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The Wellfleet Oyster: A Brief History of the Precious Mollusk

Diamond Jim Brady once spat out an oyster served him at New York’s Delmonico’s restaurant. “That’s not a Wellfleet oyster!” exclaimed the Gilded Age gourmand.

Discriminating diners have long prized the Wellfleet oyster for its merroir—the flavor that comes from the clear air and salty, plankton-rich seawater it ingests. Plump and clean, the Wellfleet oyster has a briny sweetness with an undertone of seaweed.

For centuries, the tasty meat and the hard gray shell of the Wellfleet oyster attracted an indigenous settlement, which gave way to a town. From Wellfleet’s immense oyster beds, fortunes were made, a culture developed and commercial networks spread along the Eastern seaboard. Wellfleet oysters wrapped in copper wire traveled across the Atlantic to royal tables. In tin cans they rumbled overland in covered wagons to the prairies and mountains of the West. They even contributed to the epic U.S. victory in the 1980 Olympics.

But in the centuries since the English, the French, the Africans and the Finns came to Wellfleet, the oyster has gone through dark days. Pre-Revolutionary gluttons doomed the wild Wellfleet oyster to extinction. The beds recovered, but so many oysters slid down so many gullets that they nearly disappeared again.

Wellfleet Oyster

Wellfleet lies just above the elbow of Cape Cod, and wraps like a fishhook around harbor, five miles long, two miles wide and open to the south.

Estuaries, clear and cold, feed into the harbor and the Atlantic. The Herring River, Blackfish Creek and Duck Creek carry diatoms and protozoa from the rich salt meadows along the border. Big, fast moving tidewaters feed the oysters twice a day, and at low tide the oysters are exposed to air, which makes them hardy.

Thousands of years ago, a year-round Native American community lived near the immense Wellfleet shellfish beds. Unlike most coastal New England Indians, the Native people didn’t migrate to the interior during the winter. They called themselves the Pononakanet, a branch of the Nausets, and in 1979 a discovery of 56 Native skeletons in an ossuary dated their bones to the 11^th century.

They piled shells along the forest edge to protect against storms and make it easier to get to the shore. Henry David Thoreau saw Native shell middens in nearby Truro during a visit to Cape Cod. He found oysters, clams, cockles, and other shells, mingled with ashes, and the bones of deer and other quadrupeds. “I picked up half a dozen arrowheads, and in an hour or two could have filled my pockets with them.”

Europeans Arrive

Samuel de Champlain sailed into Wellfleet Harbor in 1606, and the tremendous oyster beds so impressed him he called it Port aux Huistres.

A decade after Champlain’s visit, a terrible plague swept the Massachusetts coast. When the Plymouth colonists arrived they found so many indigenous people had died they couldn’t bury their dead. “Their skulls and bones were found in many places lying still above the ground,” wrote William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor.

The Mayflower had sailed past Wellfleet before anchoring in Plymouth Harbor, but soon enough the colonists discovered the oyster beds. They reminded them of Billingsgate, the London fish market famous for its foul-mouthed fish wives. So “Billingsgate” it was.

Billingsgate fish market in 1736 by Arnold van Haecken .

By 1644, the Plymouth settlers set their sights for another settlement on the Lower Cape from Truro to Chatham, the wrist to the elbow. They called it Eastham.

‘Then I do’

Bradford, the story goes, looked out to Billingsgate Island and asked the Pononakanet sachem, George, “Who owns that?” “No one,” replied George. “Then I do,” Bradford said.

William Bradford

Over time, the Europeans edged out the indigenous people. Some of those who survived the white man’s diseases converted to Christianity and moved to a Praying Indian town.

The last of the tribe, Delilah Sampson Gibbs, a widow, died sometime after 1838.

Billingsgate Bivalves

The European settlers learned how to tong for oysters. They’d lean over the side of a flat-bottomed boat with clumsy, 20-foot poles and grab them with the gripping teeth at the end.

In 1665, a randy Portuguese whaler and oysterman named Jacobus Loper started hauling Billingsgate oysters in his sloop. He had an easy sail from the protected harbor to Boston and Salem, and oysters travel well. Unlike scallops and soft-shelled clams, they can live for long periods in the shell outside of water.

Others quickly caught on to the oystering business. In the decades before the American Revolution, the burgeoning towns along the coast consumed vast quantities of the cheap, nutritious and highly portable Wellfleet oyster.

The town jealously guarded its beds from interlopers. By 1674 Eastham Town Meeting voted to apprehend any out-of-towners taking oysters from Billingsgate Bay.

Wellfleet Oysterman

In 1849, Henry David Thoreau and his friend Ellery Channing made their famous trek along the Lower Cape and learned about the extinction of the Wellfleet oyster.

They stayed at the home of John Young Newcomb and his family. Thoreau mistook the 87-year-old oysterman for a scarecrow. He immortalized him as the Wellfleet Oysterman in the posthumously published Cape Cod.

John Young Newcomb house. Photo courtesy Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey collection.

The merry old man loved to talk. His conversation, coarse and plain, would have suited Rabelais, Thoreau noted. He told story after story, ejecting his tobacco juice right and left. The old man’s shots seasoned breakfast of eels, applesauce and green beans.

Newcomb was born in 1762, when Billingsgate still belonged to Eastham. He remembered hearing the guns at Bunker Hill and seeing George Washington ride down a Boston street, bowing gracefully to the crowd.

When Newcomb was a year old, Billingsgate broke off from Eastham. Billingsgate chose to change its name to “Wellfleet” after the famous “Wellfleet” or “Wallfleet” oysters of England’s Blackwater Bay. The revolution loomed as Newcomb reached his teens, but the town was more concerned about the disappearance of the oyster.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham

In 1773, the town voted to regulate the oyster fishery.“ That meant keeping outsiders off the beds.

Some people said the split caused the oysters to go away. Others blamed God’s wrath, ground frost, or pollution from a stranding of pilot whales.

Newcomb said Wellfleet’s quarrel with the neighboring towns about gathering oysters, yellow specks appeared in them. Providence then caused them to vanish. At least that was the most common explanation.

The real reason the oysters went away: probably the harvesters who stripped the beds. They didn’t realize juvenile oysters needed to attach themselves to something hard, like a shell, to survive. Instead, they burned the oyster shells for fertilizer and plaster. They also cut down the forest, which caused blowing sand to smother the young oysters.

American Revolution

After the Wellfleet oyster disappeared, the town’s population fell to 1,113 in 1790, down from 1,235 when the American Revolution broke out.

But Wellfleet’s oyster industry gradually recovered with the help of oysters from away. Aquaculture had gone on since the Romans did it in the first century, and Wellfleetians found they could do it too.

Oystermen began bringing oysters from Buzzard’s Bay and Narragansett Bay, fattening them up in Wellfleet’s estuaries and giving them time to acquire that special Wellfleet relish. Then they started bringing oysters in coastal schooners from the Chesapeake Bay.

jonathan carnes corners the pepper market

Salem during the American Revolution, as imagined by engraver Balthazar Frederic Leizelt; produced for the European market.

In 1802, 40-year-old John Young Newcomb bought a share in the schooner Lydia, and then opened an oyster shop in Salem.

By the time Thoreau came to visit in 1849, Wellfleet natives supplied and kept nearly all the oyster shops and stands in Massachusetts. Newcomb told him the business was still good and improving.

Wellfleetians positioned themselves throughout the oyster industry even beyond Massachusetts. There were Atwoods, Dyers, Holbrooks and Freemans working in Boston, Philadelphia, Portland, New York and Providence, Dover, N.H., Lewiston and Saco, Newburyport and Lynn.

The Golden Age of the Wellfleet Oyster

“In the palmy days of the Wellfleet oyster business, forty or fifty sail of vessels were engaged each winter in transferring the product to the Boston market,” wrote historian Simeon L. Deyo.

From 1830-1870, Wellfleet monopolized the oyster business in New England. And what a business it was, thanks to the tin can and a widespread frenzy for oysters.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the British and the French invented canning so they could feed their armies on the march. Canning then found its way to Boston by the 1840s. There, the William Underwood Company canned large volumes of Wellfleet oysters. Union Army soldiers during the Civil War developed a taste for them; so did the pioneers migrating west.

Mawhinney Oyster Saloon in Philadelphia

By then, oystermania had taken hold of America. Starting around 1820, oyster cellars, oyster bars, oyster lunchrooms and oyster parlors sprang up all over the Eastern seaboard. Many were just plain eating dens with big heavy tables and floors covered with sawdust. They served booze and cheap oysters, raw or roasted on the half shell, oyster stew, maybe some clams, some toast or some pie.

Oyster cellars, a few steps down from street level, meant adult fun– beer, nightlife, the demimonde, the sporting life, prostitution. Charles Dickens relished his visit in 1842 to an oyster cellar in New York’s seedy Five Points neighborhood.

Ever-ready Resource

In 1848, Boston had 69 oyster houses and oyster peddlers went door to door. According to Rambles in Old Boston,

Oystermen usually appeared in the evening, carrying their heavy burden, in the shell, on their shoulders in a kind of saddle-bag, crying, “Oys! Finey Oys! Buy any Oys?” They opened the bivalves at the purchaser’s door, throwing the shells into another part of the bag.

In 1857, an Englishman named Charles MacKay visited the United States and commented on the only class difference in America: Some people washed down their oysters with champagne, some with beer.

Elegant restaurants served oysters, but so did housewives of modest means. They were cheap and nutritious. Homemakers viewed them as “the ever-ready resource” because of their “suitableness for all occasions.”

Fresh oysters were shipped west, first in wagons full of ice and then in train cars. In Illinois, a congressman named Abraham Lincoln used to hold oyster orgies in which huge quantities of the bivalve were consumed.

Big Business

In 1826, Hawes Atwood opened Atwood’s Oyster House on Union Street – still in business as the Union Oyster House. Daniel Webster often ate there, downing six dozen Wellfleet oysters at a sitting. Atwood built an imposing house in Everett, a town he helped found.

Union Oyster House

In New York City, Wellfleet’s Libby family established the famous Libby’s Oyster House on Fulton Street in 1839. It lasted more than a century. Unpretentious, Libby’s had chefs and waiters described as “despotic and opinionated but highly skilled.” It served Daniel Webster fish chowder on Wednesdays and Fridays, served New England clam chowder every day and had a hard-and-fast rule: No Manhattan Clam Chowder served in here.

Isaac Rich, born poor in South Wellfleet in 1801, built a fortune on oysters. He started off with an oyster stall on Boston’s City Wharf, then moved into warehousing, shipping and banking. In 1869, Rich cofounded Boston University.

The oyster also gave Brigham and Women’s Hospital its start. Peter Brigham, a Vermonter, began selling oysters and fish in Boston while still in his teens. Eventually he amassed enough money to leave $1.3 million for a new hospital after his death.

Oyster Wealth

The Wellfleet oyster made Wellfleet a real town. Local businessmen built Commercial, Enterprise, Mercantile wharves to service the vessels along the busy waterfront.

First Congregational Church

The Duck Creek Shipyard produced schooners, The white clapboard Congregational Church went up in 1850 with a town clock that still chimes ships’ time. Houses floated over to Commercial Street from Chequasset Neck, Griffin Island and Bound Brook. Tradesmen built shops along the long main street. Timothy Daniels ran a store across from Uncle Tim’s Bridge – a favorite motif of plein air painters – connecting Hamblen Island to the village.

There were still oil works for rendering oil from the pilot whales that washed ashore, saltworks to make salt for cod, chandleries to supply the ships.

Aquaculture

Then in 1870, the Old Colony Railroad opened to Wellfleet. The town gathered, celebrated, listened to speeches and poems. One speaker said the railroad would do for the Cape’s fisheries what it had done in Chicago for midwestern grain.

It didn’t. The railroad instead carried Wellfleetians to the mainland — to stay. The population declined along with the oyster beds.

That year, Wellfleet selectmen took notice. They began requiring permits to work the beds. Then in 1876, they adopted the grant system, leasing sections of flats to people who then cultivated and bedded oysters.

It got harder to bed oysters from the south, as northern oyster dealers had caught on to the idea. They found it cheaper for them to bed their own oysters nearby than to pay for freight from Wellfleet.

Wellfleetians then tried to plant oysters – that is, deposit seed, or spat, onto a bed of cultch. E.P. Cook got the first grant. He scattered shells along the sandy bottom, then caught and planted spat. He moved the young oysters around to different water depths to enhance their growth.

Oyster spat

But oyster planting was an inexact science, and often it failed.

In 1878, S.R. Higgins deposited seed from the Taunton River, and it lived and thrived. Oyster planting slowly increased. In 1889, Wellfleet had 30 acres of grants. Twenty years later, it had 2,400.

It wasn’t enough. Simeon Deyo in 1890 wrote, “the oyster and the oysterman are, so far as these shores are concerned, slowly, but surely, passing away.”

The harbor filled in. People moved away, as they had been every decade since 1840. The fish began to disappear.

In 1898, Fred Snow brought the last load of fish aboard the schooner Pleiades into Wellfleet Harbor.

Sealshipt

In 1911, a big, modern oyster company called Sealshipt came to Wellfleet.

Actually, it was a trust, and in 1910 the New York Times reported that the Sealshipt Oyster System was trying to monopolize the Atlantic Coast oyster business.

Sealshipt had developed a sanitary container for shipping oysters and marketed it heavily through its 25,000 retail agents. That was a big deal at the time. Exposes of adulterated and unsanitary food had riled the public, and Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

Sealshipt employed up to 125 people, who worked six days a week from 7 am to 5 pm. Another 600 worked at the Sealshipt office in Boston. They only got Thanksgiving and Christmas off, worked by the light of kerosene lamps and shipped 50 barrels of oysters a day.

Things were looking up for the Wellfleet oyster. In 1909, 22,500 bushels of Wellfleet oysters were harvested from the flats – about a fifth of the haul during the palmy days of the Wellfleet oysters. Still, an improvement.

Sealshipt lasted three years. In 1914, the business was sold at foreclosure.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

Lorenzo Dow Baker, the Banana King, came into this world on Bound Brook Island in 1840. He founded the Boston Fruit Company, which evolved into United Fruit, which evolved into Chiquita Banana.

Baker envisioned a different future for his hometown, one based on tourism and aquaculture.

Lorenzo Dow Baker

In 1886, he built the luxurious 62-room Chequasset Inn on Mercantile Wharf, which had served the now defunct mackerel fleet. Baker brought his Jamaican staff in the summer north from his Titchfield Inn, which he ran in Jamaica in the winter. He billed the Chequasset as a cruise without the seasickness.

Sportsmen and their families came for the duck hunting, fishing, tennis and billiards. Guests could stroll among the fashionable elite along the boardwalk. A full orchestra entertained dinner guests.

Then in 1905, Baker added a funny little shed with a pitched roof to the side of the Chequasset Inn. He let a Dr. David Belding conduct his shellfish research from what was actually the Massachusetts Department of Fisheries Shellfish Laboratory and Quahog Hatchery.

David Belding

Belding, a brilliant shellfish biologist and a medical doctor, laid the foundation for modern aquaculture in that shed. He wrote groundbreaking reports on bay scallops, quahogs, oysters and soft-shell clams that have yet to be surpassed. Belding also served in the Army Medical Corps in World War I, wrote books and worked as Professor of Bacteriology and Experimental Pathology at (appropriately) the Boston University School of Medicine

It would be a long time before Belding’s research bore fruit. The Wellfleet oyster continued its slide.

Things got worse. A typhoid epidemic in 1924 was blamed on oysters, while Prohibition closed the oyster cellars and taverns where they were so gleefully consumed. In 1936, David Atwood closed Wellfleet’s last oyster company. The town turned to tourism, improving the roads, creating a dump, bringing in electricity.

The Return of Dr. Belding

Scallops and quahogs overtook oysters as Wellfleet’s main crop during the Depression. Then during World War II, the Army set up a training camp for amphibious landing craft at Wellfleet. The vessels churned up so much silt they smothered the oyster beds.

By 1956, Wellfleet oysters were only planted by individuals doing it as a side hustle on small private beds. The good news was that people started following Dr. Belding’s advice, and it seemed to work. The town bought seed from the state and encouraged fishermen to bring in their shells to one section of the flats so they could collect oyster seed.

In 1966, Dr. Belding, then in his 80s, returned to Wellfleet to join the newly created Shellfish Advisory Board. Wellfleet worked with other Cape towns and the state to revive the Wellfleet oyster. They started a cultching program, planting bushels of scallop shells to catch oyster seed.

Wellfleet Harbor today

Miracle on Ice

In 1980, an artist, entrepreneur and fisherman named Paul Suggs formed the Mud Hake Oyster Company. It signaled a new era and new energy in the Wellfleet oyster industry. Suggs got a grant, and he got good at shucking. Two days a week he’d take his oysters on the road to sell them.

Suggs then decided to sell Wellfleet oysters at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid. He bought up the local product in the weeks beforehand – 80 bushels of oysters, 25 bushels of mussels and 40 bushels of clams.

In a rented U-Haul, he led friends, wives and children to Lake Placid. They set up a raw bar at the Ancient Mariner Hotel and started selling shellfish as fast as they could shuck them. One day Suggs was walking through the Ancient Mariner restaurant wearing a Wellfleet oyster T-shirt. Someone yelled, “Hey Wellfleet, hey Wellfleet!” The voice belonged to a member of the U.S. hockey team.

Suggs got to talking with the hockey players, who told him how much they wanted to win their game against the Soviet team the next day. The Soviets had dominated Olympic hockey through the 1970s, and their army had just invaded Afghanistan.

Suggs said he held the key to victory. He would give them all the Wellfleet oysters and clams they could eat for free, if they promised not to have sex that night and dissipate all that energy. He guaranteed they’d win if they kept their promise.

Both sides kept their end of the deal, and the next day the U.S. hockey team won in the last 10 seconds of the game – the Miracle on Ice.

End Notes

With thanks to The Famous Beds of Wellfleet, A Shellfishing History, by D.B. Wright. according to History of Barnstable County, Mass., 1620-1637-1686-1890 by

Images: Wellfleet oysters by Paula O via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Map of Wellfleet, Boston Public Library via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Miracle on Ice magazine cover By Copyright by Sports Illustrated/Photographed by Heinz Kluetmeier, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25356046. Union Oyster House by By Swampyank at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20434529. Wellfleet’s First Congregational Church By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093285. Oyster spat By CSIRO, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35474428. First Encounter Beach By ToddC4176 at the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16093177. This story updated in 2022.

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Six Iconic Summer Paintings of New England

New England has no shortage of summer paintings. For centuries, artists have fled cities in summer for the cool air by the seashore or in the mountains. Or perhaps they just took a short train ride from New York or Boston.

They first ventured forth to the White Mountains in the early 19^th century. They explored almost as much as they painted. Later their paintings promoted tourism.

Then summer art colonies began burgeoning throughout New England. In addition to the White Mountain painters, New Hampshire had Cornish and Dublin. Connecticut had Cos Cob and Old Lyme. Massachusetts had Provincetown, the Berkshires, Gloucester and the Lynn Beach Art Colony. Maine had Ogunquit, Monhegan and Skowhegan – as well as every other island and coastal community.

Even tiny Rhode Island and Vermont had their own artist colonies. Vermont had the Dorset painters, and painters favored the South Kingstown hamlet of Matunuck.

So here are six summer paintings, one for each New England state.

The Couch on the Porch, Cos Cob

Couch on the Porch by Childe Hassam

Childe Hassam lived in New York during the winter but in summertime he ventured to various artist colonies. Beginning in the 1890s he began visiting the Cos Cob art colony in Greenwich, Conn. Later, he also stayed at Miss Florence Griswold’s Old Lyme art colony.

Hassam, observed the New York Times, was a priest high in the councils of the increasing tribe of American Impressionsts.

Hassam painted The Couch on the Porch in 1914 in Cos Cob. The art colony began when one of the first American Impressionists, John Henry Twachtman, moved to a farmhouse in Greenwich in 1886.

One critic wrote that Cos Cob was to American Impressionism in the 1890s what Argenteuil was to French Impressionism in the 1870s.

Instead of historical scenes or famous people, the impressionsts painted landscapes and scenes of everyday middle-class life. They relied on natural light, quick brush strokes and a bright palette.

A short train ride took Twachtman’s friends from New York City to Greenwich. Some stayed at his home or boarded at the Holley House, now known as the Bush-Holley House. The colonists included such artists as J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid and Theodore Robinson, as well as writers Lincoln Steffens and Willa Cather.

Summer, North Haven

The American Impressionists just loved to paint young women in white dresses outside in bright sunshine. Frank Weston Benson mastered the theme in many of his summer paintings.

Frank Weston Benson, was born in Salem, Mass., and he grew up with a love of the outdoors. As a boy he spent many hours duck hunting in the marshes around Salem.

In 1882, when he turned 21, his parents gave him $2,000 for a trip to Europe. He studied the old masters as well as the work of Claude Monet. When he returned, he established himself as an artist, married and had four chldren, which he frequently painted.

“I follow the light, where it comes from, where it goes,” he once said.

He enjoyed success as an artist, winning many medals for his work. During the summer, Frank Weston Benson painted on the Maine island of North Haven, as well as in the New Hampshire towns of New Castle and Dublin. He painted Summer in 1909 using his wife and three daughters as models.

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/flashback-photos-frank-weston-benson-painter-light/

Eventually, critics derided his paintings as “too pretty,” so he returned to his first love. Benson mastered waterfowl etchings, and even designed the second Federal Duck Stamp.

Cape Cod Morning, Truro

From the time he was 29 in 1912, Edward Hopper spent nearly every summer in New England until his death at 85 in 1967.

He painted the dunes and cottages on Cape Cod, the rolling hills and farms of Vermont, the rocky shore of Maine, the tenements and fishing fleets of Cape Ann.

From 1930 to 1967, Hopper spent most of every summer on Cape Cod, creating a number of summer paintings. He explained why he chose the Cape in 1962:

I chose to live here because it has a longer summer season. I like Maine very much, but it gets so cold in the fall. There’s something soft about Cape Cod that doesn’t appeal to me too much. But there’s a beautiful light there — very luminous – perhaps because it’s so far out to sea; an island almost.

He loved to suggest the inner life of human beings, something he called “a vast realm.” He also once said all he wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

Cape Cod Morning, painted in 1950, is quintessential Hopper. He captures a feeling of tension and isolation, as well as sunlight on the side of a house.

Saco River, White Mountains

In the 19^th century, hundreds of artists traveled to the White Mountains to paint the splendor of what was then wilderness.

White Mountain art started in 1826, when a widely reported tragedy began to attract people to the region. Nine members of the Willey household perished in a landslide.

Then Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

Alfred Thompson Bricher, born in 1837 in Portsmouth, N.H., started out as a businessman in Boston. However, he switched to landscape painting full-time, which turned out to be a good career move. A member of the Hudson River School of Art, he specialized in marinescapes. However, he did make painting forays into the White Mountains, including Summer on the Saco (Mount Chocorua).

Second Beach, Newport

There was nothing middle-class about this scene of Second Beach in Newport, R.I. Worthington Whittredge, a late-Hudson River School painter, painted it in 1878-1880. Newport then ruled as a fashionable summer resort for the Gilded Age elite.

Southern planters had begun coming to Newport to escape the summer heat in the mid-19^th century. Northerners then started to arrive and to build lavish summer cottages. When Whittredge painted Second Beach, Newport was still on the way up. The Vanderbilts, for example, had yet to build two of the most opulent “cottages,” the Breakers and Marble House.

This summer painting shows fashionable people dipping their toes in the water and a horse-drawn carriage at the other end of the beach.

Swimming Hole, Arlington

Though born in New York City suburb, Norman Rockwell created the iconography of 20^th century small town New England.

Rockwell’s career followed the Golden Age of Illustration a period of brilliant book and magazine illustration. It ran from the 1880s to the 1920s. Rockwell began his studies at the Art Students League of New York in 1911. Inspired by such Golden Age illustrators as Howard Pyle, Rockwell decided to devote himself to illustration.

For 20 years he worked for Boys Life magazine, living in New Rochelle with his wife and three sons. But by 1938, he needed a restart, so he bought a farmhouse in Arlington. Rural Vermont inspired him to develop into the teller of fictional stories about small town America.

He had no interest in the natural beauty around him. Instead, he sought out diners, dentists offices and schoolhouses.

In 1945, he decided to paint a salesman who takes a dip into a swimming hole on a hot summer day.

Rockwell painted his neighbor George Zimmer, who posed as the salesman. It made the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, one of seven for which Zimmer modeled. Many of Rockwell’s summer paintings appeared on Post covers.

Rockwell paid close attention to details. In Swimming Hole, he tells the story of the salesman making a long drive and stopping at a swimming hole. He parks his car and methodically takes off his shirt and tie, hangs it up, lays his glasses on a newspaper and then his cigar on a shoe.

“George Zimmer, my model,” Rockwell said, “was an awful good sport. He stripped and I poured several buckets of water over his head to get the effect.”

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The True Story of the Jenny Lind Tower (and a Few Good Tall Tales)

People often wonder how and why the Jenny Lind Tower ended up on the sand dunes of North Truro, Mass. It’s an improbable sight, a medieval stone tower like a rook on a chessboard, rising high above the scrub oak of the Outer Cape. Even odder, it stands next to a radar tower that looks like an upside-down ice cream cone, a feature of the North Truro Air Force Station.

You can’t really get close to the Jenny Lind Tower, as no road or footpath leads to it, but you can see it from the Highland Links golf course.

The Jenny Lind Tower

It’s named after Jenny Lind, the Swedish soprano. P.T. Barnum brought her to the United States in 1850 for a 15-month concert tour. Lind dreamed of raising enough money for free schools throughout Sweden, so she agreed to the exhausting, but lucrative tour.

Her tour had a lasting impact on both the United States and Sweden. Baby cribs and cottage furniture bear her name, and so do parks, streets and a town in California. She did pay for free schools in her native country. And a couple of legends about her persist on the Outer Cape.

The Jenny Lind Tower Story

Before Jenny Lind arrived in the U.S., Barnum mounted a publicity blitz promoting “the Swedish Nightingale.” Lindmania swept the country. When her ship docked in New York, as many as 40,000 people greeted her on the piers.

Barnum saw to it that people could buy all sorts of Lind merch. A grocer in Lynn, Mass., sold Jenny Lind sausages. A Boston barroom opened under the name Jenny Lind Hotel. You could buy Jenny Lind change purses, watches and shoes. A Jenny Lind tea kettle even sang after a few minutes on the stove.

Lindmania reached a fever pitch by the time she reached Boston, where she gave several concerts. The biggest venue was the Fitchburg Railroad Depot, which had a second-floor auditorium.

P.T. Barnum

Barnum, typically, oversold the tickets for the Fitchburg Depot concert. That angered the people who couldn’t get in and they began to riot. So Jenny Lind climbed to the top of the railroad depot’s stone tower and began to sing, calming the crowd.

A railroad lawyer from Boston, Henry M. Aldrich, got swept up in Lindmania and attended that concert. Then in 1925, fire destroyed much of the railroad depot. Two years later, Aldrich paid to have one of the still-standing towers removed to land he owned on Cape Cod.

So goes the story.

The Fitchburg Railroad Depot

The Real Story

But Henry M. Aldrich could not have seen the Jenny Lind concert at the Fitchburg Depot in 1850. He wouldn’t be born until 1867.

Perhaps his father had seen the Swedish Nightingale. The senior Aldrich, like his son, was a lawyer for the Fitchburg Railroad. So Henry M. Aldrich probably had the tower moved to Truro because of his family’s association with the railroad, not with Jenny Lind.

In 1927, Henry Aldrich and his wife May bought property in Truro. They then hired five men to rebuild the Jenny Lind Tower on it. Eventually they built five cottages on their 100-acre property around the tower.

According to the only record of anyone using it, Aldrich and his family climbed it to watch a solar eclipse in 1932.

When Henry Aldrich died, his children sold or donated the property to become part of the Cape Cod National Seashore.

What Really Happened

There really was a riot over Jenny Lind at the Fitchburg depot. An eyewitness, Charles G. Rosenberg, described what happened that night, Oct. 12, 1850, in his book, Jenny Lind in America. He did not, however, witness any singing from any tower.

Jenny Lind

The Fitchburg Depot was on Causeway Street, an unfashionable part of town. People weren’t allowed inside until 8 p.m., but many showed up two hours earlier. By 6:30 p.m., a thousand people surrounded the train depot. Many lost their wallets to the pickpockets who followed Jenny Lind and may have loved her even more than her audience did.

At 7:50 p.m., the crowd burst through the doors and up the narrow stairways. The surging mob tore coats off shoulders, crushed hats and ruined gowns. Some women fainted, wrote Rosenberg.

The auditorium had poor acoustics and poor visibility from many seats. When the orchestra began playing, few could hear it. Meanwhile, the heat rose to an intolerable degree, so people began smashing windows to let in cool air. The tumult then paused briefly when Jenny Lind appeared.

“I caught a few notes, with sufficient distinctness, to see that at the least, one half of her voice had been frightened out of her,” wrote Rosenberg.

During the evening, half of the hall had emptied, and the remaining half crammed to suffocation. What was more singular, he wrote, was that no one left until the end, even though they couldn’t hear or see anything.

Jenny Lind only got angry at Barnum the next day, after her fears had subsided.

Back to Boston

She made a return trip to Boston on the tour. At 31, Jenny Lind came back to secretly marry her 22-year-old piano accompanist, Otto Goldschmidt. Samuel Ward, her banker and brother of Julia Ward Howe, had offered his home in Louisburg Square for the ceremony.

Jenny Lind and Otto Goldschmidt

Goldschmidt was a serious musician, not a boy toy. They’d known each other for six years. He came from a wealthy German Jewish family and had studied under Felix Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann.

On May 29,1852, the couple left for home in Europe. They had three children and lived – it’s true – happily ever after.

Ghosts of the Jenny Lind Tower

But there’s another legend associated with the Jenny Lind Tower. It has to do with Black Sam Bellamy, the pirate who died in a shipwreck off Cape Cod (and whose bones may have been recently discovered). Bellamy had a mistress, Maria Hallett, who gave birth to Bellamy’s baby. The child died and she spent a short time in jail.

According to local lore, she lost her mind or withdrew from society and moved to a shack in Wellfleet. People called her ‘Goody Hallett’ or ‘The Witch of Wellfleet.’ Today her ghost is said to haunt the Outer Cape. At sundown she screams and curses at the passing ships. The ghost of Jenny Lind then climbs the tower to sing and drives away Goody Hallett. Or maybe she sings to calm the rage of Goody Hallett.

Image of Jenny Lind Tower: By Kevin Rutherford, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15579473. Jenny Lind Tower poster By Chemical Engineer – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62154874. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Portland Gale of 1898, and the Cat that Saved a Life

Of all the storms that struck New England over the centuries, only one was named after its victim: The Portland Gale of Nov. 26, 1898.

The monumental double storm killed more than 400 people and sank 150 vessels, including the steamship Portland in the worst marine tragedy of the 19^th century.

It created a storm surge of 10 feet in Cohasset Harbor, blocked a harbor for months on Martha’s Vineyard and changed the course of the North River in Scituate. It deposited so much water in Boston that people rowed dories on Atlantic Avenue.

Sailing master Joseph Kemp compared the Portland Gale to the Great Hurricane of 1938.

Lt. Worth G. Ross, a life-saving station inspector, also witnessed the storm. “The wild fury of the wind and driving snow continued without abatement until late in the afternoon,” he wrote. “At times the force and roar of the tempest were so appalling as to be indescribable.”

The last photo of the SS Portland before she sank in the Portland Gale.

The Portland Gale

Two low pressure masses headed toward New England on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. One came from the Great Lakes, the other from the Gulf of Mexico. The weather service only predicted the storm from the Midwest would strike New England. Had it noticed the two would merge, hundreds of lives might have been saved.

The S.S. Portland, a 280-foot wooden sidewheeler, was moored at Indian Wharf in Boston on Nov. 26, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Many passengers were returning home after visiting family from as far away as Philadelphia and New York.

Though the skies were clear that afternoon in Boston, they developed an ominous yellow light late in the day. “It was the greasiest evening you ever saw,” Kemp remembered.

Capt. Hollis Blanchard, the Portland’s skipper, went ashore as freight was loaded aboard the steamship. He called the captain of the Portland’s sister ship, the Bay State. Knowing only of the one storm headed his way, he said he would beat it before it reached Portland.

At 5:30 pm, the general manager ordered the steamship line’s vessels held until 9 pm, when the weather situation clear. Blanchard either didn’t get the message or ignored it.

A man from Brooklin, Maine, named Gott saw a cat leaving the steamer, taking her kittens down the gangway one by one. He decided the cat knew something he didn’t and got off the boat.

Sightings

At 7 pm the Portland cast off, before the sudden violent outburst of wind and snow. A number of other vessels, scurrying toward safe harbors, later reported seeing the steamship.

The Portland saluted the Kennebec and then the Mount Desert as she steamed out of Boston Harbor.

Several schooners caught sight of the Portland near Thacher’s Island off Gloucester. By then, the fierce storm had begun. At 11:45 pm, the schooner Edgar Randall nearly collided with a badly damaged steamship running without lights.

During a lull in the storm Sunday morning, the schooner Ruth M. Martin spotted the Portland off Highland Light in North Truro.

Blanchard may have headed into the storm toward open water. Over the years, fishermen recovered wreckage from her path. At some point on Sunday morning, the hull of the Portland opened up to the sea.

No one really knows what exactly happened. Some think she rammed another vessel. Some think the Portland Gale swept off her superstructure and she sunk like a stone.

Recovery

Around 7 pm on Sunday, bodies started washing up on shore halfway between the Race Point and Peaked Bars lifesaving stations. Watches on the bodies had all stopped between 9 and 10. The Portland Gale had cut off all communication between Boston and Cape Cod, and relatives began besieging the steamship line with telephone calls.

A Boston Herald reporter in Hyannis got part of a telegram from Truro, which convinced him the Portland had sunk. He left Hyannis by train and went as far as he could, but the storm had washed out coastal railroad tracks. He continued on foot, horseback and then train to Boston, where he filed the story on Tuesday and alerted the world to the Portland disaster.

The passenger list went down with the ship, so no one really knows how many died. Estimates range from 176 to 192 passengers and crew. Searchers found only 36 bodies.

Aftermath of the Portland Gale

The three-masted schooner Newburgh slammed into Union Wharf on Martha’s Vineyard and went completely through. The bow and stern stuck out of the sides, which blocked shipping to the wharves. The Bertha Glover, which carried lime, caught fire and burned in Vineyard Haven Harbor for a week. Wrecked ships littered the coast after the Portland Gale. Among those that sank were the Calvin F. Baker, the Meris H. Perry, the Albert L. Butler, the Pentagoet and the Columbia.

The Portland Gale destroyed dozens of piers and houses along the South Shore of Massachusetts. It damaged coastal railroads, severed telegraph and electric lines and destroyed the ferris wheel and roller coaster in Hull.

Provincetown got hit especially hard. It destroyed half of the town’s wharves and businesses along the shore. Afterward, lumber, wharf pilings and planks from the wharves filled the west side of the harbor. The whole mass writhed like snakes as if the surf tossed them, according to an account in the Provincetown Advocate.

The newspaper also reported that Mrs. Henry Spears “watched from her windows while men cut frozen bodies out of the Jordan L. Mott’s rigging.

“From that time on, she kept the shades drawn on every window facing the harbor.”

The Portland disaster accelerated the shift from wood to steel-hulled ships, and from sidewheels to propellers.

In 2002, Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and the National Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut, located the Portland. They used data from American Underwater Search and Survey to identify her image in the Stellwagen Bank sanctuary at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay between Cape Cod and Cape Ann.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Places Workers Were Killed in New England

Over the course of New England history many thousands of workers were killed on the job.

Some, like Vermont quarry workers, died a slow death from silicosis. Others like Connecticut munitions workers died suddenly in explosions.

Carelessness killed some. Nature killed others. Sometimes law enforcement officers killed workers because they challenged the bosses over working conditions and pay.

Here are six places in and around New England where workers were killed because of their jobs. If you know of other historic places where workers were killed, please add them in the comments section.

Remington Arms

Workers were killed at the now-abandoned Remington Arms plant in Bridgeport, Conn.

The New York Times called the enormous Remington Arms plant in Bridgeport, Conn., ‘the greatest small arms and ammunition plant in the world.’ It may also have ranked as the deadliest.

At its height, Remington Arms employed more than 17,000 workers. Some of them died on the job. On April 4, 1905, three workers lost their lives in an explosion that blew up an entire building. In 1914, Bridgeport police killed an 18-year-old striking worker, Frank Monte.

On March 28, 1942, an explosion killed four women and three men and hurt 80 others. The blast shook the enormous munitions plant about 2 p.m. It “sent bullets whizzing dangerously through the vicinity, touched off a general fire alarm and brought a rush of ambulances,” reported the Boston Globe.

Investigators blamed the explosion on a nail that fell into a box of cartridge primers.

Today the abandoned Remington Arms plant still sits at 812 Barnum Ave. in Bridgeport. Since workers were killed there, it is said to be haunted.

The Penobscot River

The Penobscot River, where logging workers were killed on log drives.

Joe Attien, a Penobscot Indian chief, worked for seasonal wages as a logger and a Maine guide. Logging work carried many dangers and cost many workers their lives.

Joe Attien first appeared in print when Henry David Thoreau wrote about him in his 1864 book, The Maine Woods. Thoreau wrote, somewhat condescendingly:

He was a good looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours.

On July 4, 1870, Joe Attien led a team of log drivers down the Penobscot River in a bateau. River drives usually ended by Independence Day, when the men went into Bangor and celebrated with a vengeance.

In 1870, though, rough water delayed the West Branch drive. On July 4, the rivermen tried to break up a logjam. They launched a bateau with seven men, captained by Joe Attien from the stern.

The churning water shot the boat across the channel and smashed it against the rocks. The collision sheared off a hole in the bateau, which quickly filled with water. The unmanageable craft hurtled over a waterfall among the rocks and logs. Some of the men couldn’t swim, and Joe Attien died trying to save them.

When the river drivers found his body, they cut a cross into a tree by the side of the pond, and hung his boots in the tree. The boots then stayed there until they rotted away, a sincere memorial of a good man.

Today you can learn more about Maine’s logging history by visiting the Maine Forestry Museum in Rangeley, Maine.

Georges Banks

An obelisk to the 57 fishermen killed in the 1841 storm. First Congregational Parish of Truro.

Fishing has long ranked as one of the deadliest occupations in the United States. In 1841, so many Cape Cod fishermen perished in an October storm that the peninsula’s young women wouldn’t court men who went to sea.

On Saturday, Oct. 2, 1841, most of the Truro fishing fleet on the Georges Banks left off fishing and made for home. Only two of the nine ships that set out made it.

The wind kicked up that afternoon and reached gale force by midnight. “The ocean roared as though with an unbridled madness,” wrote Sidney Perley in Historic Storms of New England. “Its waves ran mountain high, throwing their spray far into the sky, and forming a majestic yet fearful sight.”

Cape Cod suffered the most from the storm. Parts of 50 shipwrecks washed onto the beach from Chatham to the highlands. In one day, searchers took up 100 bodies and buried them. The Truro Insurance Company failed for a lack of men to take charge of its vessels.

In the seven fishing vessels out of Truro, 57 men and boys died at sea, and only a few of their bodies were recovered. All 57 lived within two miles of each other. They had relatives throughout the town. Eight Snows and eight Paines died. So did three boys not yet 13 years old.

An obelisk in Truro’s First Congregational Parish Church yard commemorates the 57 storm victims at 26 Bridge St. in Truro.

Amoskeag Mills

Three workers were killed when a steam engine exploded at the Amoskeag Millyard.

Ida Cram and Mary Kane worked at the Amoskeag Mills in Manchester, N.H., on the morning of October 15, 1891. On that day all hell broke loose at the facility’s Number 7 mill.

The Amoskeag, the largest cotton textile plant in the world, had installed a mammoth Corliss steam engine to deliver power to four of its plants. But steam engines in the 1800s were risky machines. They powered the industrial revolution, but maintaining and operating required a new skill that many had not mastered.

That morning in 1891, Amoskeag management had concerns about the steam engine, which seemed erratic. An engineer, Samuel Bunker, was dispatched to the engine room to see if he could find the source of the problem. No one knows if Bunker ever found exactly what went wrong because debris from the giant Corliss engine killed him when its flywheel flew apart.

Ida Cram and Mary Kane also dieed in the explosion, which showered the mills with debris and sent raging blasts of steam from the broken machinery. Dozens were injured. Investigators never conclusively figured out the reason for the blast that sent three people to the grave.

Today, visitors can tour parts of the historic Amoskeag mills that are home to the Manchester Millyard Museum.

Sayles Finishing Plants

The Sayles Finishing Plant. Workers were killed during a strike at the plant in 1934.

William Sayles started a bleachery in Lincoln, R.I., which grew into the enormous Sayles Finishing Plants in the 1920s. By then, mill owners tried to squeeze more and more work out of their employees because demand for textiles had slackened while competition stiffened from foreign mills.

In the fall of 1934, unions organized a general strike throughout the textile industry – the largest in U.S. labor history. From New England to the South, 400,000 textile workers walked off the job. The strike lasted 22 days.

Strikers stopped work at Sayles, but the company hired strikebreakers to continue production. Several thousand strikers shut down the factory. Rhode Island Gov. T.F. Green ordered state troopers and deputy sheriffs to police the strikers. They arrived wielding machine guns and tear gas bombs against the unarmed workers. They fired on strikers hiding in the Moshassuck Cemetery, killing Charles Gorczynski, a 17-year-old textile worker from Central Falls. Workers carried his body through Pawtucket in an enormous funeral procession.

Police later shot and killed William Blackwood, a 44-year-old onlooker. In the end, eight strike sympathizers and four striking workers were killed, and 132 people were injured in what became known as the Saylesville Massacre.

Today, you can visit the Moshassuck Cemetery at 978 Lonsdale Ave. in Central Falls. You can also see the Sayles’ mills and workers housing in the Saylesville Historic District in Lincoln, R.I.

Proctor Marble Factory

Quarry workers were killed most often by silicosis, a lung disease.

On May 22, 1903, Janos Szlaby, a Hungarian immigrant, worked the graveyard shift at the Vermont Marble Company at Proctor, Vt.

A belt that turned the stone-finishing machinery in one of the plants snagged. The supervisor sent Szlaby to free the belt with the factory machinery whirring below. Szlaby slipped and tumbled into the factory’s balance wheel, which crushed him to death.

Countless other workers were killed in Vermont’s quarrying and stone-finishing industries.

More pernicious than the sudden deaths in the quarries and plants, however, were the lung ailments that stone workers suffered from years of exposure to stone dust. Pneumatic tools that replaced hand tools threw off great clouds of dust in enclosed work spaces. Workers worried about their lungs confronted company managers who wanted the more efficient modern equipment.

In 1909 a group of stonecutters walked off the job in Northfield, Vt. They did it because the company bought handheld surfacing tools that threw off too much dust. In the early 1900s labor agreements included language about tamping down dust on the job. But the methods didn’t work. One study of how stonecutting workers were killed in the 1920s and 1930s found silicosis cost them 11 years of their lives.

You can visit one of Vermont’s marble quarries at the Proctor Marble Museum.

Images: First Congregational Parish of Truro By Judy Moehle – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35518602. This story about where workers were killed was updated in 2021.

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Mr. Marconi Builds a Radio Station on Cape Cod and Comes to the Rescue of the Titanic

On Jan. 18, 1903, Guglielmo Marconi sent a message from his Cape Cod station, the first radio transmission to cross the Atlantic from the United States.

Nine years later, his Cape Cod wireless station would send a message to the Carpathian, requesting its help in rescuing survivors of the sinking Titanic.

Marconi was a 29-year-old Italian nobleman whose ambition, inventiveness and love of fine food took him to a windy cliff in South Wellfleet, Mass.

He aimed to transmit news and private messages to ships sailing the Atlantic that paid for the service. By the time his invention played a key role in rescuing the RMS Titanic‘s passengers, Marconi had a monopoly on the business.

Marconi

Born April 25, 1874, Marconi made his first wireless transmission at the age of 20 by making a bell ring across a room.

Guglielmo Marconi

After his successful bell experiment, he went outside on his father’s estate and transmitted signals a mile and a half away. He gradually figured out how to send wireless signals over longer and longer distances.

He moved to England with his mother, where he managed to send a signal 3.7 miles over Salisbury Plain in 1897. Two years later, his signal crossed the English Channel. He then went to the United States to demonstrate his wireless signal, sending reports of the America’s Cup race off Sandy Hook, N.J., to the New York Herald.

In December 1902, Marconi sent a signal from a station in Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, to his station in Cornwall, England, the first radio transmission to cross the Atlantic from North America.

But he had bigger ambitions: a U.S. wireless station that would compete with the undersea cables that crossed the Atlantic.

South Wellfleet

The inventor had spent months hunting for the right land on which to build his first U.S. station. He searched along the coasts of New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. He wanted a remote spot, but not too far from drinking water, labor, supplies, a rail line and a hotel.

In February 1901, Marconi arrived in Provincetown with his assistants. A Cape Codder named Ed Cook showed them around in his wagon.

When Cook took him to Highland Light in North Truro, Marconi believed he found his spot. But the locals thought Marconi was a charlatan and refused to sell him land.

Wellfleet

Next they went to South Wellfleet, where Marconi found an eight-acre parcel of land on top of a 130-foot cliff. Wellfleet Harbor was nearby, and so was a railroad station and a telegraph office.

Marconi in 1901

Cook owned the land. Marconi bought it from him for a song, then made him general contractor. While laying plans for the station, Marconi stayed at a nearby inn, but couldn’t stand the food. He earned a lasting reputation as a snob among the locals because he had food and wine shipped from Boston and New York.

Marconi left Richard Vyvyan to supervise construction of the station, including cottages, a transmitter building, a kerosene engine and an array of antennae mounted on 20 200-foot masts.

Men called riggers built the masts as they swayed in the slightest breeze. The locals predicted the masts wouldn’t withstand the first Atlantic storm. They were right.

When the station was finally finished, the transmitter sent off such a spark it could be seen four miles away. It made a sharp, deafening crack that forced workers to cover their ears. The electricity escaped through drainpipes and stove flues, even the clothesline. The housekeeper grew used to getting a shock when she hung up the washing.

In late November, a nor’easter struck Cape Cod and toppled the masts, nearly killing Richard Vyvyan. Another crashed through the roof of the transmitting room.

Success, And a Rescue

Marconi decided to rebuild the station, with four 210-foot towers that supported the antennae. By January 1903, it was ready.

He sent a message from President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII in London. It praised wireless telegraphy and greeted the monarch.

Edward replied from Sandringham with thanks and good wishes.

RMS Titanic

Marconi raced to notify the press, and congratulations poured into Cape Cod.

Marconi realized the South Wellfleet station was unstable, and built a new station in Chatham.

The company had put its operators and equipment on board some of the most prestigious ocean liners of the day. Two Marconi operators aboard the Titanic sent distress messages for several hours after the ship struck an iceberg. A neighboring vessel, the Carpathia, received the messages and steamed 58 miles to rescue 700 passengers.

After an inquiry into the tragedy, the U.K.’s postmaster-general concluded, “Those who have been saved, have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi…and his marvelous invention.”

Today, little is left of the Wellfleet station. Much of it was dismantled during World War I as a security measure. The sea claimed much of the rest of it. The site is now part of the Cape Cod National Seashore and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photo of the remains of the Marconi Station in Wellfleet by Flffy’d. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons. With thanks to Thunderstruck by Erik Larson. This story was updated in 2022.

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