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Spanish American War

Island Castaways, New England’s Huddled Masses Yearning to Get Well

Island castaways don’t have it easy. Just ask Robinson Crusoe. Yet, for centuries, medical and political authorities relied on the general inaccessibility of islands to isolate patients for whom they had no effective therapies.

In that tradition, New England governments made routine use of coastal islands to isolate patients and to protect the mainland populations from potential contagion and epidemics.

Here are seven islands, once home to island castaways in New England.

Rainsford Island

Tiny Rainsford Island in Boston Harbor may get even tinier as rising seas threaten to cut it in two. But at one time its eleven acres held a quarantine hospital, an almshouse, a reformatory and a pauper’s graveyard. The quarantine hospital moved to Rainsford in 1737 from nearby Spectacle Island. A smallpox hospital was added to Rainsford in 1832.

Even as public health practices improved and vaccines for many communicable diseases became available, the island continued as an offshore dumping ground for delinquents, unwed mothers, the indigent, the mentally ill—in other words, society’s undesirables.

Today, according to a recent Boston Globe article, the island still holds the remains of 1,777 of “Boston’s poor, diseased, and unwanted from Colonial times to the dawn of the 20th century.”

Quarantine hospital on Rainsford Island

Spectacle Island

The Boston Customs House maintained a quarantine hospital on Spectacle Island. In April 1721, a British ship arrived in the harbor with smallpox cases onboard. The infection spread ashore before authorities could move the ship and quarantine the infected crew and passengers at the island hospital.

The Puritan minister, Cotton Mather, noted in his diary, “The grievous calamity of the small pox has now entered the town.”

Spectacle Island.

Mather had other worries. He advocated a primitive method of inoculating people against smallpox. Called variolation, the technique involved exposing healthy people to the exudate of other smallpox patients in the hope of producing a mild, manageable form of the disease.

The idea was wildly unpopular, and angry mobs threatened Mather and his allies. It was, in effect, the beginning of the anti-vaccine movement in America. Not until 1796 did Britain’s Edward Jenner use cowpox exudates to develop the first safe and effective vaccine against smallpox.

Noddles Island Castaways

Noddle’s Island doesn’t exist anymore. It belongs to the artificial peninsula that makes up Logan Airport. But once it was an island and the site of a hospital for the French naval fleet. During a smallpox outbreak in 1764, the island served as the site for an inoculation hospital.

Variolation inoculation against the pox was dangerous. So, an island seemed like the best place to contain the inoculated patients. It also kept out the anti-inoculation public.

In 1802, Harvard’s Benjamin Waterhouse used the island hospital to experiment with some of Jenner’s new cowpox vaccine. Waterhouse vaccinated 19 children with cowpox, then took them to the Noddle’s hospital to expose them to smallpox patients for 20 days. (They had no “informed consent” forms to sign in those days.) None of the vaccinated children developed smallpox.

Benjamin Waterhouse, 1833 painting by Rembrandt Peale.

Six years after the Noddle’s Island cowpox experiment, the Massachusetts Medical Society reported…”persons who undergo the cowpox are thereby rendered as incapable of being affected by the virus of smallpox as if they had undergone the latter disease.”

Deer Island

Deer Island in Boston Harbor lost its island status when the 1938 hurricane filled in the channel between it and the mainland.

But in 1677 it was an island and a convenient spot to establish a quarantine station for holding smallpox cases. It evolved into an important quarantine hospital in the late 1840’s as vast numbers of Irish refugees arrived.

Many already suffered from typhus and dysentery. Between 1847 and 1849 the island hospital received some 4,800 people. A few years later, the facilities expanded to support Boston’s regular population of criminals, delinquents and paupers—very much like the earlier residents of Rainsford Island.

Almshouse, 1851

Widow’s Island

Almost lost in the archipelago of Maine’s coastline off North Haven is Widow’s Island, sometimes written as Widow or Widows. In the 19th century, the U.S. Navy built a quarantine station on the island to house sailors suffering from a tropical disease called yellow fever. A deadly infection, it regularly caused epidemics in the tropics and in American cities as far north as Boston. Scientists didn’t know what caused yellow fever or how it spread from person to person.

The Navy built a temporary facility in 1885, and then an imposing 50-bed hospital in 1888. But it never quarantined yellow fever patients on the island. An 1892 report from the Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery noted various repairs to the island hospital. But “no cases of yellow fever have been received at Widows Island.”

After describing the cleaning, fumigating and disinfecting of two ships in the New York Navy Yard, the report reached a conclusion. “It is probable that ships in the future infected with yellow fever will enter the quarantine port at New York….”

So much for Widow’s hospital.

Aerial view of Widow’s Island

In 1900, researchers in Cuba discovered mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever. So the elaborate and expensive efforts to disinfect and decontaminate ships and cargo was both unnecessary and useless. Eliminate the mosquito and you’ve eliminated yellow fever. The Widow’s Island hospital got torn down in 1935.

Gallops

Back in Boston, a 2018 winter storm exposed the forgotten graves of hundreds of smallpox victims on Gallops Island. Like many other islands scattered about Boston Harbor, the city used Gallops as a quarantine station.

NOAA map of the Boston Harbor Islands, home of countless island castaways.

A hospital for immigrants was built in 1866, and by 1886 the staff was examining over 33,000 passengers annually. A smallpox outbreak during 1872-73 sent a hundred Boston-area patients to the island. In 1873, two additional buildings were erected for cholera and yellow fever patients. In 1878, another hospital went up for passengers suffering from ‘ship fever,’ otherwise known as epidemic typhus. The following year, the old smallpox hospital was torn down and replaced.

Construction on the island, and the numbers of passengers with a variety of illnesses, hint at the vast number of immigrants passing through the port of Boston in the 19th century.

Despite the large number of ship passengers to examine and patients to quarantine and treat, the island also served as a site for the production of experimental anti-toxin. In 1891, German bacteriologists prepared anti-diphtheria anti-toxin in the blood of horses. They then used it to treat a patient dying of diphtheria. It worked, and serum-based anti-toxins, or ‘passive immunization’ became the standard treatment for many bacterial infections until the discovery of antibiotics.

(Passive immunization is now being revived to treat some COVID-19 patients.)

The Federal government took control of the island hospital during World War I and finally closed it in 1937. Today, the dead still remain at Gallops, now an island park.

Two lepers refused entrance to town, 14th century.

Penikese

Stranger than a yellow fever hospital in chilly Maine is a leper colony in Massachusetts. The U.S. has never had a large number of cases of leprosy, now called Hansen’s Disease. Still, the social stigma associated with leprosy, and scientific ignorance about its transmission and pathology, compelled local, state and federal governments to quarantine anyone suspected of having this ancient affliction.

Massachusetts was no different. The first known case in the state occurred in 1875. The infected man was isolated on Gallops Island. Immigration brought more cases and Massachusetts began looking for a site to build a leprosarium. But no one wanted it at the state’s infirmary in Tewksbury or on Cape Cod. In 1905, the state bought the island of Penikese in Buzzards Bay.

For the next 16 years, 36 patients and their doctor lived on the island in a smattering of buildings and cottages.

The patients were prisoners, but not criminals. Communicable disease has often permitted that tricky distinction. Yet, the Penikese patients—mostly immigrants—were not abandoned entirely. Doctors tried to treat their disease. A 1976 research paper described experimental “drug therapy at the Massachusetts Leper Colony, 1905-1921.” The invention of wireless radio in the 1910s also gave the islanders a link to passing ships and the Marconi News Service broadcasts.

The National Leprosarium in Carville, La., opened in 1921. The Massachusetts governor wasted no time packing the Penikese Island castaways onto a southbound train. The state fumigated the island’s emptied buildings and then dynamited them.

For the next 50 years, the island served as a bird sanctuary. Then between 1973 and 1980 the island again became a place of isolation for some of society’s troublesome members. The Penikese Island School for delinquent boys found a temporary home among the graves and wreckage of the vanished leper colony.

Island Castaways Remembered

Penikese Island in 2005.

Penikese may be an obscure island that once housed a small number of people with a rare infection, but it has not been forgotten. A book about the island’s inhabitants was published in 1997. The poet, Eve Rifkah, wrote Outcasts in 2010. She listed information about the island’s individual residents in the back of her book.

Islands often appear convenient solutions to all manner of problems. Alcatraz held criminals. Elba held a would-be emperor. Robben held apartheid’s political prisoners. North Brother held Typhoid Mary.

The islands all eventually gave up their inmates and patients to become parks, sanctuaries and tourist attractions.

For more information: See Paul Cyr’s The Exiles of Penikese Island: Politics, Prejudice and the Public Health. See also Richard J. Kahn’s The Widow’s Island Yellow Fever Quarantine Hospital in Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1885-1904: A Medical, Political, and Social History.

The author of this story about island castaways, Edward McSweegan is a Rhode Island microbiologist who writes about infectious diseases and history.

Images: By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2007_02_19_iad-bos_41.JPG, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2180315, and Widow’s Island courtesy Google Maps.

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The Brahmin Rough Riders of New England

Some people believe that the Rough Riders were almost all cowboys from out West. After all, it had earned the nickname “The Cowboy Regiment.”

But that wasn’t entirely the case, as you shall see. Brahmins from New England with refined backgrounds also joined the Rough Riders.

Men from every New England state volunteered for Teddy Roosevelt’s U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry, better known as the Rough Riders. Massachusetts had as many as 25. As a matter of fact, the actual commander of the unit, Leonard Wood, hailed from New Hampshire. Frederic Remington featured Woodbury Kane from Rhode Island in his famous painting of the immortal charge up San Juan Hill.

Col. Roosevelt and the Rough Riders on top of San Juan Hill.

Roosevelt had four recruiting stations out West, in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and the Oklahoma/Indian Territories. He had vast experience in the West and knew the cowboys already knew how to ride and shoot. But Roosevelt knew another target-rich area full of ready-for-action men: His wealthy, pedigreed friends throughout New York and New England.

Roosevelt put out the word. They responded in droves from polo clubs, boxing clubs, duck blinds, steeplechase courses, yacht clubs, Ivy League athletic fields and glee clubs. Many had graduated from Harvard.

One Rough Rider, James McClintock, who hailed from California, said they were in it for the adventure.

The Rough Riders are the stuff of legend, having generated a movie, a television show and, of course, a President. They were, however, one of the shortest lived units in American military history. They only existed for four months and 13 days before they disbanded.

Rhode Island Rough Riders

Woodbury Kane, Newport;Joseph S. Stevens, Newport; Norman Maxwell, Newport; Charles Hatch, Newport; Joseph F. Flynn, Cranston.

Rough Rider Woodbury Kane

Woodbury Kane, a classmate of Teddy Roosevelt’s at Harvard, was born in Newport, a cousin of John Jacob Astor IV. A noted yachtsman, he belonged to the New York Yacht Club and served on the crew of the Columbia in the 1899 America’s Cup Race. He was also a noted big game hunter.

After graduation, he lived the life of a bon vivant in Newport and New York. In April 1898 he and other East Coast friends joined the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry.

After enlistment, he, William Tiffany and other East Coast friends donated two $7,500 Colt machine guns to the unit. When the unit expanded to a thousand men he received a lieutenant’s commission.

While serving in the Rough Riders he was always noted for being dressed to a T, no matter the conditions. While leading K Troop in the charge on San Juan Hill, he was wounded in the forearm. Kane was awarded a citation for gallantry and promoted to captain.

He spent the rest of his life living the life of a dandy until a heart attack cut him down at the age of 46. His obituary noted he left no children, but he did leave his beloved polo pony.

Vermont

Ira A. Hill, Grand Isle; Wallace Batchelder, Chester.

Wallace Batchelder graduated from Chester Academy in Chester, Vt., before enlisting in the Rough Riders. He later fought in the Philippines under General Wood. After his service he returned to Vermont, where he became a lawyer and chaired the state’s committee to elect Roosevelt President of the United States in 1904. He later broke with Roosevelt, who in 1912 sent him a telegram telling him not to support any candidate who didn’t support Roosevelt. Batchelder replied he wouldn’t support Roosevelt.

New Hampshire Rough Riders

Dudley S. Dean, Laconia; Walter F. Hickey, Nashua; Leonard Wood, Winchester.

Leonard Wood was the actual commander of the Rough Riders; Teddy Roosevelt was his second in command.

A descendant of four Mayflower passengers, he trained as a physician at Harvard Medical School. He served as a major general in the Army. When he came to command the U.S. 1^st Volunteer Cavalry in Cuba, he was a seasoned Indian fighter in the West and had already been awarded the Medal of Honor. After the Spanish-American War, he served as Governor-General of the Philippines and contended for the Republican nomination for President in 1920.

Dean was an All American football quarterback for Harvard from 1888 to 1890. He participated in the charge on San Juan Hill. That was not to be his last military adventure. During World War II, he served as a lieutenant colonel In the U.S. Army Air Force. He was the executive producer of the play Winged Victory, which ran from November 1943 to May 1944. He lived until the age of 79, passing away in 1950.

Dudley Dean, football star

Dudley’s son John H. Dean played football for Harvard too. At Harvard, he befriended Joseph P. Kennedy and they spent summers together at Cohassett, Mass.

Maine

Guy Muncie, Calais; Harrison J. Holt, Portland; Frederick C. Wesley, Bangor.

Harrison Holt graduated from Phillips Andover and Harvard. Upon his Harvard graduation in 1898 he enlisted with Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. After the war and some business ventures in Mexico he joined the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser as a reporter. Later in life he wrote novels and detective stories, including The Calendared Isles, a Romance of Casco Bay (read it here) and Midnight at Mears House.

Connecticut

Edward C. Hall, Wallingford.

Unlike most of the Ivy League Rough Riders, Edward Hall graduated from Yale, not Harvard. Upon graduation in 1894, he went to work for Westinghouse and did a brief stint at a North Dakota ranch before enlisting with the Rough Riders. After the war he joined General Electric in Lynn, Mass., then transferred to the Schenectady office, where he died in 1912.

Massachusetts

Harry A. Curtis, Boston; Prescott H. Belknap, Brookline; John D. Hubbell, Boston; Rufus K. Thomas, Boston; Wellman H. Saunders, Salem; John P. Gardner, Boston; Guy H. Scull, Boston; Harry A. Davis, Boston; Francis B. Crowninshield, Marblehead; William H. Mitchell, Salem; Winslow Clark, Milton; Edward F. Donnelly, Boston; Michael F. Hogan; William T. James, Fitchburg; Arthur M. Leroy, Boston; Raymond Morse, Springfield; Edward A. O’Brien, Charlestown; William J. Tudor, Boston; Harry C. White, Somerville.

Francis Boardman Crowninshield, another Harvard graduate, went on to become a noted international yachtsman. He fought with Troop K of the Rough Riders and took part in the charge up San Juan Hill. In 1900, he married Louise DuPont from the famous chemical family. In 1911, he won the King of Spain’s Cup in Spain, now among his many trophies at the Eastern Yacht Club in Marblehead, Mass.

Rough Riders. Image courtesy New York Public Library.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

This story updated in 2022.

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African American Medical Students at Yale

It’s an interesting photograph: serious-looking men in hats and suits, with a couple of human skulls among them. Taken in 1895, the picture shows a mixed bag of students from the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven who would graduate in 1895, 1896, and 1897. Two of the 1895 graduates are seated in the front row with “95” painted on the soles of their shoes. In the back row are two African American medical students who would graduate in 1897. They are Arthur Leslie Howard and William Fletcher Penn.

Howard and Penn

Howard was from St. Thomas in the Caribbean and went to school at Cooke College in Antigua. Penn was born in Virginia and attended the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University). Both men arrived at Yale in 1893 and shared an apartment on Chapel Street in New Haven.

Howard came from a wealthy West Indies family. Penn sometimes worked as a waiter, which likely contributed to his on-campus reputation as one of the “grouchiest and meanest men.”

Howard wrote his medical school thesis on the treatment of tetanus, which, in the 1890s, involved the use of lockjaw forceps to pry open a patient’s “locked” jaw and injections of antiserum to counter the lethal effects of the bacterial toxin. He graduated in 1897 and moved to the U.K. to practice and continue his medical education.

Unfortunately, Howard took ill there and died in 1904 at age 28. His Caribbean background made him an early advocate of Cuba’s independence from Spain. Had he stayed in the U.S. he might have elected to participate in the 1898 Spanish-American War as a “contract surgeon.” Many African American physicians and surgeons signed on to treat the Army’s black regiments, then known as the Buffalo soldiers.

Penn also graduated in 1897 and then moved to Atlanta, Ga. He became well known in the city and had an excellent reputation as a physician. Yet, he was denied membership in the Georgia branch of the American Medical Association. Instead, he joined the Georgia State National Medical Association (NMA), which promoted the interests of African American physicians and patients.

William F. Penn

In 1926, he moved to Alabama to become chief of surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuskegee. He died of chronic myocarditis in 1934.

African American Medical Students at Yale

William F. Penn is often cited as the first African American medical graduate at Yale. He was not. As Daryl Daniels noted in his 1991 Yale School of Medicine thesis, “The first African-American known to have graduated from the School was Dr. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed.

“Because of strong abolitionist sentiment at Yale and in New Haven during the 1850s and his family’s prominence in New Haven, Dr. Creed was able to matriculate into the School of Medicine in 1854,” wrote Daniels. “He graduated in 1857 and practiced in New Haven.”

Almost a hundred years later, in 1948, Dr. Beatrix A. McCleary became the first African-American woman to graduate from the Yale School of Medicine.

From 1879 to 1896, Yale had a three-year medical program. A fourth year was added for the incoming class of 1896. Howard and Penn entered Yale in 1893 so one might have expected them to graduate three years later in 1896. But they stayed for four years; whether out of interest or necessity is unclear.

Today, all medical schools are four-year programs and open to everyone regardless of color or sex.

With thanks to A History of Yale’s School of Medicine: Passing Torches to Others. 2008, Yale University Press, and Doctors Five: African-American Contract Surgeons in the Spanish-American War. Military Medicine, 1999;164(6):435-441.

The author of this story, Edward McSweegan is a Rhode Island microbiologist who writes about infectious diseases and history. This story updated in 2022.

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Buffalo Soldiers Come Out to Vermont

In July of 1909, 750 African-American men known as Buffalo soldiers arrived at Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester, Vt., near the small city of Burlington. Greater Burlington had a population of 25,000. Of those, only 117 people were black.

In addition, the Buffalo soldiers brought with them their wives, children and camp followers, which increased the number of African Americans to about 1,500 in the Burlington area.

Historian David Work called it ‘demographic shock.’

And despite Vermont’s reputation for racial tolerance, Burlington offered a decidedly mixed welcome to the Buffalo soldiers.

Buffalo Soldiers

Buffalo soldiers were all-black units – except for officers – formed after the Civil War. The 10th Cavalry Regiment was one of six regiments, later reduced to four.

Native Americans on the frontier gave them their name. Acccording to various sources, their curly hair reminded the Indians of the fur on top of the buffalo heads. The soldiers took the name as a compliment.

Buffalo soldiers in 1899

The 10^th trained as a combat unit and fought in the Indian wars in the West, the Philippine-American War and the Spanish-American War. During the latter they had charged up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Buffalo soldiers in general had a reputation for discipline and valor.

The 10^th cavalry spent 1907-1909 in the Philippines, and returned to New York City by ship. Cheering crowds of New Yorkers, both black and white, greeted the Buffalo soldiers, even giving them a ticker tape parade

But soon enough they got a taste of the treatment that white Americans doled out to the Buffalo soldiers when stationed throughout the South and West.

Brownsville Affair

The Brownsville affair of 1906 tainted all Buffalo soldiers. The 25^th Infantry Regiment, a black unit, was stationed in the segregated town of Brownsville, Texas. When a white bartender was shot and killed, the townspeople blamed the soldiers. Though their commanding officer swore they’d been inside the barracks all night, white residents planted evidence against them.

President Theodore Roosevelt ordered all 167 men of the regiment dishonorably discharged. They weren’t exonerated until 1972.

Vermont

The 10th Cavalry Regiment began to arrive in Colchester on July 28, 1909, replacing an all-white unit at the fort.

The Rutland Daily Herald editor called them a ‘menace.’ The editor of the Burlington Free Press wrote of objections to the presence of such a large body of African Americans. Several racial incidents marred their first arrivals. One bank refused to cash a pay vouchers. Some white people left restaurants when the soldiers entered, and some even insisted on segregating the trolley cars.

Other newspapers in both the north and south took note of the animosity toward the soldiers.

That sparked a backlash among other Burlington-area residents, who wanted to maintain Vermont’s reputation for tolerance. Burlington had been a hotbed of abolitionism, and Vermont had outlawed slavery during its 14 years as a republic.

The president of the streetcar company refused to segregate the cars because the famous Tenth would cause no trouble, he said. A white army officer said he expected the Tenth Cavalry to give the people of Burlington a lesson in patriotism.

In the end, the Buffalo soldiers won over the city. The Bennington Evening Banner reported the 10th proved ‘a happy surprise.’

“They haven’t shot up the town yet, they don’t mob the trolley cars and are civil and courteous to both men and women,” reported the newspaper.

Four Years

David Work described the 10th as ‘experienced, disciplined, relatively well education, professional soldiers…with tremendous unit pride.’

Eventually Vermonters recognized those qualities.

A local club held a dinner dance for the noncommissioned officers. The city also gave them a big send off when they left for New York to conduct maneuvers.

Officers Row at Fort Ethan Allen around the turn of the century.

For the soldiers, the four-year stay in Vermont was luxurious compared to the frontier or the tropics. They had an indoor riding hall, warm barracks and wholesome food. They could even attend college. It was way better than building their own barracks, eating military field rations and suffering tropical fevers—not to mention combat. They also had plenty of time to play baseball in the summer and basketball in the winter.

Their baseball team played the University of Vermont and St. Michael’s to large crowds. They lost narrowly to a professional Negro League team, the Cuban Stars.

In addition to sports, the Buffalo soldiers provided plenty of entertainment to the people of Burlington. They let the public watch their daily mounted drills at the fort. The ban played public concerts and they even raised money for the public library. Once a week they held a parade. They also staged a production of the Merchant of Venice, and in the winter held a Wild West Show in the riding hall. The soldiers even sponsored a public showing of a boxing film about Joe Gans-Battling Nelson.

10th Cavalrymen taken prisoner in Mexico in 1916..

Departure

In 1913, the Buffalo soldiers transferred to Fort Huachuca in Arizona because of rising tensions along the Mexican border.

They left behind a small African-American community in Burlington, one that would later appear in The Negro Motorist Green Book. Some settled in Winooski and actively supported the Winooski Methodist Episcopal Church.

The 10^th stayed in Arizona for 18 years. Then in 1931, the government disbanded the Buffalo soldiers’ units.

In 2009, descendants of the Tenth Cavalry Regiment commemorated the 100^th anniversary of their arrival in Vermont with a museum display, a concert and a celebration. With thanks to The Buffalo Soldiers in Vermont, 1909–1913, by David Work from the Vermont History Journal. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Buzzards Bay Leper Colony: Tragic Exile

Around the turn of the 20^th century, a terrifying new kind of immigrant arrived in Massachusetts: the sufferer of Hansen’s disease. A person who had it was stigmatized as a leper and cast out of society.

Doctors knew little about the disease. Obviously it caused ugly sores and scales, disfigured the face and sometimes led to blindness and deafness. But many doctors thought, incorrectly, that leprosy resulted from living in filth or in sin or in both. They also thought, incorrectly, that it was extremely contagious and invariably fatal.

Under Biblical law, priests declared people with leprous sores ‘unclean,’ and exiled them. In the Middle Ages, they had to wear a bell and a clapper to keep others away. In 20^th century Massachusetts, they were forced to live out the rest of their lives on a remote island in Buzzard’s Bay, denied almost all that life held dear.

“The strength of this stigma is almost unique in the history of Western medicine,” wrote Ron Amundsen, who equated the word ‘leper’ with racial epithets.

In 20^th century Massachusetts, no one wanted to care for the outcasts. Except for a successful and socially prominent Malden couple, Dr. Frank and Marian Parker.

The Disease

Leprosy, a bacterial infection, attacks the skin and the nerves in the victim’s hands, feet, nose and eyes. According to the Boston Public Health Commission, about 95 percent of all adults have an immunity to it. It doesn’t spread easily, either. It requires prolonged contact with bodily fluids, usually through coughing or sneezing.

Another kind of leper

People can, in rare cases, get leprosy from armadillos, the only other animal known to be susceptible to the disease.

Leprosy develops slowly and takes two to ten years to manifest itself. It can cause nerve damage that leads to injuries the sufferer doesn’t notice. And, until the development of antibiotics in the 1950s, it eventually killed the sufferer.

Father Damien

Leprosy didn’t exist in Massachusetts until the late 19^th century, when it began to arrive on a wave of immigration and military conquest. People knew the disease from the Bible and from the contemporary controversy over Father Damien.

Damien, a Roman Catholic priest, ministered to sufferers of Hansen’s disease on Molokai, Hawaii, until he died of it himself in the spring of 1889. However, he had his critics who condemned him as coarse and ignorant. (The Roman Catholic Church has since sainted him.)

Robert Louis Stevenson, visiting Hawaii later in 1889, ferociously attacked one of Father Damien’s critics in a letter.

“You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a coarse old peasant for their friend and father,” Stevenson wrote. “But you, who were so refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of culture?”

Stevenson paid to publish and distribute the letter, which added to Father Damien’s fame – and to the awareness of leprosy.

In 1895, Boston health officials diagnosed an East Boston sailor with Hansen’s disease. For many years the sailor had sailed on a ship that “carried lepers from various islands of the Hawaiian group to Molokai.” They quarantined him on Gallop’s Island in Boston Harbor, where he died two years later.

Father Damien shortly before he died

The Price of Conquest

The United States annexed Hawaii in 1898 after setting out on a course of military expansion throughout the globe. The only people in Massachusetts who contracted Hansen’s disease were immigrants and people who had traveled in places – like Hawaii, China and the Caribbean — where the disease had spread.

Over the next six years, Massachusetts doctors diagnosed a half dozen or so cases of Hansen’s disease. A gardener in Salem who’d spent time in Hawaii ended up dying in the poor house. A Swedish woman discovered on entry into the port of Boston was sent back home. A British West Indian was confine to Gallop’s Island – and escaped.

Then in April 1904, Dr. Louis Edmonds reported another case of Hansen’s disease in the town of Harwich.

Sympathy for the Leper

Edmonds diagnosed a 38-year-old stevedore named Frank Pina who had lived in New Bedford’s Cape Verdean community. He had an advanced case of the disease. Pina lived apart from his wife and eight children, and Harwich officials asked the state Board of Charity to do something with him. Dr. Edmonds quarantined him in Harwich as officials wrangled over his fate. The neighbors threatened to drive Pina from town.

The state Board of Charity argued the patients should go to the state infirmary in Tewksbury. At least there the nearness to friends and relatives would soften the rigors of their disease.

The infirmary trustees said no — adamantly.

Then the commonwealth decided to build a leprosy hospital. Massachusetts bought a farm for it in the Cape Cod town of Brewster. So many panicked Cape Codders flocked to the Statehouse to object that the railroad had to add a special train.

“I am full of sympathy for them [the lepers],” a Rhode Island judge told lawmakers. “My heart is warm for them, but I, for one, do not want to see them on Cape Cod.”

Finally, Massachusetts settled the matter by buying Penikese Island, 74 acres of rock and grass 12 miles off Cape Cod. Harvard University had used the island as a natural history summer camp. Adding some cottages made it a leprosy hospital — only the second leprosy hospital, after Louisiana, in the country.

The treatment resembled that for tuberculosis in the age before antibiotics would cure both diseases. Penikese’s doctors believed in bathing, light clothing, ointments and tonics, fresh air and a nourishing diet.

Newspaper story about New England’s Leper Island

Penikese Island Leper Hospital

Dr.Edmonds supervised the first five patients, including his own, Frank Pina. Of the rest, two were Cape Verdians — Jose Rogeriquez and Isabella Barros — and two Chinese – Yee Toy and Goon S. Dub. Later exiles to the island came from Italy, Portugal, China, Japan, Greece, Russia, Latvia and Barbados. Few spoke much English.

Isabella Barros was a pregnant 26-year-old Cape Verdean woman taken from her husband and three children in Wareham. She had dark olive skin, and “her eyes are large and darkly eloquent and her teeth beautifully even and white,” reported the San Francisco Call in a story headlined “New England’s Leper Island.” Recent pictures “show her with a melancholy, despondent expression,” the newspaper reported.

Isabella Barros gave birth to a healthy baby on Penikese Island. Twenty days later, officials sent the infant to the Boston Poor Department, along with her other children.

That sent her husband, Napoleon Barros, to an insane asylum. After his release, he no longer had any interest in her or their family.

In 1906, a rumor spread that Isabella Barros had been cured. Suddenly people feared the hospital would send her back to what was left of her home. But the disease had only gone into remission, and she died after 10 years of exile on the island.

Frank and Marian Parker

After two years, Dr. Louis Edmonds left the island, unable to stand the isolation. Dr. Frank Parker took his place, and his wife Marian came along and helped with the patients. He abandoned a lucrative 22-year practice, and she left her prominent social circle.

Both Parkers tended to the patients. The hospital averaged 14 patients over the years. Parker earned $2,000 a year, organized a farm and did carpentry and electrical work. The Parkers paid for food and medical supplies with their own money. In the 13 years they lived on the island, they only took three weeks’ vacation.

Penikese Island in 2005, sit of the Penikese Island Leper Hospital.

Staff turned over frequently. As Parker explained, “The task for those who must bathe the patients, bind up their wounds and care for their quarters is sufficiently distasteful to explain their reluctance to remain long.”

Plus, he said, the isolation got on the nerves of even healthy people. But for his patients, “some insight is readily gained into the broodings of the leper, ill as he is, racked often with rheumatic pain and burning with leprous fever, — a person without hope, committed against his will to this no-man’s land.”

Nighttime Funeral

The island had few visitors, but a Catholic priest came to say Mass once a month. In 1914, Dr. Parker pleaded with a group of Protestant ministers in New Bedford, asking them to lead services on the island. He told them:

Last summer, a West Indian leper died at Penikese. He was a Catholic and we were unable to get Father Bernard until night…Picture then this burial by lantern in the dead of night. We went to the western end of the island, where the burials are made. There are no gravestones there, because the lepers do not like to see these reminders of what they are coming to. It was the month of August, when flowers were many, and each one had his little bunch of flowers. You have never seen a more striking scene.

Ornery

Solitude and injustice made the patients ornery, Parker reported to the Board of Charity in 1915. “Weak though he be he will wage such war as he may,” Parker wrote.

The patients threw away food or they opened a faucet and let water run all night, knowing of its scarcity. Since the Parkers would fulfill any reasonable request, the patients asked them to furnish all sorts of delicacies they discarded, pets they neglected and gardens they forgot.

Louisiana Leper Hospital

The Carville, La., Leprosarium. Courtesy Public Health Image Library.

Meanwhile, the federal government made plans to build a leprosy hospital in Carville, La. World War I delayed those plans, but by 1921 the government was building the Louisiana facility.

Massachusetts Gov. Channing Cox then decided to close the Penikese Island Leper Hospital. He wanted to send the 13 patients to the unfinished facility in Louisiana, far from their friends and families. Parker publicly criticized him for closing the island.

On Thursday afternoon on March 10, 1921, a harbor tugboat arrived at a New Bedford coal wharf. The patients disembarked as a crowd of gawkers and newspaper reporters looked on. Then they boarded the hospital train.

Sorry, Very Much

Dr. Parker wept as he said goodbye to his patients on the wharf, and they, too, had tears in their eyes. The doctor shared a letter from a patient with a newspaper reporter.

“My dear Mr. Parker,

I am here now 15 months with you, and now I go away from her I am sorry, very much, because I can’t repay that help you did for me. I thank you very much for your benefit you do to me and my sister. We never forget your noble feeling for us unhappy people.

I wish the God to help you and all your people as you desire, and I wish to meet you again outside some day. I say again I thank you very much. Excuse me because I can’t write very well to write you a few line words pleasant to you.

Farewell, Dr. Parker. Good-bye.

Gratefully yours,
John Marketakis”

Without a Rudder or a Job

Nurses Hall

Frank Parker said he felt like a ship without a rudder now that the patients left the island. He turned down a job with the Louisiana hospital, not wanting to move south or work in a large institution. But he couldn’t restart his practice because people feared he’d contracted Hansen’s disease after 14 years on the island. Hospitals wouldn’t employ him for the same reason.

Governor Cox stripped him of his pension in retaliation for his criticism. So Frank and Marian Parker moved to Montana to live with their son. Frank Parker died five years later, a victim of another, more contagious disease: whooping cough.

The state couldn’t find a buyer for the island, so it burned and then dynamited the hospital.

Today, a combination of antibiotics will cure Hansen’s disease. Patients can go to outpatient clinics for treatment.

In 1996, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts honored Frank and Marian Parker with a plaque in Nurses Hall at the Massachusetts Statehouse.

Images: Nurses Hall By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1410477; Armadillo By http://www.birdphotos.com – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4325104.

With thanks to Ron Amundsen, A Wholesome Horror: The Stigmas of Leprosy in 19th Century Hawaii, in Disability Studies Quarterly, and to Paul Cyr, author of The Exiles of Pekinese Island for the New Bedford Historical Society. This story was updated in 2022.

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New England’s Historic Haunted Houses

Haunted houses belong to New England lore as much as Revolutionary battles or clipper ship races.

New England ghosts, witches, devils and monsters in human shape have populated the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson and Stephen King. The region’s special brand of horror even has a name: Gothic New England.

Here are stories of six haunted houses, plus some extras suggested by our readers and added in 2017. We use the term ‘houses’ loosely, for they include hospitals, a library, a dormitory, a lighthouse and a fort. But all have drama or sorrow in their past. If you know of other historic haunted houses, please share them in the comments section.

Seaside Sanitarium

Seaside Sanitorium

Is it ghosts that haunt the sinister and bizarre Seaside Sanitorium in Waterford, Conn. — or its past?

In 1936, doctors treated children with tuberculosis with rest, sunshine, fresh air and good food. Seaside was built as a ‘heliotropic’ treatment hospital for children. Gothic Revival architect Cass Gilbert, who also planned the U.S. Supreme Court building, designed the sanitarium. The building faces Long Island Sound, with large terraces and porches for sunbathing.

Drugs made heliotropic treatment obsolete, and Seaside then evolved into a geriatric hospital, a medical hospital and a hospital for the mentally disabled. People accused its staff of abusing the patients, and it had an unusually high death rate.

The hospital finally closed in 1996. Now dilapidated, creepy and boarded up, abandoned playground equipment litters its grounds. The ghosts of abused patients are said to haunt the place.

Lately, there’s been talk of rehabilitating the old building. The State of Connecticut may redevelop it into a lodge.

35 Shore Rd., Waterford, Conn.

Other Connecticut Haunted Houses

Two other former insane asylums in Connecticut have reputations as hospitals of horror: Norwich State Hospital in Preston and Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown. Tales of cruelty and abuse in the creepy old buildings fostered rumors of hauntings.

Norwich State Hospital

An early lighthouse keeper named Ernie supposedly haunts the New London Ledge Lighthouse in the mouth of the Thames River. On the night before the lighthouse was automated, a Coast Guard officer wrote in the log: “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.”

Fort Knox

Fort Knox, Maine’s version of the Great Pyramid, was built in the mid-19th century to prevent the British from invading the region. They’d already done it during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

The State of Maine bought the hulking granite fortress on the Penobscot River from the U.S. government in 1923. Back then it cost $2,100.

The fort provides ideal conditions for haunting: it stands next to swirling waters, it’s made of vast quantities of granite and it’s in a cold climate. It also has lots of dark tunnels.

People say they hear footsteps or laughter inside the fort, or they feel someone’s touch. Ghost hunters heard soldiers talking about the Civil War. A retired state trooper saw a white object with no head, arms or legs that moved, then vanished.

The ghost in the duster coat who wanders the fort’s dark, wet tunnels is Leopold Hegyi, the caretaker at the fort from 1887 to 1900. Of Hungarian ancestry, he served as a cavalryman who helped train George Custer’s army before moving to Maine. He then patrolled the fort for 13 years by himself, except when a few soldiers arrived during the Spanish-American War.

The fort hosts an annual paranormal/psychic fair. “Fright at the Fort,” a haunted house fundraiser that helps fund the preservation of the historic site.

Click here for a ghost tracker documentary of Fort Knox.

740 Fort Knox Rd., Prospect, Maine

Other Maine Haunted Houses

A woman in a nightgown climbs the spiral staircase of the Captain Lord Mansion, a Kennebunkport bed and breakfast. Some say she was the wife of Captain Lord, who built the house in 1812, but died before living in it.

Indian chief Taukolexis died by hanging from a tree, and he supposedly haunts the nearby fort, William Henry, now a museum near New Harbor.

The ghost of 19th-century poet Sylvester Beckett rips the bed sheets off guests at Beckett’s Castle, his former summer home on Cape Elizabeth.

Boston Athenaeum

The Boston Athenaeum today

As an aspiring writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne frequented the Boston Athenaeum, a private library across from the Statehouse. In April 1842 he visited the Reading Room and encountered Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, Harvard’s librarian. Harris sat in his usual chair, reading a newspaper. Hawthorne didn’t think anything about it until later that evening, when a friend told him Harris had died. Hawthorne said that was impossible, as he had just seen him in the Athenaeum.

Then the next day, Hawthorne returned to the Athenaeum only to see Harris in the same chair. The writer speculated he was reading his own obituary. Of the encounter he wrote,

I remember—once at least, and I know not but oftener—a sad, wistful, disappointed gaze, which the ghost fixed upon me from beneath his spectacles; a melancholy look of helplessness, which, if my heart had been as hard as a paving-stone, I could hardly have withstood. But I did withstand it; and I think I saw him no more after this last, appealing look.

The minister’s ghost isn’t the only creepy thing about the Boston Athenaeum. The library holds a copy of a criminal’s memoirs bound in his own skin.

James Allen robbed and shot a man on the Salem Turnpike. In 1835, Allen received the death sentence for attempted murder and was held in Charlestown State Prison.

Allen then told his life story to the prison warden. Before his execution, he asked that his skin be used to bind two copies of his memoirs. One copy ended up at the Athenaeum after Allen’s family passed it down. It had been used to spank children who misbehaved.

10½ Beacon St., Boston, Mass.

Other Massachusetts Haunted Houses

The Lizzie Borden House

The ghosts of the Borden family roam the halls at the Lizzie Borden House in Fall River, now a bed and breakfast. Lizzie Borden famously …’took an axe/And gave her mother 40 whacks/When she saw what she had done,She gave her father forty-one.”

Jerusha Howe, an early innkeeper at the Wayside Inn before it was the Wayside Inn, rejected many suitors attracted by her beauty. She couldn’t resist an English gentleman who promised to return for her. He never came back, and Jerusha’s ghost waits for her lover in her bedroom, Room 9.

Novelist Edith Wharton built an estate called the Mount in Lenox around the turn of the century. She avidly collected ghost stories, and now visitors say they see ghosts in period dress — even Wharton herself reading — wandering what is now a house museum.

Ipswich has quite a few haunted houses, including the Treadwell-Hale house in North Main Street. It had a ghost that whispered from the top of the stairs to the rear bedroom.

Huntress Hall, Keene State College

Huntress Hall at Keene State College was named after Harriet Huntress, a New Hampshire Department of Education administrator. Her abandoned wheelchair is still stored in the attic of the building, built in 1926. The creaking chair can be heard wheeling around the attic at night, according to students who live there.

Huntress does not like to be mocked and wreaks revenge on anyone who dresses up like her at Halloween. Students who have done so – usually with a gray wig and a wheelchair — failed tests, broke their legs or been involved in bad car accidents.

The genesis of the Huntress haunting is said to be World War II. Keene State was then a teaching school and Huntress Hall was an all-female dormitory. During the war, the U.S. Navy began training pilots at Keene and housed the trainees in Huntress Hall. Huntress was said to hate men and promiscuous women, and it was then that she began to haunt the hall. Some say she is most active when students are having sex inside its walls.

Appian Way, Keene, N.H.

Other New Hampshire Haunted Houses

In the late 19th century, orphans lived in The Chase House on Middle Road in Portsmouth. According to legend, a young girl hanged herself in her room and now haunts the hallway.

Ocean Born Mary, as her name suggests, was born at sea. Pirates boarded the vessel that sailed from Ulster to New England, and the pirate captain heard the cries of a newborn baby — Ocean Born Mary Wallace, of course. He gave her mother a bolt of light green silk, which was later made into Mary’s wedding dress. Mary’s husband died and she moved to Henniker, where her ghost supposedly protects her house from harm.

Belcourt Castle

The Newport mansion Belcourt Castle features a screaming suit of armor, a haunted gold coronation carriage, chairs that toss people off their seats and apparitions dancing in the ballroom.

Belcourt Castle was built by Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, the wastrel son of financier August Belmont and grandson of Commodore Matthew Perry. (His brother August financed the Cape Cod Canal.) Richard Morris Hunt designed the mansion according to Perry’s wish to devote the first floor to carriages and stables for his beloved horses. He modeled the 60-room house on Louis XIII’s hunting lodge at Versailles.

Belmont married Alva Belmont, the ex-wife of his best friend William K. Vanderbilt, in 1896, and she began redesigning the mansion. After the Belmonts died, Harold and Ruth Tinney bought Belcourt in 1956 and filled it with their own collection of art and antiques. The Tinneys opened the house to the public for ghost tours and as a museum.

When the Tinneys owned Belcourt, suits of armor stood in a row at one end of the ballroom. People say they’ve heard screams from one suit of armor as the owner relives his death. A spear tip pierced his eye through a slit in the helmet.

A carved wooden statue of a monk brings a ghost of a brown-robed monk along with him. The ghost always appeared in the same room as the statue.

In 2012, the Tinneys sold Belcourt. Read more about it here.

657 Belleview Ave., Newport, R.I.

Other Rhode Island Haunted Houses

During the American Revolution, University Hall at Brown was converted into an army hospital where many soldiers died. A contorted soldier’s face appears in a second-floor window.

The body of Providence Mayor Thomas Doyle lay in state at City Hall after his death in 1886. His ghost is now said to haunt the building, smoking a cigar, moving chairs and whispering.

Edward Hamlin Everett Mansion

Hamlin Mansion

Edward Hamlin Everett got rich as the Glass Bottle King and inventor of the fluted bottle cap. He grew up in Bennington, Vt., and in 1886 married Amy King. Her father owned a Newark glassworks that Hamlin bought before their wedding.

Amy King died suddenly. Some said she committed suicide, others said she was murdered, still others say she drowned while swimming. Her obituary said she died after a severe operation following an unnamed illness.

Everett remarried, but his three grown daughters disapproved of the new wife. When he died, he left most of his wealth to his second wife, leaving only a tenth of it to his daughters. The daughters challenged the will in court, claiming their father wasn’t in his right mind. During the trial, known as The Second Battle of Bennington, the eldest daughter was staying at the house when she said she heard weeping coming from her father’s study.

She went to the room and found her mother lying on the floor, clearly a murder victim. Security guards say doorknobs turn in empty rooms and doors close by themselves. Students say they see a woman in white, roaming the house and grounds. Perhaps it’s the ghost of Amy King Everett.

In 1957, writer Shirley Jackson decided she wanted to write a novel about a haunted house. She began collecting postcards and newspaper clippings of ornate old houses. She likely chose the Edward Hamlin Everett home as the setting for her novel, The Haunting of Hill House. He book, a National Book Award finalist, inspired two feature films and a play.

The court, by the way, sided with the Everett daughters and gave them a third of the estate.

982 Mansion Dr., Bennington, Vt.

Other Vermont Haunted Houses

Hartness House Inn.

James Hartness, a factory owner and Vermont governor, built the Shingle-style Hartness House in Springfield in 1904. He built a labyrinth of tunnels under the house that included a library, workshop, study and bathroom. Today the house is run as a small hotel and his ghost is said to be down there still.

Ira Allen, a railroad magnate and relative of Ethan Allen, built the Marble Mansion in 1867 in Fair Haven, Vt. Today it’s an inn, and the ghost of a former owner, dressed in a gray suit, awakens guests by standing over their beds. A young woman supposedly haunts the basement and several ghostly children run around the halls.

End Notes

Photos: Norwich State Hospital, By CLK Hatcher – Norwich Hospital District – Admin BuildingUploaded by LongLiveRock, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15506667; Boston Athenaeum, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=722802; Belcourt photo by Charles V. Hamm; Hartness House Inn By Tyler Goodrich – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28509336. Seaside Sanitorium by By Victor Solanoy from Silicon Valley, USA – Seaside Sanitorium – Waterford, CTUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29847509.

This story about haunted houses was updated in 2022.

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