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Charles Shay, An Indian War Hero on Omaha Beach

Charles Shay, a 19-year-old Penobscot, landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day. Under heavy German fire, he bandaged the wounded and pulled drowning men from the blood-red tide.

The way Charles Shay looked at it, liberating Normandy continued a traditional alliance between the Penobscot Indians and the French people. His ancestor, Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin, served as a French military officer in Acadia, now Maine, during the late 17^th century. The town of Castine, Maine, is named after him. Castine married the daughter of another of Charles Shay’s ancestors, the chief Madockawando, and he fought with the Penobscot against the Dutch and the English.

There is now a plaque commemorating Indian soldiers in a little park on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach. On June 5, 2015, the park got a new name: The Charles Shay Indian Memorial.

Charles Shay shakes hands with fellow D-Day veteran George Kline at the dedication ceremony for the Charles Shay Memorial in Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, France, June 5, 2017

Charles Shay

When the U.S. Army drafted Charles Shay, history repeated itself. His ancestor, Joseph Orono, helped the Continental Army during the American Revolution.

Shay was trained as a medic and shipped out with the 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Big Red One. The Big Red One spearheaded the assault on Normandy, and suffered about 2,000 casualties on D-Day, mostly in the first hour.

Shay landed under heavy fire, carrying two satchels of medical supplies. He saw wounded men drowning in the sea, and he pulled them onto the sand. He bandaged the wounded and administered morphine, cradling the dying in his arms.

Assault troops on Utah Beach

Seven medics were killed and 24 wounded. Charles Shay escaped unhurt.

He then tended to wounded soldiers at the Battle of Aachen, the Battle of Hurtgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. Germans captured him after he crossed the Rhine on the bridge at Remagen. A month later, American troops liberated the POW camp.

Austria

Shay went home briefly, but couldn’t find work. He re-enlisted and returned to Europe as a medic for a military police battalion in Vienna. He met and married an Austrian woman, Lilli Bollarth.

Then the Korean War broke out, and Charles Shay went into battle once again as a combat medic. When the war ended, he returned to Vienna and worked for the United Nation’s Atomic Energy Commission. He and Lilli returned to the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine during the summers. While in Maine, he’d visit the University of Maine at Orono to talk German with the German language students.

His aunt, Lucy Nicolar, and her husband Bruce Poolaw had built a two-story wooden teepee from which they sold Indian novelties and Lucy’s baskets. When she died, Charles Shay inherited the teepee, so he remade it as a small family museum.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

His grandfather, Joseph Nicolar, had written a book called, The Life and Traditions of the Red Man, in 1893. Shay had it republished, and he wrote his own autobiography. But he also worked on winning recognition for Indian warriors, persuading the state of Maine to recognize June 21 as Native American Veterans Day.

Awards

Charles Shay received the Bronze Star and the Silver Star from the United States, but the French awarded him an honor that perhaps surpassed those. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic, inducted him into the Legion of Honour as a Chevalier.

Charles Shay on Omaha Beach in 2018.

In 2015, Charles Shay presided at a ceremony on a bluff overlooking Omaha Beach. Dignitaries unveiled a granite statue of a turtle and a plaque dedicating the park to the 175 Indians who landed on the beach that day. The park got a new name that day: the Charles Shay Indian Memorial.

“There is now a plaque commemorating Indian soldiers who left Turtle Island to help liberate our ancient French allies,” he said. “We will not forget their sacrifices.”

Charles Shay Indian Memorial on Omaha Beach

Shay, 98 in 2022, has a website. You can visit it here. His book, Project Omaha Beach: The Life and Military Service of a Penobscot Indian Elder, is available from Bookshop.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Shay in 2018 By Romain Bréget – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95721834. Image of Charles Shay Indian Memorial By Romain Bréget – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95721835.

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Joseph Orono, The Blue Eyed Indian Who Helped the Revolutionary Cause

The Penobscot sachem Joseph Orono died in 1801, too early to know about his consolation prize for losing his people’s land to white settlers.

He lived plenty long, though. He was said to have been born in 1688, which made him 113 when he died in 1801. If that’s true, Joseph Orono lived through every one of the French and Indian Wars as well as the American Revolution, in which he participated

A Penobscot chief

Five years after his death, Orono, Maine named itself after him. He probably would have preferred the land along the Penobscot River promised him, and then taken.

Joseph Orono

Historical accounts agree that Joseph Orono had reddish hair, blue eyes and a pale complexion. He spoke fluent French, English and Penobscot.

Accounts disagree about his lineage. Some say he had some relation to Baron de Castine, a French nobleman who married an Indian. (Castine also had a town named after him in Maine.) Perhaps Orono was Castine’s son-in-law, or grandson.

Joseph Orono himself said his father was French, and his mother half French, half Indian. A devout Catholic, he believed the Indians had suffered from war, and advocated peace. White people viewed him favorably, and described him as able, friendly and sagacious.

Revolution

In 1775, Joseph Orono and three other Penobscot chiefs went to air their grievances to the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts, as Maine then belonged to that colony. The Indian delegation stopped in Falmouth, now Portland, where the people gave them money, horses and a carriage to help them on their journey.

Two days after the Battle of Bunker Hill, they arrived in Watertown, Mass., where the Provincial Congress then met. It included Sam Adams, John Hancock and Joseph Warren.

On June 21, 1775, Joseph Orono addressed the Provincial Congress on behalf of the whole Penobscot tribe. As he spoke, the men inside could hear the groans of the soldiers dying of their battle wounds.

Orono said that if the Congress took care of his people’s grievances, the Penobscots would aid the rebels with their whole force. Those grievances consisted chiefly of trespasses by the whites upon their timber lands and cheating them in trade.

The committee responded warmly, and said the Indians’ complaints would receive their attention as soon as they could take a breath from the Revolution. Eventually, Massachusetts signed a treaty giving six miles of land on each side of the Penobscot river to the Indians.

Frigates

In 1779, the British built a fort in what is now Castine. Joseph Orono communicated intelligence about their activities to the patriots. Massachusetts then sent the Penobscot Expedition to Castine, and the Penobscot Indians fought with them. Whether Joseph Orono actually fought is unclear; he would have been 91.

The British routed the Americans in the worst naval disaster until Pearl Harbor. But Joseph Orono continued to help the cause, communicating intelligence to patriots in Machias and Halifax.

In 1780, Joseph Orono earned his Indian nickname, K’tolaqu. It means ‘frigate.’

Orono went to Newport, R.I., where French forces had landed before marching to Yorktown. His mission: to request a Catholic priest from the French consul. But he was so amazed by the French frigates in the harbor that he couldn’t stop talking about them afterword.

Island Life

Joseph Orono had often stayed and hunted with a friend on Deer Isle, a white settler named Seth Webb. After he broke with other Penobscots in 1783, he moved a small group of his people to White Island, off Deer Isle.

Penobscot wigwams

They established a little village with a Franciscan missionary, a Catholic chapel and wigwams. But they couldn’t live in peace there, either. In 1786, Joseph Orono complained to Massachusetts Commissioner Benjamin Lincoln, once a member of the Provincial Congress. People were chopping down his trees and burning the wigwams, he said.

A decade later, Massachusetts reneged on its deal to deed the land along the Penobscot River to Orono’s people. All they had left was the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation.

Penobscot Indian reservation, ca. 1940s

Five years after Joseph Orono died, white settlers near the Indian reservation incorporated, naming the town Orono. Today, the University of Maine has its main campus there. An island in Penobscot Bay also bears his name.

In May 2018, the University of Maine and the Penobscot Nation were scheduled to signed an agreement ‘formalizing their collaborations in the past decade to help manage the tribe’s cultural heritage.’

With thanks to Canoe Indians of Down East Maine, by Bill Haviland. This story about the Penobscot chief Joseph Orono was updated in 2022.

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Six Epic College Pranks

College pranks have been part of the college experience since at least the 13^th century, when Oxford students sent a prostitute to the cardinal in residence. The tradition of college pranks came to North America with the Puritans.

In the early 1800s, Harvard students thought it amusing to ring the bell in Memorial Hall during the wee hours of the morning. But at Brown, students preferred to muffle the college bell.

Over the years, college pranks have involved putting farm animals in inappropriate places. Pranksters often victimized prominent statues as well. Dartmouth students painted the statue of Harvard’s John Harvard green, Yale students painted him blue and others put him in women’s underwear.

Here we bring you six historic college pranks performed at New England institutions of higher learning. If you know of any other college pranks, please include them in the comments section.

College Pranks, Animal House Style

The Gardner Dow Field at Connecticut State, where students first paraded the ramnapped Ulysses.

There’s nothing like a sports rivalry to inspire college pranks, and the University of Connecticut and the University of Rhode Island, not 60 miles apart, are no exception.

In 1933, Connecticut State Agricultural College changed its name to Connecticut State College, and renamed its football team the Statesman rather than the Aggies.

It didn’t help the team. In 1934, the Connecticut Statesmen lost six out of their first seven games, while their opponents shut them out five times. Their final home game against the Rhode Island State Rams was likely to end badly for Connecticut.

Then Connecticut students learned that Rhode Island students planned to taunt them by bringing Ulysses, their ram mascot, to the game.

The Connecticut students stole Ulysses. During the 1934 game, Connecticut fans paraded Ulysses on the field accompanied by the marching band. As expected, Connecticut lost 18-0, Rhody fans tore down the goal posts and a fight broke out.

The next month, Connecticut chose as its mascot the Husky, a less kidnappable animal than the ram. For years afterward, Connecticut students ramnapped Ulysses and his successors. And for years afterward, the winner of the UConn-Rhode Island football game took home Ramnapping Trophy. When Rhode Island quit using live rams as mascots in 1974, the trophy was moved to the J. Robert Donnelly Husky Heritage Sports Museum on the UConn campus.

Streaking in Winter

University of Maine at Orono

College pranks took the form of streaking on college campuses starting in the early 1970s. Defined as running naked through a public place, streaking started out with solitary males running across campus or at sporting events. Women soon joined in the fun and streakers began running around en masse.

Some historians peg the beginning of the craze after newspapers began reported streakers at Florida State in January 1974. Despite the New England winter, University of Maine students quickly took up the sport at Orono.

The student government in March called a meeting at Memorial Hall to discuss how to handle the streaking epidemic. One streaker couldn’t resist temptation, and he streaked the meeting.

The state of Maine ended up enacting a law against streaking, but it proved ineffective. On Nov. 2, 2002, a police officer arrested two University of Maine undergraduate women for jogging naked through downtown Orono. A prosecutor charged them with indecent conduct. One of the women asked the police officer if he saw her genitals. He said no. The judge ruled a woman naked in the street is not an indecent act under Maine law because a woman’s genitals are primarily internal.

MIT Masters College Pranks

Smoot mark 364.4 on the Cambridge end of the Harvard Bridge. It says “+ 1 ear”, not “± 1 ear”, as it should.

The geeks at MIT have so perfected college pranks over the centuries that the MIT Museum once featured a Hall of Hacks.

The college pranks at MIT often display technical aptitude, something you’d expect at a university that teaches technology. MIT students once put a campus police car on top of the Great Dome, its lights flashing and its dummy inhabitant enjoying coffee and donuts.

Later, they put a subway car on the Great Dome and got it moving.

In the 1930s, Ken Wadleigh and four other MIT students welded a streetcar to its rails. They distracted the motorman and then set off thermite bombs to weld the wheels. Wadleigh became a dean at MIT.

In 1958, MIT students used undergraduate Oliver R. Smoot to measure the length of the Harvard Bridge. They marked the bridge at every Smoot, and measured it as 364.4 Smoots, plus or minus an ear. When the bridge was renovated in 1964, the markings were restored, and they remain today.

Not all pranks involve technology. MIT students dressed the John Harvard statue as the Unabomber after the arrest of that Harvard alumni.

Cow-centric College Pranks

Thompson Hall at UNH

University of New Hampshire students have long taken to heart the admonition, “If at all possible, involve a cow.”

Students at UNH, a land-grant college, have access to farm animals for their college pranks. Over the years, students put pigs and sheep in places where pigs and sheep don’t belong.

In the 1930s, Alpha Gamma Rho brothers managed to haul a cow into the Thompson Hall tower. Somehow they got the cow down as well.

In 1951, students replicated the college prank by stashing a cow in the second floor of Ballard Hall. A poem written by the night watchman, Pop Marshall, recounts the episode:

“Now I’m willing to guard your property / And watch your buildings fine, / But teaching music to a cow / Is a little out of my line.”

Years later, UNH would be victimized by a more serious college prank of sorts when popular physics professor Kevin Yates turned out to be a college dropout named Marvin Hewitt. Read Hewitt’s extraordinary story here.

Messing With Messer

In the annals of Brown University, perhaps no administrator was so victimized by college pranks as Asa Messer. He became president in 1804, just when Nicholas Brown gave $5,000 to the College of Rhode Island and renamed it Brown. Under Messer’s tenure, the student body grew, but Brown’s bequest wasn’t quite enough to run the college to the student’s liking.

Asa Messer

Beloved tutors left Brown for other colleges, but Messer couldn’t afford to hire enough replacements to keep class size down.

Early in his presidency, students played harmless college pranks such as painting Messer’s horse or stabling it in his third-floor office.

Then the students’ pranks turned dangerous. They built a hut of kindling and set it on fire next to University Hall, endangering the building’s roof and Messer’s barn. Students damaged dormitories in University Hall and broke windows and doors of Hope College’s new chapel.

University Hall in 1792

Messer didn’t believe in sparing the rod and spoiling the undergraduate. He punished pranksters by rusticating them – sending them off to work on a farm. They called him a tyrant.

Messer believed the students aimed their vandalism at him personally, and he resigned.

Samuel Gridley Howe had attended Brown during those troubled times, and had once led Dr. Messer’s horse into the belfry. He also put hot ashes in his tutor’s bed.

After he founded the Perkins School for the Blind, Howe went to visit Dr. Messer. He apologized for his wayward youthful behavior. Messer replied, “Howe, I am afraid of you now. I am afraid there will be a torpedo under my chair before I know it.”

Panty Raid To End All Panty Raids

Vermont College of Fine Arts today

On the evening of May 24, 1963, carloads of cadets from Norwich University led a panty raid against the women of Vermont College (now the Vermont College of Fine Arts).

Vermont’s faculty and staff had an inkling something would happen that evening. A local store clerk said he’d sold out of women’s underwear that day. Vermont Dean Pauline Collins told her students she’d received a call from Gen. Ernest Harmon, who headed of Norwich Academy, warning about the panty raid. She told them to cancel their dates, return to the dormitory by 7:00 p.m., turn out the lights when the panty raid began and let no one into the building.

At dusk, cars carrying 300 Norwich cadets began to arrive, followed by the police and fire department. A hose truck stopped in front of the dorm, and the firefighters jumped out to hook up the hoses. A Norwich cadet commandeered the fire truck and drove it into a fountain. Girls shouted from the windows, “Come on Norwich! We want Norwich!” Firefighters then turned their hoses on the students in the windows.

Fighting broke out between police and cadets. Police Chief George Connor said, “We were knocked down, kicked, and trampled upon. It’s a miracle that no one was killed.”

In the end, Vermont’s president issued a denial that his students had participated at all in the hijinks.

Images: Smoot, By Denimadept – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6792703; Streaker, By Alex Kehr – originally posted to Flickr as #367, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3953923Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225. Vermont College By Hannahmorris – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24295961.

This story about college pranks was updated in 2022.

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The 6 Tallest Trees in New England

Once New England had the greatest forests and the tallest trees in the world. They were a major attraction for English colonists and their sponsors, who coveted the huge white pines as masts for the King’s Royal Navy. The Crown reserved the biggest pine trees, which government agents marked with three slashes called the King’s Broad Arrow.

The laws protecting the trees for the King were honored more in the breach than in the observance. Pine trees became a symbol of resistance, and images of them appeared in flags.

The New England Flag

Tall trees exercised a fascination over people apart from their political context. Societies formed to identify champion trees. And today, many states maintain registries of their tallest and biggest trees.

The Tallest Trees

In 1940 a nonprofit called American Forests started the National Register of Big Trees and named the Wye Oak in Maryland as the national champion for more than 60 years. But measuring the tallest trees isn’t always an exact science, and most champions yield their place to new specimens. Either another tree grows taller or the champion is felled by disease, weather or real estate developers.

We did our best to identify the tallest tree in each state. But who knows? A storm could have felled it since it was last measured. If you know of a tree taller than the ones mentioned – or if any of those trees have fallen – please comment below.

Connecticut’s Gold Standard

Pinchot Sycamore, one of Connecticut’s tallest trees.

The most famous tree in Connecticut, other than the Charter Oak, is the 104-foot-tall Pinchot Sycamore in Simsbury. It’s 28 feet around and at least 200 years old — if not 300 years old. It was named after Gifford Pinchot and officially dedicated to the conservationist in 1965.

The big old sycamore sits on the east bank of the Farmington River near the base of Talcott Mountain. Floodlights illuminate it at night, and canoers can launch their boats nearby. For a while the Pinchot Sycamore tied the largest sycamore with a specimen in Bath County, Virginia, until a bigger one in Ashland, Ohio, surpassed them both.

The Pinchot Sycamore, though, is not the tallest tree in Connecticut. That honor belongs to a 144.6-foot-tall white pine in a small forest in West Cornwall called Gold’s Pines, named after the man who purchased it in 1870, Theodore S. Gold. The forest grew to 46 acres, and then 56. It now belongs to the Housatonic State Forest as one of the few old growth forests in Connecticut.

“Here, even on the brightest of blue sky days, the gentle wind makes a thunderous noise as it passes through,” wrote one hiker who waxed elegiac about the canopy of the ancients.

You can reach Gold’s Pines on Rte. 128, just right of the Little Guild of St. Francis animal shelter. Gold’s Pines also boasts a 127.8-foot-tall Tulip tree.

Maine’s Unofficial Champ

Yarmouth Dutch elms, possibly the tallest trees in Maine once.

There are no reliable height measurements in Maine available, according to the Monumental Tree index. Maine has its own registry of big trees, which it updates periodically but is considered unreliable. Maine residents nominate trees for the honor of appearing in the registry. The 120-foot white pine in Morrill is the unofficial tallest tree in Maine.

Maine, however, can claim the tallest chestnut tree in North America. The tree is 115-feet high, 20 feet higher than its closest competitor. Only a few dozen chestnut trees remain in Maine, as chestnut blight wiped out large stands of the trees from Maine to Georgia in the early 1900s.

The chestnut was discovered last year in a forest in Lovell, near the New Hampshire border. The forest was once part of an artist colony, Hewnoaks, founded by artist Douglas Volk (1856-1935) and his wife. Volk’s wife donated the property to the University of Maine Foundation.

Maine was once home to the largest Dutch elm tree, nicknamed Herbie. Planted in 1793 on Main Street in Yarmouth, Herbie grew to 110 feet tall with a circumference of 20 feet. Children watched some of its diseased limbs being cut off and cried, “What are you going to do to Herbie?”

Herbie finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease and fell to the ax and chainsaw on Jan. 19, 2010. A section of the trunk’s base was displayed at the 2010 Yarmouth Clam Festival. You can now see it outside Yarmouth’s town hall.

Jake Swamp

Along the Mohawk Trail, where you’ll find some of Massachusetts’ tallest trees.

The tallest tree in Massachusetts has a name: Jake Swamp. It’s a 163.2-foot white pine in the Trees of Peace Grove in Mohawk Trail State Forest. The forest, located in Charlemont, Hawley, and Savoy, has 83 trees reaching 148 feet, the largest collection of tall white pines in New England. It was discovered by Robert Leverett, a big-tree hunter and co-author of The Sierra Club Guide to Ancient Forests of the Northeast.

In 1996 Leverett helped found the Eastern Native Tree Society. Its members search for old stands in remote places and for giant trees in parks and cemeteries. When Leverett discovered the tallest white pine in Massachusetts, he named it after Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp Tekaronianeken.

Jake Swamp founded the Tree of Peace Society in 1982. He traveled around the world planting Trees of Peace near places such as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and Constitution Hall in Philadelphia. A year after his death in 2010, trees were planted around the world on October 18 on what would have been his 70^th birthday. A Tree of Peace was planted in his honor in Huntington Park, Mass.

Reader Norman Schell personally measured another giant tree in Massachusetts: the Sycamore on Rte. 47 in the center of Sunderland. A sapling when the United States ratified the Constitution, it measures 32 feet in circumference. It is acknowledged as the oldest and largest Sycamore tree east of the Mississippi.

New Hampshire’s Skinny White Pine

White pines, probably the tallest trees in New Hampshire if not all of New England.

The tallest tree in New Hampshire is a white pine measuring 166.1 feet tall on a private estate in Claremont. It was declared the new New England champion by the Native Tree Society. It’s a mystery to us who owns the estate, but if you’re in Claremont just look for a tall stand of white pines. The tallest one is ‘extraordinarily skinny,’ according to Robert Leverett, one of the men who measured it.

There were also extraordinarily tall white oaks in the Claremont stand. “The 115.2-foot white oak blew my mind,” wrote one big tree hunter. “The growing conditions have to be superb to support such a height for white oak so far north.”

Additionally, the Bradford Pines Natural Area in Bradford has trees over 200 years old and over 150 feet tall. Randy Redford believes they may be the tallest trees in New Hampshire, if not all of New England. They even have lightning rods on them.

A sugar maple in Ossipee was believed to be the biggest in New England until it fell in 1846. It yielded 3,300 board feet of lumber and nine cords of firewood.

According to legend, a pine cut on the site of Dartmouth College reached a height of 240 feet. But many doubt the species can grow so tall.

The Mighty Tulip

Tulip trees, the tallest trees in Rhode Island.

Several tulip trees have been identified as Rhode Island’s tallest tree.

According to the Cranston Herald, the tallest tree in Rhode Island is at 975 Warwick Neck Ave. in Warwick. The Rhode Island Champion Tree List of 2014 shows a Warwick tulip tree measuring 126 feet high as the tallest in the state.

The Native Tree Society, however, claims a 115.7-foot tulip tree on the ‘Nathaniel Green’ site in Kingston. They could be referring to the University of Rhode Island Campus.

The tulip tree has large flowers that sort of resemble tulips. Sometimes it’s called a tulip poplar or yellow poplar, but it’s actually related to the magnolia. Indians hollowed out its wood to make canoes from its light wood, and sometimes people refer to it as a canoewood tree.

The fattest tulip tree, measuring 16 feet around, is in Bristol. Click here for a map of a walking tour of the town’s historic district, where the tree resides.

Vermont’s White Pine

A tall white pine

Vermont’s tallest tree is a 143.4-foot white pine in Arlington, according to the Eastern Native Tree Society. It’s tucked in among one of the state’s best collections of large-diameter white pines, the Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area. There they are safe from development.

The Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area was a 1975 gift to the state from the heirs of Vermont writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Fisher, a tireless social activist, promoted education and prison reform. Though originally from Lawrence, Kansas, Fisher adopted Vermont as her home state.

The Arlington property that is now a protected wildlife area served as Fisher’s writing retreat during a career that produced more than 40 books, both nonfiction and fiction (largely set in Vermont).

Vermont takes its champion trees seriously. The state keeps a registry of its biggest and tallest trees by town and species, from the Dwarf Chinkapin Oak in Bridport to a giant Cottonwood in Hubbardton. To check it out, click here.

You can visit the Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area on Route 7A just north of Arlington.

Photos: Pinchot sycamore: By Msact at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48227856. Pinchot sycamore with people By Marty Aligata – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56461629. Tulip tree: By Timothy Valentine – http://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3583585898/in/set-72157614131871676/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6945589; White pine bough, By DigbyDalton – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28948041. This story about the tallest trees in New England was updated in 2023.

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Frederick Law Olmsted Plans A Cemetery or a Hundred

Chances are good you’ve encountered the work of Frederick Law Olmsted more than once in your lifetime. You’ve probably set foot in his parks or on his school campuses, or maybe you read his magazine. Quite possibly you also had some interaction with the Red Cross.

Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent

Olmsted was born in Hartford on April 26, 1822, to a modestly prosperous family. He worked as a seaman, a farmer, a surveyor, a social reformer and a journalist. Then he found his niche as a landscape architect. He also helped found the weekly magazine The Nation.

Olmsted co-designed Central Park, headed the first Yosemite commission and led the campaign to protect Niagara Falls. He designed the U.S. Capitol Grounds and planned both the Great White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” of green space.

The list goes on. He designed Elm Park in Worcester, Mass., considered by many to be the first municipal park in America. He also designed the 735-acre Forest Park in Springfield, Mass.

Groton School, campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm

His firm designed dozens of academic campuses, including Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, the Groton School, Berwick Academy, Pomfret School, the University of Maine and Phillips Academy. They also designed Shelburne Farms in Vermont, Providence Butler Hospital in Rhode Island, Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts and Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Conn.

Olmsted Goes South

Frederick Law Olmsted spent five years traveling the South for the New York Times (then the New York Daily Times), reporting on the slave economy.

He didn’t like what he saw. Olmsted concluded the cotton monopoly did more harm than good. He then reported that slavery made the slave states inefficient and backward. His observations had a big impact on the national debate about slavery.

Central Park in 1901, lower end of the mall

Then he co-designed Central Park with Calvin Vaux – the largest public works project in the country. When the Civil War broke out, Olmsted became executive director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. He administered medical relief, setting up field hospitals and hospital ships. Olmsted also distributed food and hospital supplies along the entire battlefront.

He had an almost maniacal belief in system and organization, for which he received much criticism.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Planner

Witold Rybczynski credits Olmsted with pioneering the concept of planning in a big industrializing country. “This recognition was not yet widely shared, which is why he was often misunderstood,” wrote Rybczynski. In A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century, Rybczynski quoted Olmsted’s mentor.

“He looks far ahead, & his plans & methods are sometimes mysterious,” wrote the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows.

“[His critics] think him impracticable, expensive, slow — when he is only long-headed, with broader, deeper notions of economy than themselves, & with no disposition to hurry what, if done satisfactorily, must be thoroughly.

Olmsted designed Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn.

Rybczynski also offered an anecdote that demonstrated Olmsted’s farsightedness. Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, wrote him a letter five years after the Civil War. Meigs, who respected Olmsted, asked his advice in landscaping national cemeteries.

Olmsted then replied the cemeteries should be designed to establish dignity and tranquility. He warned Meigs to avoid the current fashion for elaborate and artificial gardening because it would disappear.

To create a sacred grove for the war dead, he recommended just two things. First, building a simple wall to enclose the cemetery. Second, he told Meigs to plant trees indigenous to the cemetery’s region. To save money, he should plant nurseries next to the cemeteries. And if land weren’t available for nurseries, he suggested planting seedlings between the tiers of graves.

Olmsted died on Aug. 28, 1903, and is buried in Old North Cemetery in Hartford.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Central Park By …trialsanderrors – Lower end of mall, Central Park, New York City, 1901, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11159061. Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn., By Jllm06 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56543924.

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The Carnegie Libraries of New England

Three Carnegie libraries had their cornerstones laid in one day, but those were only a fraction of the tycoon-funded libraries in New England.

Andrew Carnegie donated $75,000 for the three building, all in Worcester, Mass. He then laid all three cornerstones in three hours on March 26, 1913.

Reading, Mass., Carnegie Library

The Worcester Daily Telegram reported on the ceremonies:

At all three branch libraries Mr. Carnegie made brief extemporaneous remarks, at all of them expressing keen pleasure because the city accepted his offer to build the libraries. He said that he is the city’s debtor, not the city his. He said the donors of the sites in the three locations and the city council in providing for the maintenance for these libraries, are the ones entitled to the greatest praise.

The day was cold and raw, and Mr. and Mrs. Carnegie were unprepared for it, having left New York with the sun shining. Mr. Carnegie found he required rubbers, and stopped off at a store in Quinsigamond to equip himself with them.

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was a Scottish immigrant who made a fortune in steel, then gave away most of it. One of his favorite philanthropies was libraries. He doubled the number of libraries in the United States, giving away 1,681. Of those, 95 were in New England. All but three are still standing. Two, in South Worcester and Rockport, Mass., are now private homes. One was an Abercrombie & Fitch outlet in Freeport, Maine, until 2021..

Carnegie was born in Dumfermine, Scotland, on Nov. 25, 1835, and immigrated to the United States in 1848.

Before the Civil War, Carnegie worked as a telegraph messenger in Allegheny City, Pa. He then learned a man named Col. James Anderson opened his library of 400 volumes to working boys on Saturday afternoons.

He credited the library with steering him “clear of low fellowship and bad habits,” and opening “precious treasures of knowledge and imagination.”

Fortune smiled on Carnegie, but he didn’t smile much on his workers. In 1892, his managers cut wages and locked out workers at the Homestead, Pa., steel works for 143 days. A bloody conflict resulted and scabs replaced the workers. It didn’t help Carnegie’s reputation for benevolence.

He believed anyone who worked hard could succeed as he did. He also believed in giving to the “industrious and ambitious; not those who need everything done for them, but those who, being most anxious and able to help themselves, deserve and will be benefited by help from others.”

Puck magazine cartoon, 1903

Beginning in 1881, Carnegie spent 20 years giving away money. Much of it went to libraries.

Carnegie Libraries

At first, Carnegie only gave libraries to places where he had a personal connection. He started in 1880 in his hometown in Scotland. Allegheny City, Pa., was the first U.S. city to receive a Carnegie gift for a library.

Until 1898, Carnegie only commissioned the Fairfield, Iowa, library outside of southwestern Pennsylvania in America.

A typical Carnegie Library cost $50,000. Rarely was a request turned down. He refused to endow his libraries, because, as he said, “an endowed institution is liable to become the prey of a clique. The public ceases to take interest.”

Towns had to show they needed a library, provide the building site and pay to staff and maintain the library. Free service had to be provided to all who entered.

After he gave away his first five public libraries, Carnegie created an open shelf policy, which lowered operating costs and encouraged readers to browse. To discourage theft, the circulation desks were made larger than usual and placed near the front door.

The libraries were unique, designed in a variety of styles selected by the town. They were formal, small and simple. Each had a large, welcoming doorway almost always at the top of a staircase, to symbolize the patrons’ elevation by learning. Outside nearly all the libraries had lampposts or lanterns, symbolizing enlightenment.

Variety of Styles

Classical Revival Carnegie Library in South Worcester, Mass.

They were built in a variety of architectural styles, selected by the town. In New England those styles included Classical Revival, or its offshoot, ‘Carnegie Classical Revival,’ Beaux Arts, Colonial Revival, Italianate and Queen Anne.

Prairie Style Carnegie Library in Vinalhaven, Maine

One was built in the Prairie Style on a very non-prairie location: Vinalhaven Island in Maine. John Calvin Stevens, the designer of Maine, designed two, in Houlton and Rumford.

Between 1901 and 1917, Carnegie donated:

43 public libraries in Massachusetts from 35 grants totaling $1,137,500;
18 public libraries in Maine from 18 grants totaling $241,450;
11 public libraries in Connecticut from 8 grants totaling $191,900;
Nine public libraries in New Hampshire from nine grants totaling $134,000;
Four public libraries in Vermont from four grants of $80,000.

(Take a virtual tour of New England’s public Carnegie Libraries here.)

Rhode Island’s Carnegie Library

The John Hay Carnegie library at Brown University in Providence

Rhode Island has only one Carnegie Library, but it’s a big one: the John Hay Library at Brown University. Carnegie donated $150,000 for the library, half the cost, and asked that it bear Hay’s name. Hay graduated from Brown in 1858, became Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, U.S. Secretary of State and friend of the tycoon.

Carnegie’s academic libraries were larger and more elaborate than his spare, simple public libraries. The interior of the Williston Memorial Library at Mount Holyoke resembles Westminster Hall in England.

The Carnegie Library at Tufts.

In Massachusetts he also donated libraries to Tufts, Smith, Wellesley and Radcliffe. He gave a library to Norwich University in Vermont and the Hamilton Smith Library (now Hall) at the University of New Hampshire. And he donated Carnegie Hall at the University of Maine.

(Take a virtual tour of New England’s academic Carnegie Libraries here.)

Carnegie died Aug. 11, 1919, in Lenox, Mass., at his Shadow Brook estate, then reported to be the second largest private residence in the United States. By then he had given away 95 percent of his fortune.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: John Hay Library By Filetime – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93721309. Reading, Mass., Carnegie Library By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24513387. Granby Public Library By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23974164. Unionville Carnegie Library By Doug Kerr from Albany, NY, United States – Unionville, ConnecticutUploaded by Magicpiano, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29970923.

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