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Bridgeport Elects a Socialist Mayor Again and Again and Again

Bridgeport, Conn., elected a socialist mayor for 24 years. Jasper McLevy was beloved in the city despite his friendship with a notorious radical.

He came of age at a tumultuous time. He went to work the year of the Homestead strike in Pennsylvania, when a battle between strikers and Pinkertons resulted in 10 dead and many more wounded. Two years later the national Pullman strike failed when railroad agents and their thugs murdered 30 workers.

In that heated climate, the Socialist Party attracted immigrants and workers who wanted better pay and working conditions. Businesses denounced them as dangerous radicals. Their message attracted the young man who’d grown up in a harsh working-class environment.

But McLevy, it turned out, wasn’t really a socialist. He was a politician.

Bridgeport’s socialist mayor,

Jasper McLevy

Jasper McLevy was born March 27, 1878 in Bridgeport to Scottish immigrants Hugh and Mary Stewart McLevy. His father worked as a slate roofer, as the men in his family had for generations.

The family lived in a working-class neighborhood near Seaside Park. As a boy, Jasper tried to sneak into the circus. None other than P.T. Barnum grabbed him by the seat of the pants and lectured him about honesty.

Hugh McLevy fell off a roof and died when Jasper was only 14. Jasper then quit the eighth grade and went to work to support his mother and eight siblings. He apprenticed to his uncle as a slate roofer and eventually started his own company.

Jasper also took a public speaking class at the YMCA, and in his first debate he argued that socialism was a false philosophy.

Despite his shortened education, McLevy avidly read serious books and studied every book he could find about socialism. A work of fiction, though, changed his life: the bestseller Looking Backward. In it, author Edward Bellamy envisioned a futuristic socialist utopia.

“I finally became convinced that Socialism was the only hope of the people,” he said.

He first ran for a minor city office at the age of 22 and lost. McLevy ran, and lost, in 20 other races for various offices before finally winning the mayor’s race in Bridgeport in 1933. He would serve as Bridgeport’s socialist mayor for 12 consecutive terms.

Socialist Mayor

By the 1930s, both Democrats and Republicans had pillaged the aging, bankrupt city. Then cost overruns and corruption in the construction of the Yellow Mill Bridge scandal came to light. Bridgeport was ready for a change.

The Yellow Mill Bridge. Courtesy Library of Congress.

McLevy seemed honest and down-to-earth, sincerely interested in reforming city government. He campaigned in a frayed suit and rumpled tie sometimes anchored to his soiled shirt with a safety pin.

In preparing to govern as a socialist mayor, he had studied Bridgeport as closely as he’d studied socialism. From 1900 on, Jasper McLevy attended every Common Council meeting held in Bridgeport and read every city document he could get his hands on.

Once in office, he began reforming city government with a vengeance. He sold the city limousine and sent his chauffeur back to police duties. He saved money by centralizing city purchasing, buying coal direct from the mines and renegotiating insurance contracts.

McLevy cleaned up corruption with an ordinance banning city contracts for public employees – the first city in the United States to do so. Private companies that had looted the city with trash collection contracts found themselves out of luck. City employees collected the garbage.

McLevy also benefited greatly from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, which sent money and jobs to Bridgeport. Many Bridgeport residents viewed him as a friend, and they reelected him again and again.

Penny Pinching Socialist Mayor

McLevy’s favorite phrase was, “Let’s look at the record.” Over time, though, his record began to look less like a socialist’s and more like a businessman’s. He stopped repairing roads and bridges, and he started collecting parking fines – a lot of them. In 1937 the man who bragged of his friendship with convicted socialist Eugene Debs cut wages for city employees. He wouldn’t raise them for teachers for a decade.

During the winter of 1947-48, he didn’t budget enough for snow removal. When residents complained about impassable streets, he replied, “Well, it will go away, anyhow.”

He began to win friends among Bridgeport’s businessmen, like Robert Factor. Factor recalled in a 1999 oral history, “He was a master. Really a man with a limited education but tremendously astute and always told everything exactly as it was. I don’t think the man ever told a lie in his life. He was incapable of it.”

Critics later said he never seemed to work even though he sometimes wore overalls. After all, his roofing company had several employees and he owned a weekend home in Washington, Conn.

But he still got elected, year after year. His secret? He kept property taxes low.

James Blawie, in his 1951 master’s thesis on McLevy, noted that Bridgeport was a city of small homes and factories. Homeowners and businessmen wanted low taxes. To stay in power, McLevy gave it to them.

Municipal Sweatshop

McLevy still talked the socialist talk, but he didn’t walk the socialist walk. He ran the city like a municipal sweatshop. He fought city workers’ efforts to unionize. Then in 1947, his police superintendent broke up a strike at the Canfield Rubber Company.

Labor parted ways with him. Then, the chamber of commerce opposed him when he fought an 18-cent-an-hour pay hike for city employees.

In 1957, he lost his bid for a 13^th term to Samuel Tedesco, a 40-year-old lawyer. When McLevy died five years later, the Bridgeport Herald wrote in his obituary, “a despairing; bankrupt city [that]had called him forth as their savior from political corruption. He responded with the zeal of an avenging knight.”

James Blawie, on the other hand, called his record, ‘rather a dark one.’

It includes strike-breaking, discouraging city employees from organizing, and the constant effort to keep wages as low as possible.

With thanks to James Blawie for his 1951 master’s thesis at Boston University, Jasper McLevy, The Man, The Mayor, and his City, and to Sarajane Cedrone, Jasper McLevy: Bridgeport Votes for a Change, in Connecticut Explored.

Image of Jasper McLevy: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26046319.. This story was updated in 2022.

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John Humphrey Noyes Finds Out Sex and Silverware Don’t Mix

John Humphrey Noyes started out in the 19^th century as a conventional Yale-trained minister until he found out he was perfect and without sin.

He attracted hundreds of followers who liked thinking they were perfect, too. They followed John Humphrey Noyes to his utopian communities in Putney, Vt., Wallingford, Conn., and Oneida, N.Y.

There they prospered. But John Humphrey Noyes liked sex as much as he liked being perfect, and he wound up fleeing to Canada.

He left a legacy, though, on millions of dining room tables throughout the world.

John Humphrey Noyes

He was born in Brattleboro, Vt., on Sept. 3, 1811, with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father, John Noyes, went to Congress, and his mother, Polly Hayes Noyes had a nephew who became president of the Unite States, Rutherford B. Hayes.

John Humphrey Noyes’ well-to-do family sent him to Dartmouth and then to Yale Theological Seminary.

In his second year in seminary, he decided Christ had already come a second time in 70 A.D. He then had a religious conversion, his second, after which he proclaimed he did not sin. His friends, unsurprisingly, began to think him unbalanced.

He converted a woman named Harriet Holton to his doctrine of Perfectionism, and they married in 1838. During the first six years of marriage she gave birth five times, but only one of their children lived. The couple then began living apart. He said the separation brought them both satisfaction that they had never before experienced.

Utopian Living

John Humphrey Noyes attracted about 40 followers of his Perfectionism, mostly New England farmers. After Yale kicked him out of school, Noyes and his followers moved to Putney, Vt.

In the mid-1840s, the Putney community began to experiment with communal living.

The Oneida community between 1865-75.

They shared some traits with the Shakers. For example, they believed in working for the good of the community, not just for oneself. And the whole community raised their children.

Unlike the Shakers, who didn’t have sex, the Perfectionists believed in having sex with multiple partners.

They didn’t hide their beliefs, which horrified Vermonters. A mob drove them out of Putney even as the state attorney general issued arrest warrants for John Humphrey Noyes on the grounds of adultery.

The Perfectionists moved to Oneida, N.Y., where they took out a mortgage for $2,000 on 40 acres of land, an old house, an abandoned Indian hut and an old Indian saw mill.

Silverware and Hats

They started out poor, sleeping on the floor of the old house. But they worked hard, sawing lumber for neighbors, raising crops and small fruit and making rustic furniture, silk thread, traps and palm frond hats. John Humphrey Noyes took up blacksmithing. Eventually the Oneidans starting making their famous silverware.

The community benefited from its remoteness and its simple living. It was so far from population centers that its young men didn’t have to register for the draft during the Civil War. And they used so few consumer goods they reinvested their profit in their business ventures.

The Perfectionists set up a satellite community in Wallingford, Conn., where they made matchboxes, and in Brooklyn, N.Y., where they made traveling bags. Two other small offshoots started in Newark, N.J., and Cambridge, Vt. After about a decade of hard work, they had accumulated a net worth of $67,000.

By 1875, they were worth $180,580 with about 300 members.

Criticism Prevents Novel Reading

They created a unique form of government called ‘criticism.’ It cured all sorts of faults, including selfishness, idleness, rudeness and a love of novel-reading.

Cartoon of Charles Guiteau

In 1875 a New York journalist named Charles Nordhoff visited the Oneida community and watched a session of criticism. John Humphrey Noyes sat in a large rocking chair as a group of 15 criticized a young man named Charles, who sat in the middle of the room.

Charles, they told him, sometimes used slang, acted supercilious and haughty and sometimes used pet names for people he liked. One critic said Charles had condemned the beefsteak as tough and made other unnecessary remarks about the food on the table.

Charles himself conceded he had started to think religion wasn’t important, but he was correcting that error.

Criticism, apparently, didn’t work too well on one member of the community. Charles Guiteau lived in Oneida for five years before going off to assassinate President James Garfield.

Stirpiculture

But it was John Humphrey Noyes’ views on sex that got him into trouble. He believed in ‘complex marriage,’ or what others call polygamy.

He also believed people should create children intentionally rather than through haphazard sex. But John Humphrey Noyes believed the Christian view of sex — limited to marriage — had the effect of sexually starving young people from about age 14 until they wed.

He solved the problem by having young men practice having sex with older Perfectionist women who’d gone through menopause. That way, the young men could practice delaying gratification, which was Noyes’ preferred method of birth control. He also believed women had the right to choose whether to have a child.

John Humphrey Noyes reserved most of the community’s young virgins for himself.

Another odd practice: Men asked women to have sex through a third party. At least that cushioned the letdown.

By 1869, John Humphrey Noyes began encouraging the best and brightest young people to have children. He called it ‘stirpiculture’; others called it eugenics. That’s when the community began to have trouble, because parents wanted to raise their own children.

Families also began to raise their children for a competitive, capitalist society rather than for the communal good.

Trouble

Noyes also ran afoul of Anthony Comstock, a young New York reformer who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
In 1879, John Humphrey Noyes heard a rumor that he was to be arrested for breaking the state’s marriage laws, so he fled to Canada. He died there on April 13, 1886.

The Oneida community went on to form a corporation. The business leaders determined the new company’s most profitable products were plated spoons. Eventually, the Oneida company grew into the world’s largest producer of flatware.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Six Historic Barns

Thousands of New England’s historic barns have survived severe weather, westward migration, suburban sprawl and competition from corporate agribusiness.

Often connected to other farm buildings and the farmhouse, they usually had many uses. Historic barns sheltered dairy cows, teams of oxen, horses, hay and crops.

Some historic barns, on the other hand, were built specifically for one purpose, like Connecticut tobacco or Vermont dairy cows.

But typical New England farm families grew a variety of crops and livestock, making and selling anything to support the farm. A New England farmer might sell maple syrup, timber, clothing, hard cider and barrels. He might run a tavern, or rent out his rooms or his beehives.

Big House, Little House…

Northern New England’s historic barns often connect to the house and to other buildings, Thomas L. Hubka described such connected farm buildings as ‘Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn.’

Though you might assume New Englanders connected their houses to outbuildings because of the weather, you would be only partly right.

According to Hubka, the agricultural reform movement beginning in the early 19^th century inspired New England farmers to make their farms more efficient.

So they connected their houses with such outbuildings as barns, ells, chicken coops, sugar houses, woodsheds, workshops and carriage sheds.

Farming as a way of life has waned in New England, but the public appetite for locally grown, unadulterated food is sparking a revival on a smaller scale.

If you have any favorite historic barns in New England, please share them in the comments section.

Windsor Tobacco Barn

Two of Windsor’s historic barns that sheltered shade tobacco. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Tobacco loved the sandy soil of Windsor, Conn., and in 1640 farmers began planting tobacco seeds from Virginia. As cigar smoking grew popular in the early 19th century, Connecticut farmers began to specialize in cigar binders using Broadleaf and Havana Seed. Eventually, they grew a light, tasty tobacco under tents of hand-woven cloth (hence ‘shade tobacco’) to use as wrappers.

By the middle of the 19th century, Connecticut emerged as a leading producer of tobacco. The tobacco Valley ran from Springfield to Hartford.

Tobacco farmers relied on seasonal labor from college campuses in the South, including Morehead College, which sent a young Martin Luther King, Jr., to Simsbury. They also used local child labor. World War II and the passage of child labor laws forced farmers to rely on immigrant workers from Puerto Rico and Jamaica.

Health concerns and competition from mass-produced cigar wrappers caused Connecticut’s tobacco acreage to dwindle.

Windsor produced more shade tobacco than anywhere else in the state. So in 1988, the Connecticut Valley Tobacco Historical Society formed in Windsor to preserve artifacts from the era. The historical society’s Luddy/Taylor Connecticut Valley Tobacco Museum is located in Northwest Park in Windsor.

135 Lang Road, Windsor, Connecticut

Sabbathday Lake Barns

The Shakers built these classic examples of New England historic barns. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Ann Lee founded the Shaker sect, formally known as the The United Society of Believers, in Manchester, England, in 1847. Lee broke away from the Quakers, and her followers were known as the ‘Shaking Quakers’ because of their ecstatic dancing during Sunday meeting.

After Ann Lee – known as ‘Mother Ann’ – went to prison for her beliefs, she came to America with eight followers in 1774.

The Shakers expanded to 19 utopian communities throughout the Northeast and Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia and Florida. They preached a doctrine of celibacy, self-sufficiency, pacifism, communal living and equality between the sexes.

In 1794, the Shakers formed Sabbathday Lake near New Gloucester and Poland, Maine,

By the 1840s, the Sabbathday Lake Shakers had carved a large enterprise out of the Maine forests. They owned 1,900 acres and 26 large buildings, including barns, a meetinghouse, a blacksmith shop and a large dwelling house.

The Sabbathay Lake Shakers built their barns in the New England style, the most common found in the region. Larger than typical barns in other parts of the country, they have doors at the ends and basements. The Shakers built the Sabbathday Lake barns into the side of a hill, which allowed them to access the upper floor from the ground.

The Shakers peaked in the 1840s, with 6,000 members throughout the United States. Their belief in celibacy would doom them to slow, near extinction.

But for many years during the 19^th century, the simple, self-sufficient Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, sold their products to the luxury-loving guests and the owners of the Poland Spring Hotel.

707 Shaker Road, New Gloucester, Maine

Old Tavern Farm

Like many historic barns in New England, the Old Tavern barn connects to the other farm buildings.

Like many historic barns in Northern New England, the barn at the Old Tavern Farm in Greenfield, Mass., connects to buildings with other uses.

The Old Tavern Farm served many purposes over the centuries, reverting today to its original use as a bed and breakfast.

The Old Tavern Farm’s early owners supplemented their farm income by running a tavern – or perhaps it was the other way around. They served neighbors and travelers along the Old Post Road

The tavern also served as a meeting place, a courtroom and a newsroom, noted the registration form for the National Register of Historic Places. The property doubled as a military training field, sports arena, stockyard and fairgrounds.

The main house was built around 1820, but the wing was built in 1794 on a foundation built in 1740.

Samuel Hinsdale inherited the farm from his father, Mehuman Hinsdale, once taken captive by Indians in the 1704 raid on Deerfield. Hinsdale began building on the land in 1740, and by 1747 he operated a tavern.

Others ran the tavern from 1836 until 1860, when the temperance movement shut it down. The Smith family ran the 160-acre farm from the latter part of the 19th century until 1997.

817 Colrain Road, Greenfield, Massachusetts

Bennett Farm

That cupola on the Bennett Farm’s barn was once a steeple.

Ocean Born Mary’s son Thomas Wallace once owned the land in Henniker that became the Bennett Farm. The son of the legendary New Hampshire woman then sold it to Joseph Lewis in 1777. Its subsequent owners ran it as a tavern until 1848. From that point on, its owners ran it as a typical Northern New England farm.

The barn was built in 1834 as a religious meeting house. Around 1860, the Bennett Farm’s barn burned down, so the farm’s owner moved the meeting house to the farm and converted it to a barn. The top of the steeple blew off during the Hurricane of 1938, leaving a cupola. .

Mark Bennett bought the farm in 1902, and his son Stephen took over when his father died in 1925 and ran it into the 1960s. Stephen’s son now runs the farm.

“Bennett Farm as it survives today conveys the character and scale of a late 19th-early 20th century diversified family farm,” notes The National Register of Historic Places registration form.

11 Bennett Rd., Henniker, New Hampshire

Mount Hope Farm

See Mount Hope’s historic barn at the Saturday farmer’s market held at Mount Hope.

Mount Hope Farm in Bristol, R.I., includes a mansion built in 1745 and expanded in 1840 and 1895, and two historic barns built in 1860. But it also owes its significance to its storied owners and connected events.

Once the traditional seat of the Wampanoag Indians, Benjamin Church killed King Philip nearby. The colonists then confiscated the land, and the wealthy merchant and slave owner Isaac Royall, Jr., built the farmhouse in 1745. But Royall’s Loyalist sympathies forced him to move to Halifax at the outbreak of the American Revolution.

The State of Rhode Island then confiscated the land again. Proceeds from the sale of Mount Hope went to pay Continental Army officers and soldiers.

William Bradford, great, great grandson of the Pilgrim governor, bought the house in 1783, and George Washington visited him for a week there. Bradford later won election to the U.S. Senate. The farm is also known as the Governor Bradford House, though he only served as deputy governor.

In the early 1950’s, the then-owner, Rudolf F. Haffenreffer, III, deeded Mount Hope and approximately 250 acres of the original farm to Brown University.

“Today, this handsome estate with its historic mansion and beautiful gardens, is an island of tranquility in an increasingly urban landscape,” noted the National Register of Historic Places registration form.

250 Metacom Ave., Bristol, Rhode Island

Shelburne Farms Horseshoe Barn

The Horseshoe Barn at Shelburne Museum.

Cornelius Vanderbilt’s granddaughter, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, created a classic Gilded Age gentleman farm in Shelburne, Vt.

Eliza and her husband, Dr. William Seward Webb, bought up small farms to create their 3,800-acre estate in 1886. They hired Frederick Law Olmsted to design the winding drives, scenic vistas, parklands, gardens and a golf course.

Among Shelburne Farms’ historic barns is the horseshoe barn, not one of the original buildings designed by architect Robert Henderson Robertson. It was built later as the next generation of Vanderbilts struggled to keep up the farm.

The Webbs’ daughter-in-law, Electra Havemeyer Webb, turned Shelburne Farms into a museum. She wanted a proper setting for the carriage collection, so she searched and found a rare horseshoe-shaped dairy born in Georgia, Vt.

Because the owner refused to sell it, Electra had her staff find, move and assemble hand-hewn beams from 12 historic barns and stone from two gristmills. They finished the 238-foot-long barn in 1949.

In 1957, the museum built the annex to house 150 more vehicles added to the collection.

In 1972, the Webb descendants incorporated Shelburne Farms as a nonprofit educational organization. It has 400 acres of sustainably managed woods and a grass-fed herd of Brown Swiss cows. It’s also one of the principal concert sites for the Vermont Mozart Festival. Shelburne Farms also features an inn and restaurant, open seasonally, on the shores of Lake Champlain, tours, walking trails, a children’s farmyard and a farm store that sells, among other things, cheddar cheese.

Shelburne Farms, 1611 Harbor Road, Shelburne, Vermont

Images: Bennett Farm By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19490337; Old Tavern Farm By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24500134.

Mount Hope Barn by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28160904.

This story about historic barns was updated in 2021.

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The Sabbathday Lake Shakers Sell to the Poland Springs Hotel

For many years during the 19^th century, the simple, self-sufficient Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, Maine, mingled happily with the luxury-loving guests and the owners of the Poland Spring Hotel.

Shaker barns at Sabbathday Lake

It must have been the water.

Both the Shakers and the hotel owners, generations of the Ricker family, believed Poland Spring Water had medicinal qualities.

The Shakers and the Rickers enjoyed a symbiotic relationship from the very beginning. An 18^th century land swap with the Shakers put the Rickers into the hotel business, and the Shakers became a tourist attraction. The Shakers, for their part, found the Poland Spring Hotel to be a lucrative market for their fancy goods and produce.

The Shakers

The Shaker sect, formally known as the The United Society of Believers, was founded by Ann Lee in Manchester, England, in 1847. They were a breakaway sect of Quakers known as the “Shaking Quakers” because of their ecstatic dancing during Sunday meeting.

After Ann Lee – known as “Mother Ann” — was imprisoned for her beliefs, she came to America with eight followers in 1774. They settled in upstate New York, preaching their doctrine of celibacy, self-sufficiency, pacifism, communal living and equality between the sexes.

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village

The Shakers expanded to 19 utopian communities throughout the Northeast and Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia and Florida. They established three in Maine in the 1780s, in Alfred, Gorham and Sabbathday Lake near New Gloucester and Poland.

Sabbathday Lake, formally organized on April 19, 1794, was known as the “least of Mother’s children in the East.” It ranked as the smallest and poorest of the Shaker communities.

‘You shall pay’

Poland Spring House

In the 1780s, a group of Shakers moved to Alfred, Maine, where Jabez Ricker owned property that contained the only millstream near the Shaker community. The Shakers pressured him to give up the land. The story goes that a Shaker elder told him, “Jabez Ricker, God says you must give the Shakers your farm.”

Jabez Ricker was filled with the fear of God. “Well, if God says so it must be so,” he said. Then, with a little more spirit, he added, “But you shall pay me for it.”

Sabbathday Lake

The Shakers gave Jabez Ricker a farm they owned near their Sabbathday Lake village. The site turned out to be on a main thoroughfare to Portland. Jabez Ricker in 1797 opened the Wentworth Ricker Inn to farmers and tradesmen who traveled along the road, beginning a long family interest in the hospitality business.

By the 1840s, the Sabbathday Lake Shakers had carved a large enterprise out of the Maine forests. They owned 1,900 acres with 26 large buildings, including a meetinghouse, a blacksmith shop and a large dwelling house. That decade was the peak for the Shakers, with 6,000 members throughout the United States. Their belief in celibacy would doom them to slow, near extinction.

Selling fancy goods at the Poland Springs House, 1940

The 1840s were not so good for the Rickers. The railroads were siphoning off hotel visitors to the seashore. Then one day in 1844, Jabez Ricker’s grandson Hiram went to work in his fields near a spring. For 10 days he drank water from the spring, which cured his chronic dyspepsia. By 1859, the Rickers were selling Poland Spring Water. By 1876, they built the Poland Spring House, which became a popular resort with more than 350 rooms.

The hotel was exclusive, but the Shakers were allowed on the grounds. They became friendly with some of the hotel’s prominent guests, including Gen. Benjamin Butler and Maine politician James G. Blaine.

They also became a tourist attraction. As many as 300 hotel visitors would come to watch their Sunday meetings. The Shakers sang for the guests, but only after the hotel’s musicians gave them lessons.

Fancy Goods by the Shakers

The Shakers also found a lucrative market at the hotel for their fancy goods. The Shaker sisters made four sales calls on the hotel every week. Hotel guests eagerly bought their rugs, brushes, fir balsam pillows, poplarware, sugared peel, maple candy, lemon syrup, Shaker dolls, sewing carriers and cloaks. They sold so many flowers they had to build a greenhouse.

Sister Aurelia Mace

In the 1890s, the Shakers began to sell the Rickers cream, potatoes, apples, pears and firewood. In 1898, the Shakers struck a deal to furnish crates for Poland Springs bottled water.

Shakers were invited to the hotel’s special events. In 1895, Sister Aurelia Mace attended a lecture by Booker T. Washington and the dedication of the Maine State Building, which the Rickers had moved from Chicago where it had been built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.

Sister Aurelia Mace was a favorite of the Rickers. She was featured in the weekly magazine for hotel guests:

One of the best known faces to be seen at the Poland Spring House is undoubtedly that of Sister Aurelia. Her sweet and kindly face seems to give assurance of all that is hospitable and gentle in human composition and looks out from the simple bonnet or cap, beaming with absolute good nature.

The Rickers

For her part, Sister Aurelia admired the Rickers. She wrote in her diary in 1895,

In the service of the Society, I have been at the Poland Spring House many time during the past ten years. I have received great kindness and consideration … I have taken note of the grandeur and beautiful life that fortune bestows upon her favored ones.

She wrote that she never heard a coarse expression, nor profane word in that house. As a result, she had

…great respect for the noble class of people that I have met there and it has been with great joy that I have received many favors on behalf of my people.

Sister Aurelia died in 1910 at the age of 75. The Rickers sold the hotel in 1940. Shakers continued to sell fancy goods to the hotel guests until the 1950s.

Today, there are three Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, the last remaining Shaker community. Poland Spring water is a subsidiary of Nestle. The Poland Spring Hotel is still in operation.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village By Jamie Ribisi-Braley – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35399926

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The Maypole That Infuriated the Puritans

Had it not been for his May Day party with a giant Maypole, Thomas Morton might have established a New England colony more tolerant, easygoing and fun than the one his dour Puritan neighbors created at Plymouth Plantation.

A traditional Maypole

A well-educated, well-connected, free-thinking Englishman, Morton came to America for business reasons. He held a senior partnership in a trading venture sponsored by the Crown. In 1624, he sailed aboard the Unity with Capt. Wollaston and 30 indentured servants. They arrived safely, settled in the future Quincy, Mass., and then began trading with the Indians for furs.

Morton wrote that he found two sorts of people in New England: the Christians and the Infidels. The Infidels he found ‘most full of humanity, and more friendly than the other.’

Morton would battle the Puritans over the next two decades using his wit, his pen, his political connections and his legal expertise. He even managed to get the royal charter for the Massachusetts Bay Colony revoked.

Unfortunately for Morton, he tied his fortunes to the Crown. When the Puritan Roundheads gained the ascendancy over Royalists in 1643, Massachusetts officials arrested him. They called him a Royalist agitator and threw him into prison. Today people might call him America’s first hippie.

Nathaniel Hawthorne best described Morton’s struggles with his neighbors in his short story, The Maypole of Merrymount:

Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.

Illustration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story, ‘The Maypole of Merrymount’

Pagan Past

Thomas Morton was born in 1576 in Devonshire, England, a part of the country that still bore remnants of Merrie Old England’s pagan past. The son of a soldier, probably a younger son, he studied law in London at the Inns of Court, the barristers’ professional association.

Morton’s lawyering brought him the connections that brought him to New England. After he arrived he discovered he couldn’t get along with the Puritans at Plymouth Plantation. So he, Wollaston and the indentured servants established their own colony, Mount Wollaston. It grew quickly and grew prosperous.

Morton then parted ways with Wollaston in 1626 when he learned Wollaston sold indentured servants into slavery on Virginia tobacco plantations. Morton encouraged the remaining servants to rebel against Wollaston and set up their own colony.

They didn’t need much persuading. The servants organized themselves into a free community called Merrymount with Morton in command. He called himself the ‘host.’ Wollaston fled to Virginia.

Merrymount was a colonial utopia in which the settlers were considered ‘consociates.’ They lived in harmony with the Algonquin Indians. The Puritans were horrified that the liberal-minded Morton and his men consorted with native women. They considered Morton an impious, drunken libertine. And they didn’t like that his easygoing colony attracted escapees from Plymouth’s strictness.

Those Moles

For his part, Morton disdained the Puritans at Plymouth, who he called ‘those Moles.’ He complained they ‘keep ‘much ado about the tithe of mint and cumin, troubling their brains more than reason would require about things that are indifferent.’

Morton called the pompous John Endicott ‘that great swelling fellow, Captain Littleworth.’ He nicknamed the short Myles Standish ‘Captain Shrimpe.’

On May 1, 1627, Merrymount decided to throw a party in the manner of Merrie Olde England, Maypole and all. Morton hoped it would attract some Indian brides for his bachelor followers. According to Morton,

“The inhabitants of Merrymount … did devise amongst themselves to have … Revels, and merriment after the old English custom … & therefore brewed a barrell of excellent beer, & provided a case of bottles to be spent, with other good cheer, for all comers of that day. And upon Mayday they brought the Maypole to the place appointed, with drums, guns, pistols, and other fitting instruments, for that purpose; and there erected it with the help of Savages, that came thither of purpose to see the manner of our Revels. A goodly pine tree of 80 foot long, was reared up, with a pair of buckshorns nailed on, somewhat near unto the top of it; where it stood as a fair sea mark for directions, how to find out the way to mine Host of Ma-re Mount.”

Bye-bye Maypole

Gov. William Bradford was horrified by the ‘beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.’ After a second Maypole party the next year, Myles Standish led a party of armed men to Merrymount, seized Morton and put him in chains. Standish also took down the offending Maypole.

Not a shot was fired. According to Morton, the Merrymount inhabitants didn’t want bloodshed. According to Bradford, they’d had so much to drink they couldn’t resist.

Capt. Littleworth

Bradford feared executing Morton, who had too many friends in high places in London. He did maroon him on the Isles of Shoals until September, when an English ship took him back to England. During the next winter, an especially harsh one, John Endicott led a raid on Merrymount’s corn supply. The Puritans then chopped down what was left of the Maypole.

Morton returned to New England in 1629, only to find his friends the Indians decimated by plague. Most of the Merrymount residents scattered and the Puritans’ strength increased. In September 1630, the Puritans arrested Morton again. They banished him and burned down Merrymount.

Canaan

In England, Morton plotted his revenge. Even as William Bradford was writing his History of Plimoth Plantation, Morton wrote New English Canaan, a witty composition that praised the wisdom and humanity of the Indians and mocked the Puritans. It made him a celebrity in political circles.

He also began a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Bay Colony, trying to revoke their charter. He succeeded, mostly because of King Charles’ animosity toward the Puritans. When the court ordered the charter revoked in 1634, Morton planned to return to Merrymount.

The Puritans, however, rejected the English court’s order. From 1637 to 1643, Morton and Sir Ferdinando Gorges petitioned for either a charter or an enforcement action. Unfortunately for Morton, the Crown had its own troubles – namely, the English Civil War.

Back to Plymouth

In 1642, Morton returned to Plymouth again, and again the Puritans arrested him. Not only did they view him as a ‘Royalist agitator,’ they blamed him for getting the charter revoked. They then sent him to prison in Boston, but didn’t charge him. Eventually, the Puritans granted the ill and aging Morton clemency.

Morton then spent his final days in York, Maine. He died in 1647.

Over the years other rebels and free-thinkers have lived in Merrymount, now Wollaston. Anne Hutchinson, who challenged the Puritan theocracy, lived there with her husband when they first arrived in New England in 1634. John Hancock was born there, and John Quincy Adams’ great-grandfather built a house on land in Wollaston. In 1925, a man named Howard Johnson built the first Howard Johnson’s there.

This story about the maypole that infuriated the Puritans was updated in 2022. Read more about Thomas Morton in The Trials of Thomas Morton: An Anglican Lawyer, His Puritan Foes, and the Battle for a New England by Peter C. Mancall. You can help independent bookstores and The New England Historical Society by buying it here.

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A New Age Retreat in Eliot, Maine, Saves the Career of Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley called himself ‘the artist of Maine.’ He was a renowned Modernist artist who painted manly, rugged scenes of fishermen, mountains and rocky seashores.

Mount Katahdin Maine First Snow by Marsden Hartley

But at a time when he considered abandoning art, it was an eccentric New Age community run by a woman in Eliot, Maine, that saved his career.

Marsden Hartley

Born in Lewiston, Maine, on Jan. 4, 1877, Marsden Hartley was the last of nine children born to English parents. His mother died when he was eight. His father remarried and his family moved to Cleveland in 1892. He studied art first in Cleveland and then moved to New York to study and embrace the Bohemianism of Greenwich Village.

Marsden Hartley by Alfred Stieglitz, 1916

Beginning a pattern he would repeat throughout his life, in 1901 he left New York for Maine for the first of many summers. Hartley would forever bounce between the city and the country, tiring of one, then the other. In 1937, after a long stint in Europe, he returned to Lewiston. He declared then that he wanted to become “the painter of Maine.”

He had moved to Lewiston before, in the fall of 1906. Then 29, he hoped to earn a living teaching art. He rented a studio and sent out handmade announcements, but he had few takers. Worse, his paintings didn’t sell. He had so little money he thought about giving up art for journalism.

A friend suggested he contact the Congress of Religions, a utopian community at Green Acre in Eliot. Green Acre, a former shipyard, was run by Sarah Farmer for the purpose of promoting peace, religious unity and, later, the principles of the Baha’i faith. Farmer raised the first known Peace Flag, 36 feet long, on an 85-foot flagpole.

The Inn at Green Acre

Green Acre

Hartley got a job as a handyman at Green Acre, putting up tents and doing odd jobs in exchange for room and board. He was treated as more than the hired help, and engaged in discussions about Eastern mysticism with the residents. He also talked about literature: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and Blake.

Marsden Hartley’s summer at Green Acre helped crystallize his views that landscape represents the earthly and the transcendent in human nature. Perhaps more importantly, he met a wealthy patron.

The former Sara Jane Thorp was a timber heiress and the widow of Ole Bull, the famous Norwegian violinist and composer. She followed the Swami Vivekanande. When she left nearly all her estate to the Vedanta Society, her daughter challenged the will, claiming the Hindus had driven her insane.

Mrs. Bull also extended her generosity to artists, including the Green Acre handyman. She held a one-man show of Marsden Hartley’s work at her home. His supporters from Green Acre attended, and the exhibit was a success. Best of all, he earned $90 from the sale of his paintings.

Lobster Fishermen by Marsden Hartley

Success at Last

That success convinced Marsden Hartley to soldier on with his art, which he would do until his death in 1943. He is considered one of the foremost American painters of the first half of the 20^th century.

The Peace Flag is still raised in Eliot, Maine. Green Acre is now a year-round Baha’I school operated by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Bahá’ís of the United States.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Marsden Hartley by Stieglitz By The Metropolitan Museum of Art – http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ap/web-large/DT6731.jpg, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56215414. The Inn at Green Acre By Sisay Borga Sabera – Sisay Borga Sabera, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64792699. Lobster Fishermen By The Metropolitan Museum of Art – http://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/ap/web-large/DT6731.jpg, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56215708. Fishermen’s Last Supper Public Domain.

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