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Waterville Maine

Is There a John La Farge in Your Town?

You just might be living near a John La Farge window if you live in Rhode Island or Massachusetts, and in any other New England state you might at least find a painting.

Who’s John La Farge, you might ask?

John La Farge

Born March 31, 1835 to French emigres in New York City, he graduated from Mount St. Mary’s College in Maryland. He then went to Newport to study with William Morris Hunt. There he met and married Margaret Perry, a descendant of Benjamin Franklin and granddaughter of Oliver Hazard Perry. He bought a house in Newport, though his travels, business and mistress kept him away from it half the time.

His friend H.H. Richardson commissioned him to paint murals at Trinity Church, but his easel paintings didn’t sell enough to pay the bills. He began to experiment with stained glass. He won his first commission for a window from friends at Harvard, who wanted a stained glass window to remember the Civil War Dead at Memorial Hall.

Stained glass making was in a sorry state, and La Farge labored to create the same effects of medieval cathedral windows. He layered complementary colors of colored glass, and later worked with opalescent glass—glass with a milky opaque or translucent effect. He even used mottled glass that others might reject as flawed. La Farge began to work directly with a glassmaker to get saturated but subtle colors.

Detail from Butterflies and Foliage at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston by Lori L. Stalteri. Creative Commons (CC By 2.0)

His connections with wealthy homeowners won him several commissions for stained glass windows. He drew from wildly different artistic styles: early Venetian, Buddhist, Islamic, Greek or Roman art. His windows created an exotic, opulent effect, just what Gilded Age millionaires wanted.

His friend Henry Adams, wrote “La Farge alone could use glass like a thirteenth-century artist…

In conversation La Farge’s mind was opaline with infinite shades and refractions of light, and with color toned down to the finest gradations. In glass it was insubordinate; it was renaissance; it asserted his personal force with depth and vehemence of tone never before seen. He seemed bent on crushing rivalry.

(Read about his rivalry with Louis Comfort Tiffany here.)

Battle Window at Harvard’s Memorial Hall

You can see for yourself what Adams meant in many New England cities and towns where La Farge’s work is on display.

Connecticut

Bridgeport: New Britain Museum of American Art, oil on panel, Lady of Shallot

Hartford: Wadsworth Athenaeum, water color, Water Lily and Moth

New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, windows from the Resurrection Promise Church

Maine

Brunswick: Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Athens (stained glass window); Tokio Geisha Dancing in the House of Our Neighbor, Nikko, gouache; Meditation of Kuwannon, watercolor.

Rockland: Farnsworth Art Museum–Japanese Fisherman, Study of Sunlight,

Waterville: Colby College Museum of Art– Agathon to Erosanthe (Votive Wreath)

Massachusetts

Boston: The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a watercolor, painting and drawing collection and the stained glass windows, Morning Glories, Peonies Blown in the Wind

Boston College McMullen Museum of Art– Christ Preaching, St. John the Evangelist, St. Paul

(West Roxbury): Emmanuel Episcopal Church, The Angel Holding a Lyre (or The Harpist)

(Jamaica Plain): St. John’s Episcopal Church Decorative Window

Trinity Church: Presentation of Virgin in Temple, Resurrection of Christ, Vision of St. John: Ieposolyma the New Jerusalem, Wise Virgin, murals

Cambridge: Memorial Hall, Harvard University, Athena Tying a Mourning Fillet, Battle Window, Cornelia – Mother of the Gracchi, Virgil and Homer, several paintings, Fish and Dawn in the Harvard University Art Museum

Manchester-by-the-Sea: Emmanuel Church, memorial stained glass window

Medford: Grace Episcopal Church, Rebecca at the Well

Methuen: First Church, Congregational, The Resurrection (Colonel Henry Coffin Nevins Memorial Window)

Newton: Grace Church, Memorial Window for Lizzie Shinn

“Angel of Help” in the Unity Church in North Easton, Mass.

North Easton: Unity Church, Figures of Wisdom The Angel of Help – Helen Angier Ames Memorial Window

Quincy: Crane Memorial Library, The Old Philosopher, The Angel at the Tomb

Salem: First Church, Faith and Charity

Springfield: George Walter Vincent Smith Museum, Rebecca at the Well

Stockbridge: St. Paul Preaching at Athens – Reverend Samuel P. Parker Memorial Window, The Annunciation

Wellesley: Wellesley College, Houghton Chapel—Memorial windows

Whitman: All Saints’ Episcopal Church

Williamstown: Thompson Memorial Chapel, Williams College, Abraham and an Angel

Peacock by John La Farge

Worcester: Worcester Art Museum, Peacock Window; (moved from Mount Vernon Congregational Church) Angel at the healing waters of Bethesda, Christ with Two Pilgrims

New Hampshire

Manchester: Currier Museum of Art– Sunrise in Fog over Kyoto, watercolor

Rhode Island

Lincoln: Christ Church

Newport: The Breakers, skylight

Channing Memorial Church, Christ Leading the Soul Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death

Newport Art Museum: Trompe l’Oeil Curtain

Newport Congregational Church: Ceiling Paintings

Peonies Blown in the Wind, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art (created for Newport mansion of Henry Marquand)

Our Lady of Mercy Chapel Decorative Windows, Madonna, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, St. John the Evangelist

Providence: Cathedral Church of St. John, The Wise Virgin

Providence: Church of the Blessed Sacrament, Angel of the Adoration

With thanks to Stained Glass in New England: A Digital Guide; and Art of an Opaline Mind: The Stained Glass of John La Farge by Julie Sloan and James Yarnall. This story was updated in 2022.

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Oliver Otis Howard, The Mainer Who Founded Howard University

Gen. Oliver Otis Howard thought he was fighting the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to free any slaves.

Howard had earned the nickname of “the Christian General” for his deep, overbearing piety. His men didn’t always appreciate his hectoring them about the Ten Commandments or the evils of booze.

His moral certainty led him to great achievements and to terrible deeds. He founded Howard University, which educated 150,000 freed slaves. But he later led a massacre of women and children belonging to the Nez Perce tribe because they wouldn’t move to a reservation.

Oliver Otis Howard by Matthew Brady

But sometimes Oliver Otis Howard couldn’t rely on his moral compass. During the Civil War, he faced a puzzling dilemma: Should he disobey orders and allow a fugitive from slavery her freedom?

Oliver Otis Howard

Born in Leeds, Maine, on Nov. 8, 1830, his mother sent him away to live with relatives after his father died when he was very young. He graduated from Bowdoin College at 19, and went on to West Point. A diligent student, he ranked fourth in a class of 46.

In 1856, he was a lonely young soldier stationed in Florida, far from his wife and baby boy. Seeking comfort, he attended a Methodist prayer meeting and experienced a spiritual awakening. He felt a “new well spring within me, a joy, a peace & a trusting spirit.” He sensed God had destined him for great things.

His military career, like the rest of his life, veered from highlight to lowlight. He won the Medal of Honor for leading a charge at the Battle of Fair Oaks, which cost him his right arm. But he suffered ignominious defeats at Chancellorship and Gettysburg. His men started calling him “Uh-Oh” Howard.

Freedmen’s Bureau

After the Civil War he led the Freedmen’s Bureau, a Reconstruction program that helped former slaves. The Bureau had hundreds of agents in the South distributing food and medicine and finding jobs and schooling for the new citizens.

Howard issued an order to divide up land from confiscated plantations and give it to the people who’d worked them as slaves. But while he vacationed in Maine, President Andrew Johnson reversed his order. In the end, anyone who’d received the promised 40 acres and a mule had to give them back.

Johnson viewed Oliver Otis Howard as a fanatic, and he tried to stymie him at every turn. Howard eventually concluded southerners were still fighting the Civil War and wouldn’t change their attitudes. So he turned his energies to education, and he established a school that bears his name today – Howard University. He served as president from 1869-1874.

Howard University

Howard explained the importance of Howard University in his 1908 autobiography. In the South, white people who opposed educating black people wouldn’t permit any room or building for use as a school. From 1865-67, mobs all over the South burned schools and churches used as schools. They flogged teachers and drove them away. A number of times, they murdered them.

Howard University started on three acres in Washington, D.C. Classes began in 1867 with five students, all daughters of the school’s white founders. Though it emphasized teacher training, Howard added a law school, a medical school and a seminary under its first president.

Howard University, 1868

Eventually, black students and faculty would outnumber whites, and Howard today produces more black doctorates than any other university. Alumni include Toni Morrison, Andrew Young, Kamala Harris and Thurgood Marshall.

Founders library at Howard University

Enemies

Oliver Otis Howard’s efforts on behalf of the former slaves earned him plenty of enemies, and they got him charged with corruption in running the Freedmen’s Bureau. After years of litigation the courts exonerated him, but he nearly went bankrupt paying his lawyers. And in 1872, Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For his next act, he moved west to kick Indians off their land. He commanded the Department of the Columbia from Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory. His men pursued and slaughtered Nez Perce Indians who refused to move to a reservation.

Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce resistance to Howard’s campaign to remove them from their land.

In Howard’s mind, he tried to do for the Indians what he had tried to do for freed slaves. He was giving them land on which they could lead good Christian lives, only they refused. Finally corralled into a reservation in Oklahoma, many died of disease.

Oliver Otis Howard at Governors Island in 1893.

Howard finally commanded the Atlantic Military Division at Fort Columbus on Governors Island in New York before retiring in 1894 as a major general. Then in 1896 he founded Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., to educate “mountain whites.”

He died in 1909 in Burlington, Vt., on Oct. 26, 1909. He lies buried in Lakeview Cemetery.

Greatly Puzzled

How did Oliver Otis Howard’s moral compass swing so wildly from educating freed slaves to slaughtering Indians?

One incident early in his career illuminates his thought process. He prided himself on following orders, and had difficulty resolving the moral dilemma that created.

Just after the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, the 30-year-old Oliver Otis Howard commanded a brigade. He and his men were garrisoned on a farm just west of Alexandria, Va.

First Battle of Bull Run

Abraham Lincoln aimed to quell the southern rebellion without touching slavery. He felt he had to, otherwise the loyal border states might also rebel. Military commanders were to return escaped slaves to their owners.

Howard was entertaining visitors from Waterville, Maine, when a picket guard brought a frightened young woman to him. He described her as “tall straight, healthful and active,” with a boy of about two years old in her arms.

He saw the woman’s terror, and reassured her. In his autobiography, he recounted the incident.

“What do you wish?” I asked. “Sir, I’m a slave woman, and this here’s my child. Let me and my child go free!”

Property?

Meanwhile, a poorly dressed, shrill, sallow white woman was ushered in. “That there woman is my slave,” she said. “I have always treated her well, and here she is. She has run off. Now, sir, you must send her back to me, for she is mine. She and the boy, they’re my property.”

I found myself under most stringent orders not to harbor any slave property. The white woman, seeing my embarrassment, became more and more excited, and soon began to use abusive language, directed partially to me, but mainly to her slave.

The woman kept pressing her child to her breast and with her large eyes filled with tears continued to look toward me, repeating: “Oh! my child, my child!”

Howard realized he had to decide the case. He turned to the white woman and said, “There’s your property, take it!” She replied, “But I can’t take it. She’s stronger than I! You must give me a guard.”

That was too much for Howard. He said, “No, no, I will not give you a guard. I will never use bayonets to drive a poor girl and child into bondage.”

Both women went away, and the young fugitive found her way to Washington, D.C., and to freedom. His guests from Maine, ardent abolitionists, chastised him for his hesitation.

What to do with enslaved people presented a quandary until another New Englander, Benjamin Butler, declared them “contraband of war.”

Read Oliver Otis Howard’s account of the incident in his autobiography here. Image of Howard University PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13705310. Founders Library By Derek E. Morton – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74173648. This story was updated in 2023.

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Six Brutalist Buildings

Two of the most famous Brutalist buildings in America are still provoking strong emotions in New England decades after they first reared their heavy concrete heads.

The massive buildings – Boston City Hall and Rudolph Hall — are appropriately in Boston and New Haven. Both places are key to the development of modern architecture.

For example, the influential modernist Walter Gropius found a home in Boston after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1937. He joined the faculty at Harvard, where he brought modern ideas about architecture to the United States.

And in New Haven, Yale President Whitney Griswold’s building campaign from 1950-1963 had an outsize influence on modern architecture. Glass-and-steel International Style office buildings are called Yale Boxes.

Brutalist Roots

Like much New England architecture, Brutalism came from Britain. The British didn’t love it much. Prince Charles called a Brutalist shopping center in Portsmouth, England, a ‘mildewed lump of elephant droppings.’

Many Brutalist buildings were part of urban renewal programs and, like urban renewal, were born of idealism and quickly viewed as a big mistake.

Brutalist buildings got shabby fast as concrete aged faster than the architects predicted. They turned out to be unfriendly to pedestrians and difficult to subdivide.

When Michael J. Lewis entered architecture school in 1980, Brutalism was ‘unlovely, irrelevant, a universally acknowledged historical blunder.’

And now it’s coming back.

Nikil Saval, in the New York Times, wrote in October 2016, that enthusiasm for Brutalist buildings is taking hold.

“Preservationists clamor for their survival, historians laud their ethical origins and an independent public has found beauty in their rawness,” he wrote.

Brutalist buildings can be found throughout New England. Here are examples of six for you to love or hate.

Rudolph Hall, Yale University

The Yale Art and Architecture Building was the crown jewel of Yale President Whitney Griswold’s modern building program after World War II. Under Griswold, nearly a dozen new buildings were designed by such leading modernist architects as Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, Gordon Bunshaft and Philip Johnson.

Paul Rudolph, who studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard in 1963 designed the Brutalist Art and Architecture Building.

Critics called it ‘the most provocative American building of the decade.’

Rudolph, then chair of Yale’s architecture department, created a heavy concrete structure with 36 (or 37, depending on who’s counting) levels within seven stories.

The building had problems from the start. First, art students threatened to picket the dedication ceremony. Then during the ceremony itself, 2,000 people heard architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner condemn the building as oppressively monumental.

And yet it appeared on the cover of every major architectural magazine, and New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved about it.

Inside, the building had bright orange carpets, incandescent lighting and plaster casts of Classical artworks.

Sculpture students had to work in small, dark studios in the sub-basement. The rope curtains didn’t keep out sunlight.

“It ignored about two-thirds of its users,” said Mark Simon, an architect who had to use it. Richard Benson, who taught in the building for 18 years, called it ‘awful.’

A spectacular fire raced through the building not five years after its dedication. It was widely believed (though never proven) the fire had been set by student architects forced to use it. Yale remodeled the building, cutting up the interior space into a ‘depressing rabbit warren of white-walled rooms.’

Yale then spent $126 million to restore and expand the Brutalist building, renaming it Rudolph Hall. The New York Times called it, ‘a masterpiece of late Modernism.’

Hillside, Colby College

The problem with Brutalist architecture, wrote critic Michael Lewis, was that people ‘could not be made to see that the problem with modern architecture was that it was insufficiently surly.’

Corporate and commercial clients wouldn’t buy Brutalist architecture. Only administrators of academic institutions, government and the occasional church seemed to like it.

In Waterville, Maine, Colby College administrators belonged to that select group. The college hired Boston architect Ben Thompson, a partner of Walter Gropius, to design dormitories. He came up with a network of five interconnected dorms called Hillside.

A confidential student guide to Colby describes them as ‘ugly.’ “But they have their charm, including spacious common rooms, that cozy small-dorm feeling, and their own parking lot… Plus, “I live in Hillside” can be another point of bonding– bonding through adversity, hah.”

Boston City Hall

Boston City Hall arose from the urban renewal program that demolished the immigrant West End neighborhood in the 1950s. From the rubble rose the State Health, Education and Welfare Service Center, designed by none other than Paul Rudolph.

Mayor John F. Collins then continued urban renewal with the New Boston program. It leveled the bawdy Scollay Square neighborhood, to the regret of countless sailors.

Collins wasn’t careful enough for what he wished. When presented with the blueprints of City Hall, he is said to have gasped. Someone in the room then said, “What the hell is that?”

The architectural firms of Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles with Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty designed the Brutalist behemoth and completed it in 1968.

It is easily the most hated building in the city. Boston’s late mayor Tom Menino wanted to tear it down. So did the next mayor, Marty Walsh. Boston Globe columnist Paul McMorrow agreed with them. “Its great crime isn’t being ugly; it’s being anti-urban,” he wrote.

“The building and its plaza keep a crowded city at arm’s length,” he wrote. “It disperses crowds, instead of gathering them together. It creates an island of inactivity, several blocks long and wide, in the middle of what is otherwise a bustling commercial district.”

Some, though, view it as a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture. An American Institute of Architects poll listed it as one of the 10 proudest achievements of American architecture in 200 years.

Phillips Exeter Academy Library

The writer Tom Wolfe had little use for Louis Kahn, the architect who designed the Brutalist Phillips Exeter Academy Library in Exeter, N.H.

Wolfe, in his book From Bauhaus to Our House, described Kahn as a ‘shambles,’ who had deep within a ‘molten core of confidence.’ “Kahn would walk into a classroom, stare blearily at the students, open his mouth… and from the depths would come a remarkable voice: “Every building must have … its own soul.”

Kahn was hired in 1965 to design a home for the Phillips Exeter’s 60,000 volumes. The collection has grown to 160,000 since the library opened in 1971. Today it’s the largest secondary school library in the world.

Kahn designed the library in three concentric squares. The brick outer ring includes the outer walls and the library carrel space, the concrete middle ring holds the stacks and the inner ring is an atrium with circular cutouts that reveal the stacks.

In 1997, the American Institute of Architects 1997 gave the library the Twenty-five Year Award, which recognizes architecture of enduring significance and given to one building per year.

On the Brutalism website, someone commented,

This is exactly how I imagine the library from A Clockwork Orange (book).

Knight Campus, CCRI

In 2017, admirers of the Brutalist style held a funeral for the John E. Fogarty Building, torn down in 2017. (Watch the video here.)

It’s the third Brutalist building torn down in Providence. Also gone are The Outlet parking garage on Friendship Street and the circular Gulf gas station off Broadway.

But in Warwick, R.I., the Knight Campus of the Community College of Rhode Island still stands.

The Brutalist architectural firm The Robinson Green Beretta Corporation, viewed the building as an educational megastructure. They rejected the traditional sprawling college campus with buildings separated by disciplines. Instead they tried to promote diversity and interaction among students in a single, gigantic structure.

It was built on the former Knight Estate, a gentleman’s farm owned by the founders of the Fruit of the Loom brand.

When the building opened in 1972, people already considered it outdated.

Cathedral Church of St. Paul

In 1971, a fire destroyed the Gothic Revival building where years to Episcopalians in Burlington, Vt., had worshiped. The city had undertaken a massive urban renewal project at the time. It therefore offered to swap the old St. Paul’s land for a large tract overlooking Lake Champlain and the Adirondacks. Though controversial, St. Paul’s took the deal.

The cathedral’s leaders wanted to make a new architectural statement. They thought it shouldn’t function as a museum, but home to the arts, lectures and discussion. So an international competition was held, and the winner was a local firm Truex, Cullins & Partners. The Brutalist building was consecrated in 1973.

Images: Rudolph Building, Yale By Photographer: interrupt; – edit of flickr image, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11872101; Hillside (Sturtevant dormitory), By Colby Mariam – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49324860; Boston City Hall, By Daniel Schwen – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12229690 Phllips Exeter Academy Library, By Gunnar Klack – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57029474; St. Paul’s Cathedral, By Beyond My Ken – Own work, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29111530. This story about Brutalist buildings was updated in 2022.

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Maine’s Elijah Lovejoy: The First Casualty of the Civil War

On November 7, 1837, Henry West – a shop owner in Alton, Ill. – needed a peaceful solution to an armed standoff in his small town. Elijah Lovejoy, a Maine man, was holed up in a warehouse with a gang of armed men. Outside, Dr. Horace Beal, a Marylander, had his own gang armed and assembled.

Engraving of the riot at Alton, Ill. where Elijah Lovejoy was killed.

Engraving of the 1837 riot at Alton, Ill. where Elijah Lovejoy was killed.

In the smallest sense, the two sides were literally fighting over a printing press. But in the larger sense, they fought the same fight that would finally erupt into the U.S. Civil War more than 20 years later.

Elijah Lovejoy

Elijah Lovejoy started out life in Albion, Maine, in 1802. Educated at Waterville College (now Colby), he trained as a newspaperman. He was also ordained as a minister at Princeton Theological Seminary. He traveled to the Midwest in search of opportunity and won the job of editor of the St. Louis Observer. Here, Lovejoy began taking on what he saw as the evils of the day: alcohol, smoking, Catholicism and slavery.

Elijah Lovejoy

Slavery and the treatment of black people were the hottest issues of the day in St. Louis. In 1836, the issue came dramatically to a head in the lynching of Francis McIntosh. McIntosh , a biracial porter on a steamboat, had gotten swept up in a police matter.

Two police officers had asked him to help them arrest two sailors they were chasing. When he did not help, they arrested him for hindering apprehension. As they put McIntosh in jail, a fight broke out. The two officers were stabbed, one of them killed.

Lynching

A mob broke into the jail that held McIntosh, carried him to the outer edges of the city and killed him. They burned him alive, tied to a tree. Among the lynch mob was a city alderman.

The horror of the event infuriated abolitionists. Abraham Lincoln, then a young Illinois legislator, condemned the lynching. Lovejoy lashed out in the Observer against the lynching and the failure of the courts to convict anyone for the crime.

Abraham Lincoln, 1858

Already unpopular, Lovejoy’s articles on the McIntosh lynching made the Observer even more despised and Lovejoy decided to relocate the newspaper up the river to Alton, Ill. But the reception in Alton was hardly any better.

Lovejoy had become even more radical (for the times), promoting the formation of an anti-slavery society and openly discussing emancipation of slaves. Hard economic times had come to Illinois. Businessmen in Alton began worrying that an abolitionist newspaper would make their town unpopular and further depress its economy.

Silencing Lovejoy

Dr. Horace Beal was older than Lovejoy and a long-standing, vocal supporter of slavery. He and a committee of businessmen began a campaign to silence Lovejoy. First they wrote letters – to Lovejoy and the town mayor – asking that he moderate his views. They then stepped up their harassment. They accosted him in the street and threatened to tar and feather him.

Then, they broke into his offices and destroyed his printing press – three times. Refusing to yield, Lovejoy ordered another press. When it arrived in Alton on Nov. 7, 1837, it was taken to the warehouse of Winthrop Gilman.

Lovejoy had given a speech in town announcing his intention to continue publishing. Beal assembled his pro-slavery band and went to the warehouse, intent on destroying yet another press. This time, Lovejoy and his supporters were at the warehouse, prepared to defend their property.

Shopkeeper Henry West, it was agreed, would make one last stab at peacefully resolving the issue. West entered the warehouse and heard shots fired. Both Lovejoy’s men and Beal’s had fired a volley, injuring one of Beal’s men. West told Lovejoy the crowd had come for the press. West could get the men out safely if they would surrender it.

Martyrdom of Elijah Lovejoy

Lovejoy refused, arguing he had a right to defend his property. West relayed the message to Beal, but the hot-headed doctor had no intention of backing down. The mob placed a ladder against the wall of the warehouse. Lovejoy’s men pushed it over. When the mob put the ladder back, Lovejoy again tried to push it down. He was shot and killed.

Chased from the warehouse, Lovejoy’s men retreated. The mob found the press and destroyed it. In the North, Lovejoy became an instant martyr. Abolitionists from his native Maine and throughout the country mourned his death, while in Alton no memorial service was held for fear of inciting another riot. Historians would later declare him the first casualty of the Civil War, and an inspiration to anti-slavery advocates.

Owen Lovejoy

Among those he inspired: His own brother Owen. Owen Lovejoy entered politics and became the leader of the Illinois abolitionists. He conducted people to freedom on the Underground Railroad and won election to Congress to lead the fight against slavery.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Abner Small, Civil War Hero, Imprisoned in Confederate Hell Hole

Abner Small of Waterville, Maine, narrowly evaded capture at the Battle of Gettysburg, only to be taken prisoner of war 13 months later.

He was first incarcerated in Richmond, Va., at Libby Prison, infamous for overcrowding, malnutrition and disease. He survived his ordeal and was exchanged for Confederate prisoners in time to lead his regiment in the last days of the Civil War.

Libby Prison

Battle of Gettysburg

Abner Small was 25 years old when he enlisted in the Maine 3^rd Infantry Regiment on June 4, 1861, according to the Maine Historical Society.

He was mustered out of the 3rd Maine and commissioned an officer in the newly formed Maine 16th Infantry Regiment, famous for its heroism at Gettysburg. The regiment’s delaying action on June 1, 1863, allowed the retreat of 16,000 Union Army troops, but at a dreadful cost. More than 200 were killed, captured or wounded. Only 38 lived to fight another day. Abner Small was one of them.

Maj. Abner Small

After the battle, he wrote how the men of the Maine 16^th prevented the Confederates from capturing their flags – the regimental flag and the Stars and Stripes — as they overran what was left of the regiment:

“For a few last moments our little regiment defended angrily its hopeless challenge, but it was useless to fight longer. We looked at our colors, and our faces burned. We must not surrender those symbols of our pride and our faith.” The color bearers “appealed to the colonel,” Small wrote, “and with his consent they tore the flags from the staves and ripped the silk into shreds; and our officers and men that were near took each a shred.”

He won special notice for his bravery during the battle.

Battle of Globe Tavern

Thirteen months later on Aug. 18, 1864, Abner Small was captured south of Petersburg, Va., at the Battle of Globe Tavern. After he suffered through Libby Prison, he was taken to Salisbury in Rowan County, N.C., then Danville Prison in Danville, Va.

The Globe Tavern. Photo by Matthew Brady.

“Our condition is humiliating, degrading & almost unbearable,” he wrote in his diary on Nov. 17, 1864. He complained of cold, hunger, filth, vermin and illness.

Money helped. The prisoners sold their possessions for Confederate scrip, which they exchanged for food. Small sold his watch and shared the proceeds with his men. Not all officers were so generous. Small complained about those who simply looked out for themselves.

I am sick & hungry & can borrow no money
have no money – by no money neither
can I find the virtue called charity

On Aug. 19, 1864, Abner Small wrote in his diary:

Petersburg Va.

Captd (captured) on 18th with Capt. Conley, Lieuts. Broughton
& Chapman. Confined in lockup (negro prison) with E M (enlisted men)
until 11 A.M. 19th. Moved to island in Appomattox river
Sold watch for 150$ Confed. Scrip. Watkins scout
gave me 10$. While in Petersburg I gave
Lieut. Chapman 20$, Lieut [name erased] 10$
Wrote to Col T [Tilden]

Three Cheers

Abner Small then spent six months in Confederate prisons.

On Feb. 15, 1865, incarcerated at Danville, he learned he and the other prisoners would be exchanged for Confederate prisoners. “The welcome intelligence has at last arrived!” he wrote. “[W]e leave for Richmond for ex[change] on Friday & Saturday. 3 cheers were given…”

The first 200 men in alphabetical order left the prison by railroad on February 17. Small got no sleep that night. He then left the next day, arriving at Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., at 2 p.m. on February 18. The next day, “Enjoyed luxury of hot coffee milked and sugared!” he wrote.

Not until February 22 did he win his release.

Left the southern hell
at 8 A.M. placed our
feet on God’s soil near
Cox’s landing 10 A.M.
got sight of Stars & Stripes
at Aiken’s landing at
11:30 — Left A L [Aikens Landing] in “Geo.
Leary” at 1:30 P.M.
Ham white bread and coffee
issued — 1/2 ra [ration] whiskey.

On February 24, he received $233 for his service during December and January.

Aftermath

Twenty-one years later, Abner Small wrote a history of the Sixteenth Maine Regiment in the War of the Rebellion. He married right after the war and then married again after his first wife died. Small and his second wife had two sons, and he worked as head bookkeeper at the Dunn Edge Tool Co. He became the company’s treasurer, then clerk and eventually corporate officer of the Somerset Railroad.

He died in Oakland, Maine, in 1910.

With thanks to mainememory.net. Photo Detail of Libby Prison by Alexander Gardner. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story was updated in 2022.

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Sumner Davis, The Maine Stagecoach Driver Who Got a $100 Tip

Sumner Davis discovered a way to make money in the stagecoach business that didn’t involve passengers or mail – but it did involve discretion.

Stagecoach in Harrison, Maine

The undated photo above shows the stagecoach in front of the Elm House in Harrison, Maine, a small inland town west of Lewiston and south of Waterville. The stagecoach had left Norway and was on its way to Waterford.

During the early 19^th century, travel from Maine’s Sebago Lakes Region to Portland was a challenge. There were few good inland roads. It was much easier to travel by boat along the coast.

At the outset of the War of 1812, William Sawin started a mail route between Waterford and Portland on horseback. By 1815, he used a stagecoach to take people to Portland, then the state capital.

Sumner Davis, Stagecoach Entrepreneur

Stagecoaches were at first slow and uncomfortable. Passengers were jolted as the wagon bounced on springs over rough roads. But as the population increased, the roads improved. In 1827, Lewis Downing began making the fabled Concord coach with leather straps that caused the wagon to sway. Mark Twain described it as like “a cradle on wheels.”

Eventually, Sumner Davis of Harrison ran stagecoach lines from Waterford to Portland, from Brownfield to Bridgton to Norway. At the peak of the business, he had several stagecoaches and 30 drivers.

Davis made money running errands for his customers, as well as carrying mail and passengers. He learned that discretion paid dividends. According to Ernest R. Ward, in his 1966 book My First 60 Years in Harrison:

One estimable lady in Bridgton, for instance, used to have a gallon of “tonic” delivered to her home each week for which she paid the usual charge and in addition, probably due to the discreet manner in which Mr. Davis took care of her, presented him with a Christmas present of one hundred dollars each year for several years.

This story updated in 2022.

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