Fragments of history: When the KKK marched in Kittery, Maine

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Dianne Fallon

This photo by early 20th century photographer and businessman Frank Walker documents one of the KKK "Konclaves" held in Kittery in the 1920s.

This photo by early 20th century photographer and businessman Frank Walker documents a large KKK parade held in Kittery in the 1920s (courtesy of the Kittery Historical & Naval Museum).

Why and how did Kittery-ites join the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s? The Foreside parade in this undated J. Frank Walker photo likely took place on either June 30, 1924, or August 17, 1925, when Portsmouth Herald articles document these two “Konclaves” .

The 1924 parade concluded with a “naturalization” ceremony — an initiation ritual that echoed the ceremony for becoming a U.S. citizen. The festivities wrapped up at Locke’s Cove with a cross burning.

But even though these two parades are fairly recent events, we have only fragments of history about the Kittery Klan. Were the marchers — an estimated 400, according to some — all from Kittery, or was this a region-wide gathering? Kittery was a small town of 4,700, so it seems unlikely that a single organization would draw 400 locals, especially at a time when many belonged to one or more fraternal organizations. Then again, 1924 lacked the myriad entertainments of the current era, so maybe the Klan parade provided an opportunity for a summer social event. On Labor Day, 1924, a Klan parade in Saco drew 300 marchers–reportedly a mixed crowd of locals and Klan members from throughout New England–so perhaps Kittery’s parades drew a similar crowd.

Some say–and again, this is hearsay based on fragments of talk and memory — that the parades were organized to protest the construction of St. Raphael’s Catholic Church in Kittery. But in the 1920s, no construction was happening at St. Raphael’s, established in 1916 to serve the town’s small community of 77 Catholics. Parishioners celebrated Mass in a small chapel, constructed in 1916 within the existing foundation of a one-time stable; the church was built in 1933-1934 at the same Wentworth Street location. St. Raphael’s history book mentions that Catholics faced some bigotry, including the burning of a cross on the grounds of the basement church, but includes no dates.

Another view of the parade, which shows the marching band that also participated. The photo is undated, but The lighting suggest that this is a different shot of the same parade as above (courtesy of the Kittery Historical & Naval Museum).

Another view of the parade, which shows the marching band that also participated (courtesy of the Kittery Historical & Naval Museum).

Between 1923-1925, Klan membership surged in Maine to over 20,000 people (as reported by the Klan, with other sources reporting higher numbers), mostly due to a charismatic leader, F. Eugene Farnsworth, and a fear that French-Canadian immigrants might gain political power. Thousands of Quebecois were working in the mills of Biddeford, Saco, Sanford and other Maine towns, with more crossing the border each year.

What was happening in Kittery at this time? The town didn’t have the large mills with hundreds of employees. However, U.S. Census records show a population surge in Kittery from 1900, when 2,872 people lived in town, to 1920, when 4,763 residents were counted–an increase of 66%. U.S. immigration as a whole peaked in these years. Was Kittery’s population increase fueled by immigrants? Or was the surge due to expanding job opportunities at the Shipyard as it built up during World War I?

In the early days of St. Raphael’s, the parishioners were not French-Canadians; the original membership list includes names such as Curran, Witham, Bridges, and Drake. This small group had been around for years, initially rowing to Portsmouth to attend Mass and then later traveling to South Berwick’s St. Michael’s Church.

Further north, in Portland and beyond, King Kleagle F. Eugene Farnsworth, a one-time hypnotist best described as a huckster, had capitalized on fears of French-speaking Canadian immigrants to generate interest in the Klan. In 1923, Governor Percival Baxter, a Republican, spoke out against the Klan, predicted that the organization would fail to influence the “level-headed citizens of Maine.”

But he was wrong. Two years later, Republican Ralph O. Brewster became Maine’s governor, thanks in large part to the support of the “White Knights” who backed him.

This circa 1910 postcard shows an Atlantic Shore Line trolley crossing Locke’s Cove. The KKK ceremony and cross burning occurred somewhere in this vicinity (Postcard from collections of Seashore Trolley Museum).

Farnsworth promoted “100% Americanism,” by which he meant White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. By this time, Irish Catholics were mainstream in East Coast cities, and politically powerful, and Maine had a small Irish-Catholic population (the oldest Catholic church in New England, Saint Patrick’s, was established in Newcastle in 1808).

But a new horde of non-English speaking Catholics in a rural state like Maine posed a threat. They might take all the jobs or spread diseases in their tenement houses. They might gain political power and demand funding for parochial schools, or worse.

These sentiments echoed national anxieties about immigrants, especially the “yellow swarms” from Italy and other southern and eastern European countries. By the early 1920s, the Klan claimed 6 million members, many recruited with its “100% Americanism” rhetoric.

This Portsmouth Herald article describes the parade on June 30, 1924, including the cross-burning at Locke’s Cove. A similar short article describes a parade on August 30, 1925.

Today, when I see these photos of ordinary citizens marching in white robes, I wonder who they were and why they marched. Were they “old Kittery” residents, fearful of being displaced by industrialization and a changing economy? Were they suspicious of French-speaking immigrants, even if they didn’t know any of these “outsiders” who didn’t speak English, practiced a “foreign” religion, and allegedly owed their allegiance to a religious leader in a faraway country? Were they seeking connection and community with others who made them feel safe?

During the Gilded Age of the 1890s, the outside world rediscovered Kittery, which became a popular summer destination for tourists who stayed in the town’s five large hotels.

But before the tourists came, Kittery, along with the rest of the Piscataqua region, was a sleepy backwater, in decline since Jefferson’s Embargo in the 1800s killed off the merchant economy (Kittery lost 35% of its population between 1800 and 1810). Although many stayed and got by with farming, fishing, building ships, more than 100 years passed before the Kittery reached its pre-Embargo population of about 3,100 people. Vital records in the Town Reports — births and deaths — show the same names over and again, many from families who had settled here during colonial times.

This January 19, 1933 update on Kittery Grange news mentions Kittery Klan No. 5 as contributing to an upcoming Unemployment Bazaar.

The last documented Klan event in Kittery is a 1933 notice about a social event at the Kittery Grange. By then, the Klan’s national membership had dropped to 45,000, with 225 members reported in Maine in 1930. The Klan had imploded, due in part to the murder trial and unveiling of King Kleagle D.C. Stephenson, a one-time salesman who had murdered his girlfriend, along with a variety of other allegations of corruption and abuse of power. In some parts of the country, the Klan continued to terrorize its victims, especially African-Americans, but it had lost its force as a national organization.

But before its implosion, the Klan had achieved several goals: it had helped to secure the passage of the 1924 National Origins Act, which limited the number of immigrants, especially non-Protestants from southern and eastern Europe. Then in 1928, the Klan helped to defeat presidential candidate Al Smith, a Catholic.

Still a small group in Kittery hung on. I wonder who these ordinary people were, and why we have forgotten about Kittery Klan No. 5 so easily.

Sources and resources

I welcome all additions, corrections, comments, or suggestions for further information about the Klan in Kittery, via the Comments section.

Many thanks to Kim Sanborn, Executive Director of the Kittery Naval & Historical Museum, for sharing her insights on the Klan’s presence in Kittery.

U.S. Census data is compiled in an easy-to-read format on the Kittery, Maine Wikipedia page, but I have not been able to verify the accuracy of this data.

“The King Kleagle of Maine’s Ku Klux Klan was an opportunist,” by Sharon Cummings. SoMeOldNews: Surprising Southern Maine History. Cummings’s research suggests that anti-immigrant King Kleagle Farnsworth was himself a Canadian immigrant from New Brunswick, although he claimed Columbia Falls, Maine as his birthplace.

“The Ku Klux Klan in New Hampshire, 1923-1927”, Stephen H. Goetz. Historical New Hampshire, Vol 43, No. 4, Winter 1988. Goetz also looks at the brief time of the KKK in New Hampshire, where long-established French-Canadian communities had largely assimilated into the mainstream. He speculates that the national “social hysteria” over immigration and other issues fueled Klan membership (which required the significant expenses of a $10 initiation fee and $5 for the white robe), as well as the general popularity of all fraternal organizations.

“The Nativist Klan.” Maine Memory Network of the Maine Historical Society.

Not a Catholic Nation: The Ku Klux Klan confronts New England in the 1920s, by Mark Paul Richards. Amherst/Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

Richards’s book offers insightful and evidence-filled chapters on the rise of the Klan in Maine in the 1920s. By the mid-1920s, Roman Catholics were the largest single religious group in the state, with 173, 893 adherents, compared to the Northern Baptist Convention, at 32,031, and the Methodist Episcopal Church, at 22,938. Richards also cites a 1930 Washington Post article claiming a peak membership of 150,141 Klan member in Maine, the largest in New England, and almost 20% of Maine’s population, or 30% of the white native-born population.

U.S. Immigration Legislation: 1924 Immigration Act. U.S. Immigration legislation online. The National Origins Act set limits on immigration and set up a quota system based upon the current population of the United States which basically guaranteed that the majority of immigration slots would go to immigrants from northern Europe (Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia).

“Uncomfortable History,” by Candace Kanes. Maine History Online. Maine Historical Society.

Related posts:

For more on Kittery history during the Gilded Age of the 1890s (especially on the PK&Y Trolley), see my posts “On Bridges and the Jet Set” and “Remnants of the Gilded Age at Brave Boat Harbor.”

On early 20th century immigration in Kittery: The little girl in the photo and The summer when Kittery aliens landed at the Town Office.

Lives lived, and lost, at the Kittery Town Forest

Posted on January 25, 2016 by Dianne Fallon

Kittery purchased the land for the Town Forest, once known as the Poor Farm, in 1820. An 1852 Auditors report (the oldest I've uncovered) mentions the Almshouse. Since the original purchase included a house and a barn, the town was probably using it as an almshouse for many years prior to 1852.

Back in 1820, in Kittery, Maine, the town purchased the original 13-acre plot that became the Town Farm or Poor Farm.

Sometimes when I walk in Kittery’s 72-acre Town Forest, I wonder what became of Ella Hill and her girl Annie. From 1891 to about 1897, Ella and Annie lived here at the Town Farm, or Poor Farm. In 1891, the town spent $2 to move Ella and two children to the almshouse. She arrived with an infant son, Fred, in her arms. He died on May 22 that year and probably dwells in an unmarked grave nearby.

Ella had another son, John, born around 1878 when she was 20. The 1880 census tells us that she and two-year-old John lived with Rachael Fernald and worked as a domestic servant. Ella’s father, John Hill, a farmer, died in 1880, so she perhaps went to live with and work at the Fernalds to keep body and soul together for herself and her baby. No husband is mentioned in the scant records I’ve found that document Ella’s life. After the census, young John disappears, so perhaps Ella lost two children.

At the almshouse, Ella and little Annie probably ate supper each night with Adelaide and Charles Leach. By that time, Adelaide, about 60 years old, and Charles, her 49-year-old younger brother, had been residents, or “inmates,” of the almshouse for more than 2o years. Perhaps they provided comfort to Ella when her baby died. Perhaps she comforted them when William Leach, possibly their brother or another relative, died there on January 23, 1892, at age 64.

More inmate deaths followed during Ella’s stay. In 1892, Mary Taylor, age 45 died, followed by John Ricker, age 80, and Abigail Clements, age 79. Not long after, 88-year-old Joseph Parsons arrived. Perhaps Ella helped care for these elders to earn her keep.

Ella and Annie stayed on until around 1897, when they disappear from the Kittery town reports. Did Ella marry? Did she find employment in one of Kittery’s big hotels, or somewhere else?

Town records are silent on her eventual fate. They tell us a bit more about Adelaide and Charles, both of whom lived most of their lives at the Town Farm, and died there. On January 22, 1901, Adelaide died. Although the town report listed her name as a farm inmate for more than 30 years, nobody caught the mistake that named her “Annabelle Leach” in the vital statistics. Charles died 15 years later, on September 20, 1916.

What the records don’t reveal is why the Leaches, an old Kittery family with roots dating to the 1600s, landed at the almshouse. They arrived, it seems, with other members of the Leach family, including their parents, Ebenezer and Iza, some time between 1861 and 1871; a town report from 1861-62 records expenses for “partial support” of 30-year-old Adelaide Leach at a private home. The 1860 census tells us that Ebenezer Leach was a fisherman, as was his son Charles. Various town reports list the “Leach property” as under town ownership, valued at $500 in 1906 (but not part of the Town Farm, valued at $2,000). What fate befell the Leach family, so that they lost their land and perhaps their livelihoods, and ended up living out their days at the Town Farm? Why did two young adults — Adelaide and Charles – stay at the farm?

The blue-marked Quimby Trail offers a loop walk of about 3 miles through the forest.

Today, the Town Forest is one of the Kittery’s under-the-radar resources, one in which I’ve enjoyed walking, running, and biking since the 1990s. Over the past 20 years, the forest surrounding the town land has shrunk, as housing developments have sprung up on all sides, but the Town Forest remains a great place to wander, and to wonder, about the people who once called this place home, including a good number who still remain, buried somewhere in unmarked graves.

In 19th century New England, the “poor farm” was a well-established institution where some residents worked at farm chores to pay their keep. However, evidence in Kittery’s town reports suggests that taxpayers generally supported the five to eight residents who lived there, with the town paying a salary to a “superintendent,” and bills for flour, wood, food, and other necessities, and even for hiring nearby farmers like William Haley and Samuel Norton to do the mowing and other heavy chores. Although it’s possible that “inmates” took care of a small garden, most were too old to do the hard physical labor of farm work.

The 19th century almshouse has a reputation as a misery-filled place where all manner of humanity was thrown together, elderly widows and young children mixed in with vagrants and drunkards. But some poor farms, especially in rural New England, were more convivial and communal – places of shelter and community where residents might play cards together or just enjoy the benefits of human companionship. They were more like small old-age homes, where elderly residents who had no family or whose family wouldn’t or couldn’t care for them lived out their last days.

The forest offers no dramatic vistas, but lots of old stone walls, a family cemetery, and other remains of the past that speak to lives lived and lost here.

The Town Forest offers no dramatic vistas, but lots of old stone walls, two family cemeteries, and other remains of the past that speak to lives lived and lost here. Here in the Haley Family Cemetery, walkers will find Captain Haley’s 1864 gravestone embedded in the ground, surrounded by other unmarked or illegible stones.

I suspect that the Kittery Town Farm almshouse had a community-like feel to it. Adelaide and Charles Leach surely enjoyed the company of little Annie Hill, who lived at the farm until she was about seven.

In 1820, Kittery purchased the original 13 acres for the farm, along with a house and a barn, for $325. Later, Captain John R. Haley left 59 surrounding acres to the town. It’s unclear when the town began using the house and land as its “poor farm,” but a town report from 1852 mentions the almshouse, so I suspect the land was purchased specifically to serve as a home for the poor. Some sources that discuss the Pepperrell family note that one of the Sparhawk brothers of Loyalist William Pepperrell ended up living at the almshouse (and the timing, around the 1820s, sounds about right, as a Sparhawk born in the 1750s or 60s would have been an elder by the 1820s).

Town records suggest that the town began to move away from using the almshouse as the shelter of last resort in the 1920s, when the number of residents declined to two and then to one, Mary Gunnison, an elderly woman who lived there with caretakers Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hall until around 1922.

Later, the town rented the farm for a $175 a year. In many years, maintenance expenses outweighed the rental income, which probably led to the decision to demolish the almshouse in 1961. Many Kittery residents today still remember riding the school bus past the almshouse on Haley Road.

Evidence of porcupine activity in the forest; the porkies love the bark of the many hemlock trees.

Somewhere in this forest is a lost and unmarked pauper’s burial plot that probably holds the Leaches and the other souls who died while living at the Town Farm. When the snow melts, I’ll continue to look for it, as I wander, and wonder, about these people, their stories, and why they landed at the poor farm.

Sources and resources

The Town Forest, at 77 Haley Road, runs between Haley and Lewis Roads, with parking areas on both ends. At the southern end, the former town pound, where stray livestock was once corralled, is an interesting feature.

I welcome any comments or additional information that might fill out this story about the Town Farm.

The Town Farm now features one main loop trail, about 3 miles long, known as the Quimby Trail, named for the late Conrad Quimby, a retired newspaper publisher who called Kittery home for many years, and as Chair of the Conservation Commission spearheaded the creation of walking trails in the Town Forest. Numerous herd trails also thread through the forest. Hunters regularly tramp in these woods in the fall, and more adventurous walkers can plunge deep into the forest without fear of getting hopelessly lost (especially now that residential development surrounds the forest).

Walkers will find the Haley Family Cemetery, on the Quimby Trail, soon after it bears left (from the Haley Road entrance). The Lewis Family Cemetery is located at the Haley Road entrance, next to the Town Pound.

The Rice Library holds town reports dating to 1874. More reports (but not all) can be found in Maine’s Digital Commons. The earliest report I found was dated 1852.

Some general information about the 19th century poor farm comes from David Wagner’s excellent study of six New England town farms and almshouses: The Poorhouse: America’s Forgotten Institution, New York; Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.

Information on the 1820 purchase is from the March 3, 2002 Portsmouth Herald article by Amy Wallace, “Kittery Hunts for Town Forest Solution,” by Amy Wallace.

Hunting is permitted in the Town Forest, so I recommend wearing hunter orange Monday to Saturday from November 1 to mid-December and avoiding the forest altogether at dusk and dawn, when hunters are most active. No hunting on Sundays.

Remnants of the Gilded Age at Brave Boat Harbor

Posted on August 21, 2015 by Dianne Fallon

Kittery Point, Maine — I dip my paddle in the water, push the kayak into the channel, and glide away from the causeway. I’m paddling into the marsh, heading out to Brave Boat Harbor for high tide.

At least once each summer, I paddle these quiet waters, squeezing my trip in between the tides and the rest of life. Even though I’ve paddled the marsh many times, I always feel on the brink of a discovery that might be significant, even if only to me.

Back in the 1600s, Brave Boat Harbor was a significant discovery for the explorers and early settlers who first came here. The shallow harbor provided safe anchorage from the angry Atlantic. But the entrance is narrow, and the surf makes passage tricky. Hence, only brave boats dared to enter.

Today, I am floating level with the marsh grass on an incoming moon tide. The astronomical high tide gives me longer window to explore the marsh, but typically I count on three hours around the published high tide (e.g. if high tide is at noon, I can set out at 10:30 a.m. and plan on returning to the causeway by 1:30). I’ve learned the hard way that if I linger too long in Brave Boat Harbor, I will end up scraping mud, or stranded.

The marsh is close to home, but feels remote and wild. I spot a kingfisher, skimming across the grass and up into the trees. A family of snowy egrets wades on the flooded plain. In the distance, the surf thuds at the harbor’s entrance.

A great blue heron lifts off along with a snowy egret. The egrets, once a source of plumage for ladies’ hats, were on the verge of extinction but now are common site on the marsh. They are here not by accident, but because thoughtful people took action to conserve the marshes on Maine’s southern coast.

This marsh isn’t wilderness. As I navigate the series of S-turns towards the harbor, I can see the occasional house on its perimeter. But this marsh, officially designated as the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, offers refuge both for me and the birds and animals who dwell or pass through these waters and grasses.

Fewer than a hundred years ago, the marsh was a domestic landscape. For three centuries, horses and oxen dragged people and tools across these spongy fields so that farmers could harvest the grass for animal fodder. In the channel, human-made rocky paths once allowed animals to safely cross the mucky bottom.

Then, during the Gilded Age, when droves of tourists began flocking to Kittery Point and York Harbor, workmen sunk pilings deep into the mud of Brave Boat Harbor to build a trolley trestle. For fifty years, the Portsmouth, Kittery and York (PK & Y) Electric Railway delivered vacationers from the ferry landing on Badgers Island in Kittery to York Harbor, with the clattering trolley cars traversing the marsh eight times a day during the summer months.

The PK & Y electric trolley doing a run on the trestle built through Brave Boat Harbor.

The PK & Y electric trolley doing a run from Kittery to York Harbor on the trestle built across Brave Boat Harbor (New England Electric Railway Historical Society).

This hand-drawn map shows the Routes of the different trolley lines in Kittyer and York, including the Portmouth, Kittery and York Electric Railway (PK & Y) line that hugged the coast and then crossed over Brave Boat Harbor. The trolleys ran until 1923, when the new Memorial Bridge facilitated the rise of the automobile (Seashore Trolley Museum Collection).

This hand-drawn map shows the routes of the different trolley lines in Kittery and York, including the PK & Y line that hugged the coast and then crossed over Brave Boat Harbor. The trolleys ran until 1923, when the new Memorial Bridge facilitated the rise of the automobile (Seashore Trolley Museum Collection).

As my paddle pushes the kayak forward, the vegetation changes, with less saltwater grass and more of the sedge-like salt meadow grass that was harvested for hay. The current stills as I approach the harbor. I push the boat around another bend and into the flooded pool, the still water tinted pink from the clouds above. Even though I’ve been out here many times, this moment of gliding into blue emptiness of Brave Boat Harbor always feels exhilarating.

Black cormorants roost on the line of rotting pilings. The birds stand with their breasts thrust forwards, their necks held high, as if standing at attention. At the harbor entrance, between Rayne’s Neck and Sea Point, small waves crash.

Relatively few kayakers venture out here. On this day, I spot a three or four others, but on the rocky beach, I eat my lunch in solitude.

The trolley trestle falling into the marsh. The trolley stopped running in 1923, almost 100 years ago. I wonder how long these historical remnants will linger.

The remnants of the trolley trestle falling into the marsh.

Almost 100 years have passed since the trolleys stopped running. The pilings won’t last forever. Many have withered to anonymous stumps. People who aren’t familiar with the marsh’s history don’t know where they came from, or why they are there. A few older folks in the region still recall riding the trolley as small children, but in a few years, all human memories of a bustling Brave Boat Harbor will disappear.

Here, these shorter pilings sit on a bed that would

Here, these shorter pilings sit on a solid bed built up to support them. The bed usually forms a low barrier but was flooded during the full moon tide.

Exploring these remnants of history of the marsh enriches my time here. Still, I’m glad the marsh is a quiet place today, one that offers a mental escape from a mind intent on relentless planning and doing.

Kayaking here is a meditation in letting go. The ebb and flow of the tide dictates my itinerary. If I ignore the tide, I will end up stuck in the muck. If I note it, I glide on an authentic source of flow.

Sources and resources

The Rachel Carson Wildlife Refuge was established in 1966 in honor of its namesake, although Rachel Carson did her work further up the coast, near Boothbay Harbor. The Refuge protects 50 miles of marsh and coast in southern Maine.

For more on the Memorial Bridge and its relationship to the rapid decline of the Gilded Age “big hotel” era in Kittery, Maine, see my post, On Bridges and the Jet Set.

Experienced kayakers might enjoy the loop paddle through the marsh and around Gerrish Island to Pepperrell Cove and up Chauncey Creek to the causeway. However, you need an ocean-worthy kayak to do, as ledges off Sea Point create waves and swell. It’s not a paddle for novices, and I wouldn’t recommend doing it alone.

Skulls of history in a forgotten tomb

Posted on July 19, 2015 by Dianne Fallon

Where was he, the most noteworthy man who ever called my town home?

Back and forth I wandered, searching. Where was the life-sized portrait of Sir William Pepperrell?

At the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, nobody seemed to know, at least not the two young gallery guards I asked. At last, an older gentleman led me through American Decorative Arts to my baron.

We turned a corner and came upon an entire wall taken up by the portrait, which easily was one of the largest on display at the PEM. But even here, Sir William was largely forgotten, just another guy on the wall.

Sir William Pepperrell, painted in 1745 by John Smibert, to commemorate the successful Siege of Louisbourg, at Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

Such is the fleeting nature of fame — even when you were once one of the wealthiest and most famous men in the American colonies, and the only American-born Englishman ever awarded a baronetcy.

Reproductions of this portrait of Colonial William Pepperrell (the rags-to-riches orphan who built the Pepperrell Mansion in the late 1600s) are found in several 19th century histories. I have been unable to locate the name of the artist or the current owner/location of the portrait, which may or may not be that of the first William Pepperrell.

Reproductions of this portrait of the first William Pepperrell are found in several 19th century histories.

The Pepperrells were upstarts start-from-nothing Americans. Sir William’s father, William Pepperrell, came to New England as a teenaged orphan working on a cod fishing boat at the Isles of Shoals, just off the coast of Maine and New Hampshire.

After completing his apprenticeship, young Pepperrell used his earnings to buy his first boat. Eventually, he bought more boats, leased them out, and combined his knowledge of the fishery with his business acumen to build an empire. His 1682 Pepperrell Mansion still dominates Kittery Point’s Pepperrell Cove neighborhood today.

William, his son, expanded the empire and became a colonial real estate magnate, buying up property on Maine’s coast from Kittery to Scarborough. Both father and son, however, did more than count their dollars. William senior helped to establish establish Kittery’s First Congregational Church, and was active in civic affairs, a legacy continued by his son, who served as a court judge and commanded the local militia.

By the 1740s, Kittery Point had little need for an active militia, as the threat of Indian raids on the coast had faded. But Britain and France remained engaged in warfare. In 1745, Massachusetts Governor William Shirley, abetted by others, decided that the colonists should try to dislodge the French from their fort at Louisbourg, on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. He asked William Pepperrell (the son) to raise an army of 4,000 men and take command of an expedition upon Louisbourg.

Pepperrell had no military field experience. When he accepted the command of this inexperienced citizen-soldier army, he knew the outcome was far from certain.

Long story short: After a lengthy siege, Pepperrell’s force, aided by the British Navy, captured the fort, and King George II made him a baronet. The American who had commanded the force that defeated a European army returned home to much acclaim.

Three years later, New Englanders had to swallow a bitter pill when the fort was returned to France as part of a swap for a British fort captured by the French in India. But the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle couldn’t take away that fact that the colonials had learned, under Pepperrell, that they could hold their own against professional soldiers – a lesson the next generation remembered 30 years later on the eve of the American Revolution.

Sir William Pepperrell, some say, became an inspiration for New England’s patriots. Conveniently, he passed away in 1759, so he could be remembered for Louisbourg without having to declare himself a Patriot or a Loyalist, as his Loyalist grandson William Pepperrell had to do. In 1774, his fellow citizens recalled Pepperrell as a “great American.”

In the 1730s (or possibly earlier), William built a large tomb for his father – a crypt dug into the side of a hill on a field across from the Pepperrell Mansion. A slab of imported marble capped the tomb, and the first William, who lived into his 80s, was interred there in 1734. Later, other family members joined the patriarch, including the Hero of Louisbourg.

A postcard depicting the Pepperrell Tomb circa 1910-1920, when the tomb was a tourist attraction for the thousands of visitors who stayed in Kittery’s five Gilded Age hotels. The trees are no longer standing, but the basic appearance of the tomb today is the same (1908 postcard, creator unknown).

But by the mid-19^th century, Sir William’s tomb had fallen into disrepair. Writing in 1875, popular historian Samuel Drake noted that when the tomb was repaired, at the behest of Pepperrell descendent Harriet Hirst Sparhawk, “the remains were found lying in a promiscuous heap at the bottom, the wooden shelves at the sides having given way, precipitating the coffins upon the floor of the vault. The planks first used to close the entrance had yielded to the pressure of the feet of cattle grazing in the common field, filling the tomb with rubbish. About thirty skulls were found in various stages of decomposition.”

These skulls inside the Pepperrell Tomb are likely the remains of different members of the Pepperrell family, including Sir William. The photo, courtesy of the Portsmouth Atheneum, was probably taken by descendent and local historian Joe Frost, as it was found tucked into a book he had given the Atheneum.

These skulls inside the Pepperrell Tomb are likely the remains of various members of the Pepperrell family, including (possibly) Sir William. The photo was probably taken in the 1970s by descendant and local historian Joseph Frost, as it was discovered tucked into a book he had given the Atheneum (Joseph W.P. Frost Collection, Portsmouth Atheneum).

Although the tomb was repaired then, it has repeatedly fallen into a cycle of neglect and renovation. Another source notes that at the turn of the 20^th century, young boys played games in and around the tomb. For many years, the Pepperrell Family Association maintained the tomb, but that organization disbanded in 1937, probably because its members had died, or moved away, or lost interest in a now-distant ancestor. At that time, according to notes and documents in the Frost Collection at the Portsmouth Atheneum, the tomb plot was signed over to a relative in a distant state.

For years, it seems, care of the tomb has depended on happenstance and somebody taking an interest. At the time of Drake’s writing, the proprietor of the Pepperrell Hotel, which overlooked the tomb, took an interest. But because the tomb is sort of an island onto itself, not in a cemetery, not in somebody’s backyard, it is easily forgotten.

At the Kittery Naval and Historical Museum, visitors can look at mourning rings crafted to commemorate the death of Sir William Pepperrell. These rings were worn by relatives and others to show they were in mourning. We should do more of that kind of memorial today, although the cost of purchasing 14K gold rings for a large number of mourners is probably reserved to the 1%, as was likely also the case in 1759.

At the Kittery Naval and Historical Museum, visitors can look at mourning rings crafted to commemorate the death of Sir William Pepperrell. The family distributed these rings to mourners. I like the idea of this tradition — a small but public display of mourning — although I’m sure the cost of the rings limited the practice to wealthier Americans.

In more recent times, local historian and Pepperrell descendent Joseph Frost (now deceased) corresponded with state officials and others, trying to get a person, a state agency, or some entity to take responsibility for the tomb, to assure that it didn’t again fall into a state of disrepair or neglect (Joseph W. P. Frost Collection, Portmouth Atheneum).

Back in the early 1960s, two people who claimed to represent the disbanded Pepperrell Family Association filed a quit-claim deed signing the lot over to the owner of Frisbee’s Store. He built a parking lot on the lower part of the tomb plot and carried out his obligations, per the deed, to maintain the tomb. But eventually, the tomb was forgotten again, with brush, grass and trees growing up around it.

I’m still not exactly sure who or what “owns” the tomb, but in 2008, volunteers from the Friends of Fort McClary cleaned up the tomb. Once again, Kittery’s forgotten hero was remembered. Today, a small American flag and the Union Jack flutter on grassy knoll across the street from Frisbee’s.

I wonder how many years will pass before we forget him again. I know that with volunteers, keeping something going often depends on one or two key people. They get sick, or move away, or die, or just get weary of responsibility.

Is forgetting the tomb an inevitable result of our on-to-go individualistic American lives? I haven’t visited the grave of my paternal grandparents since my grandmother died in the 1970s. I’ve visited the grave of my maternal grandparents once or twice in 15 years. I don’t even know the locations of the graves belonging to my great-grandparents, even though one great-grandmother lived long into my adulthood.

But my great-grandmother didn’t lead an expedition that inspired a generation of Americans that they had it in them to win a war against a world power. That’s a man worth remembering.

Front view of the Pepperrell Mansion, looking out towards Pepperrell Cove. The first William Pepperrell built this house, on a plot of land given to him by his father-in-law, John Bray, who lived next door. Sir William the son lived here with his family until his death in 1759, when Lady Mary Pepperrell built her own more modern mansion town the street.

PS: Readers, if you know anything more about the tomb, please add your comments or email me, and I will update the information in this post.

Sources and resources

For more on the Pepperrells, I especially recommended the last chapter of my book, Pioneer on a Mountain Bike, along with my posts, “Ghost of a Pepperrell Lady“, “Globalization,circa 1807, curses the Lady Pepperrell House“and “Nathaniel Sparhawk and the Art of Swagger.”

The Kittery Naval and Historical Museum has several Pepperrell artifacts on display, including — possibly — a telescope that William might have used at Louisbourg.

For more on 18th and 19th century mourning rings, see Historic New England’s online exhibit, Not Lost But Gone Before: Mourning Jewelry.

Drake, Samuel Adams. Nooks and Crannies of the New England Coast. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1875.

Snowmageddon 2015? Remembering the winter of 1716-17

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Dianne Fallon

By December, five feet of snow blanketed the ground. Although temperatures were not bitterly cold, the snow kept falling, with several storms in January. By early February, some drifts rose 25 feet. On February 18, the snow began falling again, continuing for four days, then ended, then began again, “being repeated so violently on February 24 that all communication between houses and farms ceased.”

Sound familiar? Welcome to coastal New England and the winter of 1716-17*.

Did snow really bury the coast in 1716-17? We have no “official” weather records from that winter, as the National Weather Service wasn’t born until 1870. But even though government data is lacking, plenty of New Englanders were documenting and writing about the snows of 1716-1717. Sidney Perley’s classic 1891 book, Historic Storms of New England, does not fully cite sources, but he liberally quotes Puritan writers like Cotton Mather as well as 19^th century town histories based on recollections and the oral tradition.

We're pretty snow in this year, but perhaps not so much as in February of 1717. Our Cape is a larger version of a typical New England house from the period, with some added details (like Georgian portico on front door) that don't quite fit. (Not to mention the power lines and garage).

We’re pretty snowed in this year, but perhaps not so much as in February of 1717. Our Cape is a larger version of a typical New England house from the period, with some added details (like the Georgian portico on front door) that don’t quite fit.

Then and now, people were fascinated by the weather, and it isn’t difficult to measure snow, albeit in 1717, weather nerds probably didn’t measure snowfall with the same precision and accuracy that scientists later developed. I know from other reading that 17th and 18^th century writers often misjudged distance and height. For example, Darby Field, an otherwise obscure guy recognized for being the first person to climb Mount Washington, reported that the sloping mountain stood 12 to 14 miles high. Similar miscalculations and exaggerations might have been true for the snow report.

But northern winters definitely were colder in the 18^th century. Scientists know that for about 400 years, from approximately 1450-1850, the northern hemisphere went through a cooling period, when overall temperatures were cooler by one degree Celsius (or just under 2 degrees F). The so-called “Little Ice Age” was not a global phenomenon (as today’s warming is) but a regional one. Scientist aren’t exactly sure what caused it, but posit that increased volcanic activity, a decrease in sun spot activity, and a greater frequency of the El Nino current – or some combination of the three – may have caused the prolonged period of cooling.

Thus, in 1716-17, the snow piled up. Then, as now, many roofs needed constant raking to prevent ice dams from collecting pools of water that would eventually flood the house. The shoveling was endless, a daily chore of carving a new path to the outhouse and the barn. Nervous homeowners eyed their once abundant piles of firewood, hoping and praying that it would last through the winter as they constantly tended the fire in the not-very-efficient fireplace. Everyone stayed close to the fire, because the rest of the house was icy cold.

After the week-long February storm, which Perley reports as dropping 10 to 15 feet of snow, the snow was so deep that it buried houses. In Medford, Massachusetts, a widow’s house disappeared beneath the snow, and was spotted only by a trail of smoke rising up from a drift. The trapped family had depleted its wood supply and the desperate mother was burning the furniture to keep them warm.

The 1664 Jackson House, the oldest surviving house in Portsmouth, NH, appears buried from this angle. Then as now, the snow provided insulation, until it began to melt and cause lots and lots of trouble.

I began writing this piece as a four-day storm was wrapping up. Since then, I’ve lost track of the storms: how many, how extensive, how much snow. In 50+ years of New England living, I have never seen so much snow.

At first, the snow was exciting (and in a way, it is still is): who doesn’t love the occasional snow day? Wandering in the silent white forest on snowshoes as the snow falls is a magical experience. The sledding and cross-country skiing will be great for at least another month. I don’t even mind the shoveling too much, as it provides an opportunity to exercise when the roads are too icy for walking and jogging.

But I can do without the snow piled on the roof that presents a constant chore for my husband, on a ladder, in bitterly cold temperatures. I’d say that as chores go, roof-raking is probably the most unpleasant. But not so unpleasant as water pouring through the roof due to an untended ice dam.

However, I’m so very grateful that I don’t have to shovel a path the outhouse after each storm, as homeowners had to do in the winter of 1716-17. Or use the outhouse when temperatures are many degrees below freezing.

I’m also grateful that my woodstove is a cozy and warm supplemental source of heat, and not THE source of heat that requires constant tending to prevent the house from becoming an icebox.

I’m grateful that no matter how much snow falls, I can turn on the faucet and water – cold or HOT – flows freely. I don’t have to break a coating of ice in a pail, or struggle through snow drifts to pump water or pull buckets from a well.

Also, thank you, Thomas Edison, for inventing the electric light bulb and starting a revolution, so that I can read, cook, socialize, and watch movies as the snow falls, rather than stumble around in a shadowy darkness lit by oil lamps and candles.

Thank-you, also, to whoever invented the snow plow, and to George Whitney, who plows our long driveway many a late night and in the wee hours of the morning.

I’m also grateful for all the snowy activities that make winter more than an annual feat of endurance, as it generally was back in 1717 (although I’m guessing kids still enjoyed a few rides on sled-like devices back then). I’m also grateful for technological improvements upon ancient ideas: snowshoes with snug plastic bindings that stay on my feet; toe and hand warmers that keep my digits toasty for hours; and Neoprene and Sorrell boots, these latter a vast improvement upon the leather boots worn by New Englanders as they trudged through the snows of 1717.

Finally, even though I like winter, I’m grateful for the day in March – probably a little later than usual this year – when on a small patch of bare earth, surrounded by decaying piles of snow, a blue-white crocus will improbably push up through the soil.

Maybe then (but just maybe, because we know it can snow in April), we’ll be able to put away the shovels until it all begins again next year.

*Perley’s book does not explain if he was working with the dates of the old Julian Style Calendar, or the 11-days-forward dates of the Gregorian Calendar adopted by the British Parliament in 1751. For more on the calendar, see my entry on Another Kind of Groundhog Day: the Candlemas Massacre.

Sources and Resources

“Little Ice Age.” Encyclopedia Brittanica. Good basic overview of the Little Ice Age.

For more on the Little Ice Age, see this New York Times Op-Ed piece by Geoffrey Parker, “Lessons From the Little Ice Age.”

Sidney Perley writes about New England’s worst weather and other natural calamities in Historic Storms of New England, first published in 1891, reprinted in 2001 by Commonwealth Editions. For more tales of grim winters, see his chapters on the storm of Februrary 24, 1722-23, and the winters of 1740-41 and 1747-48.

Oddly, the Great Blizzard of 1888 does not make the list, perhaps because it was so recent that it didn’t seem dramatic enough to write about. Ironically, in this winter of 2015 when the Boston subway system has come to a screeching halt at times, the Great Blizzard of 1888 spurred on the initial development of the city’s first subway system, which went on to provide vital transportation services in the wake of the famous Blizzard of 1978.

For a detailed account of Darby Field’s remarkable 1642 ascent up Mount Washington, see Laura and Guy Waterman’s Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the White Mountains. Boston, MA: Appalachian Mountain Club, 1989. Field did not write about his adventures, but reported on them to Maine deputy governor Thomas Gorges, who wrote about the ascent in a letter to Massachusetts governor John Winthrop.

A different kind of Groundhog Day: The Candlemas Massacre

Posted on January 30, 2015 by Dianne Fallon

At the Old Burying Ground in York, this undated memorial for the Candlemas Massacre says that the victims were buried “near this spot.” The main attack took place on snowy winter morning on the north side of the York River, about a half-mile downhill.

On January 24, on the morning after Candlemas Day, 1692, the town of York, Maine was burned to the ground by a band of 150 Abenaki Indians. Between 40 and 48 people were killed in the massacre, with an estimated 100 others taken captive and forced to march with their captors to Quebec.

The number of victims killed in the terror attack was nowhere near the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives on 9-11. But the attacks shared many elements. Both had religious as well as political dimensions. Distant orchestrators stoked the attackers with rhetoric and propaganda. Deaths were gruesome. Fire and smoke enhanced fear and panic. Finally, the emotional impact of the massacre was equal to if not greater than 9-11. If the enemy could mount an attack that destroyed an entire town so close to the center, what else might they do?

View of the York River towards the ocean, in falling snow. A snowstorm on January 25, 1692 helped to conceal the approach of the attackers.

View of the York River looking east. A snowstorm on January 25, 1692 helped to conceal the approach of the attackers as they approached homes strung out along the river. No bridges crossed the river then, and the Abenaki did not attempt to attack homes on the southern side. Other villages of York, such as Scotland and Cape Neddick, also were attacked, but most documentary evidence about the attack concerns the main village (which was the ] focus of the massacre).

According to Christian tradition, Candlemas Day celebrates the day that Jesus, 40 days after his birth, was delivered to the temple by his thankful parents. Like many Christian celebrations, Candlemas Day was built upon the pre-Christian traditions; in this case, the Feast of Light, which celebrated the increased strength of the light and occurred mid-way between the winter solstice and spring equinox. Candlemas Day was the forerunner today’s secular Groundhog Day, which this proverb (and many others) suggests:

If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,

Winter will take another flight;

If Candlemas Day be foul and rain,

Winter is gone and won’t come again.

On Candlemas Day, 1692, a portion of York’s 500 residents (counting outlying villages) likely spent part of the day in the village’s Congregational Church, where the town’s first minister, Reverend Shubael Dummer, might have offered a sermon noting parallels between the presentation of the baby Jesus and the survival of village babies born that winter. We do not know exactly what the minister preached on that Candlemas Day, but according to one source, (cited in Banks) his sermon on the “Sabbath next” before the attack included a prophetic warning to “beware of the enemy,” warningr the Congregation of the consequences if their vigilance abated, as did that of the “careless inhabitants of Laish, preceding the invasion of their land by the Danites, their foes.” Reverend Dummer was probably speaking allegorically — church attendance had declined by the 1690s and people had to be reminded that Satan was still lurking out there — but I wonder if the survivors, after the attack, remembered his words.

Although built in 1707, 15 years after the Candlemas Massacre, the surviving McIntire Garrison, sitting above the York River on Route 91 in York, is similar to the garrisons where some residents took shelter (Library of Congress photo, taken in 1936). The Garrison, now restored, is easy to spot on Route 91 heading towards South Berwick.

York had prospered in the 15 or so years since the conclusion of King Philips War. Since then relations between the Indians and the English had been fairly settled, but up north, goaded by the Catholic-Protestant religious divide and by distant European political events, the French began pouring gas on the fire.

In June of 1691, the Abenaki had attacked the village of Wells, about 11 miles away, but the residents had successfully taken shelter and fought off the attackers in a garrison house. In York, several residents had built garrison houses to which residents could retreat in the event of an Indian attack, but nobody believed that an attack was imminent. No guard was posted.

Samuel Drake’s account of the massacre notes that snow was falling heavily at dawn. Even so, people were out visiting. York was a small town, but not isolated. Thanks to the Piscataqua River highway, travel between York, Kittery and Portsmouth was not difficult (at least by 17^th century standards). Mrs. and Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, with Francis Tucker of Portsmouth, were at Moulton’s Tavern when gunshots pierced the quiet morning and the Abenakis descended upon the village spread out along the river.

The warriors began to systematically break into every home, kill the inhabitants inside, and then set fire to the house. At some point, the killing stopped, and, as Drake observes, “it would seem as if the savages themselves grew weary of the bloodshed.” With the exception of four garrison houses where some managed to take shelter, all of the 18 or 19 houses on the north side of the York River were burned.

Reverend Dummer was shot as he attempted to escape on his horse; he fell onto his doorstep, was stripped naked, and mutilated. His wife Lydia was taken captive along with their young son.

The Candlemas Massacre is remembered today with a mixture of legend and documentation. At the time, the Massacre was the biggest terror attack ever in early New England. Everyone was talking and writing about it, so many accounts exist of what happened

Although the colonial government would not negotiate for the release of hostages, it didn’t stop individuals from ransoming captives. Funds were raised, hostages redeemed. Some, like Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, returned to their comfortable home in Portsmouth. Many became refugees, taking shelter in Salem, Massachusetts and other larger towns. Others never returned, either because they died on the winter march, or, in the case of children, were adopted by Indian families.

Another raid on Wells followed that June. The frontier was abandoned and people took refuge in what felt like safer places. But they must have been afraid — if York could burn, was any town truly safe?

Was the Candlemas Massacre terrorism, or a battle in a territorial war? Describing the massacre as terrorism doesn’t negate the reality that the Abenaki had legitimate grievances. English settlements had multiplied along the Maine coast and into the interior of northern New England, threatening their homeland and survival. The colonials, in turn, carried out equally brutal counter-attacks on the Abenaki.

From the Abenaki perspective, I’m sure the Candlemas Massacre was a territorial war, a need to strike hard and dramatically to scare their enemies straight. For the victims, the massacre was pure terror.

After several years, people began to rebuild, on higher ground above the river. A new minister, Reverend Samuel Moody, arrived in 1698, his coming a symbol of the town’s rebirth. Once again, the villagers began to look for the light.

Notes and resources:

A note on dates: The date of the Massacre is sometimes presented as January 24 and sometimes as January 25, (1691-92), on the morning after Candlemas Day, using the old Julian Style calendar. The Gregorian Calendar, adopted in 1751 by an Act of Parliament, pushed the calendar ahead by 11 days (those days being pulled from time in September 1752), so many historians suggest that the Massacre happened on February 5, by today’s calendar. Adding to the confusion is that the same Calendar Act changed the legal start of the New Year from March 25 to January 1. Today, Candlemas Day is celebrated on February 2, 40 days after Christmas.

For more details and sources related to the massacre, see Charles Edward Banks’s History of York, Maine, successively known as Bristol (1632), Agamentious (1641), Gorgeana (1642), and York (1652). With contributions on topography and land titles by Angevine W. Gowen. Sketches by the author. Baltimore, Regional Publishing Company, 1967 reprint of first edition: Charles E Banks, Boston, 1931 [Vol.1], Chapter XXV (287-299). Banks’s account on the massacre synthesizes multiple English and French sources such as letters and diaries.

19th century historian Samuel Drake provides an account of the Massacre in his 1897 book, “The Border Wars of New England, Commonly Called King William’s and Queen Anne’s Wars.”

Emerson W. Baker and James Kences explore the connections between the Candlemas Massacre and the Salem Witchcraft outbreak in their article, Maine, Indian Land Speculation, and the Essex County Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692 Maine History, volume 40, number 3, Fall 2001 (pp. 159-189).

The article serves as the basis for one of the chapter’s in Baker 2014 book, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, which goes into greater detail about connections between the Salem witchcraft outbreak and survivors from the Candlemas Massacre and other Indian raids during King William’s War. Great book – not a fast read, but interesting and very detailed.

If People Magazine existed in 1776: cast your ballot for the hottest Patriot!

Posted on July 4, 2014 by Dianne Fallon

John was about 28 in this 1765 portrait by John Singleton Copley, and recently had inherited his uncle's business. I highly recommend coming face-to-face with the painting at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Both John and the painting are stunning.

John was about 28 in this 1765 Copley portrait. I highly recommend a date with the painting at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Because it’s an inanimate object, you won’t have to worry about John flirting with other patrons during your encounter.

Patriot John Hancock is the King of memorable signatures, so much so that his name has become synonymous with signing a document. As President of the Continental Congress, he was the first to sign the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

But John was memorable for more than a pretty signature. When I turned a corner at the Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and came face to face with this John Singleton Copley portrait of Hancock, I thought, wowza, he is one handsome Patriot! And probably a fun date, as he reportedly had a taste for luxury and the finer things in life. Rumored to somewhat of a lady’s man, Hancock finally settled down at age 38 with Dorothy Quincy, but apparently continued to flirt.

As King of the House of Hancock, a merchant house he inherited from his uncle, John Hancock could have lived a life focused on parties and luxury. But instead — partly because of British policies that targeted merchants — he got involved in politics. Although Hancock didn’t die broke, he spent a good amount of his fortune to support the Continental cause, instead of using the cause to increase his fortune. Now that’s patriotism.

My encounter with John made me wonder: which other patriots of 1776 might be possible winners in a People-magazine style contest for “hottest Patriot”? Below, in addition to John Hancock, I nominate four additional Patriot hotties. Cast your ballot — or contribute another nomination — for your favorite Patriot by making a note in the comments. All commenters will be entered into a drawing to win a copy of my just-published book, Pioneer on a Mountain Bike: Eight Days Through Early American History.

If you have qualms about voting for a Patriot hottie, because you are married or involved with a significant other, keep in mind: THESE GUYS ARE ALL DEAD. Be sure to vote — or nominate another Patriot — by the July 12, 2014 deadline!

Doesn't Nathan look like he just stepped off a movie set? No portraits or other images exist of Nathan, so this XXX sculpture is an idealized image, based on descriptions of young Nathan as X, Y and Z.

Doesn’t Nathan look like he just stepped off a movie set? No portraits of exist of young Nathan, so this Bela Lyon Pratt sculpture (1912) is an idealized image, based on descriptions of young Nathan as fair-skinned, with blue eyes and “flaxen” hair that he kept short.

Captain Nathan Hale: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.”

My second nomination is Nathan Hale, captured by the British in New York City and sentenced to hang for espionage. He is remembered for his speech at the gallows, in which he uttered some variation of the famous sentence above.

At 21 years old, Nathan was just a kid, albeit a mature and well-educated one who had graduated from Yale in 1773 at age 18, then accepted his first position as a teacher before the outbreak of the Revolution. Did the British really have to kill him? Breaks my heart. I know it must have broken his mother’s heart, and surely the heart of at least one girl, if not several.

President Thomas Jefferson: Imperfect Renaissance man

Thomas Jefferson was 62 when he sat for this 1805 portrait by Rembrandt Peale (New York Historical Society).

Thomas J. was getting up there in years when Rembrandt Peale painted this portrait in 1805, but still projected rugged good looks. Doesn’t he bear a striking resemblance to the actor Robert Redford?

Yes, Jefferson was a slaveowner, and had other imperfections (not to mention his Embargo Act that wrecked the economy), but this lead author of the Declaration of Independence, born to privilege, was a true democrat as well as a republican who believed in democracy, the republic, and the rights of the individual.

After 11 years of a happy marriage, Jefferson deeply mourned the death of his wife Martha, and honored her promise to never again marry, as she did not want another woman to bring up her children.

Jefferson was both a critic of slavery and a slaveowner, and it’s hard to reconcile why he didn’t walk the walk on the issue of slavery. Was his 37-year relationship with his slave Sally Hemming a mutual love relationship or an exploitive master-concubine one? We don’t know, but I can see why Sally might have found him attractive, even if he was 30 years her senior.

Major General John Stark: “Live free, or die. Death is not the greatest of evils.”

This is a popular image of John Stark, but I am not sure if it is an actual portrait or an idealized image. I welcome any identifiers.

During the Revolution, Massachusetts supplied the rabble-rousers like John Hancock and Samuel Adams, while New Hampshire quietly fielded many of the Revolution’s key generals. Major General John Stark, who is looking pretty good in this portrait, established the strategy for a successful losing battle against the British at Bunker Hill (kind of like the recent US performance in the World Cup; we didn’t win, but showed the soccer world that the American team is now a force to reckon with). Later, Stark led the Continentals to victory at the Battle of Bennington, Vermont.

Stark’s famous sentence (above), now the New Hampshire state motto, is from a letter he wrote to a group of Bennington veterans in 1809, when they gathered there to commemorate the battle. By then, Stark was 81 and and not well enough to travel.

In 1776, at age 48, John Stark was no longer a young man, but he WAS dashing. Perhaps his 11 children kept him young.

Ironic twist: When New Hampshire made Stark’s words the state motto in 1945, they also passed a law making it a crime if to conceal the motto on the state license plate. In 1977, the Supreme Court said First Amendment freedoms trumped the state’s right to require all citizens to display a particular ideology on the official license plate.

Paul Revere: Midnight Rider/Go-t0 Guy

Paul Revere, 1768 portrait by John Singleton Copley. Revere probably had more gray hair by 1776, but the same intensity.

Silversmith Paul Revere might seem an odd choice for hottest Patriot. In 1776, he was the married father of eight surviving children (he eventually fathered 16), and in this portrait, completed eight years earlier, he was already a little jowly.

But Revere’s nomination illustrates that for all of these Patriots, it’s really the entire package that make a guy attractive — personality, looks, gusto. The expression on his face — the lifted eyebrow, the piercing gaze — suggests thoughtful determination. You can tell that Paul is a go-getter, whether it be riding to Portsmouth, N.H. in 1774 to let the town know the British were coming, or sounding the alarm a year later at Lexington and Concord, or in crafting a silver platter or cup. Revere put his all into anything he took on.

Remember to vote!

Perhaps some will find a contest for the hottest Patriot irreverent. But as a history geek, I love getting to know the people of the past. These Patriots were guys who lived lives, who laughed, loved, and sometimes drank too much. They could be heroes, even if sometimes they were hypocrites, and in some cases had an equal number of friends and foes. All could have hunkered down and ridden out the Revolution with their heads bent low to the ground, but instead chose to risk their lives, liberty, and property to create a new nation. Now that’s hot!

Enter your vote — or your nomination — in the comments by July 12, 2014 to be eligible for the book drawing!

P.S. At some future point, I will run a contest on Patriot women, although I may have to broaden the category to include a portrait of the very intriguing Margaret Kemble Gage, the wife of British General Thomas Gage, and definitely not a Patriot.

Globalization, circa 1807, curses the Lady Pepperrell House

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Dianne Fallon

The Lady Pepperrell House, apparently released from its curse, on a recent spring afternoon.

Lady Mary Hirst Pepperrell had impeccable taste. So say many sources, but the best indicator is the home she built in 1760 on Route 103 in Kittery Point.

The Lady Pepperrell House is one of Maine’s outstanding examples of 18th century Georgian-era architecture. Its simple clean lines, graceful ionic pilasters, and large windows that flood the home with light invite house envy today. But by the mid-19th century, many said the luxurious house was cursed.

It certainly looked cursed. Writing in the 1870s, historian Samuel Adams Drake described the house as “a somber old mansion, having, in despite of some relics of a former splendor, an unmistakable air of neglect and decay. The massive entrance door hung by a single fastening, the fluted pilasters on either side were rotting away, window panes were shattered, chimney tops in ruins, the fences prostrate. It was nothing but a wreck ashore. This was the house built by Lady Pepperell, after the death of Sir William. Report said it was haunted; indeed I found it so, and by a living phantom.”

Lady Pepperrell’s house, built for her after the death of her husband Sir William, had almost become a metaphor for downfall of the Pepperrell family, except that the home’s decline began many years after the Pepperrell family’s Revolutionary War misfortune.

Besides, Loyalist William (Sparhawk) Pepperrell (who I’ve written about in another post) might have lost his property and most of what he held dear, but he lived a purposeful life in England after the war and ushered his four children successfully into adulthood. The Lady, his grandmother, lived peacefully in her house, with no curse ever in evidence, until her death in 1789.

Such was not the case for the branch of the Cutts family that purchased Lady Pepperrell’s home in 1800 from Catherine and Daniel Humphreys, who had acquired it from Elizabeth Sparhawk (who was Catherine’s grandmother and Lady Pepperrell’s daughter).

In the 18th century, the Cutts clan, whose ancestors were among the first settlers of Kittery, established itself as one of the leading families of Kittery and Portsmouth. By 1800, Joseph Cutts was a captain and merchant wealthy enough to buy the elegant home, keeping it in the family, more or less. (Cutts was a descendent, via his mother, of the original William Pepperrell family).

But on the other side of the ocean, troubles stirred by the rise of Napoleon set in a motion a chain of events that led to the chaining of Charles Cutts, the Captain’s son, in an upstairs chamber. He suffered from mental illness and reportedly was often chained to the floor to prevent injury to himself or others.

Drawing of Joseph Cutts (the Captain, I think, and not his son), attributed to Albert W. Fiske (Portsmouth Athenaeum collection).

The Captain himself lost his sanity, although he lived a long life, dying at age 97 in 1861. In 1839, another son, naval officer Joseph Cutts, killed himself in what once had been Lady Pepperrell’s bedchamber. His death might have been the culminating blow for his sister, Sarah “Sally” Chauncey Cutts, caretaker to her father and brothers. She too developed mental illness.

The key event in the demise of the Cutts family was Thomas Jefferson’s Embargo Act, passed in 1807 in a misguided attempt to stop British and French ships from seizing American vessels and to stop the British from impressing American merchant sailors into military service. The Act banned all trade with Britain and France, both of which were the new nation’s biggest trading partners.

With the bill’s passage, Captain Cutts lost his livelihood. He could neither buy nor sell. His ships rotted in an anchorage behind Gerrish Island. By 1813, he was bankrupt and indebted to the government for unpaid duties. (Some sources say the house was seized by the government for non-payment of taxes, and later redeemed by either Sally or another relative in the extended Cutts family). Although it’s likely that a genetics played a large role in the family’s mental illness, the strain of losing his fortune probably contributed to Captain Cutts’s breakdown.

Drawing of Sally Cutts attributed to artist Albert W. Fiske (Portsmouth Atheneum Collection)

Drawing of Sally Cutts attributed to artist Albert W. Fiske (Portsmouth Athenaeum Collection)

On his undated mid-19th century visit, historian Drake described Sally as “a harmless maniac,” who was “the sole inhabitant of the old house; she and it were fallen into hopeless ruin together.” Her appearance, he wrote, “was weird and witch-like, and betokened squalid poverty. An old calash almost concealed her features from observation, except when she raised her head and glanced at us in a scared, furtive sort of way.”

She invited Drake and his companion into the house. “Fragment of the original paper, representing ancient ruins, had peeled off the walls,” he wrote, “and vandal hands had wrenched away the the pictured tiles from the fire-places. The upper rooms were but a repetition of the disorder and misery below stairs.”

Sally led Drake and his companion to an upstairs “apartment,” where she “relapsed into imbecility, and seemed little conscious of our presence.” In her room, “some antiquated furniture, doubtless family heirlooms, a small stove, and a bed, constituted all her worldly goods,” wrote Drake. “As she crooned over a scanty fire of two or three wet sticks, muttering to herself, and striving to warm her weathered hands, I thought I beheld in her the impersonation of Want and Despair.”

I am a little skeptical as to whether or not Drake visited Sally Cutts in the Pepperrell House. She died in 1874, (a year before Drake’s book was published) and spent time prior to her death living with friends who had taken her in. Another writer, James H. Head, wrote of a similar visit to Sally Cutts in November of 1864, with his account published in the Boston Journal. Sarah Orne Jewett presented a barely fictionalized account of a visit with “Miss Sally Chauncey” in Deephaven: Selected Stories and Sketches (1877), so presumably she visited her as well.

Captain Cutts and his family are buried in the Old Burying Ground across the street from his one-time home and the Congregational Church. A table-like memorial stone tells his story. (Entering via the cemetery’s maine gate, the Cutts memorial is readily visible, to the left).

Did poor Sally regularly open her door to touring writers who wanted to invade her privacy? Or did Drake build upon and embellish the accounts of Head and Jewett? And am I the latest in a series of writers fascinated by the Cutts family history, even if it is a history that they would have preferred to keep private?

The story of the Cutts family, however, is worth remembering, because their family history is a microcosm for the economic devastation that Jefferson’s Embargo wreaked in the Seacoast region. Their pain helps us to better understand how the region suffered during this period of economic collapse. Ships rotted in harbors. Many merchants declared bankruptcy. A ripple effect reverberated throughout the local economy. Portsmouth, once a thriving port, became a backwater instead of a rival to Boston or New York.

The Embargo Act inadvertently paved the way for the Seacoast region to become what it is today: historically rich, but economically underdeveloped compared to what it might have become. The Seacoast region is not Boston, with its packed roadways and paved landscapes.

The losses suffered by the Cutts family and many others during the Embargo era have become our gain, in that we live in what is now an economically vibrant but beautiful and sustainable community. The story of the Cuttses connects with our story today.

A fire ravaged the Lady Pepperrell House on December 27, 1945 and caused extensive damage. The home was restored by X and Y. Portsmouth Herald photo from Historic New England digital collections.

Another sign of the curse? A fire ravaged the Lady Pepperrell House on December 27, 1945 and caused interior damage. John Fellows of Kittery oversaw the restoration. Historic New England (formerly the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities) owned the home from the 1940s until the 1980s, when the organization sold the home to a private owner. Portsmouth Herald photo from Historic New England digital collections.

The Lady Pepperrell House is protected by a preservation easement administered by Historic New England. Other Kittery landmarks, however, such as the Pepperrell Mansion and the Bray House, are not protected. Although both homes are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and currently are owned by good stewards, they could be torn down tomorrow if a property owner wanted to take that path.

These architectural artifacts of history remind us that we are not historical islands, despite our high tech gadgets and way of life. We live in both a global economy and an historical ecosystem where the past reverberates into the present.

Embargoes and lost fortunes lead to economic decline, paving the way for resurrection and reclamation. Trolleys connect the city to the country, and bridges and automobiles (as I’ve written about here) swiftly change a way of life. A grange hall becomes The Dance Hall, and a building where the Masons gathered transforms to a collection of gathering places for locals and visitors discovering the pleasures of walking across bridges.

Beware of curses– but only when we forget them. In remembering Sally Cuts and her family, perhaps we’ll take more care as we construct our own story.

Lady Pepperrell House, undated photo (Historic New England Collection).

Resources and sources

For a great example of connecting the past to the present, read about Stories from The Grange and Kittery’s Foreside, a project organized by Drika Overton of The Dance Hall.

For more information the architectural details of the Lady Pepperrell House, see “Palladian Perfection, New England Style, Part 2: The Lady Pepperell House at Kittery Point Maine” at The Down East Dilettante.

To read more about Drake’s visit, see Chapter 10, “At Kittery Point, Maine,” in Nooks and Corners of the New England Coast, by Samuel Adams Drake (1875).

James Head’s Boston Journal account of his 1864 visit to Sally Cutts can be found in the Pepperrell House vertical file at the Portsmouth Athenaeum.

For some detailed photos of the exterior and interior of Lady Pepperrell’s house, see Donna Seger’s “Lady Pepperrell and Her House” at Streets of Salem.

For more on the oldest homes in Kittery Point, see Colonial Village, by John Eldridge Frost (1947, publisher unknown)

The Ghost of a Pepperrell Lady

Posted on January 6, 2014 by Dianne Fallon

John Singleton Copley rarely painted children, but likely couldn't refuse the commission from Isaac Royall for the portrait of his two daughter. The Royall family amassed a fortune trading slaves and merchandise. By the 1750s, Isaac Royall was one of the wealthiest men in New England.

John Singleton Copley rarely painted children, but likely couldn’t refuse the commission from Isaac Royall Junior for the portrait of his two daughters. The portrait is owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Click portrait for larger view.

Elizabeth Royall was a royal – a member of New England’s informal royalty. When she was a tween girl, she and her older sister Mary sat for a young John Singleton Copley when he came to their Medford, Massachusetts house to paint their portrait in 1758.

New England royalty differed from British royalty in that most of the region’s wealthiest families had earned their royal status via a combination of education, commerce and the luck of having arrived first. Once having attained their status, New England’s royal families maintained it with strategic marriages, lots of social networking, and visits to England to establish and nurture helpful contacts.

Elizabeth’s grandfather Isaac Royall, born to a family of modest means in colonial Maine, kickstarted the family fortune as a merchant mariner who eventually amassed a fortune trading in rum, sugar and slaves. By the 1750s, Elizabeth’s father had inherited the family’s elegant home and farm in Medford and freely enjoyed the fruits of his wealth while continuing to add to his immense fortune. The Royall family was the largest slaveholder in New England, and the 20-27 slaves they owned (at various periods) supported the Royall lifestyle with their labors in the house and on the farm.

This portrait of Elizabeth and her older sister Mary, according to the Museum of Fine Arts, is designed to show off the family’s wealth and status through both the silk dresses and laces worn by the girls, and the inclusion of their pet dog, a King Charles spaniel then fashionable with English royalty.

Elizabeth and Mary grew up in this Georgian-style mansion that their grandfather had built around a brick farmhouse on the site that originally was owned by colonial Governor John Winthrop. Their father, Isaac Jr., had to flee Boston during the Revolution and the property was confiscated by the state. During the first months of the war, it was used by Generals Lee, Stark and Sullivan and visited by George Washington.

A few years after sitting for the portrait, Elizabeth caught the eye of fellow New England aristocrat, William Pepperrell. Young William, from Kittery Point, Maine, was the great-grandson of a Welsh orphan who had parlayed a fishing sloop at the Isles of Shoals into a small fortune that was further expanded by the commercial dealings and real estate investments of his son, William Pepperrell, who later achieved fame as the commander of a colonial militia that succeeded in taking the fort at Louisbourg, Nova Scotia, from the French in 1745, service for which King George II awarded him a baronetcy. (The fort, however, was returned to France as part of a post-war territory swap). Pepperrell’s only son died at age 24. Eventually, Sir William named his grandson William Sparhawk as his heir, on the condition that he change his surname to Pepperrell.

After graduating from Harvard in 1766, young William began to prepare for his role as keeper (and expander) of the family fortune. Exactly how Elizabeth and William met is not known, but as “royal” young people of similar ages, they would have readily crossed paths in the Boston social scene in which both were active. Even though William hailed from Maine, his grandmother Mary Hirst Pepperrell was a Bostonian. In addition to his time at Harvard, it’s likely that as William grew up, he and his siblings spent extended periods of time visiting relatives and friends in the city.

The pair met and fell in love. Then and now, people tend to end up marrying others of similar social backgrounds, but that didn’t mean that these two young people didn’t feel a spark. William was 21 when they married in Boston’s Anglican Christ Church on October 24, 1767 (some sources list the date as November 12). Elizabeth was probably around the same age. A year later, in the fall of 1768, William left a newly-pregnant Elizabeth and headed off to England to polish and secure connections that could enable the family’s fortunes to thrive. He stayed aboard for almost two years, missing the July 1769 birth of his daughter Elizabeth, although he was quite thrilled when he finally got to meet her. “I found my little girl finely grown she stands very well & just beings to speak & tho’ I am a very young Papa,” he wrote to Lord Edgecumbe. “I find myself a very fond one.”

Elizabeth wrote him many letters while he was in England. She didn’t hold back on sharing her feelings. She missed him. She felt that the Sparhawk family in Kittery Point, especially her mother-in-law, didn’t like her. She filled him in on all the royal gossip, such as New Hampshire Governor John Wentworth’s marriage to his cousin Frances ten days after the death of her husband Theodore. “A good hint to him,” she wrote on November 15, 1768, “of what he may expect, if she outlives him but I think he’ll deserve it.” (As it turns out, Elizabeth’s observation was on target: Frances Wentworth later had a scandalous affair with Prince William Henry, the third son of King George III, and 20 years her junior, while John was serving as Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia).

But when William Pepperrell returned to Boston in the summer of 1770, after almost two years abroad, he found a world turned upside-down. A series of Parliamentary acts had resulted in protests and boycotts. One-time college buddies had become political activities. People were taking sides, Patriot or Loyalist. Like many who eventually came to be called “Loyalists,” William was conflicted – he didn’t like many of the laws passed by the British parliament — but he also didn’t countenance rebellion.

In 1774, William wrote letters to British figures such as Parliament member Edgecumbe and Prime Minister Lord North, urging conciliation and peaceful resolutions. By 1774, however, the royal government had gutted the charter of Massachusetts. The elected Council on which William served was dissolved and replaced with a Council of appointed men. William elected to not to resign, as so many others had done, and was branded as a Loyalist with a capital L, even though the title didn’t truly fit.

These years of stressful politics, however, were probably happy ones at home. Elizabeth had three additional children, Mary, Harriot, and William, in the five years after William’s return from England. Baby William, their fourth son, was born in the summer of 1775. By now, the Revolution had begun. Thanks to their costly victory at the Battle of Bunker Hill, the British still held Boston, but the town was blockaded by land. Food and other supplies were scarce. For the Pepperrells, the world of luxury and privilege they had always taken for granted no longer existed. But they had each other.

Then in September Elizabeth came down with a fever, sore throat, and a bad case of dysentery. Three weeks later, she was dead, and William became the single parent of four young children (including his two-month-old infant son). William also took ill and almost died, but recovered, although he wrote to his mother that he wished not to. Did Elizabeth contract cholera or typhoid fever? A virulent strain of influenza? A bad case of food poisoning? The cause is uncertain.

William blamed the war and the food shortages that resulted in a diet heavy with salted meat. “But I still breath,” William wrote to his mother Elizabeth Sparhawk, in November 1775. “Love I never can again, till my soul is rewedded to that of my dear Betsy’s in the Joy of praising God forever.” She was, he wrote, “my deceased Friend & the worthiest of women.”

In the spring of 1776, grief-stricken and subject to arrest if he stayed in Boston, William, with his four children, set sail for England, where he became a leader of American Loyalists and an advocate for America prisoners-of-war. By legislative act, all of his property was confiscated by the state of Massachusetts. He never returned to the U.S., nor did any of his children. (His Sparhawk brothers, however, eventually returned to Kittery).

In 1779, Copley painted this portrait of the Pepperrell family in London. The portrait (which is owned by the North Carolina Museum of Art) recalls happier times, as Elizabeth had been dead for three years. Click on portrait for larger view.

Also living in London was Boston painter John Singleton Copley, who had moved there for artistic reasons. In 1778, Copley painted his second portrait of Elizabeth Royall — a portrait of her ghost. In a family portrait commissioned by William, Copley depicts a happy family, the six Pepperrells, including Elizabeth, at the peak of her beauty and fashion, but dead now for three years.

As with most colonial women, the historical record provides only glimpses of Elizabeth. Although her marriage to William is recorded, I have not found a record of her birth or death, or the location of her grave. But she did leave us her voice, in letters that she wrote to William while he was in Europe; the Portsmouth Atheneum holds a transcribed collection of them. The letters are chatty, sometimes petulant, loving, impatient, and brainy. Sometimes Elizabeth seems like a flighty young woman – after all, she was young, pregnant, and probably bored at her parents’ Medford home. But the letters also demonstrate that beneath the beauty lay a rigorous brain, as she asks William to bring home the latest books by scientists and philosophers.

What is most amazing about the letters is that they exist at all. William’s letters to her do not survive, although Elizabeth’s letters suggest that he wrote many. As Henry Knox’s cannons set their sites on Boston, and Loyalists hurriedly packed up to evacuate with the British Army, William carefully packed up the letters, by then already almost ten years old. The letters travelled to England, and then from one set of lodgings to another. Did William take them out from time to time to read them again, and hear her voice? Did he share them with his sons and daughters, to help them know the mother they had lost so young?

The letters survive today, in a private collection in England, as do Pepperrell’s descendants. William never re-married. All of his children fared well, with good careers and marriages. In his older years, William was comfortable, though no longer well. Never again would he watch sloops cruise past Kittery Point up the Piscataqua River to Portsmouth. Nor would he marry.

William was just shy of thirty when his wife died, and he lived to be 70. When he lost the love of his life, he still had his entire life ahead of him. Why didn’t he marry again, at a time when many young men lost their wives (usually in childbirth) and remarriage was routine? Was William preoccupied with his work and with raising his children? Was he not an attractive prospect because of his vastly reduced circumstances? Did he have flirtations and dalliances, or maybe a housekeeper/companion that shared his bed, if not his title? Or did William decide that no woman could ever replace Elizabeth in the family portrait?

In politics, Sir William was conflicted, a loyalist with a small “l”. In love, it seems, he earned his true title as Loyalist.

Sources and resources

Transcribed copies of Elizabeth Royall’s letters can be viewed at the Portsmouth Atheneum (although you have to go there in person to look at the letters).

For additional information on the portrait of Mary and Elizabeth Royall, visit the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

For additional information on the Copley portrait, Sir William Pepperrell and his family, visit the North Carolina Museum of Art.

The Royall House and Slave Quarters, in Medford, Massachusetts, is open on the weekend for tours from May through October. A beautiful location, and a secret hidden gem. The slave quarters are the only extent slave housing in New England.

For more detailed information on William’s status as a “loyalist” (small “l”), see “A ‘Great National Calamity’: Sir William Pepperrell and Isaac Royall, Reluctant Loyalists,” by Colin Nicolson and Stuart Scott, in the Historical Journal of Massachusetts Volume 28, No. 2
(Summer 2000).

Governor John Wentworth and the Tea Party that wasn’t

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Dianne Fallon

What would happen when the tea landed in Portsmouth? Would a mob gather at the wharf? Would violence erupt? New Hampshire Governor John Wentworth pondered these questions when he learned, on June 25, 1774, that the mast-ship Grosvenor was sailing up the Piscataqua River and carrying cargo that included 27 chests of tea.

John Singleton Copley came to Portsmouth to paint this portrait of young governor Wentworth in 1769.

Just a few months earlier, on the day of the Boston Tea Party in December 1773, Patriot-leaning residents of Portsmouth had held a public meeting and adopted a resolution declaring that if East India Company tea were brought to Portsmouth, the inhabitants would use “every necessary method to prevent it being landed or sold.”

As a Royal Governor appointed by the Crown, Wentworth owed his first allegiance to the King. He was troubled by the resistance to Parliamentary acts in places like Boston, even if he didn’t support Parliament’s decisions. And he didn’t like the fact that British troops were stationed in Boston. Now, a cargo of tea was coming into his town, and he didn’t want trouble.

This June day was a critical moment for Wentworth, the 37-year-old nephew of the first royal governor, Benning Wentworth. The King had appointed the younger Wentworth as Governor 10 years earlier, and, up until the time of the Revolution, John Wentworth had earned the respect of most New Hampshire inhabitants for his thoughtful and creative solutions to governing the colony. Not everyone always agreed with him, but most would concede that when Wentworth made a decision or proposed an idea, his primary goal was to serve the public welfare rather than his own.

Time and again, Wentworth had proven to be the ultimate diplomat, adept at compromise, negotiations, and at coming up with solutions. For example, in 1771, the King’s tax people were demanding the quitrents due for lands granted in the backcountry. Wentworth knew he had to enforce the quitrent collections. He also knew that landowners would resist paying these taxes. So he proposed that instead of going into the royal treasury, the quitrent funds should be used to develop roads from the interior to the coast. The road-building project would help farmers get their goods to market, and generally benefit the backcountry regions of the New Hampshire. This economic development, in turn, would ultimately generate more revenue for the Crown. All parties bought into this win-win solution.

This sort of maneuver characterized much of Wentworth’s dealings: how to come up with a compromise in political or other disputes in which all parties felt as if they had gained something in the solution. Now, with the Grosvenor approaching Portsmouth, the Governor had to think fast to avoid a confrontation that, in his mind, would serve no good purpose in Portsmouth.

Wentworth quickly made arrangements for a message to be delivered to the captain. Two days later, on June 27, he rode to Dover to spend the day, so as to present the appearance that nothing was afoot. While he was gone, the tea was landed and brought to the custom house before anybody knew of its arrival. Within a few hours, residents found out about the tea and assembled in a public meeting to discuss how to handle the situation, at which point Wentworth returned to town and joined the meeting. The crowd decided that as the cargo had already been off-loaded, a committee would take up the matter with the merchant to which the tea had been conveyed. Ultimately, the committee and the merchant came up with a solution: the controversial duty on the tea was paid, but the merchant agreed to export the tea to Halifax, Nova Scotia and the residents of Portsmouth agreed not to interfere with its transport. Though imperfect, the agreement satisfied all parties: the duties were paid, but the tea wouldn’t be sold or consumed in Portsmouth. Most importantly, violence was averted.

In December of 1774, when locals led by John Langdon and John Sullivan raided the cache of powder at Fort William and Mary, Wentworth acted with characteristic restraint. Instead of having the raiders rounded up and arrested – a scenario likely to result in a mob uprising – he met with leaders and asked them to return the power, on the promise of a full pardon extended to all involved. The meeting ended cordially, but the instead of returning the power, a group of men led by Sullivan returned to the fort that night to carry off 16 cannon and other arms.

What Wentworth wanted most, it seems, was to preserve public order, to keep the peace. But by the end of 1774, his authority had eroded and he was running out of options. The Patriots had convened their own assembly and government in nearby Exeter. By the spring of 1775, rebel militia had begun to fortify Portsmouth. But even then, Wentworth continued his efforts to diffuse the situation.

In the harbor, the HMS Scarborough had begun to impress local fishermen and to seize supplies for British troops in Boston. Wentworth intervened, and Captain Andrew Barclay agreed to release the fisherman.

But by this time, the Governor was such in name only. Only a few months earlier in January 1775, Portsmouth had greeted the birth of his first and only child, Charles-Mary, with booming cannons and celebrations. The festivities likely concealed the extent to which Patriot fever had taken hold in New Hampshire. Just a few months later, on June 13, 1775, Wentworth looked out his window to see a cannon pointed at the front door of his Pleasant Street home.

The Governor’s home on 346 Pleasant Street, now part of the Mark Wentworth Home senior care facility.

The cannon wasn’t specifically aimed at the Governor. A mob had gathered in front of his Pleasant Street home to demand the surrender of his friend Colonel Fenton, who had stopped by for a social call on route to his temporary home on board the Scarborough. Fenton, a once-popular Assembly member, had been voted out of office after Lexington and Concord, after angering his constituents by publishing a letter urging them to stay on their farms rather than join the rebellion. Once Fenton surrendered, to be escorted to Exeter, Wentworth decided to leave as well. Along with wife Frances and baby Charles, he fled to a damp and decrepit house at Fort William and Mary in Newcastle. In August, the family left town on the Scarborough, staying first in Boston, and then sailing to England (John stayed behind in Boston and then in British-occupied New York, but eventually he joined his family in England). After the War, the Wentworths landed in Nova Scotia, where John served for many years as lieutenant governor.

John's first cousin and wife, Lady Frances Wentworth. They married 10 days after the 1769 death of her first husband, Theodore Atkinson. This portrait by John Singleton Copley painted this portrait in xxx, when Frances was about 20 and married to Atkinson.

John’s first cousin and wife, Lady Frances Wentworth. They married 10 days after the death of her first husband, Theodore Atkinson. John Singleton Copley painted this portrait in 1765, when Frances was about 20 and married to Atkinson.

Today some might applaud Wentworth for his integrity and loyalty to the office to which he had been appointed. Others might say that he was a member of the established elite trying to resist changes that might challenge his social and economic standing. Still others might call him a waffler unwilling to take a firm stance one way or the other.

In the end, Wentworth’s compromises and negotiations didn’t stop the Revolution. He lost all of his property (except for his family portraits and furniture, which Portsmouth’s residents reserved for him) and had to flee the city of his birth, a place that his family had called home for more than a hundred years.

But in characteristic Wentworth fashion, the Governor’s losses, in a round-about way, served to benefit the public welfare. Although New Hampshire sent many men to fight in the Revolution, the war never came to New Hampshire. Aside from that non-violent skirmish at the fort in December, 1774, no battles were fought in its towns. No cities were burned, bombed or blockaded. British soldiers were not quartered in local homes. Life was harder for all during the war, especially for those families who had sent their men off to distant battlefields, but at night, the residents of Portsmouth and other New Hampshire towns slept in peace. John Wentworth may have lost all of his authority and his property, but he still managed to leave a valuable legacy for New Hampshire.

NOTE: John’s son Charles-Mary Wentworth eventually returned to live in Portsmouth, where he had many Wentworth relatives, whose numerous descendants take up a couple of columns in today’s phone book. I’d especially love to hear from any Wentworths who might have other interesting information to share about John Wentworth.

Sources

Mayo, Lawrence Shaw John Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire: 1767-1775. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921. Mayo’s biography, which is full of interesting details about Wentworth’s life and times, presents a largely flattering and at times worshipful view of Wentworth. Although I’m sure Wentworth had his flaws that a more objective biographer might highlight, Mayo’s book tends to confirm other bits and pieces I’ve read about Wentworth and how he governed.

The Maniacal Traveler

Travels around the world, in the mountains and through time…..

Category Archives: Seacoast (mostly) History

Fragments of history: When the KKK marched in Kittery, Maine

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Lives lived, and lost, at the Kittery Town Forest

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Remnants of the Gilded Age at Brave Boat Harbor

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Skulls of history in a forgotten tomb

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Snowmageddon 2015? Remembering the winter of 1716-17

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A different kind of Groundhog Day: The Candlemas Massacre

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If People Magazine existed in 1776: cast your ballot for the hottest Patriot!

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Globalization, circa 1807, curses the Lady Pepperrell House

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The Ghost of a Pepperrell Lady

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Governor John Wentworth and the Tea Party that wasn’t

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