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Abraham Lincoln in New England – Five Fast Facts

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Before he moved into the White House, Abraham Lincoln came to New England twice. Newspapers reported extensively on Abraham Lincoln in New England both in September 1848 and in February 1860, though he had far more fame on his second visit.

abraham lincoln in New England

Abraham Lincoln

Here are five facts about Abraham Lincoln in New England.

Cooper-Union Fallout

The day after his famed Cooper-Union speech in New York on Feb. 27, 1860, Lincoln stopped in Providence.

At Cooper-Union, Lincoln had carefully articulated his view on why the federal government should stop the spread of slavery into the western states. Further, he riled his opponents. He declared, “[No] part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories.”

He left the city in a frenzy as newspapers fell over themselves to praise him or attack him. The next day, Feb. 28, 1860, he gave an impromptu speech at Railroad Hall in the Providence train station.

Fifteen hundred cheering supporters attended. He used the critical newspaper coverage both for humor and to reiterate his arguments.

Lincoln on the day of his Cooper-Union speech. Photo by Matthew Brady.

Son Failing College Exams

One of the reasons, and perhaps the main reason, Lincoln traveled to New Hampshire in February 1860 was to visit his son Robert.

Robert was then studying at Phillips Exeter Academy to pass his entrance exams for Harvard College. But he’d failed them previously. Lincoln came to encourage his son as he crammed for his exams.

However, Lincoln’s Cooper-Union speech had been so widely covered people clamored to hear him. He spoke 11 times on the trip, many of them at unscheduled train stops.

Robert Todd Lincoln, ca. 1860.

Lincoln Had a Common Touch

Though an able debater and lawyer, Lincoln had the politician’s gift for relating to working men.

During his trip to New England in February of 1860, Lincoln stopped in Manchester, N.H.  Amoskeag Mill manager Ezekiel Straw gave Abraham Lincoln a tour of the mill. He introduced the candidate to the workers.

One of the mill workers hesitated to shake his hand, saying it was dirty from his work. “Young man,” said Lincoln, “the hand of honest toil is never too grimy for Abe Lincoln to grasp.”

Ezekiel Straw

Toured Massachusetts as a Minor Congressman

Abraham Lincoln first visited Massachusetts in 1848 on a tour of the state to promote Whig candidates. The visit lasted from Sept. 12-21, 1848.

The Free Soil party — a single-issue party formed to oppose the expansion of slavery in the western states — was making inroads against the Whigs in the contest with the Democrats that year. Lincoln took to the road to promote Zachary Taylor, the eventual winner.

Thirteen years after giving a speech at Worcester, a visitor to Washington from Massachusetts asked Lincoln if he remembered the trip. Characteristically, Lincoln used the moment to spread some flattery.

He said he recalled that “with hayseed in my hair I went to Massachusetts, the most cultured state in the Union, to take a few lessons in deportment. That was a grand dinner — a superb dinner; by far the finest I ever saw in my life.”

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Lincoln in 1845

Skipped Massachusetts in 1860

On his 1860 trip to New England, Lincoln did not speak in Massachusetts. He stopped only in Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire.

But the Bay State tempted him. Lincoln received an invitation to visit Springfield in the summer of 1860, but his advisers talked him out of it. At that time it was considered unseemly for presidential candidates to campaign on their own behalf.

Lincoln’s Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas, fearing a Lincoln victory, had taken to the campaign trail in a move regarded as desperate and un-presidential.

Republican National Secretary George Fogg wrote to Lincoln: “You could not go to Springfield without your journey being in some measure a political ovation. As such, it would relieve Douglas of the charge of being the only stump candidate for the Presidency. It would also be construed by the Democratic papers into evidence of Republican alarm. In this view, it might ‘hurt.’ Everything east I believe is well. The election is ours now. The triumph is ours.”

And he was right, Lincoln went on to win the presidency, though with only 39 percent of the popular vote.


Thanks to Abraham Lincoln’s Classroom. This story about Abraham Lincoln in New England was updated in 2022.

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Jefferson Davis in New England – The Unlikely Campaign

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jefferson davis in new england

Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who would go on to become president of the confederate states during the Civil War, was no stranger to New England.

A firebrand and die-hard defender of the south and all its traditions – including slavery – Davis twice traveled to New England in the 1850s. The first trip came in 1853. Davis visited the region in his official capacity as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce to tour military installations.

Both trips were designed to escape the south’s summer heat, but Davis’ second visit was also to help him restore his health and perhaps steer the nation away from war.

Gracious Maine: Jefferson Davis in New England

Davis left Baltimore for Boston aboard a steamer on July 3, 1858. After an overnight stop in the city, he caught a second steamer to Portland.

His tour of Maine included a stop at the home of General Henry Knox in Thomaston, a trip to Lead Mountain and a stop in Belfast to review a state militia meeting. In Brunswick – once home of abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe – he was honored with an honorary degree. And in Portland, he agreed to address the Cumberland County Democractic Convention.

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Jefferson Davis

Davis was quite an attraction. The Republican press had vilified Davis and his extreme views as a man of the “ultra south.” Crowds in New England who came to see him might well have expected a raving tyrant. What they got was a smooth, elegant southern gentleman with impeccable manners and exotic green-tinted glasses to protect his eyes.

Davis was largely blind in one eye due to an persistent infection, which he hoped the moderate northern climate would help him ease.

At the Democratic Convention in Portland, he sounded a note of conciliation. Were the differences between north and south really so great as to demand a war;

“Shall narrow interests, shall local jealousies, shall disregard for the high purposes for which our union was ordained, continue to distract our people and impede the progress of our government towards the high consummation which prophetic statesmen have so often indicated as her destiny?”

“No, No, No,” the crowd thundered in reply.

Boston Wowed

As he began his return journey home in October, Davis stopped again in Massachusetts. He toured Daniel Webster’s Marshfield homestead.

Charles G. Greene, founder and editor of Boston Post, hosted a reception for Davis on Sat Oct. 16 and he socialized with prominent Massachusetts’ democrats, such as Caleb Cushing.

Republican Nathaniel Banks was governor of Massachusetts at the time of Davis’ visit. Banks was a moderate Republican who had won support of Massachusetts’ fervent abolitionists in part by firing Judge Edward Loring. Loring had enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, which required northern states to return escaped slaves to the south rather than grant them asylum.

On October 11, Davis addressed the state Democratic Convention held at Faneuil Hall to nominate Erasmus Beach to run for governor against Banks. (He would fail in the general election).

Again, Davis sounded his somewhat conciliatory tone. He defended slavery. And he called it an issue of state’s rights. (Though he didn’t extend the states’ rights argument to the right to grant asylum to escaped slaves.)

But he crafted a message designed as music to the ears of New Englanders wary of war. Was Massachusetts, home of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, really ready to discard all that the country had achieved over these regional disagreements?

Jefferson Davis, Peacemaker?

He sang the praises of John Hancock for snubbing President George Washington when the president visited the commonwealth in 1789. Hancock had asserted that the governor of each state should be of superior rank to the president in matters of protocol.

Davis reserved his harshest criticism for the abolitionists, painting them as bent on destroying the country. “The political agitator, like the vampire, fans the victim to which he clings but to destroy,” he said.

In summation, Davis said he hoped that those hoping to split the nation would not succeed.

“Why, then, I would ask, do we see these lengthened shadows, which follow in the course of our political day? Is it because the sun is declining to the horizon? Are they the shadows of evening; or are they, as I hopefully believe, but the mists which are exhaled by the sun as it rises, but which are to be dispersed by its meridian splendor?”

Davis, in his speeches, stressed that the differences between the south and north were not so great as to require a split. But he never said exactly what compromise he supported to avert it, leaving the listener to form his own conclusions.

Eruption in the South

In the north, moderates might well be persuaded that Davis’ position was softening, that he was suggesting an end to slavery might be acceptable for the preservation of the union. That interpretation was pleasing to some.

In the South, the Davis’ visit to New England was viewed as something like treason.

The Charleston Mercury in South Carolina declared Davis was a “Union Mormon.” It said “Jefferson Davis we know is no more.”

Davis needed to harden his rhetoric and in November of 1858, he did so. In a speech to the Mississippi legislature, he declared that the south must secede if an abolitionist were to be elected president.

“I love the flag of my country with even more than a filial affection,” he said.  “I glory in the position which Missis­sippi’s star holds in the group; but sooner than see its lustre dimmed—sooner than see it degraded from its present equality—would tear it from its place to be set even on the perilous ridge of battle as a sign round which Mississippi’s best and bravest should gather to the harvest-home of death.”


This story about Jefferson Davis in New England was updated in 2023.

 

 

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Chouses, Jigs and Fetches – Colonial Pranks You Never Heard Of

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In the early New England colonies, life was largely spent tending to essentials. But the colonists still managed a few laughs.  Colonial pranks tended to be harmless, but still funny to those concerned.

If you were the victim of a chouse, a fetch or a jig, it meant you’d been tricked. Sometimes with ill intent, but often for laughs. A “rig” meant a “joke.” If someone ran his rig on others, it meant he’d made them the butt of his joke. If, on the other hand, the target caught on and spoiled the prank, he was a marplot or spoilsport.

Some things don’t change. Any one imposed on, or sent on a bootless errand, on April 1, earned the title “April Fool.”  The “lower people,” servants and children would drop empty papers doubled up or send people on absurd errands and so forth. They imposed on everyone they could and then saluted them with “April Fool.”

Colonial Pranks

Here are a few relatively harmless colonial pranks from that era:

Playing King Arthur. Sailors liked this game. One sailor sits on a stool and dons a wig made of oakham and old deck swabs. Beside him is a large tub of water. His fellow sailors are ceremoniously introduced to him, and one by one they pour a bucket of water over his head. If, however, the designated king can induce a smile or a laugh out of a sailor, then that man must take on the role of king.

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The Joke by Gerard Jozef Portielje

Dowdying. A man would play this gag from England on an assembled group, usually one enjoying adult beverages. He would dress himself to look half mad and burst into a room to the shock of those inside.

Funk the Cobbler. “Funk” meant to smoke or to stink. To funk the cobbler meant someone, usually a child, stuffed a pipe with cotton and weeds. The prankster then lit the pipe and covered it with a cloth so that the stinking smoke would gradually make its way out of the pipe stem. He could leave the pipe in a cobbler’s stall to stink the place up.

To Catch an Owl

Hoisting.  Hoisting was a ceremony performed on a man following his marriage – usually after returning to his military unit. Two soldiers would take bayonets and push them through the soldier’s hat, like horns. His friends would then lift him onto their shoulders and parade him around while he wore the hat.

Seating the Ambassador. Sailors also played this trick on unsuspecting souls who had never heard of the game. They would pretend to put on a play in which the victim playing the ambassador would have to give a silly speech to recite to two characters, dubbed the king and queen. The king and queen sat on two stools. The pranksters stretched a long cloth that looked like a bench between the two stools. The king and queen would invite the ambassador to sit between them. Once seated, the two on each side would suddenly stand up. The ambassador would then tumble backwards into a strategically placed tub of water.

Catching the Owl. People unfamiliar with the ways of the countryside tended to fall victim  to catching the owl. Pranksters would invite the unwitting into a barn under the pretense they intended to catch an owl. After leading the person through any number of embarrassing stunts or fake calls, the perpetrators doused the victim with a pail of water.

Thanks to: Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, By Francis Grose (1785) and Villainies Discovered: OR The Devil’s Cabinet Broken Open, By Richard Head (1673). This story was updated in 2022.

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Six New England Places With a Unique Name

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The early English and Scots-Irish settlers tended not to give a new settlement a unique name.

Many New England place names came from towns and shires in England and Ireland. The Puritans even named groups of towns in New England after groups of towns in England: Boston and Lynn, for example, were next to each other in East Anglia as they were in Massachusetts. So were Worcester and Leominster, and Amesbury, Salisbury, Newbury and Andover.

In Rhode Island, the geography of England was mimicked in Warwick and Coventry and in Bristol and Newport. In New Hampshire, Sandown and South Hampton are next to each other as they were in England. And, as in England, there was once a Gosport on the Isles of Shoals next to Portsmouth in New Hampshire.

Unique Names

The Scots-Irish did the same. As the earliest pioneers after the Puritans, they named their frontier towns after home. New Hampshire has a Derry, Dublin and Antrim; Massachusetts a Colrain and a Charlemont; Maine a Belfast, a Limerick and a Newry. Both Vermont and New Hampshire have a Londonderry, and Connecticut has a Waterford.

But sometimes the first settlers simply named a place after its geographic features, like Marshfield, Mass., and Rockport, Maine.

Others named their towns after heroes, like Washington, Warren, Hancock and Adams. Generally, individuals only had towns named after them after the American Revolution, though one New Hampshire governor was the exception that proved the rule.

There are at least six New England places that have a unique name found nowhere else.

Mianus, Conn.

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The Mianus River

Mianus is a village along the Mianus River that lies in three other districts in Greenwich, Conn:  Riverside, Greenwich and Cos Cob.

It began as a project of the Veterans Administration and the Town of Greenwich to build 40 starter homes for servicemen returning from World War II and their families. During the Baby Boom there were 90 children in Mianus, and they played in the nearby woods and along the river and harbor. A writer named Jack T. Scully grew up there and wrote a book of poems celebrating his elegiac childhood, called Mianus Village.

The unique name is pronounced ‘maɪˈænəs,’ which made it the butt of jokes on the reality show Jackass.

Mianus is also known to antique inboard marine engine enthusiasts because it was home to the Mianus Motor Works, founded in 1889.

The area was given its unique name by English settlers in the 17th century, who called it Mianus after the chief of the Siwanoy Indian tribe.

Kennebunk, Maine

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The King’s Highway in Kennebunk, Maine.

A large sign once proclaimed, “Kennebunk, the only village in the world so named.” The locally famous billboard boasting the town’s unique name was attached to the Kesslen Shoe Mill on Route One.

‘Kennebunk’ was an Abenaki Indian word meaning ‘the long cut bank,’ which refers to the long bank behind Kennebunk Beach. The town’s presence on the Kennebunk and Mousam rivers made it an early center of shipping and shipbuilding. Later, manufacturers built mills on the rivers to make textiles, leatheroid, shoes and luggage.

Today Kennebunk is a bedroom community and a destination for upscale tourists attracted by its beaches and shopping. The town was overshadowed by its neighbor – also with a unique name. Kennebunkport was often in the world’s news when President George H.W. Bush summered there at his family compound.

Kennebunk today is home to the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, historic buildings, the 1799 Inn, Tom’s of Maine and the Brick Store Museum.

Dracut, Mass.

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The historic Old Yellow Meeting House in Dracut.

Passaconaway, the Pennacook sachem who brokered peace in the Merrimack River Valley, spent most of his life on what is now Dracut, Mass.

It was known as Augumtoocooke until Passaconaway’s daughter Bess sold the land in 1665 to Captain John Evered, whose family was associated with Draycot Cerne in northern England. (Evered had earlier been in charge of the execution of Mary Dyer.) The land was sold for ‘four yards of Duffill and one pound of tobacco’ and given the unique name of Dracut.

Dracut belonged to Chelmsford until 1701, when it formally separated. Part of Dracut was set aside as a Praying Town for Christianized Indians. Dracut’s paper and textile mills attracted French-Canadian and Irish immigrants. Modern real estate development swallowed much of the town. What isn’t a suburb of Lowell is now part of Lowell, which annexed large parts of the town.  Dracut has a population of about 30,000 and still retains some rural landscapes and historic buildings.

Henniker, N.H.

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The Mill Pond in West Henniker

Henniker, a bucolic New England town near Concord, prides itself on being ‘the only Henniker on earth.’ It was chartered before the American Revolution and named for British merchant Sir John Henniker, an unusual practice at the time.

Christopher Lenney argued that towns named ‘directly and unequivocally for persons are largely of post-Revolutionary vintage’ in Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England. “The custom was un-English and only became widespread in the 19th century, when antipathy to the practice had broken down.”.

New Hampshire Gov. Benning Wentworth broke with that tradition when he dispensed land grants and charters in Vermont and New Hampshire, naming them after friends in high places to win their support for his westward expansion. Henniker, which received its charter in 1768, had been known as Todd’s Town and New Marlborough until Wentworth decided to name it after his friend.

Today Henniker is home to New England College, Pat’s Peak and the Old Depot No. 6 book barn.

Burrillville, R.I.

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The Moses Taft House in Burrillville, R.I.

Burrillville, R.I., broke off from Glocester in 1806 and named itself after a favorite son, James Burrill, Jr. Burrill had established himself as a leader of Rhode Island by the tender age of 34. He had become Rhode Island’s attorney general at 25 and was elected a U.S. senator in 1817. Shortly before he died on Christmas Day in 1820, he delivered an eloquent speech opposing the Missouri Compromise, which banned free blacks and people of mixed race from settling in Missouri. That clause ‘was entirely repugnant to the Constitution of the United States’ he said, because it created separate classes of citizens.

Burrillville originally comprised 60 square miles but lost land to Massachusetts over a border dispute. Now part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor, Burrillville once had many mills, now gone or shuttered.

St. Johnsbury, Vt.

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St. Johnsbury, Vt.

St. Johnsbury was organized in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom in 1790, a time when the un-English custom of naming towns after individuals began to take hold.

St. Johnsbury was named for Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur, also known as J. Hector St. John, a French writer living in New York. St. John wrote Letters from an American Farmer in 1782, a book praising American agriculture.

St. John befriended George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, and he corresponded with Ethan Allen, who wanted to name the town St. John. The writer suggested St. Johnsbury, realizing that several places already had the name St. John.

St. Johnsbury became a minor manufacturing center where the Fairbanks family made its famous platform scales. By the 1940s, St. Johnsbury was the world’s largest manufacturer of scales, maple sugar and candlepins for bowling.

Today it is a quintessential Victorian industrial town with a large historic district that encompasses the Railroad Street District, Main Street, the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum and the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium.

Photos: Dracut Old Yellow Meeting House, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26184431 ;Henniker Congregational Church and Historical Society, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3380925. This story last updated in 2022.

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12 Fascinating Facts About Independence Day

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Independence Day from the get-go has been a rowdy holiday with ringing bells, gunfire, cannon fire, fireworks, feasting, speeches and toasts.

Over the years, people tried to turn it into something else: a platform for temperance speeches, a chance for immigrants to express their ‘American-ness,’ a ‘safe-and-sane’ holiday. But it always seems to revert to a rowdy celebration.

Here then, is a list of 12 fascinating facts about the Independence Day.

1. Adams Messed Up

It didn’t really happen this way. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull.

John Adams got the date wrong. In a letter to his wife Abigail from Philadelphia on July 3, 1776, he wrote, “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.” You can understand his mistake, since the Continental Congress approved independence on July 2. And all the signers of the Declaration of Independence didn’t exactly gather around the parchment and sign at once. Some had left Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. Moreover, the Declaration didn’t get printed with all the names of the signers until January 1777, by Mary Katherine Goddard in Baltimore.

2. A Looong Independence Day Tradition

Boston fireworks, 2011.

Fireworks go all the way back to 1777, when Boston and Philadelphia held the first displays. The Continental Congress authorized the fireworks in Philadelphia. And in Boston, “Col. Crafts illuminated his park on the commons, threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.”

3. Quite a Streak

Charles Francis Adams

The Adams family participated in official Independence Day celebrations for 116 consecutive years. It started from the time John signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and ended in 1892, when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., gave a speech at the First Church in Quincy, Mass.

4. Independence Day Toasts

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George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

During the 19th century, people loved to drink patriotic toasts on the Independence celebrations. Tipplers carefully prepared the toasts and often published them in the local newspaper. They frequently toasted George Washington. For example, a toast from Lexington, Mass., in 1814, went like this: “The memory of Washington. May his name no more be profaned by Hypocrites, as that of Jesus has been by the Jesuits.”

5. Independence Day Time Capsule

Massachusetts State House from the Boston Common

On the Fourth of July in 1795, Paul Revere and Gov. Sam Adams laid the cornerstone for the Massachusetts State House in Boston. They also buried a copper time capsule. It contained a pine tree shilling coin from 1652, a copper medal engraved with an image of George Washington, several newspapers and a silver plate thought to be engraved by Paul Revere. State officials opened the time capsule in 2014.

6. Career Launch

 

Young Daniel Webster

On the Fourth of July 1800, Daniel Webster launched his political career as an 18-year-old Dartmouth junior. He was chosen to deliver a speech at the college because of his reputation as a speaker and debater. In the speech he praised the veterans of the Revolution, George Washington and the unifying authority of the U.S. Constitution.

7. Coincidence?

Thomas Jefferson

John Adams died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His last words were “Jefferson still survives.” He got it wrong; Jefferson died five hours earlier. Only one signer of the Declaration still lived in 1826: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Md., who died six years later at the age of 95.

8. Playing with Fire

Aftermath of the Great Portland Fire.

A Fourth of July firecracker in 1866 started the Great Portland Fire in Maine. The conflagration, the worst to date in the United States, burned 1800 buildings. It left 10,000 homeless and killed two. Fireworks, though, didn’t cause as many Fourth of July fatalities as toy guns. The toy bullets — blank cartridges, actually — pierced the skin and caused tetanus, the leading cause of Independence Day deaths in the 19th century.

 

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Henry Ward Beecher speaking at Woodstock, Conn, President Grant seated. From a Harper’s Weekly engraving courtesy Library of Congress.

9. Bor-ing

Starting in 1870, Henry C. Bowen, a businessman, hosted the country’s largest Fourth of July party in Woodstock, Conn., at his Roseland Cottage. The event featured many, many, many speeches; so many, that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes tried to get out of going in 1877. Bowen didn’t drink, and President Ulysses S. Grant had to sneak a cocktail on the porch at the first party in 1870.

The Boston Pops plays Stars and Stripes Forever.

10. Independence Day Pops

The Boston Pops Orchestra has played Stars and Stripes Forever at the end of its concerts since 1899, two years after John Philip Sousa composed it. Arthur Fiedler included it in the first Independence Day Pops concert on the Esplanade in 1929. The Pops has played it ever since, the flag always dropping in the final moments of the piece. As many as 500,000 people show up for the concert.

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Americanization Day poster

11. Americanization Day

Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis kicked off the first Americanization Day with a Fourth of July speech in 1915 at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Americanization Day, an attempt to crowd out Independence Day, responded to nearly two decades of increasing immigration, a sore spot for many Americans. The Americanization Day movement set about to reshape the day’s image around themes of immigrants embracing American culture. It didn’t last.

12. No White House Celebration

Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

The saddest Independence Day in the White House was probably in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge spent most of the day at the bedside of his 16-year-old son. Calvin Coolidge, Jr., had developed septic poisoning after he played tennis without socks and it caused a blister that got infected. He died on July 7.


With thanks to James R. Heintze’s Fourth of July Celebrations Database. Boston Fireworks image By Pablo Valerio – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15723763. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Historic Fourth of July Celebrations

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The Fourth of July has been celebrated with feasting, fireworks and festivity since Boston shot off cannons on the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The document wasn’t actually signed on the Fourth of July, as some of the signers weren’t even in Philadelphia that day. And John Adams thought the Second of July would be the day to remember, as that was when the Continental Congress voted for independence. The Fourth of July was the day the Congress adopted the document.

No matter. The first Fourth of July turned out to be cause for celebration year after year. Here are six of the oldest – and most historic – Fourth of July celebrations. If you know of another worth mentioning, please include it in the comments section below.

New Haven, Conn.

Yale College (left) and the State House.

In 1788, New Haven held a large and lavish Fourth of July celebration featuring a parade of working men grouped by their occupation. Cordwainers in a wagon made shoes as the parade wended its way from the long wharf to the Brick Meeting House. Blacksmiths made a hoe during the parade with anvil, hammer and bellows, while goldsmiths displayed a silver urn with 10 stars – one for each state that had adopted the Constitution.

According to a contemporary account, there were also sowers, reapers with sickles, thrashers with flails, butchers, barbers, distillers, bakers, tanners, curriers, leather dressers, stonecutters with chisels, cabinet makers, coppersmiths and braziers, watch and clock makers, coopers, painters, hatters with bows, weavers, tailors, boat builders, rope-makers wearing hempen girdles, shipwrights, a whaleboat with her crew, papermakers, printers, merchants, schoolmasters followed by their scholars, physicians, Yale College tutors, clergy, sheriffs, the common council, mayor, alderman, recorder, orator and high sheriff.

Roger Sherman, who signed the Declaration of Independence, attended the festivities. He heard Josiah Meigs, publisher of New Haven Gazette and Connecticut Magazine, read the Declaration of Independence and listened to a performance of a hymn composed by Barna Bidwell, a tutor at Yale College.

A feast was held at the Statehouse with at least one toast – to a model of the frigate USS Constitution. Patriotic toasts were probably drunk for George Washington and the veterans of the Revolution as well. After dinner came a ball. Outside, no doubt, there was plenty of noise. As a Yale student named Thomas Robbins wrote in his diary on July 4, 1796:

The students fired guns, etc., then came here and were very noisy, drinking toasts, etc.

New Haven over the years became the best place in the region to see fireworks on the Fourth of July.

Thomaston, Maine

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Montpelier (Robert N. Dennis collection of stereoscopic views, New York Public Library).

Revolutionary War General Henry Knox led a Fourth of July celebration in 1795 that wasn’t the first in Maine, but it was certainly the grandest.

After the American Revolution, Knox relocated to Thomaston, Maine (then Massachusetts) where he built an estate and mansion, Montpelier.

Knox owned the better part of four counties in Maine, which he came by via his wife’s family. In 1795, with Montpelier finished, Knox came to Thomaston from Philadelphia. His mission was to develop the state. By 1795 he was busily building sawmills, kilns, quarries and brickyards to attract employees and tenants for his properties.

To promote the Maine endeavor, Knox opened Montpelier to any and all guests on the Fourth of July in 1795. The feast was legendary for its sheer size. Chicken, geese and an entire ox fed the crowds. More than 100 beds were made up for overnight guests. A delegation of Penobscot Indians, with whom Knox wanted peaceful relations, came and stayed more than a week. They finally left at Knox ‘s urging. He was annoyed by the length of their visit.

Knox would live barely 10 years after the celebration, and his plans for Maine met with limited success. Montpelier was torn down to make way for a railroad when the house fell into disrepair and no buyers could be found for it. Today no one will produce a feast for you, but you can visit a 1929 replica of Montpelier in Thomaston that operates as a museum.

Boston

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The Old State House in Boston. The Declaration of Independence was read from the balcony.

Boston celebrated the first anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with joyful delirium.

The festivities began at dawn with a grand salute fired from cannon at Fort Independence and ships in the harbor. Gov. John Hancock proposed 13 toasts from the balcony of the Old State House, while cannons fired and Boston’s militia companies paraded, drilled and fired off their guns.

That day Boston established the tradition of Fourth of July oratory. It stemmed from the Boston Massacre speech delivered annually for 13 years commemorating that sad event. Rev. Dr. William Gordon of Roxbury preached a patriotic sermon to the General Court.

At night, a Col. Crafts illuminated the Boston Common. He ‘threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.’

Boston was the first municipality to officially designate the Fourth of July as a holiday, in 1783. And in 1929, Arthur Fiedler first took the podium to conduct the Boston Pops Orchestra’s performance of the 1812 Overture on the Esplanade. To this day, Boston celebrates with cannon, fireworks and church bells in one of the best attended Fourth of July celebrations in the country.

Portsmouth, N.H.

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The Continental frigate Bonhomme Richard 9commanded by John Paul Jones) battling the HMS Serapis.

There is a legend about the first Fourth of July celebration in Portsmouth, N.H., that probably isn’t true.

The story has it that five young ladies of Portsmouth — Mary Langdon, Augusta Pierce, Caroline Chandler, Dorothy Hall and Helen Seavey — made an American flag from their best silk gowns, according to specification by John Paul Jones.

Jones supposedly sailed the USS Ranger from Boston to Portsmouth, where the Ranger had been built at what is now the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. The ladies presented him the flag. He then hoisted it on the Ranger.   The record suggests, however, that John Paul Jones wasn’t in Portsmouth that day.

What did happen was that a Captain Thompson invited people to lunch on board a Continental frigate. Salutes were probably fired, church bells probably rung, and a toast to George Washington was probably drunk. In 1805, for example, Portsmouth gave Washington the following toast to ‘The memory of George Washington, Greater than Caesar–he would wear no crown, but that of the people’s love. ‘

Bristol, R.I.

fourth-of-july-bristol-parade

The Bristol, R.I., parade.

Fourth of July observances have waxed and waned over the centuries, but not in Bristol, R.I. The town proudly claims to be the birthplace of the Fourth of July celebration.

The Bristol Fourth of July Celebration started in 1785 by the Rev. Henry Wight, newly hired by the First Congregational Church.

Wight had served as a soldier in the American Revolution, and he determined that Bristol should observe Patriotic Exercises on the Fourth of July. He led the ceremonies in 1785 with a speech calling for reflection on the veterans who won the war and celebration of the new nation’s freedoms.

For 40 years, Wight would continue leading these ceremonies. The Fourth of July has been celebrated every year in Bristol since.

Sometime in the early 1800s the now-2.5-mile Military, Civic and Firemen’s Parade began. In 1975, Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci started fighting with parade organizers. Under the rules, he wasn’t entitled to walk in the parade, but he did anyway.

Parade organizers sent him a letter in 1979 telling him not to show up in 1980, and the Bristol police chief vowed to arrest anyone who made a disturbance. Cianci showed up in a helicopter. So many parade-goers cheered him the police had to let him march.

In 1984, Cianci pleaded “no contest” to a charge of assault and skipped the parade. A clown dressed in a prison uniform, carrying a ball and chain, marched in his place. In 1989 he marched ahead of the marshal, prompting the parade chairman to say Cianci was rude and shouldn’t be invited back. In 1997 and 1998, he brought along an entourage of law enforcement officers squirting the crowd with water rifles, which got him dis-invited in 1999. He returned in 2009 after serving jail time for racketeering.

Today Bristol’s Fourth of July celebration officially starts on June 14th, Flag Day, and ends with the parade on July 4th. In between are concerts, fireworks, a drum corps show, a firefighters muster and a Fourth of July ball.

Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci marched in the Bristol, R.I., Fourth of July parade in 2009 after his conviction.

Bristol, Vt.

Coincidentally, the parade committee in Bristol, Vt., boasts that the Bristol Vermont Fourth of July parade is the oldest continuous parade in Vermont.

The parade committee is silent on when the parade first started, simply saying it has been going on for ‘decades.’ Bristol did host a parade for the nation’s Bicentennial in 1976. Today Bristol’s fireworks are said to rival Burlington’s, and the parade runs for an hour and a half.

In 1980, the Bristol parade featured the first annual Outhouse Race. Contestants participate in teams, with two runners and one rider who sits inside the outhouse frame. The outhouse frame must have a door for privacy.  The race runs from St. Ambrose Catholic Church to the finish line at the traffic light, and there are usually three or four outhouses in each of the four heats.

For a youtube video of the outhouse race, click here.

Images: Old State House, Boston, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=221678; Bristol, R.I., parade: By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49912345; Buddy Cianci By Notyourbroom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7211464; Bristol, RI, street scene By TwoSheds (talk) (Uploads) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12287639

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