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Town Meeting

Five Heroic Moms in New England History

With Mother’s Day soon upon us, it’s a good time for a reminder about heroic moms.

For much of New England history, moms were supposed to be quiet, submissive, stay-at-homes providing a moral influence for the family. Reality often intruded, however. Mothers had to meet challenges without the advantages their male counterparts enjoyed.

Heroic Moms

Contrary to popular belief during most of New England history, moms were capable of military feats that took great courage. Prudence Cumming Wright, for example, captured two British spies while armed with little more than a pitchfork.

Time and time again, women have stepped in when their husbands died or disappeared. During the 18th and 19th and well into the 20th centuries, heroic moms raised children and ran businesses with few legal protections or even the right to vote.

Mothers of accomplishment until recent decades have largely escaped the historian’s notice. And so to rectify those oversights we bring you five heroic moms in New England history.

Ann Smith Franklin

Benjamin Franklin wasn’t the only member of his family to leave Boston for another city so he could start his own newspaper. Ann Smith Franklin, his sister-in-law, did it as well.

Born in 1696, Ann married Ben’s brother James, the one Ben didn’t get along with. James landed in jail in Boston for printing ‘scandalous libel’ — in other words, criticisms of the Puritans. So he and Ann took his printing press and moved to Newport, R.I. There they started printing the Rhode Island Almanack.

James died, leaving Ann with five children and a business to run. She couldn’t make enough money to support her family, so she asked the General Assembly for a contract to print the colony’s laws.

Ann Smith Franklin got the job. She also raised three children to adulthood, started The Newport Mercury with her son James and then continued to run it after he died in 1762.

She died in 1763. Her obituary described her as a woman of ‘economy and industry … [who] supported herself and her family, and brought up her children in a genteel manner.’

Prudence Cummings Wright

At 35, Prudence Cummings Wright had five children and a husband who marched off to the Siege of Boston after the Battles of Lexington and Concord.

That same fate befell most of the other ladies in her hometown of Pepperell, Mass. When Prudence learned British spies were passing information from Canada to Boston through Pepperell, she decided to do something about it.

One of many heroic moms

Prudence Wright organized a militia from the women of the town. They dressed in their husband’s clothes and, since their husbands took all the muskets, probably grabbed farm implements. Then the ladies’ militia patrolled the town.

One night they stationed themselves at Jewett’s Bridge and waited silently for the spies they expected. When two horsemen approached from the north, Prudence burst upon them with a lantern demanding to know their identities and their business. One of the men — Prudence’s Loyalist brother — tried to flee.

The women dragged both men off their horses and searched them. They found dispatches intended for the enemy, so they took the men to the local tavern. The men were released after they agreed to leave the colony for good.

At Town Meeting on March 19, 1777, Pepperell voted to pay Prudence Cummings Wright and her ladies’ guard for their service.

Mary Patten

Mary Patten wasn’t a mom yet when she faced down a mutinous crew and took command of a clipper ship. At 19, she was pregnant with her only son, Joshua.

She came from a well-to-do East Boston family and knew navigation and sailing. Her husband, a sea captain also named Joshua, took her along on a voyage from New York to San Francisco in 1856. As the ship approached the southern tip of South America, Joshua fell ill with fever. Mary set the course, navigated the vessel and nursed her husband.

Mary Patten

Then the first mate tried to incite the crew to mutiny, but Mary persuaded them to obey her. Joshua recovered briefly, but then again fell ill. For 50 days Mary wore the same clothes at the ship’s helm, ultimately reaching San Francisco with the cargo intact. Newspapers found out and made her an instant celebrity.

The Pattens returned to Boston overland. Joshua lived only a few more months. He never knew Mary gave birth to a son, and she only lived to the age of 24.

Toy Len Goon

Toy Len Goon was born in 1891 in a mud brick hut to peasant farmers in Guangdong Province. As a child she did backbreaking farm chores until the family’s land could no longer support all six children. At 10, Toy Len began to work for a wealthy merchant family as a servant and babysitter.

She married Dogon Goon when he returned to China from Portland, Maine, where he worked in a laundry. In 1917 he was arrested as an illegal resident, To avoid deportation he had to serve in the armed forces during World War I, where he was wounded and lost a limb.

When Toy Len arrived in Portland, she spoke no English. She worked in the laundry with Dogon. Over the next 13 years, they had eight children.

She managed to save $500 for a down payment on a three-story building in which they lived and started their own laundry. Dogon died of gangrene in 1952, leaving Toy Len with eight children ages three to 16. She kept the laundry going and made sure all her children got educations, refusing offers to put them in foster care. All did well academically.

In 1957, a local newspaper reported her son Carroll was a physician, Richard a businessman, Edward a research chemist, Albert a lawyer, Josephine a mother, Arthur, a Navy veteran, studying electrical engineering. Doris was a court reporter and Janet a college student.

Toy Len Goon receiving the Maine Mother of the Year Award.

Toy Len Goon was named Maine Mother of the Year in 1952 by the American Mothers Committee of the Golden Rule Foundation.

Shortly after receiving the award, she moved to Lynn, Mass., to be closer to her children. She died at the age of 101 in 1993.

Margaret Rudkin

She was a society housewife who lived in a Tudor mansion with her husband and three sons in tony Fairfield, Conn. Life was good until the stock market crashed in 1929 and her husband suffered a polo accident.

Margaret Rudkin sold the horses, fired the servants and tried to make ends meet selling apples and turkeys.

According to one account, she began baking stone-ground whole wheat bread because her son Mark had severe food allergies. According to her own account, she started baking because of her ‘interest in proper food for children.‘

In August 1937 she sold her first batch of Pepperidge Farm bread to her grocer in Fairfield, Mercurio’s Market.

Eventually she moved her bakery from the kitchen into the garage and began making white bread with unbleached flour. A specialty food store in New York, Charles & Co., ordered 24 loaves a day. Then the orders poured in after Reader’s Digest ran a story about her deluxe bread. Margaret Rudkin borrowed $15,000, and in 1940 moved her bakery to Norwalk, Conn.

Eventually she added premium cookies and small fish-shaped crackers. She and her husband sold the company to Campbell Soup, where she became the first female director. Margaret Rudkin died of breast cancer in 1967.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Shot Heard Round the World: Concord vs. Lexington vs. … Menotomy?

There was a shot, and it was heard around the world, but who fired it and where? Debate over the shot heard round the world caused more than one skirmish over the years – between Concord and Lexington.

And then Menotomy jumped into the fight.

shot-heard-round-the-world-battle-lexington

The Battle of Lexington, where the shot heard round the world was fired.

First Armed Opposition

The question, “Where was the shot heard round the world fired?” surfaced in 1824. Then the Marquis de Lafayette visited all 24 states to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of independence. When he arrived in Lexington, Mass., people told him he’d reached the ‘birthplace of American liberty.’ But then he went to Concord, where people told him the patriots made the “first forcible resistance” there.

That infuriated Lexington, having been deprived of “the honour of having raised the first standard of an armed opposition to the unjust and tyrannical measures of the mother country.”

So in 1825, the Lexington Town Meeting appointed a committee to publish a statement of facts about the April 19 affair, “as may be supported by undoubted testimony.”

From that testimony, Elias Phinney tried to put the matter to rest. He compiled a book called, History of the Battle of Lexington: On the Morning of the 19th April, 1775 (now a free ebook).

In it, he explained the confusion. Shortly after the battles, British general Thomas Gage claimed the patriots fired the first shot. To refute that claim, witnesses in Lexington said the patriots hadn’t even fired.

But in the opening days of the war, Phinney wrote, no one wanted to admit that Lexington patriots had shot at British regulars. The outcome of the war was then far from certain, and militiamen identified as shooters could wind up on the gallows.

The Shot Heard Round the World

Phinney wrote that at sunrise, 700 British regulars showed up in Lexington and about 80 militiamen came out of Buckman’s tavern. They knew the British regulars were on the march to Concord to seize arms and ammunition.

Standing on Lexington Green, militia Capt. John Parker told his men not to fire first.

What really happened was that someone — no one, to this day, knows for sure — discharged a weapon. Some people consider that the shot heard round the world.

The Battle of Lexington, by William Barnes Wollen.

Phinney, however, neglected to mention that anonymous shot. Instead, he set out to prove that the redcoats, under orders, began firing.

“Their commander, Lieut. Col. Smith, advanced a few rods, and exclaimed, “Lay down your arms and disperse, you damned rebels!–Rush on my boys! Fire!” and fired his own pistol.

Well… not quite. Smith hadn’t even arrived. It was probably Maj. John Pitcairn who told the rebels to lay down their arms. But Finney wanted to prove that the patriots did shoot back, only, however, after the British fired a second unprovoked volley. So he listed the testimony of militiamen who said they’d fired their weapons.

Testimony

Phinney wrote that William Munroe was confident some of the militiamen fired back. He testified that Ebenezer Munroe, wounded in the arm, said to him, “I’ll give them the guts of my gun.”

“We then both took aim at the main body of the British troops,–the smoke preventing our seeing anything but the heads of some of their horses,–and discharged our pieces,” Munroe testified.

“I discharged my gun into the main body of the enemy,” said Ebenezer Munroe.

William Tidd retreated up the north road as an officer on horseback pursued him. He called out, “Damn you, stop, or you are a dead man!” …”Therefore I sprang over a pair of bars, made a stand, and discharged my gun at him.”

Nathan Munroe said he jumped over a wall when the British started firing, ‘and then turned and fired at them.’

Reenactors on the march to Lexington to commemorate the shot heard round the world.

Concord Hymn

That testimony didn’t persuade Ralph Waldo Emerson. He lived in Concord in a house called the Old Manse, where his father and grandfather had watched the skirmish. In 1836, he added fuel to the debate between Concord and Lexington when he published the Concord Hymn.

It begins:

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.

Emerson, in essence, argued that in Concord at the Old North Bridge the patriots fired the first shots under orders. In Concord the British suffered their first fatalities and made their first retreat. So the first real resistance in the American Revolution happened in Concord, he concluded, along with the rest of the town.

Reconstructed Old North Bridge.

The animosity between Concord and Lexington simmered for the next few decades. During the bicentennial of the shot heard round the world, President Ulysses S. Grant considered skipping Massachusetts to evade the issue.

Then in 1894, Lexington petitioned the Massachusetts Legislature to proclaim April 19 as “Lexington Day.” Concord countered with a petition to call it “Concord Day.” Arlington, then called Menotomy, entered the fray, declaring patriots had fought a larger battle there during the British retreat to Boston.

Gov. Frederic T. Greenhalge came up with a compromise to honor the shot heard round the world: Patriots’ Day.

Since 1969, Patriots’ Day falls on the third Monday of the month of April. Maine and Connecticut also celebrate the holiday to commemorate the shot heard round the world.

Images: Reenactors By Jrcovert – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19639046. Old North Bridge By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5942756. This story last updated in 2022.

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Seven Fun Facts About New England Taxes

There isn’t much that’s fun about taxes, but we thought we’d try to find something. So we found seven fun — well, maybe just fun-ish — fact about taxes.

We do think it’s at least interesting that Rhode Islanders didn’t have to pay taxes for 40 years. And it’s fun to find out what kind of a job Sam Adams did as tax collector, or what Mainers did when the federal government actually returned money to them.

Here, then, are seven fun facts about taxes.

1. When Printing Money Meant No Taxes

Rhode Island enjoyed a 40-year holiday from taxes starting in 1710 when the General Assembly cranked out money on the printing press.

Here’s how it worked: The colony had a number of land banks, which loaned paper money for mortgages on land. The loans generated interest, which the colony’s government used to pay for its operations.

The value of the paper money often declined, which made it easier for landholders to repay their debts. Rhode Island’s supply of paper money also gave the colonists a medium of exchange. The arrangement made practically everyone happy – except for merchants in London, who had to accept the colonists’ depreciated money to pay off their debts.

When the merchants weren’t happy, Parliament wasn’t happy. In 1751, Parliament passed the Currency Act, making it illegal for Rhode Island’s General Assembly to issue any more bills of credit not backed by taxes. By the middle of 1754, Rhode Island neared insolvency, and Rhode Island towns began collecting taxes.

2. Sam Adams, Tax Collector?

Sam Adams had a job as tax collector, and he was lousy at it. Adams had inherited his father’s malt business, but it failed. In 1756 he ran for and won the post of Boston’s tax collector to support his family. But Bostonians didn’t really want to pay their taxes, and Sam Adams didn’t really want to collect them.

Sam Adams

Then a smallpox epidemic broke out in 1764, forcing many people in Boston to close their businesses. Sam Adams was inclined to overlook tax payments from people who suffered financial reverses. His laxity made him popular among Boston’s working class, but caused him trouble. As tax collector, he was liable for uncollected taxes.

By 1765, Sam Adams owed £8,000, and Boston came close to bankruptcy. Adams sued people for nonpayment of taxes, but still came up short. His friends ended up paying most of the deficit, and Boston Town Meeting made up the rest.

3. ‘Less Real and more Ideal’

In order to pay off its Revolutionary War debt, Massachusetts raised taxes to a level four times that before the war. The people of Greenwich, Mass., complained, “Our Grievances Were Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now.“

Greenwich, Mass.

Greenwich would actually have more to complain about in 1938, when the commonwealth flooded it for the Quabbin Reservoir.

4. High Hopes for a Tax Refund

In a once exciting but now forgotten episode in U.S. tax history, the federal government ran a surplus of about $30 million in 1836. Revolutionary War debt had been paid off by the sale of public lands in 1836. What to do with the money generated fierce arguments, of course, but in the end Congress decided to give most of the money back to the states. Each state could do with it what it wanted.

As state lawmakers debated about what to do with their share, ‘high hopes were awakened in all children who were out of pocket-money.

Maine, a state for only 17 years, decided to give the money back to the taxpayers. Every resident – including children — received about $2 from the state of Maine. A Deer Isle farmer’s wife named Salome Sellers decided to buy a pair of candlesticks with her money. She lived to be 108 years old, and was the last person born in the 18th century to die in the 19th. Her house is now a museum and displays the candlesticks.

Salome Sellers and one of her candlesticks

5. A Literary Solution to Taxes

New Hampshire in 1821 tried to raise money for a public university by taxing the capital stock of banks. Seven years later the state abandoned the plan as the tax didn’t raise nearly enough money.

Instead, New Hampshire established the Literary Fund, which it divided every year among the towns. The money was to be spent for the
“support and maintenance of common free schools or other purposes of education.” The Town of Peterborough decided to spend it on a municipal library.

Taxes on banks helped pay for Peterborough’s library.

6. Vermont Declares War To Raise Taxes

Vermont declared war on Germany three months before the United States did so it could give its GIs a raise. In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Enlisted men earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s lawmakers voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees and enlisted men.

Montpelier

But under Vermont’s constitution, they would have had to vote for a new tax in peacetime in order to appropriate the funds. They could vote a bonus, however, during a time of armed conflict.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters. Vermont’s lawmakers used that as an excuse to declare war on Nazi Germany – and give a bonus to Vermonters in the military.

7. Connecticut’s 42-Day Income Tax

Connecticut had an income tax for 42 days, and then it didn’t. In 1971, the state had accumulated a debt of a quarter of a billion dollars. Lawmakers struggled with how to get back into the black. Since Connecticut had the highest per-capita income in the country, the General Assembly decided on an income tax – in a late-night budget session at the end of June. The income tax was to take effect in October.

Connecticut State Capitol

The public reacted fast and furiously, though. So a special session of the General Assembly repealed the income tax on Aug. 12, 42 days after passing it. Instead, they increased sales taxes and raised tuition at the University of Connecticut.

Twenty years later, the General Assembly approved another income tax, which survives to this day.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of state capitol: By jglazer75 – Connecticut State Capitol, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2574147

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How Louisa May Alcott Voted for the First Time in 1880

On March 29, 1880, Louisa May Alcott voted with 19 other women for the first time at the Concord Town Meeting.

The only thing they could vote for, though, was school committee. The year before, the Massachusetts Legislature had bowed to pressure from suffragists and agreed to let the commonwealth’s women have that limited franchise. It would take another 40 years for the 19th Amendment to pass recognizing women’s right to vote — or at least white women’s right to vote.

When Louisa May Alcott voted, though, she wasn’t the first woman in the commonwealth to cast a ballot. In a couple of small towns, women could already vote for school committee. Ashfield and Monroe let women serve on local school boards starting in 1868. Boston did the same in 1874.

Those votes for school committee would have to satisfy women for decades. The struggle for full access to the polls would continue until 1920. And even the small concession of letting women vote for school committee was too much for some. As activist Harriet Hanson Robinson, wrote, “it was thought to be a rash and dreadful act for a woman to appear at the polls, or near the ballot box, in company with the MEN.”

Louisa May Alcott voted for the first time in 1880.

Women’s Suffrage

When Louisa May Alcott voted in 1880, the women’s suffrage movement had officially been in full swing for 32 years, ever since the first convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y.

Since then, it had gained steam, as a national Women’s Rights Convention took place in 1850 in Worcester, Mass., and the American Equal Rights Association met for the first time in Boston in 1866.

Louisa May Alcott and her entire family supported women’s suffrage along with a host of other reforms, including school reform, dietary reform and abolition of slavery.

In 1853, Louisa’s mother, Abby Alcott, drafted a petition demanding equal political rights for women in Massachusetts. In the 1870s she declared, “I am seventy-three, but I mean to go to the polls before I die, even if my daughters have to carry me.”

She never got the chance.

Though Louisa May Alcott voted, her mother, Abby Alcott, never got the chance.

How Louisa May Alcott Voted

Louisa May Alcott showed she was her mother’s daughter when she signed letters, “Yours for reforms of all kinds.”

She supported the women’s suffrage movements by writing articles for The Woman’s Journal, the leading suffrage paper.

When Massachusetts let women vote for school committee, Louisa May Alcott went door-to-door to urge women to register. She also held meetings at her house.

The Wayside, where the Alcott family lived from 1845 to 1848. They sold it to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

When the great day arrived, she wrote, a group of 20 women, ‘mostly with husbands, fathers or brother’ appeared, ‘all in good spirits and not in the least daunted by the awful deed about to be done.’

After two hours of Town Meeting, the school committee vote came up. Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s father, suggested the women vote first. The women stood up and walked to the front of the hall.

The local newspaper reported, ‘many a feminine heart [palpitated] with excitement . . . in preparation for the trying ordeal of passing in front of . . . nearly 200 great horned men & boys to deposit their maiden vote.’

Some of the men thought it funny, she wrote. But when Louisa May Alcott voted with the other women, “No bolt fell on our audacious heads, no earthquake shook the town, but a pleasing surprise created a general outbreak of laughter and applause,” she wrote.

A Good Committee

Then came a surprise. The moderator announced the voting closed before the men could vote for school committee. The men, noted Louisa, seemed perturbed.

She thought it fair because the women couldn’t vote on any other issue.

One man consoled himself by saying it didn’t matter because the women voted the same way their husbands, fathers and brothers would have.

A defiant Louisa May Alcott concluded, “We elected a good school committee.”

She hoped more women would vote, but in 1883, only seven did.

Forty years later, on August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: The Wayside by By Daderot at English Wikipedia – Photograph taken by me, July 4, 2005., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=221716.

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The Revolutionary Holidays You May or May Not Celebrate

Revolutionary holidays didn’t start and end with Independence Day.

When the Revolutionary War ended, Trumbull, Conn., celebrated with A Great Jubilee Day on May 26, 1783. The grand event featured militia maneuvers, feasting, prayer, speeches and toasts. The town was then called Stratford, and the holiday is now called Memorial Day.

Historic reenactment at Mount Independence

Holidays used to be local affairs, and they often moved around the calendar. For many years, the entire United States celebrated only two annual holidays: Washington’s Birthday and the Fourth of July. Much of New England, of course, didn’t celebrate Christmas.

Early Thanksgivings happened when state or local officials decided it happened. In 1816, for example, Massachusetts celebrated Thanksgiving on November 28, while New Hampshire observed it on November 14. It wasn’t until 1941 that Congress passed a federal law making Thanksgiving the fourth Thursday in November.

New Englanders continue to celebrate Revolutionary holidays that commemorate events in the war with Britain. They tend to happen in the summer, often to attract tourists to their craft fairs, parades and reenactments.

Revolutionary Holidays in RI and Vermont

The Burning of the Gaspee by Charles deWolf Brownell, c1892

Since 1965, Pawtuxet Village in Warwick and Cranston, R.I., has celebrated Gaspee Days around Memorial Day. The festival commemorates Rhode Island’s version of the Boston Tea Party, when patriots burned a British customs schooner in 1772.

Celebrations of the Gaspee Affair in 2018 include a road race, parade, party, fireworks and reenactment of the ship burning. In 2018, Gaspee Days was scheduled to start on May 26.

In Vermont, Bennington Battle Day is celebrated every August 16. Vermont is perhaps the only state to commemorate an event that happened in another state. The Battle of Bennington, an important victory in the American Revolution, took place in 1777 in New York.

Bennington Battle Day happens every year with a battle reenactment, but the local historical society holds events throughout the summer. The 2018 Bennington Battle Celebration includes a road race, a ceremony at the memorial and a fashion show of historic costumes.

Powder House Day

New Haven celebrates Powder House Day every year to commemorate the events of April 22, 1775. Then Capt. Benedict Arnold and his Governor’s Foot Guard were eager to help out during the Siege of Boston. So they demanded the keys to the powder house so they could actually use their weapons.

Benedict Arnold celebrated in one of Connecticut’s revolutionary holidays.

Town Meeting had voted against sending help, but the Foot Guard ignored the vote.

Arnold sent a message to the selectmen that if he didn’t get the keys in five minutes, his men would break into the power house. He got the keys.

In 2018, New Haven celebrated Powder House Day on April 21 with a memorial service at the Center Church on the Green. Then a re-enactor playing Arnold marched across the Green and demands a key from the mayor. (Click here for the script.)

The day also featured carriage rides, a parade and tours of the new trees planted on the Green.

Margaretta Days

The first naval battle of the American Revolution took place in Machias, Maine (then Massachusetts). Today Margaretta Days is still one of Machias’ Revolutionary holidays.

During the Siege of Boston, British authorities asked Ichabod Jones, a Loyalist merchant in Machias, to help obtain supplies for the army. In June 1775, two of Jones’ vessels and the Margaretta, an armed British sloop, arrived in the harbor. The townspeople tried to arrest Jones on June 11 and went after the Margaretta’s commander, who escaped. The townspeople then seized one of Jones’ ships, armed a second and chased after the Margaretta. A short battle resulted in the death of the commander and several others, as well as the capture of the Margaretta.

In 2018, Machias celebrates Margaretta Days on June 16 with a reenactment, children’s activities, period foods and artisan demonstrations.

Hack Holidays

The Massachusetts Statehouse

Eighty years ago a state law gave two holidays to state and municipal workers in Boston and the rest of Suffolk County, but not to anyone else. Government workers could take off March 17, Evacuation Day, which commemorates the day British troops and Loyalist sympathizers began to leave Boston. They can also take off June 17 to observe the anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Critics say the Revolutionary holidays reflect Massachusetts’, shall we say, overdeveloped government bureaucracy. They ridicule the ‘hack holidays’ that occur once a month except for August, when government employees take long vacations anyway.

Massachusetts hack holidays include New Year’s Day and Martin Luther King Day in January, Presidents Day in February, Evacuation Day in March, Patriots Day in April, Memorial Day in May, Bunker Hill Day in June, Independence Day in July, Labor Day in September, Columbus Day in October, Veterans Day and Thanksgiving in November and Christmas in December.

Revolutionary Holidays That Disappeared

One of the Revolutionary holidays that disappeared was Boston’s Massacre Day.

Patriots celebrated the holiday every March 5 from 1771 to 1783 to commemorate the 1770 Boston Massacre. Each year a prominent patriot delivered a speech, which would then be printed. When 1783 brought the end of the American Revolution, Boston officials decided to replace Massacre Day with Independence Day.

Fast Day wasn’t one of the Revolutionary holidays until it became one.

Since at least 1670, New Englanders regularly set aside fast days to, well, fast, attend church and ask God for blessings.

Massachusetts celebrated Fast Day until 1894, when the Legislature changed it to Patriots’ Day to commemorate the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Maine jumped on the Revolutionary holidays bandwagon and did the same in 1897. New Hampshire clung to the Fast Day tradition until 1991, when it became Civil Rights Day in January.

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Six Iconic Paintings From the New England States

Iconic paintings capture the essence of a place or a person. American Gothic, for example, reveals the stoic plainness of the rural Midwest in the Depression. A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte shows the tranquility of Parisians at leisure in the 1880s.

But what does New England offer in the way of iconic paintings? We had many from which to choose, but we went with six, one for each New England state.

If you know of other iconic paintings that reveal something essential about your state, please share them in the comments section.

Home to Thanksgiving

Home to Thanksgiving by George Durrie

Many well-known artists have painted scenes from Connecticut, which had several art colonies and quite a few famous artists. But which one painted the most iconic painting?

We went with George Durrie, who painted many scenes in his native Connecticut for Currier & Ives. Home to Thanksgiving – often misidentified as Home for Thanksgiving – was easily the most popular of all his Currier & Ives paintings. It depicts a rural scene near his home in New Haven, and it captures the charm and warmth of a Connecticut farmhouse in winter. And it explores the theme of Thanksgiving, that most New England of all holidays.

Durrie, born in Hartford in 1820, taught himself to paint. He toiled in obscurity for many years, painting wintry landscapes of rural Connecticut. Finally, at the age of 40, Currier & Ives published prints of four of his paintings. Durrie could only enjoy his fame for two years, because he died in 1862. Currier & Ives printed six of his works posthumously.

The WPA Guide to Connecticut praised Durrie as a sort of poet. “One can fairly smell the wood smoke in his frosty air, hear the creak of snow under the sledge runners, the barking of distant dogs, and breathe the atmosphere of the old, snug, cheery farm life of the early nineteenth century.”

The original lithograph stones ended up as landfill for Central Park in New York.

Christina’s World

Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth produced many iconic paintings, but Christina’s World tops them all. In it, Wyeth manages to combine the toughness, beauty and aspiration of a woman who runs a saltwater farm in Maine.

Andrew Wyeth met Christina Olson on the same day he met his wife, July 12, 1939. He picked her up on a date in Cushing, Maine, where he spent summers with his family. She drove him to the Olson farm. Betsy Wyeth vaguely remembered she did it because she’d just learned to drive and wanted to go somewhere. She and Andrew married the next year.

Christina and her brother Alvaro Olson let him set up a studio in a room on the second floor of their farmhouse. Looking out the window one day in 1948, Wyeth saw Christina Olson crawling in the field and got the inspiration for Christina’s World.

He worked on the background for two months, while closely sketching Christina’s hair, body and hands. Betsy posed for the figure.

Wyeth hung the painting in his house in Maine and no one reacted to it. “I thought, Boy, is this one ever a flat tire,” he said.

He was wrong. From then on he started receiving letters about Christina’s World — about one a week. Today it hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Breezing Up

Breezing Up by Winslow Homer

Massachusetts offered us many choices for iconic paintings. Rockport’s Motif No. 1 immediately came to mind, but we decided it was the subject, not the painting, that was iconic. Then we turned to Edward Hopper, whose many lighthouses and landscapes all say ‘New England.’ But do they say, ‘Massachusetts?’

Ultimately we settled on Winslow Homer’s Breezing Up, a scene he painted of Gloucester, Mass. Critics call it one of Homer’s greatest paintings. We view it as iconic because it shows a fishing craft, such an essential part of Massachusetts’ history. We also like the forward-looking gaze of the young sailors and the challenge posed by the rough seas.

Breezing Up now hangs at the National Gallery of Art, which calls it “one of the best-known and most beloved artistic images of life in nineteenth-century America.”

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway

willey-family-kensett-painting-mount-washington

Mount Washington From the Valley of Conway by John Frederick Kensett

John Frederick Kensett painted Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway in 1851. By doing so he gave a huge boost to tourism in the White Mountains.

Kensett belonged to the Hudson River School of Painting, which produced iconic paintings of American landscapes. An engraver made a copy of the painting, which was sold to 13,000 subscribers of the American Art Union. Artists copied the painting, and

Currier & Ives turned the engraving into a lithograph in 1860.

The monumental image of the rugged mountain appealed to American sensibilities. A curator called it “the single most effective mid-nineteenth-century advertisement for the scenic charms of the White Mountains.”

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway now belongs to the Davis Museum at Wellesley College.

Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam

Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam by John Greenwood

Rhode Island artist Gilbert Stuart painted one of the most famous paintings in the history of the world, the so-called Athenaeum portrait of George Washington. But Washington wasn’t a Rhode Islander, so we had to look elsewhere. We found what we were looking for in an irreverent painting of Rhode Island merchants and sea captains.

We liked the roguish maritime theme and the allusion to Rhode Island’s colonial past. Despite the subjects’ barroom shenanigans depicted in the painting, they later made history.

Rhode Island merchants and sea captains commissioned this painting of themselves carousing in a Dutch Guiana tavern sometime around 1755. Then known as Surinam, it was a major Caribbean trading stop. The painter, John Greenwood, a Bostonian living in Surinam at the time, painted himself leaving the tavern with a candle.

The painting includes two future governors of Rhode Island, Capt. Nicholas Cooke, smoking a pipe at the table, and Joseph Wanton, passed out in a chair. The commander of the Continental Navy, Esek Hopkins, talks to Cooke, and Stephen Hopkins, signer of the Declaration of Independence, pours rum on Wanton. The painting, appropriately, bears the title Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam. It now hangs, perhaps less appropriately, in the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Four Freedoms

Freedom of Speech by Norman Rockwell

The Grandma Moses painting Fourth of July tempted us, as it belongs to the White House and depicts a quintessential Fourth of July in a folk style. The Bennington Museum holds the largest collection of Grandma Moses paintings, and yet we had to disqualify her for one simple reason: She was a New Yorker.

In the end we settled for one of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms paintings. Rockwell painted them in his Arlington, Vt., studio during World War II to illustrate what the United States was fighting for: freedom from want, freedom of speech, freedom of worship and freedom from fear.

Norman Rockwell, of course, painted many iconic paintings. But which of the Four Freedoms is the most iconic? We chose Freedom of Speech because it interprets the subject of Town Meeting, a uniquely New England tradition. Rockwell painted something that actually happened. Jim Edgerton stood up to oppose the selectmen’s plans to build a new school. He used his neighbors for models, and even borrowed their clothes as props.

The painting appeared in the Feb. 20, 1943 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. The magazine’s editor, Ben Hibbs, said of Rockwell’s work, “A great picture, I think is one which moves and inspires millions of people. The Four Freedoms did — do so.”

You can see all the Four Freedoms iconic paintings at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.

This story was updated in 2022.

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