Tag:

Woburn

The Great India Rubber Panic Launches Charles Goodyear on a Crusade

Charles Goodyear might have live out his life as an obscure hardware store owner if the Great India Rubber Panic never took hold.

In 1833, American consumers began clamoring for exciting new products made in Massachusetts: waterproof clothing and footwear made from South American rubber.

The nation’s first rubber factory had started up in Roxbury, and it was so successful that entrepreneurs quickly opened eight more rubber factories in Massachusetts.

Almost as quickly as they opened they closed. In the summer of 1834 droves of customers began returning their rubber products. It turned out that after a year of seasonal temperature changes, the rubber began to melt in the sun. And it stank so bad that people buried it in the earth.

Into the great India Rubber Panic stepped a penniless former hardware store owner named Charles Goodyear.

Rubber Fever

Massachusetts was already a leader in shoemaking and textile manufacturing around 1820 when a Boston ship captain brought back a pair of shoes from South America. They weren’t just any shoes, but rubber shoes with gilding. Handed around as a curiosity, they excited quite a bit of comment.

Shortly after the gilded rubber shoes arrived, another ship brought 500 pairs of heavy, ugly rubber boots to Boston from South America. New Englanders quickly recognized their value in keeping feet dry, and the rubber boots sold immediately for as much as $5 each. Soon, Americans were buying hundreds of thousands of rubber boots a year.

Rubber manufacturing began with Brazilian Indians in the Amazon River Basin who made bottles from a milky substance that oozed from trees. French explorers brought the rubber bottles back to Europe in the 1730s. They called it ‘rubber’ after the English chemist Joseph Priestly said it rubbed out the marks of a lead pencil from paper.

1899 ad for rubbers. They had improved over time.

Portuguese settlers in Brazil then began making shoes, boots, hats and clothes from rubber. They set up camps in places where the trees grew abundantly and tapped them for the gum. Workers then took the fluid to the camp and smeared it over wooden models of the shoes or boots. The items were then held over a smoking fire until dry and cured in the sun. When ready, the shoes and boots were stuffed with dry grass and exported to Europe or America.

Rubber Factories

Rubber overshoe from Brazil, 1830s, Bata Shoe Museum.

Yankee entrepreneurs soon realized how cheaply they could buy rubber. It was actually used as ship ballast. They also realized they could reap enormous profit if they could replicate the Brazilians’ rubber boots.

Meanwhile, British entrepreneurs had developed a rubber-coated cloth they made into Mackintosh raincoats. And in France, manufacturers invented a technique of weaving rubber threads into narrow webs of cloth to make suspenders, guard chains and garters.

In 1833, The Roxbury India Rubber Co., became the first rubber factory in the United States. The start-up was a huge success, selling rubber shoes, boots and clothing throughout the country.

Millions of dollars were invested in eight more Massachusetts rubber factories, including the Eagle Rubber Co. in Woburn.

Then the product began to melt in summer and harden in winter, and the Massachusetts rubber factories began to fail. The only boots that were any good were the ones imported from Brazil.

Charles Goodyear

Charles Goodyear was born Dec. 29, 1800 into a prosperous New Haven family. He opened a branch of the family’s hardware business in Philadelphia, but the company went under by 1834.

By then he was obsessed with finding a way to prevent rubber from melting in summer and freezing in winter. For years he lived on borrowed money when he wasn’t serving time in debtors’ prison. He sold his children’s schoolbooks for money, and neighbors remember them digging half-grown potatoes for dinner.

People though him crazy. “If you see a man with an india-rubber coat on, india-rubber shoes, and an india-rubber cap, and in his pocket an india-rubber purse with nothing in it, you will know that it is Goodyear,” the saying went.

Charles Goodyear

Goodyear’s breakthrough came in 1839, when he was working somewhere – accounts vary — in Woburn, Mass. He dropped a mixture of sulfur and rubber onto a hot stove. It hardened into a leathery substance – the world’s first vulcanized rubber.

Naugatuck

Goodyear obtained a patent for his process five years later and set up a rubber factory in Naugatuck, Conn. The town subsequently emerged as a center of rubber manufacturing. Goodyear licensed his process to others, such as New Haven’s L. Candee & Co., which made rubber boots and shoes.

Charles Goodyear died in 1860, not yet 60 years old. He left behind $200,000 in debt, but his surviving children lived comfortably off his accumulated royalties.

His brother, Henry Goodyear, founded the Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe Company in Naugatuck, which became part of the United States Rubber Company – later Uniroyal — in 1892.

Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe Co.

Thirty-eight years after Charles Goodyear’s death, two brothers founded a tire company in Akron, Ohio. They named it the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., in honor of the man who saved the rubber industry.

This story was updated in 2021.

0 comment 413 views

Frederic Tudor in 1806 Brings Cocktails and Ice Cream to the Rest of the World

In 1805, Frederic Tudor decided to make his fortune by selling ice to people in tropical climates.

Most people thought the 23-year-old was crazy, but Frederic Tudor knew something most people didn’t. His wealthy family had the luxury of an ice house, and he had experienced the joys of cold mixed drinks and ice cream in the summer. He figured he could get the rest of the world addicted to the stuff.

And so in 1806, he launched his business by sending to Martinique a brig full of ice cut from his family’s pond. He told his sales agent to give it away to bartenders.

“A man who has drank his drinks cold at the same expense for one week can never be presented with them warm again,” Frederic Tudor wrote.

His first venture failed, and so did his second, third and fourth. In the end, Frederic Tudor made his millions and revolutionized the way the world ate and drank.

Frederic Tudor

He was born in to a Brahmin family on Sept. 4, 1783, the day after the signing of the treaty that ended the American Revolution. His father, William Tudor, had studied law in John Adams’ law office, become George Washington’s first judge advocate general and started a lucrative law practice in Boston.

William Tudor liked to live large and followed the new upper-class fashion of drinking alcoholic beverages with ice. His 23-year-old son Frederic seized on the idea of bringing the luxury of ice from Massachusetts lakes and ponds to the tropical masses in the Caribbean.

In 1806, he sent his first shipment of ice to Martinique amid much derision. “No JOKE,” reported the Boston Gazette. “A vessel has cleared at the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We hope this will not prove a slippery speculation.”

Ice turned out to be a harder sell than Frederic Tudor imagined. He was trying to sell it to people who had never once experienced anything cold. They didn’t have ice houses, and they didn’t know how to keep ice from melting. He and his partner – his brother William – lost money on the deal. William dropped out of the business, founded the North American Review and co-founded the Boston Athenaeum.

Failure

Frederic Tudor stubbornly persisted, sending another shipment of ice to Cuba. Again he lost money.

So did his father – in a real estate speculation gone disastrously wrong. Frederic Tudor kept shipping ice, losing money but learning ways to keep ice cold. Sawdust, for example, worked better than straw.

But then Frederic Tudor spent parts of 1812 and 1813 in debtors prison after his business partner swindled him.

He kept going. “Let those laugh who win,” he wrote.

He borrowed money, bought ice in Massachusetts and an icehouse in Cuba and set sail for the Caribbean. “Pursued by sheriffs to the very wharf,” he wrote. Finally, he made some money on his crystal blocks of Yankee coldness.

Smash

Frederic Tudor expanded his business to Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans, developing new sales techniques along the way.

He gave bartenders free ice for a year after teaching them how to keep it frozen in a ‘refrigerating jar’ and how to make cocktails like the Smash. He sold ice to Havana coffee shop owners and the keeper of the Tivoli Gardens after teaching them how to make ice cream.

During one mild winter, he faced an ice shortage. So he sent his ship’s captain to take a detour to Labrador and hack off part of an iceberg. Tudor also ventured to the Kennebec and Penobscot Rivers in Maine to find enough ice to ship.

In 1825 came another big turning point: Frederic Tudor met Nathaniel Wyeth, a hotel owner. Wyeth invented a horse-drawn ice plow that cut ice from ponds far more cheaply and efficiently than the laborious hand labor then used. Tudor hired Wyeth as his foreman and expanded his ice-cutting operation.

Harvesting ice

India

In 1833, Frederic Tudor gambled that a shipment of ice would survive the voyage to India. He was right. The arrival of the ice caused a sensation, especially among the colonial British administrators.

Henry David Thoreau heard about it. He watched as Tudor’s men divided Walden Pond into a chessboard pattern and cut ice into square, two-foot blocks. “The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges,” wrote Thoreau.

The same year he sent ice to India, Frederic Tudor, 50, met 19-year-old Euphemia Fenno. They married the next year and had six children.

Ice King

Frederic Tudor finally achieved the success he craved, earning the nickname ‘Ice King.’ At one point he owned ice houses in Havana, Jamaica, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Ala., Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, Sri Lanka and Singapore.

But he had created a market for ice too big for one company to serve. By 1855, 12 companies shipped ice from the Boston area.

In the run-up to the Civil War, American ships carried more tonnage of ice than any other commodity except for cotton.

People had come to view ice as a necessity to preserve food and medicine. When the Civil War broke out, two-thirds of Boston and New York households received ice deliveries every day.

And in 1862, a bartender named Jerry Thomas published The Bartenders Guide, with recipes for America’s cocktails – most of which used ice.

Wenham Lake Ice

Between 1844 and the early 1850s, the remarkably pure ice from Wenham Lake in Massachusetts became a fashionable luxury among the British aristocracy. The best London hotels put up signs advertising Wenham ice. It was said you could read a newspaper through a block of Wenham Lake ice two feet thick.

Wenham Lake today

Wenham ice inspired the popularity of cocktails like sherry cobblers and mint juleps in London. No fancy dinner party was complete without it, and Queen Victoria insisted on it.

A competitor to Frederic Tudor, the Wenham Lake Ice Co., had promoted the stuff.

By 1850, Norway and Sweden began to export ice. One ice company bought Lake Oppegaard in Norway and rechristened it “Lake Wenham.”

Aftermath

Frederic Tudor died in 1864, his fortune said to amount to $200 million in today’s dollars. His estate in Nahant, Mass., became a country club. His great-granddaughter Tasha Tudor illustrated nearly 100 children’s books and received many honors for them.

The ice business thrived, with Massachusetts supplying ice around the world from ponds in Boston, Cambridge, Arlington, Ayer, Stoneham, Wakefield, Woburn, Andover and Lynnfield.

By 1880, 22 icehouses stored 30,000 tons of ice next to Jamaica Pond in Jamaica Plain. In Vermont, 5,000 men cut ice on Lake Champlain.

But artificial refrigeration eventually overtook the need for natural ice. The commercial ice maker, invented in 1854, allowed people around the world to make their own ice for cocktails and ice cream.

How To Make a Smash

Dissolve sugar in water in a cocktail shaker; add mint and spirits. Shake well with ice and strain through a fine strainer into a rocks or old fashioned glass filled with fresh ice. Garnish.

Images: Wenham Lake By Daderot. – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1029494. Ice harvesting: Cutting the cross sections with a saw–ice harvesting, Conneaut Lake, Pa. Pennsylvania Conneaut Lake, 1907. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2018652316/. This story about Frederic Tudor was updated in 2022.

4 comments 2.3k views

Six Sears Houses

In the early part of the 20^th century, you could buy Sears houses for the price of a good pair of shoes today.

Times certainly changed. In 2005, a high-end Sears home sold for $900,000.

Sears, Roebuck and Co. sold about 100,000 kit houses from catalogs between 1908 and 1942. They were shipped by rail, with pre-cut lumber stamped for assembly. The company promised a man of average abilities that he could finish the house within 90 days — if he followed the 75-page instruction book.

Sears Houses

Sears got into the business of catalog homes because its building products division was losing money. Frank W. Kushel, who managed the company’s china department, was given the task of turning around building products. He suggested the company sell entire houses in 22 styles and ship them from the factory.

Sears copied the popular housing styles of the day, which included colonial revival features taken from historic New England homes. There’s even one model called The Puritan.

Sears marketed the houses as ‘machine made’ with already cut lumber. “No waste, no mistakes, no big labor bills,” read the catalog copy.

The kits came with nails, shingles, shellac, windows, doors, trim hardware, paint and downspouts. They did not include cement, bricks or plaster. Materials for indoor plumbing, electricity and central heating had to be bought separately.

By 1920, Sears was shipping an average of 125 houses a month. Nine years later, Sears sent 250 houses each month from just one of its four plants. The company boasted it was the world’s largest home builder.

Sears also financed home purchases, and half its homes were tied up in mortgage loans by the time of the Great Depression. The company lost $11 million on defaulted mortgages in 1934, and by 1940 it was out of the house business.

Hamden, Conn.

The C225

Realtors say a Sears house can sell for more because of the enduring quality of the materials and construction.

Sears homes were built throughout Connecticut. In Hartford alone there are dozens, but they are also in Putnam, Hamden, Canton, Shelton, Bethel, Plainville and Torrington.

The 1916 Sears catalog featured testimonials from two men who bought Sears houses in Connecticut.

D.G. Arnold wrote he was ‘well pleased’ with his home, Modern Home No. 119, in Putnam, Conn.

“All the rough lumber, doors, windows, clapboards, flooring, moldings and stairs, in fact everything required to finish a first class house, came from Sears, Roebuck and Co. at a savings of about $500, as compared with local prices,” he wrote. “My builder says he never used better finish and he has had fifty years’ experience.”

L.S. Chapman from Shelton wrote to say he saved several hundred dollars and found the materials better than expected. “Our house, No. C225, is beautiful.

The cottage at Lockwood Farm in Hamden is a Sears house. So are the Cello House, the Viola House and the Second Fiddle House at the Music Mountain in Falls Village, Canaan.

Sears didn’t make all pre-cut houses. There were actually six large companies that made kit houses, but none had the marketing clout of Sears and its famous catalog. Another company, Aladdin, sold enough homes to the Bristol Brass. Co. in 1916 to fill four blocks near the factory in Bristol, Conn.

Bucksport, Maine

The entrance to the Sears Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the Perkins House in Castine, Maine.

Identifying Sears houses has become a cottage industry for fanatics who produce books, blogs, documentaries and even bus tours by the Smithsonian Associates.

Sears enthusiasts argue whether Bucksport, Maine, has a neighborhood full of identical Sears houses – Belfasts, to be precise. Writer Scott Sowers says yes. Rose Thornton, who has made a career of identifying Sears houses, says no.

“The Sears Belfast and the Bucksport Houses are wildly different from one another,” wrote Thornton after examining a photo of a Bucksport house.

(Tangentially, the front doorway of the real Belfast was modeled on the doorway of the historic Perkins House, built in 1769 in Castine, Maine.)

People authenticate Sears houses by comparing them to the models in the Sears archives. That’s usually not enough, since houses are often altered over the years. They must also look for stamped lumber in the basement or attic, shipping labels on moldings or the characteristic ‘SR’ stamped on bathroom fixtures. (For other clues, click here.)

We did track down a Sears house on Lindsay Road in York, Maine.

A Sears house in York, Maine

Longmeadow, Mass.

A Sears Verona, catalog illustration

Sears houses arrived in two railroad box cars in a variety of styles and prices. At the high end was the Magnolia, a four-bedroom, high-ceilinged colonial modeled after Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, Mass. It sold for $5,972. (See featured image.)

At the low end was the Natoma, a three-room house that sold for $191. It had no bathroom, but you could buy the outhouse separately.

The Natoma

The Verona was another ‘high-class home,’ according to the catalog, ‘of the Dutch type of colonial architecture.’ An authenticated Sears Verona has been identified at 115 Belleclaire Ave., in Longmeadow, Mass.

A house on Medway St. in Norfolk, Mass., is in contention for being a Sears house. Authentic Sears houses were also assembled in Newton, Easthampton, Boston, Woburn, Springfield, Wrentham, Cohasset and Pittsfield.

Claremont, N.H.

The Castleton, catalog illustration

Two small New England companies also sold kit houses.

The Thayer Portable House Co. operated in Keene, N.H., from about 1920 to 1940. It had grown from the Springfield Portable House Co. in Massachusetts. There was also the Robinson’s-Money-Saving-Mill-Made Cut-to-Fit Houses of Providence, R.I.

Still, Sears was king in New England, shipping homes from its factory in Philadelphia.

Two Sears houses have been identified on Mulberry Street in Claremont, N.H. One was a Castleton; the other, a Lorain. (Click here to read more about these houses.)

The Castleton was promoted as ‘dignified and substantial,’ ‘a well-designed house that will make a pleasant home.’ The Lorain was marketed as a charming six-room colonial with dark shutters, snowy walls and window boxes. You can watch a documentary about restoring a Lorain here.

Middletown, R.I.

The Parkside, an economical Sears house

The Parkside was a cute, economical four-room house sold from 1934 to 1940. There’s an authenticated Parkside at 43 Beacon St. in Middletown, R.I. The current owner did considerable research into the house’s history and put up a website about it. (Check it out here.)

In 1938, the Middletown Parkside sold for $1,372. In 2006, it sold for $222,000. Bob Wolfenden, a military veteran, built the house in 1940 and lived in it for the rest of his life. He was a professional carpenter who became superintendent of the Newport, R.I., Water Department. He and his wife Mildred had no children.

John Little bought the house and enlarged it after his friend Bob died. The Parkside then changed hands several times, became a rental and went into foreclosure. It needed repair by the time the current owner bought it in 2006. You can see pictures of the house over the years here.

Burlington, Vt.

An Alhambra, from the catalog

Burlington, Vt., has so many catalog houses there’s a field guide to them called A Guide to the Catalog Houses of Burlington, Vermont.

Burlington was an ideal market for kits of Sears houses as well as for those of its competitors, Aladdin and Gordon Van Tine. The city’s population grew by 10 percent every decade while growing richer. The expansion of the streetcar network opened up cheap empty land. Burlington could also be reached by two major railroads, making it easy to ship kit houses.

Kit houses cluster in Burlington’s South End, the Five Sisters neighborhood, south of the University of Vermont campus, the New North End and Lakeview Terrace. Of the 30 kit houses identified in the Burlington field guide, 14 came from Sears.

A cluster of Sears houses in Burlington shows the range of styles: A four-square Fullerton and a Westly bungalow were identified on N. Prospect Street. Also:

- A Dutch colonial Lucerne on Catherine Street,
- A colonial revival bungalow called a Crescent on St. Paul Street
- A Spanish Colonial Alhambra on South Winooski Avenue
- A Tudor Revival Barrington at Marian Street.

Images: Perkins House By S437885 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35346344; Sears Catalog House, by InAweofGod’s Creation, Creative Commons license. This story about Sears houses was updated in 2022.

12 comments 2k views

New England’s Forgotten Puerto Rican Riots

From 1967 to 1979, Puerto Rican riots broke out in New England cities from Waterbury, Conn., to Worcester, Mass.

Outsiders didn’t understand them at the time, and people have mostly forgotten them since.

Aaron G. Fountain, Jr., a PhD student at Indiana University, in 2016 chronicled the Mexican-American and Puerto Rican riots throughout the United States from the late 1960s through the early 1990s.

From 1964 to 1992, he counted 43 riots that had at least 100 participants, triggered a police response and resulted in damage to buildings and vehicles. While most – 17 – broke out in New Jersey, at least nine Puerto Rican riots erupted in New England cities.

Puerto Rican Festival in Lowell, Mass. Courtesy Library of Congress.

In Connecticut, Puerto Ricans rioted in Waterbury, New Haven, Bridgeport and Hartford. In Massachusetts, Puerto Rican riots burst forth in Boston, Springfield, New Bedford and Worcester.

White and Puerto Rican teenagers threw rocks at each other in Woburn, Mass., in August 1973.

“Unlike Black riots of the 1960s, Latino riots occurred mostly in the 1970s, and they continued well into the early 1990s,” wrote Fountain. “Over two-thirds of them were in Puerto Rican communities. They occurred in major cities and in communities as small as Coachella, California, which had about 9,000 residents in 1970.”

Few people wrote about them because they fall outside the category of black-white race relations, Fountain concluded.

The First Puerto Rican Riot

On Aug. 19, 1967, hundreds of Puerto Rican and African-American youths stunned New Haven by rioting. The violence then continued for several days until the governor called up the National Guard to restore order.

Reformers considered New Haven a model city because of its urban renewal and anti-poverty programs. But tensions had grown since World War II.

Puerto Rican flag and American flag at the Puerto Rican Festival in Lowell, Mass.

Many Puerto Ricans, all American citizens, moved to the Northeast during the war . They looked for work in defense plants and harvesting fruits, vegetables and tobacco. Many Puerto Ricans came to Connecticut after arriving in New York City.

The Puerto Rican population continued to grow in the Northeast during the 1950s and 1960s. Today, Connecticut has the densest population of Puerto Ricans in the country. Half of the Puerto Ricans in New England live along the Interstate-91 corridor, from New Haven to Holyoke in Massachusetts. In fact, Holyoke has the highest percentage of Puerto Ricans in the country.

Most had little money when they arrived and had to live in substandard housing. When war work dried up, many found themselves unemployed. They also lived in neighborhoods that decayed when middle-class whites moved to the suburbs.

In New Haven that summer day in 1967, simmering resentment boiled over when Edward Thomas, a white snack bar owner, shot Julio Diaz. Diaz had threatened him with a knife.

Word then spread quickly, and rioters broke windows, looted stores, started fires and fought with police. In the end, police arrested nearly 400 people.

More Puerto Rican Riots

Two years later, on July 30, 1969, a Puerto Rican riot erupted in Waterbury. The news media gave it little coverage.

On Sept. 1, 1969, two nights of Puerto Rican riots started in Hartford’s North End and spread downtown. Buildings were looted and set on fire. Firefighters required police protection as rioters threw rocks and bottles at them. The disturbance was attributed to poor housing, high rents and an article in the Hartford Times quoting an anonymous firefighter calling Puerto Ricans ‘Pigs.’

In July 1970, there were Puerto Rican riots in New Bedford and Hartford. In May 1971 a riot broke out in Bridgeport. Three days of riots erupted in Boston’s South End in July 1972.

The Boston Globe reported a minor scuffle at the Puerto Rican Day celebration grew into a confrontation between bystanders and more than 100 policemen. Mostly young Puerto Ricans set buildings on fire, damaged police cruisers and stoned passing cars. The police were criticized for aggravating the situation.

‘Called me a spic’

Luis Palmarin, a South End resident, told the Globe:

The cop arrested me when I tried to stop him from beating a man who was bleeding badly. He threw me in the car, grabbed a soda bottle from the floor, called me a spic and hit me in the face with the bottle.

Boston City Councilman Albert “Dapper” O’Neil made the situation worse by ordering the police to “club those maggots and leeches out of the park.”

On the third night of violence, riot police were diverted from the South End because a city officials feared a melee near Boston Garden. Police had arrested the Rolling Stones in Rhode Island, which delayed the concert at the Garden..

Carlos Mora, director of the Concilio drug program, said, “The Puerto Rican population has been mistreated for a long time. Our people just want respect, and then they’ll give respect.” Forty percent of Boston’s Puerto Ricans lived in poverty.

Puerto Ricans in the United States

Changing Demographics

Two more Puerto Rican riots broke out in Massachusetts. One happened in Springfield in late August 1975 and one in Worcester in June 1979.

But then immigration patterns changed. Other Latino groups moved to the Northeast. In Massachusetts, for example, Puerto Ricans comprised 75 percent of the commonwealth’s Latino population. That then fell to only 49 percent by 2000.

In 1984, a riot broke out in the Tower Hill neighborhood of Lawrence, Mass. Fountain characterized the disturbance as “Hispanic.” Dominicans had moved into the largely Puerto Rican section of the city.

Buildings were burned, people were injured and police used tear gas and clubs over several days of Dominican and Puerto Rican riots.

“They don’t want to know anything about us – the way we live,” 24-year-old Ramon Rodriguez, told the Boston Globe. “One day you just get tired of it all and say enough. It has always been this way as long as I’ve been here. It’s just now that we’re getting tired of it.”

This story about Puerto Rican riots updated in 2022. Images: Denatale, D., Rankin, T. & Montaño, M. (1987) Puerto Rican Festival, Lowell, Massachusetts. United States Lowell Massachusetts, 1987. [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/afc1987042_mm_c001/.

2 comments 586 views

The Cold Friday of 1810

The legendary Cold Friday of 1810 brought such terrible winds and frigid temperature that people talked and wrote about it for generations.

Tales of the killer weather event made their way into town histories, journals and court records long after it happened on January 19. They told of the many people who froze to death while traveling along the highways. The wind blew down houses, barns and vast numbers of timber trees. Ships wrecked, cattle froze in their barns and old people died of hypothermia inside their homes. It was so cold pens wouldn’t write though they were right next to the fireplace.

Winter in the country: a cold morning. by Currier and Ives, courtesy Library of Congress.

What made the Cold Friday so lethal was the sudden, steep drop in temperature that caught people unaware.

Sudden Plunge

Several jourrnals claimed the mercury dropped 100 degrees in Boston in less than 24 hours, from 67 to 33 below zero, Michael R. Doyle reported in 2005. Though the ice in the harbor did freeze to Spectacle Island, that may have been an exaggeration.

The more scientific minds at the American Register reported the mercury dropped from 48 degrees on Thursday to nine below zero on the cold Friday. In Portsmouth, N.H., it went from 54 on Thursday to minus 12 on Friday — and minus 13 on Saturday.

Joseph Dow, in his History of Hampton, N.H., described how the plunge in temperature surprised some local farmers:

“…[I]n Hampton, the morning was so mild, several farmers set out for Newburyport, with ox-loads of potatoes, beguiling with neighborly chat the tedium of the slow progress.

“On the return, the cold became so intense and the wind so violent, all suffered extremely, and one man who had rashly left his overcoat at home was only saved from perishing, by wrapping himself in the blankets that had covered the potatoes.”

Cold Friday Redux

So memorable was the Cold Friday that a mention of it 20 years later meant the listener understood it to mean January 19. Asked to recount a date in a New Hampshire court case, the witness simply said it happened on the “Cold Friday, 1810.”

Henry David Thoreau, one o the two loves of Louisa May Alcott

Henry David Thoreau thought of the Cold Friday during the winter of 1857, the coldest ever in New England. On Jan. 11, 1857, he wrote in his journal:

“Mother remembers the Cold Friday–very well–She lived in the house where I was born–The people in the kitchen Jack Garrison–Ester–& a Hardy girl drew up close to the fire–but the dishes which the Hardy girl was washing froze as fast as she washed them close to the fire. They managed to keep warm in the parlor by their great fires.”

Few people ventured outside. The New England Farmer reported, “very little going from place to place. Farmers piled on the wood and attended to their cattle, and that was about all for the day.” Anyone who had to go outside for an errand that could not be deferred, ‘sped over the ground like squirrels and were fortunate if they returned with no flesh from the intensity of the frost.’

One intrepid little girl named Rebecca Ramsdell braved the cold to walk a mile to school in Henniker, N.H. Her teacher, who awarded medals to his most punctual students, gave her the prize. She kept it during the term. In fact, she kept it her whole life. The Henniker Historical Society has a picture of her at age 100 with the medal. (See it here.)

Casualties

In Woburn, Mass., Joseph Brooks, a 50-year-old Revolutionary War veteran, and his cousin Benjamin, 45, had no such luck. They went into the forest to cut wood during the mild afternoon of January 18. They were found frozen to death on January 20.

The Rev. William Bentley

People even died without going outside. Salem diarist William Bentley reported in his diary.

“Several Old Persons perished within doors…Susanna Beadle, aet. 82, attempting to arise from bed was so chilled as to expire immediately.” Bentley wrote. “A woman, also a Widow, chilled, fell into the fire, on the western part of the Town, & escaped with life enough to put out the fire in her clothes but did not call assistance & perished with the cold & found dead in the morning.

“The young man from the Ship going to Beverly Shore not half a mile could not be recovered. A Soldier coming from Salem Fort only to the Farm houses on the Neck, not half a mile, was much frozen……the use of the pen was impracticable unless near to the fire, & even before the fire the water froze on the tables.”

The fierce winds blew ashore several other vessels in the harbor. Capt. James Sears and the crew of the sloop Margaret, carrying a load of plaster from Thomaston, lost their lives at sea.

In Antrim, N.H., the wind blew the roof off the home of Samuel Marshall and his family, and in Farmington, Maine, the home of James Johnson burned.

Saddest Story

The saddest tale of suffering was repeated many times. It happened in Sanbornton, N.H. According to the New Hampshire Historical Society, the wind blew down part of the home of Jeremiah Ellsworth, jeopardizing the lives of his wife and three children.

Mrs. Ellsworth dressed the youngest child and went into the cellar, leaving the other two in bed. Jeremiah Ellsworth went to the home of David Brown, a quarter mile away, seeking help. His feet had frozen, though, and the two men agreed he shouldn’t risk the danger of going back home.

Brown hitched his horse to a sleigh to rescue Mrs. Ellsworth and the children. He found her and the baby in the cellar, the other two naked in bed as the wind blew their clothes off. He covered them with a blanket and put them in the sleigh, but the wind turned the sleigh over and scattered everything.

Mrs. Ellsworth decided to walk to Brown’s house but sank into the snow, benumbed by cold. She crawled to Brown’s house, where she had changed so much her husband didn’t recognize her.

Brown put the children back in the sleigh but the wind blew it over again and tore it to pieces. He could only carry two of the children, so he left the baby, who was dressed, behind on the road. When he reached his home the children were still alive, but died a few minutes later. Brown was too exhausted and frostbitten to find the baby, but later that day a search party found him dead by the side of the road.

The parents lived, but had no more children after that Cold Friday.

This story was updated in 2023.

1 comment 1k views

Christopher Seider: The First Casualty in the American Revolutionary Cause

Christopher Seider was just 11 in 1770, a working boy in Boston at a time when the city was awash in the debate over the Massachusetts colony’s relationship with Great Britain.

In 1770, the American colonies strongly resisted the British Townshend Acts. The Acts taxed goods such as lead, paper tea, paint and glass. However, the desire for British goods was also strong.

American-made clothing and other products were often rougher in appearance and less appealing. Some goods could only be had by importing them.

Non-Importation Agreements

Boston merchants had agreed to boycott British goods to protest the tax. But throughout the colony, people wondered whether they’d continue to honor non-importation agreements. Boston had played a leading role in implementing the non-importation strategy and convincing other colonies to join in. But the cost took its toll.

Frustrated by several years of struggling to make a profit, the stage was set for merchants to announce they would no longer honor non-importation agreements and would resume selling British goods.

Theophilus Lillie, a dry goods merchant, was one of the earliest to break the non-importation agreements. Though some merchants disregarded the ban altogether, most did it quietly. Lillie, though not political, did so with a flourish, announcing his intentions in a letter to the Boston Chronicle.

His decision led to dueling letters and articles in the newspapers and, on the night of February 22, a protest in front of his house.

Importer

“A number of boys had been diverting themselves with the exhibition of a piece of pageantry near the house of Theophilus Lillie,” the Boston-Gazette and Country Journal reported. They placed a sign, ‘IMPORTER,’ in front of his home.

Soon their protest turned explosive. Ebenezer Richardson, a British customs officer, stepped in and tried to stop the demonstration. He urged several passing men to tear down the sign and effigies in front of Lillis’ house.

The passersby declined to help, and the protesters drove back Richardson and pelted him with dirt and stones as he fled. But the crowd pursued him to his house.

Richardson went to a window and first fired his musket without shot to disperse the crowd. He returned to the window to shoot again — this time his gun loaded with “swan shot,” pea-sized lead balls.

Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston massacre. In the background on the right a gun can be seen firing from a window, an oblique reference to Seider’s death.

Christopher Seider

The shot injured teenager Samuel Gore, but it killed 11-year-old Christopher Seider, the blast striking him in the chest.

The news raced through the city, with newspapers halting their presses to include accounts of the shooting. Later they would report more than 1,000 people attended his funeral procession days later, which started at Boston’s Liberty Tree. Poet Phillis Wheatley would also memorialize him in a poem.

“It is hoped the unexpected and melancholy death of young (Seider) will be a means for the future of preventing any, but more especially the soldiery, from being too free in the use of their instruments of death,” the Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal opined. However, 11 days later the Boston Massacre would take place and the march to Revolution continued.

As for Richardson, he was tried and convicted of killing Seider and imprisoned for a time, but was later pardoned by the king and offered a post in Philadelphia in 1773. In that city, publishers attacked Richardson with a broadside and spread the story that he had fathered a child out of wedlock. They said he allowed a Woburn pastor to take the blame for it.

Richardson, widely reviled, would later flee to England.

This story was updated in 2022.

6 comments 1.8k views

Newer Posts

Older Posts