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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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The West Indies Send Sugar, Slaves and Red Sox Stars to New England

For four centuries, the West Indies have made an outsized impact on New England. In 2018, West Indian stars and a West Indian manager brought the Boston Red Sox to a World Series championship.

West Indians have come to New England as doctors, teachers, ministers, slaves, farm workers and servants, depending on when they came.

Beginning in the 17^th century, merchants like Connecticut horse jockeys, Rhode Island slavers and Boston banana importers have traded with the West Indies. Well into the 19^th century, retail shops called West India Goods Stores sold items from the Caribbean and all over the world.

And West Indians came to New England in waves – from the British and Spanish West Indies, the French Antilles and the Dutch Caribbean. Some were Afro-Caribbean, like W.E.B. Du Bois’s father, some were Euro-Caribbean, like Oscar de la Renta, Jackie Kennedy’s favorite designer.

Kevin Youkilis, Alex Cora and Dustin Pedroia.

And some came as key players for the Boston Red Sox. Rafael Devers came from the Dominican Republic. Xander Bogaerts came from Aruba. Christian Vazquez and manager Alex Cora came from Puerto Rico.

So when the Red Sox clinched the world championship in Los Angeles, Cora acknowledged a historic relationship when he said, “I can’t imagine what’s going on in Boston, I can’t imagine what’s going on on my island.”

West Indies Trade

Tragically, the first documented West Indians in New England were slaves from Barbados. European slavers bought captured Africans and took them to Barbados in the British West Indies to work on ever-larger sugar plantations.

Because the West Indian planters grew few crops other than sugar cane, New England traders seized the opportunity to sell them farm produce, livestock, salted fish and wood products. They brought back sugar, molasses and some of their slaves on the two- to five-week voyage.

Enslaved Afro-Caribbeans first came to Massachusetts in 1638 and to Connecticut in 1639. At the end of the Pequot War in 1669, the Puritans tried to force captured Indians into slavery. The Indians, though, ‘would not endure the yoke,’ so the Puritans sent them to the West Indies in exchange for captive African laborers.

On the eve of the American Revolution, Massachusetts and Connecticut each had about 5,000 black people living within their borders. Most had lived in or were born in the Caribbean.

As late as 1860, one in five black Bostonians had a Caribbean birthplace. Many West Indians were free, and some quite successful. Prince Hall from Barbados founded the Negro Masonic Order in Boston in 1775. John Brown Russwurm from Jamaica founded the first African-American newspaper after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1826.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born free to a Haitian father in Great Barrington, Mass., in 1868, rose to international prominence as a historian, sociologist and civil rights leader.

An 1855 map of the West Indies

2nd Wave from the West Indies

From 1900 to 1930, a second wave of immigrants from the West Indies arrived, mostly from the English-speaking islands. They were typically literate and skilled, and a significant number had worked as professionals and in offices. Others were dockworkers, porters, laborers and domestic servants.

They came because they suffered tremendous economic hardship due to the decline of the Caribbean sugar plantation during the late 19^th century. And they came to New England for a very specific reason: cheap steamer fares.

During the late 19^th century, a group of Boston merchants called Boston Fruit ran a steamship service between the West Indies and Boston. They imported bananas, coconuts, oranges and lemons, eventually becoming Chiquita Brands International.

Boston Fruit’s steamer also carried passengers, including West Indians coming to Boston, the first port of call. They also settled in New Haven, Cambridge, Mass., and New York. Florida, though, had the highest concentration of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in 1900, just under 22 percent..

In 1924, immigration from the West Indies all but stopped with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. The law sharply limited immigration from countries outside of Western Europe.

Then the Great Depression came, and many immigrants returned to the West Indies, forced home by economic hardship and even more restrictive immigration policies.

World War II

Puerto Rican men immigrating to the United States. Photo from the film ‘Puerto Rican Passages.”

In 1900 Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens, and for the next 45 years about 90,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the continental United States. Some came to work in defense plants during World War II. But it wasn’t until 1945 that the Great Migration of Puerto Ricans started, lasting until 1964.

Half a million people from the islands, 21,000 a year, came to the mainland, many as farm workers. Some stayed in Springfield, Mass., and Hartford, Conn. They were joined by Jamaican contract farm workers picking apples, tobacco, melons and blueberries.

Life was harsh for Puerto Ricans in New England’s declining industrial cities. Young Puerto Ricans rioted from Worcester to Waterbury during the late 1960s through the 1970s. Many returned to the island.

Jamaicans

The flow of West Indian immigrants slowed in 1952, when Congress enacted an immigration law, the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. It aimed to keep out black immigrants, and it worked.

But like a pendulum, immigration laws loosened up in 1968. They let in close to half a million Caribbean immigrants, mostly Cubans, to Florida. The number of Jamaicans rose eightfold, to about 75,000 in the ’60s. Then it almost doubled in the ’70s to 140,000 and rose again in the 1980s to 208,000 in the 1990s.

In New England, Jamaicans concentrated in the Hartford and Bridgeport areas of Connecticut, which has the fifth highest population of Jamaicans in the country. The Blue Hills neighborhood of Hartford, in fact, has the densest concentration of Jamaicans in the United States. Jamaicans have also settled in the Boston area and throughout New England. Jamaican musicians perform at reggae festivals all over the region. Even Brattleboro, Vt., has a Jerk Festival.

Dominicans

Big Papi, David Ortiz

Today, three New England states – Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut – have some of the densest populations of people with West Indies heritage in the country. Only Florida and New York have more.

The arrival of Dominican immigrants from the West Indies contribute heavily to the West Indian presence in New England. Beginning with the assassination of President Trujillo in 1961, a series of political and economic crises drove waves of Dominicans to the United States.

Dominicans comprise the largest Hispanic group in Rhode Island – 35,008 in 2010. They also dominate the Hispanic population in eastern Massachusetts. The Connecticut cities of Danbury, Waterbury and Bridgeport have large Dominican populations.

Only New York City has more Dominicans than Lawrence, Mass., with 30,243 as of 2010. And when Marcos Devers was appointed as Acting Mayor of Lawrence, he became the first Dominican-American mayor of a U.S. city.

Massachusetts, in fact, has the fourth largest Dominican population (103,292 in 2010) in the United States. The Bay State can also claim David Ortiz, the Red Sox legend, now an American citizen living in suburban Boston.

End Notes

Images: David Ortiz By Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, NJ, USA – CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52501471; Alex Cora By Eric Kilby – Three Amigos, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63535958.

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The Secret Killer of the Waterbury Radium Girls

Frances Splettscher was the first of the Waterbury radium girls to die. In 1921 at the age of 17, she had gone to work for the Waterbury Clock Co., painting watch dials with the new miracle substance, radium.

To get a nice, sharp point on her paintbrush, Frances, like the other radium girls, put the brush to her lips to get a nice, sharp point, dipped it into the paint and painted the dial. Then she did it again, over and over, for eight cents a dial.

The radium girls’ ailments mimicked a condition called phossy jaw

The radium girls didn’t think radium carried any danger. The company told them it would give them glowing health. Wasn’t radium used to cure people?

The radium girls believed their supervisors. They painted their dress buttons with it and their fingernails, and they painted rings on their fingers.

In 1925, Frances Splettscher died of radium poisoning after an agonizing illness. She developed severe anemia, and her teeth hurt. When a dentist pulled a tooth, part of her jaw came with it. Her mouth rotted until she had a hole in her check.

She was one of hundreds of young immigrant women hired to paint luminous paint onto the popular new watch dials in Connecticut – in Waterbury, Bristol, Thomaston and New Haven – and in Orange, N.J., and in Ottawa, Ill. She was also one of dozens who died from radium poisoning.

Radium Girls

In 1920, Katherine Schaub had come to train the radium girls at the Connecticut watch studios, including the Waterbury Clock Co. She had worked as a dial painter in Orange, N.J., at the United States Radium Corporation (USRC).

Katherine later contracted radium poisoning and, with four other dial painters, sued USRC. The company settled out of court, but Katharine died at the age of 30 after suffering excruciating pain.

Waterbury Clock Co.

In 1923, U.S. Public Health Service said radium workers should take precautions. The radium girls in Waterbury knew nothing of it. A company doctor named Frederick Flinn examined them and reassured them they were fine.

What they didn’t know was that Flinn was a fraud who found a career covering up for companies that killed their workers with radium poisoning. He hadn’t gone to medical school; he had just acquired a PhD. That didn’t stop him from taking blood, reading x-rays and ordering medical treatment.

Frederick Flinn helped USRC fight the charges brought by Katherine Schaub and the other radium girls. He also worked with Waterbury Clock to sweep the radium poisoning under the rug.

Frederick Flinn

Radium girls at work.

Flinn had approached Waterbury Clock Co. offering to examine the dial painters for free. By 1925, the year Frances Splettscher died, the company hired him.

That same year Elizabeth Dunn tripped slightly on a dance floor and suffered a spontaneous fracture of her leg. The radium had eaten into her bones, riddling them with holes. She developed the same jaw necrosis that felled Frances Splettscher. Elizabeth Dunn died in 1927.

At least by then Waterbury Clock Co. had warned the radium girls not to put their paintbrushes into their mouths.

Under the Rug

By the summer of 1926, Frederick Flinn found two cases of radium poisoning at Waterbury Clock. He continued to tell the radium girls they were perfectly healthy. He told Katherine Moore eight times she didn’t have a trace of radium in her body. She died from radium poisoning.

A radium dial.

In December 1926, Flinn published an article in a medical journal concluding, ‘An industrial hazard does not exist in the painting of luminous dials.’

Not until 1928 did Frederick Flinn find five girls who might have radium poisoning.

Flinn pretended concern. He convinced the radium girls to accept company settlements that freed it from further liability. With no lawyers representing them, the young, unsophisticated radium girls had no hope of justice.

Between 1926 and 1936, Waterbury Clock quietly paid out $90,000 for settlement, support and medical costs for 16 radium girls. One family received a paltry $43.75 as compensation for the death of their radium girl.

USRC

Meanwhile, radium girls were getting sick and dying in New Jersey. Five of them, including Katherinie Schaub, brought suit against USRC. Their lawyer tried to prove their horrific diseases resulted from occupational hazards associated with radium dial painting.

Alice Hamilton

A Harvard professor named Alice Hamilton tried to help. She had identified the occupational dangers of the Danbury hat factories, and she heard about the Waterbury girls. She told the New Jersey lawyer to look into the Waterbury Clock Co. cases.

In 1927 the lawyer wrote to the workmen’s comp commission in Connecticut. They hadn’t heard anything about it. “No claims have been filed with me. I have heard a number of rumors such as you have, but know nothing about them,“ wrote the commissioner.

USRC argued in court that no other cases of radium poisoning existed.

Aftermath

The New Jersey radium girls did win a settlement, but USRC managed to wriggle out of further liability. Waterbury Clock also wangled a change in Connecticut’s workmen’s compensation law, shortening the statute of limitations to three years from five.

In 2014, May Keane, the last of the radium girls, died in Middlebury, Conn., at 107. She had only worked as a dial painter at Waterbury Clock for a few months, which probably extended her life. However she lost all her teeth and suffered from colon cancer and breast cancer.

If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about child labor here. With thanks to The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. This story was updated in 2023.

Images: Waterbury Clock by By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=68158102. Radium dial by By Arma95 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9502836.

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The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of the Triple Decker

In the years before World War I, New England’s iconic triple decker brought thousands of immigrants into the middle class. Triple deckers also inspired the undying hatred of housing reformers.

The New England triple decker

Triple deckers sprang up in New England’s booming mill towns and industrial cities between 1870 and 1910. Ambitious immigrants loved them because they offered a path to home ownership. A family could live in one apartment and collect rents from two.

But to housing reformers, the triple decker was a fire trap and a nasty place to live. Much better, thought the reformer, were small single-family homes in the suburbs and subsidized public housing in the cities.

The housing reformers prevailed – for a while.

History of the Triple Decker

The name triple decker originally referred to a British man-of-war, which had three gun decks.

They appeared in New England after the Civil War. Some consider them an outgrowth of New England’s colonial building traditions – because they’re made of wood.

By 1870, New England’s economy boomed. An influx of immigrants caused the populations to triple over the next few decades in Boston, Lowell and Worcester in Massachusetts, Lewiston in Maine and Bridgeport in Connecticut. Populations quadrupled in Fall River, Mass., Pawtucket, R.I., Waterbury, Conn., and Manchester and Nashua in New Hampshire.

Poor families moved near factories and mills to work, but at first many scrounged for a place to live. They jammed into stables, cellars and even tents.

Investors saw an opportunity to make money by building light-framed

The Peter Baker Triple Decker

wooden three-flats. For example, Peter Baker owned a lead manufacturing company in Worcester. He built several triple deckers on Vernon Hill as speculative investments to house Irish working-class families.

Athanase Dussault, a carpenter, built a cluster of six triple deckers in Fall River in 1916 for a successful peddler named David Boguslavsky.

Hundreds more mill owners, small builders and carpenters put up the wooden three flats all over the region. They concentrated in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New England’s industrial cities.

Between 1880 and 1930, 16,000 triple deckers housing about 192,000 people sprang up in Boston.

In Fall River, 4,120 of the city’s 17,698 structures are triple deckers.

Living in or near a New England triple decker, wrote The New York Times, was like hating the Yankees or skipping work on St. Patrick’s Day.

American Dream

The triple decker never won any architectural awards, but it enjoyed enormous popularity. It gave working- and middle-class families a chance to own a home. They could live in one unit and rent out the other two.

The triple decker ‘succeeded remarkably in housing and helping the poor,’ wrote Howard Husock in his 1990 article Rediscovering the three-decker house.

A triple decker in Haverhill, Mass

Unlike New York’s cramped, windowless brick tenements, New England’s triple deckers offered the worker a big, airy living space with heat and hot water.

An ambitious clerk or mechanic who earned an average of $25 a week could rent for $20-$25 an apartment with a parlor, dining room, kitchen and bathroom. It also had a stove, hot water, two bedrooms, two porches, heat, electricity and hardwood floors.

Worcester

In 1947, the Worcester Telegram called triple deckers ‘monuments to a time of good workmanship, good family life, and good practical answers to the problem of rapid city expansion.’

Some consider Worcester the epicenter and birthplace of triple-decker construction.

Triple deckers made up half of all building construction between 1890 and 1900 in Worcester. Of the 6,000 built, 4,000 remain, and as late as 1972 they housed one-third of the city’s 100,000 residents.

The National Register of Historic Places lists many Worcester triple deckers, such as the Ludwig Anderson house built in 1896. Anderson, a grocer, first owned the triple decker on Vernon Hill. Swedish immigrants moved there to work in nearby steel wire mills. Anderson’s first tenants included two Swedish families headed by a machinist and a woodworker. Later tenants included wireworkers, machinists, a clerk, a chauffeur and a toolmaker.

Not everyone in Worcester – or elsewhere, for that matter – fell in love with the triple decker. In 1900, the Worcester Board of Trade called the triple decker ‘a blot on the landscape.’ It towered, ‘like an enormous dry-goods box on our sightly hills.’

Backlash

The so-called ‘reformers’ who tried to get rid of the triple decker also, not coincidentally, wanted to get rid of immigrants.

In 1894, Prescott Farnsworth Hall and two other Harvard graduates formed the Immigration Restriction League to sound the alarm about the dangers of immigration.

Prescott Farnsworth Hall

Hall also campaigned against triple deckers as chairman of the Town Improvement Committee of the Brookline Civic Society.

“Americans are both esthetically defective and blindly devoted to obsolete ideas as to the extent of personal liberty,’ he wrote in support of banning triple deckers. He argued they caused deadly fires and didn’t benefit their residents.

What Prescott Farnsworth Hall really didn’t like was immigrants joining America’s middle class.

Flat-roofed triple deckers in Cambridge, Mass.

Another housing ‘reform’ group, the National Housing Association, in 1912 published a guide to reform that advocated single-family homes in the suburbs and subsidized public housing in the cities. The problem with public housing, though, was that it didn’t allow tenants to become homeowners.

But under pressure from such groups, Massachusetts in 1912 passed a law allowing cities and towns to ban triple deckers. Not in so many words, though. The language said municipalities could prevent construction of any ‘wooden tenement’ in which ‘cooking shall be done above the second floor.‘

The Triple Decker Menace

The Providence Chamber of Commerce put it more bluntly in a 1917 Providence magazine article that attacked the three decker menace.

People, except for Italians and Jews, were realizing ‘it lowers one’s social standing to be rated as a three decker dweller,’ argued the chamber.

It described the unpleasant experience of a middle-floor tenant, with tramping feet on the thin board floor overhead and the aroma of cooking from the lower floor. Children squabbled, mothers quarreled over yard use on wash day and clutter blocked the landings. “They have moved on to the greater joy and comfort of the two-tenement house,” noted the chamber.

The chamber urged Rhode Island to ban the triple decker menace and follow the example of Bridgeport, Conn., and 36 Massachusetts municipalities such as Arlington, Belmont, Brookline and Swampscott.

More restrictive laws followed, and by 1927 it was almost impossible to build a triple decker.

Fall and Rise of the Triple Decker

By the 1950s, flight to the suburbs and urban renewal caused the abandonment or destruction of thousands of triple deckers.

Banks didn’t like lending mortgage money for old triple-deckers. They fell apart quickly because absentee landlords abandoned and neglected them.

Boston triple deckers

In 1975, the Boston Globe editorialized that people still viewed the triple decker as, ‘second rate, even hazardous housing.’

But times changed. And, as the Globe pointed out, ‘nobody can afford to replace them.’

“Homely though they may be, they are too useful for destruction and there is nothing to take their place,” the Globe opined.

It turned out that a triple-decker built for working-class factory workers in 1910 fit the needs of middle-class professionals a century later.

In the 1980s, interest rates soared, money dried up for public housing and condomania took over.

Banks then changed their minds and began lending for mortgages on triple decker condominiums. Builders even started to build new triple-deckers in Boston.

“Their economical value has stood the test of time,” wrote Boston magazine in 2016.

Sally Zimmerman, preservation manager for Historic New England, said triple-deckers would have been demolished and replaced with smaller structures if it hadn’t been for the condominium.

“The condominium is the real savior of the three-decker,” she said.

If you enjoyed this story about the triple decker, you may also want to read about New England’s Sears houses here.

Images: Ludwig Eaton By Pvmoutside – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15657274; Boston triple deckers By myself (User:Piotrus) – Own work (taken by myself), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6651986. Cambridge triple-deckers By Dr.frog at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Sreejithk2000 using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10522657. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Ben Franklin Statue That Ran Away From Home

Two hundred years after Ben Franklin started writing for his brother’s newspaper, a Ben Franklin statue followed the route he took when he ran away from home.

The Ben Franklin statue

Only instead of ending up in Philadelphia, the Ben Franklin statue ended up in Waterbury, Conn.

A renowned sculptor, Paul Bartlett, received a commission to create the statue of Franklin in 1921. He had completed his masterwork, the pediment to the U.S. Capitol, five years earlier. When Bartlett finished his Ben Franklin statue, someone had the bright idea of putting it on the road before settling in Waterbury.

Why Waterbury?

The Ben Franklin Statue was a gift to the city from Elisha Leavenworth, a Waterbury industrialist who died childless in 1911.

The Waterbury Republican took out an ad to explain why Waterbury needed a Ben Franklin statue: “Waterbury loves the memory and respects the character of Franklin, and will furnish the proper atmosphere for a statue of the Revolutionary philosopher and statesman,” the ad said.

In a burst of boosterism, the ad extolled the virtues of Waterbury: studious, thrifty, prosperous and beautiful.

Ben Franklin Statue Runs Away

Ben Franklin described the route he took to Philadelphia in his autobiography.

First he sailed to New York City. A friend persuaded the captain of a sloop that the teen-aged Franklin had ‘got a naughty girl with child.’ He said Franklin needed to leave secretly because her friends would make him marry her.

Benjamin Franklin

“So I sold some of my books to raise a little money,” he wrote, “was taken on board privately, and as we had a fair wind, in three days I found myself in New York, near three hundred miles from home.”

Franklin tried to get a job with a printer, who told him to go to Philadelphia because his son, also a printer, had lost his helper. Franklin boarded a ship for Philadelphia, but a squall sent the vessel off course. He disembarked in Perth Amboy and walked 50 miles to Burlington, N.J.

In Burlington he realized people thought he had run away. He immediately caught a boat to Philadelphia. Franklin arrived in the city dirty, tired and hungry. He had only a Dutch dollar and a copper shilling in his pocket.

The Ben Franklin Statue

The Ben Franklin statue got a bigger celebration than the real Ben Franklin ever did, at least as a runaway. The 22 cities it visited gave “large-scale patriotic demonstrations” on its arrival, according to the Boston Globe.

Paul Bartlett around 1890 by Charles Sprague Pearce

Printers, electricians and opticians took charge of the statue along the route, which started in Philadelphia. It stopped in the New Jersey towns of Bordentown, Burlington and Perth Amboy on the way to New York.

The Ben Franklin statue then sailed to Boston, where it arrived at Charlestown Navy Yard. It was “securely strapped to the deck of the Naval tug Lykens, forward of the pilot house and accompanied by two sea scouts,” according to the Boston Globe.

The statue paraded through the streets of Boston, got reviewed by the governor and paused in front of Franklin’s birthplace on Milk Street. People placed memorial wreaths on Franklin’s parents’ graves in the Old Granary Burying Ground.

Then the statue was exhibited on Boston Common for two days with an honor guard of sea scouts, soldiers and Boy Scouts.

It moved on to Providence, New London and New Haven, the birthplace of the sculptor. Finally, the statue made one more stop in Bridgeport.

And then it rested in Waterbury, where it was unveiled June 4, 1921.

The statue still sits in Library Plaza today.

Image: By Amphictyon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46419672. This story last updated in 2022.

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