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Ellen Robbins, Flower Painter and Perennial Prank Victim

What was it about Ellen Robbins that inspired people to play practical jokes on her?

She made a good living as a flower painter in the 19^th century. Her gorgeous botanical watercolors sold well, in bound books and in frames. She grew up in shabby gentility, helped along by her well-to-do family and friends.

Wildflowers by Ellen Robbins. Chromalithograph. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Summers she spent in fashionable resorts, winters in her Beacon Street studio. Artists more high spirited than she frequented those places, which may explain why Ellen Robbins was the butt of so many jokes. She was prim, temperate, careful. She preferred nature to the social ramble, and she didn’t like displays of wealth, which she considered vulgar.

Toward the end, though, Ellen Robbins got a good laugh on everyone else.

Ellen Robbins

She was born in 1828 in Watertown, Mass., the youngest of seven children. Her father owned a factory, but his business failed and he died when she was two.

She described herself as a plain, sickly child with a lame foot. She grew up poor, but with prominent neighbors and cousins—Maria White, who married James Russell Lowell, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis were both cousins. Her relatives also included a leading family of Watertown, the Thaxters, through whom she would discover the artists’ colony on the Isles of Shoals.

Autumn Leaves, courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art

As a child, she loved to paint. As the youngest, her sisters played jokes on her. They told her sugared almonds were spiders, which she believed. When presented with the treat, her sisters held out their hands for her almonds, which she gave them.

She attended the School of Design in Boston on the suggestion of her cousin, William Abijah White, an abolitionist and friend of Frederick Douglass. Then, needing to support her family, she got a series of jobs trying to design prints for textiles., For a time she worked at the Merrimac Printworks in Lowell, Mass., and at the Manchester Printworks in Manchester, N.H.

But she never got the hang of it, so she gave up and went home to Watertown. There she attended Stephen Salisbury Tuckerman‘s School of Design, which taught her what she needed to know about watercolor.

Flower Painter

She excelled at painting watercolors of flowers, and decided to create books of spring flowers as they came. Each book had 20 paintings and sold for $25. Here having wealthy friends and relatives paid off. Cousin Hollis Hunnewell bought one for another cousin, a countess living in Paris. Philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway bought another.

“I now began to feel my good fortune had begun,” she wrote.

Ellen Robbins in her studio, photograph by J. Appleton Brown

She then contributed a watercolor of autumn leaves to an exhibit of amateur paintings. Several people who liked her paintings asked her to give lessons, and so she took a class of seven students. Ellen remembered how Susan Cabot Lowell Sohier brought a melon basket filled with flowers to paint, a Herculean task.

Eventually she began giving private lessons She continued to attract pupils, and after many years she had seven classes a week, at $150 a class. Her students came mostly from Boston’s old moneyed families.

“In my classes, when those came, I lived for two hours each day in the fashionable world; and after hearing of balls and parties, the rest that followed in my simple home was most grateful,” she wrote.

The Cool Kids

In addition to Boston’s elite, Ellen Robbins had entree to an expatriate community of American artists in Rome. One of its members, sculptor Harriet Hosmer, had been a close friend since childhood.

Harriet Hosmer, engraving by Auguste Rodin

Hosmer had a relationship with the leader of that expatriate group, the cross-dressing actress Charlotte Cushman. When Cushman was performing in Boston, she visited Robbins’ studio and gave her tickets to her shows. She also gave her a recipe for shampoo that supposedly thickened hair. But the shampoo had red lavendar as an ingredient. When Ellen used it to wash her mother’s hair, it turned pink.

Charlotte Cushman by William Page, 1853. National Portrait Gallery.

Another member of Cushman’s group, sculptor Margaret Foley, suggested Ellen sell her paintings through a Summer Street gallery eventually known as Doll & Richards. The gallery accepted her work, which sold out in a matter of weeks. Henry Ward Beecher was her biggest customer.

She took a studio at the corner of West and Tremont streets in Boston, later at 6 Beacon Street. There she made friends with John Appleton Brown and his wife, who had a studio next to hers.

Asters, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts Boston

She kept boxes of butter and sausage on the window ledge overlooking Beacon Street. One day she got a postcard from her landlord remonstrating her for putting food on the window ledge. She went next door to share her indignation with Appleton Brown, who made a show of sympathizing with her. But then his mouth twitched and she realized he had sent the postcard.

Travels

Reflecting on her success, she wrote, “My pictures were in great demand, and everything seemed to help me, for I was almost alone in the painting of flowers, and had relatives who were interested in my success, helping in a financial way.”

Another cousin, Henry Durant, who founded Wellesley College, hired her to paint a frieze at Wellesley (now gone).

She then built a studio in Bar Harbor, where she sold her flower paintings for many summers. But Bar Harbor began to attract wealthy swells, so she changed summer venues to the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine.

Hyacinths, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

There at her family’s hotel, poet Celia Thaxter hosted many artists and literati of the day. Some of them enjoyed playing practical jokes on Ellen Robbins. One night they sneaked a parrot into her bedroom.

Thaxter’s granddaughter remembered how the high-spirited Hassam played another joke on her.

Childe Hassam and Appleton Brown greatly annoyed a most temperate fellow artist, Levi’s cousin Ellen Robbins, by sneaking into her studio and filling her Franklin stove with empty champagne bottles. She was not amused when, the next damp day, she tried to light her fire and was choked by smoke.

Celia Thaxter’s garden at the Isles of Shoals by Childe Hassam

In 1873, she had saved enough to go to Europe with her sister. Again, a wealthy friend helped her out. Two days before she sailed, John Cummings, a wealthy banker, walked into her studio and handed her a letter of credit for a thousand dollars. He told her he wanted her to see Switzerland and Germany.

In London she befriended May Alcott, whose sister Louisa May, had written the blockbuster children’s novel, Little Women.

Ellen Robbins Gets the Last Laugh

The joke was on everyone else in 1893.

Back home in Watertown with her sisters, Ellen, then in her 65th year, fell gravely ill. As she lay in her sickbed, the Young Men’s Republican Club gave a dinner in town. Toward the end of the dinner, the Episcopal minister made some remarks, and ended by pointing to some flowers on the table. He said they reminded him of Miss Ellen Robbins, who painted such realistic flowers. He then added that “she is lying very ill at her house tonight.”

The next day, Ellen’s sister Martha ordered a sewing machine from a man who also worked as an undertaker. He delivered the sewing machine in his undertaker’s wagon. A Mr. Hartwell, who worked in the paper mill nearby, happened to look out the window just as the wagon left the house. One of his workmen had a sister who boarded at the Robbins’ house, and he told Mr. Hartwell Ellen would be the one taken away by the undertaker.

Wildflowers No. 2, chromolithograph, courtesy Boston Public Library

Mr. Hartman went to tell the minister, who stopped by to pay a condolence call. Startled when he saw Ellen on the sofa embroidering, he said he was pleased to see her looking so well. A stream of visitors followed the next day, all commenting on how happy they were to see Ellen looking so well.

A neighbor, Miss Mary Fitch, wanted to attend her funeral. Mary’s sister heard that a funeral would take place the next day at 2 p.m., and assumed that meant Ellen Robbins would be laid to rest. Mary went to the funeral service, and viewed the remains – of a bald old man wrapped in a shroud. “Oh, how changed,” she said. She soon figured out she’d gone to a stranger’s funeral.

Ellen Robbins lived another 12 years, dying at the age of 77.

With thanks to Reminiscences of a Flower Painter, parts I and II, by Ellen Robbins for the New England Magazine, Vol. 14, 1896. This story last updated in 2022.

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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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The Working Girls of Boston: Immoral Floozies or Honest Toilers?

During the Gilded Age, the working girls of Boston had to contend not just with low pay but with reputations as immoral tramps. In the parlance of the day, they had “forsaken the path of virtue.” Or they “fell” by succumbing to the “temptations” and “perils” of the city.

It wasn’t true, at least for the great majority of the working girls of Boston. But that didn’t stop people from believing it.

From the Civil War to World War I, people accepted that , “Working class women — and especially black women — were freely available for sexual use by upper-class males,” according to Gerda Lerner in The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History.

Carroll Wright.

And so a statistician named Carroll Wright in 1884 took it upon himself to investigate the slut shamers’ allegations. As head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, he assigned his small army of field agents to interview 1,032 of the 38,881 working girls of Boston.

Applicants for working papers at the Department of Education Building in Boston, Mass., in 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Two decades later, Lewis Wickes Hine picked up on Wright’s work in a different way. He photographed young people, teenagers and children, working in factories, on the waterfront, in fields and on the street. In the process, he captured many images of the working girls — and they were girls — of Boston.

Together, Wright and Hine reveal in detail what the lives of the working girls of Boston were all about – hard work and low pay.

Fallen Women

After the Civil War, one of the founders of the Boston Young Women’s Christian Association, Lucretia Boyd, had a list of the city’s working girls. She told a friend that “she was warranted in saying that nearly one half of the girls on the lists would be led astray unless something could be done to place some additional protection about them.”

And in 1866, the Ladies Christian Association sent out a flier saying, “Intelligent Christians among us have long deplored the dangers that beset this class of persons.”

Sadie Singer, 15, racking flowers at the Beston Floral Supply Co., in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine

By 1884, men were coming to the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics office to complain the streets were crowded with working girls in the evening. They ‘were in the habit of soliciting men to accompany them home,’ wrote bureau chief Carroll Wright. “These gentlemen have expressed themselves as greatly astonished that in a city as well regulated as Boston, girls should come out of stores and shops and ply their vocation as night walkers on the streets in the evening.”

And so Wright had the BLS investigate the working girls of Boston ‘to determine whether the ranks of prostitution are recruited from the manufactory.’

The Working Girls of Boston

Boston in 1884 had a thriving manufacturing base that employed working girls in bookbinderies, shoe and boot factories, bakeries, distilleries, print shops and, most of all, clothing manufacturers.

Textile and clothing manufacture was a huge industry in New England, and by far the biggest in Boston. In 1855, the clothing industry generated $8.5 million in annual sales, more than twice as much as the next biggest, distilleries. Many Boston girls found employment as coat makers, custom tailoresses, coat basters, pantaloon stitchers, machine pressers, dressmakers, milliners and bustle makers.

The Pay Is Too Low

But they didn’t earn enough to live on. Most of the working girls of Boston earned less than $5 a week (about $133 in today’s dollars), according to Wright’s Fifteenth Annual Report about the working girls of Boston.

“The pay is too low,” complained the girls, who earned between $3 and $6 a week making men’s clothing, the report said. A 13-1/2 year old working as a canvas baster reported earning $1.25 a week.

The clothing industry nearly doubled in Boston over the next 50 years. In 1909, Hine’s photographs show young girls learning the skills needed in the needle trades.

Working Girls learning dressmaking in the Free Evening School in 1909. Photo By Lewis Wickes Hine

But wages didn’t grow with the clothing industry. In 1884, the working girls were complaining that employers suppressed their already meager pay. One reason: they faced competition from piece workers.

Piece Work

“Girls used to make better pay before the [piece workers] came,” one worker told the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The girls who did piece work, like the hourly employees, also faced declining wages. Bustle makers used to get 65, 75 and 85 cents a dozen, but price cuts reduced their earnings by 15 cents, reported the BLS. Then demand for bustles slackened off and bustle makers earned only 25 cents for 12 bustles – as much as a girl could make in a nine-hour day.

A nine-year-old girl carrying garments down Blackstone Street in 1912, to a Hanover Street home. She finishes eight pairs of trousers a day and gets eight cents a piece. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Men did piecework, too, but they got paid more for it. In printing, work that paid male compositors 35 cents paid females only 25 cents. A girl compositor, noted the BLS, ‘by over-exertion in trying to make good wags at 25 cents per 1000 brought on paralysis of one-half of the body resulting in permanent injury.’

No New Clothes

Because of the low pay, many working girls lived at home. But in some cases, reported the BLS, mothers made their daughters quit. It cost more to feed and clothe them than they earned.

Restaurant workers, for example, earned an average of $4.06 a week.

A 14-year-old waitress, Delia Kane, at the Exchange Luncheon in South Boston in 1912. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

Clerks earned an average of $5.02 a week, bookkeepers $6.12.

Malvina Amundsen, 15, working as an office girl at the Eastern Talking Machine Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

“It is said that many of the girls get discouraged, as they hardly earn enough to pay running expenses, and are obliged to practise the most rigid economy,” the BLS reported. “One girl says she ‘turns her clothes upside down, inside out, and outside in, not being able to make enough over living expenses to buy new clothes’.”

Shop Girls

Mary Creed, 14, selling cigars in the store of Mrs. Breslin in 1917. Lewis Wickes Hine

People especially viewed shop girls as floozies likely to turn to prostitution, according to Wright.

They made the “vile charge” that a saleswoman or shop girl has to become the ‘intimate friend’ of the proprietor or department head to get a job, he wrote.

People commonly wondered, “How can they dress well when they earn so little?” he continued. Many live at home, he argued. And he observed that a girl working all day for $3 or $4 a week couldn’t fall into evil.

A 15-year-old girl punching sheets at the Boston Index Card Co. in 1917. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

“Girls cannot work hard all day and be prostitutes too,” wrote Wright.

A Boston police captain endorsed that argument. “He said that people, who charge the working women with walking the streets at night for evil purposes, do not know what they are talking about,” wrote Wright. “Night walkers are all of them hardened convicts or prostitutes; some of them may have been hard working women, but no working woman ever walks the streets as a prostitute.”

The Honest Working Girls of Boston

Wright then concluded the working girls of Boston were making “an heroic, an honest, and a virtuous struggle to earn an honorable livelihood.” Rarely did they live a life “other than one of integrity,” he concluded.

“It is easy to be good on a sure and generous income; it requires the strongest character to enable one to be good and respectable on an unstable income of five dollars per week,” he wrote.

And about those men who complained about the working girls of Boston walking the streets?

Wright had a tart response:

“It does not speak well for them and indicates to our mind that the first offence was on their part,” he wrote.

With thanks to The Atlas of Boston History, edited by Nancy Seasholes, and Jennifer Cote, “Class and the Ideology of Womanhood: The Early Years of the Boston Young Women’s Christian Association.” You can read the Massachusetts BLS Fifteenth Annual Report, The Working Girls of Boston, here.

Lewis Hine photo credits: National Child Labor Committee collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

This story last updated in 2023.

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The Murder of Mary Bean, Pregnant Mill Girl

One spring day in Saco, Maine, Osgood Stevens, 14, was having trouble clearing debris from Woodbury Brook. He couldn’t dislodge a whitewashed plank stuck in a culvert. When he finally managed to pull it out, he realized why. A dead woman named Mary Bean was tied to it.

He didn’t know her identity at first. A calico apron covered her face, which rats had eaten away. Her clothes didn’t identify her – just a thin shift, a nightcap and blue stockings. But she had distinctive hair, long and dark, and the residents of Saco figured out who she was. A Canadian mill girl who had come to live at the home of Dr. James Harvey Smith during the winter. The board to which she was tied had the same whitewash pattern as Smith’s stable, and it matched an empty space in a stall.

Ambrotype of a woman believed to be Berengera Caswell.

It was 1850, a time when young women left their farms and family to work in New England’s burgeoning textile industry. The mills needed cheap labor to work the carding machines, mule spinners and looms. Starting in 1830, young, single farm women began finding the independence and wages of a mill job an attractive alternative to the drudgery of farm labor. But many people found the self-sufficient mill girls unsettling, and used ‘girl of the town’ to describe prostitutes.

Mary Bean became a cautionary tale about what happened to young women who left home and lost their virtue. It was a story people knew well. In 1831, a pregnant mill girl named Sarah Cornell died by strangulation, and a Methodist minister – her seducer – took the blame for her murder.

A Boston newspaper ran the headline, “Supposed Murder of Another Factory Girl.”

Mary Bean

Her name wasn’t even Mary Bean. She was Berengera Caswell, born in Brompton, Quebec in 1828.

Berengera and her two sisters, Ruth and Thais, left their farm in Canada for the mill cities of New England. They first went to Lowell, Mass., where Ruth got married and remained. Berengera and Thais then moved to Manchester, N.H., where they found work in the Amoskeag mills. Berengera got a job in the carding room, earning $3.25 a week for 12-hour days. But at night she could shop, or go to lectures or socialize with friends on the streets of Manchester.

The Amoskeag Millyard in Manchester, N.H.

In 1849, Berengera met a machine operator named William Long and they became lovers. Long lost his job, however, and moved back home to Biddeford, Maine, in September 1849.

Berengera then moved to Salem, Mass., where in November she realized she was pregnant. She went to Biddeford, where she moved into a boardinghouse, and found Long. They decided she should have an abortion.

Long had gotten a new job at the Saco Water Power Co. on Factory Island. His supervisor, a Mr. Blake, introduced him to Dr. Smith, who performed abortions. Blake even loaned him the $10 for the procedure. Long told Blake that the girl’s name was Mary Bean – a private joke, because he used the word “bean” to describe activity considered depraved.

The Saco River in Saco, Maine.

Smith, who didn’t have a medical degree, practiced herbal medicine.

Berengera moved in with Smith and he began treating her with a juniper extract to induce contractions.

It didn’t work. And so Smith decided to surgically remove the fetus. The hook he used punctured her uterus and infected it. The infection turned septic and spread throughout her body. Berengera died on Dec. 22, 1849.

The Cover-up

Maine laws left the legality of abortion a murky question in 1849. Women could easily buy over-the-counter herbal remedies that induced abortion. Up until 1841, custom and law decreed that abortion was permissible until quickening, when a woman could feel the fetus move. But then in 1841, the Maine Legislature passed one of the first laws in the United States to make it a crime for anyone to try to abort a pregnant woman. Violators faced punishment of a fine up to $1,000 and a year in jail.

That didn’t end the practice of abortion, as custom made it acceptable before quickening. A handbook for justices of the peace in that era noted that an old law considered it manslaughter. However, it said, ‘the modern law doth not look upon this offence in quite so atrocious a light, but merely as a heinous misdemeanor.’

And so Dr. James Harvey Smith hid Berengera’s body. He tied her to a plank and put it in the brook, thinking it would float to the Saco River and into the Gulf of Maine. But her body only traveled into the culvert where Osgood Stevens found it 3-1/2 months later.

Sensational Trial

Smith, when questioned, said Mary Bean had not died as the result of an abortion, but of typhoid. So town officials exhumed her body and removed her reproductive organs. More than 600 people, including newspaper reporters, attended the coroner’s inquest in Saco. William Long testified he’d taken Berengera to Smith’s house. Doctors presented testimony about her condition. Neighbors described Smith’s abortion practice. And a 12-year-old Irish servant, Anna Covney, said she’d seen Smith use his tools on Berengera and other girls. She’d also watched Berengera die.

Nathan Clifford

Smith was charged with murder. In his defense, he hired a lawyer, Nathan Clifford, a former diplomat and U.S. attorney general and a future U.S. Supreme Court justice.

The trial mimicked the coroner’s inquest. Clifford tried to shift the blame to Berengera’s seducer, William Long. Then when her sister Thais identified the dresses and jewelry found in Smith’s home as Berengera’s, Clifford tried to turn it against her. He painted Berengera as self-indulgent, vain and morally suspect.

It took the jury just two hours to find Smith guilty of second-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to life in the Maine State Prison. But Clifford appealed, arguing Maine state law contradicted itself on the question of abortion. He succeeded in freeing Smith after he served two years in prison – the punishment for manslaughter. Smith died of tuberculosis three years later.

Aftermath

Newspapers sensationalized Smith’s trial, and writers turned Berengera Caswell’s death into a morality tale.

One book, Mary Bean, the Factory Girl; or The Victim of Seduction appeared in 1850. and A Thrilling and Exciting Account of the Horrible Murder of Mary Bean, the Factory Girl, appeared in 1852.

Another writer disguised William Long as George Hamilton in A full and complete confession of the horrid transactions in the life of George Hamilton: the murderer of Mary Bean, the factory girl in 1852.

A pamphlet, titled Mary Bean: The Factory Girl. A Domestic Story, Illustrative of the Trials and Temptations of Factory Life, Founded on Recent Events, used Mary Bean’s story as a cautionary tale for mill girls lured by the city. In it, the author wrote,

…the unthinking female is ensnared in the toils of the destroyer, and being insidiously led onward, step by step, she awakes from her dream of fancied happiness, but to mourn over her dishonor, and the destruction of her cherished hopes. Such was the case with Mary Bean.

With thanks to ”Mary Bean” — The Factory Girl by Robert Wilhelm in Murder by Gaslight and The Changing Nature of Abortion in Rural Maine, 1904-1931 by Mazie Hough in Maine History, Winter 2016-17. Also Murdered Mill Girl Memorialized At Maine Library by Nancy Mattoon for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on March 10, 2010.

Image of the Saco River: By The original uploader was Decumanus at English Wikipedia. – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Matthiasb., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3422062. This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places Products Were Made

Back in the day, products were made in New England — a lot of products.

The early cod fishermen and Yankee traders made their fortunes and invested them in mills and factories and railroads. Those investments resulted in what we now call the Industrial Revolution in the United States.

Starting with the first water-powered cotton mill in Pawtucket, R.I., New England clothed a good part of the world for many, many years. New Englanders made clocks and can openers, steam engines and shoes, board games and battleships.

So many products were made in New England that people started attributing technical expertise and inventiveness to ‘Yankee ingenuity.’

Now, as you travel along the highways and railroad tracks you can see the crumbling brick remnants of New England’s industrial strength. If you want a glimpse of what it used to be like to make things, you can visit some restored mills that have been turned into historic parks. Or you can visit New England’s over-financialized downtowns, where once-productive factories and warehouses are now brew pubs, offices and condos.

Mickey Mouse Watch

Part of the Waterbury Clock complex. Photo courtesy Google Maps

Oh, could Mickey Mouse sell watches. He rescued a floundering clock company as well as Walt Disney studios during the Great Depression.

For years the Waterbury Clock Company was one of the biggest makers of clocks in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, known as the Switzerland of America. It also churned out wristwatches during World War I from its huge brick factory on North Elm and Cherry streets in Waterbury.

By the 1930s, the Waterbury Clock Company struggled financially. So did Disney. An ad salesman proposed making and selling the Mickey Mouse watch to save them both. Skeptical company executives – including Walt Disney – decided to try it anyway.

The cheap cheerful watch was just what a depressed public wanted. A Macy’s promotion sold 11,000 Mickey Mouse watches in one day. And by 1957, 25 million Mickey Mouse watches had sold.

In the 1950s, the company took the Mickey Mouse watch off the market and began selling a line of reliable and inexpensive watches. They called them Timex. Today, the Waterbury Clock Company has morphed into the Timex Group, its Waterbury factory buildings nothing but empty hulks. The company started a Timexpo Museum in Waterbury, which traced the company’s history, but that, too, closed.

Bates Bedspread

The old Bates mill, where products were made and people had jobs. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

For decades, the Bates Bedspread made an ideal wedding gift for a discriminating young couple like George and Barbara Bush. In fact, the Bushes posed in a 1948 magazine ad for the coverlet.

Bates for years was Maine’s largest employer. The giant textile mill complex in Lewiston, Maine, opened with one building in 1854 and grew to eleven. In 1940, the company hit on the idea of reproducing colonial-era candlewicked bedspreads like the one George Washington gave to Martha. It was a hit. By the 1960s, it seemed everyone had a Bates Bedspread.

By 1990, demand petered out and cheap imitators took a big piece of the market. The company closed in 2001, its mills now part of the Bates Mill Historic District listed on the National Register of Historic Places. You can still buy a Bates Bedspread at the Bates Mill Store (904 Main Street, Monmouth, Maine) from former employees who started Maine Heritage Weavers to carry on the tradition.

Monopoly

How ironic that the former Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

In 1888, the Parker brothers started their eponymous company in Salem, Mass., making board games out of an old laundry building. First they made board games like Billy Bumps Goes to Boston, then they introduced ping pong and tiddly winks, and eventually they came up with Monopoly. They bought more land and built a 35,000-square-foot factory, employing 500 people.

Hasbro bought Parker Brothers and therefore Monopoly in 1991. The game is still actually manufactured in a 1960s-era plant in East Longmeadow. Hasbro bought the plant from Milton Bradley and then sold it to Belgium-based Cartamundi in 2015. Cartamundi agreed to make Monopoly in the East Longmeadow factory, at least until 2020.

Prophetically, perhaps, the Monopoly factory gave way to real estate development. The old Parker Brothers factory was torn down, replaced by the Jefferson Street apartment complex. The neighborhood now belongs to the Bridge Street Neck Historic District.

Levi’s Denim

Amoskeag Millyard, 1911, where many, many textile products were made

You can’t miss the Amoskeag Mill complex in the center of Manchester, New Hampshire. The city grew up around the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, founded in 1831. The mill yard it grew into the world’s largest cotton textile plant, with sixty-four mill buildings stretching a mile and a half along both banks of the Merrimack River.

Among the cloth it produced: denim for the first Levi Strauss ‘waist overalls.’ Strauss and his partner Jacob Davis invented the blue jean when they received a patent for the way they riveted their waist overalls in 1873. Amoskeag shipped its nine-ounce XX blue denim to San Francisco, where Levi’s workers sewed it into blue jeans. Until 1915, the Amoskeag mills supplied all the denim for Levi’s 501 jeans.

After World War I, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company suffered from recession, competition, aging technology and floods, finally closing in 1935. Some textile manufacturing continued in the old mills for a while, but many of the mills were torn down. Today offices, restaurants, college branches, and the Millyard Museum fill the old mill yard.

The Catamaran Sailboat

Products were made here for very wealthy people. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

One of the most talented naval architects in the world was Nathanael Greene Herreshoff, named after the Revolutionary general from his home state of Rhode Island.

After Nat Herreshoff graduated from MIT he opened a boatyard in 1878 with his blind brother, John, in Bristol, R.I. The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company started making steam-powered boats, but during most of its sixty-seven years designed and built yachts for wealthy Americans.

The Herresshoff boatyard built every yacht that won the America’s Cup race between 1893 and 1934. Nat Herreshoff built the U.S. Navy’s first torpedo boats, invented new and efficient marine hardware, developed methods to make light wooden hulls and patented the sailing catamaran.

The Herreshoff Manufacturing Company also built seven catamarans, including Amaryllis and Amaryllis II. The boatyard closed in 1945 after Nat Herreshoff died, but a museum now stands on the former site. There you can see the Amaryllis II, as well as some famous yachts, models and designs of the Herreshoff company.

Fairbanks Scales

Fairbanks scales, still made here on Portland Street in Saint Johnsbury. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

The town of Saint Johnsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom once made Fairbanks platform scales and sold them around the world.

Today Fairbanks still makes scales in a long, low commercial building in scenic Saint Johnsbury. And the company still sells them around the world. You’ve probably stood on one in a doctor’s office.

In 1824, Thaddeus Fairbanks, a wheelwright by trade, opened an iron foundry with his brother in Saint Johnsbury. They made and sold heating stoves, plows, and farm implements. Around 1830 he got interested in growing hemp, but ran into trouble trying to weigh large amounts of the stuff from a balancing beam. So he came up with the idea of the platform scale, which used levers to counterbalance the weight. By digging a pit for his contraption and placing a platform on top of it, he could weigh an entire wagon accurately.

The Fairbanks brothers’ company has changed hands several times, its headquarters moved to Kansas City, Mo., and another plant built in Meridian, Miss. But they still make scales in Saint Johnsbury, and if you look around you’ll see the Fairbanks gave the town many of its public institutions.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Robert Roberts Tells All – About How To Be a House Servant in 1827

Robert Roberts moved comfortably among Boston’s Brahmin class, not as an equal but as an African-American servant.

He was good at his job, and in 1827 he published a manual on how to do it. The House Servant’s Directory: A Monitor for Private Families was the first book written by an African-American published by a commercial publishing house. The book, reprinted twice, was also a must-read etiquette manual for rich Americans who wanted people to think they had good taste.

In the House Servant’s Directory, Robert Roberts appeals to his reader to judge people on their character rather than on their skin color. He advised servants to obey their employer, but not because of the servant’s inferiority. Roberts believed submission would lead to financial independence.

A staunch abolitionist, he worked to end slavery and promote racial equality. His second son took his activism further, suing to integrate Boston’s public schools. That lawsuit would have tragic repercussions more than half a century later.

Robert Roberts

He was born around 1780 in South Carolina and somehow educated himself. He alludes to Shakespeare and the Bible in his book. Records don’t show his early status, whether slave or free.

Nathan Appleton

He arrived in Boston from Charleston in 1805, perhaps with Nathan Appleton, for whom he worked as a manservant. Appleton, along with Patrick Tracy and Francis Lowell, established a textile manufacturing complex in a town renamed Lowell, Mass. Kirk Boott, for whom Roberts also worked, ran the Lowell mills successfully and made them all rich.

Roberts may have been alluding to his experiences with the famously irascible Boott when he said a servant would experience many trials of temper, ‘more perhaps than in any other station in which you might enter.’

Kirk Boott

But on the other hand, Roberts wrote, “this station of life comprises comforts, privileges and pleasures, which are to be found in but few other stations in which you may enter.”

One privilege he probably enjoyed: traveling with Appleton to Europe in 1810. He mentioned in his book that he served the finest families in England and France.

Robert Roberts later worked for Christopher Gore, a wealthy U.S. senator and governor of Massachusetts from 1825-27. He managed Gore’s splendid country estate in Waltham. There he served large dinners that included such dignitaries as President James Monroe. Gore may even have paid for the publication of The House Servant’s Directory.

Today, Gore Place is a house museum where Robert Roberts’ lemonade is served on special occasions.

Gore Place

Gentleman’s Service

The job Robert Roberts described amounted to managing an entire household as head butler or steward. He advised the servant to display deference to the employer but to conduct himself with dignity and skill. He advised employers to only hire servants over 30 years old.

Throughout the day, the servant had to help his employer get dressed and keep his clothes in order, make and present drinks, supervise contractors, serve meals, supervise servants, light the fire, maintain the wine cellar and shop for food.

One of the servant’s most important duties was serving meals in a style befitting an aristocratic Bostonian. Historian Graham Russell Hodges notes the House Servant’s Directory served as ‘a precise manual of proper dining room conduct for an aspiring American elite.’

The book gives detailed instructions on serving dinner. Don’t bring the cheese out too early, because it might smell. Make as little noise as possible when changing plates. Make sure the side dishes line up straight on the table. Take a station a yard behind the person at the foot of the table and a little to the left. Never let your thumb be farther than the rim of the plate. Take off dish covers with your left hand. Have half as many candles as guests, with a flame should be 18 inches above the table.

Heating the house occupied a great deal of time in winter, and Roberts devotes 14 pages to making a fire of Lehigh coal, also known as anthracite or Rhode Island coal.

The House Servant’s Directory also includes many recipes, for polishes, cleaners, spot removers, jams, sauces, drinks and adhesives.

The Eel Cure

One of a house servant’s duties, wrote Roberts, might be to sober up his employer with hot coffee or a cup of vinegar. He might even have to reform his employer’s excessive drinking – something Roberts said he did once successfully. He advises:

Put, in a sufficient quantity of rum, brandy, gin, or whatever liquor the person is in the habit of drinking, three large live eels, which leave until quite dead, give this liquor unawares to those you wish to reform, and they will get so disgusted against it, that, though they formerly like it, they will now have quite an aversion to it afterwards; this I have seen tried and have the good effect on the person who drank it.

Throughout the day, the servant had to present himself as articulate, well-mannered, efficient, reliable and clean. Roberts even gave tips on personal hygiene. For example, one should wash one’s feet three times a week in water and rum.

The book went into three editions over the next 20 years. Anyone considering hiring a servant or working as one had to read it. Museums that display Federal period rooms and place settings still use Roberts’ directory as a reference.

Outside the Day Job

Robert Roberts left a legacy that went well beyond etiquette for the wealthy.

He settled among Beacon Hill’s African-American community and worked to end slavery. He got close to prominent African-Americans, including Paul Cuffe, a wealthy sea captain, and James Easton, an outspoken abolitionist and blacksmith.

Beacon Hill today.

Soon after he arrived in Boston, he married Dorothy Hall. Her father, Jude Hall, had won his freedom fighting in the American Revolution. The Hall family suffered an agonizing blow when kidnappers sold her three brothers into slavery in the South.

Dorothy died of tuberculosis in 1813. Later that year Robert Roberts married Sarah Easton, James Easton’s daughter. They had 12 children.

After Christopher Gore died in 1827, Robert Roberts left service. He worked as a stevedore, or ship unloader, in Boston, where he owned his own house. A member of the First Independent (African) Baptist Church on Beacon Hill, he campaigned against the Back to Africa movement.

Christopher Gore

In 1831, Robert Roberts attended the first annual National Convention of Free People of Color in Philadelphia, a meeting that responded to violent racism. He also collected money for a manual labor college for young black men in New Haven, an effort that ultimately failed.

Late in life he exhibited signs of dementia. In 1852, his children asked the court to appoint them guardian of his finances. They lost their case. Robert Roberts died at the age of 83 in December 1860.

He left an estate worth over $7,000 at a time when few African-Americans had estates over a thousand dollars.

Benjamin Franklin Roberts

Robert Roberts’ second son, Benjamin Franklin Roberts, took up his namesake’s trade: printing. He started an abolitionist newspaper in the United States, the Anti-Slavery Herald. It didn’t last long.

In 1848, his five-year-old daughter Sarah attended the segregated Abiel Smith School. She had to walk a long way past a whites-only school, and received an inferior education. Benjamin Franklin Roberts sued the Boston School Committee to let Sarah enroll in a school for white children.

“Turned Away from School,” Anti-Slavery Almanac, Boston, 1839.

A young black attorney, Robert Morris, argued the case along with co-counsel Charles Sumner, the famous anti-slavery politician.

Sumner argued that separate schools could never be equal, and that Sarah suffered psychological harm by attending an inferior, segregated school.

In the end they lost the case. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, Lemuel Shaw, ruled that prejudice could not be wiped away but law. He established the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine upheld in 1896 in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which justified Jim Crow laws.

Sumner, however, helped persuade the Massachusetts Legislature to ban segregated schools in 1855 – the only statewide desegregation law passed in the 19^th century.

To read some excerpts from A House Servant’s Directory, click here.

Images: Gore Place By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18003287. This story was updated in 2022.

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