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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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Six Presidential Houses in New England

Before presidential libraries, there were presidential houses, and every New England state has at least one.

Massachusetts, of course, was the birthplace of the most presidents: the two Adamses, John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush. You could almost count Calvin Coolidge, as he lived in Northampton for years, and even George Washington spent nearly a year in Cambridge as commander in chief of the colonial military.

Coolidge, though, was born in Vermont, and New Hampshire gave us Franklin Pierce. No president came from Rhode Island, though Dwight Eisenhower spent considerable time in Newport. And if it weren’t for the Bushes, Connecticut and Maine would have little claim to presidential roots.

So in celebration of President’s Day, we bring you six presidential houses. If you know of another, please mention it in the comments section.

37 Hillhouse Ave.

37 Hillhouse Ave., where President George W. Bush lived for two years.

The housing shortage after World War II forced Yale University to convert an Italianate mansion into housing for married student veterans. George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara lived there while he studied at Yale and they started their family. George W. Bush lived there until he was two, and then the family moved to Texas.

The elder president had left Yale as a sophomore to serve in the Navy. Of his living conditions, he wrote, “Not to make too much of the postwar housing shortage, but there were a dozen other veterans’ families sharing the house with us — each with one child, except for Bill and Sally Reeder, who had twins. That made 40 in all.”

It couldn’t have been that much of a hardship. Both Mark Twain and Charles Dickens described Hillhouse Avenue as ‘the most beautiful street in America.’

Today, Yale uses the building for its Economics Department.

Walker Point

The main house of the Bush compound at Walker Point.

Americans grew familiar with the Bush compound during the presidency of George H.W. Bush, who held news conferences while staying there. His son, George W. Bush, also stayed at the home during his presidency. So did a half dozen world leaders — and George H.W. Bush’s political opponent, former president Bill Clinton.

The Bush family has used the Walker Point estate since the days of George H.W. Bush’s great-grandparents.

Walker Point juts out into the Atlantic Ocean in Kennebunkport, Maine, and includes a large Shingle Style house, eight other residences, tennis courts, a dock and a sports field. Though the Bushes still own it, tourists enjoy the scenic drive along Ocean Avenue, where they can glimpse the property.

Peacefield

One of many presidential houses in Massachusetts, both Adams lived at Peacefield in Quincy.

Massachusetts has produced more presidents than any other New England state and can claim the most presidential houses: John and John Quincy Adams, who lived at Peacedale in Quincy. John F. Kennedy, of course, was born in Brookline, summered in Hyannis Port and lived in Boston. George H.W. Bush was born in Milton, but his family soon moved to Greenwich, Conn.

Massachusetts also has quite a presidential houses known as summer White Houses. Calvin Coolidge, who lived the greater part of his life in Northampton, spent a summer in Swampscott. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama summered on Martha’s Vineyard. Less well-known summer visitors include Franklin Pierce, who spent time in Andover, Mass., and Grover Cleveland, who vacationed in Marion and Bourne on the South Shore. Cleveland’s summer home in Bourne, Gray Gables, was torn down but rebuilt to resemble the original.

William Howard Taft summered twice in Beverly until his hostess floated her house to Marblehead to discourage him. (She didn’t like the crowds he attracted.)

We won’t even count the presidents who lived in Massachusetts while attending Harvard. Okay, we will: the Adamses, Kennedy, Obama, both Roosevelts and Rutherford B. Hayes.

But since two presidents lived most of their lives in Quincy, we chose Peacefield, the Adams Family homestead. Built by a Loyalist in 1731 and abandoned during the American Revolution, John and Abigail bought the house in 1787. They lived in London at the time, and found the house disappointing when they returned. Abigail said it looked like ‘a wren’s nest.’ But she spent years renovating and expanding it while John attended to his political duties.

John Quincy Adams also lived at Peacefield, as did his son, the statesman Charles Francis Adams and his grandson, historian Henry Adams.

Peacefield today belongs to the U.S. government as the Adams National Historical Park. It comprises 11 buildings, including the birthplaces of John and John Quincy Adams.

For more information, click here.

Franklin Pierce Homestead

The Pierce Homestead, one of two presidential houses in New Hampshire where Franklin Pierce lived.

Franklin Pierce grew up in the gracious home his father built after serving in the American Revolution. He may even have been born there in 1804, the year his father built the house.

Benjamin Pierce had bought 200 acres in Hillsborough, N.H., after the new state turnpike opened nearby. Benjamin Pierce ran a tavern, and on Christmas Eve in 1824 hosted a dinner for 21 Revolutionary War veterans. Franklin probably attended — or helped serve — the dinner. Benjamin Pierce later served two terms as New Hampshire’s governor.

Franklin lived in the family home until for 23 years until 1834, when he married. He had spent seven years away at school, college and law study in Portsmouth.

His wife, Jane Appleton, didn’t like Hillsborough, and they moved to Concord. Benjamin Pierce died in 1839 and left the house to his son-in-law. Franklin’s sister, Elizabeth, married John McNeil, Jr., a general in the War of 1812.

After his disappointing single term as president, Franklin Pierce briefly returned to his childhood home in Hillsborough.

New Hampshire actually has two Franklin Pierce presidential houses: the one in Hillsborough, and the Pierce Manse in Concord, also a house museum. For more information, click here.

Eisenhower House

Eisenhower House, one of Rhode Island’s presidential houses.

In 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower and his wife Mamie summered in Newport, R.I., during his presidency in 1958 and 1960. At first in 1958 he stayed at the Naval War College on Coasters Harbor Island, but he wanted to be closer to the golf course at the Newport Country Club. He moved to a mansion at Fort Adams.

Now called Eisenhower House, it was built in 1873 for Gen. Henry Jackson Hunt, a Civil War artillery officer. The house has stunning views of Narragansett Bay and Newport Harbor.

Another of Rhode Island’s presidential houses, Hammersmith Farm, was the site of John F. Kennedy’s marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. As president, Kennedy occasionally visited the farm, still in private hands.

Eisenhower House is now part of Fort Adams State Park and available for weddings and social events. For more information click here.

Plymouth Notch, Vt.

Birthplace of Calvin Coolidge, one of several presidential houses in Plymouth Notch.

Calvin Coolidge’s birthplace is such a throwback to the way Vermont used to be that some people call it “Vermont’s Brigadoon.” Coolidge cannily used it as a backdrop to hone his image as a thrifty Yankee.

Coolidge was actually sworn in as president of the United States while vacationing at his boyhood home in Plymouth Notch, Vt.

His father, a notary, swore him in at 2:47 a.m. on Aug. 3, 1923, hours after President Warren G. Harding died.

Coolidge often visited his family home, a modest white frame farmhouse in the classic New England style of big house, little house, back house, barn.

The Secret Service detail assigned to him slept in tents on the property and a dance hall nearby served as his office in the summer of 1924.

Today Coolidge’s birthplace and surrounding buildings comprise the Calvin Coolidge Homestead District, which includes the Cilley General Store, the Post Office, the Wilder Restaurant (serving lunch), the church, several barns, the dance hall and the Plymouth Cheese factory. For more information click here.

Click on the image to buy the ebook from Amazon. Paperback version now available.

If you really want to know what a president and first lady were like, find out what they ate. The New England Historical Society’s new book, Eat Like a President, tells you about the six New England presidents, their servants, their families, their friends and how they struggled to make the White House presentable for public entertainment. Click here to buy the ebook; here for the paperback.

Images: Graves-Gilman House By Eumenes12 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5447836. Walker Point, By Zollernalb – own work, eigene Arbeit, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2730841. Franklin Pierce Homestead By User:Magicpiano – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20697770. Plymouth Notch By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34788716. Peacefield by By Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3162095.

This story about presidential houses was updated in 2023.

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The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the Triple Decker

In the years before World War I, New England’s iconic triple decker brought thousands of immigrants into the middle class. Triple deckers also inspired the undying hatred of housing reformers.

The New England triple decker

Triple deckers sprang up in New England’s booming mill towns and industrial cities between 1870 and 1910. Ambitious immigrants loved them because they offered a path to home ownership. A family could live in one apartment and collect rents from two.

But to housing reformers, the triple decker was a fire trap and a nasty place to live. Much better, thought the reformer, were small single-family homes in the suburbs and subsidized public housing in the cities.

The housing reformers prevailed – for a while.

History of the Triple Decker

The name triple decker originally referred to a British man-of-war, which had three gun decks.

They appeared in New England after the Civil War. Some consider them an outgrowth of New England’s colonial building traditions – because they’re made of wood.

By 1870, New England’s economy boomed. An influx of immigrants caused the populations to triple over the next few decades in Boston, Lowell and Worcester in Massachusetts, Lewiston in Maine and Bridgeport in Connecticut. Populations quadrupled in Fall River, Mass., Pawtucket, R.I., Waterbury, Conn., and Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire.

Poor families moved near factories and mills to work, but at first many scrounged for a place to live. They jammed into stables, cellars and even tents.

Investors saw an opportunity to make money by building light-framed

The Peter Baker Triple Decker

wooden three-flats. For example, Peter Baker owned a lead manufacturing company in Worcester. He built several triple deckers on Vernon Hill as speculative investments to house Irish working-class families.

Athanase Dussault, a carpenter, built a cluster of six triple deckers in Fall River in 1916 for a successful peddler named David Boguslavsky.

Hundreds more mill owners, small builders and carpenters put up the wooden three flats all over the region. They concentrated in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New England’s industrial cities.

Between 1880 and 1930, 16,000 triple deckers housing about 192,000 people sprang up in Boston.

In Fall River, 4,120 of the city’s 17,698 structures are triple deckers.

Living in or near a New England triple decker, wrote The New York Times, was like hating the Yankees or skipping work on St. Patrick’s Day.

American Dream

The triple decker never won any architectural awards, but it enjoyed enormous popularity. It gave working- and middle-class families a chance to own a home. They could live in one unit and rent out the other two.

The triple decker ‘succeeded remarkably in housing and helping the poor,’ wrote Howard Husock in his 1990 article Rediscovering the three-decker house.

A triple decker in Haverhill, Mass

Unlike New York’s cramped, windowless brick tenements, New England’s triple deckers offered the worker a big, airy living space with heat and hot water.

An ambitious clerk or mechanic who earned an average of $25 a week could rent for $20-$25 an apartment with a parlor, dining room, kitchen and bathroom. It also had a stove, hot water, two bedrooms, two porches, heat, electricity and hardwood floors.

Worcester

In 1947, the Worcester Telegram called triple deckers ‘monuments to a time of good workmanship, good family life, and good practical answers to the problem of rapid city expansion.’

Some consider Worcester the epicenter and birthplace of triple-decker construction.

Triple deckers made up half of all building construction between 1890 and 1900 in Worcester. Of the 6,000 built, 4,000 remain, and as late as 1972 they housed one-third of the city’s 100,000 residents.

The National Register of Historic Places lists many Worcester triple deckers, such as the Ludwig Anderson house built in 1896. Anderson, a grocer, first owned the triple decker on Vernon Hill. Swedish immigrants moved there to work in nearby steel wire mills. Anderson’s first tenants included two Swedish families headed by a machinist and a woodworker. Later tenants included wireworkers, machinists, a clerk, a chauffeur and a toolmaker.

Not everyone in Worcester – or elsewhere, for that matter – fell in love with the triple decker. In 1900, the Worcester Board of Trade called the triple decker ‘a blot on the landscape.’ It towered, ‘like an enormous dry-goods box on our sightly hills.’

Backlash

The so-called ‘reformers’ who tried to get rid of the triple decker also, not coincidentally, wanted to get rid of immigrants.

In 1894, Prescott Farnsworth Hall and two other Harvard graduates formed the Immigration Restriction League to sound the alarm about the dangers of immigration.

Prescott Farnsworth Hall

Hall also campaigned against triple deckers as chairman of the Town Improvement Committee of the Brookline Civic Society.

“Americans are both esthetically defective and blindly devoted to obsolete ideas as to the extent of personal liberty,’ he wrote in support of banning triple deckers. He argued they caused deadly fires and didn’t benefit their residents.

What Prescott Farnsworth Hall really didn’t like was immigrants joining America’s middle class.

Flat-roofed triple deckers in Cambridge, Mass.

Another housing ‘reform’ group, the National Housing Association, in 1912 published a guide to reform that advocated single-family homes in the suburbs and subsidized public housing in the cities. The problem with public housing, though, was that it didn’t allow tenants to become homeowners.

But under pressure from such groups, Massachusetts in 1912 passed a law allowing cities and towns to ban triple deckers. Not in so many words, though. The language said municipalities could prevent construction of any ‘wooden tenement’ in which ‘cooking shall be done above the second floor.‘

The Triple Decker Menace

The Providence Chamber of Commerce put it more bluntly in a 1917 Providence magazine article that attacked the three decker menace.

People, except for Italians and Jews, were realizing ‘it lowers one’s social standing to be rated as a three decker dweller,’ argued the chamber.

It described the unpleasant experience of a middle-floor tenant, with tramping feet on the thin board floor overhead and the aroma of cooking from the lower floor. Children squabbled, mothers quarreled over yard use on wash day and clutter blocked the landings. “They have moved on to the greater joy and comfort of the two-tenement house,” noted the chamber.

The chamber urged Rhode Island to ban the triple decker menace and follow the example of Bridgeport, Conn., and 36 Massachusetts municipalities such as Arlington, Belmont, Brookline and Swampscott.

More restrictive laws followed, and by 1927 it was almost impossible to build a triple decker.

Fall and Rise of the Triple Decker

By the 1950s, flight to the suburbs and urban renewal caused the abandonment or destruction of thousands of triple deckers.

Banks didn’t like lending mortgage money for old triple-deckers. They fell apart quickly because absentee landlords abandoned and neglected them.

Boston triple deckers

In 1975, the Boston Globe editorialized that people still viewed the triple decker as, ‘second rate, even hazardous housing.’

But times changed. And, as the Globe pointed out, ‘nobody can afford to replace them.’

“Homely though they may be, they are too useful for destruction and there is nothing to take their place,” the Globe opined.

It turned out that a triple-decker built for working-class factory workers in 1910 fit the needs of middle-class professionals a century later.

In the 1980s, interest rates soared, money dried up for public housing and condomania took over.

Banks then changed their minds and began lending for mortgages on triple decker condominiums. Builders even started to build new triple-deckers in Boston.

“Their economical value has stood the test of time,” wrote Boston magazine in 2016.

Sally Zimmerman, preservation manager for Historic New England, said triple-deckers would have been demolished and replaced with smaller structures if it hadn’t been for the condominium.

“The condominium is the real savior of the three-decker,” she said.

If you enjoyed this story about the triple decker, you may also want to read about New England’s Sears houses here.

Images: Ludwig Eaton By Pvmoutside – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15657274; Boston triple deckers By myself (User:Piotrus) – Own work (taken by myself), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6651986. Cambridge triple-deckers By Dr.frog at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Sreejithk2000 using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10522657. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Mysterious Death of Massachusetts Movie Star Thelma Todd

Eighty years ago Thelma Todd shot to fame. An actress from Massachusetts, she had conquered Hollywood by the time of her death at just 29 years old. Who killed her? No one knew then, and no one knows today.

Was it the ex-husband, a shady film producer and agent? Her gangster lover? Or was it her business partner?

Thelma Todd, 1933.

Was it Thelma Todd herself? The question has overshadowed her legacy as an actress, but it has also made her famous long after her death.

Thelma was born in 1906 in Lawrence. Her father was a superintendent of streets and an alderman. Schoolmates recalled a friendly, bright and determined young woman.

After high school, Thelma attended Lowell State Normal School – the school for training teachers, now part of Lowell University. Though Thelma went so far as to do her student teaching, she hoped for fame and a more glamorous career. So she entered beauty pageants and acting contests.

Thelma Todd: The Star

Buster Keaton, Thelma Todd and Jimmy Durante in Speak Easily (1932)

In 1925 she was crowned “Miss Massachusetts” at the state Elks convention in Swampscott. She also caught the eye of Hollywood talent scouts. They recommended her for the Paramount School for Junior Stars, run by the Paramount Movie Studio. There, her instructors praised her for her talent and warned her to watch her weight.

Movie producer Hal Roach – the director behind Laurel and Hardy – signed Thelma to a contract and began casting her in zany short comedies. Her roles would be familiar to viewers today. She belonged to a duo – one sensible woman, the other a clown. Together they would work their way in and out of comical situations.

Thelma Todd played the adorable working girl trying to retain her poise while being dragged into her friend’s shenanigans.

Actresses ZaSu Pitts and Patsy Kelly co-starred with her in these films. She established her comedy chops playing the straight women to the Marx Brothers in two of their films. Thelma, though, wanted more from her career. She wanted to try dramatic film.

Thelma Todd began dating director Roland West. Together they planned to launch her in a new direction in his dramatic film Corsair. (Watch it here.) At the time of their affair, West had a wife who was apparently not troubled by it.

To hammer home the point that her role marked a departure in her career, Thelma used the name Alison Lloyd in Corsair. She now had two professional outlets for her talent, starring in comedies with the likes of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby and in dramatic films playing off leading men such as John Barrymore and Ricardo Cortez.

Thelma Todd in Corsair.

By now Thelma Todd was a bankable actress. Attractive, slim – one interviewer noted she had dropped 20 pounds since she left Massachusetts – and disciplined in her acting, Thelma was in demand.

In her personal life, Thelma had been linked with many Hollywood men. She had gotten married in an elopement in 1932 to Pasquale DiCicco, a movie producer/agent/small-time hood.

The marriage to DiCicco would last just two years. It was punctuated by frequent, loud arguments fueled by alcohol. But by 1933, Thelma was showing just how savvy she had become. She had traveled to London for work and returned to Massachusetts to visit family. Newspapers floated a rumor that the star was contemplating divorce.

Divorce

She addressed the rumors with a sly wink: “I’m afraid it would be silly to make a divorce announcement now. With so many being discussed in Hollywood I wouldn’t have a chance to get any sort of publicity.”

But the divorce did come through, in 1934. That same year Thelma decided to spread herself even thinner. She opened a restaurant and supper club in Pacific Palisades: Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe. The restaurant was a draw for tourists because it was popular with Thelma’s celebrity friends. Her partner in the club was Roland West, her former lover and director.

Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe today

Thelma roared through 1935 on all cylinders. She knew the shelf life for a Hollywood starlet was not a long one. The supper club, she said, would be her financial stability when her career petered out. She didn’t worry about wrinkles or a few extra pounds because she would have the cafe.

As Christmas 1935 approached, her family back in Lawrence hoped that 29-year-old Thelma might visit for the holidays. But on Dec. 16, 1935 Thelma was found dead. The airbrushed version of her life would soon crumble.

Thelma Todd: The Scandals

Thelma Tood told a newspaper interviewer that for a Massachusetts girl, Hollywood took some getting used to.

“At first when I was making a picture and men hailed me as sweetheart or honey or came up and put an arm around me when they wanted to tell me something, I was insulted. We don’t take familiarities from men in New England,” she said, but she soon learned not to take offense.

“They were just being friendly,” she said. “Now I appreciate that fact.”

In the wake of Todd’s mysterious death, attention would immediately focus on two men.

Thelma Todd was found in a closed garage on the morning of Monday, Dec. 16. She sat at the wheel of her showy convertible Lincoln Phaeton. The garage sat on a hill high above her night club, and it was owned by Roland West.

The coroner quickly ruled that accidental carbon monoxide poisoning had killed Thelma Todd. But soon her friends began raising questions. Three broad areas of suspicion emerged.

Ex-husband

Pasquale DiCicco, Thelma’s ex-husband was out of her life, or so everyone assumed. But Saturday night before her death, DiCicco and Todd had a fight at a party. Todd had been invited and she was seated at a table where a chair was reserved for Di Cicco. But he showed up with another date and sat at another table. Thelma was furious.

Actress Ida Lupino arranged the party and she later said DiCicco had asked to be invited and seated next to Thelma. He explained that he was joking when he said it was because Thelma was so hostile to him. DiCicco wasn’t just a New York agent. He was also an associate of New York mobster Lucky Luciano. (And future husband of Gloria Vanderbilt.)

Lucky Luciano in Rome.

He had introduced Thelma to Luciano and the two had an affair. Luciano would have been a valued connection because he could obtain amphetamines that an actress would need to keep her weight down.

Luciano was in Los Angeles at the time off Todd’s death. Rumors also floated that Luciano had pressured Todd to let him use the third floor of her supper club for a casino and that he abused her.

Roland West

The second line of suspicion fell on Thelma’s one-time lover and restaurant partner Roland West. West’s career had cooled after the film he made with Thelma Todd, and the full nature of his relationship with her was unclear. The two had apartments next to each other above the restaurant, but he remained married.

Roland West

Thelma and West had discussed the future of their restaurant. Though wildly popular, it didn’t make money. Some sources say that West told Thelma the reason the restaurant was losing money was they were pressured by Luciano to buy from mob-controlled suppliers at exorbitant prices.

Had Thelma planned to square off against the mob? And what exactly did Luciano have over her or West to be able to extort from them? Before Thelma departed for her Saturday night party, West had asked her to return before 2 a.m. True to his word, at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning, West locked the doors to the supper club and went upstairs.

He went to sleep at 2:30. Thelma had not yet returned. The dog startled later in the morning, but West heard nothing. The coroner suggested that Thelma climbed the 270 steps to the garage at the top of the hill over the restaurant with the intention of sleeping in her car. Chilled by the night air, she started the motor for heat and was overcome by carbon monoxide fumes.

But there were problems with his theory.

Questions

The engine in the car in which Thelma Todd died was not running when it was found on Monday morning, yet there was still fuel in the tank.

Further, witnesses began coming forward to say that Thelma had not spent all day Sunday dead behind the wheel of her car, as the coroner proposed. She had spoken to one friend on the phone. And Jewel Carmen, Roland West’s wife, said she had seen Thelma Todd in her car with a man on Sunday.

Thelma herself had told friends that she had a new romantic interest, a man from San Francisco. This unidentified stranger could never be located.

An autopsy revealed that Thelma’s blood contained lethal levels of carbon monoxide and that she may have been drunk at the time of death. But it also found damage to her throat that someone might have caused by forcing a hose or other object into her mouth.

That finding would create an eerie echo of a story involving Luciano and Thelma. She had sworn off drinking at one point to control her weight, and he had forced a champagne bottle into her mouth to get her drunk.

Thelma Todd: Postscript

Still other theories floated around. Thelma’s father had died in 1926 and her mother had moved to California to live with her. She had told an acquaintance that she planned to build a large new mansion. How could she afford this?

Some suggested that Thelma was actually despairing at the poor performance of the restaurant and took her own life. But friends refuted that notion, describing her as lighthearted as ever.

In the end, a grand jury impaneled to investigate the case could reach no conclusion. It split between those who thought her death suspicious and those who thought it accidental, as the coroner first suggested.

Thelma’s mother Alice had a forthright opinion. Her daughter died accidentally, she said. She chalked up to the investigation to “cheap politicians trying to get jobs.”

Roland West continued to run the supper club after Thelma Todd died, though it lost much of its star appeal and he eventually renamed it. West’s artistic career largely ended when Todd got married, and some would say he made a death bed confession about knowing more about her death than he let on.

As for Thelma Todd herself, she made the journey back to Lawrence, Mass. Family had Thelma’s ashes buried with her mother when she died.

You may also enjoy this story about another mysterious death of a New Englander who went to Hollywood here. This story about Thelma Todd was updated in 2022.

Images: Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Cafe By Foto: © JCS / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23777012

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Lady Deborah Moody, A Dangerous Woman, Comes to New England

In 1654, when New York governor Peter Stuyvesant needed help collecting taxes, he turned to Deborah Moody. The career of the Salem, Mass., woman then came full circle from outcast to political power broker.

Sketch of a woman in 1640 by Wenceslaus Hollar.

A friend of John Winthrop, Moody came to Massachusetts to escape religious intolerance in England sometime before 1640. Moody’s husband, a baronet, had died 10 years earlier. Her son had sold most of the familial lands in Wiltshire.

In trying to reestablish her life as a widow, Lady Moody had visited London where she attended some of the more exotic religious services of the day among the Baptists and Quakers.

Deborah Moody, Anabaptist

Deborah Moody became an Anabaptist, a school of thought that held people should not be baptized as children but rather as adults.

Anabaptism amounted to heresy in the 1630s. Lady Moody, now a heretic, had to appear before England’s Star Chamber, the high court that heard cases involving the nobility. The court had the power to decide how long nobles could live away from their ancestral estates, and it ordered Lady Moody to go home to Wiltshire.

A 1504 document showing Henry VII in England’s Star Chamber with clerics and the mayor of London.

Moody had considered joining Winthrop and his settlement in America. Though she had long criticized the Church of England, the prospect of joining in the new colony had initially seemed too daunting. But with this new frustration, Deborah Moody decided to move.

At age 54, she pulled up stakes and sailed for America. She first settled in Saugus on a grant of 400 acres for a plantation. Shortly, however, she bought a small house in Salem, and then a farm of more than 1,000 acres from John Humphrey in nearby Swampscott. Humphrey, a one-time deputy governor of Massachusetts, had grown tired of the new colony and was returning to England.

Neighbor Trouble

She had the misfortune of moving into the neighborhood of the Rev. Hugh Peter, also a fellow member of the church at Salem. Given her unconventional beliefs she could hardly have chosen a worse neighbor. Peter was one of the ministers who had successfully prosecuted Anne Hutchinson just two years earlier for her Anabaptist beliefs.

Hugh Peter. Image courtesy of The Public Catalogue Foundation

Peter succeeded in having her banished from Massachusetts for her illegal religious beliefs.

Faced with the increasing hostility, Deborah Moody decided to leave Massachusetts just as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams had. Rather than head for Rhode Island, however, Moody chose New Amsterdam (now New York).

John Winthrop noted in his journal: “The Ladye Moodye, a wise and anciently religious woman, being taken with the error of denying baptism to infants, was dealt withal by many of the elders and others, and admonished by the church of Salem (whereof she was a member); but persisting still, and to avoid further trouble, etc., she removed to the Dutch, at the advice of all her friends. Many others infected with Anabaptism removed thither also. She was after excommunicated.”

John Winthrop

Gravesend

Moody and a group of her followers who relocated in 1643 to New Amsterdam found the Dutch government much more tolerant. She still had considerable wealth, and New Amsterdam welcomed her. The governor granted her 7,000 acres on the southwestern tip of Long Island.

Lady Deborah Moody Memorial in Gravesend.

She called her new settlement Gravesend. But the new town had a rocky beginning. Though she had cautioned all her fellow settlers to pay the local Native Americans for any land they wanted to use, there were misunderstandings. The indigenous people did not embrace the concept of property ownership. Payments were for fishing rights, they believed, while the colonists expected full ownership of the land they paid for.

Soon, the Natives attacked and the settlers gathered in Lady Moody’s sizable home for protection. Deborah Moody toyed with the idea of returning to her home and land in Massachusetts. Peter had by now returned to England. He would eventually be executed as a regicide for his role in the trial and execution of Charles I.

Old Gravesend Cemetery.

But Peter was not the only enemy Moody had. Moody wrote to Winthrop asking whether she might return, and on-again, off-again governor John Endecott urged him to advise her against it unless she was prepared to renounce her views.

“I shall desire that she may not have advice to return to this jurisdiction, unless she will acknowledge her evil in opposing the churches and leave her opinions behind her, for she is a dangerous woman,” Endecott wrote.

Deborah Moody, Brooklynite

Moody and her fellow Gravesend villagers fortified their small town and dug in. Over the coming years, the town grew and Deborah Moody earned widespread respect. Gravesend did not adopt a single, sanctioned church. Rather, people worshiped as they wished with many, like Lady Moody, simply conducting services in their homes.

As stability set in, Lady Moody emerged as a major power in the town. She had so much influence that in 1654 Gov. Stuyvesant had to call on her to mediate a dispute over taxes.

Dahill Road and Kings Highway in Gravesend, Brooklyn.

Lady Deborah Moody died in 1659 at 73, and Gravesend — now part of Brooklyn — bears her stamp to this day. You can still walk some of the streets she laid out in 1643.

With thanks to Liz Loveland for her editorial suggestion. This story about Deborah Moody was updated in 2023.

Images: Lady Deborah Moody Memorial by By Jim.henderson – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23005948. Old Gravesend Cemetery By Jim.henderson – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23005944. Brooklyn roads by CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1335607.

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Denton Crocker Enjoys Basic Training During WW II

Denton Crocker considered becoming a conscientious objector during World War II, but he decided Germany’s aggression had to be stopped. He was drafted while attending Northeastern University, but got a deferment until graduation. On June 29, 1942, he was inducted in his hometown of Swampscott, Mass. He spent 10 weeks at Fort Devens in Ayer, Mass., before being shipped off to Camp Pickett in Virginia for basic training.

Denton Crocker

It was at Camp Pickett that he chose the path that took him to the South Pacific fighting the Allies’ deadliest enemy: the mosquito. During his first week in basic training he was noticed as officer material because, he believed, he was 6’4”, he had Boy Scout training and he was enjoying himself.

On Sept. 13, 1942, Denton Crocker wrote home to his parents in Swampscott.

There is hardly a spare moment during the week in which to write so I will send off a letter each Sunday. The program each day during the week is something like the following: Up at 5:30 for roll call & 15min of setting-up exercises, then breakfast. After that there is time to make up the bunk (it has to be ripped up & remade each day) to shine shoes, etc. Then there are 2 classes of about an hour each dealing with such varied subjects as (1) personal hygiene, (2) first aid, (3) elementary anatomy and physiology, (4) scouting, patrolling & the use of cover and concealment, (5) the organization of the Medical Department, (6) care & nomenclature of equipment, etc. Then come two hours of drill. Next dinner and in the afternoon there may be a hike (we have had 2 short ones not over 4mi with a light or stripped pack) or there may be classes — or both. After supper clothes are washed, shoes shined, notes studied, etc. Lights go out at 9:30.

I have learned how to make up a full and stripped pack, what the procedure is in changing the guard, the general orders for guard duty and a lot else. I am scheduled to go on guard duty Wednesday.

In the same letter he tells his parents of his decision to attend Sanitary Technicians School. He also reported he was called into the platoon sergeant’s room for a favorable report on his progress:

Friday I had the interview with a Captain in the Sanitary Corps. He described the type of work and it appealed to me so a week from tomorrow I start an intensive three-week course in the Sanitary Technicians School here. There will be frequent tests and probably studying in the evening. Also I well be held responsible for the material handed out in the {basic training} classes such as I have had this week. During my 3wk course I will be exempt from daytime {basic training} drill, hikes, KP, & guard duty. When the course is over, I will rejoin the group I came here with and finish basic training when they do.

He later wrote he was determined to do his best and have a good time, which explains his final paragraph:

I’d just as soon you wouldn’t have people look me up here as I’ll be very busy weekends & every other time and would rather not feel obliged to accept invitations, etc.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress. With thanks to the Library of Congress, Veterans History Project.

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