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The Portuguese Farmers Who Made Falmouth Strawberries Famous

In 1892, Manuel Viera Martins retired from whaling and bought a cottage in the Waquoit section of Falmouth, Mass. He and his 11-year-old son cleared the scrub oak and pitch pine off the land with axes. Then they planted strawberries. The next spring they picked their first crop. Over the next four decades, hundreds of farmers from the Portuguese islands would grow millions of Falmouth strawberries. They made the Cape Cod town the largest producer of the tasty fruit in Massachusetts—and, for a time, the United States.

Portuguese farmers in Falmouth

Today, Tony Andrews’ pick-your-own strawberry farm remains one of the last vestiges of the Falmouth strawberry juggernaut that peaked around World War II. But the Portuguese islands still have a presence in Falmouth. Kale soup is on restaurant menus, linguica and choriza on sale in the local grocery stores. St. Anthony’s Church celebrates a Day of Portuguese Mass.

And on Pentecost Sunday, the Holy Ghost Society honors its patron saint with a festa, serving free sopas to anyone who comes.

Falmouth Strawberries

Manuel Viera Martins, nicknamed Tio Calhau, may not have been the first Portuguese islander to plant strawberries in Falmouth. Local lore bestows that honor on John Emerald. While working at a gardening job, the story goes, Emerald saw some strawberry runners sprouting from a trash heap. He then took them home and planted them in the sandy soil of East Falmouth.

Whatever the case, the two men’s lives followed the trajectory of most of the Portuguese islanders who settled in East Falmouth. They came from the Azores, where poverty and oppression made for harsh living conditions. Later they came from Cape Verde.

St. Michael’s, one of the Azorean islands From which Falmouth strawberry farmers came. They also came from Pico and Faial

Most settled first in the cities of Southeastern New England – New Bedford, Fall River, Taunton and Providence. To this day the region has the densest concentration of people with Portuguese ancestry in the United States.

After settling in the cities the Portuguese islanders came to Falmouth, returning to their farming roots. They found work on cranberry bogs, farms and as day laborers. Then they bought land. Falmouth had plenty, and it was cheap – a dollar or two an acre. Cape Codders viewed it as worthless, but the Azoreans saw something else.

Immigration

Tio Calhau, born on Pico in the Azores in 1855, shipped out on a New Bedford whaler, the Kathleen, as a young man. He landed in New Bedford after four years at sea and collected his 1/140^th share of the voyage’s profit. Then he signed up for another voyage on the Kathleen in 1875, and when it anchored in the Azores he jumped ship and went home.

Tio Calhau then married Maria Josefa Rodrigues, and in 1883 they immigrated to New Bedford. Tio Calhau took another whaling voyage, but when he came home Maria put his foot down: No more whaling.

In 1914, immigrants from Brava, Cape Verde, looking ashore from the Savoia as the await the disembarkation process to be finished. Photo courtesy New Bedford Standard-Times.

Whaling had brought many Portuguese immigrants to the United States. When whaling died out, the textile mills that replaced it drew more. Many took the packet service between New Bedford and the Azores, eventually a nine-day steamship ride.

By 1900, 142 people of Portuguese descent lived in Falmouth, then a town of 3,000. Of the 55 who had immigrated, 54 came from the Azores; the rest were born in the United States.

That was when the strawberry farms began to take off. By 1922, Falmouth had 300 acres of strawberry fields, many along the Davisville road. Most farmers had only 10 or 20 acres, but a few had 60 or 70. Altogether they extended over six to seven square miles. “One million quarts of them left her fields the past season!” gushed Cape Cod Magazine that year. And new land was being cleared every year.

Strawberries

Frank A. Waugh came to Cape Cod in 1920 to write about the Falmouth strawberries for The Country Gentleman. The Portuguese farmers had identified an agricultural opportunity overlooked by many, he wrote.

“Up until quite recent times agriculture had been considered a negligible institution on Cape Cod,” wrote Waugh. “Some persons, not excluding the natives, have indeed considered it a joke.”

Alice Valerio in 1930

(Waugh did note one exception: the cranberry.)

“These Portuguese farmers are honest, thrifty, hard workers and remarkably intelligent in their management of this somewhat complicated industry,” wrote Waugh.

He asked Manuel Garden, one of the leading Portuguese strawberry growers, how he cleared his strawberry land. “With my own hands and an axe,” Garden said.

The Emeralds

John Emerald (Americanized from Amaral) had two brothers, Frank and Manuel, who arrived from the Azores in 1898 and 1900, respectively. They married, had families, and grew strawberries, along with turnips, corn, potatoes, carrots and raspberries.

Early in the morning, Manuel would work on his farm on the Davisville Road, then bike to Penzance Point in Woods Hole to work as a landscaper on one of the estates. Then he rode home and worked his strawberry field until it got dark. Bit by bit he acquired more land. At first he’d buy an acre or two for $1 “and other considerations.” Eventually he could afford an acre of cleared land for $100.

Emily Emerald and her father Manuel

Manuel married Estrella Farias in 1903, and they had eight children. The Emerald clan reigned over Falmouth strawberries. Manuel’s brother John started shipping his strawberries in refrigerated railroad cars to Boston. When others followed, a local side hustle grew into a regional industry. Boston buyers knew the Falmouth strawberries as fern berries because the pickers packed them in layers of ferns.

The growers formed two cooperatives to market the berries, which sold in New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Montreal and Quebec. At peak season, the railroad ran a special Berry Train.

Eventually, trucks replaced trains. They left after sundown to make the then-seven-hour round trip to Boston. At the industry’s height in 1947, Falmouth sent 32 trucks to market each night, carrying a total of 13 million quarts of strawberries. That amounted to half the commonwealth’s strawberry crop.

Child’s Work

Children worked in the strawberry fields along with their parents. They fed and watered livestock, chopped kindling and filled the woodbox. As an adult, Joe Medeiros recalled school children walking the family cow to a pasture across the road from the school. “Come three o’clock, when they let us out of school, I’d call my cow,” he said. “The other guy would get his cow and we would walk home down Davisville Road.”

Because strawberries ripened over just a few weeks, children were allowed to leave school to pick them. Whole families picked strawberries. Bea Emerald, Manuel’s daughter, remembered picking 275 boxes of strawberries in one day when she was seven years old.

The Falmouth strawberry farms kept expanding, and they ran out of pickers. Most farmers hired about 10 pickers; the Emeralds had 25.

Bea Emerald would take the train to the Portuguese neighborhoods in Wareham, to knock on doors looking for pickers. If she didn’t find enough there, she’d go to New Bedford and Providence.

Strawberry pickers

By the Great Depression, when so many looked for work, 3,000 strawberry pickers came to Falmouth during the harvest when the town’s population was only 5,000.

Farmers built sheds on the property to house them. Picker sheds on the Davisville Road survived well past the zenith of the Falmouth strawberry industry.

Many pickers were Cape Verdeans, who had emigrated because of a severe drought in 1904. They earned two cents a quart.

The Church Built by Falmouth Strawberries

Devout Roman Catholics, the Portuguese farmers got permission from the diocese in 1911 to build their own church. They would call it St. Anthony’s, after the patron saint of the Azores. Farmers gave all the money from the berries picked on the peak Sunday of the harvest to the church. St. Anthony’s became “the church that strawberries built.” All the labor for the church was donated, and St. Anthony’s celebrated its first Mass — in Portuguese — in January 1924.

St. Anthony’s merged with St. Joseph Guardian of the Holy Family Parish in 2021.

Walking to church

Falmouth’s Portuguese communities also formed fraternal societies, such as The Fresh Pond Holy Ghost Society and the East Falmouth Holy Ghost Association. The Fresh Pond Society still puts on a festa in June. The celebration starts with a procession that takes a crown and a scepter to an altar, music, an auction and lots of Portuguese food — sopas, jag, cacoila and bacalhau, along with hot dogs and chips.

A third wave of immigration has contributed to the vibrancy of Portuguese culture in southeastern New England. It began in 1957, when a year of volcanic eruption devastated the Azorean island of Faial. Sen. John F. Kennedy then sponsored the Azorean Refugee Acts, which led to 100,000 Azorean refugees coming to the United States over 10 years. Today more Azoreans live in the United States than in the Azores.

Demise of Falmouth Strawberries

World War II brought the beginning of the end to the Falmouth strawberry boom. The war itself created a labor shortage, as people could get jobs with defense manufacturers or on the military installations on Cape Cod.

Soldiers from Camp Edwards would march up the Davisville Road to train for amphibious landings. The children who lived on the Davisville farms stood on the roadside and poured fresh strawberries into their helmets.

Strawberry growers tried to adapt to the wartime conditions. They held a picking competition between the sailors at Woods Hole and the soldiers at Camp Edwards. In 1944, German POWs at Camp Edwards went to work picking strawberries.

Tony Andrews

Antonio de Andrade, born in 1905 on Cape Verde, arrived in Providence as a 21-year-old sailor. He changed his name to Tony Andrews, and with his uncle bought 17 acres of land in East Falmouth in 1927. They cleared it and farmed it and expanded it to 50 acres. Nearly half had strawberries growing on them.

Tony Andrews bragged he could plant 5,000 strawberry plants in one day without machinery. But as pickers got hard to find, Andrews turned his farm into a successful pick your own operation during the mid 1950s.

Postwar development gobbled up the Falmouth strawberry farms, which dwindled to 150 acres in 1955, then to 12 in 1984. Of those, eight belonged to Tony Andrews. He died in 2006, and his seven children put the farm on the market. In 2018, the Town of Falmouth bought the farm for $2 million. People can still pick strawberries on it in June.

With thanks to Sopas, by Lewis A. White, Strawberry Farming by Jennifer Stone Gaines and The Emerald Family of East Falmouth by Richard Kendall.

Images: Strawberries By Marcus Vegas from Tallinn, Estonia – Delicacies, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4208712 St. Michael’s By Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92988433. Vintage images of Falmouth via youtube, St. Anthony’s, Falmouth, MA, Living History.

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Six Places That Raised a Liberty Pole

Beginning in 1766, the liberty pole symbolized dissent from Great Britain, but over the years it took on different meanings for the people who raised them.

The first liberty pole in America was actually a tree. On Aug. 14, 1765, the Sons of Liberty hanged stamp collector Andrew Oliver in effigy from the boughs of a large elm in Boston. Forever after it’s been known as the Liberty Tree.

When someone raised a red flag – a gift of John Hancock — at the top of the tree, it meant the Sons of Liberty should meet. British soldiers later hacked it down when they occupied Boston.

As tall as 170 feet high, the liberty pole sprang up in towns throughout New England as the British Parliament imposed unpopular taxes and restrictions on the American colonies. Sometimes it stood next to a liberty tree. Sometimes it replaced the tree.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, commenting on symbolic reisistance to Great Britain, wrote, “In this department of silent propaganda no single venture paid richer dividends than the Tree of Liberty.”

“Raising the liberty pole,” 1776 / painted by F.A. Chapman ; engraved by John C. McRae, N.Y.

The Liberty Pole

The Romans erected the first liberty pole after assassinating Julius Caesar. The murder plot’s leaders met at the Roman Forum, where someone placed a Phrygian cap from a freed slave on top of a pole to show the Romans won their freedom from Caesar’s tyranny.

In the British North American colonies, the liberty pole began to spring up in response to specific events. Shutesbury, Mass., for example, erected a liberty pole on Sept. 5, 1774, the day the Continental Congress first met.

When the pole (or tree) was capped with a red Phrygian cap or a flag, it meant the townspeople should assemble and vent their anger with the British government.

The liberty pole reappeared even after the Revolution ended. It showed resistance to the Whiskey Tax and support for the French Revolution. When the Sedition Act passed, the liberty pole reappeared — and disappeared. Federalists who supported the Sedition Act cut them down in Wallingford, Vt., and in Vassalboro, Maine.

By the mid-19^th century, people erected liberty poles as focal points for Fourth of July celebrations or as symbols of loyalty to the United States. Sometimes they stood for symbols of dissent and had nothing to do with patriotism.

The Phyrgian cap survives too — on the official seals of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. Army and the state flags of West Virginia, New Jersey and New York.

Here, then, are six places where a liberty pole once stood. If you know of any others, please mention them in the comments section.

Newtown, Conn.

On May 19, 1774, 1,000 residents of Farmington, Conn., erected a liberty pole, burned an effigy of Gov. Thomas Hutchinson and a copy of the Boston Port Act.

By October 1774, Connecticut newspapers reported, “Liberty-poles from 100 to 170 feet high, are erected and erecting in most of the towns of Connecticut.”

Newtown, Conn., put up a liberty pole to commemorate the nation’s centennial in 1876. It wasn’t the town’s first liberty pole, though; a resident remembered one in his childhood, sometime in the 1830s. The wooden pole fell to the weather and the town replaced it several times. Today, Newtown’s flagpole stands as the town’s most prominent landmark.

Old Town, Maine

A disagreement among two factions of the Penobscot Indian tribe resulted in two liberty poles on their reservation.

Sometime between 1848 and 1859, the Indians on the Penobscot Reservation in Old Town, Maine, split into two groups. It started when the old sachem, Atien Swassin, was accused of drunkenness, adultery and corruption. A public council convicted him and removed him from office, but his followers remained loyal to him. They formed the Old Party and erected a liberty pole and flag.

Those loyal to the new sachem formed the New Party and also erected a liberty pole and flag.

The two groups argued and fought until the Old Party sent a messenger to several Indian tribes in Canada, inviting them to participate in a fight on the reservation, also known as Indian Island. The tribes refused, but held a Great Fire Council to try to reconcile the two parties.

The council sent two envoys to the Penobscot Reservation, and they agreed to abolish the parties, cut down the liberty poles and live in peace. But a wily leader of the Old Party persuaded the New Party to cut down its liberty pole first. After they cut it down, three members of the Old Party hugged their liberty pole so now one could cut it down without cutting their arms.

Eventually the three Old Party members repented and apologized, and the two parties managed to get along after that, according to Sprague’s Journal of Maine History in 1917.

Bedford, Mass. (Still Raising a Liberty Pole)

The liberty pole appeared in many Massachusetts towns, including Taunton, Concord, Middleborough, Barnstable, Granville and Vineyard Haven. But as far as we know, only Bedford still commemorates the raising of the liberty pole two Saturdays before Patriots Day.

The tradition began in 1965, a year after the Bedford Minuteman Company of reenactors formed. Now, minutemen reenactors from all over New England gather on the Town Common and march with fife and drum to Wilson Park. There they watch a minuteman shinny up a 25-foot pole and place a red cap on it. Then a British soldier disrupts the celebration.

The Bedford Liberty Pole Capping Parade and Ceremony is one of the opening event for all of the minuteman companies of the region;

Portsmouth, N.H.

A tall flagpole with an eagle, a shield and a carved Phrygian cap marks the spot of Portsmouth’s first liberty pole. It lies between what is now Prescott Park and Strawbery Banke.

During the run-up to the American Revolution, a tidal inlet separated the two places, and a swing bridge connected them.

On Jan 9, 1766, New Hampshire’s Sons of Liberty erected a liberty pole by the bridge to show their opposition to the Stamp Act. They hoisted a banner that read, ‘Liberty, Property and No Stamp.’ They also forced the stamp tax collector, George Meserve, to resign.

From then on, Portsmouth called the bridge Liberty Bridge.

Portsmouth put up a flagpole to honor the original liberty pole on the Fourth of July in 1824, and then replaced it with another in 1899.

At that point, Portsmouth also filled in the inlet, dismantled the Liberty Bridge, tore down dilapidated old buildings and created Prescott Park and the Strawbery Banke house museum.

The flagpole, though, still stands in the original spot.

Newport, R.I.

Newport’s patriots assembled under the liberty tree on a triangular piece of land at the corner of Thames and Farewell streets. William Read had donated the land to William Ellery and other Sons of Liberty shortly after the repeal of the Stamp Act. There, the patriots held mock funerals for liberty and hanged unpopular Loyalists in effigy. They also put up a liberty pole at a distance from the tree and put their colors on both whenever appropriate.

When the British occupied Newport, they cut down the liberty tree. Newport patriots planted an oak tree in its place to commemorate their victory in the American Revolution. It lasted until the Civil War, and another oak was planted in 1876. That one lasted only 21 years. The fourth liberty tree, a leaf beech tree, was planted in 1897 and still stands. In 1919, Henrietta C. Ellery deeded the property and the tree to the city. It is now William Ellery Park, a small pocket park.

Waterford, Vt.

Capt. John Wyman was a belligerent Revolutionary War veteran extremely proud that he had fought at Bunker Hill. After the war he moved to Dummerston, Vt., and said he wanted to be buried on a hill on his farm. He got his wish, at least until the town moved his body to a cemetery. While he rested on his farm, however, townspeople erected a liberty pole next to his grave.

However, we couldn’t figure out where the old revolutionary had been buried, and Dummerston bears no sign of a liberty pole. Nor could we find evidence of liberty poles in Bennington or Wallingford, where Vermonters had erected them. We hit pay dirt, though, in the Lower Waterford section of St. Johnsbury.

The Caledonian Record reported on May 17, 1861, “People of all parties assembled at Lower Waterford to participate in the ceremony of giving to the breeze the American flag … and to declare their devotion to the constitution and the Union.” They formed into a hollow square around the liberty pole, and ‘the flag was brought forth and flung to the breeze…’

Howard Coffin, in his book, Something Abides: Discovering the Civil War in Today’s Vermont, refers to a photo that shows the flagpole in front of the Congregational Church across from the old hotel. Both still stand.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Amazing Indian Women From New England

Indian women faced double discrimination since the first European colonists arrived in the Americas. Many fought back against the prejudice that destroyed their traditional way of life.

Some Indian women like Lucy Nicolar exploited stereotypes to put across a message of equality for all. Other Indian women like Gladys Tantaquidgeon used modern education to preserve traditional customs and arts.

Here, then, are six amazing Indian women from New England. If you know of others, please mention them in the comments section.

Lucy Nicolar

Lucy Nicolar, a talented musician, took the stage name Princess Watahwosa, and spent her life mixing entertainment with political activism.

Publicity photo of Lucy Nicolar as Princess Watahwaso

She was born June 22, 1882, on the Penobscot reservation, which stretched along the Penobscot River in Maine from Indian Island to East Millinocket. As a child she traveled with her family to Kennebunkport. There they sold baskets and performed in Indian dress for tourists.

Lucy came to the attention of a Harvard administrator who hired her as his assistant, took her into his household and gave her musical and educational opportunities. Eventually she became a recording artist with Victor Records, performing adaptations of Indian songs such as By the Waters of Minnetonka and By the Weeping Waters.

Lucy Nicolar eventually returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation with her husband Bruce Poolaw, a Kiowa entertainer from Oklahoma. They opened a gift shop while Lucy and her sister campaigned to improve life on the reservation. The two Indian women raised the educational standards for Penobscot children by gaining access to the public schools. They also persuaded the state to build a bridge to the island.

Lucy and Florence also demanded the right to vote for their people. When the state extended suffrage to the Penobscots in 1955, Lucy Nicolar cast the first ballot.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain promoted the then-radical idea that Indians – and Indian women — are people.

The Lowell Offering

A half-Algonquian mill girl, she published some of the first criticisms of the treatment of Native Americans in short stories from 1841 to 1848.

Born sometime around 1797, perhaps in Wolfeboro or Brookfield, N.H., she was part European. She married Josiah Chamberlain, a farmer, in 1820 and they had three children. Her husband died in 1823. Betsey sold their farm and went to work in the Lowell textile mills to support herself and her children.

The mill girls wrote for magazines published in town called the Lowell Offering and the New England Offering. Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote for both.

Harriet Hanson Robinson, a Lowell Offering contributor, wrote that Betsey Guppy Chamberlain probably came to the mills from a Shaker community.

She had inherited Indian blood, and was proud of it. She had long, straight black hair, and walked very erect, with great freedom of movement. One of her sons was afterwards connected with the New York Tribune.

Betsey Guppy Chamberlain wrote 37 stories and poems for the magazines. In them, she embraced themes of Indian gods and spirituality while satirizing Christian hypocrisy. Robinson called her the most original, prolific and noted of all the Offering writers.

In a story called A New Society she wrote of her dream where new rules of living are adopted. Among those rules:

Resolved, That every father of a family who neglects to give his daughters the same advantages for an education which he gives his sons, shall be expelled from this society, and be considered a heathen.

Weetamoo

Weetamoo, a Pocasset Wampanoag Indian, was married to Wamsutta, the eldest son of Massasoit. Massasoit had negotiated a treaty of friendship with the Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation, and the English and Indians coexisted peacefully for 55 years.

Wamsutta succeeded his father as the tribe’s sachem. When war broke out between the English and the Narragansetts, Wamsutta and the Wampanoags joined the English against their rival tribe. After Wamsutta died, the Plymouth Colony grabbed more and more Indian land, subjected the Wampanoags to a humiliating peace treaty and hanged three of their men.

Weetamoo became sachem after Wamsutta died because the Wampanoags allowed women to become sachems in the absence of an adequate male heir.

Weetamo allied with her brother-in-law, Metacomet, also known as King Philip, to drive out the European settlers. They attacked the English in June 1675.

After months of bloody fighting in King Philip’s War, the English defeated the Wampanoags in August 1676. While trying to escape from them, Weetamoo drowned in the Taunton River. The English fighters mutilated her corpse, cut off her head and displayed it on a pole.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian acclaimed for her dancing in Paris.

Mary Alice Nelson

She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for recognition as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly was born on the Indian Island Reservation on Nov. 17, 1903, about 20 years later than Lucy Nicolar, with whom she performed early in her career.

As Molly Spotted Elk, she started out on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

In 1930, she starred in the film documentary The Silent Enemy. The next year Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned home, she stayed behind.

Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he wrote passionate love letters to her. She agreed to marry him, and they had a daughter. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

The Nazi invasion of Paris separated Molly and Jean. She fled with her daughter on foot over the Pyrenees and found her way home to Indian Island. For the rest of her life, she drifted between New York and the reservation, taking menial jobs. She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73, in poor physical and mental health. But she left a legacy: a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language.

Buffy St. Marie

Buffy Sainte-Marie was a rising pop star in the 1960s until her activism on behalf of her Native-American people put a lid on her career.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, 1970

She was born Feb. 20, 1941, on the Piapot Plains Cree Nation Reserve near Craven, Saskatchewan. Her parents abandoned her as an infant. Albert and Winifred Sainte-Marie, a Wakefield, Mass., couple of Mi’kmaq descent, adopted the baby known only as Beverly.

Nicknamed Buffy, she played piano and guitar by the time she went off to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

There she began to write songs about Native-American rights, addiction, incest and war. When the singer Donovan recorded one of her songs, Universal Soldier, it rose to the top of the charts. That launched her on a successful recording career – which began to sputter in the mid-1960s.

Starting in the 1990s, Buffy Sainte-Marie came out and said the industry blacklisted her in the 1960s because of her activism. She sent money to buy water for the Indians who seized Alcatraz Island the year before. She’d also set up a foundation to send young Indians to law school.

Her career took a twist in 1975, when Sesame Street called to ask her to make a one-time appearance on the show. Buffy Sainte-Marie then appeared on Sesame Street for the next five years.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon

Medicine woman Gladys Tantaquidgeon revived dying Indian traditions, published books on traditional herbal medicine and helped the Mohegan tribe gain Federal recognition.

She was born on June 15, 1899 to Mohegan parents, a descendant of the Mohegan chief Uncas. She grew up on Mohegan Hill in Uncasville, Conn.

Indian women elders selected her when she was five years old for training in traditional pharmacology and culture. While studying anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladys researched traditional Indian herbal medicine. Over her lifetime, she published several books about traditional medicine.

In 1931, Gladys, along with her father and brother, started the Tantaquidgeon Indian Museum. It displays eastern Indian artifacts and is still run by the Mohegan tribe.

During the Great Depression, she worked as a native arts specialist with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board. She helped western tribal artisans preserve traditional skills and arts by finding ways to sell their work. She also saved customs like the Ghost Dance and the Sun Dance, banned in the 19th century.

Gladys saved tribal records and correspondence, documents that helped the tribe’s case for federal recognition.

Gladys Tantaquidgeon died in 2005. Her great niece, Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel, continues her work as an author and the current Mohegan Medicine Woman.

End Notes

Images: Gladys Tantaquidgeon By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37390510. Thanks to Bunny McBride for research on Lucy Nicolar and Molly Spotted Elk in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives (Viewpoints on American Culture) edited by Theda Perdue and Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris . Thanks to Annalyssa Gypsy Murphy for her research on Betsey Guppy Chamberlain in Dissent Along the Borders of the Fourth World: Native American Writings as Social Protest and Judith A. Ranta in The Life and Writings of Betsey Chamberlain: Native American Mill Worker. And thanks to Jason Schneider for his research on Buffy St. Marie in Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music… from Hank Snow to the Band. For more about Weetamoo, read Longing To Be Free: The Bear, The Eagle and The Crown by Judith Guskin. This story was updated in 2022.

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Jolly Jane Toppan, the Killer Nurse Obsessed With Death

Jolly Jane Toppan killed at least 31 people between 1880 and 1901, but the doctors who hired her thought she was one of their best nurses.

Jane Toppan

Today, psychiatrists say she was one of the most unusual serial killers in history. Like many serial killers, she had an unstable childhood. Unlike most female serial killers, she did it for the sexual thrill.

As her victims lay dying, she got a powerful erotic charge from holding and caressing them.

Jane Toppan couldn’t resist that excitement, and admitted she aspired “to have killed more people — helpless people — than any other man or woman who ever lived.”

Jane Toppan

She was born Honora Kelley around 1857 in Boston, the youngest of four girls in a poor Irish immigrant family. Her mother died of tuberculosis when she was a year old.

Her father, Peter Kelley, a tailor, lost his mind and was said to have sewn his eyelids shut.

Kelley — known as ‘Kelley the Crack’ — tried to raise the girls, but he was suspected of abusing them.

In 1863, Kelley took 8-year-old Delia and 6-year-old Honora to an orphanage called the Boston Female Asylum in the city’s South End. The orphanage placed girls in respectable families when they turned 10.

Boston Female Asylum

Delia supposedly became a prostitute and an alcoholic. Another sister, Nellie, ended up in an insane asylum.

Honora became an indentured servant to Mrs. Ann C. Toppan of Lowell, Mass. The Toppans passed her off as an Italian girl whose parents died at sea, because of the stigma associated with the Irish. They also renamed her “Jane Toppan,” which sounded less Irish. She died well in school and had many friends, but got unattractively fat.

Jane also displayed the earmarks of a sociopath, telling outrageous lies: her father sailed around the world, her sister married an English nobleman, her brother was decorated at Gettysburg by Abraham Lincoln.

Nursing

At 18, Jane Toppan graduated from Lowell High School. The Toppans freed Jane from her indenture and gave her $50, but she stayed in the household as a servant.

Young Jane Toppan

When Ann Toppan died, Elizabeth took over the house, and continued to treat Jane as a servant, though with more kindness than her mother.

Elizabeth married a church deacon, Oramel Brigham, who moved into the Toppan house. But something — some strain or dispute — caused Jane to move out of the house she’d lived in for 20 years.

At 33, Jane Toppan started her training as a nurse at Cambridge Hospital in 1887. There she earned her nickname, ‘Jolly Jane,’ for her friendly outgoing personality. She liked to gossip, though, and celebrated the dismissal of students she didn’t like. She lied that the Tsar of Russia had offered her a nursing job, and she probably stole small things. Many of her fellow students grew to detest her.

The hospital administration grew concerned over her obsession with autopsies, but didn’t know she experimented with morphine and atropine on her elderly patients.

Boston City Hospital female ward around 1890

One patient, Amelia Phinney had an operation in 1887. Afterward, she said, Jane Toppan gave her a dose of bitter medicine, causing her to lose consciousness. Jane climbed into her bed and kissed her all over her face, but something startled her and she stopped.

The next morning Phinney decided it had all been a dream. Fourteen years later, Jane Toppan was arrested, and Phinney realized she’d had no dream.

Two Faces of Jane Toppan

Jane Toppan got a job at Massachusetts General Hospital, but lost it because she recklessly gave out opiates. Nevertheless, doctors recommended her as a private nurse to their wealthy clients.

Massachusetts General Hospital. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Outside of her job she guzzled beer, told dirty jokes, gossiped madly and enjoyed turning her friends against each other. But to the doctors and their patients she seemed a highly skilled professional, compassionate and cheerful.

Nurse Jane Toppan was earning $25 a week when women earned an average of $5 a week. She was also getting a sexual thrill, she later admitted, from climbing into bed with her patients as she murdered them.

Killing Spree

She befriended her elderly landlord and his wife, but killed them one by one. She later explained they had gotten ‘feeble and fussy’ and ‘old and cranky.’ Her colleagues in nursing school remembered her saying there was no use keeping old people alive.

In 1889, 70-year-old Mary McLear fell ill on a visit to Cambridge. Her doctor sent Jane Toppan, ‘one of my best nurses,’ to care for her. Jane poisoned Mary McLear.

A month later she killed a close friend with strychnine so she could take her job as dining hall matron at St. John’s Theological School in Cambridge. She got the job, but it didn’t last. The administration couldn’t ignore complaints of her incompetence and missing money.

Marriage Plot

Elizabeth Toppan Brigham, Jane’s foster sister, often invited her to come visit and stay in the house she grew up in. Jane sometimes took her up on the invitation.

Jolly Jane was vacationing in Buzzard’s Bay in the summer of 1899 when she targeted Elizabeth Brigham. Elizabeth complained of depression, and Jane invited her down to the Cape.

One day she took Elizabeth to the beach for a picnic of cold corned beef, taffy and mineral water laced with strychnine.

“I held her in my arms and watched with delight as she gasped her life out,” Jane later said.

Jane Toppan then insinuated herself into the household of Elizabeth’s widower, Oramel Brigham, because she wanted to marry him.

With three days she killed Brigham’s housekeeper, 77-year-old Edna Bannister. She took over from Edna and tried to impress Oramel Brigham with her housekeeping skills. Brigham made it clear he didn’t want her as a housekeeper or as a wife.

Jane Toppan decided to win his love by poisoning him and then nursing him back to health. That didn’t work either, so she threatened to claim he’d gotten her pregnant. An enraged Oramel Brigham ordered Jolly Jane Toppan out of the house.

She tried to commit suicide with an overdose of morphine, but failed and went to the hospital. Upon her release, she visited an old friend, Sarah Nichols, who lived with her brother in Amherst, N.H.

Suspicious Minds

By 1901, a Massachusetts state detective was following Jane Toppan. He suspected her of killing the entire family of Alden Davis .

Jane had rented a cottage in Bourne from the Davis family, but she hadn’t kept up with the rent. Alden Davis’ wife Mattie came to Cambridge to collect, but Jane killed her with a cocktail of morphine and atropine. Then she moved in with the elderly Alden Davis to take care of him.

Jane Toppan took care of Alden Davis all right. She killed him and then two of his married daughters, Minnie Gibbs and Geraldine Gordon.

Minnie Gibbs’ father-in-law suspected the sudden deaths of an entire healthy family had to do with foul play. He consulted a toxicologist and got a judge to order Minnie’s body exhumed. Investigation revealed she died of morphine and atropine poisoning.

Taunton State Hospital, 1987 (since demolished)

Police arrested Jane Toppan in Amherst on Oct. 29, 1901.

Jolly Jane Toppan went to trial for murder in the summer of 1902. She confessed to her lawyer she killed at least 31 people, perhaps as many as 100.

She claimed she started her killing spree because a boyfriend dumped her when she was 16. A Lowell office worker gave her a promise ring, but moved to Holyoke, Mass., and fell in love with someone else.

“If I had been a married woman, I probably would not have killed all of those people,” she said. “I would have had my husband, my children and my home to take up my mind.”

An eight-hour trial took place in Barnstable County Courthouse. A jury deliberated for 27 minutes and found Jane Toppan not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent the rest of her life at Taunton State Hospital, dying on Aug. 17, 1938.

Some attendants remembered her calling them into her room and smiling. “Get some morphine, dearie,” she said, “and we’ll go out in the ward. You and I will have a lot of fun seeing them die.”

This story last updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read ‘Married to a Murderer, H.W. Mudgett’ here. Images: Boston City Hospital female ward courtesy Boston City Archives via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0. Boston City Hospital surgical ward via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.

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Six Strange Rocks of New England, From the Eubrontes to the Man-eating Stone of Glastonbery

It should be no surprise that New England’s stony soil should produce a goodly number of strange rocks. They have such nicknames as the Devil’s Footprint, the Narragansett Runestone and the Man-eating Stone of Glastonbery.

Folktales grew up around some of New England’s strange rocks, like the one about the devil’s footprint in Maine. Scientific research explained some of the others, like the dinosaur tracks named the Connecticut State Fossil.

In some cases, like the Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee, there has never been a satisfactory explanation for how they got that way.

Here then are six strange rocks, one in each state, along with the stories that go with them. If you know of any others, please share them in the comments section.

The Connecticut State Fossil

Eubronte, one of Connecticut’s strange rocks

In 1802, a Massachusetts farm boy named Pliny Moody came across dinosaur tracks in Holyoke, Mass. That was the first of many discoveries of dinosaur tracks in the sandstone of the Connecticut River Valley.

Eubrontes is the name given to the footprint, not the dinosaur. Edward Hitchcock, the president of Amherst College, studied fossils in Holyoke, Mass., and gave them the name. He concluded, wrongly, the tracks were made by large birds.

On Aug. 23, 1966, Edward McCarthy was bulldozing a path for I-91 in Rocky Hill, Conn., when he overturned a block of sandstone imprinted with six three-toed footprints. The land turned out to be a former lakebed riddled with dinosaur tracks, the largest in North America.

Scientists confirmed the importance of the Rocky Hill dinosaur tracks, which are about a foot long. The highway was moved and the lake bed was designated a Connecticut state park. Scientists found about 2,000 of the three-toed tracks, which have been linked to the Jurassis-era Dilophosauris.

The Connecticut Legislature designated the Eubrontes fossil as the official state fossil in 1991. Other state legislatures were doing the same around that time. They did so in Massachusetts (therapod tracks in Granby), Maine (Pertica quadrifaria,a plant, in Baxter State Park) and Vermont (Beluga whale skeleton in Charlotte).

Dinosaur State Park, 400 West St., Rocky Hill

Devil’s Footprint

The devil’s footprint is said to be in the cemetery wall.

Next to the meeting house in North Manchester, Maine, lies a cemetery surrounded by a wall with a strange rock in it. The rock, in the corner of the wall, has three imprints said to be the devil’s footprints. One looks like a cloven hoof, the other two look human. Someone conveniently spray painted them red.

There is a story that goes with the rock, which may or may not be true (probably not). Years ago, a crew of construction workers was clearing a path for Scribner Hill Road when they came upon a boulder that could not be moved. One of the workmen exclaimed he’d sell his soul to the devil to move the rock. The next day, the rock was moved and the construction worker gone. The devil left his footprints on the rock as a reminder of the deal.

The North Manchester Meeting House, built in 1793, is still used as a church.

144 Scribner Hill Rd., North Manchester

Dighton Rock

Of all New England’s strange rocks, Dighton Rock, is the most studied.

Dighton Rock has mystified people since before the colonization of America. The rock is an 11-foot-high boulder covered with ancient petroglyphs of an unknown origin. It once rested on the shore of the Taunton River, but it now has its own museum (operated by appointment only) in Berkley, Mass., once part of Dighton, Mass.

Visitors to the strange rock will be in good company as Cotton Mather, George Washington and dozens of scientists have attempted to decode the meaning behind the writing on it.

Some theories: A message left by Norse explorers, Native American symbols and a message from God. So far no consensus exists as to the rock’s significance, and its meaning remains a mystery.

Dighton Rock State Park, Bayview Ave, Berkley

Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone

The Mystery Stone of Lake Winnipesaukee

Seneca Ladd was many things: Piano maker, carriage maker, mill owner, banker (He was one of the founders of the Meredith Village Savings Bank), amateur meteorologist, and geologist.

New Hampshire’s Lakes Region well remembers his legacy. But his most unusual accomplishment remains a mystery. One day while workmen were digging on his property in Meredith sometime in 1872 or earlier they uncovered an egg-shaped object buried at a depth of two feet and encased in clay.

The object, by far the smallest of our mystery stones, is a carved stone bearing markings that remain unidentified. Ladd himself thought his “egg” was Native American in its origins and he displayed it for the curious for much of his life. The egg still baffles scientists as to what exactly it is. Ladd’s daughter gave the object to the New Hampshire Historical Society in 1927, which then displayed it in its Museum of New Hampshire History in Concord.

New Hampshire Historical Society, 30 Park St., Concord

Quidnessett Rock

Wickford, R.I.

Quidnessett Rock, also known as the Narragansett Runestone, is a strange rock in North Kingstown, R.I., with a somewhat shaky pedigree.

Rhode Island historians first paid attention to the 2.5 ton rock around 1984. The rock bears a series of unusual markings that some claim look like markings made by the religious sect known as the The Knights Templar. This faction claims the stone is a marker, probably documenting a land claim that dates to before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

However, Edward Brown of Providence came forward to clarify that he and his brother made the markings on the rock as young boys in 1964, though not as a hoax. They did it just for fun, he said.

Others view the rock as a nuisance. A resident of Pojac Point in North Kingstown caused a kerfuffle when he lifted the rock and dropped it farther out to sea to slow the onslaught of visitors to the stone. After someone caught him he retrieved the stone, now on permanent display in Updike Park in the Village of Wickford. It makes as good an excuse as any for a trip to the charming village.

Updike Park, 89 Brown St., Wickford

Man-Eating Stone of Glastonbery

The Green Mountains

Between 1945 and 1950, five people disappeared on Glastonbery Mountain, four without a trace: Middie Rivers (1945); Paula Jean Welden (1946); James Tedford (1949); Paul Jephson (1950); and Frieda Langer (1950).

Rivers, an experienced hunter, knew the area. Welden, a Bennington College sophomore, disappeared while hiking the Long Trail. James Tedord, a veteran, vanished on a bus exactly three years after Paula Welden disappeared. Jephson, an eight-year-old boy, went missing from the family truck while his mother fed some pigs. And Langer disappeared on a hike near the Somerset Reservoir. Her body was then found seven months later in an area that had been carefully searched.

In 2009, a writer named Joseph Citro suggested an explanation in his book, The Vermont Monster Guide: The man-eating stone of Glastonbery Mountain. In it, he wrote,

“No one alive has seen this dangerous anomaly on Glastonbury Mountain. Native Americans knew of it, and warned people away. We can only imagine it as a sizable rock, large enough to stand on. But when someone stands upon it, the rock becomes less solid, and, like a living thing, swallows the unfortunate trespasser. A number of disappearances have been reported on Glastonbury Mountain. Could all these vanished folks have stepped inadvertently on this hungry stone?”

Citro dubbed the area, part of the Green Mountains, the Bennington Triangle.

Glastonbery Mountain, Glastonbery

To read about the strange rocks that form mysterious stone structures of New England, click here.

Images: Wickford, R.I., By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20433895; Lake Winnipesaukee Mystery Stone By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18574963; Green Mountains From the nek – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22873955. This story about strange rocks was updated in 2022.

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Titicut Follies, The Documentary Film About a Madhouse So Shocking It Was Banned

Titicut Follies exposed the sordid and cruel treatment of prisoners in 1966 at Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Bridgewater, Mass.

Promotional poster for Titicut Follies

Corrections officers and social workers appeared on film as callous bullies. Doctors revealed themselves as unable to treat patients properly. Patients suffered harassment and mockery. They were herded like cattle and kept in their cells naked.

In one scene, a doctor force-fed liquid food to a patient. He asked for butter or lard to lubricate a rubber tube that he inserted into the patient’s nostril. Then the doctor let his cigarette ash fall into the liquid.

“The inmates at Bridgewater were treated very badly, by and large,” said the film’s director, Frederick Wiseman. “But many of them had committed the most outrageous crimes imaginable.”

Others should have gained their freedom years ago.

The Filming of Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman, a 36-year-old Boston native and Yale-trained lawyer, got tired of teaching at Boston University. He knew Bridgewater State, because he had taken his students there on field trips. He asked for permission to film inside, and the superintendent let him do it for 29 days in the spring of 1966.

Frederick Wiseman

Bridgewater State started out as a poorhouse in 1855, then became a workhouse and finally a hospital to evaluate the criminally insane. Within 14 years, prisoners killed five corrections officers during escape attempts.

Wiseman named Titicut Follies after an annual talent show put on by the inmates. (‘Titicut’ is the Indian name for the Taunton River.)

The film opens with a scene from the talent show: Inmates in marching band costumes sing a slightly off-key Strike Up the Band.

Then the film shows the darker side of the hospital.

A patient wearing nothing but shorts screams in his bare cell. A doctor interviews an inmate who raped an 11-year-old girl. Corrections officers order patients to strip naked.

Wiseman interspersed scenes of the doctor force feeding the patient with scenes of the patient’s corpse being embalmed. “He was treated better in death than in life,” Wiseman said.

Impact of Titicut Follies

Vincent Canby said it made Marat/Sade look like Holiday on Ice. Amos Vogel called Titicut Follies ‘a major work of subversive cinema.’

Roger Ebert called the film ‘despairing’ and said the hospital could have come out of the Middle Ages.

There is an old man named Jim who is constantly taunted by the guards, whose uniforms are disturbingly similar to a policeman’s. While he is being shaved with fast, painful strokes by the barber, the guards needle him: “Why’s your room so filthy, Jim? What’s that you said, Jim?” They are bullies who have their victim pinned and helpless.

Jim returned to his cell naked, wrote Ebert.

It appears that the inmates are deprived of clothing much of the time because that is cheaper and makes security easier.

Ebert questioned whether naked confinement in a barren cell cures mental illness.

(Read Ebert’s whole review of Titicut Follies here.)

Titicut Follies won awards at European film festivals before it was scheduled to premiere at the New York Film Festival. But the administration of Gov. John Volpe sought an injunction preventing its release. The Massachusetts Superior Court banned the film on the grounds that it violated patients’ privacy.

Gov. John Volpe

No court has banned any other American film for reasons other than obscenity or national security.

The Massachusetts court ordered all copies of Titicut Follies destroyed. Wiseman appealed the decision. In 1969 the court allowed certain people — like doctors, lawyers, social workers and teachers –to see it for educational purposes. The general public couldn’t see it until 1991, when another Massachusetts judge concluded that it didn’t violate the inmates’ privacy. The reason? Because they had all died.

On Sept. 4, 1992, PBS aired Titicut Follies.

Improvement?

Bridgewater State Hospital

Bridgewater State Hospital should have released dozens of patients who didn’t belong there in the first place. When Wiseman filmed Titicut Follies, a fruit vendor sentenced to two years for drunkenness had been incarcerated for 28. His crime: He painted stripes on his horse to look like a zebra because he thought it would attract customers to his cart.

The film inspired a study in 1968 that found the courts committed 30 inmates illegally. Many stayed long after their prison sentences expired because they didn’t have the money or the legal skills to get out. The study found a man named Charles still at the hospital in 1967, well after he had served out his two-year-sentence for breaking and entering — in 1910.

Treatment improved some after Titicut Follies. The population fell from about 900 to about 300. The institution contracted with teaching hospitals, so better doctors dealt with the patients. But then the contracts expired and the treatment deteriorated.

Aftermath

A corrections officer threw acid in a patient’s face, but authorities dropped the internal investigation in 1999. Five years later a patient murdered a bipolar inmate after the hospital failed to protect the victim.

Attendants strapped patients to tables by their hands and legs, a practice that killed one inmate and destroyed another’s health. One inmate never convicted of a crime spent 6000 hours in isolation.

Wiseman won many awards for his films, including High School, Legislature and Belfast, Maine.

In 2017, the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University performed Titicut Follies as a ballet. That same year, a private company took over management of Bridgewater State Hospital.

Images: Frederick Wiseman, By Charles Haynes from Bangalore, India – frederick wiseman, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=54063175. Titicut Follies poster By http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Titicut-Follies-Posters_i940761_.htm, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17347492. This story was updated in 2022.

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