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Mario Buda, The Other Boston Bomber

On Sept. 16, 1920, an Italian immigrant named Mario Buda parked his horse-drawn wagon across from J.P. Morgan and Co. and down the street from the New York Stock Exchange.

Few noticed as the balding little man left his old horse and rusty wagon amid the lunchtime street bustle. Then the bells of Trinity Church chimed noon, and a deafening blast sent scores of people to the pavement. Windows shattered, shrapnel flew and a ball of flame and smoke rose to the sky.

Aftermath of the Wall Street bombing.

As victims lay bleeding in the street, Mario Buda melted into the crowd.

At least that’s what law enforcement officers – and since then, historians — surmised. Mario Buda made a likely suspect after four years of anarchist terror bombings eventually linked to him. He probably blew up Wall Street because his closest friends, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, had been charged with murder just five days earlier.

Anarchist Terror

World War I had ended nearly two years before the Wall Street bombings, but the anarchist violence it spawned didn’t stop with the Armistice.

Well before the war, anarchists had allied themselves with the radical labor unions, the Industrial Workers of the World, known as Wobblies.

Inflation ate into workers’ earnings as war approached, and tens of thousands walked off the job for higher pay and shorter hours. Some of the biggest strikes in history had taken place just before the United States intervened in World War I, including the 1914 Ludlow massacre in Colorado and the 1912 Bread and Roses strike in Lawrence, Mass.

Labor unrest had spread throughout New England in such actions as the 1912 American Woolen Mill strike in Willimantic, Conn., the 1913 Ipswich Hosiery Mill strike and the 1915 Bridgeport munitions workers strike.

As the United States edged closer to World War I, anarchists battled the capitalists who, they believed, made huge wartime profits off their downtrodden workers. Anarchists rejected all authority and embraced violence in the war against capitalism.

Beginning in 1912, an Italian immigrant named Luigi Galleani led the anarchists from his newspaper office in Lynn, Mass. The Justice Department called his newspaper, the Subversive Chronicle, the ‘most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country.’ Though small, the newspaper had subscribers all over the world.

Galleani found a receptive audience in some of the 30,000 Italians who lived in Boston—including a 30-something immigrant named Mario Buda.

Mario Buda

He was born in Sicily on Oct. 13, 1884, the son of a gardener. In 1907, then in his early 20s, he immigrated to the United States and worked as a gardener, in construction and in factories He returned to Italy in 1911, then came back to Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood two years later.

People described him as quiet, serious and proud; friends gave him the nickname Nasone, or Big Nose. Police considered him elusive and dangerous.

At first he commuted to his job in a Framingham hat factory. Then he and his brother started a cleaning store selling to Wellesley College students. All the while he went to anarchist meetings and anarchist picnics, took part in anarchist theater recitals and started an anarchist school.

As an anarchist, he supported labor strikes, and he met Nicola Sacco during the 1913 Hopedale, Mass., textile strike. Police shot and killed a worker during the 12-week strike, which failed in the end.

Three years later, in 1916, he met Bartolomeo Vanzetti at the Cordage strike in Plymouth, Mass.

Violence Begins in 1916

By 1916, the United States began to prepare for the war then raging in Europe. On New Year’s Day, a security guard discovered a wicker suitcase filled with dynamite in the Massachusetts Statehouse. It failed to go off.

But the next day, a bomb went off in Woburn, Mass., ripping apart a New England Manufacturing Co. factory. Rumor had it the company received threatening letters telling it to stop shipping goods to Europe.

Across the country, communities began to hold Preparedness Days to celebrate the military buildup for the U.S. entry into war. On July 22, 1916, an anarchist bomb went off in San Francisco during a Preparedness Day parade, killing 10 and wounding 40. Police suspected Mario Buda of setting off the bomb, but they never closed the case.

Luigi Galleani

Then in early December of 1916, an antiwar riot turned violent in Boston’s North End. Police arrested 10 people, including Mario Buda. In the courtroom he refused to take an oath on the Bible, and he received a five-month prison sentence.

A few weeks after the riot, a bomb rocked the North End, blowing up the Salutation Street police station. It didn’t hurt anyone, as it exploded on a quiet Sunday morning. But the bomb blew a hole through the three-foot brick wall and broke every window for blocks.

Mario Buda Bombs Milwaukee

When Mario Buda left prison, he went to Monterrey, Mexico, with Sacco, Vanzetti and another Italian anarchist, Carlo Valdinoci. Monterrey had an active community of Italian anarchists, and some historians suspect Buda and his friends honed their bomb making techniques while there.

On April 6, 1917, the United States entered World War I. Boston’s district attorney warned of more anarchist violence. Though most of the city’s 30,000 Italians supported the war, police described the North End as ‘anarchist headquarters.’

Two months later, police arrested the three leading anarchists in the United States. In New York, they arrested Emma Goldman, who’d once run an ice cream parlor in Worcester, Mass., and her lover Alexander Berkman. They arrested Luigi Galleani at his home in Wrentham, Mass., for an editorial he’d written opposing the draft.

Some Italian community leaders tried to distance themselves from the anarchists. In November, the pastor of the Italian Evangelical Church in Milwaukee held a loyalty rally in front of local anarchist headquarters. A riot broke out, and police shot and killed two anarchists and arrested 11.

An anti-anarchist cartoon

The Milwaukee killings propelled Mario Buda out of Mexico. Shortly after police shot the anarchists, someone discovered a package in the evangelical church basement. The janitor took it to the police station, where it exploded, killing nine police officers and a civilian.

Police never caught the culprit. Years later, though, anarchists revealed who made the bomb: Mario Buda.

The 1919 Anarchist Bombings

The year 1919 brought a wave of anarchist bombings. They started when Luigi Galleani delivered an inflammatory speech in Taunton, Mass., just prior to his deportation. The next day, four anarchists blew themselves up trying to plant a bomb in the American Woolen Co. in Franklin, Mass

The new attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, vowed to crack down on ‘aliens and Bolsheviks, radicals, and anarchists.’

On April 28, mail bombs arrived at the homes and offices of 36 prominent men, including John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jr., Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,– and A. Mitchell Palmer. Only one exploded, blowing off the hands of a housekeeper.

Then in June 1919, large bombs went off within 90 minutes of each other in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, New York, Washington, D.C., and Paterson, N.J. A night watchman died in the New York explosion.

The bomb in Washington, D.C. blew up on the front porch of A. Mitchell Palmer. It exploded in the hands of the Italian anarchist who’d carried it, Carlo Valdinoci – one of Bruda’s traveling companions in Mexico. Valdinoci was picked up in little pieces on the front lawn of Palmer’s neighbors, Assistant Navy Secretary Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor.

Did Mario Bruda have anything to do with the 1919 bombings? Probably.

Palmer Raids

Palmer immediately blamed anarchists and radicals for the bombings he termed ‘terrorism.’ Beginning on Nov. 7, 1919, the FBI started rounding up suspects in what became known as the Palmer raids. Led by J. Edgar Hoover, they were notorious for violating people’s rights. The FBI threw suspects into filthy, crowded prisons without telling them why. They arrested people just for visiting prisoners in Hartford’s notorious Seyms Street Jail.

All in all, the FBI caught up 10,000 people in its dragnet, many of them Italian or Jewish from Eastern Europe. In Connecticut they raided Ansonia, Bridgeport, Hartford, Meriden, New Haven, New London, South Manchester and Waterbury. In Massachusetts they raided Boston, Chelsea, Brockton, Bridgewater, Norwood, Worcester, Springfield, Chicopee Falls, Holyoke, Gardner, Fitchburg, Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill. And in New Hampshire, they rounded up people in Clarement, Derry, Lincoln, Manchester, Nashua and Portsmouth.

Francis Fisher Kane, U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania, resigned in protest. By such methods, he said, “we drive underground and make dangerous what was not dangerous before.” His words proved prophetic.

Mario Buda Bombs Wall Street

Mario Buda called Sacco and Vanzetti ‘the best friends I had in America.’ Police arrested them in connection with the murder of two men during a robbery of the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company. Police had also questioned Buda, who escaped.

Prosecutors charged Sacco and Vanzetti with murder on Sept. 11, 1920. Five days later, a dilapidated wagon carrying 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of sash weights blew up on Wall Street.

The Associated Press reported,

Office workers were just hurrying into the street for their noonday meal when a jet of black smoke and flame rose from the center of the world’s greatest street of finance.

Then came a blast and a moment later scores of men, women and children were lying, blood covered, on the pavement.

The explosion killed 38 people and injured 143, including J.P. Morgan’s son Junius. Joseph P. Kennedy, who’d been walking by, was badly shaken but unhurt. Most of the victims were clerks, stenographers and office boys.

American Anarchist Fighters

A letter carrier discovered several leaflets in a nearby mailbox. In crude letters, it read,

Free the Political Prisoners or it Will Be Sure Death for All of You! American Anarchist Fighters.

Federal investigators settled on Mario Buda as the perpetrator, as he had rented the horse that pulled the wagon bomb. But they never questioned him, and Buda slipped out of the country. The Wall Street Bombing case was never closed.

Mike Buda would resurface in Italy as Mike Boda and carry on his anarchist activities. He died in Italy on June 1, 1963.

The limestone walls at 23 Wall Street still bear the pockmarks of the 1920 bombing.

With thanks to The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day by Steve Puleo and Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background By Paul Avrich. This story was updated in 2022.

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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.

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Carl Rettich, The RI Mobster Who Invented Cement Shoes

When Carl Rettich moved to a seaside mansion on Warwick Neck in Warwick, R.I., people thought he was a genteel lawyer named Charles Ryerson who moved to the neighborhood to take care of his elderly father.

The crime castle of Carl Rettich. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

He actually belonged to the mob and had links to Al Capone.

Carl Rettich

The New Jersey-born Rettich got involved with New York’s criminal underworld at 17. He overheard a plot to kill a wholesale poultry dealer, but kept his lips sealed about the murder. That got him started in the mob-controlled live poultry business. He soon moved on to bootlegging.

Suspected of a 1924 murder in New York, Carl Rettich moved to Rhode Island to run New England’s biggest crime ring during Prohibition.

When the truth about ‘Charles Ryerson’ emerged, so many people flocked to ogle his crime castle that an ice cream vendor showed up to sell his wares.

Prohibition

When Prohibition took effect, speakeasies sprang up all over Rhode Island (and elsewhere). Illegal hooch flowed freely in Kent County: in West Warwick, Old Warwick, Warwick Neck, Arctic, Apponaug and East Greenwich.

Smugglers operated with impunity along Rhode Island’s rugged shoreline, where quiet inlets and coves disguised their activities.

Danny Walsh, a prominent Rhode Island horse breeder, controlled the liquor smuggled into Rhode Island. Carl Rettich joined Walsh and began expanding operations. He bought the 20-room mansion overlooking a cove. The press later nicknamed it the ‘crime castle’ and ‘murder mansion.’

Carl Rettich

He lived large on Warwick Point. People said Rettich threw parties for politicians and ‘high-hat’ friends, during which he showed off his machine gun by firing it on the front lawn. The estate was so isolated the neighbors didn’t complain.

Carl Rettich also had a fleet of speedboats tricked out for smugglers’ every need. They each had three Liberty airplane engines and were plated with armor and layers of New York telephone directories. They would speed out to the 12-mile limit, where they unloaded bootleg liquor from seagoing vessels. Then the rumrunners brought their contraband to a stone dock leading to Rettich’s crime castle. They stored the booze in a secret underground vault before distributing it.

Then Danny Walsh and Carl Rettich had a falling out. Walsh disappeared in February 1933 a day after they argued in public. Rettich was suspected of accepting a ransom of $40,000 for Walsh and then doublecrossing Walsh’s family.

Grisly Tale

The Associated Press ran a story on June 3, 1935, speculating that Walsh ‘was stood in a tub of cement until it hardened about his feet, and then thrown alive into the sea.’ The AP reported it was just a ‘grisly underworld tale,’ and no witnesses had been found.

Police kept looking. An informant tipped them off to Rettich’s criminal activities. He told them Rettich’s crime castle contained a secret vault and an underground tunnel.

In April 1935, police acted on a tip. On the banks of Lake Pearl in Wrentham, Mass., they found the body of Andino Merola slumped over a Chevrolet with a .38 bullet in his head. Merola was a small-time associate of Carl Rettich, and police believed he was involved in the murder.

In July, police got a warrant to search the crime castle. They combed the property, but found no tunnel, no vault. The basement was spotless, with four whitewashed brick posts.

A Few Beer Cans

One detective thought the basement looked too clean. He looked carefully and found a large screw in one of the posts. When he turned it, the cement floor rose slowly to the ceiling, revealing steps that led to a concrete room. But they only found a few beer cans in the room.

Police discover the secret vault. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

On the rest of the property, though, police found an arsenal of weapons, a car with bullet holes in it and stolen money.

Police eventually accumulated evidence implicating Rettich in the disappearance of Danny Walsh, a dozen Massachusetts bank robberies and four murders.

As details about the real Carl Rettich emerged, his crime castle took center stage. On May 5, 1935, a crowd of 15,000 people came to rubberneck the 20-room mansion.

Cement Shoes

Informants told police that Rettich’s gang took Walsh to a dungeon and clubbed him on the head. They put his body in a barrel filled with concrete and dumped it into the ocean.

His girlfriend talked too freely about what happened to Walsh, they said. Rettich’s men took her to the underground vault, killed her and put her feet in a tub of wet cement. Then they dumped her into the ocean. Putting a whole body in wet cement was just too heavy.

No one ever found their bodies. But Carl Rettich spent the rest of his life in prison anyway, convicted on multiple charges for a Fall River mail heist that netted $129,000.

Carl Rettich built his crime empire with help from corrupt public officials. Prosecutors later discovered that Rettich and his gang had paid off Warwick police for three years. An investigation uncovered the bribes, and 11 police officers left the force.

This story was updated in 2023.

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The Franklin Library, Not Quite What the Town Wanted

In 1790, the townspeople of Franklin, Mass., decided they wanted a bell. They got the Franklin Library instead.

The Franklin Library

The library opened its doors to everyone in town, the first public library in the United States. It had another distinction: Benjamin Franklin started it.

In 1778, Franklin broke off from Wrentham, Mass., and planned to incorporate as the town of Exeter. But before official incorporation, someone changed the name to honor Benjamin Franklin. Word had arrived that Franklin gained French support for the American Revolution, key to American victory.

Benjamin Franklin

Seven years later, someone — his name unknown today — approached Franklin and reminded him of the honor the town had given him. He suggested Franklin reciprocate by donating a bell for a steeple the town wanted to build on its meeting house.

Franklin commented in a letter to Dr. Richard Price that the ‘country people’ of Franklin should spare “…themselves the Expense of a Steeple at present, and that they would accept a gift of Books instead of a Bell, Sense being preferable to Sound.” He noted the poverty of the town, and commented it no more needed a bell than a toad needed a tail.

Franklin asked Price, then in London, to select proper books for the people of Franklin. Price’s selection included history and theology books. (For a list of the books, click here.)

The Franklin Library

The books, 116 of them, arrived some time before June 22, 1786. Within a year, the townspeople started squabbling over who could use the Franklin Library. The town voted to only allow members of the Congregational Church to use it. But some families lived so far from the church they attended other Congregational churches.

The town resolved the issue at Town Meeting on Nov. 26, 1790:

That the Rev. Nathaniel Emmons be Directed to lend the Books presented to this town by the late Dr. Franklin to the Inhabitants of this town at large, and until the town shall order other ways, they being accountable to him for the use and improvement of said books.

A bookcase held the Franklin Library at the home of Rev. Emmons while he served as minister of the Congregational Church. By the mid-19^th century, the town kept the library in a barn. A library association was formed to find a place for the books. They moved around until 1904, when the Ray family donated a building. The library renovated the structure and reopened in 2017.

Horace Mann, a Franklin native and the father of American public education, was enthralled by several books he found in the library.

“Had I the power, I would scatter libraries over the whole land, as the sower sows his wheat field,” Mann said.

This story about the Franklin Library was updated in 2022.

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New England Colonists Thunderstruck by the Lightning Storms of 1768

Terrific lightning storms unsettled New England colonists during the summer of 1768, when rising tensions with Great Britain led to conflict and violence. But unlike the Puritans of a century before, the colonists didn’t view the lightning as a message from God.

Benjamin Franklin

The Age of Enlightenment had arrived, and reason and analysis won over superstition and traditional authority. Or at least began to.

So even as Sam Adams was proselytizing for rebellion against the King, inquiring minds tried to analyze the severe lightning that struck that summer. They were continuing the scientific analysis that Ben Franklin had started. He’d conducted his famous kite experiment 14 years before then.

The 1768 Lightning Storms

The tremendous lightning storms in the summer of 1768 came as the Townshend Acts passed in 1767, took effect and colonists in British North America resisted them.

In February 1768, Sam Adams circulated a letter among the colonies opposing the Acts, calling them taxation without representation.

Agitators in Boston harassed customs inspectors, and in May a British warship with 50 guns sailed into Boston Harbor. In July, Gov. Francis Bernard dissolved the General Court.

Harvard’s second Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy, John Winthrop. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums.

On July 2, lightning struck Hollis Hall at Harvard College. In a letter to the editors of the Boston Chronicle, John Winthrop wrote that what happened supported the view that lightning was electricity. He described how the violent thunderstorm beat down a chimney top, shattered woodwork and windows and tore several feet of brickwork. Several students felt a blow, which they compared to an electric shock. One students was thrown from his chair, perceiving neither the flash nor the thunder.

And then Winthrop described the lightning rod, which Franklin had invented in 1749:

In my house, that has such an apparatus fitted with bells to give notice of the passage of the lightening along the rods, the bells began to ring as soon as the first thunder was heard at a distance.

The bells continued ringing briskly for about an hour, he wrote. The lightning “frequently flashed from one bell to the other, and with cracks loud enough to be heard in the farther part of the house.”

Boycott

In August, Boston merchants agreed to boycott British goods until the repeal of the Townshend Acts. Tremendous thunderstorms struck from Salem, Mass., to Norwalk, Conn., on the afternoon of August 1. In Roxbury, Mass., lightning shattered a window. In Boston, it knocked a clock case into fragments on a Winter Street home. It also threw clothes around a room in a Water Street home and melted a pewter plate on a mantel in Temple Street. It stunned two children, who recovered.

That storm extended to Connecticut, where lightning knocked over a tree in Hartford, killing two cows, and set a barn in Norwalk on fire.

The fierce lightning flashes inspired a citizen in Salem, Mass., to send a poem to the Essex Gazette:

What grumbling Noise comes thro’ the yielding Air!
Is it the Cannon’s Roar! The Din of War?
No! — ‘Tis the Voice of God; he Thunder rolls,
And flashes Lightnings to the distant Polls.

British warships arrive in Boston Harbor.

Sulfur and British Soldiers

In September, 4,000 British soldiers arrived to keep order and set up permanent residence in Boston. A few weeks before the British began their military occupation, lightning tore a large oak tree to pieces in Wrentham, Mass.

But the next evening, September 8, brought the weirdest lightning strike of all.

It struck Daniel Mann’s tavern, where ladies and gentlemen sat around a tea table. A flash of lightning came into the room, followed by an explosion, apparently as loud as the discharge of a cannon. Large sparks were seen, and the air in the room smelled like sulfur, which gave one person an intense headache. A windowpane broke, a clock injured, the ceiling and floors damaged. One man felt a violent shock on top of his head, another felt pain in his shoulder and found his coat scorched.

“All the inmates were filled with terror,” reported Essex historian Sidney Perley in Historic Storms of New England.

In Rehoboth, Mass., lightning killed a 10-year-old boy. A barn in Mendon, Mass., burned to the ground when struck. In Uxbridge, lightning tore up the heart and floor of a house and stunned several family members.

“This shower was not as local as thunder showers generally are,” Perley wrote, “but it extended over a large territory, and the lightning was sharper and more frequent and disastrous than it was remembered to have been before in many parts of the region.”

This story was updated in 2022.

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Jason Fairbanks Had Two Faces. One Killed Eliza Fales.

The issue is settled: Jason Fairbanks murdered Eliza Fales in 1801, but the story of exactly what happened has never been completely clear.

Two distinctly different views of 21-year-old Jason Fairbanks’ life still hold.

People most commonly view him as little more than a spoiled brat.

Others said he suffered a disability worsened by medical treatment, and that he tried hard to overcome it.

Jason Fairbanks

Jason Fairbanks was born during the American Revolution in 1780 to a prominent Puritan family in Dedham, Mass.

He did so poorly in school his parents suggested he should find a trade rather than attempting college.

“His proud spirit, indignant at the imaginary disgrace of using his hands in this way to gain a living, would not stoop so low,” recorded one newspaper.

Gravestone of Jason Fairbanks in the Old Village Cemetery in Dedham, Mass.

Rather, he carried on “aping the manners of a gentleman, at the expense of his virtuous parents’ labor — who used persuasion to no effect on their obdurate son to dissuade him from a liberal education.”

Failing at school, the Fairbanks sent their son to Wrentham Academy to prepare him for college.

Newspapers reported he was ‘frequently guilty of excess’ during his studies, which at the time were ‘imputed to juvenile indiscretions.’

On top of his generally poor attitude, Fairbanks had fallen in love with Eliza Fales. He insisted Eliza she should marry him. The more obsessed he got, the less he could focus on anything else.

“His attention was now chiefly devoted in writing love sonnets to his Dulcinea, and to conversing personally with her,” reported one newspaper.

Another Side of Jason Fairbanks

Love-struck, lazy, haughty and entitled. Was this Jason Fairbanks, or was his true nature very different?

Jason’s brother Ebenezer, in describing his brother, painted another portrait. At age 12, Jason had been vaccinated against smallpox and contracted the disease. Doctors subsequently treated him (probably with mercury), and he couldn’t use his frozen and withered right arm from the shoulder down.

Far from malingering, Ebenezer describes Jason working hard and exerting himself. He reached the point several times that his lungs began bleeding, and he suffered headaches, fatigue and fevers. He was weak and his health poor.

Jason Fairbanks pursued schooling despite his deficiencies, wrote Ebenezer, because it seemed the best way for him to find a job that would allow him to earn a living.

Eliza Fales

When it came to Eliza Fales, everyone agreed. Pretty, engaging and vivacious, people sometimes called her Betsy.

According to one news account, “Luxuriant auburn hair flowed in graceful ringlets around her well-turned shoulders, and neck and bosom might with alabaster vie.

“Her tapered waist, her glowing cheek, tinged with the crimson blush of virgin modesty, displayed the most happy assemblage of the carnation and lily that ever graced mortal form,” reported the newspaper in the overblown prose of the day.

Modest, unassuming, a smiling delight. No wonder if Jason fell in love with her. The two struck up a friendship, and they spent hours together. And whether they were more than friends or not is an open question.

On May 18, 1801 around noon Eliza went to a neighbor’s house hoping to recover a book the Faleses had loaned, The History of Lady Julia Mandeville. When her neighbor explained she hadn’t finished it, Eliza stayed awhile playing with a small child. Around 1 p.m., she left and went walking in a pasture.

It’s not clear whether Eliza and Jason planned to meet or not. Eliza’s friends did not care for Jason, and some said her father had banned him from their home. Her father, though, denied it.

Jason had told a friend he intended to marry Eliza, and if she refused he would ‘attempt her chastity.’

In the pasture, Jason produced a document his niece had drawn up for him: a phony marriage certificate. It showed Eliza and Jason as husband and wife. The cousin said Jason asked her to draw it up as a flirtatious jest.

The Murder

As to what happened next, we can only conjecture. At about 3 p.m., Jason turned up at the Fales’ home covered in blood. Eliza had killed herself and he had tried to do the same, but failed, he said.

In the pasture, Eliza’s father found her dying with numerous stab wounds and a slashed throat. Jason, too, had stab wounds and a slashed throat.

Fairbanks House, photo courtesy Library of Congress

He said she had slashed and stabbed herself when he told her they would never be married, and tore up the phony marriage certificate to drive home the point. The ripped document was, indeed, found next to Eliza’s body.

Eliza died. Jason did not. His story quickly came under suspicion, not least because the wounds to Eliza seemed defensive. She had several wounds on her back. It seemed unlikely she would have stabbed herself that way.

Eliza’s family said the girl had no romantic interest in Jason, so far as they knew.

Authorities arrested Jason Fairbanks.

The Trial

Newspapers from near and far covered the sensational trial. Massachusetts Attorney General John Sullivan, Revolutionary War hero and later governor, led the prosecution. Harrison Gray Otis and John Lowell, the patriarch of the Boston Lowells, represented Jason Fairbanks.

In the end, the court concluded that Fairbanks had committed the murder, and he was sent to the Dedham jail to await execution.

Fairbanks had friends, however, and a group of young men in August went to the Dedham jail, overpowered the jailer and released Fairbanks. Together with a friend, Henry Dukeham, Fairbanks headed west through Massachusetts and into New York. They made their way to upstate New York and arranged passage on a boat to take them north to Canada.

Just hours from freedom, the two young men decided to have breakfast, unconcerned about any danger.

Moses Holt found the two men as they were eating breakfast. Holt, from Hadley, Mass., had joined a three-man posse to track down Fairbanks. Holt, with a faster horse, had ridden ahead, and when he found Fairbanks and Dukeham he delayed them until the other men arrived.

Newspaper broadside depicting the hanging of Jason Fairbanks

End of the Story

Authorities hauled Jason Fairbanks back, not to the Dedham jail, but to a more secure jail in Boston. On the day ordered, Sept. 10, 1801, they took him to Dedham and hanged him. Thousands of people attended the gruesome event.

Afterwards, his family buried him in the same cemetery as Eliza.

The story, however, never died, inspiring books, such as The Report of the Trial of Jason Fairbanks, The Solemn Declaration of the Late Unfortunate Jason Fairbanks (written by Jason’s brother Ebenezer), and numerous newspaper broadsides from which this account is drawn.

Today, the Fairbanks house still stands in Dedham, the oldest house in Massachusetts and the oldest timber-framed house in North America. The Fairbanks family still owns the house, and frequently holds reunions in it.

Charles Fairbanks, Jason’s sixth cousin once removed, served as U.S. vice president under Teddy Roosevelt.

This story about Jason Fairbanks was updated in 2022. Tombstone of Jason Fairbanks By Slugger O'Toole – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83405868.

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