes. Today it looks across at offices, gas stations and retail stores.

All Saints Church, Ashmont

One stormy Sunday, a snow squall stranded Mary Lothrop Peabody and her husband Oliver near the small wooden chapel of All Saints in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. They were on their way from their estate in Milton to church. They had just lost a young child. Coincidentally, so had the rector of the All Saints chapel. The storm hit them on Dec. 28, 1879, the Feast of the Holy Innocents.

The Peabodys stopped in the chapel instead of forging on to church in Boston. The sermon moved them deeply. The minister preached, “Rachel, weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.”

Oliver had co-founded the investment bank Kidder, Peabody. He and Mary decided to build a new All Saints church. They, like Cram, were children of Unitarian ministers who became Anglo-Catholics, aka High Episcopalians.

The Peabodys hired young architects, Ralph Adams Cram and his partner Bertram Goodhue. They persuaded the Peabodys (or perhaps they needed little persuading) to revive the Gothic style in the design of All Saints. It was Cram’s first church. Cram biographer Douglas Shand-Tucci said of All Saints, Cram’s first church:

A significant landmark in American architectural history, All Saints’ is, of its type, Cram and Goodhue’s masterpiece, and a model for American parish church architecture for the first half of the 20th century.

All Saints Church

The Episcopal All Saints Church, Peterborough, is one of Cram’s small masterpieces, considered by some to be the most beautiful church in America. It’s set back from the road on four acres in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. Ralph Adams Cram modeled it after St. Mary the Virgin Church in Iffley, Oxfordshire, England.

Cram stressed local workmen and local materials – hence, he ordered the building built of granite. Some of the finest Arts and Crafts artisans in the region decorated the interior: woodcarver Johannes Kirchmayer, ironworker Frank Koralewski and stained glass artisan Charles Connick.

Mary Lyon Cheney Schofield commissioned the building in 1913 to honor her family. Her first husband, Charles Cheney, was the son of the founder of American Express. He died in 1897, shortly before their third child was born. Her second husband, Harvard professor William Schofield, died in 1920. One of her sons died in World War I. Mary lived until 1947. She, her husbands and her son are interred in the chapel.

Emmanuel Church

In the early 19th century, many residents of South Newport, R.I., couldn’t afford to attend church because they had to buy pew seats. So in 1841, three women from Trinity Church began to hold religious meetings in their homes.

Eight years later, with 88 members, they bought an empty Baptist church. Within three years, the Rhode Island Episcopal diocese admitted Emmanuel Church. The parish soon built a wooden Tudor-style church.

By the turn of the century, the old church needed repair or replacement.

Rhode Island’s prominent Brown family stepped in and commissioned Ralph Adams Cram to design Emmanuel Church in Newport. He later designed other buildings for the princely Browns.

Natalie Bayard Brown built the church in memory of her husband, John Nicholas Brown I. It took two years to build, reaching completion in 1902. Cram’s partner, Bertram Goodhue, designed the rich interior ornamentation, which went wildly over budget.

In the early 1930s, concert organist E. Power Biggs served at the church.

Today, Emmanuel still prides itself on welcoming anyone who wishes to worship.

St. James Episcopal Church

The parish of St. James was organized in the summer of 1826, when Woodstock, Vt., was a prosperous mill town that produced scythes, carding machines, woolens, carriages and tack.

It was built in time for Christmas Eve service in 1827 and consecrated the next year. The founders of the parish bought stone for the church, but discovered quicksand under the land donated for the site. They built a wooden frame church instead, and put a Paul Revere bell in the tower.

In 1907, St. James got the stone church its founders wanted. Ralph Adams Cram designed the building, considered one of his most distinguished smaller churches. He incorporated the brass pulpit and lectern, the marble font and three stained glass windows, one of which came from Tiffany studios.

If you’d like to read more about Gothic Revival buildings in New England, see our story about Henry Vaughan.

Photos: St. James Episcopal Church, AlexiusHoratius~commonswiki; Emmanual Church By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434397; All Saints Church, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19104034; All Saints, Ashmont By Jim Roberts – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51960817; Seymour St. John Chapel, Wallingford, Conn. By Daderot (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

This story about Ralph Adams Cram was updated in 2021.

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Marian MacDowell Founds the MacDowell Colony

Marian MacDowell was a 50-year-old woman tending a sick husband in 1907 when she founded the New Hampshire institution that nurtured some of America’s greatest composers, writers and artists.

Edward MacDowell and Marian MacDowell.

Two tragedies sent her on the path to starting the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. One, the death of her mother; the other, the death of her husband, four decades later.

Marian MacDowell

Marian Griswold Nevins was born in New York City on Nov. 22, 1857, the third of Cornelia and David Nevins’ five children. Her father was a successful Wall Street banker. Her mother died when she was eight — and her father was away. The doctor and her grandmother made her give her father the news. She recalled,

I heard the carriage come up to the front door and then they all looked at each other with consternation; neither one could dare to go out and meet him… knowing the very strong affection my father had for me, they pushed me out into the hall and said, “You have got to tell Father Mother is dead.” He came in, looked at me and said, “What is the matter?” I said, “Mother is dead,” and he fell as though he had been knocked over the head with a heavy blow.

David Nevins sent the children to live with two aunts, Lucretia and Caroline Perkins, in Waterford, Conn. Caroline, who taught music, recognized Marian’s musical talent and encouraged her to pursue the piano.

he 1910 Peterborough Pageant used MacDowell’s music to dramatize the history of Peterborough, N.H., set on the grounds of the MacDowell Colony. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Choices

In 1880, 23-year-old Marian Nevins sailed to Europe – where all serious American musicians studied — to train with Clara Schumann. Schumann wasn’t available, however, and Marian studied instead with a young American composer, Edward MacDowell. Three years later, he asked her to marry him. She agreed on one condition: That he would devote his life to composing and live off her savings. They were married in 1884 in Waterford.

The young couple eventually settled in Boston, which gave MacDowell membership in the group of New England classical music composers known as the Boston Six. Three months into the marriage, Marian MacDowell realized she had to choose between her husband’s career and her own. She chose his. (Listen to MacDowell’s piece To A Wild Rose from Woodland Sketches here.)

Quiet

Leonard Bernstein at the MacDowell Colony.

Realizing he needed a quiet place to work, she bought Hillcrest, an abandoned farm in Peterborough, N.H., in 1896, without consulting him. She telegraphed the news to him and he replied, “All right, in your name, your responsibility.”

Nevertheless, he loved Hillcrest. Marian surprised him after their first summer by having a log cabin built with a view of Mount Monadnock. It was a perfect place for him to compose, and he wrote most of his significant piano works from it. (Listen to From A Log Cabin here.) She would leave his lunch in a wicker basket and leave it on his doorstep so he could work undisturbed – a tradition that continues to this day at the art colony.

Edward MacDowell had taught music at Columbia University since 1896, but in 1904 he quit his job during an academic dispute. Soon afterward he was hit by a Hansom cab and he went into a severe mental decline. A friend said, “His mind became as that of a little child. He sat quietly, day after day, in a chair by a window, smiling patiently from time to time at those about him, turning the pages of a book of fairy tales…”

Even as they relied on friends for financial support, Marian MacDowell began to realize their dream of a summer colony where artists could find inspiration in quiet and solitude. In 1907, she deeded their farm to the Edward MacDowell Association and founded the MacDowell Colony. During that first season, the guests were sisters Helen Farnsworth Mears, a sculptor, and Mary Mears, a writer.

The MacDowell Colony

Marian MacDowell near the log cabin studio. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Edward MacDowell died on Jan. 23, 1908. Marian MacDowell was 50 years old, but she would remain involved with the art colony for the next 48 years. She resumed her career as a pianist and went on the road to raise money, visiting 600 cities in a 15-year period. Again, at the age of 73, she embarked on a concert tour to raise money in the United States and Canada.

Over time the colony expanded and produced a considerable body of work.

Fellows

An estimated 6,000 artists have been supported in residence, including the winners of at least 61 Pulitzer Prizes.

Fellows included Leonard Bernstein, who wrote MASS while there, and Amy Beach; poet Edwin Arlington Robinson; painter Lilla Cabot Perry; novelists Willa Cather, James Baldwin and Spalding Gray; and playwright Thornton Wilder, who was inspired by nearby Peterborough to write Our Town. L. M. Kit Carson wrote The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 while at the MacDowell Colony, and Michael Chabon worked on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

In 1946, on her 89^th birthday, Marian MacDowell resigned her job as head of the MacDowell Colony but continued on as ‘corresponding secretary.’ On her 96^th birthday, the Town of Peterborough sent her a cake with the message ‘To Marian MacDowell, Peterborough’s First Citizen, Beloved by All New Hampshire.’ It was the last year she managed to come to the Colony. She died three months shy of her 99^th birthday, on Aug. 23, 1956.

She summed up her achievements simply: “I am a very ordinary woman who had an opportunity—and I seized it.”

This story was updated in 2023.

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New Hampshire’s James Wilson, Not Exactly Father of the Year

To his admirers, Gen. James Wilson of Keene, N.H., commanded respect and admiration. He acquired wealth and renown in the decades before the Civil War as a lawyer, politician, military man and adventurer. Truly a larger-than-life figure.

His children had more mixed feelings about him.

In 1850, James Wilson left three motherless daughters and a son, ages 13 to 24, to seek his fortune in California. He left behind chaotic finances and an elegant brick home in Keene – with a mortgage. He gave them little or no financial support. Their mother had died two years before he left, and for 11 years they sent him letters wondering when he’d come home.

James Wilson

He was born March 18, 1797 in Peterborough, N.H., the son of a congressman. In 1820, upon graduating Middlebury College, he moved to Keene and enlisted in the state militia. He served for the next 18 years, rising to the rank of major general. He also took up his father’s profession.

At 28 he won election to the New Hampshire House of Representatives. He really made his mark, though, during the presidential election of 1840. Wilson stumped for William Henry Harrison in all the New England states, in Pennsylvania and, for a month, in New York State. He was “one of the most eloquent and efficient popular orators of his time,” wrote Briggs.

William Henry Harrison campaign flag.

Harrison won, which earned James Wilson a patronage job as surveyor general in the public lands of Wisconsin and Iowa. There he made his fortune, which he eventually dissipated.

In 1846 he won election to Congress, where he served for three years. Then at 53 he suddenly resigned and left to seek his fortune in California. His wife, Mary, had died, and he left his children to run the household and keep his creditors at bay. Wilson didn’t quite abandon his children — Mary Elizabeth, 24, Annie, 18, Charlotte, 16 and Jamie, 13 — but he certainly left them in the lurch.

In California he had received a political appointment (in part due to his friend Daniel Webster) on the Land Commission. Eventually he was accused of corruption and removed. Wilson did strike gold, and sent his family samples from which they made jewelry. He supported himself, and occasionally his children, by lawyering.

Sleepless Nights

A year after he left, his oldest daughter, Mary Elizabeth, or Lizzie, married John Sherwood, a New York lawyer. A socialite who wrote for various periodicals, she didn’t enjoy managing two households at once while her father sought his second fortune.

Mary Elizabeth Wilson Sherwood

Money issues often troubled the Wilson sisters. On Aug. 3, 1853, Annie wrote her father:

I have been obliged to borrow fifty dollars of Mr. Newell, as the $450 received in May has given out. I had with it to pay Mr. Wheeler, church tax etc. which I have already written you, beside finding the wood shed empty (owing to Uncle Robert’s neglect) and having to fill it at this expensive season. I shall hope to receive some funds by the next mail.

Uncle R. informed me the other day that “our creditors have got a judgement against us” which I did not understand at all until he added, “if something don’t turn up money soon we must lose everything.” I was sick and nervous and out of money when he told me and the prospect of being turned out of house and home, of losing even this roof which covers us kept me awake a good many nights.

James Wilson Comes Home

James Wilson spent 13 years away from his family. Eventually his son Jamie joined him in California.

The SS Golden Gate

In 1861, a year after Jamie’s arrival, Wilson returned east on the steamship Golden Age. He had missed two daughters’ weddings, the birth of five grandchildren and his son’s graduation. He moved back to Keene and, in the early days of the Civil War, made speeches in support of the Union cause. Then, after eight months, he went back to California.

Five years later he returned to Keene at the age of 70. His daughters had managed to save the family home, a brick mansion on the corner of Main and Emerald.

In 1871, New Hampshire voters sent him to the state Legislature. Some said they did it to avoid the expense of supporting him in the poorhouse. He died on May 29, 1881, at the age of 85.

Accolades

James Franklin Briggs gave him accolades after his death in his adulatory Sketch of General James Wilson of New Hampshire.

There was a charm about his personality that made all who knew him ever hold him in loving remembrance. … He was six feet and four inches in height, well built, erect, with deep set bright blue eyes, a wealth of black, curly hair, stern and determined, yet fascinating, countenance” and often spoke of himself as a rough hewn block from the Granite State, and everywhere was spoken of by his friends as “Long Jim Wilson.” As a lawyer he was able and successful, and won a high reputation. As an advocate he had few equals and no superior. Before juries his eloquence was irresistible.

Another View

His daughter Lizzie had a clearer picture of his strengths and weaknesses.

On Sept. 29, 1859, Lizzie wrote her father:

My dear Father,

It is a long time since I wrote you, and now I do it without having heard anything from you for several months. It was so severe a disappointment that you did not come home that I felt as if I never could write you again. I felt as if you cared for us no longer. Your reasons for not coming were so vague and unsatisfactory. The business at Keene is in such an undetermined state,–I wish you would explain to us a little of the business, position, and intentions of our father…

Oh! my Father! What are you thinking of, that you have left your daughters so many years in suspense, when one page would tell us all. Why will you not pay off the encumbrances off that house settle it legally on us four … No matter what the story is, do tell it rather than not answer my questions. If I have never to go to Keene as my home again I want to know it. If I won’t I want to know that…

Lizzie

With thanks to Sisters of Fortune: Being the true story of how three motherless sisters saved their home in New England and raised their younger brother while their father went fortune hunting in the California Gold Rush by Nancy Coffey Heffernan and Ann Page Stecker. This story was updated in 2022.

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Flashback Photo: Peterborough Town Library, 1906

Peterborough Town Library

This photo of the Peterborough Town Library in New Hampshire dates to 1906, but the library itself goes back to 1833. It’s the oldest taxpayer-supported free library in the United States.

It was Unitarian minister Abiel Abbot who had the idea to build a central collection of books owned by the people and free to everyone who lived in Peterborough. Money was available to buy books from the State of New Hampshire. A capital stock tax had been intended to build a state university, but it turned out not to be enough for a university. Hence, the State Literary Fund was created, and Peterborough decided to use it for books.

On April 9, 1833, a proposal was made and passed at Town Meeting “that a portion of the State Literary Fund be used for the purchase of books to establish a library, free to all the citizens of Peterborough.”

The town bought 100 books and put them in Smith and Thompson’s General Store, along with the post office. The postmaster acted as librarian until 1854, when Miss Susan Gates was appointed to take care of the town library books. In 1873, the growing collection of books moved to the town hall. Within two decades there were 6,000 books and not nearly enough room. So in 1893, the library was given its own building designed by noted bridge engineer and summer resident George Shattuck Morison. The collection now includes more than 50,000 volumes.

The Library explains its importance on its website:

The Peterborough Town Library’s claim to importance is not that it was the first library to which the public had access, for such libraries had existed before 1833. Rather, its importance rests in its being created on the principle, accepted at Town Meeting, that the public library, like the public school, was deserving of maintenance by public taxation and should be owned and managed by the people of the community, who thereby ceased to be dependent upon private munificence.

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One Family’s Miraculous Ride During the 1938 Storm

On Sept. 21, 1938, New Englanders started out enjoying what looked like a decent fall day. No one was paid attention to the 1938 hurricane headed up the coast. The Moore family had no reason to think they would take a miraculous ride to safety that day.

Weather forecasters told those who paid attention the storm had turned out to sea. The worst they should expect? A breezy day.

Houses destroyed by the hurricane of 1938. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

One man at the National Weather Bureau predicted the storm would, in fact, follow the devastating track of the hurricanes of 1635 and 1815. But his superiors overruled him, and the forecast for the day called for good weather.

1938 Hurricane

Estimates vary, but at least 400 people perished that day and maybe as many as 800. The hurricane of 1938 crossed over the tip of Long Island, then slammed into New London, Conn., and raced up the Connecticut River Valley at 50 miles per hour.

It caused unprecedented destruction. In New London, high waters pushed a five-masted ship, Marsala, into a warehouse and then started a fire that demolished a quarter-mile section of the city’s business district.

As the storm passed the Milton Observatory in Massachusetts, 186 m.p.h. wind gusts were recorded. Up into New Hampshire, Peterborough went up in flames and part of the Cog Railway on Mt. Washington blew down. And in Vermont, the storm caused a train derailment and uprooted maple trees and apple orchards.

Rhode Island got the worst of it. Parts of downtown Providence were under 14 feet of water, with people sheltering on the second and third floors of buildings. In Westerly, R.I., 100 people died ecause of the storm.

Perhaps the most astounding story of the storm comes from the Moore family of Westerly. As the storm grew stronger, the family tried to evacuate their beachfront home, but could not. As the ocean waves began surging into the house, Catherine Moore recalls her father bracing against the front door literally trying to hold back the ocean.

The Miraculous Ride

As the family moved first to the second floor and finally to the third floor to stay above the storm surge, they watched as house after house succumbed. They saw neighbors washed away. Finally, the waves overwhelmed their own house, lifting it off its foundation.

“Next thing I knew, we were floating,” Moore recalled. “We were on the water with the waves crashing over us, and part of the house still attached, one of the walls still attached to this piece of floor, and it almost acted as a sail.”

In all, 10 people clung to that bit of floor as it hurdled across the sound to land in Connecticut, where the family then stepped back on to land and back into their lives.

Newsreel footage of the 1938 hurricane can be seen here.

This story was updated in 2021.

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