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University of Vermont

Royall Tyler, the Man Nabby Adams Wanted To Marry

John Adams’ daughter in 1785 dumped the charming rake Royall Tyler to marry a dashing military hero. She may well have regretted her choice, but her secretive nature prevents us from knowing.

Abigail, or ‘Nabby,’ was the only daughter of John and Abigail Adams who lived to adulthood. She was handsome, not beautiful, and reserved. When she was 16 years old, Royall Tyler came to Braintree to practice law. He won, then lost, her heart.

What Nabby couldn’t have known was that her husband-to-be, William Stephens Smith, was a has-been at 30, and Royall Tyler would become a successful politician, professor and literary celebrity.

Royall Tyler

The dashing Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler was born June 18, 1757 in Boston, the son of a wealthy merchant. His father died when he was young. He studied at Harvard, where he squandered half his inheritance on drinking, partying and gambling. He also fathered a child with a cleaning woman.

After college, he studied law under Francis Dana, for whom a young John Quincy Adams had worked when he served as minister to Russia. Tyler then moved to Braintree, where he lodged with Abigail Adams’ sister and brother-in-law, Mary and Richard Cranch.

He soon grew friendly with John Quincy Adams and his sister Nabby, who at 16 was eight years younger than he.

Tyler cut a dashing figure. He was handsome, well-mannered and dressed stylishly.

Abigail Adams found Royall Tyler charming, and believed him when he told her he had reformed. She wrote to her husband, then in Europe. The young man had ‘a sprightly fancy, a warm imagination and an agreeable person,’ she wrote, though she admitted Tyler was ‘rather negligent in pursueing (sic) his business … and dissipated two or 3 more years of his Life and too much of his fortune to reflect upon with pleasure; all of which he now laments but cannot recall.’

She also told John Adams that Royall Tyler was courting his daughter.

Reformed Rake

John Adams exploded in writing at the news. He wrote Abigail a letter in January 1783:

I confess I dont like the Subject at all. . . . My Child is a Model, as you represent her and as I know her, and is not to be the Prize, I hope of any, even reformed Rake. . . .

But Tyler persisted and John Adams eventually relented. By the spring of 1784 he won Nabby’s heart and the approval of her parents. The Adams family expected them to marry.

Nabby’s letters are lost, and she never mentioned Royall Tyler in her letters. Still, it’s possible from her mother’s writing to glean what happened.

Stories about Tyler’s college days resurfaced in Braintree, and the Adamses came to think of him as an insincere flatterer.

Nabby Adams

In 1784, Nabby sailed for Europe with her mother to join her father and oldest brother, John Quincy.

Nabby wrote letter after letter to Royal Tyler. Ships from America kept arriving without letters from him. She kept to herself her ‘fear, suspicion, doubt, dread and apprehension.’

Finally, her mother broached the subject with her. Nabby asked Abigail whether she thought someone they knew was a man of honor. Abigail responded:

I replied yes a Man of strict honour, and I wisht I could say that of all her acquaintance. As she could not mistake my meaning, instead of being affected as I apprehended she said, a breach of honour in one party would not justify a want of it in the other. I thought this the very time to speak. I said if she was conscious of any want of honour on the part of the Gentleman, I and every Friend she had in the world, would rejoice if she could liberate herself.

Nabby decided to dump Royall Tyler.

In the summer of 1785, Nabby told her mother about the break-, up, asking that ‘neither the Name or subject may ever be mentiond to her.’ She sent Tyler a Dear John letter in September that year.

Consolation

Nabby’s letter devastated Royall Tyler. He took lodgings with the Palmer family in Boston, where he was consoled by Betsey Palmer. He took so much consolation from Betsey he fathered a child with her – and possibly two — while her husband was away.

Tyler then married Betsey Palmer’s daughter Mary, and they had 11 children. He took part in suppressing Shay’s rebellion, which took him to Vermont. There he became chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Vermont.

Royall Tyler became a literary celebrity as well. He wrote a comedy, The Contrast, performed in New York City before George Washington and members of the first Congress. He wrote a satirical newspaper column, published a novel, the Algerine Captive, authored legal tracts, plays, a musical, two long poems, essays and a travel narrative.

Tyler later said he only regretted his youthful profligacy to the extent it hampered his ambition later in life.

William Stephens Smith

When Nabby Adams broke up with Royall Tyler, she had her eye on someone else: Col. William Stephens Smith, secretary to the American delegation to London.

Smith was the son of a wealthy New York merchant, a Princeton graduate and a veteran of the Revolution where he had served on George Washington’s staff. When she married him, Nabby had on idea of the downward spiral his career would take.

They married in 1786 and returned to New York, where they had four children.

Smith received appointments to several federal posts, but he dabbled in Latin American coups and speculated recklessly in land. By 1809, the family lived on a small farm in western New York State. The rest of the Adams family viewed him as hopelessly improvident.

Nabby discovered a small lump on her breast, which turned out to be an aggressive form of breast cancer. In 1811 she returned to Boston and had a mastectomy without anesthetic.

She survived the operation and returned to New York. The cancer returned, though, and she told her husband she wanted to die in her father’s house. Her wish was granted on Aug. 15, 1813.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Secret History of New England’s Sundown Towns

“Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark” reads the faded road sign, an artifact on display at the Tubman African American Museum in Georgia. The sign was found outside one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

Sundown towns were municipalities that prevented African-Americans or other minorities from lingering after dark.

A sundown town sign found in Connecticut

James Loewen, a sociologist who taught at the University of Vermont, discovered thousands of sundown towns throughout the United States, including New England.

Beginning in the 1890s, New England’s small towns and rural communities drove African-Americans into urban ghettoes, Loewen contends.

Small towns kept out not just black people, but Jews, Catholics, Greeks, Italians, Indians, even trade unionists and gays. They used violence and intimidation and restrictive covenants and mortgage practices

Great Migration

Some New England counties drove out their entire African-American populations. From 1890 to 1940, many African Americans who lived in rural areas of New England had to move to cities.

From 1890 to 1930, the U.S. black population increased 60 percent. Between 1915 and 1930, more than a million African-Americans moved from the South and the Caribbean to the North. And yet entire counties in New England became whiter.

In Maine, for example, only two of the state’s 16 counties had fewer than 10 blacks in 1890. By 1930, Maine had five.

Writes Loewen, in Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, 14 Maine counties had at least 18 African Americans. By 1930, only nine did. Five black people lived in Lincoln County in 1930, where 26 had lived in 1890. Hancock County had 30,000 people in 1930, but only three were black. Forty years earlier, there had been 56.

Vermont had no all-white counties until 1930. New Hampshire had no all-white counties in 1890, but two in 1930.

Rise of the Klan

Keeping out African-Americans happened well before the 19th and 20^th century. In 1717, Town Meeting in New London, Conn., voted against free blacks living in the town or owning land anywhere in the colony.

But in the 1890s, racism deepened in the North as memories of the Civil War faded. Waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants from Canada and southern Europe moved into Yankee mill towns. The influx of immigrants sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan — and created sundown towns.

In the early 1920s, the Klan began to hold regular meetings and cross-burnings in small towns in eastern and central Massachusetts. A Klan rally near Montpelier, Vt., in 1925 drew 10,000.

Klan members march on Washington in 1926

The Klan spread rapidly in Maine, with 15,000 showing up at the state convention in 1923. The KKK held its first daylight parade in the United States in Milo, Maine, in 1923, and others soon followed.

In 1925, The Washington Post estimated New England had more than a half-million Klansmen, with 150,141 in Maine and more than 370,000 across the other New England states.

Though Klan membership fell almost as quickly as it grew in New England, the KKK left a legacy of sundown towns. Their history is rarely told.

Tales of Sundown Towns

Loewen collected anecdotes about places where minorities were afraid to spend the night.

Italian stonecutters who quarried in Portland, Conn., were told to be on the other side of the Connecticut River by sundown. The bridge would then stay open at night so no one could pass over it.
One resident of the Wollaston neighborhood of Quincy, Mass., remembers an incident from the mid-1950s: “My father, a jazz musician, had some of his musician friends over one night for some jamming. Most of the musicians involved were black. The next day, a delegation of neighbors…came by to register their disapproval that my father had blacks in their neighborhood after dark.”
A similar story was told about Burlington, Conn. An African-American family friend from Waterbury came over to play cards. “He always made a habit of leaving before sunset and if he could not, he would spend the night on the couch. … [In] earlier years, whenever he would drive in or out of town, the police would stop and harass him, detain him for questioning, or pull him over and run his license and plates. Comments were made to the effect that being a black man in Burlington after dark, he couldn’t be up to any good…”

Starting in the 1930s, the Negro Motorist Green Book guided African-American travelers away from sundown towns. Black travelers typically carried blankets, food and cans of gasoline in their cars to avoid embarrassment, or worse.

Restrictive Covenants

In 1905, restrictive covenants began appearing in property deeds. They typically stated, “No portion of these premises shall ever be sold to or occupied by anyone other than members of the white or Caucasian race.” Then they often added, “Nothing in the foregoing shall preclude live-in servants.”

The exception rather than the rule: Jackie Robinson at home in Stamford with his wife Rachel, sons David, Jackie Jr.. and Sharon.

A 1940 deed for a development called High Ledge Homes in West Hartford, Conn., said, “No person of any race except the white race shall use or occupy any building on any lot.” The deed allowed one exception for people of a different race: the owner’s employees.

Similarly, Manchester-By-The-Sea in Massachusetts only allowed blacks and Jews to live within its borders if they were servants.

Government-Supported Sundown Towns

The federal government encouraged sundown towns through discriminatory mortgage practices. Between 1934 and 1968, 98 percent of loans approved by the federal government in Connecticut went to white, non-Hispanic borrowers.

In 1954, baseball great Jackie Robinson bought a house in Stamford, Conn., but only with help from prominent white people. He proved the exception in suburban New England.

In Nahant, Mass., a property deed written in the 1920s contained language forbidding the owner to sell the house to Greeks or Jews. (Nahant, ironically, now has the densest population of Greek descendants in New England.)

Anti-Semitism

A film that exposed Darien as one of Connecticut’s sundown towns.

In 1922, the Sharon, Conn., chamber of commerce distributed a leaflet asking homeowners not to sell to Jews. Another realtor in Greenwich, Conn., sent a similar memo. It said, “From this date on, when anyone telephones us in answer to an ad in any newspaper and their name is, or appears to be Jewish, do not meet them anywhere.”

Darien, Conn., did not let Jews spend the night within its borders. The 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement , co-starring Paul Revere’s descendant Anne Revere. exposed the practice. Gregory Peck played a reporter pretending to be Jewish to write a story on anti-Semitism.

The Civil Rights movement then started to change all that with laws against racist policies. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, family status or national origin.

But attitudes didn’t necessarily change.

In 1973, all-white Ashby, Mass., voted at Town Meeting 148 to 79 against inviting people of color into town.

Photos: Darien, Conn., via Wikimedia. This story about sundown towns was updated in 2023. With thanks to Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism by James Loewen.

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Married to a Murderer, H.W. Mudgett

Clara Lovering eloped with 17-year-old Herman Webster Mudgett before a New Hampshire justice of the peace in 1878. She didn’t expect him to abandon her and the son born two years later.

Clara Lovering Mudgett

Nor did she realize until later that she was lucky to escape the marriage alive.

Herman Webster Mudgett, aka Dr. H.H. Holmes, lured victims into an elaborate ‘murder castle’ during the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. He may have killed as many as 200 people, though he admitted to only 27. He also ran elaborate life insurance scams, which led to his arrest and conviction.

Clara Lovering was a beautiful young woman from a prominent family in Loudon, N.H. It wasn’t until he was caught in Boston 16 years later that she learned the truth about the man she loved.

H.W. Mudgett

Herman Webster Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, N.H., on May 16, 1861, a month after the Civil War broke out. His parents, Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, were devout Methodists and strict disciplinarians. Levi, a farmer and a violent alcoholic, beat his children and locked them in the attic when they misbehaved.

Herman Mudgett

Herman was a mama’s boy who spent a lot of time reading Edgar Allan Poe and Jules Verne. He also liked to invent things.

Young Mudgett stood out at school, Gilmanton Academy, as a small, odd and unusually bright boy. On his way to school he had to pass the office of a village doctor who left his door unlocked.

Mudgett’s schoolmates found out he was afraid of the doctor’s office and dragged him to it, he later claimed ‘struggling and shrieking.’ They brought him face-to-face with a grinning skeleton.

“It was a wicked and dangerous thing to do to a child of tender years and health, but it proved an heroic method of treatment, destined ultimately to cure me of my fears, and to inculcate in me, first, a strong feeling of curiosity, and, later, a desire to learn, which resulted years afterwards in my adopting medicine as a profession,” Mudgett claimed — from his prison cell.

Gilmanton Academy

More likely, wrote Erik Larson in The Devil in the White City, ‘far from struggling and shrieking, he merely gazed at the skeleton with cool appreciation.’

Trouble seemed to follow him even as a boy. His only friend died from a fall when they were playing alone in an abandoned building. And he developed a hobby of dissecting animals.

Clara

Herman Mudgett developed courtly manners, a dapper wardrobe and a winning way with women. He graduated high school at 16, and got a job as a teacher in Alton, N.H. There he met Clara Lovering, whose father represented the district in the New Hampshire state Legislature.

Clara was intensely attracted to Herman, but bothered by his insistence on sex. After courting for more than a year, they eloped on July 4, 1878.

She gave birth to their son, Robert Lovering Mudgett, in 1880 in Loudon, N.H. By then Herman Mudgett tired of teaching and went to work as a clerk in a Concord, N.H., grocery store. For a year he lived in Concord while his wife lived with his parents in Gilmanton. He decided he wanted to be a doctor. Clara agreed to support Herman through medical school.

Gilmanton, N.H., in 1910.

He enrolled in the University of Vermont‘s medicine program in Burlington, frequently visiting his young family. Clara supported him ‘doing services to various people’ (probably sewing), according to newspaper reports.

After a year Herman Mudgett transferred to the University of Michigan, a medical school that emphasized dissection. She joined him in Ann Arbor, but after a year they decided she’d be better off at home in New Hampshire.

His Michigan professors recalled him as a roue who breached his promise with a widow from St. Louis. He stole cadavers, mutilated them and tried to collect insurance money by saying they died in an accident.

During the summer of his junior year he took a job as a traveling salesman for a book publisher in Northwestern Illinois. He kept the proceeds and fell in love with Chicago.

Life After Medical School

Herman Mudgett graduated in 1884 and set out to find a place to practice. He tried Portland, Maine, where he got another sales job. In his travels he discovered Mooers Forks, N.Y., where he was hired as a grade school principal. He corresponded with Clara by mail, and he visited her several times. He contributed little to support his family.

In Mooers Forks, he was rumored to have caused the disappearance of a boy seen in his company. He also plotted – but didn’t execute – an elaborate life insurance fraud involving a cadaver.

In October of 1888, he visited Clara and Robert at home and told them he had business in Chicago. He didn’t want her to join him. That may be because he had already married another woman. Clara took him to the train station in Concord, and didn’t see or hear from him again for six years.

Clara decided she would have to support herself and her young son. She learned dressmaking in Concord, then set up a successful shop in Tilton.

“There is a modest little tin sign tacked on a simple white building on Main st. opposite the hotel, right in the center of this seminary village, which reads, “Mrs. C.A. Mudgett, Dressmaking,” reported the Boston Globe. She lived in an apartment above the store with her son.

Torture Chamber

Meanwhile, Herman Mudgett was working insurance scams around the country. According to the Boston Globe, “On one occasion Holmes insured his own life for $20,000. Then he went to a hotel in Rhode Island, wearing a beard. He got a body, took it two miles from the hotel, cut the head off, and buried the rest. He shaved, went to the hotel, registered under a new name and asked for Holmes. They said he had gone out, but was staying at the hotel. The swindler took the head, charred it in the hotel furnace and tried to identify it as his own. This particular scheme fell through.”

Mudgett’s torture chamber, or “castle,” in Chicago

Mudgett moved to Chicago and began calling himself Dr. Henry Howard Holmes. He bought a pharmacy, and the owner mysteriously disappeared. Across the street he built a three-story building with living quarters, torture chambers, trapdoors and chutes into the basement kiln. During the Columbian Exposition he opened his home as a hotel for unlucky visitors to the fair. He seduced his female guests, swindled them, killed them and burned their remains.

He also married a third women without divorcing Clara or his second wife.

Mudgett was finally jailed in St. Louis for selling mortgaged goods. He brought a fellow inmate in on one of his schemes. When Mudgett failed to deliver, the inmate tipped off authorities.

Returned Wanderer

In early October 1894, Clara Mudgett got a typewritten letter that her husband sent to his brother in Jamaica Plain from Indianapolis. He explained he was in a train wreck that fractured his skull, then confined in a Minneapolis hospital where he completely forgot who he was. He gradually came to his senses and worked so he could earn enough to come home, set up a business and support his wife and child.

Clara wrote to him, and he responded he was leaving Chicago for Tilton via Montreal. He then sent her a letter from Montreal where he said he was detained on business.

Mudgett was actually hiding out in Burlington, renting a house with the wife of an accomplice he had murdered. He tried to kill her by planting a bottle of nitroglycerine in the basement and asking her to bring it to him. She wisely refused.

One day he went to pick up his mail in Burlington and saw Pinkerton detectives in the post office. He quickly disappeared.

Homecoming

At noon on Monday, Nov. 5, 1894, Herman Mudgett arrived in Tilton by train and found out where Clara and 14-year-old Robert were living. ‘The home-coming was a joyous one for the wife,’ reported the Globe. “The wife hugged and kissed the returned wanderer, wept over his narrow escape from death and long illness, desiring no further explanation of his absence, satisfied with his being home at last and for always, for he had told her so.”

They had a festive family dinner, and then he went to visit his parents in Gilmanton for a few days. He returned to Tilton for about a week, then said he had business in Boston. But Pinkerton detectives were on his trail, and arrested him on Saturday, November 17.

A Boston Globe reporter came to Clara’s house and asked her about her married life. She told him, then asked why. When the reporter told her of her husband’s arrest, she burst into tears and said, “Perhaps he has another wife, too, somewhere.”

Moyamensing Prison. The execution of H. H. Holmes, scene while he was making his final address. Sketched in the Prison by Newmar, Times artist. From Holmes’ Own Story (1895) by Mudgett, Herman W. https://archive.org/details/HolmesOwnStory1895

Mudgett was tried for murder in Philadelphia and hanged on May 7, 1896. Robert became a certified public accountant and city manager of Orlando, Fla.

At the age of 46, Clara Lovering married John Peverly and moved to Vallejo, Calif. She lived to be 95 years old, dying on March 9, 1956. She is buried in Canterbury, N.H.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Historic New England Football Fields

Football, once called the Boston Game, was played on many historic New England football fields since the 19th century. And New England has made many contributions to the development of the sport.

As early as 1827, New England college students played an organized football game. New England jocks formed the first organized football club (there’s a plaque on Boston Common about it). The National Football League also played its first night game in New England.

But even more significant, a New England college was the birthplace of modern football and the modern football stadium.

New England even had an NFL championship before Tom Brady and Bill Belichick joined the New England Patriots – in fact, before they were born.

Here, then, are six historic football fields or their exact locations, one in each New England state.

Yale Bowl

Yale Bowl

Had it not been for an architect named Charles Ferry, the Superbowl might be called something else. Ferry designed the Yale Bowl Stadium as – well, the first bowl-shaped football field.

Fill was used from the field to form an elliptical berm around the stadium. Ferry designed the exterior in a neo-Gothic style, and acid was poured on it to make it look old.

For some reason Ferry failed to include locker rooms in the stadium; Yale football players must walk 200 yards from the Smilow Field Center. They enjoy the walk, but the New York Giants who played there in 1973 and 1974 did not.

The Yale Bowl was finished in 1914 with 70,896-seats and renovated in 2006 with 61,446. No stadium in the United States is older and larger than the Yale Bowl. It inspired the shape of the Rose Bowl, the name of post-season college football games and the name of the premier football contest in the world.

It isn’t just the modern stadium that began at Yale. So did modern football. A former Yale football star named Walter Camp set the rules for today’s game over the course of 15 years in the late 19^th century.

Whittier Field

Hubbard Grandstand at Whittier FIeld

The first organized intercollegiate football game in Maine was played in Lewiston between the Bates team later known as the Bobcats and the Tufts team later known as the Jumbos on Nov. 6, 1875.

But almost from the beginning, Bates has had a football rivalry with the Bowdoin Polar Bears, one of the oldest college rivalries in the country. It started when a Bates player wrapped the college’s garnet-and-white scarf around Bowdoin’s statue of a polar bear. Bowdoin players wrapped their black-and-white scarf around Bowdoin’s statue of a bobcat. But Bates students have soaked the scarf in gasoline and set it on fire after a football win.

Bates fans call their opponent “Blowdoin,” “Harvard rejects” and “plantation boys.” Bowdoin students taunt “dirty Lews,” referring to Lewiston’s poverty. Both sides call the other “safety school.”

All Bates-Bowdoin games take place on Bowdoin’s historic Whittier Field, which opened in 1896. It features a track where Olympic champion Joan Benoit Samuelson trained.

Boston Common

Amateur football played on Boston Common 1909, photo by Lewis Hine. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In the 18^th century, football started out in the United States as something like the medieval European sport of mob football. The game had unlimited players, and one of its few rules disallowed manslaughter and murder as ways to move the ball.

By the 19^th century, mob football moved to college campuses as an intramural sport. Each college played by its own rules. A Harvard tradition known as Bloody Monday started in 1827, with the freshmen playing the sophomores. Winslow Homer illustrated the game in an engraving called Class Day at Harvard University in 1858. The game often ended with injuries, so college administrators finally banned it.

By then, another version called the Boston Game grew popular at East Coast prep schools. It used a round, inflatable ball introduced in 1855. Graduates of Boston’s elite prep schools formed what some consider the first organized football club. They called it the Oneida Football Club.

The Oneidas played pickup teams from 1862-65 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members of the club dedicated a small stone monument on the Common that claims it never allowed a point. The inscription reads, “On this field the Oneida Football Club of Boston, the first organized football club in the United States, played against all comers from 1862 to 1865. The Oneida goal was never crossed.”

Dartmouth College Green

Football on Dartmouth’s green

In 1867, Dartmouth had its own version of football, called Whole Division. Seniors and sophomores played juniors and freshman in chasing after a ball. Every ambulatory student played the game.

Nine years later, three Dartmouth students put up rugby-style goal posts on the campus green for football games. The Dartmouth administration didn’t sanction the game and tore down the goal posts by commencement. One of the three students, Lewis Parkhurst, later donated the money for Dartmouth’s main administration building, Parkhurst Hall. The football team would later be called Big Green.

Dartmouth played its first intercollegiate football game against Amherst College in 1881, by a touchdown. The score: 1-0. That auspicious start for Big Green came before a crushing 53-0 loss to Harvard in 1882 and an even worse loss to Yale in 1884 by a score of 113–0.

The Cycledrome

The Cycledrome in Providence.

Providence Steam Roller was the first New England team to won the NFL championship — in 1928. The Steam Roller – not the Steamrollers – was so named as an unstoppable force of athletic prowess. It played in a stadium built for bicycle races called the Cycledrome.

The team was founded in 1916 by Providence Journal staffers, a judge and a real estate developer. It soon became a regional powerhouse and was considered the best independent team in the country. The Steam Roller began playing NFL teams in 1924. It did so well against them the owners decided to join the NFL in 1925. In 1928 the Steam Roller won the NFL championship with the best winning percentage in the league. Each player got a gold watch.

A peek into the Steam Roller’s finances in 1927 showed one of the team’s major expenses was 15 percent of the gate receipts to the Cycledrome. The NFL took 1 percent of gate receipts, visiting teams took $2,475 and the players – all of them — earned $1,972 in salary. That left the team almost $6,000 in the black that year. Financial difficulties eventually doomed the team at the end of the 1931 season.

The Steam Roller made history in 1929 in a November game scheduled against the Chicago Cardinals. A storm made the field unplayable. They decided to play a night game three days later on Nov. 6 at nearby Kinsley Park, which had just gotten lights. The ball was painted white and 6,000 people came to watch.

The two football fields are now parking lots. The Cycledrome is a parking lot and a Peter Pan bus station between I-95 and Rte. 1. Kinsley Park is a parking lot at the corner of Kinsley and Acorn streets.

Athletic Park

An early University of Vermont football team

At the intersection of Intervale and Riverside roads in Burlington, Vt., is a highway plaque marking the site of Athletic Park. It was located on the streetcar line between Burlington and Winooski. The University of Vermont’s football team played there from 1887 until 1906.

Vermont’s football history is otherwise limited. Only two players in the NFL even attended college in Vermont: Washington Redskins receiver Pierre Garcon played just one season at Norwich University before transferring, and Seattle Seahawks kicker Steven Hauschka graduated from Middlebury College.

Vermont high schools have produced only three NFL players: Joe Shield, Jason Foster and Bob Yates, according to the Burlington Free Press. Shield didn’t produce a single statistic in just three games for the Green Bay Packers in 1986, and Yates never started a game in five seasons as an offensive lineman for the Boston Patriots from 1961-65.

The third, Jason Foster, a former Tampa Bay Buccaneer, was known for receiving a 5 on the Wonderlic test, the second lowest score in NFL history. Wonderlic is an intelligence test in which a score of 10 suggests literacy.

Photos: Yale Bowl BBy Parkerjh – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=103979446. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Madness — or Murderousness? — of Vermont’s Ezra Smith

To this day nobody really knows what happened in August of 1877 to Deacon Ezra Smith of Vergennes, Vt. Was he engulfed by madness? Was he always secretly evil? Or was he an innocent man who chose the worst possible moment to slip from the path of righteousness?

Either way, within a year he would be penniless and on the run for his life, his reputation destroyed.

Ezra Smith

Ezra was 54 in 1877. He was considered a well-off businessman, worth perhaps $20,000. He dealt in stoves and tin ware with two other men – Baldwin and Stewart – in Vergennes. And he had a sizable farm in Addison, Vt.

Ezra had a long marriage to his wife Cordelia, and they lived in a nice home in downtown Vergennes on Green Street. They had a son Frank, 21; daughter Mary, 25. Ira Mills, the 10-year-old orphan son of Cordelia’s sister, Adelaide Mills, lived with the family in Vergennes.

Son Frank, meanwhile, had recently married and lived at the family farm in Addison.

Ezra served as a deacon in the Addison Baptist Church, and the family belonged to the Baptist Church in Vergennes.

Addison Community Baptist Church

The marriage between Cordelia and Ezra Smith, benefiting from Vermont’s growing economy, seemed cordial and peaceful . No one ever challenged that appearance.

Trouble

The trouble started simply enough when Cordelia started feeling ill on Aug. 4, 1877. Doctors concluded she had cholera. Because of her age, doctors presumed, she struggled to shake off the illness. After eight days of vomiting and diarrhea, Cordelia died.

During those eight days, Cordelia’s neighbors, friends and relatives would come to visit. They would later note that it seemed the Smiths received a lack of support from church friends. Ezra then had to provide much of his wife’s care.

Ezra was later described as exhausted, frazzled and haggard during the period of Cordelia’s illness. His major support came from a young neighbor, Mary Champlin, who attended to Cordelia and stayed in the house during the illness.

On August 12, Ezra prepared some beef broth for Cordelia. She complained of its bitterness and later passed away in her sleep. Ezra closed Cordelia’s open mouth and bound it shut with a sheet to prepare her for her funeral.

Then, neighbors say, he slipped into the next bedroom and made love to Mary Champlin, his wife’s body still warm.

Mary Champlin

Mary Champlin, 31, lived in Vergennes with her four children. Mary’s husband worked in Essex, N.Y., and stayed home only for a day or two a month. Mary’s husband had left her once because Mary had taken up with a lawyer from North Adams, Mass. But they managed to patch up their marriage.

In January of 1877, Ezra first met Mary at a church social held at his home . The children and the adults at the social played a game, and as penalty for losing Ezra had to kiss Mary. Mary was not particularly attractive, as her friends describer her, but that silly kiss was Ezra’s undoing, he would later say.

As Cordelia lay sick, tongues began wagging in town. They deemed Mary’s presence in the home improper. Mary’s husband, Wilbur, tried to persuade Mary to leave town, but she refused and he left with their children.

Cordelia’s father only learned of her sickness a day before she died. He ordered doctors to investigate, and they grew suspicious. They suspected poison. So Cordelia’s father hired Solon Burroughs, one of Ezra’s friends to worm his way further into Ezra and Mary’s confidence.

lydia-sherman-arsenic-bottle

Wilbur Champlin acknowledged he had a quantity of arsenic that he used for preserving birds as trophies. Mary had access to it, he said. Cordelia’s father had her body investigated by Peter Collier, a chemist at the University of Vermont.

Finally, the sheriff made three arrests: Ezra, Mary and Solon Burroughs. Ezra confided to Solon that he believed that all three of them would hang if they couldn’t find a way to stop the investigation. Egged on by Burroughs, Ezra wrote to Professor Collier offering to pay him $350 to stop his investigation.

All Ezra accomplished in writing the note was to add another piece of evidence to the case against him.

Downward Spiral

The local Vergennes prosecutor had his case sewn up by December. He invited two high-powered lawyers to assist him –ex-Governor J.W. Stewart of Middlebury and Col. W.G. Veazey of Rutland.

John Wolcott Stewart

Gen. J.H. Lucia of Vergennes and Henry Ballard, a dynamic young lawyer from Burlington, would handle the defense. Ezra’s lawyers had the trial postponed in December of 1877 to give them a chance to prepare. It would finally begin in June of 1878.

Meanwhile, in December word leaked out that Ezra and Mary were in adjoining cells in the Middlebury jail. They had been passing love notes to each other through a stovepipe hole in the wall between them.

“Their affection for each other seems as ardent as before their arrest,” the newspaper reported.

In March of 1878, with Ezra Smith locked in jail, his creditors seized his house and property in Vergennes and his farm in Addison. They were put up for sale. With his property valued at $6,300, Ezra’s debts amounted to more than $8,000.

Vergennes, Vermont

The Trial

The trial began in June 1878, and few doubted Ezra’s guilt. He was labelled a wife-poisoner and perhaps a serial killer. His sister-in-law, Adelaide Mills, had died in circumstances similar to Cordelia’s. Ezra’s father-in-law had that case investigated, though after four years little evidence could be found.

Testimony established that the relationship between Mary and Ezra had been unwholesome. Stolen kisses witnessed by a shopkeeper, whispering between the two and glimpses of Ezra with his arm around Mary cemented the story.

The professor, Peter Collier, testified that Cordelia’s internal organs seemed unusual. And he found traces of arsenic in her internal organs, but he acknowledged he didn’t find enough arsenic to prove it had killed her.

Solon Burroughs testified that his old friend Deacon Ezra Smith was not all he appeared. He told of crooked business deals that Smith had participated in. And, he said, Smith swore that as long as he had a penny to his name, Mary Champlin would never go hungry.

Satyriasis?

On the final day of testimony, crowds packed the courtroom anticipating they would finally hear from Ezra. But they were disappointed. The final push from Ezra’s defense came from a Doctor Goldsmith.

“There is a form of insanity in which an old man who has always lived a virtuous life becomes morbidly infatuated with some woman and has an uncontrollable desire to have sexual intercourse with her at unusual places and times,” he said.

It is a disease which commonly attacks one of advanced age in which there is not only abnormal desire, but unusual power. It is called satyriasis; I have met with such cases. This desire follows many species of insanity it becomes an overruling passion; an old man with not only the great infatuation, but also the unnatural power such as the State has claimed in this case, I should judge was inflicted with this disease to such an extent, that he would be in a manner irresponsible; never saw a person afflicted in this way when under 50 or over 80 years of age; this is most common in women.

The Satyr’s Family by Albrecht Durer

Innocent, but Disgraced

Even Solon Burroughs acknowledged that he questioned his old friend Ezra’s sanity.

“I would say of his actions that he was insane,” he said. “[That] could explain some things I saw in no other way.”

The prosecutors pounced on the defense maneuvers. It was clear, they explained eloquently, that Ezra Smith had been backed into a corner by their case. Finally, he was left only with a ludicrous claim of insanity.

Ezra’s lawyers, meanwhile, hammered at the circumstantial nature of the case against Ezra. Ballard said prosecutors had entered no proof, only possible motive, into the record. It was a stunning coup that would help build the young defense lawyer’s career. The prosecutors, so sure of the motive, had failed to nail down enough sure evidence.

The jury voted 11-to-1 on the first ballot. Finally that one hold-out juror changed his vote. Ezra was found innocent. Vermonters were shocked at the decision. It left Ezra and Mary facing only a charge of adultery. Mary moved to New York, where she followed the trial with interest.

Ezra was bankrupted and disgraced. Soon after the trial he relocated to New York. And Cordelia’s father vowed to pursue him tirelessly for new evidence in the case.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image of Addison Baptist Church By Mfwills – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11365113.

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Why Vermont Declared War on Germany Months Before Pearl Harbor

Nearly three months before Germany declared war on the United States, Vermont declared war on Germany.

Montpelier, where Vermont declared war on Germany.

Pearl Harbor, of course, triggered the United States’ entry into World War II. Two days after the Japanese attack on Dec. 7, 1941, the United States declared war on Japan. The assault surprised Hitler as much as anybody, but he declared war on the United States on December 11. The next day, the U.S. reciprocated.

Vermont beat everyone to the punch. On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s Legislature reinterpreted a military order issued by President Roosevelt to establish a state of armed conflict with Germany.

Why War?

Was this another example of Vermont’s iconoclasm? The state always went its own way, having been established as a republic in 1777 before joining the United States. It was the first to ban slavery, the first to provide for a state university – and a Vermonter was the first to photograph a snowflake.

But Vermont wasn’t just trying to be different. Vermont declared war on Germany for a good reason.

In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Non-officers earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

Soldiers from nearby Fort Ethan Allan at the Champlain Valley Exposition at Essex Junction, Vt. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

For example, Marjorie Kenney Haselton, a war bride pregnant with a small child, worried frantically about money. From Massachusetts, she wrote to her draftee husband about her finances. She received $80 a month. Her expenses were $20 for rent, $36.50 for milk and groceries, $8.55 for utilities and $6.95 for insurance and laundry. That then left $8 for clothing, medicine, heat in winter months, newspapers, periodicals and amusements.

Why Vermont Declared War

Recognizing many such cases of hardship, the Vermont Legislature wanted to award a bonus to Vermonters called up to serve.

In September 1941, lawmakers got their chance. The Legislature held a special session to bail out the University of Vermont, then facing a financial crisis.

Lawmakers not only appropriated money to bail out the university on September 16, they voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees.

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

President Roosevelt signs declaration of war against Germany.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters.

Armed Conflict

Vermont lawmakers seized on the chance to redefine ‘armed conflict.’ They called it a state of national emergency in which the president orders armed force to protect lives or property endangered by any hostile foreign power.

In other words, Vermont declared war on Germany.

According to historian Vic Henningsen, the act caught national attention. One newspaper praised the state:

“The rest of the nation, perhaps, may be satisfied by assurances and euphemisms of our national leaders to the effect that we are not at war and have no intention of entering upon a shooting war with the [Germans] or their Axis henchmen. But not so Vermont.

“Vermont sees things clearly and is willing to pay for its vision.”

Image: “VermontMontpelierCapital2709w” by Walter Jeffries. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons. This story about how Vermont declared war on Germany was updated in 2023.

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