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Woodstock Vt.

The Early Days of New England Skiing

When members of the Appalachian Mountain Club began hacking ski trails in New Hampshire over Barrett and Temple Mountains in 1927, New England skiing had just started to get popular.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Back then there may not have been a single mile of downhill ski trail on the continent, according to the Jan. 25, 1935 Ski Bulletin. Those first Appalachian Mountain Club skiers finished 20 miles of trail in the southwest corner of New Hampshire.

Then, in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, the Winnipesaukee Ski Club finished trails on what is now Gunstock. The Works Progress Administration further developed the Belknap Mountains Recreation Area.

Skiing at Dickinson’s farm, March 1939.

Dickinson’s Farm

Much early New England skiing took place at mom-and-pop ski areas. Putting up a tow rope and taking in lodgers was a way for farmers to earn a little more money in the off season.

Enthusiasm for skiing spread to a farm in Lisbon, N.H. , in 1936. Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott took pictures of local teenagers skiing on Dickinson’s farm in March 1939. She described the photos:

On Saturday afternoon many high school students come to Dickinson’s farm to ski. Mr Dickenson built a ski tow on his farm three years ago at a cost of one thousand dollars. This is the first year he had made any money, although business is increasing rapidly now. He has a small dairy farm and until the hurricane last year destroyed his entire grove of maple trees he made and sold maple syrup. Lisbon near Franconia, New Hampshire.

Tow rope on Dickinson’s farm.

Cannon Mountain

New England skiing wasn’t just a way for farmers to make money. It also allowed innkeepers to extend their season into winter. Kate Peckett, the daughter of the owners of Peckett’s-on-Sugar-Hill, persuaded her parents to run a ski school on Cannon Mountain.

Kate is also credited with inspiring the Taft Slalom trail on Cannon Mountain, which the Civilian Conservation Corps cut in 1933 as the first racing trail in North America.

In February 1933, the Ski Bulletin called it a “ski run equaled by nothing in the East.”

The CCC also built a parking lot and ski trails on Cannon Mountain. And in 1938, the state of New Hampshire agreed to finance an aerial tramway on Cannon, completed in 1939.

Skiers from Boston relaxing in lodge at North Conway, N.H.

Vermont

The first tow rope in New England was constructed on Jan. 28, 1934 in a former sheep pasture near Woodstock, Vt. Made out of rope, pulleys and an old Model T engine, it gave birth to the White Cupboard Skiway (named after the nearby inn).

Skiers on porch of Mr. Dickinson's home.

Skiers on the porch of Mr. Dickinson’s home.

The Civilian Conservation Corps played a big role in developing Vermont’s ski industry. CCC enlistees built 11 ski trails, mostly in Stow. All but one still exist.

Two Vermonters affiliated with Dartmouth College also helped popularize skiing in New England. When a Swedish student challenged the school’s carpenter, Fred Garey of Thetford, to make a pair of skis, he rose to the occasion. He figured out how to make the eight-foot-long skis from seasoned ash in his kitchen. When he showed them to the Dartmouth students, he realized he had a hit on his hands.

Another Vermonter, Fred Harris of Brattleboro, founded the Dartmouth Outing Club in 1909 as a student. National Geographic ran a story about skiing in New Hampshire in 1920 that featured the club, and Dartmouth’s admissions tripled.

Early New England skiing on the Taft trail on Cannon Mountain.

Maine

When Maine’s first tow rope opened in Fryeberg in 1936, 200 people came to ski and 3,000 came to watch.

Maine’s first Alpine skiing resort, Shawnee Peak in Bridgton, opened in 1938 with a 1,100-foot tow rope.

Today, Maine has more than 100 abandoned rope tow sites.

Skiers at the top of Cannon Mountain.

For more information about New England skiing history, check out the New England Ski Museum at the base of Cannon Mountain or on their website. All photos by Marion Post Wolcott in March 1939, courtesy Library of Congress. This story about New England skiing was updated in 2023.

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Francis Herrick, The Lobster Doctor

If you love lobster, it’s not a Mainer you need to thank. Or even a Bay Stater. It’s Vermont’s Francis Hobart Herrick.

Born in Woodstock, Vt., in 1858, Herrick earned a Ph.D. in biology, and the subject of his studies was the lobster, especially how lobsters reproduced. Over the course of his career, he authored books on birds and a critical biography of John James Audubon, but it was his work for the United States Fish Commission that had its most lasting impact.

The commission was concerned about the boom and bust cycle of lobstering. Lobstering would be at a lull, the interest in them would increase and the number of fishermen would increase. Then the population of lobsters would crash, prices would increase and the market would disappear.

When the population of lobsters increased again, the cycle would restart. To fishermen it seemed to make no sense. Each female lobster could have thousands of eggs. How was it possible that overfishing was the problem?

The Findings of Francis Herrick

Herrick made a long and careful study of the subject, and he publicized two key findings in his study:

Yes, lobsters produced a lot of eggs. But their reproductive cycle is extremely complex. A female must carry the eggs inside her body for up to a year before they emerge. Then they have to cling to her underside for up to another year. At that point they hatch, and the larvae, at the earliest stages of their lives, drift in the currents – a tasty meal for whatever stumbles across them before they drop to the bottom of the ocean. Lobsters weren’t producing a lot of eggs to produce a lot of lobsters. They were doing it because so few survived.
While a one-pound lobster lays 8,000 eggs or so, a 10-pound lobster might produce as many as 100,000 eggs. By always taking the largest lobsters, the fishermen were dooming the lobster population to collapse.

Francis Hobart Herrick

Herrick’s lavishly illustrated 1893 report was not put to use overnight. But eventually, as regulators and fishermen began to better understand the lobster, they realized that they were not like other fish. You had to protect both the very youngest lobsters, so they could develop to the point where they were capable of reproducing. And you had to protect the very oldest lobsters, because they produce the most eggs.

The result is our modern system of regulating lobster fishing, where small and large female lobsters are off limits, while the middle-aged variety wind up on our plates.

This story last updated in 2021.

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Flashback Photo: Woodstock Town Meeting, 1940

This photo of the 1940 Woodstock Town Meeting in Vermont was taken by Marion Post (later Marion Post Wolcott) for the U.S. Farm Security Administration. During the Great Depression, Post had grown frustrated that her employer, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, kept sending her to photograph ‘ladies’ stories,’ so she become a photographer for the FSA during the Great Depression.

She traveled the country photographing life as she saw it. Her photographs of the Woodstock Town Meeting show the townspeople discussing the issues, taking a lunch break, listening to the debates and casting ballots.

One of the main questions at the Woodstock Town Meeting was whether to ban the sale of intoxicating liquors. The townspeople also voted on whether pinball machines should be allowed in town. Post recorded some of the banter with her photographs. For example, when a selectman went to vote, the women who gave him the ballot said, “If you vote yes for liquor, you’d better put your ballot in a box in a different town. We won’t let you stay around here long.”

While in Woodstock, Post took the lovely photograph of the town at night (below). It is one of the most requested images from the Library of Congress’s Farm Security Administration collection.

We don’t know whether the town banned the sale of intoxicating liquor in 1940, but we’re quite certain it’s permitted now.

Woodstock, Vt., at night.

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The Revenge Drama of the First Ski Rope Tow

The creators of the first ski rope tow in the United States stole the idea from another person. A year later, that person got his revenge. In the process, Vermont’s ski industry was born.

Ski rope tow

Three cranky New York businessmen inspired the creation of that first rope tow on Jan. 28, 1934.

The New Yorkers were staying at the White Cupboard Inn two miles north of Woodstock, Vt. Over lunch they complained to the owners, Elizabeth and Robert Royce, about paying $40 each for the privilege of climbing up a mountain in order to ski down it.

“You ought to be able to think of something to get us up these hills,” said one of the New Yorkers, a stockbroker named Thomas Gammack. “Each of us is spending $40 apiece to enjoy a weekend in Vermont, yet the most we can do in a day is to climb a hill half-a-dozen times. We want to get in all the skiing we can on these weekends. We want to be carried uphill.”

Wallace “Bunny” Bertram, the Dartmouth ski team’s first coach, had been telling the New Yorkers about a tow rope he’d seen in Canada. He was in the room when they complained about climbing up the hill. Bertram asked the Royces if they had a Montgomery Ward or Sears catalog, explaining he wanted to figure out how much it would cost to build a rope tow.

The First Rope Tow

Robert Royce decided to get there first. He rented a former sheep pasture called Gilbert’s Hill before Bertram could. With an investment from the three New Yorkers, they bought the equipment for the first U.S. rope tow: pulleys, an 1,800-foot rope and a Model T Ford engine. They rented a hilly pasture and the White Cupboard Skiway was born.

They sold ski tickets for $1 a day and 50 cents for night skiing. Skiers grabbed on to the circulating rope and let it carry them up the 900-foot hill.

Though the rope tow broke down frequently, that first ski season was a huge success.

Suicide Six

The next year, the Royces intended to rent Gilbert’s Hill again. Elizabeth Royce gave a cab driver $100 in bills and asked him to go to the bank and fetch a crisp $100 bill. She intended to present it to the hill’s owner. The cab driver brought back a limp, crumpled bill. While she took the time to clean and iron it, Bertram rented the hill out from under her for $10.

Bertram worked out the problems with the rope tow, which allowed him to develop the famous Suicide Six Ski area.

With thanks to The Vermont Standard and the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Hall of Fame and Museum.

Images: Suicide Six By Jared C. Benedict – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67100524.

This story last updated in 2023.

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Ring Them Revere Bells

Only by accident did Paul Revere at 57 years old get into the business of casting bells.

Paul Revere, by Gilbert Stuart

He’d had some experience with bells. As a teenager he signed a contract with Christ Church – Boston’s Old North Church — to serve as a bell ringer. And like everyone else in Boston, he understood the importance of bells. They rang to wake people, to summon them to church services, to tell the cook to start dinner, to mark the passing of a human life.

The First Revere Bell

Revere in 1792 belonged to the New Brick Church, which had a problem: Its bell cracked. He offered to recast it, though he knew nothing about molding and casting bells. So he consulted with Aaron Hobart, one of the few people in America who did know about bells.

Hobart probably told him how bells with pleasant, musical tones are notoriously hard to forge: The shape affects the tone, as does the combination of copper, tin, silver, zinc, and lead. Copper from different mines will also create different sounds.

Revere’s first bell for the New Brick Church, a 912 pounder, was not terribly successful because of its harsh tone. But Revere and his sons Paul Jr. and Joseph Warren went ahead anyway. They then cast 398 bells between 1792 and 1828, first at their North End foundry and after 1804 in Canton, Mass. The bells often bore the inscription “THE LIVING TO THE CHURCH I CALL AND TO THE GRAVE I SUMMON ALL.”

King’s Chapel, about 1900

Powerful and Mellow

Over time Revere learned the proper composition of metals, and he used that knowledge in other metallurgical pursuits. In 1794 he was said to be the only man in America who knew anything of the difference between ores and the seven metals.

Revere and Sons made other kinds of bells as well, most notably for the U.S.S. Constitution. They also provided the copper sheathing for Old Ironsides and the Massachusetts Statehouse dome.

Revere, perhaps stung by criticism of that first bell, insisted that a committee approve the sound of a bell before its final sale. He’d cart the bell from his foundry into his back yard, where a committee of vestrymen or church deacons or selectmen had assembled. Small boys from the neighborhood gathered around the bell as well, according to Esther Forbes in Paul Revere and the World He Lived In. She described the Revere bells as beautiful bells, “powerful and mellow.”

Revere bell in the Pawtucket Congregational Church in Lowell, Mass.

Records

Revere was casual about recordkeeping. When young man in Farmington, Maine, bought a bell for $500, Revere forgot to write down his name. He did remember the bell was for Farmington Academy, and when he didn’t get paid he had to figure out who to write to. He wrote several threatening letters and finally did get paid.

More than a century later, researchers Edward and Evelyn Stickney traveled around the country compiling an inventory of Revere bells. They found 134 inscribed with the Revere name. Most were in Northern New England, but the Stickneys found Revere bells as far away as Savannah, Ga., Washington, D.C., and Tuscaloosa, Ala. They then published a small book about their discoveries in 1956, and revised it to mark the U.S. bicentennial.

There’s even a Revere bell in Asia. Revere’s daughter Maria married Joseph Balestier, the first U.S. consul to Singapore. In 1843, she donated a Revere bell to the first Church of St. Andrew’s in Singapore. Now the country’s national museum now has it in its collection.

Revere bell in the National Museum of Singapore

Revere’s first bell was resold in 1901 to St. James’s Episcopal Church in Cambridge, Mass., after the New Brick Church building was razed. The bell is on display, ringing only on Good Friday and at midnight on Christmas Eve.

More Bells

His biggest and most famous bell is still rung at services in King’s Chapel, where it is said to have a “unique and charming sequence of harmonic effects.”

The First Unitarian Church of Providence boasts that it has the largest bell cast at the Revere foundry in Canton.

The citizens of Bath, Maine, pay a special tribute to their Revere bell every year. They had bought it in 1803 for the new meetinghouse. Forty-seven people made pledges of $491 to buy the bell, in amounts ranging from $2 to $50. Now, at New Year’s Eve at noon they surround City Hall to ring the bell and sing Auld Lang Syne. They could sing Happy Birthday, since Revere was born on Jan. 1, 1735 (New Style).

Extraordinary

Woodstock, Vt. has five Revere bells. In 1818 three men traveled from Woodstock to Boston and bought a Revere bell for the First Congregational Church. It cost $319.95, at 45¢ a pound. It cracked in 1974, and so the church now just displays it. Three Revere bells still ring in Woodstock from the Masonic Temple, Saint James Episcopal Church and the North Universalist Chapel. The fifth rests on the putting green in front of the Woodstock Inn.

Old South

In 2012, a Paul Revere bell was restored and hung in the Old South Meeting House. It had come from the First Baptist Church of Westboro, Mass., which had closed. Two thousand people watched as a crane lifted the bell into the tower. Now the bell sounds the time for the Downtown Crossing neighborhood. Boston Mayor Tom Menino called it “extraordinary.”

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Lowell, Mass., Revere bell by By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21009269. Singapore Revere bell By Smuconlaw. – Own work., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38297817.

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The Great New England Vampire Panic

New England farmers in the 19th century fell prey to a vampire panic. They thought the dead rose from the grave to drain the life from their living families. And they thought they had a solution: dig up the dead, remove their hearts and burn them.

An 1864 French lithograph showing farmers exhuming a body believed to be a vampire.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. That’s because the real culprit was tuberculosis.

Then called consumption, it causes its victims to waste away slowly until they die.

People then didn’t understand that consumption was an infectious disease. It could spread easily among rural families cramped together in farmhouses during the winter.

The Vampire

New England’s folk customs about vampires came from Europe and crossed the Atlantic shortly after the American Revolution.

Archaeologists and historians say the old European folk belief spread from the late 1700s to the late 1800s through southern and western Rhode Island, central-southern Vermont, southeastern Massachusetts and eastern Connecticut.

There are at least 12 historic accounts of panic about vampires. In each case, New Englanders dug up the dead and destroyed their internal organs to stop the spread of the disease.

Different communities treated suspected vampires differently. Some simply flipped them over in their graves in Plymouth, Mass., and in some Maine communities.

In Connecticut, Vermont and Rhode Island residents burned vampires’ hearts, sometimes inhaling the smoke as a cure.

1896 Boston Globe story about Rhode Island superstitions about vampires.

One case of vampire panic, which Henry David Thoreau wrote about, happened in 1817 in Woodstock, Vt. Daniel Ransom was three years old when his brother Frederick, a Dartmouth student, died of consumption.

Daniel Ransom recollected his family had a tendency to tuberculosis. “It was said that if the heart of one of the family who died of consumption was taken out and burned, others would be free from it,” he wrote. “And Father, having some faith in the remedy, had the heart of Frederick taken out after he had been buried, and it was burned in Captain Pearson’s blacksmith forge.”

The remedy failed. Daniel Ransom’s mother, sister and two brothers died of consumption afterward.

Mercy Brown

Mercy Lena Brown also fell victim to the vampire belief in 1892, toward the end of the New England panic.

She and her sisters died of tuberculosis in Exeter, R.I., and their brother Edwin came down with the disease. Their father gave permission to exhume the bodies. So villagers and the local doctor dug up Mary, Mary Olive and Mercy.

Mercy Brown’s gravesite.

The first two had decomposed, but the more recently buried Mercy had not – probably because of the winter cold. Her heart also had blood in it, which they took as a sign she was feasting on brother Edwin. They removed her heart from her body, burned it, mixed it with water and gave it to Edwin to drink. He died two months later.

A reporter for the Providence Journal covered Mercy Brown’s exhumation, and the story spread. It reached newspapers in England, and it may even have inspired Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula.

Griswold Gravel Pit

In the 1990s, archaeologists studied the remains of an unusual skeleton found in a gravel pit in Hopeville, a borough of Griswold, Conn. The gravel pit had once served as a colonial cemetery, and someone had beheaded the skeleton and arranged it in a skull-and-crossbones pattern.

Archaeologists Paul Sledzik and Nicholas Bellantoni concluded the skeleton was another victim of the New England vampire panic.

The two archaeologists cited as evidence the May 20, 1854 issue of the Norwich Courier, which reported on vampires in another borough of Griswold, Jewett City. They concluded the Ray family got the idea of digging up the dead from the Waltons, who lived two miles away in Hopeville about 50 years earlier.

The gravel pit had once been the Walton family cemetery, and the rearranged skeleton showed signs of tuberculosis. The archaeologists discovered indications of the disease in other skeletons in the gravel pit.

Jewett City Vampire Scare

About 50 years after the Waltons dug up their dead, the Ray family did the same, earning local notoriety as the Jewett City vampires.

The Norwich Courier story found by the archaeologists reported Horace Ray had died of consumption. Then two of his grown-up sons died of the disease, and another son came down with it.

The family decided to dig up the two brothers and burn them on the spot. They did it, ‘because the dead were supposed to feed upon the living.’ They believed, ‘so long as the dead body in the grave remained undecomposed, either wholly or in part, the surviving members of the family must continue to furnish substance on which the dead body could feed.’

According to the Damned Connecticut blog,

…it was with the pure intent of protecting the living that the decomposing bodies of Lemuel and Elisha were dug up and burned immediately. Although it appears the body of Joseph Sr. was spared, it was believed the incendiary action did the trick — history does not record a specific date for Henry’s demise, so it’s thought that he survived his affliction.

The Ray family was buried in the Jewett City Cemetery at the end of Anthony Road.

Images: Mercy Brown headstone by Josh McGinn-Flickr, Creative Commons 2.0. This story about vampires was updated in 2022.

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