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Scituate Mass.

Lighthouse Keepers, the Ultimate Social Distancers

Ever since George Worthylike climbed the steps to light the lantern at Boston Light in 1716, lighthouse keepers have practiced an extreme form of social distancing.

Boston Light

For many years, lighthouse keepers got their job through political patronage. The work offered a steady income and a place to live, as lighthouse keepers had to work from home to keep that light going from sundown to sunrise.

But lighthouses often stood on barren ledge far out to sea, and life could get lonely for the keeper and his family. Some lighthouses are said to be haunted by the ghosts of lighthouse keepers driven mad by the monotony and isolation.

The problems faced by lighthouse keepers, in fact, sound very much like the challenges faced by people under shelter-at-home orders during the 2020 health crisis.

Getting a decent haircut, for example, can be hard when you live 25 miles out to sea. Such was the case with Mrs. Roscoe L. Fletcher, who described her lonely life to a newspaper reporter on Jan. 2, 1943. She was married to the lighthouse keeper at Matinicus Light, well off the coast of Rockland, Maine.

“I am enclosing a photo of a lighthouse haircut. It may be amusing to those who can have a choice of numerous barbershops at any hour of the day,” she wrote. “If my husband doesn’t have an opportunity, on account of weather conditions, to get his hair cut at either of the islands, I have to get up the courage and try.”

Lighthouse Keepers Fight Boredom

In the days before Netflix, boredom posed a serious problem for lighthouse keepers. In the 1890s someone visited Minot’s Ledge Lighthouse, which sits on a rock off the coast of Scituate and Cohasset in Massachusetts. The keeper told the visitor, “The trouble with our life here is that we have too much time to think.”

Minot’s Ledge Light in a Storm (Harper’s Magazine)

Elson and Connie Small were stationed in Maine lighthouses for 29 years–without electricity until 1946. Connie wrote, “Cooped up on a rock together for months on end, seeing no one else, we’d sometimes get mad at each other.” Eldon would go off by himself to the engine house, or Connie would go stand on a ledge by the sea for several hours.

Lighthouse keepers often kept themselves busy with gardens, but some of the lighthouses on the Maine coast sat on barren rock. At Saddleback Ledge, the lighthouse keeper managed to grow some pea vines, potatoes and oats from his trash. Keepers brought dirt from the mainland to Mount Desert Rock and Boon Island to make container gardens.

In 1876, the Lighthouse Board started sending about 40 books in wooden cases to the most isolated lighthouses. There were 50 little libraries that first year, another hundred the next. By 1885, there were 420 libraries. The keepers had to exchange them every three months during the quarterly inspection. No one knows how long they lasted, but there were 351 libraries by 1912.

Lightships

Lightship crews faced the same monotony and isolation that lighthouse keepers did. Lightships were essentially floating lighthouses with a beacon and a fog signal. They had to be manned 24/7 with a good lookout at all times

At the Brenton’s Reef Lightship, crews had to serve 20-21 days on and 10 days off. In 1905, the New York Times reported,

The sailors say that before they have been ten days on a shift they are bored to death of one another’s company. For five days or so at the start they play checkers and chess, and have an occasional game of cards. That soon palls. [. . .] Five days before it is time for shore-leave some of the men are scarcely on speaking terms.

Nantucket Lightship

Bernie Webber, in Lightships, Lighthouses, and Lifeboat Stations: A Memoir and History wrote on a Nantucket Lightship WAL-534, a captain and chief engineer didn’t get along. They were the only two who ate in the wardroom. They hung a curtain down the middle of the table so they didn’t have to look at each other during meals.

Worse than Nantucket may have been the South Shoals Lightship, which combined the horrors of isolation with the pitching and rolling of the sea. An old whaling captain once said, “The loneliest thing he had ever seen at sea was a polar bear floating on a piece of ice in the Arctic ocean; the next loneliest object was the South Shoal Lightship.”

The crewmen aboard the Nantucket lightships found a way to alleviate their boredom: making baskets. Hence the Nantucket Lightship Basket, which today sell for hundreds of dollars.

Lighthouse Keepers’ Ghost

For some asocial keepers, lighthouses were an introvert’s heaven. For others they amounted to sheer hell.

The isolation of the Phippsburg, Maine, lighthouse, for example, drove the lighthouse keeper to madness and murder. Today a piano-playing ghost is said to haunt Seguin Lighthouse. The story goes that the lighthouse keeper in the mid-1850s bought his wife a piano to keep her from getting bored. But she only had one piece of sheet music. And so she played the same song over and over and over, driving her husband mad. Finally he chopped the piano to bits, then killed his wife and himself. Sometimes people say they hear piano music floating on the breeze at Seguin Island.

Ernie

New London Ledge Light, a short tower atop a squat building on a hunk of ledge in the Thames River, actually lies within the borders of Groton. Ledge Light’s fame rests with a ghost named Ernie, real name (according to a psychic) John Randolph. Ernie opens and shuts doors, turns the television on and moves things around.

New London Ledge Light

The story of Ernie, aka John Randolph, goes like this: During the 1920s, John Randolph brought his wife to live on Ledge Light after winning an appointment as lighthouse keeper. His wife couldn’t stand the loneliness of living on a tiny island with all the lights of the city beckoning to her a mile away. She began flirting with fishermen and harbor pilots, and one day she left John Randolph. Desolate, John Randolph climbed to the top of the lighthouse, cut his throat and fell 65 feet to the ground.

Ernie’s legend lived on, but one lighthouse keeper’s daughter didn’t believe it. Barbara Beebe Gaspar’s father kept the light going during the 1930s, and she concluded the story of Ernie arose from bored and lonely lighthouse keepers.

In 1987, a Coast Guard crew member stationed at Ledge Light wrote in the logbook:

“Rock of slow torture. Ernie’s domain. Hell on earth—may New London Ledge’s light shine on forever because I’m through. I will watch it from afar while drinking a brew.”

New London Ledge Light By Moondancedryad – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21656592. Lightship Nantucket By ArnoldReinhold – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70975216.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Charles Torrey – The Most Successful, Least Celebrated Abolitionist

In June of 1844, Charles Torrey arrived in Baltimore. He was well-known as an anti-slavery agitator and architect of the Underground Railroad. He had avoided police many times over the years, in Washington and Baltimore, while helping some 400 slaves to freedom in Canada and the northern states.

Sketch of Charles Torrey

Then in Baltimore a slave trader accused him of helping slaves escape. A local tavern owner also accused him of stealing two of his slaves. With specific charges, the police arrested Torrey and tossed him into jail to await trial. It was the last stop in the career of the most successful abolitionist who was largely ignored by history.

Charles Torrey

Torrey was born in Scituate, Mass., in 1813. By 1817 both his mother and father, as well as his sister, had died of tuberculosis. Relatives then raised young Torrey. Schooled at Exeter and Yale, Torrey became a teacher and then minister.

He seized on slavery as the most dangerous evil of the day, and made it his mission to exterminate it. He travelled New England speaking out against the institution. But soon he grew tired of the slow, pacifist approach taken by William Lloyd Garrison and his Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

William Lloyd Garrison

Torrey first challenged Garrison for leadership of the movement, and failed. He then joined with other radicals in splitting off and creating the Liberty Party in 1840. But he soon grew weary of the political process, and began taking direct action. He spoke with African Americans, both free and enslaved, and he learned the difficulty of simply running away to the North. Further, the penalties for attempting escape were so fierce that many slaves judged it too dangerous to even try.

Direct Action

Torrey and other hot-headed abolitionists decided to take direct action. They travelled to Washington and Baltimore, encouraged slaves to escape. Then they drove them north by wagons to help them disappear into a Quaker-run network of safe houses.

This new breed of abolitionist sought out slaves owned by southern political leaders to stir as much debate as possible. Over the next several years, Torrey freed hundreds of slaves. But his boldness put a target on his back. Southern congressmen grew more outspoken in their denunciation of abolitionists who liberated slaves. They went so far as to declare they should be shot.

In 1842, Torrey, operating as a journalist, attended a convention of slaveholders at Annapolis, Md.. He intended to report on their organized efforts to defend slavery. Police arrested him for inciting illegal activities.

Torrey soon returned to Maryland for his last attack on slavery.

Corrupt Practices

Abolitionists like Torrey faced not just the official opposition to their work. They also had to operate alongside a murky world of slave traders, slave hunters, corrupt police and black spies. There was a robust trade in slaves where free blacks would induce a slave to flee. The free black would keep the slave in captivity, thinking he was on his way to freedom. Only later would he discover he had basically been kidnapped and ransomed back to his owner.

Corrupt police and jailers would work the crowds at the Baltimore black churches looking for escaped slaves. They would tip off slave hunters, who could negotiate to get the slave returned for less than the advertised reward.

Torrey made it his business to publicize these corrupt practices. It wouldn’t take long before he would fall prey to them in Baltimore.

First, a slave hunter lodged a complaint against him (probably fabricated). Then William Heckrotte, tavern owner, accused Torrey of helping a family of slaves escape north.

Stuck in jail, Torrey used the time to help educate black inmates about how to access the Underground Railroad and escape.

Yet his arrest distressed him.

“I have very little desire to become a martyr,” he said in a letter to an uncle. “How I should act in prospect of being called to that glorious host, I do not know.”

Advertisement placed by William Heckrotte seeking the return of his slaves

Martyrdom

Torrey once attempted escape. His former landlady and her daughters regularly visited him. While not abolitionists, they visited Torrey so he could go outside for an hour of fresh air for the visit. The jailers spread a story that he had an improper relationship with one of the women and had the visits stopped. The newspapers reported that Torrey’s wife had hired an investigator to prove the charges and seek divorce.

Torrey hatched a plan to escape to clear his name, but a fellow inmate alerted jailers to the plan. Torrey’s wife would later write and assure him that she did not believe the charges.

After two years in jail awaiting trial, Torrey was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison. He penned a book about his childhood in Scituate, Home! Or the Pilgrims’ Faith Revived, to provide some income for his wife and family.

Torrey even wrote a reconciliatory letter to Garrison, who he had pilloried for his lack of direct action to combat slavery. The letter did little to heal the division between the two.

Torrey’s tuberculosis took a toll in the jailhouse conditions. He died in in prison in May of 1846.

Aftermath

The divisions between the moderate and radical wings of the abolitionist movement followed Torrey to the grave. Though acknowledged by his contemporaries as having freed more slaves via the Underground Railroad than anyone, the staid Park Street Church in Boston withdrew an offer to host his funeral. It was moved to the more progressive Tremont Temple. He was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Park Street Church

In writing the history of the abolitionist movement, the contributions of Torrey and the other advocates of direct action were largely downplayed in the histories of the era, in favor of a version of events that glorified Garrison and his supporters.

During his long incarceration, Torrey gave interviews and wrote letters published in Baltimore. Though he tried to reason with Marylanders, he never lost his harsh edge:

“I make no appeal for sympathy. Let the guilty do that,” he wrote in one broadside. “The states of Maryland and Virginia will go to trial before the tribunal of mankind.”

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Park Street Church By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39075427.

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New England Places To Visit Now That It’s Memorial Day

Houghs Neck

What better New England place to spend Memorial Day than the Irish Riviera? Wollastan, Nantasket and Hough’s Neck beaches have been popular vacation spots for Irish immigrants since the 19^th century.

But South Shore beaches weren’t only for swimming. In Scituate, the most Irish town in America, immigrants used to harvest red algae – a practice known as mossing. There is actually a Maritime and Mossing Museum run by the Scituate Historical Society. Open Sunday afternoons, it is set in the 1739 residence of Capt. Benjamin James on the Driftway. Exhibits describe the Portland Gale, Scituate’s many shipwrecks, Thomas W. Lawson’s seven-masted schooner and Irish mossing.

New Hampshire Boat Museum

Memorial Day is also the start of boating season and the opening of the New Hampshire Boat Museum in Wolfeboro near Lake Winnipesaukee. The museum features a glorious new display of vintage boats, art from Motor Boating Magazine covers and an exhibit on locally made McDuff engines. For more information click here.

Full Moons

Last week the Full Flower Moon appeared. It’s what the Abenaki Indians called the ‘moonesquam nimockkesos’, or ‘when women weed their corn.’ William Pynchon, the founder of Springfield, Mass., recorded the Abenaki names for the full moons in 1645. Pynchon built a warehouse in what was once Springfield, but is present-day East Windsor, Conn. The area is still known as Warehouse Point. There’s a lot of history nearby, including the Connecticut Trolley Museum, open on weekends this time of year. St. John’s Episcopal Church at Warehouse Point is on the National Register of Historic Places. In nearby Scantic is the Scantic Academy, a historic Federal Style school building that serves as a museum and as the headquarters for the East Windsor Historical Society.

The Abbe Museum

You can learn more about the Wabanaki tribes at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, Maine. The museum has two locations: one at 26 Mount Desert Street in the center of Bar Harbor, and a second at Sieur de Monts in Acadia National Park. Its full name is the Robert Abbe Museum of Stone Antiquities, which gives you the idea that its collection includes Native American artifacts from prehistoric and historic times. The museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, opened May 1 with a new core exhibit, People of the First Light, which introduces the visitor to Wabanaki culture and history. Four Directions of Wabanaki Basketry features a basket from each of the Wabanaki tribal communities. At the just-opened Sieur de Monts branch, an exhibit presents Abenaki perspectives on St Sauveur, the first French Jesuit settlement on Mount Desert Island.

Barefoot in New Hampshire

Capt. Walter Barefoot was a litigious rogue who spent a great deal of time in courthouses from Boston to York, Maine, during the 1660s and 1670s. He actually lived in Dover, N.H., where he owned a saw mill along the Lamprey River. The William Damm Garrison house in Dover would have been standing when Barefoot was in and out of court. It’s part of a history museum called the Woodman Institute, which was founded in 1916 and includes exhibits on local history and natural history. The museum’s campus has three brick houses of Federal style architecture, including the former home of abolitionist Senator John P. Hale. Among its art and antiques are a saddle in which President Abraham Lincoln rode to review troops shortly before his assassination, a set of samurai armor that belonged to a Japanese delegate to the 1905 Portsmouth Peace Conference and examples of textiles made in Dover.

Americana

Rose Wilder Lane, the only daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, kept her contribution to the Little House books secret. There’s little trace of Rose in Danbury, Conn., her home for 25 years. But not far away in Kent you can visit a pioneer cabin, part of the Eric Sloane Museum, which opened May 13. The museum by the artist of the same name is open Friday through Sunday. Sloan’s collection of early American tools is on display, as is his studio and some of his artwork. The museum also includes an heirloom apple orchard and the remains of an iron furnace.

Like Sloan, N.C. Wyeth illustrated books about America’s past. Wyeth’s son Andrew and grandson Jamie also explored early American themes. In Vermont, Shelburne Museum director Thomas Denenberg on Wednesday discusses the Wyeths—N. C. (1882–1945), Andrew (1917–2009), and Jamie (b. 1946)—and offers new perspectives on these three painters who have shaped the way Americans view their world. For more information, click here.

Mark Your Calendar

This year the Providence Preservation Society’s annual Festival of Historic Houses features modern living spaces in the city’s prized historic homes and gardens. The 2016 Festival takes place on June 11 beginning at 10 a.m., on the north end of Benefit Street, known as Providence’s “Mile of History.” The Preservation Society was formed on that mile 60 years ago to save the architecturally significant neighborhood from demolition—a major milestone in our America’s preservation history.

New this year, visitors can go to other neighboring cultural organizations as part of Explore Historic Providence day. They can also celebrate PPS’s 60th Anniversary at Cheers to 60 Years, a free open house from 4-6 p.m. following the Festival. Click here for more information.

Photos: Abbe Museum photo By AbbeMuseum – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 Wikimedia; Houghs Neck By Sswonk – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia.

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How Boston’s South Shore Became the Irish Riviera

Visit the South Shore of Massachusetts and you won’t have much doubt about why people call it the Irish Riviera. Orange-and-green flags fly from many a home, and the region is filled with Roman Catholic churches and schools, Irish dance schools and Irish pubs, restaurants and bakeries.

Nantasket Beach along the Irish Riviera

You may conclude the Irish Riviera resulted from suburban flight from the working-class neighborhoods of Boston, that most Irish of American cities. But well before the exodus to Braintree, Hull and Marshfield, well-heeled Irish families had built seaside Victorian mansions along the coast south of Boston. And even before that, the Irish gained a toehold in what is now the most Irish town in America: Scituate, Mass. They did it by engaging in the now-lost industry of Irish mossing.

Mossing

Irish immigrants began arriving in Boston during the Irish potato famine starting in 1842. Daniel Ward, an Irish immigrant, headed south and started collecting seaweed, or mossing, in the 1850s in Scituate.

Irish moss

Irish moss is a red algae used as a thickener and stabilizer in ice cream, beer, wine, medicine and in calico dye manufacturing. Mossers hauled the slimy stuff from the sea floor with heavy rakes at low tide. Those who mossed at both low tides could gather as much as 1,000 pounds a day. Others made money spreading the seaweed on the beach to dry and packing it into crates.

It was a full-time job for Irish immigrants during the mid-19^th century. But it didn’t make Daniel Ward rich. The salvage rights to the Forest Queen in 1854 did. The wrecked vessel from London had carried a load of silver bars, and Daniel Ward got the rights to them.

Scituate Harbor

He built a big house on a cliff and offered it for use as the first Catholic Mass. Starting in 1856, priests said Mass there four times a year.

In 1942, an anonymous mosser told American Magazine, “It’s a great farm we have out there. We don’t have to plow it or plant it, but it gives us four crops a season.” By the end of World War II, it was a lucrative summer job for young people. It died out, a victim of cheap labor overseas. Lucien Rousseau, the last commercial sea mosser, died in 1983.

But Scituate’s Irish mossers left a legacy: the Irish Riviera. Once they established an Irish-Catholic enclave in the town, Quincy and Randolph built parishes in 1848 and 1850.

The Irish Riviera

John F. Kennedy and others sitting on the deck of the Kennedy family home in Hyannis, Mass. Left to right: Ethel Skakel Kennedy, Jean Kennedy, an unidentified man, an unidentified woman, John F. Kennedy, K. LeMoyne (“Lem”) Billings, and an unidentified woman. (Photographer unknown. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston)

As the Boston Irish began to acquire wealth and power, they began to move to large houses on the South Shore, to Marshfield, Scituate and Cohasset, according to historian Thomas O’Connor. Boston’s rogue mayor, James Michael Curley, spent summers in Scituate. In hot weather, Irish families visited Nantasket, Wollaston and Hough’s Neck beaches.

Nantasket Beach in Hull was a fashionable vacation spot for the well-off Irish. Rose Fitzgerald’s family had a place on Nantasket Beach in Hull. Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly died at his summer home there.

After World War II the migration accelerated as returning GIs from South Boston, Hyde Park and Dorchester moved to the South Shore suburbs. It continued through the 1950s and 1960s.

By The Numbers

Today, Scituate and Marshfield are the epicenter of the Irish Riviera, which some consider the stretch from Weymouth to Kingston. Others consider the Irish Riviera to comprise Milton and Quincy outside of Boston to Cape Cod, where the Kennedy family still maintains a compound. The late Speaker of the House Thomas P. ‘Tip’ O’Neill retired to Harwich Port on the Cape.

Nearly 50 percent of Scituate residents have Irish ancestry. The Fieldston neighborhood of Marshfield is the most Irish-American section of the second-most Irish-American town in the United States. At least 44 percent of the population in Marshfield, Braintree, Hull, Avon, Pembroke and Milton have Irish ancestry.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005-2009 American Community Survey, 19 of the top-20 most Irish communities in Massachusetts are south of Boston. Here they are by the percentage of residents who claim Irish ancestry:

47.5 Scituate
46.5 Braintree
45.8 Hull
45.6 Marshfield
44.9 Avon
44.9 Pembroke
44.6 Milton
44.5 Abington
44.3 Whitman
44.2 Hanover
43.4 Weymouth
43.0 Walpole
42.2 Holbrook
41.4 Duxbury
41.2 Norwell
40.8 Hanson
17.4 Boston

This story about the Irish Riviera was updated in 2022.

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A Brief History of New England Town Meeting Controversies

The first Town Meeting controversies didn’t have anything to do with buying a new fire truck or a proposed zoning law, but whether Town Meeting should even happen in the first place.

When John Winthrop arrived on the shore of Massachusetts to build a city on a hill, he didn’t have Town Meeting in mind at all.

Town Meeting, Woodstock, Vt., 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The First Town Meeting Controversies

During their Great Migration to New England, the Puritans fled the monarchy, not the monarch. Massachusetts Bay Colony hardly started out as a bastion of representative democracy. Members of the General Court elected themselves for life in 1630.

But the Puritans had also brought with them English ideas of the rights of subjects and of constitutional guarantees against arbitrary power. As a result, freemen struggled against the lifers in Massachusetts’ General Court.

In 1632 they got the right to elect two people from each plantation (an early version of a township) to confer with the Court about raising a public stock. They also agitated to elect their representatives annually.

In 1639, the Rev. Nathaniel Ward cautioned against allowing the freemen to vote on laws. “I see the spirits of the people runne high and what they get they hould,” he wrote.

John Winthrop

Town Meeting Gets Started in Connecticut

To the south of Massachusetts, the colonies of Connecticut and New Haven had more democratic leanings. Winthrop wrote to Thomas Hooker in 1639 telling him he thought the leaders of Connecticut’s government shouldn’t have submitted its constitution to the people.

And on June 4, 1639, in New Haven Colony, a Town Meeting took place when “all the free planters assembled together in a general meeting to consult about settling Civill government according to God.”

Winthrop was fighting a losing battle.

Early Town Meeting

At first, Town Meeting handled all civil affairs. In the earliest days, for example, Dorchester, Mass., held Town Meeting every Monday at 8 a.m.

The colonists realized that was an unwieldy way to do business. So they limited Town Meeting issues to taxes, appropriations and other recurring items. They made attendance mandatory and imposed fines on those who didn’t show up.

In colonial elections, only male property owners could vote. But in Town Meeting, all adult male taxpayers voted. Early town meetings dealt with grants of land, bridges and pounds, the appointment of fence viewers, loose animals, alms for the poor, bounties for wolves, ministers’ salaries and provisions for churches and schools. Early Puritan towns sometimes elected ‘seaters’ to affix the relative rank and dignity of the meetinghouse seats.

Whatever was discussed at town meetings was discussed thoroughly. That still holds true, sometimes to the despair of the meeting-goers. During the all-day meetings, men chewed on meeting house seeds — dill or caraway — to promote concentration.

The Revolutionary Town Meeting

Massachusetts royal governor William Shirley viewed Town Meeting as a crucible of democracy. Not a good thing, to his way of thinking.

In his book, The Unknown American Revolution, historian Gary Nash quotes Shirley complaining about the “Mobbish turn in this town.” Shirley blamed it on the constitution, by which the management of it is devovl’d upon the populace assembled in their town meetings.” The “meanest inhabitants” generally outvote the “gentlemen, merchants, substantial traders and all the better part of the inhabitants; to whom it is irksome to attend.”

Gov. Wiliam Shirley. No rabble for him.

Nash and other historians drew a straight line between New England’s Town Meeting, the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. Town Meetings at Faneuil Hall provided the main forum for the leaders of the American Revolution. Throughout New England, they organized depots of military stores, converted farmers and tradesmen to Minute Men and prevented anarchy in a time of war.

Town meeting controversies erupted in Boston in the 1740s and in 1784, when elitist conservatives proposed replacing the annual gatherings with an elected mayor and aldermen. “At a raucous town meeting in 1784, efforts to present the plan were met with shouts of “No incorporation. No mayor and aldermen. No innovations.”

Two-Faced Jefferson

As a revolutionary, Thomas Jefferson admired Town Meeting. As a president who imposed an embargo unpopular in New England, he disdained it.

“I felt the foundations of the government shaken under my feet by the New England townships,” he wrote. “[A]lthough the whole of the other states were known to be in favor of the measure, yet the organization of this little selfish minority enabled it to override the Union.

The Last Century

Perhaps no state guards its prerogative of direct democracy more jealously than Vermont, which held its first Town Meeting in Bennington in 1762. In 1844, the Town of St. Albans refused to allow presidential emissary Gen. Winfield Scott to speak to them about flouting the country’s neutrality laws. Today the first Tuesday in March is a state holiday in Vermont. Coffee and maple sinkers (doughnuts) are the preferred treat.

By the early 19^th century, towns turned into cities. Some began to view Town Meeting as a quaint, if admirable, artifact of the past. Newspaper reporters focused on the impassioned wrangling over minor disagreements. In 1892, the Boston Globe reported Melrose, Mass., Town Meeting had a lively debate over the wisdom of suing the Boston and Maine Railroad. The issue? The railroad parked freight cars so they blocked a shortcut to the depot.

At Barnstable, Mass., Town Meeting in 1937 a fight between two brothers earned press attention because one described his overweight sibling as “an elephant.” The dispute involved the right-of-way over Henry B. Day’s Wianno property.

Woodstock, Vt., Town Meeting, March 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Year after year, Town Meeting settled such local disputes in New England town halls, schools and gymnasiums. What to do about the failings of the Reading, Mass., municipal light board in 1926. The fate of the Scituate elms in 1937. Whether to sell intoxicating beverages in Woodstock, Vt., in 1940. The $350 bonus to the Redding, Conn., highway employees in 1948.

On Jan. 22, 1928, Boston Globe writer Louis Lyon bemoaned the disappearance of a tradition – Town Meeting Cake, similar to a fruitcake,

… that peculiar confection that is as distinctive to town meeting itself is distinctive to the soil of New England.

On the Radio

In 1935, New England Town Meeting caught the attention of NBC Radio. The network decided to experiment with a talk radio show featuring live comments and questions from the audience. NBC expected little from America’s Town Meeting of the Air, but listeners loved it. The show ran from May 30, 1935, to July 1, 1956.

1935 promotional brochure for America’s Town Meeting

Throughout the 20^th century, Town Meeting survived and flourished in New England, despite the press’s lamentations that it was dying out. In 1953, the Boston Globe reported Harvard, Mass., was one of the few towns to continue the tradition of an all-day town meeting.

The menu was turkey and lemon meringue pie. And, according to the Globe, ‘there was more debate over not spending $1,500 for road improvements than there was in spending $170,000 for the new school.’

This story was updated in 2022.

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Minots Ledge Light: The Most Dangerous and Romantic Lighthouse in America

Minots Ledge Light, the most romantic lighthouse in America, is also the site of the most tragic event in the history of the American lighthouse.

The original Minots Ledge Light

Minots Ledge Light rises dramatically from a tiny outcropping of ledge one mile off the coast of Cohasset and Scituate, Mass. Its beacon flashes in a 1-4-3 cycle, the same number of letters in ‘I love you.’ Hence the nickname ‘Lover’s Light.’

Author Edward Rowe Snow called it “the most dangerous beacon in America.” On April 17, 1851, a hurricane swept the original Minots Ledge Light was swept to sea.

It had been built over two years and lighted for the first time on Jan. 1, 1850. The need for a lighthouse on the ledge was clear. Many ships wrecked on the rocks and the reefs nearby. The first of many shipwrecks was recorded in 1695; by the 1750s, 80 ships and 400 lives were lost in the surrounding waters. After Boston merchant George Minot lost a ship on the rocks in 1754, people called it Minots Ledge.

In 1843, lighthouse inspector I. W. P. Lewis reported there was a great need for a lighthouse on Minots Ledge, as more than 40 vessels were wrecked on the ledge in the past 10 years. He wrote the area was “annually the scene of the most heart-rending disasters.”

Minots Ledge Light

Capt. William H. Swift, of the United States Topographical Bureau, agreed. The question was whether a granite cylinder anchored to such a tiny speck of ledge could withstand the wind and the waves.

Swift proposed a radical new approach: cement nine iron pilings into the rock and build the lantern and the keeper’s house on top of them. He reasoned the waves would break harmlessly through the uprights.

Rebuilding

It took two years to build the lighthouse, as people could only work on it in calm weather.

Henry David Thoreau passed by it in 1849, describing it thus:

Here was the new iron light-house, then unfinished, in the shape of an egg-shell painted red, and placed high on iron pillars, like the ovum of a sea monster floating on the waves…When I passed it the next summer it was finished and two men lived in it, and a lighthouse keeper said that in a recent gale it had rocked so as to shake the plates off the table. Think of making your bed thus in the crest of a breaker!

The first keeper’s pet cat jumped to its death, so panicked by the dramatic swaying of the tower during a storm. The keeper, Isaac Dunham, wrote that a storm in March “makes the light reel like a Drunken man.” He asked the government to strengthen the tower, but the government ignored him. Dunham quit on Oct. 7, 1851.

John Bennett took Dunham’s place, confident in the safety of the tower. Then he changed his mind. On April 16, a fierce nor’easter pounded the tower. During a lull at the beginning of the storm, Bennett had rowed across to the mainland. His two assistant keepers, Joseph Wilson and Joseph Antoine, remained. Though terrified by the reeling lighthouse, they heroically kept the lantern lit and the bell ringing.

Message in a Bottle

Sometime around midnight the surging waves snapped off the central support to the tower. At 1 a.m., the residents on shore heard the furious sound of the keepers pounding the lighthouse bell. The lighthouse probably toppled into the sea about then.

Two days later a Gloucester fisherman found a message from the keepers in a bottle: “The beacon cannot last any longer. She is shaking a good three feet each way as I write. God bless you all.”

Joseph Antoine’s body washed ashore at Nantasket. Joseph Wilson died of exhaustion and exposure on Gull Rock.

For the next nine years, a lightship was stationed near Minots Ledge. In 1855, workers started building a new stone tower under the watchful eye of a lifeguard. It took five years to finish because another storm swept it away, unfinished, in 1852. Keepers finally lit the light on Aug. 2, 1860.

Minots Ledge Light now belongs on the National Register of Historic Places. Memorial plaques honoring Joseph Wilson and Joseph Antoine were lowered to the ocean floor in 2007. Some fishermen claim they can hear their ghosts crying for help.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Minots Ledge by Bill Llott via Flickr, CC by ND 2.0.

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