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The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857

The Cold Storm and Great Freeze of 1857 prostrated New England during the winter of 1856-57, one of the worst ever. Thirty-two snowstorms dumped more than six feet of snow on the ground. Fierce winds created drifts as high as 18 feet, and it got so cold the mercury froze in thermometers.

The frigid cold and heavy snow caused tremendous suffering and destruction, both during the winter and afterward. An untold number of people died. Some perished in shipwrecks, fires or floods, while others departed quietly, borne away by cold or starvation. The bitter cold no doubt contributed to an influenza outbreak, called “one of the greatest epidemics,” and death.

The property damage was immense, beginning with church spires blown away and ending with freshets that carried off buildings. High winds dashed dozens of ships against the shore and blew down houses. Commerce came to a halt, as snow paralyzed railroads and ice immobilized coastal navigation.

“That was a tremendous winter,” wrote steamboat historian Henry Whittemore in 1893.

December Start

The weather in New England remained mild until mid-December, though plenty of snow had fallen. Then on December 17 the temperature plummeted to 12 below zero in Massachusetts and 16 below in Maine.

The next day was the coldest day New England had suffered in 22 years, with temperatures rising scarcely above zero anywhere in the region.

It would get even colder. And for the rest of the winter, violent wind and snowstorms buffeted New England. A snowstorm on December 23 foretold what was to come.

January Storms

January opened with a storm on the third, which made the railroads impassable.

Sidney S. Rider, editor of Book Notes, recalled that storm half a century later. He worked as a clerk in the bookstore of George H. Whitney in Westminster Street. It started on Saturday, snowed all night and continued all the next day. Westminster Street was a bed of ice two feet thick for a month or more, he wrote.

A Book Notes reader, W.A. Potter, remembered the next storm. “On Jan. 8, 1857, railroad trains were snowbound all over New England. On that day not a train reached Providence until evening. Pawtucket omnibuses were unable to reach the city, Narragansett Bay was frozen solid to Newport, and a few persons skated to that city. No vessel arrived from outside for 10 days.”

Fire and Ice

On very cold days, New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns grew especially anxious about the threat of fire.

During the Cold Storm and Great Freeze, fire gobbled a box factory in Cambridge, the Claverick House in East Boston, Dr. J.E. Hunt’s house and outbuildings in Thomaston, Maine and John Coe’s dwelling house in Hitchcockville, Conn.

In Laconia, N.H., the railroad shops burned at the end of January. “The temperature was 30 degrees below zero, and the fireman suffered severely,” according to the fire department’s history.

The most spectacular fire that winter burned down Vermont’s granite Statehouse.

The Vermont Statehouse burned down On Jan. 6, 1857

For three days starting January 6, temperatures had plunged below zero. At the beginning of that cold snap, a workman was heating the Vermont Statehouse for a meeting the next day. After he closed the vents, the furnace got too hot. Flames then shot up through a floor register in Representatives Hall. The fire soon enveloped the dome. Townspeople helped firefighters by throwing chunks of ice and snow at the building.

The fire seemed under control until the wind whipped up, scattering burning coals throughout the town. Only the heavy snow on nearby roofs prevented it from spreading. In the end, the inferno left only the granite walls standing. Vermont had to build a new Statehouse.

10 Days in January

On Saturday, January 17, an enormous cold weather system settled over a swathe of the United States. By Sunday it was 30 below at Muscatine, Iowa, 40 below in Watertown, N.Y., and 30 below at Woodstock, Vt.

That weekend began the worst 10 days of the worst winter in memory.

People thought it too cold to snow, reported the Cambridge Chronicle. They had it wrong. On Sunday night, a devastating snow hurricane — the Cold Storm — hit New England.

A fierce northwest wind drove the snow. “Doubtless many persons, as they reluctantly crawled out of their warm nests to shiver in the sharp air of Monday morning, looked forth with surprise upon the drifted heaps that blocked their gates and doors,” the Chronicle said.

“Men were floundering through the snow up to their waists,” reported the Chronicle. Women only peeped out at the window and railcars stood still.

Perfect Tempest

In Connecticut, between two and three feet of snow fell, and all travel stopped, according to the Illustrated Commercial Mechanical, Professional and Statistical Gazetteer. On Monday the gale turned into a “perfect tempest” and blew down the Chapel Street Church spire in New Haven, prostrated “two lofty spires” in Waterbury and caused “much other damage.”

The barque Tedesco, headed for Boston, wrecked off Swampscott, Mass., all hands lost. In Provincetown, gale-force winds drove 17 vessels onto the beach. The wind also demolished a house in New Bedford.

Two schooners and a sloop went ashore at Owl’s Head, and the storm blocked the roads in Thomaston, Maine.

The London Illustrated News carried this print of “The recent deep snow in Massachusetts: street in New Bedford.” Courtesy Library of Congress.

Drifts

After the Cold Storm, drifts on the Cape Cod railroad tracks rose as high as 18 feet.

In Essex, Mass., drifts rose above the windows of William Perkins’ good-sized two-story house, the Pittsfield Sun reported. The Perkins family had to look at the clock to find out whether morning had arrived yet. One of the neighbors shoveled away the snow so Perkins could climb out of the window.

In Providence, Sidney Rider remembered the tremendous amounts of snow. “When I reached Mr. Whitney’s shop that snow drift was 17 feet high; and the boys had pierced it with a hole, though which the boys had led a horse, unhitched from a nearby carting wagon,” he wrote.

That was one of the few businesses that did open after the Cold Storm. Many didn’t. The trains didn’t run and ships froze in harbors all along the coast. People did without the bread, meat and milk ordinarily delivered to their door because draught horses couldn’t make it through the snow.

In the Connecticut River Valley, the cost of food skyrocketed. “The factory had been developed at the expense of the farm. Provisions were coming in from the West and the Connecticut valley was not feeding itself,” wrote Springfield historian Mason Arnold Green.

The poor suffered terribly for the want of food, and many churches took up collections for them, wrote Salem historian Sidney Perley.

Great Freeze

The Great Freeze of 1857 continued after the storm. On January 19, the day of the Cold Storm, the mercury froze in the thermometer in Franconia, N.H., and registered 50 below zero in the Vermont towns of Montpelier and St. Johnsbury.

“The air was very thin and peculiarly transparent and light, and the sky therefore remarkably clear,” wrote Perley.

Scene on the ice, Boston Harbor–Citizens Hauling the Ferry-Boat. Courtesy Boston Public Library

Steamboats had to break the ice on Long Island Sound, which froze for a month. “The harbor at New Haven is frozen as tight as Baffin’s Bay,” reported the Hartford Times on January 27. “Capt. Merrow, of the schooner Daniel Trowbridge, who has been for a week frozen in near Southwest Ledge, at the mouth of New Haven harbor, reports that nothing but ice can be seen from his topmast, with a spyglass.

Narragansett Bay was frozen tight, with ice 14-inch thick on Pawtucket Bar as late as mid-March. The ice blockage lasted so long that the Providence textile mills started to run out of cotton.

“There was plenty at Newport, and the Commercial Steamboat Company resolved to break through the ice and get that cotton,” wrote Whittemore (ck). A captain Williams took charge of the Curlew, a very strong boat. The Curlew broke through the ice and towed the cotton in bales.

Frozen

In New Hampshire, Portsmouth Harbor froze over for the first time in memory. So did Boston Harbor. On January 26, Henry David Thoreau saw vessels frozen in the ice.

“Saw thousands on the ice,” he wrote in his journal. “[A] stream of men reaching down to Fort Independence where they were cutting a channel toward the city– Ice said to reach 14 miles. Snow untracked on many decks.” The ice didn’t go out until February 15, he noted.

On January 31, it snowed in Mexico City, an extremely rare phenomenon.

Freshets

Then came a thaw in February and two great rainstorms, which brought another set of problems. Tremendous freshets washed away buildings and bridges from Connecticut to Maine.

In Connecticut, the Housatonic River flooded, carrying off bridges. The floodwaters rose to the top of the Manufacturers’ Bank vault. After the flood subsided, bank officers couldn’t find a dry note of paper in the building.

The Shetucket River in Norwich flooded the waterfront and caused tremendous property damage.

In Castleton, Vt., an avalanche destroyed the barn and wagon shed belonging to Merlin Clark on February 22. Ice and snow filled the Clark’s house and buried a baby in its cradle, but the child survived unhurt.

Flooding came later in Maine. On April 16, for example, a Kennebec River freshet caused damage up and down the river, carrying away the toll bridge at Waterville and a railroad bridge in Skowhegan.

Damage caused by a freshet

Another Cold Storm

During March and April, the weather seesawed between balmy and fiercely cold. Then on April 21, Connecticut got hit by another great snowstorm. It started as rain, then turned to snow, dumping as much as two feet on Southern Connecticut.

The storm system whitened the streets of Baltimore, but in Bartlett, N.H., heavy rains washed away every bridge.

Then just when everyone thought the winter had ended, ice formed in Litchfield County, Connecticut, on Sunday, May 17.

This story updated in 2022.

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Before Dunkin’, New England Had the Waldorf Lunch System

Before New England gave the world Howard Johnson’s, Dunkin Donuts, McDonald’s and Subway, it invented the Waldorf Lunch.

The Waldorf Lunch System emerged in 1904 as one of the earliest chain lunch rooms. It was a time when all kinds of quick lunch spots emerged: lunch wagons, coffee-and-cake saloons and temperance spas. Schrafft’s, an offshoot of the Charlestown, Mass., candy company, started a lunch room in Boston in 1898 as an outlet for its candy. The Worcester Lunch Car Company would soon churn out prefab diners.

Waldorf Lunch was different. Its founder, Henry Kelsey conceived of standardized restaurants serving volumes of reliable food at good prices in clean, white-tiled lunch rooms.

Waldorf Lunch with car in front in Harvard Square.

Marketing emphasized its reliability. A 1922 ad said, “There’ll be good, fresh coffee at the Waldorf Lunch today. It’s always the same.”

At the company’s peak, 200 Waldorf Lunch restaurants fed the urban masses in seven states, but mostly Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and upstate New York. Waldorf Lunch disappeared in the 1960s, gobbled up by a multinational corporation and pretty much forgotten. But in 2016 a restaurateur uncovered some of the original Waldorf Lunch tiles in a Harvard Square restaurant. He decided to restore them. If only he could restore the prices.

Waldorf Lunch History

Waldorf Lunch served food with dependable quality at a time when diners weren’t sure about what, exactly, appeared on their plates. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed unsanitary meat-packing practices, would sell 25,000 copies in six weeks in 1906. The public outcry resulted in the federal Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection acts of 1906.

Henry Kelsey founded the first Waldorf Lunch in 1904 in Springfield, Mass. He named it after the Waldorf Hotel in New York City – according to lore, on the suggestion of a passerby as he prepared to open. He served coffee, donuts, sandwiches, soups and basic meals.

Advertising copy in 1922 pointed to the Dutch origins of the word “Waldorf.” An ad boasted of four inspections every 24 hours in each Waldorf Lunch and 398,000 pounds of cleaning powder annually. “I’d call that housekeeping to beat the Dutch–as you might say,” wrote the copywriter.

In 1906, Kelsey started another Waldorf Lunch in Boston. By 1919, when he expanded to 38, the company went public. From then it grew even faster. By 1929, it had 147 eateries, a fixture on the urban scene, with many open 24 hours, wrote James C. O’Connell in his book, Dining Out in Boston.

Ladies dine at a Waldorf Lunch in Charlestown, Mass., in June, 1950.

In New England, hungry diners could find 29 Waldorf Lunch restaurants in Boston. Providence had 10 Waldorf Lunches by 1916. They also sprang up in Pawtucket and the Massachusetts cities of Cambridge, Chelsea, Everett, Fitchburg, Haverhill, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford, Salem, Springfield, Waltham and Worcester. Manchester, N.H., had at least one, and so did Hartford, New Haven and Waterbury in Connecticut.

“Travelers could count on the Waldorf for a certain standard of food quality and environment,” wrote O’Connell. “It was a significant step up from downtown Boston’s beaneries.”

Fred Allen Visits Waldorf Lunch

Comedian Fred Allen in his memoir, Much Ado About Me, reminisced about his favorite cheap eats while growing up in the Allston section of Boston.

Beginning in 1908, Allen worked at the Boston Public Library after school, and he passed a Waldorf Lunch on the way home. He would look in the window and see the white-tiled walls, the inviting chairs, the smiling waiter standing behind the glass counter with the tempting foods on display. He couldn’t resist, so he went in and ordered a trilby and a glass of milk, five cents each.

Fred Allen in the 1940s

“A trilby was a fried egg served a la mode with a thick slice of onion,” he wrote. “Encased in a large bun, well seasoned with salt and pepper, and doused with ketchup until the ketchup flowed down the sides of the bun on to the plate to be dunked in later, the trilby was guaranteed to end off malnutrition indefinitely.”

The System

Modern efficiency was the watchword during the heyday of the Waldorf Lunch System.

The company carefully calculated every portion at a central commissary–in Boston, on High Street, near what is now International Place.

“Each serving of hash has been carefully measured and done up in waxed paper before being sent to the member stores,” reported the 1922 manual, Chain Stores: Their Management and Operation.

“All baking is done in the central commissary which operates twenty-four hours a day. In 1920, the average meal costs 30 cents and the company made less than two cents profit on each meal. But that year Waldorf Lunch served 36 million meals, and made a “substantial profit.”

A Waldorf Lunch commissary

Waldorf Lunch restaurants had five-foot-long stands with an assortment of food. A waiter stood behind each. For hot foods, he called to the cooks, who delivered each order over a shelf that separated him from the kitchen.

Restaurant historian Jan Whitaker, in a 2004 essay in Gastronomica, described the appeal of the quick lunch restaurant:

“It was precisely the quick lunch’s up-front, hard-surfaced reality that made it dear to the hearts of the poets and intellectuals of the machine age. To them the quick lunch was the symbol of its time, representing lively urban humanity, basic functionality, and a what-you-see-is-what-you-get-style.”

Restaurant Associates bought the Waldorf System Corporation during the conglomeration craze of the 1960s, and by the 1970s it had disappeared. But not entirely.

Harvard Square

In 2015, a restaurateur named Ayr Muir planned to open a vegetarian restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue in Harvard Square. A demolition team came in to tear down the interior of the former Yenching restaurant, which served Chinese food since 1975. Before that, starting in the mid-1930s, it had been the Hayes-Bickford, another popular Boston-based lunchroom. And before that, it had been Waldorf Lunch, starting in 1913.

The crew found grime-covered tile pennants in the wall: Harvard, Bowdoin, Carlisle Indian School. They also found white-tiled walls embedded with crimson H’s (for Harvard). Muir decided to save the tiles

The former Waldorf Lunch in Harvard Square

You can see them now at the Clover Food Lab in Harvard Square.

“It would have been unconscionable to just have let that history disappear,” Muir told The Harvard Gazette. “This store has an important story to tell.”

Images: 1913 Waldorf Lunch tile By Macrakis – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=89858555. Interior of Waldorf Cafeteria, courtesy Rev. Wolcott Cutler, Boston Public Library, Charlestown Branch CC BY 2.0.

With thanks to Dining Out in Boston by James C. O’Connell and Restauranting Through History blog by Jan Whitaker. This story was updated in 2023.

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Not Just From the South: the Great Black Migration to New England

In the early part of the 20^th century, entire church congregations from Americus, Ga., moved to Hartford during the great black migration north. Their pastors re-established themselves in the city as their parishioners got jobs in the surrounding defense plants and tobacco fields.

The story of an entire southern community migrating to a northern city is told often throughout the United States. From 1916 to 1970, 6 million African Americans moved from small southern towns to cities in the Northeast, Midwest and West.

For many, the great black migration was a journey from Jim Crow laws, lynchings, debt slavery and rural poverty to a somewhat better life in urban factories.

That, at least, is the simple version. In New England, the story gets a little more complicated. Migrants of color came not just from the American South, but from the Caribbean, Africa and the rural towns of New England. And they only came in large numbers until about 1930.

A map of the black percentage of the U.S. population by each state/territory in 1990. Black = 35.00+% Brown = 20.00–34.99% Red = 10.00–19.99% Orange = 5.00–9.99% Light orange = 1.00–4.99% Gray = 0.99% or less

Not Really Welcome

Before the great black migration north, people of color had already lived in New England. White New Englanders pushed them out with restrictive laws and few job opportunities. In 1755, for example, Africans made up 20 percent of the population of Newport, R.I., a major hub of slave trading. By 1900, only about 7 percent of Newport’s population was black.

The same held true in Hartford. Sociologist Charles S. Johnson wrote that Hartford had a larger black population proportionately in 1790 than in 1910. Whites took a “kindly and paternalistic” attitude to them, limiting their employment to servitude, he wrote. In 1800, blacks made up 4.5 percent of Hartford’s population; that number fell to 2.4 percent by 1900.

Boston was no different. In 1790, the year of the first census in that city, 4.2 percent of the population was black. In 1900, it fell to half that – 2.1 percent.

A map of the black percentage of the U.S. population by each state/territory in 1900. Black = 35.00+% Brown = 20.00-34.99% Red = 10.00-19.99% Orange = 5.00-9.99% Light orange = 1.00-4.99% Gray = 0.99% or less Magenta = No data available

But Boston’s African American population did grow slowly after the Civil War. Its strong abolitionist tradition attracted black people, and they were not legally denied the right to vote when the war ended. The Legislature In 1885 even passed a law forbidding discrimination in public places on the basis of race.

Such civil rights leaders as William Monroe Trotter, W.E.B. Du Bois and, later, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., spent significant time in Boston. But they couldn’t prevent the decline of the Boston area’s manufacturing base, which drove its prosperity and provided at least some opportunity for people of color.

Big Cities

The North and the West experienced two great black migrations in the 19^th century. The first started in 1910, swelled with the advent of World War I and then declined in the early 1930s. The second went from 1941, when wartime manufacturing again attracted black migrants, and lasted until 1970.

Only the first wave really came to New England. During the second wave, the only New England cities to experience slightly more than a one percent increase in their black populations were in Connecticut: Stamford, Hartford, Bridgeport and New Haven. And many New England cities saw a decline.

During that first wave, tens of thousands of African Americans from the South came to New England’s cities. But so did rural black New Englanders. Between 1915 and 1930, entire counties in New England became whiter even as the region as a whole got darker.

Train Arrive

During the first great black migration from the southern United States, most African Americans came by train. A statue of A. Philip Randolph in Boston’s Back Bay station testifies to the importance of the railroads as well as the African American Pullman porters who rode them. The porters shepherded the unsophisticated country folk to Philadelphia, New York, Bridgeport, Hartford, New Haven, Providence and Boston. Under Randolph, they also formed the first all-black union in 1925, a key development in the Civil Rights movement. (Malcolm X worked as a Pullman porter for about a year in 1943.)

Much of the great black migration in the early 19th century happened by train

The farther the black traveler went, the more it cost. That partly explains why Boston attracted a smaller percentage of African Americans than Philadelphia or New York—or even the southern New England cities.

Another reason Boston didn’t quite have the pull of industrial centers like Chicago or Detroit was that its manufacturing fell into decline. But Connecticut’s burgeoning defense industries were on the upswing.

From 1910 to 1940, the cities that experienced the largest growth in black population included Hartford, with a 23.6 percent increase. New Haven grew 22.4 percent and Bridgeport 13.8 percent. The others: Boston at 13.2 percent; Stamford 8.4 percent; New London, Conn., 8.2 percent; Waterbury 8.1 percent; and Providence 6.3 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Today, Connecticut has the largest black population in New England. It rose from 1.7 percent in 1900 to 9.1 percent today, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Tobacco

One reason Connecticut, and Hartford in particular, attracted so many southern blacks: Connecticut shade tobacco.

Tobacco growers relied on European immigrants to harvest the tobacco around Hartford. But then World War I broke out, and immigrants who worked the tobacco farms returned to Europe to fight the war. Or they went to work in brand-new defense plants that paid 65 cents an hour and guaranteed two years of work.

The tobacco growers needed help, and they went for it to the National Urban League, formed in 1911 to help resettle black migrants.

The Urban League went to historically black college administrators like John Hope, president of Morehouse College, for seasonal tobacco workers in Connecticut. That began a long relationship with African-American students—like Martin Luther King, Jr.—who came to work summer jobs and get a taste of living free from Jim Crow. Eventually growers found they needed year-round workers, so southern black families began to move to Hartford.

The old Winchester Repeating Arms Co., in New Haven.

But other than servitude and tobacco, the opportunity to get an industrial job in a tool or firearms factory ‘receded to an almost hopeless distance,’ wrote Charles Johnson, who in 1921 wrote The Negro Population of Hartford, Connecticut. But then in 1916, Connecticut’s factories faced a severe crisis as the labor shortage worsened.

Black tobacco workers drifted from the tobacco fields to the defense manufacturers, but mostly doing unskilled work in the coal yards and lumber yards, or as teamsters and porters. When the war ended, they got laid off first.

By 1921, 60 percent of companies surveyed hired no blacks, according to Johnson.

A Sociologist’s View of the Great Black Migration

Johnson was the first black president of Fisk University. Before that, he studied the plight of those who came north in the first great black migration to Connecticut, focusing on Hartford.

Charles S. Johnson

Though the newcomers had many skilled tradesmen among them, they found jobs off limits to them at the Winchester Repeating Arms Co., New Haven Clock Co., and the New Haven Box Co. Some, like Colt’s Patent Firearms Manufacturing Co., Pratt & Whitney and the Royal Typewriter Co., preferred to hire African Americans only to perform unskilled duties such as custodial work, Johnson wrote.

Southern blacks had it harder than the Connecticut natives. The men wore overalls and women wore dust caps and aprons outside of the house—simply not done in the urban North.

The southerners, wrote Johnson, ‘were crude and ungainly, many of them boisterous, with strange habits of dress and manners altogether repellent to the older Negro residents inured to the refinements of the city.’

However, he wrote, the green soon rubbed off.

Most of the newcomers came from Georgia, but one-third as many came from Virginia. Americus, Ga., in particular sent blacks to Hartford.

Housing Problems

Southerners Johnson described as ‘crude laborers, loafers and ne’er do wells’ moved into neighborhoods vacated by the better-off natives.

The conspicuously successful, he wrote, didn’t live together, but forged close bonds with each other.

The newcomers lived along the Connecticut River in housing that Johnson described as among the oldest and most deteriorated sections of the city. Houses had few bathtubs or working toilets, and residents complained of leaking roofs, defective plumbing, fallen plaster and trash in the alley or yard.

Another neighborhood, the old red light district, he described as lower class but full of strivers. Hardworking families lived next to a ‘vicious and criminal element’— prostitutes, gamblers and bootleggers.

Southern blacks got blamed for anything bad that happened. “If a crime was committed it was assumed to have been committed by a Southern Negro,” wrote Johnson.

The Great Black Migration to Boston

During the Civil War, Boston had a black population of mariners, skilled craftsmen and servants who lived on Beacon Hill. Around 1900, they moved to the South End and Roxbury neighborhoods. Southern migrants, many from Norfolk, Va., joined them in Roxbury.

New England, and Boston in particular, had for centuries developed deep connections to Caribbean plantations. In the early 20^th century, the United Fruit Company had a direct steamer service between Boston to Kingston and Port Antonio, Jamaica.

So Boston’s West Indian community began to emerge around 1910. Immigrants from Barbados and Jamaica moved into the Roxbury neighborhood and formed St. Cyprian’s Church, after white Episcopalians discriminated against them. In fact, black migration to Boston in the teens and 20s mostly came from the Caribbean, Cape Verde and South America.

Boston’s Second Wave

Some Southern blacks also arrived in the Boston area to work in the local shipyards during World War II. The Charlestown Navy Yard, for example, employed 2,000 black workers during the war, out of a total workforce of 47,000 people. The gigantic Fore River ship yard only hired black workers in the temporary auxiliary yards.

By the 1950s, Boston’s Afro-Caribbean population grew to 5,000 — 12 percent of the city’s black population.

But federal immigration laws passed in 1922, 1924 and 1952 restricted the influx of West Indians. Then in 1965, Congress eased the restrictive quotas. Family reunification laws allowed Jamaicans and Barbadians to come to Boston, settling in Crosstown in the South End and Cambridgeport in Cambridge. Then, as Jewish families moved out of Roxbury, Dorchester and part of Mattapan, West Indians moved in. They also moved to the Massachusetts cities of Randolph, Malden and Brockton.

The Boston Red Sox’ Big Papi, David Ortiz, was born in the Domincan Republic.

In the 1970s, Haitians began migrating to Boston. By the 1980s, Boston had the third largest Haitian-American population in the country and the fourth largest Dominican-American population. Lawrence, Mass., and Providence also have a sizable Dominican presence.

Cape Verdean Communities

Cape Verdeans established communities in New England during the whaling days of the 19^th century—New Bedford and Providence, especially, but also into Connecticut. The trickle of Cape Verdeans grew into a flood in the early 20^th century due to poverty, drought and starvation. They worked in cranberry bogs, on the waterfronts and in the textile mills.

They moved to Hartford, where Charles S. Johnson found them in an undesirable neighborhood of African Americans from the South and Portuguese from the Cape Verdean and Canary Islands.

As in the case of Afro-Caribbean migrants, immigration restrictions slowed the arrival of Cape Verdeans in New England.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 initiated another great black migration: a new wave of Cape Verdean migrants. By 2010, New England cities account for every one of the 12 biggest Cape Verdean communities in the United States. In descending order, they are: New Bedford, Boston, Brockton, Pawtucket, Fall River, Taunton, Wareham, Providence, Randolph, East Providence, Central Falls and Bridgeport.

Former second baseman and manager for Major League Baseball Davy Lopes. He is of Cape Verdean descent and grew up in East Providence.

Universal Negro Improvement Association

Discrimination and inequality convinced many black people in New England they’d never receive fair treatment in the United States. A colorful, controversial Jamaican named Marcus Garvey had a message that appealed to them: they should be proud, they should achieve economic self-sufficiency, and they start another great black migration back to Africa.

Marcus Garvey

Garvey in 1914 created the Universal Negro Improvement Association to spread his message. In Connecticut, it had active chapters in Hartford, New Haven, New Britain, Portland, East Granby, and Rockville.

Garvey also helped establish the African Orthodox Church in Boston. St James African Orthodox Church moved into the Highland Park neighborhood of Boston 15 years after Garvey died in 1940.

Civil rights lawyer Constance Baker Motley remembered her parents’ friends following Garvey. She grew up in the Dixwell neighborhood of New Haven. Her father, from Nevis, thought Garvey a fool.

Constance Baker Motley

A Great Black Migration to Africa

Going back to Africa wasn’t a new idea, and it wasn’t just an African idea. Thousands of African Americans resettled in the West African country of Liberia. Now many of their descendants have returned to Rhode Island

In the early 19^th century, the American Colonization Society wanted to send ship former slaves to Arica. The ACS, in fact, helped found Liberia, where it sent shiploads of African Americans beginning in 1821.

Though most African Americans opposed colonization in Africa, some didn’t. A successful mixed-race entrepreneur, Paul Cuffe of Westport, Mass., supported the movement as well. He took 38 people from the U.S. black community to Sierra Leone in 1815.

Paul Cuffee (illustration)

In 1826, a group of Africans from Newport, R.I., left for Liberia. All perished of coastal fever within a year.

In the end, about 12,000 African Americans immigrated to the settlement that became Liberia. They declared independence in 1847 and in 1872 called themselves a free republic. The African Americans emerged as a political elite, but didn’t coexist peacefully with the indigenous people. From 1979 to 2003, Liberia went through bloody unrest, a coup, Ebola and two civil wars.

Great Black Migration from Liberia

Liberians started another great black migration to Rhode Island, the former slave-trading capital of the North American British colonies.

Rhode Island’s black population has more than doubled since 1900, from 2.1 percent to 4.5 percent. Pawtucket is 16.4 percent black, while in Providence people of color account for 13.3 percent of the population.

Now Rhode Island has the largest population of Liberians per capita in the U.S., which has an estimated 15,000 Liberians within its borders. The state, and particularly Providence, serves as the hub of the Liberian presence in the United States.

Late in 2019, Congress approved a Trump administration proposal to grant 4,000 Liberians a path to citizenship in the United States.

This story was updated in 2022.

Maps: 1990 By Blank_US_Map.svg: User:Theshibboleth – This file was derived from: Blank US Map.svg:, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20424896 By Blank_US_1900 Map.svg: User:Theshibboleth – This file was derived from: Blank US Map.svg:, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20424565; Davy Lopes By Keith Allison from Hanover, MD, USA – Dusty Baker, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58682216.

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Rosalind Russell Narrowly Escapes Waterbury

Rosalind Russell’s long career as a soignee actress with a flair for comedy almost came to an end in 1955, when she fled Waterbury, Conn., in the midst of Hurricane Diane.

She had paid a visit to her hometown for the premiere of her otherwise forgettable film, The Girl Rush. Her better films included The Women, His Girl Friday, My Sister Eileen, Gypsy and Auntie Mame. She also won a Tony award as Best Actress for Wonderful Town, a Broadway hit with music by Leonard Bernstein.

Rosalind Russell as Auntie Mame

Unlike many actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the deeply religious Russell stayed married to one man her whole life. She took a long time to get around writing her autobiography, she explained, “because for thirty-five years I’d been married to one husband. (Thirty-five years? And she calls herself a movie star?)”

She titled her autobiography Life is a Banquet, after one of her most memorable lines as Auntie Mame: “Life is a banquet, and most poor suckers are starving.”

Rosalind Russell

She was born Catherine Rosalind Russell on June 4, 1907, a middle child of seven in a prosperous Catholic family in Waterbury. Her father had a lucrative law practice, and her mother worked as a teacher. “My mother was Irish and she was superstitious, if you’ll forgive the tautology,” she wrote.

Young Roz had a Catholic school education, and remained a devout Catholic her whole life. “My family was very Irish in the middle of New England Congregationalists–there was a great distrust of Catholics; we couldn’t go into their churches, they weren’t supposed to come into ours,” she wrote.

Rosalind Russell in 1945.

When she reached her teens her family moved to a 13-room Victorian house on Cracker Hill, where they had two servants. She attended Waterbury Catholic High, and even as a Hollywood movie star kept in touch with her favorite teachers. She then went to Catholic college, Rosemont in Pennsylvania and Marymount in Tarrytown, N.Y.

Trouble with Angels

Later in her career, she played mother superior in The Trouble with Angels, released in 1966. Before shooting began, a friend–a real mother superior–asked her to come to St. Louis to raise money for a Catholic girls’ school she was trying to build. Russell convinced Columbia Pictures to open the film in St. Louis and donate ticket proceeds to the school.

She herself cut her high school classes to go to local theatrical performances, of which there were plenty in Waterbury back then.

Russell lied to her mother about leaving Marymount for acting school. She told her she wanted to teach voice. Then she enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City to study acting.

Rosalind Russell’s name then appeared on the playbill of several summer stock productions, in a Boston repertory theatre company and in a minor role on Broadway. In 1934, she signed a contract with MGM. Her breakthrough came five years later when she played the classy, glamorous and funny Sylvia Fowler in the film The Women.

Cary Grant, Matchmaker

The Women established her as a comedienne and brought her to the attention of Frederick Brisson, a Danish film producer and friend of Cary Grant. Brisson sailed to New York from Europe in an ocean liner that played The Women in a continuous loop, which he half-ignored. He finally sat down to watch it and fell in love with Russell. “I’m either gonna kill that girl, or I’m gonna marry her,” he told a friend.

Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday.

Rosalind Russell worked on another film in which she combined glamour and wit, His Girl Friday, with Grant. They played fast-talking journalists with lines like, “I wouldn’t cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up.” Grant was single at the time, and he and Russell dated during filming.

She didn’t know Brisson stayed in Grant’s guest house while they made His Girl Friday. Every morning on the set, Cary Grant would greet Russell with the question, “Have you met Freddie Brisson yet?” Finally Grant showed up one night to take her to dinner and dancing, but he had a stranger at his side. Freddie Brisson, of course.

Cary Grant acted as best man at their wedding in 1941. Three years later they had one son, Carl Lance Brisson.

The Brisson family: Mrs. Cleo Brisson, Lance, Rosalind Russell, Freddie Brisson.

Rosalind Russell Returns to Waterbury

In 1955, Waterbury lured Rosalind Russell back by renaming the State Theatre the Rosalind Russell State Theatre. The ceremony would coincide with the premiere of her latest film. She agreed.

“Wonderful Town” promotional poster.

“I rode in a parade in a white satin dress that was all beaded, with a matching little thing that sat on my head, being Princess Grace all over the joint,” she wrote.

The theatre manager who greeted her was blind drunk, she had to attend a dinner at ‘the great snob Waterbury Club.’ Her brother had to make a speech and a television crew had set up cameras on the Waterbury green.

“And then the storms washed everything away,” she wrote.

Hurricane Diane destroyed the bridge and the railroad, and it killed 55 people in Waterbury. Russell left for New York City in a rented car with an assistant and a driver, who she directed to New Haven. The Naugatuck River had overflowed, so they had to take a long, circuitous route

“It was a terrible night, and I’ve never been to Waterbury since,” she wrote.

Rosalind Russell died of breast cancer on Nov. 28, 1976, with Freddie Brisson at her side.

This story was updated in 2023.

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Higley Copper Coins: Connecticut’s Rare, Exciting and Historic Penny

According to the legend of the Higley copper, a Connecticut doctor with a powerful thirst and a copper mine minted the colony’s first copper coins.

Dr. Samuel Higley frequently patronized the local tavern, where a drink cost threepence. So Dr. Higley, who happened to own a copper mine, struck his own three-penny coins. One version of them bore the words, “VALUE ME AS YOU PLEASE.”

The story may be apocryphal, but Dr. Higley did exist. He and his family mined copper, which grew into a major Connecticut industry. And coin collectors believe the homemade Higley copper circulated fairly wildly.

In 2014, a coin collector bought a Higley copper for a half-million dollars.

19th-century drawing of a Higley copper

The Higley Copper

Dr. Samuel Higley, born around 1687 in Simsbury, Conn., attended Yale College for two years and trained as a doctor. He also learned blacksmithing and picked up metallurgical and mining skills. Before his marriage to Abigail Bement in 1719 he taught school.

He is credited with making the first steel in the U.S. colonies. In 1728, he told the Connecticut General Court he had ‘with great pains and cost’ discovered a ‘curious art’ by which he could transmute iron into good steel. Two blacksmiths testified that Higley had come into their shop, asked for a pound or two of iron and said he’d make it into steel. Several days later he brought it back, and the blacksmiths found it ‘good steel,’ the first they’d ever seen.

So the Connecticut General Court gave Higley a 10-year monopoly on steelmaking.

That same year he bought a tract of 143 acres in what is now East Granby and began mining the land. People said the mine had such rich copper that Dr. Higley could walk into it with a pick and simply stab a lump of pure metal. He’d then take it home and strike coins from it.

Connecticut Copper

The Connecticut copper industry, which lasted about two centuries, began in Copper Hill in Simsbury around 1707 and ended in Bristol in 1953. Mines stretched up and down the Connecticut Valley and dotted the surrounding hills. They gave a start to U.S. brass manufacturing, which centered in Waterbury, Conn., the world’s leader in brass production.

Today, little remains of the once-thriving industry. In 1776, revolutionaries turned the mine into a POW camp, and later the state made it into a prison called Newgate. Prisoners nicknamed it Hell. Today, the state operates the Old Newgate Prison as a museum.

Old Newgate Prison, 1910 postcard

Back in the 1730s, copper mines were small-scale operations, and much of the metal ended up in England.

Samuel Higley undoubtedly had help mining his copper. And it isn’t clear if he himself made the steel dies or struck the coins from them.

Making your own coins, as you might suspect, violated the law in the 1730s. John Hull had minted coins in Massachusetts Bay Colony until English authorities shut him down in 1682. But the colonists suffered a shortage of small coins, and the British authorities couldn’t always enforce the law.

The Coins

One version of the Higley copper legend has it that Simsbury’s local tavernkeeper stopped accepting Higley’s threepence after he’d accumulated quite a few of them. Another story says people started complaining the coin wasn’t worth two-and-a-half cents more than the British halfpennies then circulating.

Whatever the story, Higley struck a version of the coin that said, “VALUE ME AS YOU PLEASE,” on one side, and “I AM GOOD COPPER” on the other.

Coin collectors, though, say his local prominence as a businessman and landowner helped establish the value of the Higley coppers. Thousands, mostly dated 1737, circulated in the region.

“It is likely that a large number and a variety of sellers accepted Higley Coppers in transactions for goods and services,” wrote Greg Reynolds in Coin Week. They probably had more stable value than colonial paper money, he wrote.

What Goes ‘Round

All except one have a deer and the numeral three on the tails side. One bears the image of a broad axe with the words, “I CUT MY WAY THROUGH.” Another has the spokes of a wheel and the legend, “THE WHEEL GOES ROUND.”

Four kinds of Higley copper have a hammer on the back, while three have an ax. Some date to 1738 and 1739, after Samuel Higley died at sea while taking a shipment of copper to England. His family may have continued making coins after he died.

Five varieties of the Higley copper are on display at the Connecticut State Library, the Simsbury Historical Society and Connecticut Historical Society. Coin collectors identified two other varieties, and consider them among the rarest and most exciting early American coins.

They have sold for tens of thousands of dollars. Even replicas of the Higley coppers go for far more than their original value: One sold for $646.

This story was updated in 2022.

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The Civilian Conservation Corps, a Young Man’s Adventure

During the depths of the Great Depression, a 17-year-old boy from Warren, R.I., enlisted in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

He did it to help support his family, but his time in the Civilian Conservation Corps turned into the adventure of a lifetime.

The CCC started when President Franklin D. Roosevelt persuaded Congress to pass the Emergency Conservation Act on March 31, 1933. His goal: to generate jobs for young men suffering from an almost 25 percent unemployment rate.

The Warren boy at first was too young to join the Civilian Conservation Corps. You had to be 18 to enlist. But in October 1935, the government lowered the age requirement to 17, and he signed up. The teenager met all the other requirements. He was unemployed, unmarried, physically fit and his family was on relief — like tens of millions of other American families.

He earned $30 per month {about $570 today), but he had to send $25 home. That beat the $21 per month that regular U. S. Army soldiers made at the time. The money the CCC boys sent home supported an estimated 12 to 15 million family members.

The Civilian Conservation Corps 141st Company. Leo Caisse is in the middle row, second from right.

Go West, Young Men

The Warren boy was sent to Fort Adams in Newport for physical conditioning and evaluation, just as all other enrollees in the nation did at their local Army depot. At the end of their two weeks of training and evaluation, he received his final physical and inoculations. For some of the boys it was the first time they saw a doctor.

The Civilian Conservation Corps assigned the Warren boy to the 141^st company posted at Burlingame in Charlestown, R.I. He was issued a blue denim work suit and a renovated Army olive drab uniform with CCC patches. (Roosevelt thought the uniforms looked shoddy and in 1938 ordered the Navy to design a spruce-green uniform.)Then he took the CCC oath.

civilian-conservation-corps-burlingame-beach-house

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this beach pavilion at Burlingame State Park.

His company, like several others, was transferred out West, which had more forest work and fewer unemployed young men than in the East. He had to get his parents’ permission because of his age.

He took a train cross country from Fort Adams to a campsite at Triangle Lake near the Town of Junction City, Ore. There they became the 2108 Company of the Civilian Conservation Corps.

In Oregon, the teenager and his company built fire guard service stations, fire lookout towers, trails and shelters. They fought forest fires when needed, a hallmark of the CCC wherever they were.

Cowboys and Mountain Lions

The young man earned a truck driving license issued by the Department of the Interior. He learned to operate a bulldozer, tractor and a jackhammer. He also learned welding, a skill he would later use in helping to build the USS Massachusetts at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Mass.

In Oregon, he served a maximum of four six-month enlistments, all that the CCC allowed and was honorably discharged on June 23, 1936.

Leo Caisse

He returned to Warren, but after a little more than a year he re-enlisted in 1937. This time was assigned to the 2130^th company in Casper, Wyo.

In Wyoming, his Civilian Conservation Corps company built bridges, roads and a dike, according to National Archives records. He fought fires, of course, and some members of his company fought coal fires. While in Wyoming, he also learned another skill: how to evade a mountain lion in the wild.

Later in the 1950s he told stories to his son about how he knew real cowboys and Indians out West. That was really intriguing because it was the heyday of cowboy shows on TV and Cowboy Town in Plainville, Mass. His name was Leo Caisse. He was my father and he passed away when I was very young.

It has been a revelation researching his adventures and it has given me a sense of pride that he and so many others benefitted from this program, which began the green movement.

Roosevelt’s Tree Army

Roosevelt’s Tree Army developed many public parks that still stand today as a living legacy to their work.

Less obvious today was the improved health and well-being of the boys who joined.

Enlistees were so undernourished due to the Depression that they gained an average of 12 pounds each. When issued their uniforms, it was the first time most of them got new shoes.

Many camps had two movies a week with state-of-the-art equipment, chaplain services, lending libraries, organized sports and vocational education. President Roosevelt mandated that all enrollees learn to read and write in the service if they hadn’t achieved literacy yet.

The Civilian Conservation Corps offered 603 different courses nationwide. They often had camp newspapers, wrote poetry, composed songs and put on plays, as well as engaged in organized sports with other camps and local teams.

A Civilian Conservation Corps pillow

The men celebrated holidays in camp, including Mother’s Day. In one instance, they invited their mothers to camp for a dinner and the boys put on a skit for them. In another, the commanding officer collected 25 cents from each man to send home a special pillow to their mothers.

The Army ran the CCC, but the state or national park service would select the projects. Since fascism was on the rise overseas, the Army was careful not to drill the Tree Army. Nor did it allow saluting or weapons training.

Still, many Civilian Conservation Corpsmen who joined the Army were automatically inducted as corporals or sergeants, depending on their leadership experience in the Corps.

Following are summaries of the Civilian Conservation Corps in each New England state.

Rhode Island

Rhode Island had eight camps, but they did not all operate continuously or simultaneously. Fort Adams served as their state headquarters.

In the very beginning at least two Rhode Island companies were sent to other states: one to Rangeley, Maine and another company (about 200 men) to Vermont. Later they went to Oregon and Wyoming.

Rhode Island eventually enrolled 15,900 men out of 2.5 million men who served nationally.

civilian-conservation corps-goddard-state park

The Civilian Conservation Corps built this structure and many fireplaces at Goddard State Park in Rhode Island.

Massachusetts

Over 100,000 men served in the Massachusetts Civilian Conservation Corps, which brought together two wasted resources: young men and the land.

When the CCC began, Massachusetts had accumulated 100,000 acres, mostly inaccessible to the public. When the Emergency Conservation Act passed, Chief Forester Harold Cook immediately prepared applications for seven camps. He would eventually have 31 camps.

The first enrollees arrived at Fort Devens for medical exams and some basic training and testing to acclimate them to a military routine.

They built roads and trails, overlooks, picnic shelters and log cabins. And they engaged in timber improvement, pest control and forest fire fighting. In the end they planted 12 million trees and improved 170,000 acres of state land. The Massachusetts enrollees collectively sent an estimated $20 million home to their families.

Friends of the Upton State Forest are restoring a former CCC administration building and cottage. At least one former member – and probably many others — was so desperate for work he forged his birth certificate and joined at age 15. He learned construction skills that served him the rest of his working life.

They built the access road to the top of Mount Greylock as well as the Thunderbolt Trail. The CCC created the Savoy State Park, too, and the Elliot Tower in Milton’s Blue Hills Reservation. It still stands today and offers a panoramic view from Boston Harbor to Mount Wachusett. The Blue Hills reception center has a small CCC exhibit that includes memorabilia.

New Hampshire

Bear Brook State Park is one of the few surviving CCC camps that now serve as museums.

Over 37,000 young men served in the CCC in New Hampshire. They built state parks such as Moore Brook and Bear Brook, and ski facilities such as Waterville Valley, Cannon Mountain and the Wildcat Trail at Pinkham Notch. They also fought forest fires, planted trees and built dams, bridges, roads, camp grounds and hiking and bridle trails.

At the Bear Brook exhibit stands a statue of a shirtless Corpsman with an ax. Identical statues stand at the Freetown State Forest, a former camp, and at the Maine State Library in Augusta.

civilian-conservation-corps-acadia-shelter

The Civilian Conservation Corps built many park shelters, like this one at Arcadia State Park in Rhode Island.

Connecticut

Connecticut had a total of 17 camps, and over 30,000 men served in the CCC. Some hadn’t enlisted, but were LEMs – locally enlisted men, such as carpenters and stone masons. Along with their traditional work, the CCC also built nine lookout towers, constructed 123 bridges and developed over 1000 acres of public camping and picnic grounds.

As in all other camps, the Connecticut CCC couldn’t build roads. They did, however, build many truck roads for fighting forest fires.

When a dam broke above Hartford in 1936, it devastated the area. The CCC lent a hand by clearing out 2,950 buildings and 800 other structures.

A CCC Museum in Stafford Springs, Conn., once the administration building for Camp Conner, contains photos, displays, information and artifacts.

Maine

CCC statue in Augusta

Fort Williams in Portland Harbor administered and trained Civilian Conservation Corpsmen for both Maine and New Hampshire. At its height, Maine had 16,686 men, 1,612 supervisors and 1,136 out-of-state enrollees in 19 camps. Additionally, Rhode Island sent 144 to the Rangeley area. The camps closed by 1942, but in their heyday the CCC’s emphasis evolved from emergency relief to job training. The Maine and New Hampshire Tree Army sent home an estimated $4 million.

Their assigned work came from the Maine Forest Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and the National Park Service. It included, much like all the other CCC work roads, trails, recreation areas, erecting buildings, and pest control.

George Dorr, superintendent of Acadia National Park, saw his chance to improve the park in the Civilian Conservation Corps. He asked Roosevelt for a camp at Acadia. Eventually some 3,000 poor boys, mostly from Maine, came to three CCC camps in Acadia. They opened new trails and improved old ones, planted thousands of trees, made fire roads, fought fires, built footbridges and constructed two campgrounds, Blackwoods and Seawall. They built Ocean Drive, which loops around the park with stunning views of the coast and opened hiking trails to Echo Lake, Long Pond and Beech Cliff.

There is a memorial dedicated to the CCC and their work in Maine in Augusta.

Vermont

Vermont was originally allocated four camps but got 30, more than any other state of its size. The reason? The highly motivated State Forester Perry Merrill, a man with great foresight who saw the potential for CCC work.

Some 40,000 men served in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Vermont. However, only about 11,000 came from Vermont. The other companies transferred from other states such as Rhode Island because Merrill found so much work for them to do.

A massive flood in 1927 had devastated much of the state, and the Vermont CCC boys gained recognition for their flood control activities and dam building. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the 2,000-foot Waterbury Dam along with the Wrightsville and East Barre dams.

They also built many ski slopes, including the Stowe Ski Resort and the Mount Mansfield State Park. They also built 105 miles of truck roads for forest fire fighting and 10 lookout towers.

About the author of this story: Leo Caisse of East Providence, R.I., published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He has also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College. Leo passed away in 2020, and we miss him very much. This story updated in 2022.

Photos, except for the Civilian Conservation Corps pillow and statue, courtesy Leo Caisse. CCC statue by By DrStew82 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59856211. This story was updated in 2021.

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