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The Wallingford Tornado of 1878 Unleashes Terror on an Unsuspecting Town

The Wallingford Tornado of 1878 ranks as one of the worst natural disasters to ever strike Connecticut. It caused so much damage the ruined town center became a tourist attraction.

The town then was a burgeoning community of about 4,000 people along the Quinnipiac River. Many of its residents were Catholic immigrants who worked in two large silver factories.

The Wallingford Tornado wasn’t the only destructive tornado to hit Connecticut. The state has, along with western Massachusetts, a tornado alley that has experienced some of the worst damage in U.S. tornado history.

And in 1878, it took the Wallingford Tornado just moments to inflict terrible destruction on an unsuspecting town.

An empty shell left by the Wallingford Tornado. Photo courtesy New York Public Library.

Connecticut Tornado History

Connecticut ranks only 43rd in the United States for tornado frequency, and most Connecticut tornadoes are weak. But occasionally an intense tornado strikes, and the state’s dense population gives the weather system more opportunity to wreak havoc. A Connecticut tornado can cause as much damage as its Midwestern siblings.

The first record of a Connecticut tornado happened in 1648. The settlers didn’t have much to say about it, other than on June 14, a ‘great tempest’ toppled trees somewhere near Hartford.

Then on June 20, 1682, a tornado destroyed forests in southern Connecticut. In the worst hit town, Shelton, the tornado left scarcely a tree standing along a half-mile-wide path.

During the Four State Tornado Swarm of 1787, at least five tornadoes starting in New Britain struck Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, killing two in Wethersfield. The first went from New Britain to Coventry in Connecticut, while another traveled from Killingly to Mendon, Mass. A third struck northeast of East Windsor and the fourth injured two while moving from Northborough, Mass., to Framingham, Mass. The fifth hit Rochester, N.H.

The Worcester tornado of 1953, one of the 25 worst tornadoes in U.S. history, killed 90 people in a 90-minute terror spree.

And back in Connecticut in 1979, the Windsor Locks tornado was one of the most destructive in history, killing three people and causing millions of dollars of damage.

Damage caused by the Wallingford Tornado.

The Wallingford Tornado

The Wallingford tornado struck furiously around 6 pm on Friday, Aug. 9, 1878. The black funnel cloud appeared over Mt. Tom and hit the Community Lake and created a 200-foot-high water spout.

Then it headed for the center of town.

Wallingford was completely unprepared for the disaster. The Wallingford Tornado ripped up trees from their roots, destroyed orchards and tore down at least 40 houses and 50 barns. It caused a fire to start, but fortunately rain put it out quickly.

The Wallingford Tornado also took off the top two floors of the new brick schoolhouse, wrecked the windmill, a brick factory and the Catholic church. The collapsing buildings killed most of the victims.

All that took two minutes.

In the end, the storm killed 34 people, mostly Catholic, at the rate of one person every four seconds. The tornado severely injured another 28 people and inflicted minor injuries on 42.

The Wallingford Tornado also uprooted telegraph and telephone wires, cutting off communication. A 12-year-old boy named John Hoey rode on horseback to Meriden, the next town, to seek help. Within an hour of the tornado touching down, trains began to arrive with rescuers. Seven doctors came a half hour later and turned Town Hall into a hospital.

Aftermath

The Catholic Church buried 25 of the victims on Sunday, two days after the Wallingford Tornado struck. Ten thousand people came to the funeral.

Over the next few days, special trains carried thousands more sightseers to see the destruction. They could buy refreshments to help raise money for the survivors. Factories in New Britain closed to workers could travel to Wallingford to view the carnage.

This story was updated in 2023.

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How the Londonderry Scots-Irish Saved New Hampshire from Massachusetts

The Londonderry Scots-Irish saved New Hampshire from a Massachusetts takeover by multiplying along the border and fighting the town across from it.

Massachusetts had taken over Maine in the 1650s, and by 1731 Royal Gov. Jonathan Belcher cast a greedy eye on New Hampshire as well.

But he worried that the aggressive Irish – they weren’t called ‘Scots-Irish’ until the 1830s – in Londonderry would thwart his takeover attempt.

As he hatched his plan, Belcher complained to an ally in New Hampshire, “I am afraid the Irish party wou’d oppose it.”

He was correct.

Jonathan Belcher

Gov. Jonathan Belcher

Jonathan Belcher was born in 1682 into a wealthy Massachusetts family. His father, Andrew, built a trading empire, partly on the backs of slaves and with the help of pirates, according to some. His ambitious son Jonathan didn’t let scruples get in his way either. He owned slaves, bribed government officials and set up an illegal smelting operation in Simsbury (now East Granby), Conn.

Jonathan Belcher won an appointment as royal governor of New Hampshire and Massachusetts in 1730 by spreading his largesse among government ministers. As governor, he gave plum political jobs to his friends and took them away from his enemies. He also let his political friends harvest pine trees reserved for the king’s masts, which would prove his eventual undoing.

But Belcher couldn’t stop the fighting between the Londonderry Scots-Irish and the people of Haverhill, Mass., over their border.

Erasing the border would end the fighting, Belcher thought. He had other reasons for wanting to annex New Hampshire, as well. He needed to satisfy farmers in eastern Massachusetts who wanted more land for their children, and he wanted access to those tall white pine trees in central and northern New Hampshire.

Eastern White Pine

And he wanted to shut up his political enemies, who enjoyed his inability to stop the fighting over the border.

The Londonderry Scots-Irish

New Hampshire had actually belonged to Massachusetts until 1679, when London officials divided it into a separate province. But throughout the 17^th century, New Hampshire remained thinly settled with only four real towns: Portsmouth, Dover, Exeter and Hampton.

Then the Scots-Irish arrived.

They were Presbyterian Scottish farmers who had settled in Ulster in the 1600s. They first arrived in Boston in four ships in 1717, but their fellow Protestants did not extend a warm welcome. The Scots-Irish timing, unfortunately, was off. They arrived during a food shortage, a smallpox epidemic, inflation and scarce housing.

The Massachusetts Puritans made it clear the Scots-Irish needed to move on.

And so a group led by James MacGregor settled a village in 1719 they called Nutfield, now Londonderry and Derry, N.H. There they planted the first potato in North America, established farms and fought with their neighbors to the south in Haverhill, Mass.

Border Wars

For a long time no one had paid much attention to the border between New Hampshire and Massachusetts because no one lived there.

But then the growing population of Massachusetts began to clash with the growing population of Londonderry Scots-Irish. The Londonderry Scots-Irish claimed a part of what Haverhill, Mass., viewed as its own.

People in Haverhill started calling the Londonderry Scots-Irish ‘papists.’ They cut hay in the Scots-Irish fields, threatened them with violence and arrested them for trespassing and nonpayment of taxes. But the Londonderry Scots-Irish gave as good as they got.

Massachusetts, for its part, claimed Londonderry, arguing the colony’s northern boundary followed the Merrimack River all the way to Lake Winnipesaukee. To stake its claim, the Massachusetts General Court granted a township in what is now Concord, called Pennycook, and encouraged settlement there. Then it granted more townships from Concord on south.

Nonsense, argued the New Hampshire faction. The northern border of Massachusetts lay three miles north of the mouth of the Merrimack River, then extended westward all the way to the New York line.

The final decision on the border lay in England. Both New Hampshire and Massachusetts sent agents to London to argue their case. But in order to prevail, they had to demonstrate they could settle the territory and establish local governments that had actual authority. Both sides found that task difficult.

John Wentworth

Further aggravating Jonathan Belcher was the lieutenant governor for New Hampshire, John Wentworth. Wentworth also had designs on land in New Hampshire.

Wentworth found an ally in David Dunbar, an Irish thorn in Jonathan Belcher’s side. Belcher, in fact, called him a ‘bullfrog from the Hibernian fens.’

The king had appointed David Dunbar Surveyor General of the King’s Woods. It was a big job, and Dunbar took it seriously. He aggressively enforced the timber laws, reserving the biggest white pines for the king’s masts.

John Wentworth came up with a plan: He invited David Dunbar to visit Londonderry. He told him that New Hampshire, unlike Massachusetts, made sure the king got the biggest pine trees. Wentworth’s plan worked, as Dunbar took up the cause of the Londonderry Scots-Irish.

Then in 1630, John Wentworth died. The king named David Dunbar Belcher’s lieutenant governor in charge of New Hampshire. Belcher was furious.

He decided one way to get rid of David Dunbar was to annex New Hampshire. He had an ally in Richard Waldron, New Hampshire’s secretary of state. Waldron circulated a petition requesting that New Hampshire join Massachusetts. It backfired. Only 500 people signed it, and of those only 10 could actually vote. The rest were boys, servants and indigent people. Belcher’s plan was dead.

Dunbar then managed to use Belcher’s tolerance of illegal logging against him. He and Belcher’s other enemies got the king to fire him as governor of New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

And from then on, the Londonderry Scots-Irish staked out New Hampshire’s southern border as their overflow populated the borderline.

Learn about the history of the Irish by exploring the food they ate, from the ancient Celts who hid their butter in peat bogs to Irish Americans who celebrated St. Patrick with corned beef and cabbage. Now available in paperback and ebook from Amazon. Click here.

This story was updated in 2023.

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When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned (and Partied) in Westport, Conn.

In 1920, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, Conn., so he could write, she could swim and they could both party their brains out.

The Fitzgeralds reigned as the king and queen of the Jazz Age. He was 23, she was 19, and their reckless high spirits – plus their drinking — had gotten them kicked out of several New York hotels.

American literature probably owes a debt of gratitude to the New York hotel managers who disinvited the Fitzgeralds. It was in Westport, after all, that Scott met a wealthy neighbor who inspired Jay Gatsby.

About a year after Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, they visited his family in Minnesota. Here Zelda is pregnant with their only child.

Westport

When Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport, the town had not yet evolved into a tony New York suburb. But it was getting there. A 50-mile train ride to Times Square brought commuters to Times Square, and it began to attract literary and theater types from New York.

In the Fitzgeralds’ era, Westport brought literary critic Van Wyck Brooks, Dorothy and Lillian Gish and Broadway producer John Williams for weekends in the country. A New York culture took root in the town, and by 2014, the local historical society exhibited many of the 767 New Yorker covers produced by artists living in and around Westport.

Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Martha Stewart, Sandy Dennis, Harvey Weinstein and Shirley Jackson all made their homes in Westport.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in this Westport, Conn., house. Image Courtesy Google Maps.

How Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Honeymooned

The Fitzgeralds blew into town in a secondhand sports car in May of 1920. Neither had a clue how to keep house, so closets filled with dirty laundry and neither of them cooked. Eventually they hired a house boy named Tana.

Earlier that year, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut novel, This Side of Paradise, sold out within four days of publication. It won him celebrity, a healthy income and Zelda’s Sayre’s hand in marriage.

Scott and Zelda wed on April 3, 1920 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and frolicked in New York City. But Scott needed to get back to writing his second novel, and so they honeymooned in Westport from May to September. Zelda rented a large colonial home where he had a separate room in which to write. She could also swim every day. Their neighbor, a multimillionaire named F.E. Lewis, let her cut across his property to walk to Compo Beach.

Compo Beach

Lewis had inherited a fortune – what would amount to $300 million in today’s dollars — and he lived on a 175-acre estate called Longshore.

Today, it’s the Inn at Longshore, hosting corporate events and destination weddings. Back then, Lewis threw extravagant parties that Scott and Zelda attended. They weren’t the only celebrities he invited. Dancer Anna Pavlova, magician Harry Houdini and movie star Marie Dressler came too. At one party he featured camels, elephants, vaudeville acts and a cowboy and Indian show. Theatrical producer David Belasco, mentioned in the Great Gatsby, came, and John Philip Sousa wrote music for one of his parties.

Drinking Again

When Scott and Zelda didn’t go to New York for weekend parties they invited friends to stay with them. They drank heavily and fought often.

A Princeton friend came to visit and wrote,

Went to visit Fizgeralds in Westport…stayed drunk for two weeks straight. Atmosphere of crime, lust, sensuality, pervaded the home.

Another classmate, critic Edmund Wilson, found the couple ‘reveling nude in the orgies of Westport.’

They tore along the Boston Post Road in their sports car with occasional stops at roadhouses to replenish their gin supply. Then Zelda wrecked the car by driving over a fire hydrant.

At a party, they reported a false fire alarm. According to one story, the firefighters asked where the fire was and Zelda pointed to her breast and said, “Here.”

Westport from across the Saugatuck River in 2010

Gatsby

After the Fitzgeralds honeymooned in Westport, they moved to a New York City apartment near the Plaza Hotel. They later moved to Great Neck, Long Island, from 1922 to 1924, then to Paris, all the while spiraling downward into alcoholism, madness and early death. Scott managed to finish only four novels.

For many years, people thought Scott Fitzgerald patterned the setting for his masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, on Long Island.

Then in 1996, a New Yorker writer named Barbara Probst Solomon asked whether Gatsby included a blend of their time in Great Neck and that first beachy summer when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport?’

Author Richard Webb, Jr., grew up in Westport, and he was sure the answer was yes. In 2018 he published his book, Boats Against the Current: The Honeymoon Summer of Scott and Zelda: Westport, Connecticut 1920.

The book that tells the story of how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport.

The title alludes to the ending of Gatsby, one of the most famous in American literature:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

This story about how Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned in Westport was updated in 2023.

Images: Westport in 2010 by WalkingGeek via Flickr, CC by 2.0. Compo Beach by Carol M, Highsmith, estport United States Connecticut, 2011. August. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2012630296/.

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Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass

He rose from slavery in the South to international prominence as a writer, orator and anti-slavery activist. Frederick Douglass didn’t spend a day in school and only learned to read by a stroke of luck. That’s just one of the amazing facts about Frederick Douglass.

He was born in 1818 to a white father he never identified and to a black mother he barely knew.

Douglass escaped from slavery as a 20-year-old with the help of a free African-American, Anna Murray, whom he married as soon as he escaped.

After only a few years of freedom, abolitionists discovered the articulate young fugitive slave. But Frederick Douglass was far more than an abolitionist exhibit of a survivor of slavery. As an orator, he enraptured his audiences; as a polemicist, he caught the attention of presidents; and as a public intellectual, he influenced the debate about slavery, war, equality and opportunity.

Here then are seven fascinating facts about Frederick Douglass.

Frederick Douglass

1. Why New Bedford

Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford in 1838 to get a job as a caulker, a trade he had learned as a slave in Baltimore.

When he escaped slavery and arrived in New York City, his rescuer, David Ruggles, advised him to go to New Bedford because he could get a job on the waterfront there. He could also fit into the large African-American community, which included both free blacks and fugitive slaves. He arrived penniless and with a new wife. Eventually he began to speak out against slavery at local abolitionist meetings.

William Lloyd Garrison, leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, heard him speak and decided to put him on the broader abolitionist circuit.

By the time Frederick Douglass left New Bedford, he was a rising star on the abolitionist lecture circuit, traveling as far as Michigan to speak against slavery.

He never did get a job as a caulker, though. White workers on the waterfront refused to work with him, so he had to earn a meager living doing common labor like hauling barrels of whale oil.

Nathan and Mary Johnson houses, where Frederick and Anna Douglass first stayed in New Bedford.

2. Columbian Orator

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln learned how to give speeches from the same book.

Published in 1797, the Columbian Orator sold 200,000 copies and went through 23 printings until 1860. The author, Caleb Bingham, was a radical egalitarian who believed the young United States needed educated citizens. He published the book to promote a dignified, classical style of speaking without any aristocratic pretensions.

Abraham Lincoln studied it as a young politician during a cold winter in Illinois. The Columbian Orator also influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Frederick Douglass bought the book as a 13-year-old slave living and working in Fells Point, Baltimore.

His mistress taught him to read, which was unusual (and forbidden). The boy made friends with a gang of white boys in Baltimore, and they showed him their schoolbook, the Columbian Orator. The book captivated him, and he spent 50 cents to buy it with money he earned polishing boots. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he said.

The full name of the book: Columbian Orator, Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules, Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence.

3. A Little-Known Fact About Frederick Douglass

One of the little-known facts about Frederick Douglass was that he took his name from a Scottish hero in a Sir Walter Scott poem.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he changed his name to Stanley, then Johnson, to evade capture when he fled Maryland.

But when he arrived in New Bedford, he and his wife Anna stayed with Nathan and Mary Johnson, black abolitionists. Nathan Johnson told him there were already too many Johnsons in New Bedford. He gave his houseguest the name ‘Douglass’ after the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake.

Frederick Douglass described what happened in one of his three autobiographies:

…unwilling to have another of his own name added to the community in this unauthorised way, after I spent a night and a day at his house, gave me my present name. He had been reading Lady of the Lake, and was pleased to regard me as a suitable person to wear this, one of Scotland’s many famous names.

In the poem, James Douglas feuded with King James V of Scotland, whom he had formerly mentored, and was himself a fugitive. He came from a line of aristocrats known as the black Douglases because of an ancestor’s dark complexion and ferocity on the battlefield.

Douglass later went on the abolitionist lecture circuit in Scotland, a country he loved. While there, he met a surviving relative of Sir Walter Scott.

4. Frederick Douglass Says No to John Brown

Three-and-a-half weeks before John Brown made his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass met with him in a stone quarry across the Virginia line in Pennsylvania. Brown, disguised as a fisherman, urged Douglass to join him in the attack.

Up until then Frederick Douglass encouraged and supported Brown, but he couldn’t go along with his plan to seize the federal armory. He tried to talk him out of the suicide mission.

After the attack failed disastrously, word got out that Douglass met with Brown just before the raid. The governor of Virginia ordered Frederick Douglass arrested, but he fled to Canada and then to Britain.

5. A Career Highlight With Abraham Lincoln

After the Civil War, Frederick Douglass criticized President Abraham Lincoln for his weak Reconstruction plan and failure to give black people the vote. Lincoln invited Douglass to visit him at the White House.

During their meeting – their second – the two men had a long and frank discussion while Connecticut Gov. William Buckingham waited at the door. Lincoln’s secretary interrupted Lincoln twice to tell him the governor waited for him, and Lincoln waved him off. He said, “I want to have a long talk with my friend Frederick Douglass.”

Douglass often retold that story.

6. Jim Crow in Lynn

He moved to Lynn, Mass., in 1841, after his involvement in one of the most famous Jim Crow incidents in history. Still living in New Bedford, he had taken the train from Boston for a speaking engagement in Newburyport, Mass. He boarded the train in Lynn and sat with three white abolitionists.

Then the conductor grabbed him by the collar and demanded he move to the Jim Crow car. Douglass said he would if the conductor gave him a reason. Other passengers began to chant, “Give him a reason.”

The conductor finally replied, “Because you are black.” The passengers surrounded the conductor, but soon a half dozen company thugs arrived and began to beat Frederick Douglass. He clung to his seat, but they pulled it up by the bolts and threw him and the seat out of the railcar and onto the ground. They threw his luggage after him as well.

The outrage shown by the people of Lynn helped persuaded him to move to the city, which had a large abolitionist community. He and his growing family lived in a small frame house on Union Street.

His wife helped support them by working as a shoebinder, a common occupation then in Lynn. He wrote his first autobiography (he wrote three) in Lynn, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

Anna Murray Douglass

7. White Women

His friendships with white abolitionist women provoked severe criticism. In 1847, he caused a scandal when he traveled by steamboat down the Hudson River to an abolitionist meeting. Newspapers discovered he slept in a stateroom next to Lydia or Lucretia Mott (it isn’t clear which). He finally had to explain that he had two choices: to sleep on the deck in the cold because black men couldn’t buy cabins, or to have Miss Mott book an adjoining room.

Later, he developed close relationships – possibly romantic – with British abolitionist Julia Griffiths and German radical Ottilie Assing. Both women spent time living in the Douglass household, inspiring speculation and rumor.

But it was his marriage to white abolitionist Helen Pitts that caused a real firestorm of criticism. A descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1859. In her 40s when they met, Douglass hired her as a clerk and married her two years after Anna died.

Fast and furious came the denunciations. “The Venerable Colored Orator Takes a White Wife” screamed one headline. A Washington, D.C., newspaper called it a ‘national calamity.’ Many in the black community called him a traitor to his race.

To the criticism, Frederick Douglass replied, “This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.”

One of the most surprising facts about Frederick Douglass is that he married a white woman. Here he is with his wife Helen Pitts (seated); her sister, Eva Pitts, is standing.

End Notes to Fact About Frederick Douglass

Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass owes much to Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. This story was updated in 2023.

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Rhode Island’s Little Annapolis: The PT Boat Training Center at Melville

During World War II, Rhode Island residents could hear the roar of PT boat engines from Narragansett Bay all day and see tracer bullets fired over the ocean at night.

They could watch the PT boats racing around either in formation or practicing maneuvers. Perhaps Richard Nixon saw them from the Quonset Point Naval air station while he trained there in 1942. Perhaps George H.W. Bush had an aerial view of the little boats while training at the Charlestown Naval Air Station. And maybe they caught a glimpse of John F. Kennedy racing around the bay, leaving a rooster tail in his wake.

Birth of the PT Boat

The Navy had recognized early in the war that it needed small, high-speed, heavily armed gunboats to use among the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific. From that insight came the Patrol Torpedo boat, known as the PT boat. You may have seen PT boats in motion pictures such as They Were Expendable and PT 109 or the comedy TV show, McHale’s Navy.

Nearly all of the 14,000 PT boat officers and men trained at the small navy base on Narragansett Bay in the village of Melville, a part of Portsmouth, R.I. The Navy didn’t just train its men there, but developed PT boat policies and tactics as well.

Not many histories of these small bases have been written. Melville, however, graduated a disproportionate number of extremely successful men. In addition to a president of the Unite States, Melville graduated a U.S. Supreme Court justice, three movie stars, five U.S. ambassadors, four NFL coaches, six top corporate executives and a U.S. attorney general – to name a few.

This is their story.

Devil Boats

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

PT boat logo

The base was formally known as the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center (MTBSTC). The Japanese called them Devil Boats, and the Navy fondly called them the Mosquito Fleet, after their logo. The Secretary of the Navy signed an order establishing the PT boat fleet on Feb. 17, 1942.

In the beginning, a Massachusetts firm began construction on the small base. But then the Navy largely turned it over to the Rhode Island companies of Gilbane, Coleman and Collins. When all was said and done, there would be 59 buildings and 150 Quonset Huts (a Rhode Island invention). These buildings and huts would house classrooms, mess halls, warehouses, machine shops, living quarters and more — everything you’d find in a large Navy base.

The builders literally built a boat basin for the PT boats out of a swamp. It was staffed full time by 57 officers and 280 enlisted men. Motorists could see it from the Mt. Hope Bridge, which connects Bristol and Portsmouth.

Alongside the PT boat training unit was the Motor Torpedo Boat Repair Training Unit (MTBRTU). This unit had a staff of 30 officers and 950 enlisted men. Here they trained on maintaining the three 1500-horsepower Packard engines on a PT boat either in dock or the field. On the other side of the base was the Naval Fuel and Net Depot – a good location because those Packard engines gobbled up huge amounts of high-octane fuel.

Melville also had the advantage of having the Navy’s Newport Torpedo Station on Goat Island down the road from it. The torpedo station could provide training duds, sometimes live, for the torpedo boats to practice with. It also supplied experimental torpedoes to try out and a seven-mile torpedo range running north from the torpedo station up Narragansett Bay toward Prudence Island.

Mount Hope Bridge

Specht Tech

The Navy organized the PT boats into 44 squadrons, generally comprised of 12 boats. All told, the Navy commissioned over 650 PT boats by the end of the war.

The men nicknamed the squadrons ‘RON’, from the last three letters of ‘squadron,’ and added their number. RON 4 began operations at the Newport Navy Base on Jan. 13, 1942. It later moved to the crowded Melville base and remained in operation for the duration of the war. RON 4 patrolled the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts coastline. Thus Narragansett Bay provided a safe haven for training and experimentation.

Lt. William C. Specht, soon promoted to lieutenant commander, was tapped to serve as Melville’s first commander in March 1942. He also ran the repair and fuel depots. Specht oversaw the construction of the base as well as the development of its curriculum. Navy men assigned to the course at Melville joked they attended “Specht Tech.”

Lt. jg. John F. Kennedy in PT 109

Plenty Tough

The PT boats were built mostly by the Higgins Company in New Orleans and the ELCO Company, a division of Electric Boat, the submarine builder. They had to measure at least 77 feet long in order to carry and launch Mark 8 torpedoes. They also carried twin 50-caliber machine guns. Some of the PT boats had 20 mm cannons.

The crewmen did their gunnery training at the Anti-Aircraft Center at Price’s Neck on Newport’s Ocean Drive. George Donovan, now 92, remembers them practicing at night. Along with his brother and cousins, he watched from his grandmother’s bedroom window, which faced Ocean Drive. They were fascinated and mesmerized watching countless tracer bullets fired out over the ocean at practice targets towed by small airplanes. These trainees used live ammunition, and occasionally they strayed off target and accidently shot down the tow plane.

The men trained in their PT boats on Narragansett Bay and in the ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, 10 miles south of Newport. People said the rooster tail and the roar of the engines was most impressive the first time you heard and saw them. These boats could travel between 40-45 miles an hour at full throttle and were physically demanding to operate. So demanding they sometimes said that “PT” meant the men had to be ‘plenty tough.’

A PT boat underway near Midway

Accidents Happen

Occasionally, things went wrong.

Whenever the torpedo station was going to launch a test torpedo along its seven-mile range off Gould Island, it blew a very loud warning whistle. But one day in 1942 the commander of PT 122 did not hear the whistle, understandable over the roar of three Packard engines. He strayed into the test range and was nearly sunk by a test torpedo.

On another occasion that same year, PT 59 launched a torpedo in error. It traveled an estimated seven miles and struck the cargo ship USS Capella, anchored off Jamestown, and it began to sink. The quick-thinking skipper used his powerful engines to push the Capella to shallow water and thus save her from sinking. She was later repaired and put back into service. However, the entire incident was kept secret until the 1970’s.

Then in 1943, another PT boat launched a torpedo that went off course and sank a freighter anchored off the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

And while patrolling Rhode Island coastal waters, PT 200 struck an unknown submerged object and sank.

Melville Today

Soon after the end of World War II, the Navy decommissioned the Melville Training Center and dismantled it. All that remains today are a couple of buildings and a plaque to commemorate what once was there. A busy marina operates in the PT boat cove.

When I was a youngster in the early 1960s, my friends and I used to play on an abandoned PT boat, which had been stripped of its armament and beached on the shore of what is now Hanley’s Beach, on Jacobs Point along the river in Warren, R.I. It had apparently crashed into something submerged because it had a large hole in its hull. We could enter the PT boat through the hole and play around, imagining what once might have taken place aboard her.

According to the Warren Preservation Society, what remained of the PT boat burned to the ground about 1970. All that’s left is some iron from what once must have been her engines.

Today there are precious few PT boats remaining, perhaps 10 in the world. Two fully restored boats can be seen on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. If you want to experience what they were really like, take a trip to New Orleans and the National WW II Museum where they have fully restored the PT 305 to fully operating condition. You can even take a 45-minute ride on it in Lake Ponchartrain.

As noted previously, about 14,000 people went through the Melville Training Station out of about 12 million men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. What seems to me remarkable, and far out of proportion to its size, is the number notable men who served there.

The PT boat in Battleship Cove

Melville Alumni

Here is an incomplete listing:

Anthony Akers, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand

Paul Austin, Chairman of the Board, Coca Cola

Howard Baker, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, chief of staff to President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan

William C. Battle, President of Field Crest Mills, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Charles A. Black, husband of Shirley Temple and aquaculture pioneer

John D. Bulkeley, Navy Vice Admiral and one of the most decorated men in military history, including the Medal of Honor; skippered PT boat that took Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines

Michael Burke, CBS Sports executive and President of the New York Yankees

John Clagett, author of 19 books

Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American football player, Notre Dame 1941; college football coach`

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., part of the invasion of Southern France, organized the Beach Jumpers, movie actor

Paul B. (Red) Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy, author

John Harllee, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission

Michael J. Holovak, All-American football player, Boston College, 1942; college football coach and NFL team executive

John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

Joe Kuharich, college football coach and head coach NFL teams

Elgar Laux, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corp.

Walter Lemm, head coach Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals

Henry Loeb, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

Carl Maddox, Athletic Director, Louisiana State University

Clinton McClain, player, New York Giants

Torbert MacDonald, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts

John N. Mitchell, U.S. Attorney General

Robert Montgomery, actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild

James Madden Newberry, founder of PT Boats, Inc.

Jack B. Olson, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas

Paul T. Rennell, Vice President, Pan American World Airways

Don Rickles, actor and comedian

Raymond P. Shafer, Governor of Pennsylvania

Preston L. Sutphen, Sr., President of Electric Boat, builder of PT boats

Harold Thorkilsen, President and CEO, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Malcolm Troon, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Soviet Union

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, millionaire

George Vanderbilt, millionaire

Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

End Notes

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, passed away in 2020. He published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Images: PT Boat at Battleship Cove By Wikimaster97commons – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3846572; John F. Kennedy in PT 109 courtesy the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. This story was updated in 2023.

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Loyalists and Patriots: Mary Munro Sent Packing to Canada During the Revolution

During the American Revolution, Vermont was a battleground that pitted loyalists and patriots against each other, not just on the battlefield but in quiet communities like Shaftsbury.

Shaftsbury was the home of John and Mary Munro, a prosperous loyalist couple with at least seven children. They had moved from New York in 1767 and built an estate called Fowlis on land disputed by New York and New Hampshire.

John left Mary and seven children on the property while he went off to fight the American Revolution — on the British side. Patriots constantly harassed Mary. After they won the Battle of Saratoga, Mary fled through the wilderness to Canada. Though she survived and lived for another 38 years, she never fully recovered from her ordeal.

Loyalist John Munro

John Munro

John Munro, born in Scotland to a family of modest means, came to the colonies in 1756 as a Highland soldier. Stationed in Albany, he fought in the French and Indian war. For his service he received from New York a grant of land in Vermont, and he rose to wealth and local distinction. He may have had help from his wife, born Mary Brouwer, the daughter of a prominent Dutch couple in Schenectady, N.Y.

Appointed sheriff and chief magistrate in Shaftsbury, John Munro tried to enforce the land claims granted by New York. Unfortunately, those conflicted with the claims granted by New Hampshire.

John Munro tangled with the Green Mountain Boys over the disputed territory. He famously captured Remember Baker, a cousin of Ethan Allen, but the Green Mountain Boys rescued Baker from prison. One legend has it that Seth Warner struck Munro on the head with his sword, but Munro’s thick hair and skull broke Warner’s weapon.

Then as revolution loomed, fighting between the ‘Yorkers’ and the Green Mountain Boys evolved into fighting between loyalists and patriots.

Loyalists and Patriots

Loyalists get short shrift in American history books. But as historian W.S. MacNutt, wrote in an essay, The Loyalists: A Sympathetic View, “To the Loyalists the Revolution was the antithesis of modernity and freedom, a conspiracy of reckless and designing men to raise themselves from adversity to affluence, from public disfavor to high prominence.”

The New Hampshire grantees no doubt had designs on John Munro’s land, which included a manor house, 100 tenants, grain and lumber mills, a nail factory, an ashery and a pottery. Loyalists and patriots viewed each other with contempt.

When the Revolution broke out, Munro joined the 48^th Regiment of Foot, leaving Mary and the children behind. He recruited his own tenants and neighbors, and he spent his own money and farm stores to provision his troops. John Munro probably went off to war thinking the well-trained, well-equipped British Army would prevail over the patriots.

But as MacNutt noted, “To the amazement of many the conspiracy succeeded.”

In 1776, the patriots seized John Munro and imprisoned him in an Albany jail for 18 months. They sentenced him to hang, but he escaped to Canada in 1777.

Mary Munro

In the summer of 1777, the loyalists and patriots had both failed to gain military advantage. The French had not yet decided to join the patriots. Gen. John Burgoyne had taken command of the British forces and, stationed in Quebec, came up with an ambitious plan to end the war. He would lead his army south and cut New England off from the rest of the colonies. That, he believed, would make it easier to end the rebellion.

Meanwhile, the Vermont patriots seized the Munro estate and kept Mary and her children captive. They could stay in the house and keep two milk cows for the children, but otherwise they had little to eat. Mary sent an undated letter to her husband describing her dire straits.

“I am in a poor state of health and very much distresst. I must leave my house in a very short time, and God knows where I shall get a place to lay my head,” she wrote. “My own relations are my greatest enemies … The mills they have had a long time in their possession, likewise all your tenants’ lands and houses.’

Then in the fall of 1777, the patriots defeated Burgoyne during two battles in Saratoga, N.Y., just 35 miles from Shaftsbury. Burgoyne surrendered his army and, in the war’s turning point, the French decided to give the patriots military support.

Loyalists and patriots: Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga.

On the Run

Mary and her children had to flee. John Munro got permission for her to move to Canada, and she sold some silver plate she’d hidden to pay for the trip.

First she went to Schenectady, where her family (presumably patriots) refused to help her. Then she traveled toward Lake George to join other loyalists on their way to Canada. They decided to lighten their load by getting rid of their food and most of their clothes.

The Munros’ eldest daughter, Christiana, in 1795, years after the conflict between loyalists and patriots.

When they arrived at Lake George, they had to wait in the woods for six days, almost perishing of cold and hunger. Then three other families arrived, and together they persuaded the commanding officer at Fort Edward to give them a boat and a flag. A party of Indians discovered them and chased after them.

Mary and her children were ‘very sickly the whole winter’ after they arrived in Quebec. John Munro declared the children recovered. But, he wrote, “Mrs. Munro never will.”

Twenty years after her ordeal, her youngest son William wrote to his father. “For Gods sake keep a good store of nourishment in the house which is the only thing you can have to comfort you and my poor ailing Mother who has suffered so much for us all.”

Mary Munro outlived her husband by 15 years, however. They both died in Canada, he in 1800, she in 1815.

This story last updated in 2022.

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