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We Won’t Go Until We Get Some: New England Colonial Christmas Traditions

Just how rowdy was a New England colonial Christmas? It depended on who was celebrating. But it bore little resemblance to Christmas today, and New Englanders found it a touchy subject from the start.

Illustration of Gov. William Bradford putting down the Christmas revels in the earliest days of Massachusetts. (Howard Pyle)

Illustration of an early New England colonial Christmas tradition: Plymouth Gov. William Bradford putting down the Christmas revels. (Howard Pyle)

The Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth were a mix of people. They were led by separatists who despised the Christmas traditions of the Anglican Church as well as the Roman Catholic Church. They wanted to establish their own protestant churches, free of Christmas.

But many of the Pilgrims did not come to America for religious reasons at all. They were craftsmen or farmers recruited to ensure the colony would survive, and they simply wanted to make a better life in America.

New England Colonial Christmas

On their first Christmas at Plymouth, the Pilgrims celebrated the best way they knew how: They worked right through it. By the next year, Christmas traditions began infiltrating the group, and Gov. William Bradford had to put down the celebrations. He went so far as to call the Christmas treat mincemeat pie ‘idolatrie in a crust.’

As the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony gained ascendance, they had plenty of disagreements with the Pilgrims in Plymouth. But they largely agreed in their dislike of Christmas.

There remained in their midst, however, people who did celebrate Christmas with gusto. The fishing communities especially embraced the New England colonial Christmas, with their less-literate members mostly celebrating the holiday. Much of what actually happened was never recorded. What was recorded was seen through the eyes of the Puritan theocracy, and they painted an ugly picture of Christmas indeed.

Paganism

The Puritans complained that Christmas arose from an unnatural ideological marriage between the Roman Catholic Church and the pagans. They thought it originated in the Roman festival Saturnalia.

Just how pagan is Christmas? We won’t try to settle that debate. But the New England colonial Christmas increasingly irritated the Puritans, and they decided to stomp it out.

In 1647, the reformers in England outlawed Christmas. And the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut soon followed suit. People who celebrated Christmas would be subject to a fine of five shillings.

In 1662, a Beverly, Mass., man found himself in court for hosting a drunken gathering on Christmas Day. He was a troublemaker whose family frequently tangled with Puritan society. His wife would eventually die on the gallows, but that’s another story.

More Mayhem

A second glimpse of Christmas mayhem occurred on Christmas Day in 1679 in Salem, Mass. Joseph Foster, Benjamin Fuller, Samuel Brayebrooke and Joseph Flint decided they wanted some booze for the holiday. They knew 72-year-old John Rowden had made perry, a liquor made from pears. So they dropped in to pay him an unscheduled visit.

Rowden told them to get out. Fuller refused, saying, “it was Christmas Day at night and they came to be merry and to drink perry, which was not to be had anywhere else but here and perry they would have before they went,” according to court records. The encounter ended in a fight and stolen property.

Twelfth Night (The King Drinks), by David Teniers the Younger (1634-1640), foreshadowing the New England colonial Christmas.

Drinking was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Christmas debauchery. The New England colonial Christmas included wassailing, mumming, gambling and feasting.

The Puritans constantly struggled to keep Christmas under control. The hoi polloi embraced the New England colonial Christmas as quite a good time.

With the harvest over, the cupboards full and the long winter yet to come, December seemed a perfect month for a ripping good celebration.

Lord of Misrule

In England and elsewhere in the colonies, towns would appoint a “lord of misrule.” This custom borrowed from Saturnalia as well. Generally the towns appointed someone of lower standing to this role to serve as master of ceremonies of the Christmas celebration either up to or including the Twelfth Night festivities.

The reason? During the New England colonial Christmas, people reversed their roles and the poor ruled over the wealthy. In addition to the feasting and drunkenness, the more outgoing celebrants used the holiday as an excuse for wassailing. Wassailing involved barging into the houses of the wealthier citizens, singing a song or two or putting on a short skit, and demanding food, drink and money.

Figgy Pudding

Perhaps you’ve sung the Christmas carol, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, with its chorus of “Oh, bring us a figgy pudding…we won’t go until we get some.” They meant it.

Figgy pudding with flaming brandy

The more obliging citizens would fork over the goods. Others, however, declined — resulting in fights, rock-throwing and hard feelings. Even more abhorrent to the Puritans was the sexual promiscuity that accompanied Christmas. Celebrants cast aside their inhibitions.

One of the more colorful New England colonial Christmas traditions was mumming, in which men dressed like women (and vice versa) or simply disguised themselves in a range of costumes. Mumming could be as innocent as street theater or as bawdy as a loosely disguised roving orgy.

The Puritan objected to the custom because a person disguised could slip into a neighbor’s house for an assignation without raising eyebrows. How commonplace was the debauchery? It’s probably impossible to say, though the good Puritans wanted nothing to do with it.

In 1681, with the Civil War over in England, the crown began pressuring Massachusetts to embrace the Anglican Church and roll back Puritan reforms. The colony complied by repealing the laws against Christmas. But the holiday remained frowned upon.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

Mad Mirth

In 1687 the Puritan minister Increase Mather railed against Christmas. He declared that those who celebrated it “are consumed in compotations, in interludes, in playing at cards, in revellings, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.”

No one really disagreed. It just didn’t bother some people the way it did Mather and the Puritan leadership.

It would take more than 100 years for Christmas to develop the wholesome, twinkly veneer it has today. While the southern colonies and New York, with its Dutch roots, embraced Christmas earlier, New England Protestants would hold out well beyond 1800.

The rest of the nation also felt the influence of the New England colonial Christmas tradition. In 1789, for instance, Congress held a session on Christmas Day. Businesses throughout New England always opened on Christmas. And children attended school on Christmas well into the 1800s.

The New England Colonial Christmas Gets a Facelift

By the early 1800s, however, with Episcopalians and Catholics already celebrating Christmas, the holdout Protestants felt pushed to join in. Most, though, still considered Christmas a pagan holiday that the Catholic Church had co-opted for its own purposes.

The holiday got a facelift with the poem Twas The Night Before Christmas, published in 1822. and Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol in 1843. The opposition in the church then began to relent.

Marley’s Ghost, from A Christmas Carol. Original illustration by John Leech from the 1843 edition

After the Civil War, the battle ended. New England joined the rest of the country in embracing Christmas. And Christmas, by the way, embraced New England values, at least to some degree. The over-the-top debauchery and drunkenness gave way once and for all to the quieter, conventional celebrations we know today.

* * *

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

To read more about the history of New England colonial Christmas, you may want to read The Battle for Christmas, by Stephen Nissenbaum.

This story about New England colonial Christmas traditions was updated in 2022.

Images: Figgy pudding By Ted Kerwin – originally posted to Flickr as Figgy Pudding with Flaming Brandy, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7162734. Twelfth Night by David Teniers By David Teniers the Younger – PradoWeb Gallery of Art: Image Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15885934.

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The Parker Brothers of Salem, Mass., Build A Game Empire

Search any New England attic and you’re likely to find a version of Parker Brothers’ Monopoly. The beloved board game can trace its existence to 1883, when 16-year-old George Parker decided to liven up a dull game called Everlasting.

George, Charles and Edward Parker.

Everlasting was designed to teach moral lessons to young people. George thought games should be fun, not preachy. He added lettered cards, changed the rules and called the game Banking.

George Parker and his brothers enjoyed playing Banking so much he had 500 copies printed up and sold them to Boston-area retailers. In the end he cleared a profit of $80. That first taste of success led to the creation of Parker Brothers.

For a century, Parker Brothers was a mainstay employer in Salem, Mass., and the publisher of 1,800 games.

George Parker

George Parker was born in Salem on Dec. 12, 1866. His father, a sea captain turned merchant, lost most of his money in the panic of 1873. He died in 1877, when George was 10. His widowed mother and two brothers, along with an aunt and an uncle, lived in an 18-room house in Medford, Mass.

One of those rooms had shelves full of board games, relatively new in Puritan Massachusetts.

A Mansion of Happiness game

Liberal Puritans tolerated one early board game called The Mansion of Happiness: An Instructive Moral and Entertainment Amusement. It was first printed in the United States in Salem in 1843. Parker Brothers would later buy the rights to the game and republish it in 1894.

But before starting Parker Brothers, George tried his hand at making and selling a few more games. Those didn’t do too well. He then tried journalism, but gave it up. He went off on his own, selling his games along with toys and games from the J.H. Singer Company in New York.

Parker Brothers Born

George Parker, Parker Brothers founder

By 1887, George Parker had hired his first employee and rented a store in Salem for $12.50 a month (where the Hawthorne Hotel now stands). He realized he was good at selling and developing games. He was not so good at production and finance, though his older brother Charles was.

George in 1888 invited Charles to join him as a partner and Parker Brothers was born. Another brother, Edward, would join them 10 years later.

Charles soon persuaded George to manufacture Parker Brothers games under their own roof. They leased an old laundry on Bridge Street and went to work.

The company’s earliest games were designed to appeal to a regional audience, with names like Ye Yankee Peddler, Billy Bumps Goes to Boston and the Yale-Harvard Game. They realized they needed to branch out with games that had national appeal. The solution: Create a game called Office Boy, based on the popular Horatio Alger rags-to-riches books.

The company innovated and grew, adhering to its pledge to make games that “look well, play well and sell well.” Parker Brothers started publishing games with tie-ins to current events, such as Klondike, based on the Alaska gold rush, and War in Cuba, based on the Spanish-American War. The company was the first to advertise games in newspapers.

Hits Keep On Coming

George traveled to Europe, spotted ping-pong, and brought it back to the U.S., where it became a best seller.

The hits kept on coming: Tiddledy-winks, Rook, Pit, Flinch. Parker Brothers kept expanding, turning the old laundry building into an integrated manufacturing complex. There the company invented, produced, packaged and shipped toys and games. George continued to test the games with family and friends.

Then came the Great Depression, which nearly put Parker Brothers out of business. Monopoly saved the company.

Parker Brothers bought the rights to Monopoly in 1935 from a laid-off heater salesman named Charles Darrow. The game, though, had already been patented in 1903 by a woman named Elizabeth Magie.

Parker Brothers sorted it all out and began selling the game in 1935. It was wildly successful. In 1936, Parker Brothers licensed Monopoly for sale outside the United States. British intelligence had special versions made for prisoners of war held by Nazis. The games had maps, compasses and real money to aid escapes.

A game of Risk being played.

George Parker retired from Parker Brothers’ day-to-day operations as Monopoly started to take off. The company would go on to sell iconic games such as Clue, Sorry!, Risk, Trivial Pursuit and Ouija, and it would introduce the Nerf ball. It would remain family-owned until 1968, when it was sold to General Mills. After a series of mergers, the Salem plant on Bridge Street closed in 1991.

George Parker died on Sept. 26, 1952.

Game Rules

George Parker believed business was like a game, that if you followed the rules you could win. He developed 12 rules that he followed all his life.

Know your goal and reach for it.
Find “winning moves.”
Play by the rules but capitalize on them.
Learn from failure; build upon success.
When faced with a choice, make the move with the most potential benefit versus risk.
When luck runs against you, hold emotion in check and set up for your next advance.
Never hesitate and give your opponents a second chance.
Seek help if the game threatens to overwhelm you.
Bet heavily when the odds are long in your favor.
If opportunity narrows, focus on your strengths.
Be a gracious winner or loser. Don’t be petty. Share what you learn.
Ignore principles 1 to 11 at your peril!

Monopoly shoe by William Warby via Flickr, CC BY 2.0. Parker Brothers image: By Edward – http://parkerbrothersfamilyhistory.blogspot.com/2009/05/george-swinnerton-charles-and-edward.html, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57931761. Risk By © Jorge Royan / http://www.royan.com.ar, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50453387. This story was updated in 2022.

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Eunice Williams, The Unredeemed Captive

In 1704, Mohawk Indians raided the frontier town of Deerfield, Mass. They captured local pastor John Williams, along with his family. Most of the family (those who didn’t die in the attack or aftermath) would be ransomed – all but a seven-year-old girl the Mohawks refused to free.

A 1913 reenactment of the abduction of Eunice Williams.

Eunice Williams, born Sept. 17, 1696, would spend the rest of her life with the Mohawks. She converted to Catholicism and married a Mohawk Catholic. Her family never gave up trying to bring her home, but when they finally reached her as an adult it was too late. She refused to return, and her Puritan family never got over the loss.

In Deerfield, John Williams was a prominent Puritan minister, married to Eunice Mather, the daughter of Eleazer Mather and first cousin to Cotton Mather.

War on the Frontier

In 1704 Queen Anne’s War raged along the frontier. The French and English fought for control of North America, and the Mohawk and Abenaki people allied with the French against England.

Historian John Demos believes the raid on Deerfield was masterminded by Marquis de Vaudreuil, governor of New France (Canada). He very much wanted the return of the mysterious pirate known as Capt. Pierre Maisonnat dit Baptiste. Baptiste had wrought havoc with English shipping on the Atlantic Coast on behalf of the French until t British captured him. Vaudreuil wanted the pirate returned, and the best way to do that was to capture an important English prisoner and offer him for exchange.

Vaudreuil quietly approached the Indians with his offer and they accepted, writes Demos in his award-winning book, The Unredeemed Captive.

An illustration of the raid on Deerfield, published around 1900

The Deerfield Raid

On the night of Feb. 28, 1704, a band of Abenaki and Mohawk Indians attacked Deerfield. They killed 39 people, including small children. They plundered possessions, set houses on fire and slaughtered cows, pigs and sheep. The Indians took 112 people captive, including the surviving members of the Williams family: John, Eunice, and five of their children, Samuel, 15, Esther, 13, Stephen, 9, Warham, 5, and Eunice, 7. Then they began the two-month journey through the snowy wilderness into New France.

The children and their father would survive the long winter journey. Their mother would not.

Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil. Was he ultimately responsible for the abduction of Eunice Williams?

By April 1704, the Indians took the Deerfield pastor and three of his children — Esther, Samuel and Warham — to Montreal. All four were turned over to the French authorities. They wouldn’t return home until further negotiations ended. Stephen was still at large in the woods with the Abenaki. He would stay with them for 14 months, until he was ransomed and sent to join his father in captivity in a small village near Montreal.

Eunice Williams

The Indians took Eunice Williams to live with Catholic Mohawks in a small mission fort near Montreal called Kahnawake. John Williams visited his daughter once, and she begged him to take her with him. He told her to pray and to remember her scriptures.

By 1706, five of the Williams family were ransomed and sent home. A Mohawk family that had lost a daughter to smallpox adopted Eunice Williams. The family gave her a new name: A’ongonte, meaning ‘she who has been planted like an ash.’ She was also baptized Catholic and given the name Marguerite.

Her father tried to arrange for her release, but the French intermediaries said the Mohawks “would as soon part with their hearts as the child.” She would later take the adult name of Kanenstenhawi.

Her father would spend the rest of his life trying to free the daughter he always knew as Eunice Williams.

In 1707, John Schuyler, a New York merchant who had many contacts with northern Indians and traders, heard about a sighting of Williams’ daughter. He also heard she didn’t want to return to her family. Schuyler stayed in touch with her Mohawk family in an effort to redeem her.

[optinrev-inline-optin1]In March of 1713 the Williams family learned the melancholy news that Eunice Williams had married an Indian. They were devastated.

Not Even A Look

John Schuyler visited her at Kahnawake. She had forgotten her English, and they needed a translator to communicate. Schuyler pleaded with her to return to her family. She said no, not even for a visit.

Rev. John Williams, father of Eunice Williams

The next year, her father visited her. She did not give him so much as a pleasant look. He would never see her again.

Eunice Williams and her husband, François-Xavier Arosen, had two daughters who grew to adulthood, Catherine and Marie, and a son named John.

Eunice Williams Returns

After John Williams died in 1729, Eunice’s brother Stephen took up the task of bringing her back. He had become a minister in Longmeadow, Mass., and he persuaded her to meet in Albany with him, along with their brother Eleazer and brother-in-law Joseph Meacham. On Aug. 27, 1740, they had a ‘joyful, sorrowful’ meeting, and Stephen persuaded Eunice and her husband to visit them in Longmeadow for four days. They actually stayed a little longer, camping out in the orchard near Stephen’s house.

The next summer Eunice and Aronson brought their children first to Longmeadow to visit Stephen, then to Coventry, Conn., to visit her sister Esther. Finally they went to Mansfield, Conn., where they visited her brother Eleazer.

In 1743, Eunice Williams and her family came to spend the winter with her family in Longmeadow and Deerfield, where her brother Elijah lived. Stephen hoped that this long visit would persuade her to stay, but again she refused.

One Last Visit

She wouldn’t return for another 17 years. In 1761, she brought her husband, a daughter and son-in-law and grandchild to Longmeadow for a brief 10-day visit. Ten years later in 1771, she wrote a letter to Stephen, chastising him for not staying in touch and expressing a desire to see him again. Stephen died in 1782 without ever seeing Eunice again. She died Nov. 26, 1785 at the age of 89.

By the time she died, Eunice Williams had one grandson and 12 great-grandchildren. Two of her great-grandchildren were sent to school in Longmeadow, where they dropped their Indian dress and manners. One of them, Eleazer, would later make the fraudulent claim that he was the lost Dauphin – Louis XVII, the rightful heir to the throne of France.

In 1837, 23 descendants of Eunice Williams arrived in Deerfield, Mass., to visit the graves of their ancestor John Williams and his wife Eunice. They camped near the village and attended Sunday services. They stayed for 10 days, weaving baskets and selling fabrics to the villagers who visited them so often they could barely find time to eat their meals.

Eunice Williams’ descendants behaved “decently and inoffensively,” according to the prefatory remarks of a sermon delivered about their visit. And then they returned to Canada.

With thanks to The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America by John Demos.

This story was updated in 2023. You may also want to read about the Rice boys, also taken captive by Indians, here.

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Four Freedoms Didn’t Come Easy for Norman Rockwell

In May 1942, Norman Rockwell stopped by a drab bureaucrat’s office in the Pentagon and learned of the urgent need for images of the four freedoms.

He could not have imagined that the visit would result in four of America’s most cherished paintings. Nor could he have imagined that, 76 years later, his work inspire contemporary artists to reinterpret them with more diverse subjects.

Rockwell had come to military headquarters to get approval for a poster promoting the Army’s Ordnance Department.

On his way out the building, he stopped by the Office of Facts and Figures Graphic Division. An official then told Rockwell of a tall order: to create posters and billboards about the four freedoms.

Rockwell rose to the task. But it didn’t come easy.

Freedom from Want, by Norman Rockwell

The Four Freedoms

President Franklin Roosevelt had laid out the four freedoms as a rationale for entering World War II.

“As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone,” Roosevelt said in his speech (watch it here) articulating the four freedoms everyone in the world ought to enjoy.

Rockwell went home to Arlington, Vt., and puzzled over ways to illustrate abstract ideas like ‘no aggrandizement.’ The solution came to him as he lay in bed.

He thought of a neighbor, Jim Edgerton, who had stood up at town meeting and criticized the decision to rebuild a school that had burned down. No one agreed with him, but everyone listened respectfully.

“That’s it! That’s freedom of speech!” thought Rockwell. The next morning he was up at 5 a.m., drawing sketches of ordinary people doing ordinary things that illustrated basic American freedoms.

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

Fine Arts Men

He took his large charcoal drawings back to the Pentagon’s new Office of War Information (OWI), a centralized propaganda bureau. Typically, Norman Rockwell would roll out his sketches on the floor like a rug, grinning with expectation.

He received a painful insult. An official believed to be Archibald MacLeish wouldn’t even look at them. “The last war you illustrators did the posters,” he said, according to Deborah Solomon in American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. “This war we’re going to use fine arts men, real artists.”

MacLeish, an intellectual snob, edited the Saturday Evening Post’s rival, Fortune magazine. As assistant director of the OWI, he hired modernist artists like Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Salvador Dali to create posters for the war effort. They were never used.

On his way home, Rockwell stopped off in Philadelphia to show his sketches to Ben Hibbs, an editor at the Saturday Evening Post. Hibbs loved them.

Freedom From Fear

Four Freedoms, Seven Months

For the next seven months, Norman Rockwell worked feverishly on the paintings, pleading illness to avoid his other obligations and working himself into a state of nervous exhaustion. By the time he was finished he was flat broke and had lost 15 pounds.

He reworked the first painting, ‘Freedom of Speech,’ over and over, using a local gas station owner as his model for the working-class man standing up and speaking at town meeting.

He also had trouble with ‘Freedom of Worship,’ which featured eight heads representing different religions. Rose Hoyt, the model for the Catholic woman, told Rockwell she was an Episcopalian when he asked her to hold rosary beads. “Would you be a Catholic for today?” he asked.

‘Freedom From Fear’ is a sentimental interior scene of young parents checking in on their children before turning in for the night.

‘Freedom From Want’ was the third in the series, and many consider it Rockwell’s masterpiece. Mrs. Wheaton, Rockwell’s cook, modeled as the grandmother serving an enormous Thanksgiving turkey to a large family sitting around a table at midafternoon. Art critics especially admire the play of white-on-white; some note the beverage of choice – water – as casting a Puritan tone.

Europeans, however, criticized the painting as an image of American gluttony. Rockwell later thought he’d made the turkey too big.

Policy Differences

The paintings, published in four consecutive editions of the Saturday Evening Post, were a smash. The magazine received 60,000 letters, overwhelmingly positive. Even President Roosevelt wrote a letter praising them. ‘You have done a superb job bringing home to the plain, everyday citizen the plain, everyday truths behind the Four Freedoms,” he wrote.

The Office of War Information, which had rejected Rockwell’s drawings, agreed to print 2.5 million posters of them. The U.S. Department of the Treasury took them on tour to 16 cities to promote war bonds. To kick it off, a five-minute newsreel of Rockwell painting in his studio appeared in movie theaters around the country.

The exhibit opened in Washington, D.C., on April 27, 1943, to huge crowds. More than $1 million in war bonds were sold in that city alone, as Rockwell autographed copies of the paintings. He declined to tour with the exhibit, and returned to Vermont.

Freedom of Worship

Resurgence of the Four Freedoms

The year 2018 marked the 75th anniversary of the Four Freedoms exhibit in Washington — and a revival of interest in the Four Freedoms.

The Four Freedoms toured the country again — along with modern interpretations of the classic paintings. The Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., solicited entries by contemporary artists and selected 37 to accompany the Four Freedoms on a multiple-city tour beginning in October 2018. It returned to the Norman Rockwell Museum two years later.

“He is experiencing a resurgence this year,” noted the New York Times in November 2018. “But it is the interpretation of the artist’s classic images, perhaps, that has given Mr. Rockwell’s work renewed life.”

Most of the artists, according to the Times, were prompted by the racial and political tension dividing the country. One artist produced a photograph showing a gay couple serving Thanksgiving dinner. Another photographed an African-American woman standing up at Town Meeting.

A tweeter with the handle @stubbonabby tweeted,

I used to work at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, MA and lemme tell you–he’d be 100% in favor of this.

To see some reimagined images of the Four Freedoms, click here.

Ironically, Archibald MacLeish would leave the OWI after only eight months in office, citing policy differences.

This story about the Four Freedoms was updated in 2022.

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How the Great Colchester Molasses Shortage Nearly Ruined Thanksgiving

Molasses played such a starring role in the colonial New England Thanksgiving that a shortage of it in 1705 forced Colchester, Conn., to postpone the holiday for a week.

That first Thanksgiving

The weather turned unusually frigid for the Connecticut Valley town that fall. In mid-October a terrible cold snap lasted for three days, followed by mild weather, and then a blast of even colder weather.

The river froze, a frigid wind blew and a storm blanketed Colchester under three feet of snow. Because the river rarely froze so early, the settlers hadn’t laid in winter provisions usually shipped from Norwich and New London.

Colchester then had only a handful of families. Founded in 1698 on land purchased from the Mohegan tribe, it was the northernmost town in the colony of New London. The settlers had only established the parish two years before that cold autumn, and they wouldn’t lay out streets until the next year.

Colchester relied on boats to deliver supplies along a tributary of the Connecticut River, 10 miles away.

Early Thanksgiving

In early New England, the Puritans replaced Roman Catholic feast days like Christmas and Easter with secular holidays like Training Day and Commencement Day. Thanksgiving days and Fast days had a religious purpose: to come together as a community for meditation and communing with God.

New England’s theocratic governments called for public days of fasting or thanksgiving in response to political or natural events. They could happen several times a year. And they were often local affairs.

In 1705, November 4 had been proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving. But as the day approached, Colchester had almost no molasses. Worse, nothing could be delivered on the frozen river to the settlement.

Why Molasses?

New England colonists used molasses imported from the West Indies because it didn’t cost as much as sugar. A byproduct of sugar refining, colonists used it in baked beans, brown bread and pumpkin pie. By 1750, colonists consumed an average of three quarts of molasses a year.

Blackstrap molasses

The English colonists had learned from the Native Americans about the pumpkin, called pompion, and adapted it to their own cuisine.

The pumpkin pie came to symbolize the New World bounty celebrated by Thanksgiving. By the time Colchester discovered its molasses shortage in 1705, pumpkin pie had been a well-established dessert for half a century.

Congregational Church, Colchester, Conn.

Pumpkins played such an important role in any feast that some 17^th-century Puritan ministers denounced them from the pulpit. They preached that Thanksgivings should be renamed ‘St. Pompion’s Day’ because of the gluttony they inspired.

But without molasses, the townsfolk of Colchester couldn’t make pumpkin pie. Nor could they have baked beans, molasses cake or sweetener for rum. The bottom line: No molasses, no Thanksgiving.

A Food Legend

And so Colchester’s town fathers postponed Thanksgiving because they couldn’t hold it “with convenience” on November 4. The Colchester town records describe how they came to solve the problem:

At a legal town-meeting held in Colchester, October 29, 1705, It was voted that WHEREAS there was a Thanksgiving appointed to be held on the first Thursday n November, and our present circumstances being such that it cannot with convenience be attended on that day, it is therefore voted and agreed by the inhabitants as aforesaid (concluding the thing will not be otherwise than well resented) that the second Thursday of November aforesaid shall be set aside for that service.

The tale of the Great Colchester Molasses Shortage became a food legend. Two centuries later, Rose Mills Powers wrote a poem about it for the July 1908 edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine:

Colchester housewives are glum and sad—
Colchester housewives who should be glad—
Baking and brewing for Thanksgiving day.
What is the trouble up Colchester way?
Answer the housewives with streaming eyes,
“No molasses for pumpkin pies!”
The sloop that fetches the precious freight,
Thanksgiving molasses, is late, is late,
And how can Colchester celebrate!

Colchester housewives are gay and glad—
Colchester housewives bake like mad.
No feast decreed by the governor, this,
But Colchester colonists shall not miss
Their dinner, though late by a week and a day—
The sloop’s in the harbor—Hurray! Hurray!
Thanksgiving molasses for all the town,
For pies of pumpkin so rich and brown;
Colchester folk at last sit down.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Blackstrap molasses by By Badagnani – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4129522.

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The Mysterious Death of Newport Movie Mogul Thomas Ince

The death of Thomas Ince just after his 42nd birthday party was as legendary as some of the movies he produced. As with many Hollywood legends, it didn’t have much truth to it.

Born into a show business family on Nov. 16, 1882 in Newport, R.I., Ince rose from failure as a stage actor to success as the first film tycoon. He pioneered the system of moviemaking still in use today before he left a yacht owned by newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst. Thomas Ince died several days later, his body quickly cremated.

Even before the funeral, suspicions mounted about his death. The rumor mill churned out the story that Hearst believed his mistress, Marion Davies, cheated on him with Charlie Chaplin. Davies and Chaplin had joined them on the boat, and rumors surfaced that Hearst actually shot Thomas Ince by accident, intending to shoot Davies, Chaplin or both.

Thiomas Ince in 1918

Thomas Ince

He entered the family business at age six, acting and later singing at funerals and weddings. His father, John “Pop” Ince, started out as a vaudeville comedian but then worked as a theatrical agent. His mother sang comic opera under the stage name Emma Brennan or Emma Jones.

Thomas made his Broadway debut at 15 and then formed an unsuccessful vaudeville company. At 28, he talked his way into a job with a small independent film company in 1910. At the time, Thomas Edison’s Motion Pictures Patents Company tried to crush all independent producers. So he went to Cuba with Mary Pickford and Owen Moore to make movies.

But only in Hollywood could Thomas Ince make the films he yearned to make: westerns and Civil War dramas.

He borrowed a suit from a friend and a large diamond ring from a jeweler and walked into the offices of the New York Motion Picture Company. The firm had opened a studio to make westerns on the West Coast. He got the job.

Thomas Ince, his young wife Nell and a small entourage went to Edendale, Calif., to make films. There he began to revolutionize moviemaking. He inventing the shooting script. He then acquired 460 acres and created the first movie studio, called Inceville. It had sound stages, offices, sets, dressing rooms and a commissary.

Inceville

Ince hired a Wild West show, replete with cowboys, cattle and Indians who set up their teepees on the property. The teepees sat cheek-by-jowl with a fake Swiss landscape, a Japanese village, a Puritan settlement, mansions and cottages. Ince went on to organize production methods, putting the producer in charge of the film instead of the director and cameraman. He also invented the five-reel film when two reels were the standard of the day.

Fires eventually destroyed Inceville, and Thomas Ince created Triangle Studios with Mack Sennett and D.W. Griffith. Three years later he founded the studios in Culver City that would become MGM. On that lot would later be filmed such classics as Gone with the Wind, King Kong, Lassie and Citizen Kane.

Paramount, Then Trouble

Thomas Ince sold out a few years later and formed Paramount Pictures with Adolph Zukor. Then he moved on to form his own studio again. At Thomas H. Ince Studios he made a few memorable films, Anna Christie and Human Wreckage, but he lost power and influence to competing studios.

By 1924, the rumor mill had Thomas Ince edging toward bankruptcy. Supposedly he wanted to make a deal with Hearst to rescue his fortunes.

On November 16 he boarded Hearst’s lavish yacht The Oneida as a guest of honor – it was his 42^nd birthday. Chaplin, Davies and actress Elinor Glynn also boarded the yacht. They celebrated his birthday at dinner, and sometime afterward he suffered acute indigestion. He had drunk champagne and eaten salted almonds, forbidden to him because he suffered from a peptic ulcer.

Though allegations of a cover-up surfaced after his death, the real cover-up had to do with his failing health. Ince worked at a killing pace and his co-workers had seen him double over in pain with indigestion. He also suffered chest pains and, toward the end of his life, insomnia.

Death of Thomas Ince

A physician aboard the yacht, Dr. Goodman, diagnosed Ince as extremely ill. A water taxi took him ashore and a train brought him to Los Angeles. Ince got worse on the train and was taken off it at Del Mar, where he was treated at a hotel. He went home the next day, November 19, and died.

William Randolph Hearst

The death certificate said he died of heart failure. But the front page of the Los Angeles Times ran headlines that said, “Movie Producer Shot on Hearst Yacht.” Those headlines soon disappeared, and the Hearst newspapers reported Ince had taken ill at Hearst’s home, San Simeon. Chaplin’s valet said he saw Ince bleeding from a bullet wound to the forehead.

Charlie Chaplin

Rumors proliferated about what really happened: Hearst caught Chaplin and Davies in a compromising position and shot Ince by accident; Hearst poisoned Ince; an assassin hired by Hearst killed Ince; Hearst stabbed Ince in the heart with a hatpin. Adding to the confusion were the lies and denials told by Hearst’s guests.

Marion Davies

But before his body was cremated, it lay in an open coffin for an hour for viewing. No one saw that bullet hole in his forehead.

The story has lived on, in a mystery written by Hearst’s granddaughter Patty and in a film called Cat’s Meow.

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed reading it, you may also want to read about Varick Frissell and his deadly film here.

Images: Inceville By Ferd J. Zettler – PBA Galleries, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7655554

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