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Worcester Mass.

Bathsheba Spooner, Hanged for Murder—Or For Her Loyalist Father?

In March of 1778, a traveler brought strange news to Sandwich, Mass., about an unnatural murder in Brookfield. A woman had hired two Russians to kill her husband. The woman turned out to be well-known in Sandwich: Bathsheba Spooner, daughter of a notorious Loyalist.

She had moved away from the Cape Cod town with her family as eight-year-old Bathsheba Ruggles. At 20, she married a prosperous farmer in Brookfield, Joshua Spooner.

Newcomb Tavern, Birthplace of Bathsheba Spooner

Twelve years later, her 17-year-old lover and two deserters from the British Army – Hessians, not Russians – beat Joshua Spooner to death. Then they shoved his body head-first down a well. Bathsheba Spooner went to trial for inciting the men to kill her husband.

She was sentenced to hang, along with her co-conspirators. But Bathsheba was pregnant. Which raised a question: Did her unborn child pay for the sins of his Loyalist grandfather?

Bathsheba Spooner

She was born on Feb. 13, 1745 in the Newcomb Tavern on Grove Street.

Her father, Timothy Ruggles, had gone from guest at the tavern to landlord, as he had married the widow Newcomb. They had six children. The Newcomb Tavern became a hotbed of Loyalist sentiment, and its patrons often clashed with the patriots in town.

Timothy Ruggles then moved the family to a farm in a new town called Hardwick, Mass. There he served as chief judge of the common pleas court in Worcester. Young John Adams, who studied law in Worcester, admired him. “His honor is strict . . . People approached him with dread and terror,” wrote Adams.

Timothy Ruggles

At six feet tall, Ruggles had a commanding presence and an outsize personality. He graduated from Harvard, practiced law and rose to brigadier general in the French and Indian War. He also won a number of elections to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, including as speaker from 1762 to 1764.

As patriots began agitating against the Crown, Timothy Ruggles led the Loyalist cause in New England. He founded the Loyal American Association, which vowed to enforce obedience to the King. The group also pledged resistance to the rebels and to use force to retaliate if harmed.

Unhappy Marriage

Ruggles influenced Bathsheba, his favorite daughter, to marry Joshua Spooner. He reasoned the union would cement her social position in town. Spooner could provide for her with an elegant home and fine clothing on his large farm in nearby Brookfield, Mass.

Winthrop Chandler, ‘The Homestead of General Timothy Ruggles’

But Bathsheba’s marriage to Joshua Spooner did not go well. She was pretty and intelligent, but “her passions had never been properly restrained.” Later in court, witnesses testified her husband was weak, easily intimidated and unable to sustain “a manly importance as the head of the family.” Others described him as an abusive drunk who slept with the servants when Bathsheba turned him away. Though they had four children, she had an “utter aversion” to him.

Meanwhile, her patriotic neighbors shunned her. They viewed her father as a leading traitor, and they suspected she agreed with him. John Adams, exaggerating a bit, wrote that the “whole continent” viewed Timothy Ruggles with “utter contempt and derision.”

In 1774, patriots attacked Ruggles’ farm and poisoned his cattle. Threatened wherever he went, Ruggles finally took refuge in British-occupied Boston. Eventually he fled to Nova Scotia, and Massachusetts confiscated his property.

Bathsheba, who adored her father, found herself isolated in Brookfield with a husband she hated. Some people thought her quite mad.

Infidelity

One day in March 1777, a handsome, 16-year-old Continental Army soldier, Ezra Ross, met Bathsheba while traveling home to Ipswich, Mass. He had completed his enlistment after fighting with Washington in New York and Trenton. He had suddenly taken ill in Brookfield, and Bathsheba took him in and nursed him to health.

Ross returned to Brookfield in August on his way to support the patriots at Ticonderoga. Then, after the victory at Saratoga, Ross came again to the Spooner home. People saw him out riding with Bathsheba, nearly twice his age.

When Bathseba discovered Ezra had gotten her pregnant she made plans to get rid of her husband. She gave Ezra Ross a vial of nitric acid and told him to pour it into Spooner’s grog. But he didn’t do it.

Then in February 1778, two British deserters showed up in Brookfield. Sgt. James Buchanan and Pvt. William Brooks were among the many British soldiers who left the army during its arduous trek from Saratoga to Boston. There they were to leave for Britain.

With her husband away on business, Bathsheba brought the deserters into her home, offering them food, drink and rest. Increasingly desperate to kill her husband before he detected her pregnancy, she offered the soldiers $1,000 to do the deed. They said they would.

When Spooner came home he threw the soldiers out of his house. But Bathsheba hid them in the barn and continued to feed them. On March 1, 1777, Ezra Ross suddenly reappeared, and he agreed to help the soldiers kill her husband. That night, Joshua Spooner came home from Cooley’s Tavern and William Brooks attacked him in his dooryard, aided by Buchanan and Ross. They beat him to death and then threw his body down the well.

Apprehension and Trial

Bathsheba had planned to say Joshua got up in the middle of the night and fell into the well. But she had selected three very clumsy murderers. They left such evidence as Spooner’s battered hat, blood and footprints in the snow and a snowbank next to the well.

The three murderers fled to Worcester, where authorities apprehended them the next day. They wore Joshua Spooner’s clothing and carried Bathsheba’s money.

Robert Treat Paine

They confessed to the crime and went to prison. So did Bathsheba, though she never confessed.

The trial began on April 27 at the Old South Meeting House in Worcester

William Cushing presided, along with John Sullivan and David Sewall – patriots all. Robert Treat Paine, who had signed the Declaration of Independence, led the prosecution on behalf of the commonwealth.

Levi Lincoln, a relative of the 16^th president, defended Bathsheba on the grounds of insanity. “Many cool-headed contemporaries of Mrs. Spooner believed that she was beside herself when she committed the act for which she was tried,” wrote a distant relation, Samuel Swett Green, in 1888. Lincoln himself said he believed her insane.

Lincoln also pleaded with the jury to set aside “all political feeling.”

Bathsheba Spooner, Guilty

After 16 hours, the jury found all four guilty. Cushing set June 4 as the date for them to hang. In late May, Bathsheba begged the court to delay her execution because of her pregnancy. Cushing relented and moved the date to July 2. Then began a series of examinations to determine if the child had quickened in her womb. Panels of midwives did not agree.

William Cushing

Five thousand people watched the four murderers hang on July 2. John Avery, secretary of the Massachusetts Executive Council, signed the warrant of execution. Avery also happened to be Joshua Spooner’s step-brother and an ardent patriot who hated Timothy Ruggles.

With the noose around her neck, she took the sheriff’s hand and uttered her final words: “My dear Sir, I am ready. In a little time I expect to be in bliss and but a few years must elapse when I hope I shall see you and my other friends.” An autopsy revealed a five-month male fetus.

Bathsheba’s sister Martha Green buried Spooner in the Brookfield cemetery and Bathsheba on the Green estate in Worcester.

Monument to Timothy Ruggles in Middleton, Nova Scotia

Timothy Ruggles died in Nova Scotia at the age of 82 in 1793.

Images: Monument to Timothy Ruggles By Hantsheroes – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37862735.

With thanks to The Most Extraordinary Murder, by Chaim M. Rosenberg for the Journal of the American Revolution, Sept. 20, 2018.

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When Poor Apprentice Laborers Were 2 Years Old

In 1754, Boston’s overseer of the poor bound out Joseph Clifton, aged two, as an apprentice to Aaron Clinton, a brickmaker in Medford, Mass. Joseph, probably orphaned or abandoned, had no say in the matter.

For the next 19 years, Joseph couldn’t leave his master’s household without permission. He had to gladly obey all of his orders. In return, Clinton would provide room and board and teach Joseph his trade, along with reading, writing and arithmetic. When Joseph turned 21, Clinton would give him two suits, called freedom suits, one for Sunday and one for work.

Joseph wasn’t alone. Surviving records in Massachusetts show that from 1735 to 1805, Boston’s overseers of the poor bound out about 1400 children as apprentices. Rhode Island’s surviving records show 725 poor children were bound out during the second half of the 18^th century.

Apprenticeship contract for Sarah Scribner.

For some, like Isaiah Thomas, apprenticeship led to a successful career and a place in history. For others apprenticeship meant a lifetime of poverty and toil. And in the case of Nathaniel Sewell, it meant an early death.

Nathaniel Sewell, Smelly Apprentice

In 1643, a London street kid named Nathaniel Sewell arrived in Newbury, Mass., to work as an apprentice for William Franklin. The child had arrived with a batch of poor children sent to Massachusetts, where colonists had a pressing need for laborers.

It had been 24 years since English authorities shipped the first load of 100 homeless children to Virginia, where they labored as apprentices until they turned 21. The experiment succeeded, at least for the masters, and the next year another hundred kids arrived in Virginia.

Nathaniel Sewell, a smelly child, had the scurvy when he landed in Massachusetts. His master treated his young apprentice harshly. Franklin left him in the cold and wet, corrected him mercilessly and hung him in the chimney as punishment. But Sewell would not bend to Franklin’s will, and so Franklin took him to court in Boston.

On the way, Franklin had to tie the sick boy to his horse because he couldn’t sit up. Nathaniel begged for water, but Franklin refused. Hours after they reached Boston, Nathaniel Sewell died. Franklin was charged with killing his servant, found guilty and hanged for the offense.

The Family Apprentice

The Puritans believed servants, apprentices or employees had a duty to obey the master of the household, but the master also had a duty to them. He had to teach them to read Scripture, follow a trade and be a good person. He was also not supposed to kill them.

The practice of apprenticeship didn’t always work out, as in the case of Nathaniel Sewell. But the Puritans believed in the concept as sound. To their minds, an orderly society rested on the family – a family headed by a male. The single life inspired “sin and iniquity,” the Puritans believed.

In the 17^th century, Massachusetts, Plymouth and Connecticut colonies actually passed laws requiring single people to live with a family. If a single person didn’t find an established family, the local authorities would find one for him – or her.

That went for children, too.

Child Labor

From 1692 to the Revolution, Massachusetts took care of hundreds of poor children younger than 10 by binding them out as apprentices to families. (The maritime trades were the one exception to the family apprentice). About three dozen children hadn’t reached the age of five.

Most young girl apprentices spent a lot of time doing this.

In Rhode Island, very young children (who couldn’t be expected to work much) came with a premium paid by the town. Colored children made up 25 percent of all indentures in Rhode Island, where apprenticeships lasted longer.

Overseers of the Poor

In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, poor families in Puritan New England could expect a knock on the door. The door would open to admit selectmen or overseers of the poor, who would inspect their home. Then they’d decide whether or not to take a child away from the family as a pauper apprentice.

In the case of craft apprentices, like Paul Revere (silversmithing) or Benjamin Franklin (printing), parents had a say in the terms of the agreement. Not so in the case of poor, abandoned, orphaned or illegitimate children.

Puritan town officials even took children from their homes if they thought the parents immoral. Around 1644, for example, they took two children away from Ruben Guppy of Salem and apprenticed them to another family. Guppy had gone to court many times for stealing fences, lying and accusing his wife of a “wanton dalliance.” He’d also said something blasphemous to Puritan ears. God, he believed, found his nail parings as acceptable as a day of Thanksgiving,

Heartfelt Pleas

But town leaders also seized children from their parents because of their poverty. In Northampton, Mass., town officials in 1680 took two sons and one daughter away from Robert Lyman and his wife. They apprenticed the children to other families despite the parents’ heartfelt pleas to the court to keep their children.

It could have been worse for Mr. and Mrs. Lyman. In 1756, Massachusetts passed a law that ordered selectmen to bind out adults as workers for one year if they couldn’t support their children. Three years later, the colony passed another law allowing an unmarried mother to be indentured for five years if the child went on the dole before the age of five. Those two laws only took effect for a few years, and the Legislature did not reenact them.

Isaiah Thomas, Success Story

For some poor children like Isaiah Thomas, apprenticeship was the best thing that could happen to them.

Success story Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas’ father abandoned the family, leaving his wife to support five children. Isaiah went to live with a family in the country between the ages of two and six. At seven, he returned to Boston, where authorities drew up an apprenticeship contract on July 7, 1756, to a printer named Zachariah Fowle.

Until he turned 21, Isaiah had to obey Fowle, keep his secrets, leave him only with permission and avoid gambling, taverns, fornication and matrimony. In return, Fowle had to teach him printing, to cipher, read and write, and to give him two freedom suits when he turned 21.

Freedom suits, by the way, had considerable value. In 1761 a freedom suit was worth about five months’ wages. A few poor apprentices also received freedom dues in the form of cash, land or tools.

Isaiah Thomas ran away from Fowle at age 18, but returned to Boston and started an influential newspaper, The Massachusetts Spy. Thomas took up the patriot cause and emerged as the foremost publisher of his age. He was an ally of John Hancock and Sam Adams and friend of Paul Revere.

During the Siege of Boston, Thomas smuggled his printing press out of town and settled in Worcester. There he published the Bible, almanacs and the History of Printing in America. He also formed the American Antiquarian Society.

From Boston to the Boonies

In 18^th-century Boston, children could end up as apprentices far from home and family. Hard economic times had fallen on the town after a series of wars and smallpox epidemics. Impressment of sailors by the British Royal Navy had also scared off shipping.

But settlers spreading out into outlying towns needed plenty of help. They looked to Boston’s poor to get it.

In 1745, Edward Holin was apprenticed in Boston at the age of 18 months to Robert Anderson, a housewright in Chester, N.H.
Five years later, five-year-old Mary Hermon left Boston to apprentice as a household servant to a trader named Joseph Langeret in Lebanon, Conn.
In 1765, seven-year-old Thomas More departed Boston for Pownalborough, Maine, as an apprentice housewright for the next 14 years to James Flagg.

Conversely, Rhode Island’s economy thrived, and the colony’s wharves and workshops needed cheap labor. Perhaps that’s why Rhode Island’s pauper apprentice boys didn’t win their freedom until 24, girls until 21.

Mary Butcher, 7, Apprentice

Few poor boy apprentices came close to Isaiah Thomas’ success. Historian Lawrence Towner found only three apprentices listed as masters of their own trade in 1796 out of 60 boys bound out to tradesmen between 1760 and 1790. They worked as a tailor, a hairdresser and a tobacconist.

The best that could happen to a poor servant girl was marriage to a decent husband. Other than that, she’d spend her life in service or, like Mary Butcher, end up in the poorhouse.

In 1754, Boston authorities bound seven-year-old Mary Butcher as an apprentice servant to Richard Storkney, a yeoman farmer in Stoughton, Mass.

The Idle Servant by Nicholas Maas.

For the next 11 years she had to work for him in exchange for room, board and a rudimentary education.

Storkney, like all masters, had to produce letters testifying to his good character (the Nathaniel Sewall case had apparently proved instructive). Then Mrs. Storkney had to train Mary to spin wool, to keep house and to read. (Girls didn’t need writing or math.) When Mary got her freedom at 18, the Storkneys had to give her two freedom dresses.

Fifty years later she reappeared in the record, poor, single and lame in Canton, Mass. The overseers of the poor wrote, “She is a person whom nature has not been over bountiful in furnishing her mental faculties.” They sent her to the Boston poorhouse, where she presumably died.

End Notes

With thanks to: Markets for Children in Early America: A Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship John E. Murray and Ruth Wallis Herndon in The Journal of Economic History, 2002. Graham Millar, The Poor Apprentices of Boston: Indentures of Poor Children Bound Out Apprentice By the ‘Overseers of the Poor of Boston, July 4, 1958. And The Indentures of Boston’s Poor Apprentices: 1734-1805 by Lawrence W. Towner, 1962.

Images: Young Girl at Spinning Wheel By https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/0a/28/c704a981cdb6bf5f30d829506d67.jpgGallery: https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/V0039573.html Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-03-23): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/th7sdqf4 CC-BY-4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36633776. This story was updated in 2022.

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Danger, Disappointment and Desire: Colonial Superstitions About Moles

Colonial New Englanders commonly held superstitions about moles — the spots on the skin, not the small burrowing animal.

One of the most pernicious held that moles and other markings in certain places denoted the bearer had made a pact with the devil. In other words, that person was a witch.

From “Examination of a witch” by Tompkins Harrison Matteson (1853)

But more frivolous interpretations existed, as well.

The New academy of Complements, a book of sample love letters and advice, enjoyed popularity in England in the 1500s to the 1700s. It went through countless printings and iterations. The early American printer Isaiah Thomas of Worcester brought it to this country in the 1700s for entertainment and advice.

It included a complete treatise on the meaning of moles.

Superstitions About Moles

A mole in the middle of the forehead denotes riches and advancement, by the favor of friends.

On the right part of the forehead, a mole signifies a life prosperous and successful in love affairs; on the left, that you shall meet with many crosses and disappointments.

If you have a mole between the eyes inclining to the nose, you will grow rich by marriage.

A mole on the nose signifies a speedy marriage, and the party to be fruitful in children.

A mole on the right cheek shows the party to be prosperous in worldly affairs, but covetous and desirous to circumvent other people.

Could the colonists have imagined Marilyn?

For a man, a mole on the left cheek means he is cross in his affairs; for a woman, lots of honor and danger of life in child birth.

A mole on the chin demonstrates a perfect wife, but promises no great riches.

A mole on the left arm promises much labor, but on the right, riches gained by industry.

More Mole Superstitions

A mole on the breast promises the party advancement by the favor of the great ones.

On the belly, a mole demonstrates the party to be beloved and to gain riches and advantages by it.

A mole on or near the private parts promises ability in duties, vigorous in love and successful in many children.

Jennifer Lawrence — labor and sorrow?

A mole on the neck denotes much labor and sorrow.

People with a mole on the right hip are greatly to be beloved and fortunate in love affairs.

A mole on the left hip signifies the party shall be rich by death of relations.

A mole on the right knee promises success in love and several marriages.

Finally, much better to have a mole on the right leg than the left. A mole on the right leg promises plenty and an easy life, but on the left, travail and poverty. The same holds true for the right or left foot or any part of the heel.

Thanks to: The New academy of complements erected for ladies, gentlewomen, courtiers, gentlemen, scholars, soldiers, citizens, country-men, and all persons, of what degree soever, of both sexes: stored with variety of courtly and civil complements, eloquent letters of love and friendship : with an exact collection of the newest and choicest songs à la mode, both amorous and jovial / compiled by the most refined wits of this age. This story on superstitions about moles last updated in 2022. Image of Jennifer Lawrence: By IVN News – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67032781.

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Hepsibeth Hemenway, the Nipmuc Cakemaker of Worcester, Mass.

Hepsibeth Hemenway was a mixed-race laundress and cook who never ventured far from Worcester, Mass., but she fascinates people more than 150 years after her death.

An unlikely portrait of Hepsibeth in old age hangs in the Worcester Historical M useum.

How and why a woman of such limited means had her portrait painted is a mystery to this day.

Hepsibeth Hemenway

Hepsibeth Hemenway portrait at the Worcester Historical Museum

She was descended from Samuel Bowman, a proprietor of Natick, Mass., one of the praying Indian towns of Plymouth Colony. Bowman returned to Worcester after King Phillip’s War.

Hepsibeth was born March 25, 1763, the daughter of a Nipmuc Indian, Lydia Bowman, and a white man named Crosman. It was illegal for a white man to marry an Indian then, and town records show her simply as the daughter of Lydia Bowman.

Her father died in the American Revolution, and her mother died a pauper shortly after the war ended. She lived and worked as a servant for the family of Judge Timothy Paine until 1789.

During the first Fourth of July celebration in 1777, Hepsibeth Hemenway was said to have roasted a pig on Worcester Common. A year later, she watched approvingly as Bathsheba Spooner was hanged for the murder of her husband.

She left the Paine household when she married Jeffrey Hemenway at the age of 26. He was 53.

Jeffrey Hemenway

The Timothy Paine House

Jeffrey Hemenway had led an adventurous life before marrying Hepsibeth. He was a widower believed to be half American-Indian and half African-American.

He had been brought in infancy from Boston to Framingham, Mass., and given to Ebenezer Hemenway and his wife Mary Eve. Mary Eve was captured by Indians as a baby and redeemed as a girl. His foster parents adopted Jeffrey and he learned the carpenter’s trade. He worked on the Old South Church after fighting in the French and Indian War.

Hemenway was adopted by his foster father and learned to be a carpenter. He fought in the French and Indian War. Afterward he worked on the Old South Meeting House.

In the Revolution he fought at the Battles of Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill. He served in the Continental Army for seven years without a scratch. One of his daughters kept a nutmeg grater he had carried through the war to grate roots.

Cakes

Jeffrey and Hepsibeth Hemenway had 10 children, eight of whom lived to adulthood. To help support the family, she took care of indigent women at town expense and did laundry – the worst, lowest paying job available.

She was an excellent cook and never wanted for customers for her celebrated wedding cakes. They weren’t the white cakes we know today, but large, dark, and filled with fruit and nuts.

Perhaps her exposure to Worcester’s elite families – the ones who could afford wedding cakes – has something to do with the portrait of her. The clothes she wore in the painting were probably hand-me-downs from a well-to-do woman.

Jeffrey died when Hepsibeth was 56. She rented out her small house at 79 May St. and moved to a smaller one near the cemetery on Mechanic Street, the heart of Worcester’s commercial district. Until the last year of her life, 1847, she took in laundry and hung it outside.

Portrait

In the 1840s a local dispute arose over the burying ground. Some wanted to move the bodies and develop the land. They complained children played among the headstones, men gossiped along the perimeter and laundry fluttered over the graves.

An artist named Henry Woodward painted a picture of the laundry over the cemetery, and some speculate he found Hepsibeth intriguing and decided to paint her, too.

Her youngest son, Ebenezer, worked for many years as the janitor at Worcester City Hall. When Hepsibeth Hemenway died on Feb. 17, 1847, he wrote a poem to her that tells us more about her than a parade of facts and anecdotes.

One stanza reads:

O I thought of my boyhood–thy kindness to me,

When youngest and dearest I sat on thy knee;

Of thy love to me ever so fondly expressed,

As I grew up to manhood unconscious how blest.

Gone; gone; oh! thou art gone;

The Lord ever bless thee–oh! bless thee, my son.

Read the whole thing here.

Images: Photo of Timothy Paine House By Pvmoutside – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15798054. This story was updated in 2022.

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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/.

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Frederick Law Olmsted Plans A Cemetery or a Hundred

Chances are good you’ve encountered the work of Frederick Law Olmsted more than once in your lifetime. You’ve probably set foot in his parks or on his school campuses, or maybe you read his magazine. Quite possibly you also had some interaction with the Red Cross.

Frederick Law Olmsted by John Singer Sargent

Olmsted was born in Hartford on April 26, 1822, to a modestly prosperous family. He worked as a seaman, a farmer, a surveyor, a social reformer and a journalist. Then he found his niche as a landscape architect. He also helped found the weekly magazine The Nation.

Olmsted co-designed Central Park, headed the first Yosemite commission and led the campaign to protect Niagara Falls. He designed the U.S. Capitol Grounds and planned both the Great White City of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” of green space.

The list goes on. He designed Elm Park in Worcester, Mass., considered by many to be the first municipal park in America. He also designed the 735-acre Forest Park in Springfield, Mass.

Groton School, campus designed by Frederick Law Olmsted’s firm

His firm designed dozens of academic campuses, including Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Yale University, the Groton School, Berwick Academy, Pomfret School, the University of Maine and Phillips Academy. They also designed Shelburne Farms in Vermont, Providence Butler Hospital in Rhode Island, Arnold Arboretum in Massachusetts and Seaside Park in Bridgeport, Conn.

Olmsted Goes South

Frederick Law Olmsted spent five years traveling the South for the New York Times (then the New York Daily Times), reporting on the slave economy.

He didn’t like what he saw. Olmsted concluded the cotton monopoly did more harm than good. He then reported that slavery made the slave states inefficient and backward. His observations had a big impact on the national debate about slavery.

Central Park in 1901, lower end of the mall

Then he co-designed Central Park with Calvin Vaux – the largest public works project in the country. When the Civil War broke out, Olmsted became executive director of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, a precursor to the Red Cross. He administered medical relief, setting up field hospitals and hospital ships. Olmsted also distributed food and hospital supplies along the entire battlefront.

He had an almost maniacal belief in system and organization, for which he received much criticism.

Frederick Law Olmsted, Planner

Witold Rybczynski credits Olmsted with pioneering the concept of planning in a big industrializing country. “This recognition was not yet widely shared, which is why he was often misunderstood,” wrote Rybczynski. In A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century, Rybczynski quoted Olmsted’s mentor.

“He looks far ahead, & his plans & methods are sometimes mysterious,” wrote the Rev. Henry Whitney Bellows.

“[His critics] think him impracticable, expensive, slow — when he is only long-headed, with broader, deeper notions of economy than themselves, & with no disposition to hurry what, if done satisfactorily, must be thoroughly.

Olmsted designed Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn.

Rybczynski also offered an anecdote that demonstrated Olmsted’s farsightedness. Montgomery Meigs, quartermaster general of the U.S. Army, wrote him a letter five years after the Civil War. Meigs, who respected Olmsted, asked his advice in landscaping national cemeteries.

Olmsted then replied the cemeteries should be designed to establish dignity and tranquility. He warned Meigs to avoid the current fashion for elaborate and artificial gardening because it would disappear.

To create a sacred grove for the war dead, he recommended just two things. First, building a simple wall to enclose the cemetery. Second, he told Meigs to plant trees indigenous to the cemetery’s region. To save money, he should plant nurseries next to the cemeteries. And if land weren’t available for nurseries, he suggested planting seedlings between the tiers of graves.

Olmsted died on Aug. 28, 1903, and is buried in Old North Cemetery in Hartford.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Central Park By …trialsanderrors – Lower end of mall, Central Park, New York City, 1901, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11159061. Willowbrook Cemetery in Westport, Conn., By Jllm06 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56543924.

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