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Louis Brandeis Celebrates Hanukkah in 1915

Louis Brandeis during Hanukkah in 1915 delivered a message to the Zionists of America that described the holiday as a celebration of the struggle for democracy.

Brandeis himself strove for social justice during his lifetime. Over the course of his long career he earned the nickname the Peoples’ Lawyer.

A brilliant lawyer and jurist, he introduced pro bono legal service and the concept of the right to privacy. He pioneered the use of scientific and economic data in legal arguments.

Louis Brandeis also helped write the Federal Reserve Act, fought for strong first amendment rights, corporate transparency, consumer protection and workers’ health and safety. He fought corruption and corporate monopoly, and he supported both conservation and Zionism.

Louis Brandeis

He was born November 13, 1856 in Louisville, Ky., to parents who escaped anti-Semitism in Bohemia, now the Czech Republic.

His brilliance became apparent in his youth, when his parents taught him to cherish high-minded ideals. He graduated from high school at 14 and then went to Harvard.

Louis Brandeis graduated from Harvard Law School at the age of 20, with the highest grade point average recorded by the school for the next 80 years. His doctor urged him to drop out after he damaged his eyes by studying intensely in dim gaslight. Instead, he paid other students to read to him.

After graduation, Louis Brandeis and a fellow student started a law practice in Boston. He had clerked for a Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Horace Gray, and Massachusetts’ legal community viewed him so highly he didn’t have to take the bar exam. His law firm, Nutter McClennen & Fish, still exists in Boston today.

At 35, Louis Brandeis wrote an article in the Harvard Law Review defining the right to privacy, which added an entire chapter to American law.

In 1891 he married Alice Goldmark and they had two daughters. He earned enough money to make his family comfortable. Though a millionaire, he lived in a modest home on Beacon Hill, and he paddled a canoe in Dedham, Mass., for relaxation.

Crusader for Justice

Louis Brandeis famously said,

We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Louis Brandeis paddling his own canoe.

When he’d earned enough money from his law practice he began a crusade for social reform. He successfully fought J.P. Morgan’s efforts to monopolize New England’s railroads. He also exposed insurance fraud in Massachusetts, and he fought the practice of turning over federal lands to private corporations.

Starting in 1914, Louis Brandeis began to expose the miserable conditions in Massachusetts poorhouses. He held 57 hearings in nine months, which resulted in the reorganization of the poor law. He also exposed corruption among Boston’s politicians and persuaded the Legislature to make certain kinds of corruption a crime.

That year, he wrote a book called Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It, about investment bankers’ control of American industry.

Eventually, Louis Brandeis stopped accepting money for his work, devoting his energies to representing the people. He won his nine-year fight against J.P. Morgan’s attempt to control all New England’s railroads. In the famous Brandeis Brief he pioneered the concept of using science to argue cases. He argued, successfully, that the law should prevent women from working excessive hours because it injured their health.

Supreme Court

In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson nominated his friend Louis Brandeis to the U.S. Supreme Court. His opponents bitterly fought the nomination. Later, Justice William O. Douglas wrote that Brandeis was feared because he was incorruptible. And, he wrote,

… the fears of the Establishment were greater because Brandeis was the first Jew to be named to the Court.

Louis Brandeis, during his 22 years on the Supreme Court, was considered one of the finest and fairest justices ever.

Hanukkah Message

He joined the Zionist movement in 1914, because he believed it the solution to anti-Semitism.

In his 1915 message to Zionists, called the Victory of the Maccabees, Louis Brandeis described their triumph as

…not a military victory only; but a victory also of the spirit over things material…a victory of the many over the ease-loving, safety-playing, privileged, powerful few, who in their pliancy would have betrayed the best interests of the people; a victory of democracy over aristocracy.

As a part of the eternal world-wide struggle for democracy, the struggle of the Maccabees is of eternal worldwide interest. It is a struggle of the Jews today, as well as those of 2,000 years ago. It is a struggle of America as well as of Palestine.

Louis Brandeis died on Oct. 5, 1941, two years after retiring from the Supreme Court.

Usen Castle at Brandeis University

In 1948, the Jewish community founded a co-ed, nonsectarian university called Brandeis in Waltham, Mass.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Body Snatcher of Chebacco Parish

In April 1818, the discovery that a body snatcher had removed eight human bodies from their final resting place shocked the people of Chebacco Parish on Massachusetts’ North Shore.

Several months earlier, people saw lights in The Old Burying Ground (now in Essex). It snowed that night, so no telltale footprints were left.

But when the snow melted, it revealed a hair ornament on the ground. It belonged to 26-year-old Sally Andrews, who died of consumption on Christmas Day 1817. Further investigation found her grave empty.

Heinous Crime

Not only did town officials discover a body snatcher had removed Sally’s body, they found seven more bodies missing as well. They included 10-year-old boys Isaac Allen and Phillip Harlow; Mary Millet, aged 35; William Burnham, 79; Elisha Story, 65; and Samuel Burnham, 26.

All had been recently buried. The body snatcher had also taken a colored man who had been buried six years previously.

The furious residents of Chebacco Parish raised the enormous amount of $500 for information about the person who had conducted this “most daring and sacrilegious robbery.”

As a reminder of the heinous crime, eight coffins were left open for the public to view for three months.

Anatomists

The townspeople had no hope of recovering the bodies, as they believed they had ‘passed under the dissecting knife of the anatomist.’

Suspicion fell on the ‘anatomist’ for a reason: In the 19^th century, body snatchers robbed graves to sell to doctors or medical students for anatomical research or lectures. Doctors even did it.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Rembrandt van Rijn

The body snatchers generally targeted fresh graves, as the soft earth made digging easier. Sometimes they hired women to act as grieving relatives who claimed the bodies of the dead at poorhouses. Sometimes they hired women to attend funerals so they could detect any obstacles to the body snatching.

The demand for fresh bodies grew as colleges established medical schools in America. Harvard Medical School, established in 1782 by John Warren, younger brother of Joseph Warren, Aaron Dexter and Benjamin Waterhouse.

Wrote Warren’s son, John Collins Warren, Jr., “No occurrences in the course of my life have given me more trouble and anxiety than the procuring of subjects for dissection.”

Body Snatcher

Thomas Sewall, a promising young doctor in town, was a likely suspect as a body snatcher.

He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1812 and set up a physician’s practice in Ipswich. He also lectured on anatomy to medical students.

The Rev. Robert Crowell described his scientific approach to medicine:

Though endowed by nature with a bold and penetrating genius, and though rich in all the learning of his science and vigilant in marking its progress, he never allowed his judgement to yield to the fascination of theories, or to the authority of systems; but founded his practice on the solid basis of experience.

The townspeople suspected that ‘solid basis of experience’ included dissecting fresh bodies.

Sure enough, authorities discovered he possessed parts of the bodies of Sally Andrews and William Burnham.

Daniel Webster

Sewall hired Daniel Webster as his lawyer, but it didn’t matter. A jury found him guilty on two counts of knowingly and willfully receiving, concealing and disposing of the bodies of two of his patients. The court fined him $800 and ordered him out of the community.

Aftermath

Webster invited him to move to Washington, D.C., to reestablish his career. In 1825 he cofounded the medical department at Columbian College (later George Washington University), and he taught anatomy.

In 1819, Chebacco incorporated into the town of Essex.

Two decades after the body snatcher incident, the townspeople could still barely talk about it, wrote Duane Hamilton Hurd in his book, History of Essex County, Vol. II. Hurd had arrived in town 22 years later, and wrote that a ‘pungency and acerbity in every occasional allusion to it by the majority of the adults.’

If you liked this story about the body snatcher of Chebacco Parish, you may also like to read about Fortune, the slave whose body was used for medical training, here.

This story was updated in 2022.

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From Soups to Nuts – Ten Eponymous New England Classic Foods

What could be a better guarantee that your name will never be forgotten than having a food named after you? Here, in no particular order, are 10 eponymous New England classic foods and the people who inspired them. (Plus a couple extras.)

Hubbard Squash. Captain Knott Martin was a master mariner from Marblehead, Mass. On returning from one of his voyages in 1854 he introduced his neighbor, Elizabeth Hubbard, to a strange, foreign vegetable. It was a squash. Elizabeth began extolling its virtues to a seed merchant, James Gregory, and he decided to produce seeds from the vegetable to market. Since no one could tell him the name of the vegetable, he dubbed it the Hubbard Squash. It can grow to 45 pounds and last in the pantry for months, making it a valuable addition to any garden. There are competing theories as to how the squash got its name, but we’re sticking with this one.

New England Classic Foods

Real New England Classic Foods

Mary Janes. You’ve probably eaten a Mary Jane. They’re a molasses and peanut butter flavored little taffy style block sold in a yellow wrapper with a picture of a little girl on them. That’s Mary Jane. Charles Miller of the Charles N. Miller Candy Company said he named them (but maybe Robert O. Lord did). His company was actually located in Paul Revere’s house. The products were popular on the penny candy scene since their inception in 1914. Miller told the story that he named the candies after a favorite aunt. Others have suggested it was just a popular name in that era. NECCO subsequently bought Mary Janes, but went bankrupt. The Atkinson Candy Co. now makes them under a licensing agreement with Spangler.

The Baldwin Apple. The Baldwin apple made its debut on the farm of John Ball of Wilmington, Mass., in 1740. A random hybrid, it only grew for about 40 years in and around Wilmington. But it got its name from Loammi Baldwin, a farmer and hero of the American Revolution. Baldwin promoted the variety aggressively. Firm, bright red and a reliable and abundant crop, the Baldwin was for many years the most popular apple in New England and New York.

Baldwin Apple

Soup and Cake

Rumford’s Soup. One of Loammi Baldwin’s good friends was Benjamin Thompson, who would be made a German count in 1791 for his assistance to the German government. Count Rumford was a prolific inventor and not shy about attaching his name to things. His Rumford stoves are still in use. Concord, N.H., was at one point named Rumford after him. Working in Germany, Rumford researched nutrition and developed a soup, Rumford’s Soup, as a nutritious food staple that could be served widely in the military, workhouses and poorhouses. The barley-pea soup became a basic military ration in Europe for much of the 1800s and into the 1900s. Germans still trot out the classic recipe at Oktoberfest.

German Chocolate Cake. Though it may sound improbable, German chocolate cake is not German. It gets its name from Samuel German who worked for Dorchester’s Baker’s Chocolate Company. The company produced its dark “German’s Chocolate” bearing Samuel German’s name. It was adapted as the standard chocolate brand to be used in making a German chocolate cake, the chocolate layer cake with pecans, coconut and cherries on top that became wildly popular in the 1950s. German Chocolate Cake day is June 11, which is as good an excuse as any to bake one of these delicious dessert treats.

An Accident and Connoisseurs

Parker House Rolls. Mainer H.D. Parker established the Boston Parker House Hotel in 1855. He ran it until he died in 1884. Sometime during the 1870s the roll that bears his name got started. The soft, white rolls are slightly sweet and have several legends about their creation. The stories feature a baker growing furious and throwing dough into the oven, only to accidentally produce the hotel’s signature rolls. A local favorite from the start, Fannie Farmer made them famous when she included them in her 1896 Boston Cooking School Cook Book.

The Parker House in 1910

Bartlett Pear. The most common pear in America, the Bartlett Pear, is names for Enoch Bartlett, a Dorchester, Mass., farmer. Bartlett bought his farm from James Carter, who planted his land with Bartletts around 1799. To connoisseurs, the flavor of the Bartlett epitomizes the pearishness they seek in the fruit. Carter had imported the pear trees from Europe, where they are known as Williams pears. Farmer Bartlett apparently did not know what to call them, and so when he began marketing them he named them after himself. The name stuck. By the time people identified the Bartlett as being the same as the Williams pear, it was wildly popular in North America and kept its new name.

Health Food Nut

Graham Crackers. Connecticut’s Rev. Sylvester Graham was born in 1794 in Suffield, Conn., to an aging father and mentally ill mother. Raised by relatives, he developed a fierce ideology that he carried with him into the pulpit when he took up the family trade of ministering. He hated waste and unhealthy food almost as much as he hated alcohol, and so he preached that people should eat a simple vegetarian diet of minimally processed foods. In his sermons around the county, he advocated for people using Graham flour and Graham crackers, made of unrefined whole wheat. Though he earned no money from the products he advocated, he did earn fame because the name stuck. We have Graham crackers in American pantries to this day.

Sylvester Graham

More New England Classic Foods

Needhams. The Needham candy, a chocolate-covered coconut and potato sweet that is popular in Maine, was actually invented in the candy kitchens of John Seavey in Auburn, Maine, around 1872. But the modest Mr. Seavey chose not to name them after himself or his employee who dreamed them up. Rather, he named them after George Needham, a well known minister of the day who had settled in Boston from his native England. Needham’s remarkable life had very little to do with the candy that keeps his name alive today.

The needham

Joe Froggers. In Marblehead, Mass., Joe Frogger cookies have been a prized sweet for generations. They are large ginger cookies first baked by a man known as Old Black Joe Brown and his wife Lucretia, known as Aunty Crese. Joe served as a soldier in the American Revolution. After the war, he and his wife ran a tavern on Gingerbread Hill near a small pond filled with frogs. Hence the name ‘Joe Frogger.’ The cookies kept for a long time, and sailors and fishermen took barrels of Joe Froggers with them on their voyages.

Burbank Plum and Burbank Potato. Luther Burbank of Lancaster, Mass., headed west to California in the 1870s and spent a lifetime developing new strains of plants. He created dozens of varieties of flowers and vegetables, including two that bear his name. The Burbank Plum and the Burbank Russet Potato. The Burbank Russet, which Luther developed in Massachusetts and used to pay for his westward migration, is the most widely grown potato in the United States today. It appears in, among other preparations, McDonald’s French fries.

This story about New England classic foods was updated in 2022.

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The Wicked Blue Lights of New London Give Connecticut a Bad Name

On the moonless night of Dec. 18, 1813, a pair of mysterious blue lights at the mouth of the Thames River thwarted Stephen Decatur’s attempt to sneak through a British blockade.

Stephen Decatur.

A British squadron had chased Decatur’s three warships up the river from Long Island Sound in June, a year after the War of 1812 broke out. For six months, Decatur and his men remained stuck five miles upriver, unable to do more than nurse a hearty distaste for New London.

So when Decatur saw those blue lights, he immediately understood them as signals to warn the British of his attempted escape.

War of 1812

New England as a whole objected to the War of 1812, which brought hard times to the region. Banks failed, poorhouses overflowed and unemployment approached 50 percent of the workforce. New London faced the additional menace of a British invasion because of Decatur’s presence on the Thames River.

No one ever found out whether a British spy or an American traitor lit the mysterious blue lights. But the publicity surrounding the affair tarnished New England’s dominant political party, the Federalists, who implacably opposed the War of 1812.

Decatur vs. New London

U.S. Navy Commodore Stephen Decatur in 1813 was fresh off a military triumph. In 1812, his frigate United States captured the HMS Macedonian off the Canary Islands. Decatur had the ship repaired and refitted, and hauled his prize back to New York for wartime duty on the American side.

In June, a British squadron spotted Decatur’s three warships in Long Island Sound off Montauk Point. Decatur, with no room to maneuver, ordered his ships to flee up the Thames River. Two Revolutionary-era forts could protect the river from either side: Fort Trumbull in New London and Fort Griswold in Groton.

But New London, a hotbed of Federalism, resented both the war and Decatur. New Londoners treated Decatur not as a hero, but with “scathing remarks implying cowardice, duplicity, and other invectives.”

New London, 1813

The New Londoners exasperated Decatur. He tried to order Connecticut’s militia commander, Jorah Isham, to reinforce the old forts. Isham refused. Then when a U.S. Army general arrived to oversee New London’s defense, Isham disbanded the militia.

Decatur ended up building his own fort upriver and thoroughly disliking New Londoners.

Blue Lights

The USS United States

So on the night of December 18, the tide was right and so was the moon. Stephen Decatur planned to slip through the British blockaders. In total darkness, several guard boats cautiously guided his warships out of New London Harbor.

Just then a lookout whispered to an officer that he saw one of the blue lights burning near Fort Trumbull. Another of the blue lights burned near Fort Griswold on the Groton side of the river.

Decatur, furious, turned back. His warships never escaped. In April 1814, his men dismantled the vessels and Decatur returned to New York by land.

A Gross Libel

But days after the blue lights incident, he told his story to the editor of the New London Gazette and to the Navy Secretary. He believed treasonous New London Federalists had burned the blue lights to foil his escape.

The Gazette condemned the “traitorous wretches who dare thus to give the enemy over those great and gallant men.” The Gazette asked who had lit “these wicked lights, these torches of treason.”

The USS United States capturing HMS Macedonia

Indignant, New Londoners responded. They said the blue lights probably came from innocent fishermen or British spies. Maybe Decatur even made them up to excuse his failure to run the blockade.

The town’s Federalist congressman, Lyman Law, demanded an inquiry to clear up the matter. Federalist newspapers in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut excoriated the Gazette for its “foul misrepresentation” and its “gross libel on the People of that patriotic state.”

Nonetheless, the incident tainted the Federalist Party – the party of Washington, Adams and Hamilton. “Blue light Federalist” stuck as an insult until 1833.

Blue Lights and a Convention

A year after the mysterious blue lights infuriated Stephen Decatur, New England Federalists met secretly in Hartford. They wanted to air their grievances with the war and with the Democratic-Republic administration of James Madison.

The so-called Hartford Convention included some Federalists who probably wanted New England to secede from the United States. The convention, however, didn’t recommend secession. The Federalists’ enemies promoted the fiction that it had.

The convention in Hartford and the blue lights in New London consequently gave Connecticut a reputation for disloyalty.

The Federalist Party fared even worse. Shortly after the Hartford Convention ended, so did the War of 1812. The Federalists fell from public favor, except in New England, and never regained power.

This story about the blue lights of New London was updated in 2023.

Image: Map of New London (cropped) By DigbyDalton – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30432617.

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A Poorhouse in Each New England State

The poorhouse was once a very real and often feared part of life in New England.

Poorhouses evolved from the English poor laws of the 16th and 17th centuries. They required the community, most often the town, to take responsibility for its poor residents.

During the earliest days of colonial New England, the poor often relied on families and neighbors for help. In Plymouth Colony, for example, most towns kept a herd of cattle to farm out to families in want. While poor families had the cows in custody, they could get milk and birth calves.

Eventually overseers were elected to find work for able-bodied people and help for those too old or feeble to work. A poor tax supported the overseer and the almshouse, the poorhouse or the poor farm.

The cost of caring for the poor caused some communities to warn out people who seemed likely to fall into poverty. Sometimes towns drove entire families away.

Benjamin Franklin didn’t think much of Boston’s first poorhouse, established in 1660. “There is no country in the world in which the poor are more idle, dissolute, drunken and insolent,” he wrote in 1766. (Anne Sullivan, Helen Keller’s teacher and companion, lived in a Massachusetts poorhouse.)

Other Massachusetts towns auctioned off their poor to the lowest bidder, a system called vendue. In 1786, Malden, Mass., auctioned Mary Degresha off to the lowest bidder, who earned six dollars a week for housing and taking proper care of her.

Often, poor people hired out to work as servants or laborers, a practice that bordered on slavery. Such abuse inspired change in the early 19th century, and the practice of hiring out gradually declined.

Financial panics — 1817 and 1837 — touched off waves of poor farms, as did the Irish migration during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s.

The poor were kept out of sight, on farms down back roads or in walled-off buildings. By the late 19^th century, states were building asylums for the mentally ill. After the turn of the century, poorhouses declined and mostly old people lived in them.

Middletown, Conn., Alms House

Middletown Alms House

Since the 17th century, Connecticut’s poor law required towns to take care of their impoverished residents. In the earliest days of the colony, blood relatives and neighbors provided for people in need. By the time of the American Revolution, towns began to build almshouses for the poor.

The Middletown Alms House, built around 1812. is one of the oldest poorhouses still standing in the United States.

It still stands on Silver Street between the Connecticut River and the old Connecticut State Hospital for the Insane. In 1920, the Report of the State Board of Charities reported, “The bedrooms and beds appeared to be in excellent condition and the inmates seemed contented and well cared for. About thirty-five acres of land are attached.”

That year, 64 of Connecticut’s 168 towns had a poorhouse or town farm. Other towns sent their poor away, sent them to the loweest bidder or placed them in asylums and hospitals. By the end of the decade, only 50 towns still ran almshouses.

In 1853, Middletown moved its poor to a more remote location on Silver Street.

Click here for more information about Connecticut poorhouses.

Portland, Maine, Almshouse

Portland poorhouse

After the American Revolution, Maine put its poor in the hands of overseers, who paid people to take them into their homes for a year.

Mercy Lovejoy and her five children, for example, were auctioned off in 1817 to a farmer who fed and clothed them in exchange for their labor. The town of Livermore paid him $3.95 for the six Lovejoys.

Larger cities and towns began to build almshouses and poor farms. The bodies of inmates who died in custody were shipped in barrels or boxes to the medical school at Bowdoin College.

Portland may have had a workhouse since 1763. In 1803, the town established an almshouse next to the poor farm (now on the site is an ice arena). Portland police rounded up homeless people and sent them to the almshouse, which strictly regulated inmates’ behavior. Those who could had to work ‘cheerfully and faithfully.’

Portland closed the poor farm and almshouse around 1900 for a more modern hospital and workhouse. A cemetery on the property was dug up in 1904, and taken to a pit at Forest City Cemetery in South Portland.

Today a brick barn behind the Portland Expo still stands, the only remnant of the Portland almshouse and poor farm.

Falmouth, Mass., Poorhouse

Falmouth Poorhouse

The Falmouth poorhouse was built as a tavern in 1769. Then the War of 1812 caused a depression across Cape Cod, and the tavern owner packed up and left for Cincinnati. The town moved the tavern 4-1/2 miles next to the Methodist Cemetery, and it became the Falmouth Poor House.

The town fenced the land and later built a barn, which allowed it to reclassify the poorhouse as a work house. Anyone who refused to work would be confined in a cell or farmed out indefinitely.

In 1878 the poorhouse turned into a poor farm, which actually supported itself by selling food. It wasn’t closed until 1960. The seven people remaining in the poorhouse went on welfare and moved to hospitals. The poorhouse now stands empty.

Strafford, NH, County Almshouse

The Strafford County poorhouse

New Hampshire had a system of ‘poor in, poor out,’ with some poor people living at home. They got some help from the county, but they had to work.

Unlike the other states, which made their towns care for the poor, New Hampshire by 1866 required the county to provide for them. Each of New Hampshire’s 10 counties had a county poorhouse.

New Hampshire’s poor people generally had to qualify for help by living in a town and paying taxes for seven consecutive years. A 1904 U.S. government report summarized New Hampshire poor laws as follows:

The parents, grandparents, children, and grandchildren of any poor-person, if of sufficient ability, are liable for his support. Town paupers requiring complete maintenance, except honorably discharged veterans who must be supported outside the almshouses, as well as those without town settlement, are cared for on county poor farms … The overseers have authority…to bind out paupers, and to apprentice children.

A fire destroyed the main building of the Strafford County almshouse in 1881, killing 13 people. The county replaced it with a large, three-story brick almshouse, designed to shelter 300 people. The insane asylum was also located at the site.

Twelve years later, the insane asylum burned to the ground, killing 40 of 44 inmates. “Forty Crazed People Burned to Death,” reported the local newspaper on March 10, 1893. “At the window could be seen the tortured faces of the demented inmates, now raging and howling fiends.”

A controversy broke out about conditions at the county farms, especially for children. By 1898, the county moved most poor children into foster care.

In 1907, Strafford County built a jail next to the almshouse, and in 1970 built the county nursing home in front of it.

Dexter Asylum, Providence, RI

Dexter Asylum

Rhode Island philanthropist Ebenezer Knight Dexter bequeathed the funds for the Dexter Asylum when he died in 1824. He left his Neck Farm to the Town of Providence and stipulated that a wall surround it.

Previously, caretakers bid to the town for the job of taking in poor people.

Dexter left oddly specific instructions for the wall, which took eight years and $12,700 to finish.

The Asylum, a working vegetable and dairy farm, housed the poor, elderly and mentally ill. By the 1840s most of the residents were Irish immigrants indentured for six months. Men and women lived separately and only saw visitors once every three weeks. They had bread and tea for dinner.

The Asylum meted out punishment to those found guilty of drinking, immoral conduct, loud talking, disrespectful behavior or faking illness to avoid work. They confined such miscreants to a jail cell for three days and kept them on a short allowance of food. They confined the mentally ill in ‘maniac cells.’

By 1849, 190 residents overcrowded the poorhouse. Some of the mentally ill transferred to the new Butler Hospital. Eventually the Asylum capped its population at 100.

The Asylum then shut down in 1957, and playing fields replaced its gardens.

Today part of Providence’s poorhouse survives as the rough stone wall bordering Brown University’s Olney-Margolies Athletic Complex

Burlington, Vt. Poorhouse

Burlington Poorhouse

In Vermont during the 19^th century, towns or groups of towns built poor farms and poorhouses.

Burlington established its first poorhouse in 1816. During the Civil War, it filled with the families of deceased soldiers and with the families of draftees whose pay hadn’t reached them yet.

Many French transients came to Burlington from Canada in the depression after the Panic of 1873, while the Irish arrived during the potato famine of the 1840s and 1850s.

The Burlington poorhouse sheltered several hundred long- and short-term residents who slept on straw mattresses. In 1871, for example, 62-year-old resident Jerusha Waters was a crippled long-term resident. Mary Marks, 73, was blind and had lived there for 19 years.

Most, though, lived at the poorhouse for a short time, perhaps a couple of months. Often they arrived in the winter when they ran out of heating fuel and returned home in warm weather.

By the turn of the century, poorhouses fell into disrepute. Burlington’s poor were then directed to local affiliates of the American Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Elizabeth Lund Home for unmarried mothers and private nursing homes.

Photos: Middletown Almshouse By Steadyjohn – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5722133; Strafford County Poorhouse By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34873317. Falmouth Poorhouse By Gabe20770 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95643580. This story about the New England poorhouse was updated in 2023.

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Dorothea Dix and Franklin Pierce: The Battle for the Mentally Ill

Before she led the Union Army nursing corps during the Civil War, New England’s Dorothea Dix led the most ambitious reform efforts for the care of the mentally ill ever attempted in the U.S.

Dix argued that a land grant system, similar to the one that created state universities, should be used to create mental hospitals across the country. And she very nearly succeeded, were it not for New Hampshire’s only U.S. president, Franklin Pierce, and his insistence on catering to southern slaveowners above all else.

Dorothea Dix

These two New Englanders would not seem to be natural opponents on the issue, but they came to loggerheads nonetheless in the swirl of politics in the 1850s. Slavery and even a hint of abolitionism dominated the terms of virtually all debate.

Dorothea Dix

By any measure, Dorothea Dix led a remarkable life. Born in Hamden, Maine, to a semi-invalid mother and an alcoholic Methodist preacher for a father, she fled at the age of 12 to live with her wealthy grandmother in Boston and her great aunt in Worcester.

While her mother and father floated around New England, Dorothea Dix worked at teaching and writing. But soon after her grandmother’s death, she found her true calling as a social agitator. Following a trip to Europe, where she became acquainted with the reform movement to improve the conditions of the mentally ill, she brought the issue home with her.

The treatment of indigent mentally ill people in New England and throughout the country was abominable in the 1830s. Asylums barely existed and most often the mentally ill were housed in segregated quarters in jails or poorhouses. Lacking any training or understanding of mental illness, the jailers often treated their charges no better than animals.

Dorothea Dix struck upon a straightforward and effective means of change. She simply traveled the country touring the facilities and described what she saw. She seemed to understand government’s penchant for commissioning studies in lieu of taking action, and she appointed herself to study the conditions of the indigent mentally ill.

Pits, Pens, Outhouses

In state after state, beginning in Massachusetts, she documented mentally ill people living in underground pits, pens, outhouses and attics. She simply explained how they lived lacking clothes, heat and decent food.

Her reports shamed even the most recalcitrant legislatures into taking action, and in the 1840s insane asylums led by doctors began springing up throughout the country. Building on the techniques that had worked on a state level, Dorothea Dix took her case to Washington.

Sympathetic congressmen in 1848 provided her with an office in the capitol. There she launched a six-year effort to pass a law that would grant 10 million acres of federal lands to build asylums. The idea was relatively simple. The land would be used to construct hospitals on, or sold to raise money for the hospitals.

A stark depiction of the lives of the mentally ill created sympathy in Congress. After four attempts at passage, she finally won overwhelming support for the bill in 1854.

Congress at that time was preoccupied primarily with the question of slavery. One of the reasons Dix was able to procure passage of her proposal was that she was not an abolitionist. She believed African-Americans were inferior to whites, and found the New England abolition movement to be tedious. She supported the American Colonization Society, which wanted to send slaves to Africa.

Franklin Pierce

On the surface, she would seem like the ideological soulmate for New Hampshire-born President Franklin Pierce. Pierce was the northeasterner chosen by the Democrats to be their presidential candidate. His Yankee background appealed to the North and his sympathy for slave owners appealed to the South. He was the perfect choice: While critical of slavery, he did nothing about it.

Franklin Pierce

The Dix land grant bill nearly made it into law. Millard Fillmore, president until 1853, had spoken in favor of the concept. But the bill was successfully stifled during his presidency. Westerners did not like the law since it would sell some of their public lands to support asylums in other states. They managed to slow its approval.

But the real opposition came from southern politicians. Southern Democrats hung their arguments in favor of slavery on the concept of state’s rights. Critics of the Dix plan, notably Jefferson Davis, argued that the bill infringed on state’s rights. If it passed, nothing would prevent Congress from passing a similar law to free slaves. Then Congress could sell western lands to compensate slave owners and provide property for the freed slaves.

30 Asylums

Before his election as the president of the confederacy during the Civil War, Davis served in the U.S. Senate from Mississippi. He fought fiercely against the Dix bill. As Pierce’s Secretary of War, he could also agitate against the land grant bill.

Ultimately, Pierce sided with the southern slave interests, as he generally did, and vetoed the law. In the aftermath, Dorothea Dix returned to Europe to work on promoting the interests of the mentally ill there. She would later lead the Union Army’s nursing corps throughout the Civil War, where she generated controversy as well.

But at the end of her life, she could look on more than 30 insane asylums that her movement inspired as part of the first effort in the country to provide a humane setting for the indigent mentally ill.

Pierce, of course, is widely remembered as the president who started the tradition of the White House Christmas tree.

This story about Dorothea Dix and Franklin Pierce was updated in 2021.

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