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Polio Makes Its U.S. Debut in Vermont’s Otter Creek Valley in 1894

In June of 1894, a strange nervous disease attacked several children in Vermont’s Otter Creek Valley. It started as a summer cold, but then it paralyzed its unlucky victims. After a few weeks, people in the valley began hearing about deaths from the mysterious ailment. By the end of July, the valley filled with dread as the disease took victim after victim, seemingly at random. Then finally a 37-year-old country doctor figured out what afflicted Otter Creek Valley: polio

Charles Caverly was the right person in the right place at the right time to diagnose the disease that would maim and kill tens of thousands of U.S. children over the next half century.

Otter Creek

Summer after summer, polio returned in great waves, striking first in the Northeast and then moving westward. It struck randomly – in the city, in the country, among rich and poor, healthy and sickly. Like AIDS in the second half of the 20^th century, polio in the first half was lethal, incurable and favored a specific group of victims – children.

It would take six decades before Jonas Salk developed the first safe vaccine against polio. But the process of eradicating the disease began with Charles Caverly and the large body of data he collected in Vermont.

Charles Caverly

He was born in Troy, N.H., on Sept. 30, 1856, to an old New England family. His great-great-grandfather, Philip Caverly, served as a soldier in the American Revolution.

He went to local high schools, prepped for college at Kimball Union Academy in Meriden, N.H., and graduated from Dartmouth in 1878. He then attended the University of Vermont School of Medicine, and then studied for 18 months at the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York.

Charles Caverly

Caverly began practice in Rutland in 1883, in association with Dr. Middleton Goldsmith.

“He was a quiet, cultivated man, with a singleness of purpose which was striking, a lack of pretense which was always charming, and an ability which was perfectly evident,” wrote Robert W. Lovett, who knew him.

But Caverly was more than a country doctor. He had a passion for public health, and by 1897 he served as president of the Vermont State Board of Health. He also taught hygiene and preventive medicine at the University of Vermont College of Medicine.

Polio Strikes the Otter Creek Valley

The first polio cases appeared in the middle of June in Rutland and nearby Wallingford. Until mid-July, it prevailed in Rutland, then other nearby towns began reporting cases.

Caverly sensed the new disease had created a feeling of uneasiness among Vermonters. In late July he decided to investigate the outbreak systematically. He reached out to all the physicians in the area who had patients affected by the disease. Caverly identified 123 cases from June 17 to September 1. All but six were within the Otter Creek Valley, which was only 15 miles wide and 30 miles long.

The investigation, he wrote, “soon convinced me that this region had been affected by an epidemic of nervous disease very rarely observed.”

Some Polio Cases

Caverly then described some of the cases he’d seen.

The first case was a three-year-old American boy, healthy, active and strong. He grew feverish and cranky and had stomachache. After three days he lost the use of his legs. At the end of 10 days, he began to walk by holding on to chairs. Then in three weeks, he could walk again.

The second case was similar: A sturdy, 3-1/2-year-old Irish boy had a high fever and incontinence. On the third day, his legs were paralyzed. One leg improved, the other not so much, and after 10 weeks he could walk, but had spinal curvature.

Case 93, a two-year-old American boy, got stomachache, fever and rash. After a few days, his legs were paralyzed. He didn’t improve much after two months, Caverly reported.

Case four was a six-year-old boy taken with convulsions while playing in the street. They lasted nine hours, along with a fever, vomiting and excessive sensitivity of his extremities. The boy died after six days.

Polio died out in September, but not after 132 people, mostly children, had come down with it, and 18 had died.

Caverly Figures It Out

Caverly took careful note of the strange disease. Boys, for example, were more likely to get it than girls. Some died early, some recovered with no paralysis and some were permanently disabled. He saw a 70-year-old man with polio. He saw it in horses, dogs and chickens.

Caverly decided the mysterious disease had to be one of two things: cerebro-spinal meningitis or poliomyelitis. He sent the brain and spinal cord of a chicken to doctors in New York. One said it was cerebro-spinal meningitis, but two others said it was polio. Polio it was.

History of Polio

Polio was not unknown before it ravaged Otter Creek Valley. Sir Walter Scott, born in 1771, contracted it as a child and walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Sir Walter Scott. Note the cane.

In 1789, British doctor Michael Underwood came up with the first clinical description of polio. He noted “the debilitations of the lower limbs” in children. Doctors called it “teething paralysis” or “infantile paralysis.” They would occasionally see isolated cases.

But because polio didn’t reach epidemic proportions, doctors, including Charles Caverly, didn’t think it contagious.

Polio, actually, is extremely contagious. A virus, it enters the body through the digestive system by droplets from the nose and mouth and by contact with contaminated feces. But the overwhelming majority of people who get it – 98 percent – don’t show symptoms.

Ironically, polio emerged at a time when advances in public health had gotten diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and diphtheria under control. Many scientists believed improvements in cleanliness and hygiene had succeeded too well. In dirtier times, they thought, infants developed mild infections but fought them off with the help of maternal antibodies. That immunized them against more severe attacks of the disease. But improved sanitation delayed children’s exposure to it, leaving them more vulnerable to the severest form of polio.

Polio Returns Every Summer

After Otter Creek, polio appeared in Europe. In the Northeast United States, it began to return every summer, at first sporadically and then with a vengeance. By 1905, the medical community realized the contagiousness of the disease. Public health authorities closed swimming pools, canceled county fairs and tacked quarantine signs on homes where the disease had struck.

In the summer of 1910, a severe epidemic of polio hit North America, killing 2,500. It hit Massachusetts hard, especially in Springfield. Another terrible outbreak struck Vermont in 1914, concentrated in the northern half of the state. The mortality rate neared 25 percent, and 226 victims were left with varying degrees of paralysis. The state Board of Health realized it had to do something. Charles Caverly persuaded an anonymous benefactor to make a generous donation for the prevention and care of polio.

Children at a polio clinic in France. Courtesy NARA.

The state decided to hold free public clinics in the infected areas where victims could go for treatment and care.

Robert Lovett, a doctor engaged in that effort, described how patients were given braces and crutches. Therapists helped train their muscles, exercised their withered limbs and gave them massages. Family members were taught how to massage and exercise polio victims.

“Thus it happened that from being the first state in which the disease occurred in epidemic form, Vermont also became the first to undertake on a statewide scale the after-care of the victims of infantile paralysis,” wrote Lovett.

The 1916 Outbreak

The worst was yet to come. In 1916, a wave of polio struck without warning a Brooklyn neighborhood called Pigtown. Twenty-four hundred people died in New York City, 80 percent of them children under five years old.

Courtesy March of Dimes

As the terrifying disease traveled beyond New York, cities and towns in the Northeast began to bar outsiders. Armed policemen patrolled train stations and roads to make sure no strangers crossed the borders. Parents told their children not to play with anyone they didn’t know, share their ice cream cone or go swimming. In New York, people blamed dogs and cats for spreading polio. They killed 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs.

In Vermont, Charles Caverly continued to monitor the polio outbreaks. He wrote reports loaded with data about polio outbreaks in his state. They included the distribution and timing of cases, ages of victims, type of house they lived in, the soil around the house, quality of the sewer facilities, water supply, family history, the number of cases in railroad towns.

But then in 1918 polio took a back seat to another disease – influenza. Among the many thousands killed by the flu pandemic was Charles Caverly.

Lovett credited Caverly with first seeing the need to understand polio. “Dr. Caverly did not live to see the disease against which he had fought so long and so untiringly really conquered and the fear of future epidemics removed,” wrote Lovett. “[B]ut he did live to see many of the victims of infantile paralysis in Vermont well on the road to happy, useful, and in some cases normal lives, and to know that real contributions to the knowledge of the disease had been made by those working in cooperation with the State Board of Health under his presidency.”

FDR

In 1921, a wealthy, influential 39-year-old named Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio. Five years later he founded the Georgia Warm Springs Foundation, after the waters he’d taken for therapy. Later it was renamed the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (NFIP).

Franklin Roosevelt taking a therapeutic plunge in Warm Springs, Ga.

Then in 1938, five years into his presidency, Roosevelt kicked off the NFIP’s March of Dimes campaign to raise money for polio research. The public sent 2,680,000 dimes to the White House.

Many scientists had already started work on a vaccine or a cure for polio. In the United States, scientists conducted research at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Cincinnati.

During the mid-1950s, Dr. Jonas Salk at the University of Pittsburgh tested a polio vaccine. In April 1955, banner headlines announced the great news: tests had proven Salk’s vaccine successful. The government then mobilized a massive public health effort to vaccinate every child in America. By 1991, polio was eradicated in the Western Hemisphere.

Polio, The Beginning of the End

Sara Jones had gotten the disease at two years old, one of the first Otter Creek Valley victims in 1894. Polio had paralyzed her legs. For the next 20 years she dragged herself around her North Ira farm. Finally, a doctor operated on her feet so she could wear shoes. The next year she got her first pair of crutches, and in 1955 she got her first wheelchair.

On Jan. 5, 1956, Sara Jones attended the NFIP’s kickoff of its national fundraising campaign on the side of Mt. Mansfield in Vermont. The Dartmouth Outing Club built a snow sculpture of Dr. Jonas Salk, and Olympic gold medalist Tenley Albright figure-skated for attendees. At night, a torchlight parade was held, and a monument shaped like a dime was dedicated to those first 132 victims.

With thanks to The “New Disease” strikes the Otter Creek Valley by Edward Neuert and to Infantile Paralysis in Vermont.

Images: Otter Creek By Chumash11 – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73732544. This story updated in 2023.

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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation. The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast. People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month. “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.

This story updated in 2022.

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When New Englanders Feared a French-Canadian Immigrant Conquest

When French-Canadians came to work in New England’s textile mills in the later 19^th century they sparked conspiracy theories of an immigrant conquest. Even the New York Times claimed that there were secret attempts to turn New England into New France.

Lowell Mill Girls

In its earliest years, women were the main component of New England’s textile workforce. In the 1840s, an increasing number of European immigrants came to operate the textile machinery. Then came the Civil War, a disaster for cotton textiles, New England’s largest 19^th century industry. New England’s mills were devastated by the Union blockade of Confederate ports during the war that hindered southern cotton from reaching northern shores.

Some New England mills closed their doors, while others slashed their hours. A contemporary observer described the result in the flagship mill town of Lowell, Mass.: nine corporations shut down and 10,000 workers thrown “penniless, into the streets.”

After the war, New England’s textile manufacturers found that their workforce had scattered and was not returning to the mills. To save the industry – and New England’s economy – the textile corporations scoured the rural areas of the region. They also searched Europe and Canada for laborers. Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec responded to this call en masse.

Newcomers

In the years between 1865 and 1900, hundreds of thousands of French-Canadians crossed the border in search of work in New England’s factories. By the beginning of the 20^th century, French-Canadian men, women and children comprised 44 percent of the region’s cotton textile workforce.

Young millworkers from Manchester’s Little Canada, 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

During this period French-Canadians established Little Canadas in industrial towns from Lake Champlain to the Blackstone River Valley, and from the coasts of Maine to the Connecticut River. In towns such as Woonsocket, R.I., and Biddeford, Maine, the French-Canadians eventually became the majority, electing their own as mayors.

St. Ann’s Church complex, Woonsocket. It was built with nickels and dimes from French-Canadian millworkers.

Throughout the region, the newcomers from the North preserved their French language, their Catholic religion and the traditions of their rural Canadian parishes. They established their own schools, and a host of mutual benefit and social organizations. They intended to preserve their French-Canadian identity within the U.S.

A Conspiracy Theory About an Immigrant Conquest

The French-Canadian desire to maintain their language and customs raised alarm bells in New England and throughout the U.S. So did their heavy concentration in densely populated neighborhoods and their ever-increasing numbers. The mainstream press reported on an alleged invasion of New England by immigrants from across the border. Major media outlets including the New York Times, Harper’s and The Nation weighed-in on the political, economic and social implications of this cross-border influx.

In the period between 1880 and 1900, elements in the press spun a conspiracy theory around the French-Canadian newcomers. Some commentators theorized that the Catholic Church had dispatched the French-Canadian workers into New England in a bid to take over the region on behalf of the church. The French-Canadian workers, claimed these conspiracists, would first seize political control of the region. Then, went the theory, Quebec would declare its independence and annex New England to create a revived New France.

Increasing Alarmism

The New York Times repeated these claims on several occasions throughout the 1880s and 1890s. In 1885, the paper stated that there were plans afoot “to form a new France occupying the whole northeast corner of the continent.” Returning to the story in 1889, the Times stated that this supposed revival of New France would include, “Quebec, Ontario, as far west as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New-England States, and a slice of New-York.”

Notre Dame of Montreal Basilica

The newspaper’s rhetoric became increasingly alarmist over time. By 1892, the Times opined that French-Canadian immigration was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith…This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

This editorial seems to have imputed subversive intent to the French-Canadians’ mutual aid societies. In fact, these groups offered insurance and other benefits unavailable to French-Canadian Catholics elsewhere. Such groups were not oriented around the conquest of New England. It was simply false to assert that “every adult French Canadian” belonged to them.

Protestant Efforts To Convert French-Canadians

Some Protestant clergy climbed on the immigrant conquest conspiracy bandwagon. They responded with initiatives to convert the French-Canadians. The Congregationalists of Massachusetts supported Rev. Calvin Elijah Amaron, a missionary who established the French Protestant College at Lowell. A few years later, he moved it to Springfield, Mass. A major aim of this college, today known as the American International College, was to train French-speaking Protestant missionaries to go forth and convert the French-Canadians of New England and Quebec.

American International College in Springfield, Mass.

In 1891, Amaron published a book called Your Heritage; or, New England Threatened. It was a long-form treatment of the theory that a French-Canadian Catholic cabal planned to undermine New England. In Amaron’s mind, Roman Catholics could not be reliable U.S. citizens since they owed their first allegiance to Rome. The “Romish clergy,” Amaron wrote, forced its adherents into a “moral and intellectual bondage” that is “worse than southern slavery.”

The Gospel Wagon

The Baptists also made efforts to convert the French-Canadians of New England. Statistics cited in the 1906 book Aliens or Americans? by Howard Grose showed that the Baptists expended more resources on missionary activities to convert the French-Canadians than on any other predominantly Catholic group in the United States.

The Baptists’ Henry Lyman Morehouse, in an 1893 article titled The French Canadian in Quebec and New England, compared the effort to convert the French-Canadians to the abolitionist movement. “Slavery in the United States has gone,” Morehouse wrote. “The next great act of emancipation is that which shall free from mental and religious servitude the people of Quebec…”

Henry Lyman Morehouse

The Baptists also fielded a contraption called the Gospel Wagon. A large horse-drawn vehicle, it had a pulpit, organ and lanterns for preaching by night. Missionaries deployed the wagon in Massachusetts and New Hampshire mill towns, preaching Protestantism to the French-Canadian enclaves from their customized vehicle.

Immigrant Conquest Conspiracy Countered

Other voices countered the rhetoric about an immigrant conquest conspiracy. William MacDonald, a professor at Bowdoin College, disputed the notion that the Canadiens were a threat to the region. In an 1896 article in The Nation, MacDonald soberly recounted the facts showing that a French-Canadian demographic takeover of New England was unlikely. MacDonald also summarized the region’s attitude toward the French-Canadians in their midst:

Useful and indispensable as they have become, they are nowhere received with cordiality, or commonly referred to save as an inferior class; even their religion is denounced as un-American, and the influence of the Church little regarded or else misconstrued….As a class, they are treated considerately in public because of their votes, disparaged in private because of general dislike and sought by all for the work they do and the money they spend.

The conspiracy theorists offered little evidence to buttress their claims beyond a handful of utterances from the ultra-Catholic wing of the French-Canadian elites in Quebec. A few firebrands in Quebec had made expansionist noises. But, then as now, the political future of Quebec was hotly debated. There were many views on the subject. There was no semblance of unanimity in Quebec around the notion of a revived New France that would include New England.

Most of the workers coming from French Canada to New England were poor farmers, their non-inheriting adult children, day-laborers and wage earners in small Canadian factories. Their motives for crossing the border were chiefly economic rather than political or religious. Jobs and steady wages were the magnets attracting them southward.

French-Canadians Assert Their Patriotism

While conspiracy theorists were proclaiming that the newcomers were incapable of U.S. citizenship, New England’s small French-Canadian elite were voicing their American patriotism at a series of national conventions held throughout the U.S.

French-Canadian family arriving from Montreal.

At these French-Canadian conventions, speakers pointed to their people’s service in the U.S. military dating to the American Revolution. They also highlighted their historical role in settling the U.S. Midwest. They or their French cousins had founded or helped to found Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, as well as Natchez, Mobile, New Orleans and numerous other cities.

Convention delegates also encouraged their people to become naturalized U.S. citizens. Contrary to the theory that Quebec planned to annex New England, many French-Canadians in the States favored U.S. annexation of Canada.

The End of a Conspiracy

The fear of a French-Canadian conspiracy subsided in the early 20^th century as newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe began to enter the U.S. in increasing numbers. New England manufacturing slowly lost its lead in the textile industry to the U.S. South beginning in the 1920s.

As the mills faded away, the Little Canadas gradually dispersed, a process that continued throughout the 20^th century. And along with these enclaves went the memory of a period when some Americans considered poor French-Canadian mill workers a threat to New England’s way of life.

David Vermette is the author of this story about fears of an immigrant conquest, updated in 2023. He is a writer, researcher and editor born and raised in Massachusetts. He wrote the book A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018).

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Is There a John La Farge in Your Town?

You just might be living near a John La Farge window if you live in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, and in any other New England state you might at least find a painting.

Who’s John La Farge, you might ask?

John La Farge

Born March 31, 1835 to French emigres in New York City, he graduated from Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland. He then went to Newport to study with William Morris Hunt. There he met and married Margaret Perry, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin and granddaughter of Oliver Hazard Perry. He bought a house in Newport, though his travels, business and mistress kept him away from it half the time.

His friend H.H. Richardson commissioned him to paint murals at Trinity Church, but his easel paintings didn’t sell enough to pay the bills. He began to experiment with stained glass. He won his first commission for a window from friends at Harvard, who wanted a stained glass window to remember the Civil War Dead at Memorial Hall.

Stained glass making was in a sorry state, and La Farge labored to create the same effects of medieval cathedral windows. He layered complementary colors of colored glass, and later worked with opalescent glass—glass with a milky opaque or translucent effect. He even used mottled glass that others might reject as flawed. La Farge began to work directly with a glassmaker to get saturated but subtle colors.

Detail from Butterflies and Foliage at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston by Lori L. Stalteri. Creative Commons (CC By 2.0)

His connections with wealthy homeowners won him several commissions for stained glass windows. He drew from wildly different artistic styles: early Venetian, Buddhist, Islamic, Greek or Roman art. His windows created an exotic, opulent effect, just what Gilded Age millionaires wanted.

His friend Henry Adams, wrote “La Farge alone could use glass like a thirteenth-century artist…

In conversation La Farge’s mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

(Read about his rivalry with Louis Comfort Tiffany here.)

Battle Window at Harvard’s Memorial Hall

You can see for yourself what Adams meant in many New England cities and towns where La Farge’s work is on display.

Connecticut

Bridgeport: New Britain Museum of American Art, oil on panel, Lady of Shallot

Hartford: Wadsworth Athenaeum, water color, Water Lily and Moth

New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, windows from the Resurrection Promise Church

Maine

Brunswick: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Athens (stained glass window); Tokio Geisha Dancing in the House of Our Neighbor, Nikko, gouache; Meditation of Kuwannon, watercolor.

Rockland: Farnsworth Art Museum–Japanese Fisherman, Study of Sunlight,

Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art– Agathon to Erosanthe (Votive Wreath)

Massachusetts

Boston: The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a watercolor, painting and drawing collection and the stained glass windows, Morning Glories, Peonies Blown in the Wind

Boston College McMullen Museum of Art– Christ Preaching, St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul

(West Roxbury): Emmanuel Episcopal Church, The Angel Holding a Lyre (or The Harpist)

(Jamaica Plain): St. John’s Episcopal Church Decorative Window

Trinity Church: Presentation of Virgin in Temple, Resurrection of Christ, Vision of St. John: Ieposolyma the New Jerusalem, Wise Virgin, murals

Cambridge: Memorial Hall, Harvard University, Athena Tying a Mourning Fillet, Battle Window, Cornelia – Mother of the Gracchi, Virgil and Homer, several paintings, Fish and Dawn in the Harvard University Art Museum

Manchester-by-the-Sea: Emmanuel Church, memorial stained glass window

Medford: Grace Episcopal Church, Rebecca at the Well

Methuen: First Church, Congregational, The Resurrection (Colonel Henry Coffin Nevins Memorial Window)

Newton: Grace Church, Memorial Window for Lizzie Shinn

“Angel of Help” in the Unity Church in North Easton, Mass.

North Easton: Unity Church, Figures of Wisdom The Angel of Help – Helen Angier Ames Memorial Window

Quincy: Crane Memorial Library, The Old Philosopher, The Angel at the Tomb

Salem: First Church, Faith and Charity

Springfield: George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, Rebecca at the Well

Stockbridge: St. Paul Preaching at Athens – Reverend Samuel P. Parker Memorial Window, The Annunciation

Wellesley: Wellesley College, Houghton Chapel—Memorial windows

Whitman: All Saints’ Episcopal Church

Williamstown: Thompson Memorial Chapel, Williams College, Abraham and an Angel

Peacock by John La Farge

Worcester: Worcester Art Museum, Peacock Window; (moved from Mount Vernon Congregational Church) Angel at the healing waters of Bethesda, Christ with Two Pilgrims

New Hampshire

Manchester: Currier Museum of Art– Sunrise in Fog over Kyoto, watercolor

Rhode Island

Lincoln: Christ Church

Newport: The Breakers, skylight

Channing Memorial Church, Christ Leading the Soul Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Newport Art Museum: Trompe l’Oeil Curtain

Newport Congregational Church: Ceiling Paintings

Peonies Blown in the Wind, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (created for Newport mansion of Henry Marquand)

Our Lady of Mercy Chapel Decorative Windows, Madonna, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. John the Evangelist

Providence: Cathedral Church of St. John, The Wise Virgin

Providence: Church of the Blessed Sacrament, Angel of the Adoration

With thanks to Stained Glass in New England: A Digital Guide; and Art of an Opaline Mind: The Stained Glass of John La Farge by Julie Sloan and James Yarnall. This story was updated in 2022.

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Mary Bliss Parsons, the Witch of Northampton

The year 1656 wasn’t the first time Mary Bliss Parsons of Northampton was accused of witchcraft. Nineteen years later, in 1675, she was indicted for witchcraft and imprisoned for 10 weeks in Boston to await her trial. Some of the magistrates who sat in judgment of her went on to hear the horrific Salem witchcraft trials of 1692-3, the last hurrah for New England’s witch hunters. They had recognizable names: Thomas Danforth, Simon Bradstreet, William Stoughton and then-governor, John Leverett.

Simon Bradstreet

Mary Bliss Parsons

Mary Bliss was born in England in about 1627, most likely in Painswick Parish, Gloucestershire. She came to Mount Wollaston (now a part of Quincy) in the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1635 at the age of about eight. She sailed with her parents and four elder step-brothers.

By 1640 they, and many others, had followed the great Puritan divine Thomas Hooker to Hartford in Connecticut Colony and belonged to the first group of settlers there.

Thomas Hoooker and his people

Many extant records and a number of depositions explain the accusations of witchcraft against Mary. When the whole story comes out it all comes down to the jealousy of one woman. Sarah Lyman Bridgman convinced other townsfolk that Mary Bliss Parsons—with the help of the devil—had caused their hard luck, even the deaths of their babies.

Mary wasn’t afraid to take her complaints and opinions right to the source of her grievance. If she paid you to weave some yarn and you delivered it full of flaws, she wouldn’t stand for it. If you borrowed the family’s team of oxen to plough a field and she saw you whipping and mistreating them, she would march across the field and give you a talking to.

Joseph Parsons

Legend says Mary Bliss was a great beauty. To make herself even more enviable she married Joseph Parsons in 1646. He would become the wealthiest man in Hampshire County and, before he died, one of the richest in the territory. Joseph traded furs, owned a retail store and the sawmill and co-owned the first grist mill in Northampton. In 1661, he got a license to keep an ordinary, or tavern, there. He would become the largest land owner in the new settlement of Northfield, and in Boston he bought a house, a wharf and warehouses.

Joseph also served often as selectman and, because he knew the Indians through his trading enterprises, as liaison between the natives and the townsmen.

Early Springfield buildings

It was written that Mary Parsons was ‘possessed of great beauty and talents.’ She was not very ‘amiable,’ she had ‘haughty manners’ and was ‘exclusive in the choice of her associates.’ So, there she was, beautiful and rich with a mind of her own to speak.

As if that wasn’t enough to annoy all the other goodwives in town, she had an astoundingly successful birthrate. In the 17^th century, many women died giving birth, and many children did not survive childhood. For 25 years Mary got pregnant just about every two years. Her last child was born when she was a grandmother. She had 11 children, including two sets of twins. All but two of her children survived to adulthood. In a time when male children were valued above females (males were needed to run the farm) her first six babies were boys and then came five girls. It was just as if she had said, “Joseph, I have given you all the help you need. Now I will help myself.”

Sarah Bridgman

Sarah Lyman Bridgman was convinced Mary’s good fortune was a gift from the devil. Her gossip spread from town to town in the Connecticut River Valley. Many of Sarah’s friends and neighbors listened and wondered. They told stories. Several people saw Mary walking out at night wearing nothing but her shift. One man followed her and saw her walk on water. When he reported her, he said her clothes were not wet.

The Connecticut River

Because of her night walks, her husband installed a lock on the door to their house. He later complained to a friend that no matter where he hid the key, Mary would find it and go out in the night. Frustrated, Joseph forced her into the cellar and locked her in for her own safety. Alone and terrified Mary reported seeing spirits fly at her in the dark. All this happened during the early years of their marriage while they lived in Springfield during a witch scare. Another woman and her husband in Springfield were suspected of witchcraft.

While in church, probably during a sermon about doom and the devil’s presence in town, two ‘bewitched’ children (the minister’s young daughters) fell screaming to the floor under a witch-induced spell. Overcome by fear, Mary joined them on the floor clutching at her throat and crying out in terror. She had to be carried home. Mary Bliss Parsons’ strange behavior in Springfield aroused suspicions that followed her to Northampton.

No one knows why she was so disturbed during this time. She did lose both her second baby and her father in 1650. Springfield also experienced a witch scare at the time.

Jealousy

Both Mary and her enemy Sarah, had come of age in Hartford. Mary’s father, an average yeoman, had only six acres of land. Sarah’s much better off father had 30 acres. After their marriages, both young women moved with their husbands to Springfield. Some years later, when Mary’s husband decided to join in the settlement of Northampton in Massachusetts, Sarah and her family soon followed.

Poor Sarah had little good fortune. Her husband was not rich and not much involved in town government. He served as constable for a short term, and the other positions given him were unimportant. Sarah had eight births but only four children survived infancy—three girls and one boy. Three boys and one girl died at two months, four months, six months and nine months.

Sarah accused Mary of causing her only son a grave injury. He had gone into a swamp to fetch a wandering cow when ‘there came something and gave him a great blow on the head…and going a little further…he stumbled and put his knee out of joint.’ The healing did not go well even after the knee was set and, as a result, he suffered a lot of pain. In his delirium ‘he cried out that Goody Parsons would pull off his knee’. And then from his bed he said ‘there she sits on the shelf…there she runs away and a black mouse follows her.’

Sarah’s stories about Mary’s witchery spread to both Springfield and Northampton. When Joseph Parsons heard the gossip, he sued Sarah for slander and won his case, further damaging Sarah’s reputation.

The Trial

Sarah died in 1668 at about the age of 47, but the animosity she carried toward Mary Parsons lived on. In 1674 Sarah’s daughter, Mary Bridgman Bartlett, a young wife and the mother of her first child, died under suspicious circumstances. People said ‘she came to her end by some unlawful and unnatural means…by means of some evil instrument.’

Her husband, Samuel Bartlett, and father, James Bridgman, saw to Mary Parsons’ arrest, indictment, imprisonment and trial on May 13, 1675.

Depositions and testimony of this trial have been lost, but historians assume that many of the same charges brought against Mary during the slander trial of 1654 were aired along with the new charge of the murder by witchcraft of Mary Bridgman Bartlett.

Mary testified to her innocence and that she had committed no crimes. She said, “The righteous God knows of my innocency—with whom I leave my cause.”

Gov. John Leverett

A jury of 12 men found her innocent, and the governor, and magistrates of the Court of Assistants allowed her to go free. She went home to care for her children, the last of whom was still only two.

Karen Vorbeck Williams, the author of this story, is the award-winning author of My Enemy’s Tears: The Witch of Northampton, The House on Seventh Street, and Pretty: A Memoir.

Image of the Connecticut River: By I, Denimadept, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2417686. This story was updated in 2023.

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Private Snafu, Horny WWII Cartoon Character, Teaches Soldiers How To Behave — And Dr. Seuss How To Write

Well before the Grinch Stole Christmas or the Cat in the Hat Came Back, Dr. Seuss gave voice to Private Snafu, a cartoon character decidedly not for children.

Snafu was a horny, stupid, sloppy big mouth who did everything wrong. That was the point. Private Snafu starred in propaganda cartoons for the U.S. Army during World War II. By constantly messing up, he taught lessons about why it’s important to do things right – or at least, to do them the Army way.

Dr. Seuss – Springfield, Mass’s own Theodor Geisel – wrote many of the 23 cartoons ultimately shown to soldiers between June 1943 and 1946. Because some of his audience was only semi-literate, Dr. Seuss used simple, easy-to-remember rhyme for his characters. He later used the same technique in his books for children.

Private Snafu

Snafu, the narrator explains, stands for “Situation Normal…All Fouled Up.” But he pauses before the word “fouled,” to hint at the F-word usually used.

The cartoons were risqué, with bathroom humor, bosomy women, mild cursing and racial stereotypes of the enemy that would horrify people today.

Private Snafu was described as “a patriotic, conscientious guy who thinks the army’s swell.” But he gets himself into hot water by disobeying orders. In the process, Private Snafu shows how to handle a rifle, manage personal hygiene, avoid malaria, put on a gas mask – and why it’s important.

He has a good angel on his shoulder, though, or rather a cigar-smoking, unshaven Technical Fairy First Class, who persuades Private Snafu to do the right thing

In one episode, Snafu complains about peeling potatoes on KP. The Technical Fairy, in a dream, shows him what would happen if Snafu ran the Army. The soldiers would all get booze and women, but their enjoyment would end when the Luftwaffe catches them unprepared.

“The moral, Snafu, is the harder you work, /The sooner we’re gonna beat Hitler, that jerk,” the Technical Fairy tells him in pure Seussian.

Warner Brothers

The cartoons came about after Warner Brothers Cartoons won the bid for the contract from the U.S. Army. Frank Capra, who directed It’s a Wonderful Life, dreamed up Private Snafu. Dr. Seuss was joined by such giants of animation as Chuck Jones, Mel Blanc and Bugs Bunny creator Fritz Freleng.

Bugs Bunny, in fact, makes cameo appearances in two of the shorts. Daffy Duck appears as well.

Dr. Seuss

In one cartoon, Private Snafu starts a rumor and ends up in a padded cell, driven insane when it multiplies into word that the Allies lost the war.

“The hot air is blowing, a rumor is growing,” says the narrator in more Seussian.

Several of the Private Snafu shorts deal with leaking classified information. In Spies, he lets slip that he’s taking a transport ship to Africa. Axis spies find out, the information lands on Hitler’s desk and U-boats end up killing Private Snafu. He finds himself in hell and asks the devil who let the secret out. The devil puts a mirror in front of him and he sees a horse’s behind.

In one of the last cartoons, however, Dr. Seuss may have let his imagination get a little too close to the truth. In Going Home, Private Snafu lets slip that the United States plans to drop an imaginary secret weapon onto Japan. At the same time, scientists were working on the real atom bomb. Going Home was never released, with no explanation. Was it because the writer who warned against leaking classified information had inadvertently released classified information?

Dr. Seuss would later collaborate with Chuck Jones on the ever-popular television special, How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

This story was updated in 2023.

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