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How To Be a Swamp Yankee

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A swamp Yankee is born, not made. Those who aspire to swamperdom may tell you differently, but they’re wrong.

Though definitions of “swamp Yankee” vary from “trailer trash” to “salt of the earth,” they agree on one thing: the swamp Yankee goes back generations to the same part of New England. Mark Patinkin , in his Providence Journal column, defined them as “earthy, proud New Englanders who date to the Revolution, but haven’t made or spent much money since.”

Thomas Barnes, a New Bedford raccoon hunter, illustrated a 1925 article explaining swamp Yankees.

The pushback he got from that column prompted him to write another. In it, he concluded, “I think I’m more confused than when I started.”

We understand.

“The outside world has never understood the Swamp Yankees,” wrote one denizen of Hope Valley, R.I., a hotbed of swamperdom. “We act dumb to keep our privacy.”

Swampers

In 1963, Ruth Schell wrote a scholarly essay on swamp Yankees. She concluded the typical swamper is “…a rural dweller—one of stubborn, old-fashioned, frugal, English-speaking Yankee stock, of good standing in the rural community, but usually possessing minimal formal education and little desire to augment it. “

A more disdainful definition comes from the urban dictionary. “Someone whose family has been in America for generations (several of which may actually reside together) but has never gotten off the ground, couch, or smack long enough to build a functional family or become a redeeming member of society.”

An even more scornful description came from the late Walter Stone, longtime Rhode Island state police chief who retired in 1990: “illiterate woodchopper.” (T-shirts were subsequently made with the slogan, “I’m an illitrit woodchoppah.”)

Otis Dyer wrote a book, Swamp Yankee, in which he explains where “woodchoppah” comes from.

Edward Buzzell, [swamp] Yankee dairy farmer from Slocum R.I.

Swamp Yankees were usually small dairy farmers who supplemented their income by spending their winters in the swamps, cutting firewood to sell in Providence and Pawtucket and saw-logs to local sawmills.

They also worked as fishermen and shop owners, wrote William Sisson in Soundings:

They were tough, smart, laconic fishermen, farmers and merchants who grew up in Rhode Island and Connecticut and could wrest a living from land, sea and small shops. Best as I can tell, they were an independent, hard-working lot who spoke what was on their minds and didn’t suffer fools.

Pete MacPhee, who designs rock ‘n roll posters, motorcycle ads and beer cans, calls himself Swamp Yankee. “A Swamp Yankee to me is a blue-collar guy who marches to the beat of his own drum,” he told The Newport Daily News. (MacPhee once handled the props for a heavy metal band called the Amish Alcoholics – “Spinal Tap but worse,” MacPhee said.)

Where the Swamp Yankee Dwells

Grayson Hugh, an R&B singer-songwriter, wrote a song called Swamp Yankee.

(I ain’t no punk (ain’t no punk)
just a little bit stanky (a little bit stanky)
I got the funk (I got the funk)
I’m a swamp yankee (swamp yankee))

Hugh describes himself as “from the western hills of Connecticut,” but he’s a first-generation American born in Hartford, so no, he ain’t no swamp Yankee.

In a 2003 article in New England Quarterly about President Calvin Coolidge, Kerry W. Buckley called Calvin Coolidge a swamp Yankee because he came from an old family “no longer prominent or monied.”

calvin-coolidge-farm

Calvin Coolidge Swamper wannabe?

Another former Massachusetts governor, William Weld, was also described in a newspaper as a swamp Yankee. Perhaps he earned the designation because he liked to brag about his $8 drugstore glasses. But Weld came from Long Island and Coolidge from Vermont, so no, they ain’t no swamp Yankees, either.

The real swamp Yankee comes from the watery lowlands of southeastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island or eastern Connecticut.

Some argue Massachusetts has only one swamp Yankee county: Bristol. Others make a case for southern Worcester County, too. As for Cape Cod: absolutely not.

Connecticut has four swamp Yankee counties: Middlesex, New London, Tolland and Windham. Four of Rhode Island’s five counties are swamper country: Bristol, Kent, Providence and Washington.

Proud swamper Barry Browning in 2000 argued swamp Yankeeland is smaller than that. According to him, swamp Yankees come from South County – which exists only in the minds of Rhode Islanders. It’s a mythical county along the southern coast of the state.

According to Browning, swampers come from rural parts of South County, such as Perryville, Hope Valley, Richmond, Hopkinton, Exeter, Alton, Woodville, “Tuckertown” and Matunuck. Driving south from Providence, swamp Yankee country it starts past the old Bostich-Textron Plant on Route 2 in East Greenwich.

How the Swamp Yankee Got Started

The origins of the term are also disputed. Some say the name started in Thompson, Conn., during the American Revolution. Townsfolk who feared a British attack hid overnight in the swamp.

According to others, swamp Yankee refers to the descendants of those who fought in the Great Swamp Fight during King Philip’s War. (Not really something to be proud of.)

Engraving depicting the colonial assault on the Narragansetts’ fort in the Great Swamp Massacre in December 1675

Still others say they arrived in the Great Puritan Migration, but usually as indentured servants or underpaid crew on the ships. Further, the story goes, the servants got paid at the end of their indenture with swampland.

To add to the confusion, the New York Times reported in 1935 that swampers were Yankees driven out of mill towns by immigrants ( “Out of the Whirlwind,” The New York Times, May 26, 1935 .)

Hunh?

Browning explained in 2006 why the Times might have gotten confused. “The ”great” cotton mill families of South County’s nineteenth century….are inextricably entwined with many old-line South County families who would now consider themselves “Swampers,” he wrote.

Back in the day, he wrote, one would have correctly described swampers as uneducated and poor. “However today I know several who would call themselves “Swampers” who have attended Brown, Wellesley Smith, and other Ivy League colleges,” he wrote. Others, he wrote, serve on bank boards and  own over 1,000 acres of land. The ownership and coveting of land is an inherited trait, he noted.

“Swampers” seem to take pride in accumulating ancestral objects, and they practice frugality. They paint the bathroom floor, though they can easily afford ceramic tile.

How To Spot a Swamp Yankee

One way to tell a swamp Yankee is to look in the yard. There’s a big woodpile and a clothesline in it because swampers heat their houses with woodstoves and dry their clothes in the fresh (often winter) air. You might spot an accumulation of shells, evidence of all the quahogs they’ve eaten. You might also spot an accumulation of old vehicles.

Montville, Conn., in New London County — swamper territory.

The house might be unpainted, but flowers will bloom in the yard. A swamp Yankee might also leave an old washing machine in the dooryard for decades, or recycle a bathtub in the pasture to water the cows. A swamp Yankee might still patch his roof with corrugated tin.

Swamp Yankees wouldn’t buy new clothes because that would be showy and embarrass the family. They drive old pickup trucks or perhaps a Buick Skylark with a rotting muffler.

Eating and Talking

You used to be able to find swamp Yankees at the Swamp Yankee Days festival in Ashaway, R.I. It featured a tractor parade, baked bean-eating competition, a Mr. and Mrs. Swamp Yankee contest and cow chip bingo. To play, you put some well-fed cows out on some grass and lay bets on who will produce a cow chip first.

The Country Store by Otto Land

Ashaway’s annual fest has ended, but you might find a swamp Yankee in an old country store telling lies to another swamp Yankee. Those are disappearing, too.

But if you do happen to find such an emporium, you’ll know if the patrons are swamp Yankees by the way they talk. There’s no “r” at the end of a syllable, and “i” is pronounced “oi.” They can also improvise with added syllables.

Catherine Presley , who grew up in Hope Valley, tried to explain it:

Theyugh in Hope Valley. Ole Ben James would saye to mah brother’s “Whaccha saye bouy!”

And

We wood goeh dowun to the main street theyugh, to the squayugh and get summuh that theyugh sodey wahtah.

Swampers eat as their ancestors did. Supper might consist of johnnycakes, cube steak and codfish cakes. Or fried eels, baked beans(home made) and johnnycakes. An upcountry swamp Yankee could dine off slab bacon, boiled potatoes and johnnycakes, while a coastal swamper might feast on smoked buckies (river herring), bluefish and johnnycakes.

So, whaccha saye to theyat?


Images: Mattity Swamp By Swampyank – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105080393. Edward Buzzell Delano, Jack, photographer. Mr. Edward Buzzell, Yankee dairy farmer of Slocum, Rhode Island. United States Rhode Island Washington County Slocum, 1940. Dec. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017793117/. Country Store: Lang, Otto, -1940, Artist. The Country Store. , ca. 1890. [Between and 1910] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2009616966/. Montville: Montville: Delano, Jack, photographer. Untitled photo, possibly related to: Houses and small farms in the Montville, Connecticut area. United States Connecticut Montville, 1940. [Nov] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2017748612/.

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Rebekah Harkness, the Scorned Socialite of Watch Hill, R.I.

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Rebekah Harkness spent much of the Standard Oil fortune she inherited on the ballet. Not just going to performances, but sponsoring entire ballet companies, buying up real estate for them and sending them on world tours.

rebekah-harkness

Rebekah Harkness

In 1962 she turned her Rhode Island estate, Holiday House, into a summer dance camp for the entire Joffrey Ballet company. She gave the dancers everything they needed and then some.

With her help, the Joffrey won international renown—something she wanted for herself. She danced, too, and composed music. But she annoyed the neighbors, alienated her children and provided a tempting target for critics. They called her ballets worthless, her music crap.

She thirsted for acclaim as a composer, a dancer and an arts patron, but her thirst for booze and pills undid her. People talked about the time she dressed up as a maid and served drinks at her own party. And about the times she cleaned her pool with Dom Perignon, dyed the neighbor’s cat green and filled her fish tank with scotch.

taylor Swift

Taylor Swift in 2019

Fast forward 60 years, and another thin, rich, beautiful white woman bought Holiday House. And then in 2020, the house’s owner, Taylor Swift, wrote a song about Rebekah Harkness, called The Last Great American Dynasty. The music video featured the beach and the waves from the house, just as Rebekah Harkness would have seen it.

Rebekah Harkness

“She had a marvelous time ruining everything,” Swift crooned. Maybe. According to her biographer, Craig Unger, Rebekah Harkness led a life “littered with high Gothic tragedy.” She was a poor little rich girl, and by the end of her life, she wasn’t that rich.

She was born April 17, 1915 to a wealthy St. Louis stockbroker Allen Tarwater West and his trophy wife Rebekah. West co-founded G.H. Walker & Co. with George Herbert Walker, grandfather and great-grandfather of the Bush presidents.

Her parents did care that she looked good, according to Unger. When they criticized her for getting pudgy, she took up skating and dance, practicing with a fierce discipline.

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Watch Hill Harbor

The family spent summers at Watch Hill, then an old money, old Hollywood enclave overlooking Block Island Sound. Clark Gable, Douglas Fairbanks and Andrew Mellon owned homes there.

Her parents packed Rebekah off to finishing school. She and her friends called themselves the Bitch Pack and disrupted debutante parties. They performed a strip tease at a social event and put mineral oil into the punch bowl at a coming-out party.

Franklin Pierce Descendant In-Law?

In 1939 she married Dickson Pierce because, she said, she didn’t have anything better to do. They had a son, Allen, and a daughter, Terry. Pierce claimed to be a descendant of President Franklin Pierce, though that would have been quite a feat. Franklin Pierce’s three children died before reaching adulthood.

Franklin Pierce

Franklin Pierce

The couple divorced in 1946. Then in 1947, she married Standard Oil heir William Hale Harkness, who brought her into the serious money class. The Harkness family had a reputation for its philanthropy. It donated Harkness Tower at Yale, Harkness Commons at Harvard and Harkness Pavilion at New York Hospital.

harkness-tower

Harkness Tower at Yale University.

It was the second marriage for both of them. He had a daughter and a granddaughter who became the actress Elizabeth Montgomery.

Rebekah and Bill Harkness had one daughter, Edith. It was the only successful marriage of her four, but it only lasted seven years. In 1957, Harkness keeled over at Holiday House while sitting for a sculpture Rebekah was working on, dead from a heart attack.

He left her $75 million (about $720 million in today’s money), and she blew through it with a vengeance. She spent a small fortune buying her way into the dance world, surrounding herself with dancers, musicians and choreographers. At the same time, she studied music composition and dance.

Rebekah also loaded up on art and real estate. She bought a mansion in Palisades, N.Y., a Manhattan penthouse and getaways in Nassau and Gstaad. She also expanded Holiday House to include eight kitchens, 42 rooms and 21 baths. Nine servants and three cooks kept the place running.

“This arrangement effectively kept her from having to see her three children on anything like a regular basis,” the New York Times commented.

Holiday House

While Bill Harkness was alive, he and Rebekah threw raucous parties every weekend. She once dressed as a waitress at one of them so she could eavesdrop on the guests. But the loud parties caused problems with the neighbors. So did the ballet dancers practicing on her lawn. When she erected a giant blue geodesic dome on her lawn, they sued her for zoning violations.  She retaliated by dying a neighbor’s cat green.

The parties continued when she brought the entire Joffrey to Watch Hill in 1962 and 1963. Then a little-known ballet company, they spent the summers practicing and experimenting with new ideas.  She gave them weekends off and charge accounts to the shops in town. She once served them a cake with $10 bills baked into it. If a dancer needed dental work or a nose job, she paid for it. And when she discovered one of her Joffrey dancers didn’t own a suit, she sent all the Joffrey men to Saks and all the women to Bergdorf’s for formalwear.

She also bought them an old firehouse in Westerly to practice in, calling it the Harkness Center for the Arts.

joffrey

Rebekah Harkness’ patronage allowed the Joffrey to perform in Iran.

Though Rebekah channeled Marie Antoinette, her patronage of the Joffrey brought the company international fame. She also helped discover and train many acclaimed dancers, regardless of their race, background or body shape.

The Joffrey dancers who spent the summer at Holiday House loved it. “We were in heaven,” said Danish ballerina Lone Isaksen.

Her children, not so much. They complained she cared more about the dancers than she cared about them.

Price to Pay

The Joffrey had a price to pay for Rebekah Harkness’s support. She insisted that it perform ballets to scores she had written. One work, Dreams of Glory, had an insipid story about a little boy who dreams of becoming John F. Kennedy. Dancer Lawrence Rhodes said it was one of the few times he was embarrassed to be in a ballet.

Others—Jerome Robbins and George Balanchine — flatly refused to choreograph her musical compositions. The same fate befell the popular tunes she composed.

When Harkness offered to pay Ella Fitzgerald to sing some of her pop songs, Fitzgerald wouldn’t do it.

Rebekah Harkness’ Ballet

After two years, Rebekah Harkness suddenly cut her ties to the Joffrey when Robert Joffrey, its founder and choreographer, wouldn’t rename his company for her. Then she stole most of the Joffrey dancers for her own ballet company – the Harkness.

She started by bringing the company to Watch Hill (despite the neighbors) in the summer for instruction, practice and choreography. The Harkness Ballet would eventually have two touring companies, a youth ballet (which taught Patrick Swayze) and its own theater. In its day, the Harkness would train more professional dancers than any other company.

harkness

Press photo of Rebekah Harkness in 1966 with two o her Harkness dancers.

Rebekah bought a mansion on New York’s Upper East Side and turned it into a posh training center for dancers called Harkness House. She brought in top choreographers, Jerome Robbins and Brian Macdonald — to teach 16 and 17 year olds. She hired Salvador Dali to design sets. And she gave Alvin Ailey his first commission. (You can see a video clip of Salvador Dali and Rebekah Harkness here.)

In 1972, she bought an old theater near Lincoln Center and refurbished it on a grand scale as the first theater devoted exclusively to ballet. It had hand-carved Louis XIV chairs and a huge mural that featured the company’s dancers – as well as Rebekah Harkness – in the nude. One critic denounced it as the worst mural ever made.

Critics

The critics, especially the New York Times’ Clive Barnes, savaged Rebekah. The rich socialite whose judgment sometimes lapsed was just too good a target. She didn’t help herself with her capriciousness. She got thrown off a cruise for swimming nude in the pool and swearing at the crew. Once she pretended to be a cleaning woman and approached the reclusive J.D. Salinger, hoping to convince him his stories should be set to her music.

 

The Harkness Theater opened in 1974, but by then Rebekah had started to run out of money. She began to cut back and look for public funding. She ended up selling the theater at a huge loss, and the Harkness Ballet company folded in 1975. Today it’s pretty much forgotten, despite the tens of millions of dollars she spent on it.

But according to An American Ballet Story,

The dancers, choreographers, composers and designers were pioneers and experimenters.  Themes of sexual repression, homoerotic love, tribalism and even the aftermath of rape were explored by some of the most famous choreographers of the time.  All of the work and much of the music was original.

The Sad End

Rebekah struggled with drugs and alcohol. She developed an addiction to injections of B-vitamins, painkillers and testosterone. Guests would find needles in her bathrooms, their walls spattered with blood. Her voice grew husky and her muscles calcified.

She’d had a brief, unhappy marriage to a doctor in the early 1960s. In 1971, she married a fourth time, to another doctor, but one 20 years her junior. That marriage lasted three years.

Meanwhile, the booze and the pills caught up with her. So in 1977 she checked into Silver Hill, a rehab clinic in New Canaan, Conn. When she got out, she sold her Palisades mansion to the Isley Brothers.

In November of 1977, her son Allen shot a man during a brawl in Miami. He received a prison sentence of 15 years, but didn’t bother to get in touch with his mother. He later said his time in prison was the happiest of his life.

Her youngest daughter, Edith, had tried to commit suicide at the age of 15 by flinging herself out of a high rise in front of her. An awning saved her life. Edith spent her life in and out of mental institutions, finally committing suicide in 1982. Rebekah died that same year after a long bout with cancer. She died June 17, 1982.

Holiday House, Redux

The Holiday House property was divided into three lots, according to Watch Hill Through Time. The gargantuan house itself was partially demolished, then sold to a family that remodeled it and renamed it High Watch.

holiday-interest

Aerial view the former Holiday House. Image courtesy Holiday House, Courtesy Google, Maxar Technologies.

Taylor Swift bought the former Holiday House in 2013 for a reported $17.75 million in cash. She brought her ‘Squad – musician, actor and model friends – to the mansion for Fourth of July ‘Taymerica’ parties. They featured fireworks, boat rides and a giant inflatable water slide. Swift gave all her friends matching red-white-and-blue onesies.

The celebrities brought paparazzi and, echoes of the Rebekah Harkness era, complaints from the neighbors. Swift put up “No Trespassing” signs that they didn’t like either. Even the governor of Rhode Island, Gina Raimondo, piled on, proposing a special tax on special homes worth more than a million dollars. People called it the “Taylor Swift Tax,” though it never became law.

When Swift bought the house, a local writer for The Day reminded her of the time a body washed up on the beach under her Watch Hill mansion.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Swift wrote and recorded a new album called Folklore. One song, The Last Great American Dynasty, is about Rebekah Harkness. Swift Identifies with Harkness in her last line, “There goes the loudest woman this town has ever seen/I had a marvelous time ruining everything.”

The music video that accompanies the song features the beach below Holiday House as Rebekah Harkness would have seen it. (Watch it here.)

Images: Harkness Tower Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1653891. Taylor Swift By Cosmopolitan UK, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=90905376. Watch Hill Harbor By Stephg82988 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23370833.

With thanks to Blue Blood by Craig Unger and The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company by Sasha Anawalt. This story was updated in 2022.

 

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statue

Rhode Island’s Plymouth Rock—Well, Almost

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Rhode Island’s Plymouth Rock never quite achieved the fame of its counterpart in Massachusetts. But it wasn’t for want of trying.

According to legend, the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock in 1620. Then in the 19th century, it was encased in an elaborate Victorian canopy. Tourists flocked to it. By 1920, canopy fashion had changed and a simple neoclassical canopy replaced the original one.

thomas-faunce-plymouth-panorama

Plymouth Rock

Rhode Island’s Plymouth Rock

In 1636, Roger Williams and his party fleeing the Puritan fathers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony had settled in Rumford, now part of East Providence along the Seekonk River. Soon thereafter, a friend in the Plymouth Colony warned Williams that he still hadn’t left Massachusetts Bay territory–and they wanted to arrest him.

Williams and his followers paddled a canoe to the western side of the river and set foot upon Slate Rock—Rhode Island’s Plymouth Rock. There, according to another legend, Narragansett Indians greeted him with, ”What Cheer, Netop?”

The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636 by Alonzo Chappel, courtesy RISD Museum

From that Slate Rock landing Williams went on to found Providence and the Colony of Rhode Island.

Then in the 19th century, someone came up with the idea of enshrining Slate Rock and developing if as a tourist attraction for Providence. Having gained the support of the town fathers, in 1877 work began in clearing on and about Slate Rock. By that time, it had become overgrown and covered with sediment that washed down on it.

Someone suggested they just dislodge the rock and move the whole thing. In their infinite wisdom, they decided to use some dynamite to effect the move. Alas, they used too much dynamite and blew Roger William’s Slate Rock to smithereens.

All Not Lost

But all of those pieces were not completely lost. Enterprising merchants sold chunks of Rhode Island’s Plymouth Rock in stores. You can see some pieces in the floor of the vestibule of the Central Baptist Church on Wayland Avenue in Providence. You can see another chunk embedded in Brown University’s Waterman Avenue gates and one in the pedestal of the Brown University Bear on campus.

Eventually, a monument to Williams and his landing finally went up in a little park on Gano Street. The monument, built in 1906, still stands today.

A Roger Williams Flashing Light?

There’s more to the story. Plans to build a much more appropriate monument began in 1850. The park for it was then developed in 1867, but not until 1934 did the effort gain steam in preparation for the 300th anniversary of the colony’s founding. The park evolved into Prospect Terrace.

National Park Service Ranger John McNiff puts on Roger Williams impersonations in Rhode Island. He also works at Roger Williams Memorial Park in Providence.

His research indicates the original concept called for a 200-foot-high  obelisk topped with a flashing light. Now bear in mind, Prospect Terrace is already 200 feet high. The  Roger Williams flashing light would reach 400 feet. People in Boston could have seen it, as well as the ghosts of the Puritans who plagued his life so much.

Roger Williams’ final resting place.

However, that concept never saw the light of day. A Westerly granite statue of Roger Williams and the rest of the monument finally rose 14 feet high. At the base of the statue, the remains of Roger Williams were laid.

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

Leo Caisse, the author of this story, passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II  Magazine, October 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I. This story was updated in 2023.

Image: Roger Williams Monument By I, Infrogmation, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2292319. Roger Williams statue By Rhododendrites – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65213559. Brown Bear By Ad Meskens – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21442592.

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The Greatest New England High School Football Rivalries

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New England high school football rivalries go back to the days when teams traveled by stagecoach to visit their opponents. When there were no field goals or forward passes and when no one was really all that sure about the rules. When schools held fundraisers to buy the ball – which, by the way, was round.

Many people associate high school football rivalries with the South. And yet New England, with 4.5 percent of the U.S. population, has about a third of the centuries-old high school football rivalries in the country. But considering that players originally called football ‘the Boston Game,’ perhaps it’s not all that surprising.

Beginning in 1875, New England high schools have celebrated their football rivalries with bonfires, pep rallies, parades, snake dances, community dinners, alumni reunions … and fights, riots, bomb threats and eggings.

In no other region do so many high school football teams play on Thanksgiving Day every year. Many, but not all, of the Thanksgiving Day games involve ancient rivalries. Massachusetts has about 50 of them, Connecticut 15 and Rhode Island about 20.

football-thanksgiving-postcard

Northern New England has only two Thanksgiving games, probably due to the weather. Manchester, N.H., holds a Turkey Bowl to determine the league champions, and Portland, Maine, features a crosstown rivalry between the Deering High School Rams and Portland High School Bulldogs.

In 2020,the COVID-19 pandemic put all those rivalries on hold, as state and school officials canceled entire football seasons.

Boston Latin-Boston English. Classic.

Before the Civil War, football was more of an excuse for a brawl than an actual game. But then a more organized version evolved. Boys from East Coast prep schools began to play what they called the Boston Game, something of a cross between rugby and soccer.

Then a group of students from Boston schools, including Boston Latin and English High, formed the Oneida Football Club. They played pickup teams starting in 1862 on Boston Common. In 1925, surviving members dedicated a small monument on their old playing field. They bragged they’d not only never been beaten, they’d never allowed an opponent to score.

oneida-club

Artists’ rendering of an Oneida Club game on Boston Common.

The Oneida Club disbanded after a few years. Then in 1887, Boston Latin played English High on Thanksgiving at Harvard Stadium. They did it again for 130 consecutive football games. It’s the oldest continuous Thanksgiving high school rivalry in the country.

Latin tends to beat English (they’re 80-38-13), and in 2011 the Wolfpack gave the Bulldogs a 50-0 drubbing. With Latin ahead 44-0, Latin let a woman player onto the field, senior Kathy Le. The crowd cheered.

Massachusetts has 11 other high school football rivalries that go back more than a hundred years.

Some Thanksgiving games between rivals attract thousands of fans, like the 100th annual Salem-Beverly contest in 1998. The game drew 11,000, a bigger crowd than struggling Major League Baseball teams can sometimes lure to their ballfields.

beverly football

Beverly’s first team

Needham-Wellesley

Five years before Latin and English went after each other on the gridiron, Needham and Wellesley high school athletes played their first game. The rivalry started when West Needham and East Needham split up in 1881 amidst a bitter controversy. They took their high schools with them, so West Needham became Wellesley.

On Thanksgiving Day in 1882, they started the oldest public high school football rivalry in New England.

As the two teams lined up on the crooked midfield line, the Wellesley captain realized he only had nine players. So he sent his brother into the stands to find two more.

The rivalry intensified over the next few years, and by the end of the century both teams used ringers – including ‘out-of-town professionals.’ Then in 1901, the schools limited ringers to town residents, which made for lousy football but good boxing. Several fistfights livened up the game, which featured frequent fumbles and ended in a 0-0 tie. Andrew Wyeth’s uncle managed the first all-boys’ team in 1906.

The Needham-Wellesley Thanksgiving rivalry had to take a break for the world wars because so many players enlisted. Officials also cancelled the games from 1950-52 because rioting broke out.

As recently as 1991, the game was called because of a bomb threat on the field. It turned out to be a prank by some Needham High School kids.

Fitchburg-Leominster

In 1898, the eighth Fitchburg and Leominster game went to a 0-0 score until the last two minutes. Then Fitchburg scored on a punt return — with the help of the hometown crowd, which kept any tacklers away from the ball carrier. The referee ruled the game a scoreless tie.

The next day the Fitchburg Sentinel had the audacity to report a win with the headline, “Fitchburg Wins 5-0.” The score stayed in the record books that way until 2010, when a Leominster Sentinel and Enterprise reporter insisted on changing it to 0-0. At the end of 2019, the Leominster Blue Devils have played the Fitchburg Raiders on Thanksgiving 104 times. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the cancellation of the match-up in 2020.

Norwich Free Academy vs. New London

Six years after the first ever collegiate football game, two Connecticut high schools started the longest high school football rivalry in history: Norwich Free Academy and New London High School. Ulysses S. Grant was president.

It started on May 12, 1875, and it hasn’t been continuous. But it has been fierce, with faculty sometimes playing as ringers. One year a Norwich-favoring referee let the clock wind down a little too slowly, time enough to let his Wildcats score the winning goal.

In 1898, the Wildcats were playing the Whalers in New London when a sudden snow squall enveloped the playing field. An NFA punter kicked the ball in the air, and it disappeared. The game ended since the teams had no more balls.

Another game ended early four years later, when Norwich Free Academy scored 130 points on New London in the first half. The game was called.

norwich-free-football

The Norwich Free Academy football team, 1898.

In NH, It Starts in Little League

On New Hampshire’s Seacoast, boys start hearing about the epic rivalry between Dover High and Rochester’s Spaulding High when they’re in Little League.  In 2011, 30,000 fans watched the teams compete in a playoff match.

One long-tenured Rochester coach brought such intensity to the game that the Dover players believed he spied on their practices from the nearby woods. And whenever a small plane flew overhead, they’d stop their drills and mill around the field because they thought Spaulding wanted aerial photos of their practices.

In 1969, the Spaulding Red Raiders and the Dover Green Wave played their 63rd game to a 0-0 tie. A rainstorm reduced the field to a quagmire, the players so covered with mud it was hard to tell the teams apart. A Red Raider claimed he scored a last-second touchdown, but no one could tell for sure.

Weather conditions probably explain why the three Northern New England states have only two Thanksgiving Day games — the Manchester, N.H., Turkey Bowl and the game between Crosstown rivals Portland Bulldogs vs. Deering Rams at Fitzpatrick Stadium in Maine.

Cony, Gardiner and … Chizzle Wizzle?

“Chizzle Wizzle, Chizzle Wizzle, sis boom bah! Cony High, Cony High, rah, rah, rah!”

That cheer for Augusta’s Cony High School Rams inspired students in 1892 to form the “Chizzle Wizzle Association” to raise money for the team. The Rams faced the Gardiner Tigers that year in their first of many games.

Miss Aldine Holmes kicked off the first Chizzle Wizzle in 1893 with a piano solo and Miss Cusick and Mr. Studley ended it with a duet. Ice cream and cake were served during intermission.

If that sounds decorous, the games were anything but. Ten years after the first game, the Gardiner Journal called the schools ‘old time rivals’ and complained of rowdyism.

Gardiner won by 2-0 in the 1910 game that involved quarreling and ‘the mixing up of the crowd and the players after nearly every play.’

After losing the 1926 game, Cony students threw rotten eggs at the Gardiner fans. ‘One girl’s hat, stockings and coat were ruined,’ reported the Gardiner Journal, which also noted Gardiner fans ‘went home quietly with sad faces,’ when they lost. Augusta, on the other hand, didn’t feel the need to be ‘sportingly generous.’

Augusta’s Chizzle Wizzle now lasts four days and ends with a ball, not a brawl. Cony students claim it’s the longest running high school variety show in the country. In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic drove the variety show online.

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A Marine recruiter talks to Cony players after they beat Gardiner in 2016. Photo courtesy U.S. Marine Corps.

Vermont’s ‘The Game’

In Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom they just call it ‘The Game’ – the St. Johnsbury Academy Hilltoppers vs. the Lyndon Institute Vikings. In 2013, a USA Today survey of the country’s greatest high school football rivalries. ‘The Game’ won the Vermont, New England and Eastern regions and finished fourth in the United States.

Sometimes thousands of fans attend the game between two towns that don’t have 15,000 residents between them. Excitement mounts in the week before the contest, with bonfires, a parade, class floats, a pep chapel, an alumni dinner and, as the Caledonian Record put it, ‘screaming teens.’

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These Vikings really wanted to win.

The rivalry dates to a game played on Oct. 27, 1894. Lyndon had never played an opponent before and lost 28-0. To commemorate the 100th anniversary of The Game, a state lawmaker (clearly a St. Johnsbury fan) sponsored a resolution that gloated over that first victory. Even though anyone who could even remember the game was probably long dead.

But on that ‘auspicious and historic’ fall day, the resolution went, the two teams ‘met on the gridiron’ to play the ‘new and intriguing sport’ evolving into one of Vermont’s ‘favorite autumnal activities.’

In that game, the two squads of ‘interscholastic athletic pioneers’ played a game in which St. Johnsbury ‘demonstrated their strategic mastery’ and ‘handily defeated’ Lyndon.

Three Miles Apart

No two high school football teams have played as many games against each other as Westerly High in Rhode Island and Stonington High in Connecticut. Though in different states, the schools are only about three miles apart. They’ve played against each other since 1911, and in 1913 they started playing on Thanksgiving as well as during the regular season.

The town Rotary Clubs take turns holding a dinner for both teams the night before the Thanksgiving game. The schools hold pep rallies in their auditoriums and the townspeople go to nighttime rallies on the commons.

By 2018, the Westerly Bulldogs and the Stonington Bears had played 98 games on Thanksgiving Day, with pretty even won-loss records. The 2018 game was a mismatch, though, with Westerly beating Stonington by 61-0. That, however, was only half as bad as the 1917 game, when Westerly beat Stonington by 122-0. In fairness, most of Stonington’s first-string players had enlisted and left to fight World War I.

There’s a terrific mural commemorating the rivalry behind C.C. O’Brien’s Irish Sports Bar and Café at 8 Mechanic Street in Pawcatuck.

Andover vs. Exeter

Two of the greatest ever football coaches played in one of the greatest ever high school football rivalries.

Amos Alonzo Stagg suited up for Phillips Exeter’s Big Red nearly a hundred years before Bill Belichick played center for Phillips Andover’s Big Blue.

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An Andover-Exeter game. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones collection.

Stagg probably had to take a stagecoach for away games. Belichick was there in 1971 when some Andover students got caught trying to spray paint Exeter’s field blue.

The oldest private high school football rivalry began on Nov. 2, 1878 when both schools had existed for about a century.

Stagg, a poor Irish student, attended Exeter with the intention of going to Yale as a divinity student. But as a standout athlete he felt sports calling to him, and he ended up playing key roles in the development of intercollegiate football and basketball.

Belichick, the son of an assistant coach at Annapolis, went to Andover as a postgraduate to improve his chances at college. He played center in a game against Exeter that left the team undefeated. Buzz Bissinger, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for Friday Night Lights, reported on the game for the Phillipian. They won 34-8.  Belichick, 37 years later, gave his daughter Amanda a felt pennant with the score of that game on it when she entered Andover.

He later said he learned about the science of football at Andover, and that he owed the school a lot. Patriots’ fans should be forever grateful.

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Bill Belichick at Andover with his friend Ernie Jones.

Massachusetts High School Football Rivalries

Phillips Andover Academy and Phillips Exeter Academy (New Hampshire) since 1878.
Wellesley High School and Needham High School since 1882.
Milton Academy and Noble and Greenough School (Dedham) since 1886.
Boston English High School and Boston Latin High School since 1887.
Malden High School and Medford High School since 1889.
Winchester High School and Woburn Memorial High School since 1891.
Beverly High School and Salem High School since 1891.
Newburyport High School and Amesbury High School since 1891.
B.M.C. Durfee High School (Fall River) and New Bedford High School since 1893.
Athol High School and Ralph C. Mahar Regional High School (Orange) since 1894.
Leominster High School and Fitchburg High School since 1894.
Newton North High School and Brookline High School since 1894.
Barnstable High School and Falmouth High School since 1895.
Reading Memorial High School and Stoneham High School since 1899.
Marlborough High School and Hudson High School since 1900.
Melrose High School and Wakefield High School since 1901.
Whitman-Hanson Regional High School and Abington High School since 1910.

Connecticut High School Football Rivalries

Norwich Free Academy and New London High School since 1875.
Ansonia High School and Naugatuck High School, since 1895.
Shelton High School and Derby High School since 1904.
Stonington High School and Westerly (Rhode Island) High School since 1911.

Maine High School Football Rivalries

Cony High School (Augusta) and Gardiner High School since 1892.
Thornton Academy (Saco) and Biddeford High School since 1893.
Hebron Academy and Kents Hill School since 1894.
Lewiston High School and Edward Little High School since 1897.
Portland High School and Deering High School (Portland) since 1911.

New Hampshire High School Football Rivalries

Phillips Exeter Academy and Phillips Andover Academy since 1878.
Spaulding High School (Rochester) and Dover High School since 1906.

Rhode Island High School Football Rivalry

Westerly High School and Stonington (Connecticut) High School since 1911.

Vermont High School Football Rivalry

St. Johnsbury Academy and Lyndon Institute since 1894.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the list of oldest high school football rivalries. This story was updated in 2022.

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Four Days in May: The 1942 Rhode Island Forest Fires

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On May 1, 1942, fire leveled more than 300 acres in the Limerock section of Lincoln, R.I. The source of ignition was at first thought to be ashes from a wood chopper’s pipe. The fire – the first of the 1942 Rhode Island forest fires — destroyed a cord of wood, damaged a garage and threatened three homes.

On the same day, 250 acres burned in Johnston on the Rohrig Estate. It took 60 firefighters to save a Scout camp and a farm from the blaze.

Again on the same day, firefighters fought a 350-acre forest fire at White Rock just northwest of Westerly. Only a wind change saved a number of houses in the fire’s path, something State Fire Service workers and 80 men from three towns couldn’t accomplish.

Manpower was scarce, as the United States had entered World War II six months earlier, and tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders joined the war effort. But the fires would only get worse over the next few days – and suspicions would grow about the source of the 1942 Rhode Island forest fires.

Westerly Fire Chief Columbus Pasetti believed arson started the fires. But 15 wildfires would burn all over Rhode Island over the first four days in May. The cause might have been even worse than arson.

Fire Bug

As soon as firefighters smothered the Westerly blaze, they got called to a four-acre fire at the Cook Farm. But the State Fire Service men had already broken off to extinguish a fire in Coventry.

The Coventry fire took two days to put out and spread into West Greenwich, where it mushroomed into a 40-square-mile inferno. By then it consumed a dozen homes and leveled camps and barns.

Rhode Island officials were convinced they had a fire bug on their hands.

1942 Rhode Island Fires

On May 2 alone, fires broke out in the western Rhode Island towns of West Greenwich, Scituate and Coventry. In the eastern part of the state, a fire started in Newport among fallen timber from the 1938 hurricane around Tonomy Hill.

Officials said the fires, the biggest in Rhode Island memory, had been set deliberately.

A call for help went out. Soldiers from Fort Devens and sailors from Quonset Point joined the crusade to extinguish the fires. All available apparatus in the area responded, as well as equipment from as far away as Warren and Bristol.

A thousand people fought the Rhode Island fires by then, but still they couldn’t extinguish them.

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Army and Navy officials said they dispatched more men to help. Governor J. Howard McGrath issued a public appeal for another thousand men.

All workers from the Works Progress Administration and the state Department of Public Works were dispatched to the scene. Volunteers poured into the area, but were only allowed to fight the fire if they had some equipment.  Some volunteers went in with as little as a shovel or a burlap bag. The situation was growing desperate.

Warwick announced a special police motorcycle patrol to protect their woodlands.

All told, 3,000 volunteers and firefighters fought the Rhode Island fires.

Louttit School

At least 75 volunteers and firefighters received injuries in the fire. They were treated at a makeshift hospital at the Louttit School in West Greenwich (now the town’s public library). The school also served as a headquarters for the whole firefighting operation.

The Providence Police radio patrol set up two heavy-duty transmitters at the Louttit School, communicating via six portable sets.

The U.S. Army set up a mobile field kitchen to feed the hungry men. Emergency canteen units from the Red Cross and Civil Defense Women’s Ambulance and Transportation Corps also arrived at the scene.

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The Louttit School, now the West Greenwich Library

Martial Law

It’s still May 2, and Governor McGrath declares martial law in Coventry, West Greenwich, Scituate and in parts of three other towns. Blue-uniformed state guardsmen along with 200 soldiers with loaded rifles now patrolled the roads of those towns.

Suddenly 20 of those state guardsmen found themselves trapped by flames as the fire surrounded them. They managed to escape.

Another guardsman, while going to his backpack tank, got disoriented and had to run for his life as the flames leaped ahead of him among the tree tops. He finally found refuge in a swamp.

Damage

Another story unfolded when a grandmother, a mother and three children ran for their lives as the fire raged around them. They found salvation in a nearby brook. As the fire passed over them, they made their way through the smoldering forest to a highway where a motorist picked them up and brought them to safety.

They had watched as their home, their barn and their garage burned to the ground. Their dogs and all their livestock perished, except for one pig.

Among the buildings destroyed in the Rhode Island fires was a storage facility with 250,000 board feet of lumber owned by the federal government.  Firefighters barely saved another building with 1.25 million board feet of federal lumber in it.

Coincidence? It was widely believed, according to the New York Times, that it might be sabotage. No one, however, made the official charge.

Enemy Action?

Author Ian Fleming wrote once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

Governor McGrath said he saw Army aerial photos that showed the fires starting up in widely separated areas. The conditions at the time were not conducive to flying sparks igniting fires in those far-apart places.

James R. Simmons with the Federal Fire Service strongly hinted that the Rhode Island fires were suspicious. Of the 15 fires that erupted almost simultaneously, many started near federal lumber storage areas – the location of which was confidential.

rhode-island-fires-mcgrath

Gov. James Howard McGrath

May 3

On May 3, yet more Rhode Island fires broke out, four to be exact: two in Assonet, one in Somerset and one in Tiverton. One hundred men took three hours to check the Tiverton blaze by a backfire.

Fire also raged in the Moosup Valley section of Foster along the Connecticut border. Rhode Island and Connecticut fire forces struggled to halt the progress of that conflagration.

At 9 p.m. that night, Governor McGrath announced that all of the fire seemed to be under control. Mopping-up operations would continue into the next day to make sure the fires were out. By the end of May 3, the last 1,500 firefighters straggled home as the nightmare seemed to be at an end.

A Wider View

What caused the Rhode Island fires? We have seen experienced professionals speculate that arson or maybe sabotage started them. Remember, Governor McGrath saw Army aerial photos showing many fires starting at the same time.

Was there a precedent for this? Here’s a bigger view.

On April 20, 1942, Forest Ranger J.B. Fortin reported 20 fires starting almost simultaneously on Sunburst Mountain in Brevard, N.C. They developed into huge forest fires.

Fortin, a veteran ranger, had never seen anything like it. On his first radio call, he said it had to be saboteurs. The outbreak of fires in Brevard went on for a week.

Then later that month 168 fires broke out in New Jersey — coincidentally near an Army base. Those fires grew so tremendously that a call went out for shock troops of citizens to help extinguish them along with 2,500 soldiers. The fires eventually consumed 5000 acres, according to the New York Times.

William Breuer in his book The Air Raid Warden Was a Spy, entitled one chapter The Eastern Seaboard Set Ablaze. The FBI was going to investigate all of these fires, but never revealed what they found.

So were all of these fires sabotage?

Maybe.

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

1942 was a bad year for fires. The Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston killed 660 people that year. Read more about them here and here.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Green Book Guides African-Americans to Safety in New England (and Elsewhere)

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African-Americans driving through New England from the 1930s to the 1960s carried the Green Book to guide them to friendly hotels, restaurants and service stations.

It was a time when they might find themselves in sundown towns, which banned minorities from within municipal limits after dark. The practice wasn’t limited to the Jim Crow South — it happened in New England, too.

green book imageJames Loewen, a historian who researches sundown towns, found evidence of a sign in Connecticut that said, “Whites Only Within City Limits After Dark.”

Always alert to potential embarrassment or danger, African-Americans carried blankets, packed lunch and even toted cans of gasoline when they took to the road.

And they carried the Green Book.

The Green Book

Victor H. Green was an African-American letter carrier in New York City. Among his deliveries were Jewish guides that told Jewish readers what restaurants and hotels didn’t admit them. He asked his colleagues in the postal service to help him by asking around on their routes about good places to stay. He then published the first Green Book in 1936, focusing on metropolitan New York City.

The 10-page book, which sold for 25 cents, included listings for restaurants, service stations, hotels, tourist homes, taverns, liquor stores, beauty parlors, nightclubs, drugstores and tailors.

It included a quotation from Mark Twain on its cover:

Travel is fatal to prejudice.

Expansion

green book The_Negro_Motorist_Green_BookThe Green Book expanded over the years to include every U.S. state. It also included advertisements for lodgings, for Ford automobiles and for service stations. During World War II, Victor Green suspended publication, but by 1949 it ran to more than 80 pages.

Esso (now ExxonMobil) promoted the Green Book  because of the work of James ‘Billboard’ Jackson, the company’s first black marketing specialist. Esso sponsored the guide, telling its black customers it allowed them to ‘go further with less anxiety.’ African-American drivers could buy the Green Book and get maps at Esso stations. Shell, on the other hand, had a reputation for turning away black customers.

Green’s timing was good. African-Americans were buying cars as soon as they could afford them to avoid the indignities of traveling on trains or buses.  The interstate highway system was still in the future, so motorists had to drive through unfamiliar towns where they might not be welcome.

Journalist George Schuyler, a Rhode Island native, explained in 1930,

 …all Negroes who can do so purchase an automobile as soon as possible in order to be free of discomfort, discrimination, segregation and insult.

Obsolescence

Green looked forward to the day people wouldn’t need the Green Book. In the 1949 edition he wrote,

There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.

The year the Civil Rights Act passed, 1964, was the Green Book’s last. By then Civil Rights activists demanded equal access and discouraged voluntary segregation.

Jim Crow Bible

Charlie's Sandwich Shoppe

Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe

During the Jim Crow era, the Green Book was the Bible of black travel. Today it is a guide to a past that hasn’t completely vanished.

In the 1949 Green Book, for example, listings for the African-American neighborhood in Boston’s South End include eight hotels and guest houses, nine restaurants, a couple of barbers, the Savoy Nightclub (where Malcolm X once shined shoes) and a half-dozen tailors.

Charlie’s, one of the restaurants listed on Columbus Avenue, was where Sammy Davis. Jr., used to tap dance for change as a young boy. Charlie’s, now known as Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe, closed in 2014 but reopened under new ownership.

As New Haven revives the jazz that once made it a mecca for musicians, the 1949 Green Book limns the Dixwell neighborhood where Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday performed. There was the Phillis Wheatley Hotel, the Dr. M.F. Allen tourist home, the Belmont Restaurant, the Elks Nightclub and Lillian’s Paradise.

The Monterey Café, where owner Rufus Greenlee danced with Josephine Baker, lasted long enough to foster New Haven’s Hip Hop scene in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.

Providence

Most of the accommodations listed in the Green Book in New England were small hotels and tourist homes owned by African Americans. In cities, they were usually found in marginal or minority neighborhoods.

One notable exception was the Providence Biltmore, an elegant 19-story hotel in the middle of downtown. It was built in 1922 after the Providence Chamber of Commerce campaigned for a signature hotel where people could gather for important civic and cultural events.

The hotel had an open occupancy policy, accepting both black and white guests. But it took a step further by actually paying for a listing in the Green Book. Beginning in 1941, it simply reads, “Biltmore” under the heading “Providence.”

The Providence Biltmore closed in 1975, but reopened four years later after renovation and a landmark designation. It changed hands, underwent another renovation, changed hands again, and was renamed Graduate Providence.

Oak Bluffs

Oak Bluffs

Oak Bluffs

Today, the Town of Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard is a resort community visited by such prominent African-Americans as Spike Lee, Charlayne Hunter-Gault and Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. In 1956, it provided even more of a reprieve for upper-middle-class African-Americans like Martin Luther King, Jr., who wrote speeches on the porch of an Oak Bluffs cottage. 

In 1948, Dorothy West wrote a novel about the town’s social life,  The Living Is Easy. That year the Green Book listed eight places where cottages could be rented in Oak Bluffs.  (You can watch an online documentary about Oak Bluffs for free here.)

The Shearer Cottage on Martha’s Vineyard catered to black vacationers starting in 1912. Charles and Henrietta Shearer built their wooden tourist home in the Highlands area of Oak Bluffs. Charles had been born into slavery but graduated from Hampton Institute in Virginia, then worked as a teacher.

Shearer Cottage is still in business and still run by the Shearer family.

Ironically, the Green Book didn’t list the Shearer Cottage until 1963, along with such establishments as Brownie’s Cottage, Cinderella Cottage and Dunmere-By-The-Sea.

Rock Rest

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Rock Rest in Kittery, Maine

One New England destination popular among African-Americans did not list in the Green Book: Rock Rest in Kittery, Maine. Clayton and Hazel Sinclair once owned the 2-1/2 story wooden Cape, running it as a guest house from 1946 to 1977. They advertised by sending postcards to their mailing list.

Clayton worked as a chauffeur in New York, Hazel as a ladies’ maid to a family that summered in Maine. When Clayton and Hazel decided to relocate, Clayton found a dilapidated house on Route 103 and Kittery and promised to fix it up. He did, and Hazel’s reputation as a cook drew enough guests to run Rock Rest as a business in the summer. Clayton Sinclair also worked in the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and Hazel catered in the off season. Today the house is on the National Register of Historic Places. On June 4, 2022, two historic markers were scheduled to be unveiled commemorating Rock Rest.

For an interactive map showing places listed in a 1956 Negro Travelers’ Green Book, click here. View the text of the 1949 Green Book, courtesy The Henry Ford, here.


Photos: Oak Bluffs by Elkman at Wikipedia, Charlie’s Sandwich Shoppe by John Phelan at Wikipedia. Rock Rest By Robm154 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35858018.

This story was updated  in 2023. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about New England’s sundown towns (which only allowed white people to stay after dark) here. 

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