Exeter Historical Society in New Hampshire Local History Programs

The Jenny Wren Club

2012-01-20T14:12:00.000-05:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, January 20, 2012.

In November of 1913, a group of 12 Exeter girls - all between the ages of 7 and 9 - got together to form a sewing club. A copy of their record book, written in clumsy school-girl script, was donated to the Exeter Historical Society in 1991 by the family of Faith Kenniston, one of the girls in the group. In a very grown-up way, they elected officers, decided on the purpose of the club (to learn to sew), set meeting dates as Saturdays at 3:00 p.m. and collected dues of one cent per meeting. Faith’s mother, Inez, would serve as their adult advisor. It was all very business-like until the final entry: “After the business was over, the members danced for half an hour. Helen E. Redman, Secretary.”

In 1913 clubs of all kinds were popular with all ages. It was an era with little outside entertainment. Men joined fraternal organizations like the Masons, Odd-Fellows, Foresters or Improved Order of Red Men. Women sometimes joined the auxiliary branches of the men’s groups or they formed their own reading clubs, church organizations, social welfare groups or current event clubs. The girls of Exeter had plenty of examples of how to run a proper club.

They named their group after a character in Charles Dickens’, Our Mutual Friend. Jenny Wren was a sympathetic care-taker of her alcoholic father, who supported herself by making doll clothes. The girls may have heard of this character, but it was more likely that they had not. Our Mutual Friend was not one of Dickens best known or easiest novels - certainly not the choice reading material for girls barely out of second grade. The Jenny Wren Club of Exeter was part of a larger program to encourage home sewing by one of the nation’s largest makers of sewing patterns - the Butterick Corporation.

Butterick sales were lagging due to the expansion of ready-made clothes. It was simply no longer necessary for women to spend hours and hours hand sewing clothing for the family. It was just as easy (and sometimes just as inexpensive) to purchase clothes off the rack. To keep their sewing patterns selling, Butterick had to figure out a way to convince women that homemade clothes were somehow better than their more convenient store-bought counterparts.

The company began by publishing a fashion magazine called The Delineator - so named for the master dressmaker patterns that professional tailors and seamstresses used to individually fit a garment to a customer. The Delineator became wildly popular, setting fashion standards in a way that earlier women’s magazines, such as Godey’s Ladies Book, had done in the mid-nineteenth century. But rather than encouraging women to purchase the new styles in the magazine, The Delineator reminded them that home sewing patterns, particularly those made by Butterick, were fully adaptable and would produce a garment that would conform better to any size woman. And, it would be better made, because you made it yourself. Home sewing was no longer seen as a necessity, it was a question of quality and womanhood.

But what about the new generation of girls who would not necessarily have to be taught to sew by overworked mothers? How could home sewing skills be encouraged in the next generation? To tackle these problems The Delineator created a national movement of girls’ sewing groups called Jenny Wren Clubs. The Exeter girls were part of a much larger movement.

It was probably Mrs. Kenniston who suggested to the girls that they form a club, and they met at the Kenniston home for most of the first meetings. The club was duly registered with The Delineator and received a club certificate, membership pins and frequent letters of encouragement .

Even with the help of a national magazine, Mrs. Kenniston had her work cut out for her. School-aged girls one hundred years ago were no more demure than girls of the same age today. And anyone who presumes that girls are quiet and happy to sit still sewing for an hour hasn’t hung around with any of them. Once the girls met, took attendance, collected dues and settled into their project of the day, Mrs. Kenniston kept them amused by reading or telling stories - she once spent nearly the entire hour telling them about the girlhood of Helen Keller. The club eventually rotated meetings between the member’s homes, inviting one another’s mothers to host the group.

They would sew for a while, have a snack and then do something more active before the meeting adjourned. Sometimes they danced, (“with the phonograph for music, and Mrs. Kenniston for teacher, the members danced the Virginia Reel”) or played in the snow or “played at magic writing.” Who knows how much actual sewing the girls learned, but the club certainly provided them with companionship and an initiation into the world of club life. And Butterick still makes home sewing patterns today, so the experiment proved to be a success for all involved.

Amos Tuck's Magnificent House

2012-01-06T13:05:00.000-05:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, January 6, 2012.

In 1838, young lawyer Amos Tuck moved to Exeter with his wife Sarah and three young children. There were numerous lawyers already in town, but Tuck, at his wife’s urging, decided there was room enough for another. The Tucks moved into a plain but roomy wooden house at 72 Front Street. In this house, Sarah and Amos would have five more children and would mourn the deaths of most of them. In a time when infant mortality was high, it was unusually high for the Tucks. Of their eight children, only three survived into adulthood. The most children they had at any one time was five – and that lasted only four years.

Sarah herself died at the age of 36 in 1847. Ever a practical man, Tuck was married again within six months to Catherine Shepherd. Marriage wasn’t the only change in his life that year; he was elected to the U.S. Congress and the family moved to Washington D.C. in November. It was at his first congressional meeting that he met another freshman congressman, Abraham Lincoln.

The two men were the same age and both were disillusioned with their respective political parties’ views on the expansion of slavery. He and Lincoln served together for two years, forming a strong friendship. Lincoln went back to Illinois to resume his legal career. Tuck continued to live in Exeter and Washington, D.C., serving two more terms in congress.

In 1853, after returning to Exeter, Tuck decided to build a new house on Front Street. Moving slightly away from the center of town, he purchased a piece of land on the opposite side of the street. His family, by this time, had shrunk to nearly an empty nest. Son Edward was off to Dartmouth and his eldest daughter, Abigail, married that year. This left Tuck, his wife and 14 year old daughter Ellen as the only permanent residents in the new house.

The Tucks decided not to make their new house similar to the other old colonial structures on Front Street. They chose, instead, to build an Italian villa, a trendy new style in architecture in 1853. Most of Exeter’s architecture up until that point, consisted of boxy symmetrical colonials with deeply pitched roofs and overlapping clapboarding. Tuck’s house, although constructed of native materials, was designed to look like it was dropped in New England from the outskirts of Tuscany. The clapboarding is smooth to mimic Italian stucco. The roof is designed with a low pitch with deeply overhanging eaves that are heavily bracketed. Italian villa homes, like the Tuck house, are usually asymmetrical and feature a prominent porch. It remained the unrivaled example the Italianate style until Alva Wood built his house across the way at 84 Front Street in 1864.

Tuck’s house oozed elegance. When Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert, came to Exeter in the fall of 1859 to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, he often visited the Tucks at their fine home. When his father stopped by the following winter, he did not spend any time with the family, although it was long presumed that he had stayed at the house. Amos Tuck was in St.Louis when Abraham Lincoln was in town, and later berated him for not even stopping to visit his wife and daughter. For many years, however, the house bore a plaque that stated that Lincoln had stayed there. It seemed like the logical place for Lincoln to stay – he and Tuck were old friends from Congress. In later years, Tuck’s son, Edward, would state that he thought Lincoln had stayed at his father’s house – but he had been away at college at the time, so his statement, made in old age, is a bit suspect. In actuality, we have no idea where Lincoln slept during his brief visit.

Tuck lived in the house until his death in 1879. The house remained in family hands for decades after. Still a private residence, the house has undergone extensive renovations in this past year under the careful guidance of Exeter’s Historic District Committee. It remains a jewel on Front Street.

Clothing During the Great Depression

2012-01-03T15:05:00.000-05:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Tuesday, December 27, 2011.

Are you knitting furiously to finish those Christmas mittens? Maybe deciding to make 10 pairs of mittens for Christmas presents was a bit ambitious. Time to head to the drugstore for last minute presents. Today, we make clothing as gifts, but it used to be a time consuming chore to keep the family clothed.

Maude Richards, of Exeter, had six sons and a daughter to take care of in the early part of the twentieth century. On top of all of her other duties -- cooking, marketing, canning, cleaning, adjudicating family squabbles, keeping rooms for academy boarders and eventually running a catering business out of her kitchen -- Maude also had to make sure everyone in the family had enough clothing. Her husband was a salesman and was frequently out of town.

In 1913, Maude began keeping a record of all the sewing and knitting projects she completed. Each page of the journal contains a brief description, “kimono apron for myself,” or “marble bag for William”, and frequently a swatch of fabric. Her output is a wonder considering she only had a few hours per day to devote to sewing and knitting. There are a few years missing – 1917 through 1919 must have been too complicated for the family – but it picks up again just as clothing styles began to change in 1920.

When her sons were little, Maude dressed them in rompers and blouses. She used primarily cotton fabrics, which her daughter Olive remembers her buying as remnants from the Exeter Manufacturing Company. Pink was definitely an acceptable color for boys at the time and Maude seemed to favor it. Page after page shows her preference for pink – March 1st, 1913: “rompers for Lauris, blue trimmed with pink and white check” reads one entry.

Some days she managed only a small bit of sewing, “hemmed 1 napkin”. On other days she’d complete much larger projects, “cream linen gown for myself, Baltic blue linen & white pearl buttons for trimming.” Over the few days around January 7th, 1916, she managed only a “small doily with crocheted edge.” It doesn’t seem like much, unless you consider that baby Olive Jeannette was born on January 2nd and Maude notes “in hospital” almost as an afterthought.

Olive’s birth allowed Maude to sew girl’s clothes at long last. After all those boys, she must have been glad to create more decorative pieces for her daughter, although she still favored pink for the entire family. “January 16, 1920: pink & white pajamas for Olive Jeannette. January 18th, 1920: Pink & white outing flannel night-gown for Donald.” She rarely mentions underclothes, except for occasional petticoats, perhaps because underwear could be purchased cheaply. She also doesn’t list those articles of clothing she had to alter.

The Great Depression in Exeter began in the 1920s, not the 1930s as in other parts of the country. A growing family meant that the Richards’ had to be frugal to keep everyone properly dressed. Olive recalls that most of her school clothes came from an annual rummage sale held in the town hall by the O’Leary sisters. Elizabeth O’Leary and her sister, Cecelia Donnelly, would collect used clothing year-round to supply the sale. Although she didn’t particularly like wearing other people’s made-over clothes. She later wrote, “Mother used to say that I had more clothes than any other girl in town; and I’ll bet I did! But nearly all of them were castoffs, rummage-sale items or greatly marked-down things from an Exeter or Haverhill store.”

Maude didn’t buy pre-made sheets and towels. Muslin for bed sheets came in widths that were not wide enough for the average bed. The long, perfectly straight seams had to be made either down the center or on the sides to make a sheet that would fit on a bed. Pillowcases had to be made by hand and Maude generally took on all the bedding projects at one time. During one week in July of 1920, she stitched together seven bed sheets. When the sheets wore out, they were reused. Olive Richards Tardiff later recalled, “Nothing was wasted in our house. Old sheets were cut or torn up for many uses. The best parts were made into pillow cases. Squares were torn for dust rags or for window washing. On rainy days, the children might be set to work tearing strips off the ends of the sheets to wrap into balls for use as bandages to tie onto sore toes or fingers.”

Like so many Exeter women, Maude Richards had to be creative, resourceful and, most of all,productive to keep the household supplied. One of her final entries in the sewing book contains a particularly productive week:

“August 8 to August 12 (1920). Aunt Alice and I had a ‘sewing ‘ time and made three envelope chemesis for her, two envelope chemesis for myself, two slip-ins for me, two nighties for myself, one for Aunt Alice, two long petticoats for her, one nightie for Olive Jeanette, one pair of rompers for Dorothy’s baby, one lavender gingham for Aunt Alice, finished black and white striped gingham for myself and four aeroplane linen napkins for Aunt Alice, for which I take credit for half.”

How String Bridge Got Its Name

2011-12-15T13:18:00.000-05:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, January 13, 2006.

There are two ways to get across the river in downtown Exeter. The Great Bridge crosses the river at the upper falls and the String Bridge crosses at the lower. Sometimes when people cross the Great Bridge they don’t even realize they’ve crossed a bridge at all, and certainly don’t notice the falls. Great Bridge is our primary bridge in Exeter; perhaps this is why it has such an impressive name. Our waterfalls may not be as spectacular as Niagara Falls, but they’re important to us and are the reason the town exists at all. We have every right to call our bridge “Great”.

The String Bridge sits over the lower falls at the point where the Exeter River meets the Squamscott River. The first mill ever built in Exeter was built on the little island that makes up the center of the bridge. You see, String Bridge is actually two bridges and an island. When Thomas Wilson first set up his gristmill in the 1640’s on the eastern side of the island, he most likely threw together a bridge so his patrons could carry sacks of grain across without needing a boat. This early bridge, although not specifically described in any of the early records, was most likely a narrow pedestrian arrangement made up of a single “stringer” log. So, no, we never had a rope bridge crossing the river in Exeter, however romantic that idea may be.

When Captain John Gilman built his gristmill on the western side of the island, he was given the right by the town to build a more substantial bridge. His bridge system was described by Charles Bell as “nothing more than one or two timbers laid across each of the channels of the river, with hand rails at the side”. It remained a pedestrian bridge for over one hundred years. This is the bridge that appears on our earliest map of Exeter in 1802.

Around 1817, it was decided to make the String Bridge, as it was now called due to its early construction, a carriage bridge. New stringers were installed with planking laid across wide enough to allow a single horse and carriage to pass. The construction was paid for by the townspeople of Exeter who made pledges for the cost. This incarnation of the bridge served the town well, even if it did still cause a bit of traffic disruption when two carriages wanted to pass at the same time. By 1888, however, the bridge was showing its age. The Exeter News-Letter reported, “On Thursday afternoon of last week Brown & Warren made an examination of the southern portion of String Bridge, finding the planking and cross timbers so unsound as to make the bridge really unsafe.” Repairs were ordered immediately. Within a short time it was determined that simple repairs were not enough and the bridge system was almost entirely rebuilt.

The bridges were enlarged in 1910 to accommodate two carriages to pass, but the structure we know today was eventually built in 1935. If you walk across the bridge today you can still see this date carved into the railing. The Exeter News-Letter boasted at the time “all materials, where possible, are to be purchased from Exeter merchants.”

The island has had many names over the years, usually based on the names of businesses that were located on it. The current agreed-upon designation is “Kimball’s Island” named for Kimball’s Hardware. Over the years the island was used for mills, warehouses and even a blacksmith shop owned by Swedish immigrant, Olaf Hanson. For a while, the address for this business was “Chestnut Hill Avenue”, but today the simpler “String Bridge” is used.

Searching for Home in the Land of Oz

2011-11-17T16:26:00.001-05:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, November 4, 2005.

Polish American Club, c. 1930s

New England rarely looks like a promised land. With our harsh climate, rocky soil and stoic citizenry, we’re hardly somewhere over the rainbow, but for many groups of people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New England had a great deal to offer – even if it didn’t quite turn out to be the magical Land of Oz.

Dorothy’s homeland of Kansas was dismal. L. Frank Baum was very clear about that: “When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same color to be seen everywhere.” It was a life without color or hope. There was no chance to pursue one’s dreams in this gray world.

Neither was there much hope for many of the people trapped in an endless cycle of economic bondage in parts of Europe. Even Exeter had fallen into a listlessness of declining population and abandoned farms as the Yankees moved west. As the nineteenth century progressed, industrialism crept into the area and the need for labor increased. Exeter attracted some close neighbors before it began casting about. French Canadians began drifting into the region as early as the 1840s. They brought with them no illusions about the landscape – Canada’s climate being quite similar to ours. When they arrived in Exeter they discovered another group filtering in from the wasted potato fields of Ireland. Together, these two groups worked the early mills of Exeter and brought their common Roman Catholic faith to the universally Protestant town. Agricultural failure had prompted both groups to leave their homelands and they mingled together, frequently intermarrying, as they integrated into the town.

Far, far away, behind the moon, beyond the stars, more people were aching to find a place where dreams really do come true. In eastern portions of Europe people in the late nineteenth century lived on the edge of poverty like Dorothy’s Uncle Henry who “never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was.” To countless peasants in Poland and Lithuania, a dream began to grow. Somewhere over the rainbow, or at least over the Atlantic Ocean, was a place where dreams really do come true. Coming, as they did, from miserable tenant farming, extreme poverty cycles, brutal military conscription and few educational opportunities, America with its streets paved in gold must have appeared to be the most glorious place on the face of the earth or the sky. This purely imaginary world had to be better than the one they were in. The dream told them: “hold onto your breath, hold onto your hearts, hold onto your hope,” and it carried them away to the golden land of America.

The first Polish and Lithuanian immigrants arrived in Exeter in the 1870s. Unlike the Irish and Canadian immigrants who’d come thirty years earlier, the newcomers must have been startled to discover that this new country wasn’t quite the pot of gold they’d expected. The factory work they’d longed for turned out to be just as punishing as the fieldwork they’d left behind. They soon noticed that everyone in the factories had a ghostly pallor and factory owners cared little about working conditions. Child labor was common in Exeter even into the 1920s. Racism provided Europeans with an uncomfortable edge in the marketplace. Many immigrants decided early that they would return home as soon as they were able.

Just as Dorothy discovered that her imaginary world wasn’t as welcoming as she expected, our newest neighbors also came face to face with some harsh realities. We never really know what happens to Dorothy after she returns to Kansas (in the film and stage versions of the story, that is). Most likely she still had to contend with an angry Almira Gultch who was still after poor little Toto, but I like to think she brought a little bit of Oz back to Kansas. Home is, after all, where your feet are and the recent arrivals in Exeter soon discovered that the yellow brick road was leading their children to a much better life. They stayed. They went to school. They became citizens. “They” became “Us” and together we are a town.

Sarah Orne Jewett

2011-11-15T17:26:00.000-05:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, October 27, 2011.

“On the brink of the hill stood a little white schoolhouse, much wind-blown and weather-beaten…” wrote Sarah Orne Jewett. During the early part of the twentieth century, Jewett was an accomplished author – writing primarily about nature and life in small town New England. Although she wasn’t born in Exeter and never lived here, she had strong ties to the town through her ancestry and often visited for long periods.

Born in South Berwick, Maine, in 1849, Jewett was a doctor’s daughter. Her father, Theodore Jewett, had studied medicine at Harvard and completed his practical studies in Exeter under the capable guidance of Dr. William Perry. While in Exeter, Jewett had met and married Perry’s daughter, Caroline Gilman Perry. Once his studies were complete, Dr. Jewett returned to his family’s hometown of South Berwick.

Sarah was a sickly child, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and was often absent from school. The nature of the disease caused acute flare-ups that would primarily affect her knees and shoulders. Once the swelling went down – and she sometimes reported that her knees would swell so badly that she couldn’t see her feet – the pain would linger for days or weeks. It might seem that this would lead her to be a bookish girl with endless hours spent on a couch reading, but for Sarah it was just the opposite. Classrooms were like prisons for her and only increased her discomfort. She preferred wandering the woods and fields of her village to sitting still at a desk. Arthritis is sneaky that way – it can make one immobile for stretches of time, yet it is best treated with movement. Children today, even with much better treatment, concur that sitting in school all day only makes things worse.

Luckily for Sarah, her father indulged her self-treatment and allowed her to skip school. He took her on his calls around town and she got to know village life in depth. She also visited her grandparents and cousins in Exeter very frequently. During the summer of 1857, she stayed in Exeter at her grandparents’ house on the town square to attend the summer term of school. Old Doctor Perry proved to be just as adept as his son-in-law at treating the girl with care. She was probably lucky that both her father and grandfather ignored the common treatments of the day and felt that fresh air and sunshine were the best treatments for her aching body. Dr. Perry’s medical text (currently in the collections of the Exeter Historical Society) - “First Lines of the Practice of Physic” by Dr. William Cullen, published in 1807- advocated topical bleeding, purging and a bland vegetarian diet for the treatment of chronic rheumatism.

Her father undertook to educate his daughter primarily at home after her reluctance to attend school was identified. She wrote later, “in these days I was given to long, childish illnesses, and it must be honestly confessed, to instant drooping if ever I were shut up in school. I had apparently not the slightest desire for learning, but my father was always ready to let me be his companion in long drives about the country.” She may not have liked to read or study, but she did adore taking in the sights and the characters they encountered on their travels.

“I used to linger about the busy country stores, and listen to the graphic country talk. I heard the greetings of old friends, and their minute details of neighborhood affairs,” she wrote. Her life was filled with the people of New England and her later writings would include dialogue that would read just as it sounded to her young ears.

At the age of 19 she began sending stories to magazines such as Atlantic Monthly and quickly made a name for herself. Although she suffered from arthritis flare-ups for the remainder of her life, she never allowed it to control her ambitions. She traveled the world, but always returned to South Berwick. Her serialized stories were published in book format, the most well-known include A Country Doctor, published in 1884, and The Country of the Pointed Firs, published in 1896.

In an undated letter, she wrote to the librarian of the Exeter Public Library, “I do not forget that I am a grandchild of the old town and of the Gilmans who always have had its well being so close to their hearts. Believe me.” She may be associated with South Berwick, but Exeter was dear to her.

When Trick or Treating Came to Town

2011-10-29T20:41:00.001-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column originally appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, October 30, 2009.

Halloween is that weirdest of holidays – a children’s event that adults also celebrate – not quite official, you don’t get the day off school, but only the most sadistic of teachers would assign homework on trick or treat night. It was, in Europe, a religious festival with deep roots. In the United States, it emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a light-hearted affair.

To track down when Halloween became a holiday locally, we turn to the local newspapers. As early as 1891, there are notices of parties at private homes: “Halloween parties were given Saturday night by Mrs. Dr. J.E.S. Pray and by Miss Lillie Colton”. Costumed dances were hugely popular in Exeter in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Trick or treating, however, was a much later development.

Official events are easy to spot. But the unofficial Halloween is a bit more slippery. Like the Fourth of July, which was often a loud and unruly nighttime event, Halloween provided a time when local kids let loose with mild vandalism that generally went unpunished. Clothes lines were cut down, fence gates and wagon wheels were often removed and even the family outhouse might be found in a different location when morning arrived. “Two students charged with extinguishing street lights are to have a hearing before Judge Shute next Saturday,” noted the News-Letter in early November of 1891.

Most of the activity was more nuisance than harmful, but it created an atmosphere of hooliganism that wasn’t tolerated the rest of the year. In 1943 – the year before trick or treating began – the Exeter News-Letter noted, “considerable damage was done Sunday night by hoodlums. Three of the cement benches on the Parkway were rolled into the river, an express truck from the railroad station was hauled on top of the steps at the Front Street entrance of the Seminary, a mail receptacle box from Elliot and Front Streets was moved into Phillips Hall and several sections of fences on Pine and Front Streets were ripped down.”

The first documentation of trick or treating in the archives of the Exeter Historical Society is a diary entry of Helen Tufts who, on October 30th, 1944, noted the date as, “Beggar’s Night: ‘Beggars’ came – 3 lots!”. This was the first time she mentions this kind of activity. The Exeter New-Letter never mentions children going door to door before this date. It’s odd that trick or treating began during the sugar rationing days of World War II, but this was when it was first reported in other parts of the country as well. Perhaps most of the treats were apples, nuts and popcorn. It’s also to be noted that the kids were out on October 30th – the traditional “mischief night” - rather than Halloween proper on October 31st. This is still done in much of the state of New Hampshire, and sets us apart from the rest of the country.

In 1948, in an effort to curb some of the unruliness, Ben Swiezynski, Jr., a local photographer, began the tradition of showing free movies on Halloween night at the Town Hall. “Two and one-half hours of entertainment is scheduled for the youngsters who are urged to come early to get good seats.”

By 1950, trick or treating was in full force. In 1957 it was reported that, “no incidents of mischief requiring the attention of police were reported last night. Residents, however, report a heavy run on ‘treats’ made available for the masked ‘goblins.’” Helen Tufts also noted the heavy turnout, “Around 50 Trick or Treaters – my supplies gave out at 7:30 so I wrote a letter to Barbara in the bathroom so no light would show.”

Trick or Treating still requires the participation of both the children and the residents. Although some adults consider it a type of extortion - and we have had a few notorious incidents, like when our local white supremacist, Tom Herman, in 1990 handed out candy on Salem Street in full Ku Klux Klan regalia, a teachable moment if ever there was one - on the whole it’s a fun time for everyone. Sometimes the only way we get to meet our neighbors is when we dress up the little urchins and go door to door. For their part, kids define the word “neighborhood” as the area one can reasonably trick or treat in two hours, and neighbors are sometimes remembered as “the guy in the goofy pumpkin sweatshirt who gave out orange taffy” instead of “Mr. Nickerson.” But really, what’s wrong with a little toilet paper decorating the maple tree? It’s only once a year, after all.

Connections to Slavery: Exeter

2011-10-22T12:24:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, October 14, 2011.

In 1938, the town of Exeter celebrated its 300th birthday. A grand parade was held on July 4th and was, according to the Exeter News-Letter, “easily the best ever witnessed in Exeter.” One of the town’s premier employers, the Exeter Manufacturing Company, chose the plantation South as its float’s theme. Described by the News-Letter as “Cotton and Colored Folk”, the float bore the title: “Exeter Manufacturing Company: 1827-1938 Over a Century of Progress.” It was a curious choice, but an apt depiction of the conflicted historical perspective most northern towns have with their relationship to slavery.

To provide some social framework, it’s important to note that Margaret Mitchell’s nostalgic, if historically dubious, Gone With the Wind, had been published the year before Exeter’s tercentenary parade. The old South was hot, in much the same way pirates and vampires are hot today. If we are very generous, we can view the parade float as a reflection of the fad of the time, when it was not unusual to see caricatures of African-Americans lurking in our culture. Minstrel shows were still wildly popular in town and would remain so through the 1950s.

But deeper than just a cultural fad, the float holds a great deal more accuracy than one might imagine. There were no cotton plantations in New Hampshire. Cotton requires a hot climate and better soil than we have in New England. Slavery was legal in New Hampshire until 1857, when the legislature finally decided to abolish a practice that had already died out of its own accord. Portsmouth historian, Valerie Cunningham, remarked in her book, Black Portsmouth, “Individual emancipation and gradual abolition notwithstanding, white Yankees promoted slavery by indifference to its persistence and its expansion elsewhere, and by consuming slave-produced products.” Every bale of cotton spun into thread and woven into fabric at the Exeter Manufacturing Company from its beginnings until 1861 was grown, tended and harvested by enslaved hands. The 1938 parade float was a celebration of that system.

Exeter Manufacturing Company was well aware of its past. The factory had struggled during the Civil War when its supply of cotton had been cut off. In August of 1861, shortly after the war had begun, the board of directors announced that the factory would close down for a while, leaving the mostly immigrant employees out of work. The American Ballot, an Exeter newspaper of the time, announced the news with the snarky comment, “operations have been suspended in the mill, and the operatives are to have a vacation of two months, which assurance gives no pleasure to many of them, much as they need rest and relaxation.” It didn’t occur to anyone to consider the lives of the field hands that had picked that cotton, instead the focus was placed on local workers. Hannah Brown, a seamstress in Exeter, noted in her diary early in the war, “Business is dull as ever, very little work to be done, the war puts a stagnation on everything. If the war continues until winter it will be so hard for poor folks. I don’t know what will become of them.”

The two month furlough turned into an entire year. The mill sat idle, yet the stockholders at the 1862 meeting were rewarded with a dividend of $25.00 per share. The trustees of the mill had cleverly determined that the real profit would be had from raw cotton. When the mill shut down in August of 1861, the cotton in the warehouse was carefully saved until the price soared the following year. Other textile mills were happy to buy it. This tactic only worked for that first year, however, and once the cotton was sold the company needed to find a new source of income. No one had thought the war would last as long as it did. The Exeter News-Letter is silent for the remainder of the war on how the cotton mill continued, but a local minister, Elias Nason, mentioned in his published account of the war that, “about one-third of the Exeter Cotton mill is in operation” in January of 1863. It was likely that the mill obtained cotton from any source it could find – including occasionally buying mattress filling from local residents, which was noted in the Lowell newspapers later that same year. The records of the stockholders meetings make no mention of where the cotton came from during the latter part of the war; they are filled, instead, with the time and place of meetings and the unanimous re-elections of the board members.

There was talk of turning to Central America for cotton where, “both native labor and free negro immigrant labor can, it is said, be obtained and the quality of the cotton there raised is known to be excellent,” the News-Letter reported. The comment reflects the desire of northerners, at least by the end of the Civil War, to obtain cotton farmed by free hands. The end of the war brought about great expansion in the output of the mill, and this is the usual record we find when reading the mill’s history. Steam engines installed in the 1870s, but never any mention of its participation in America’s “peculiar institution” of just a decade before.

Exeter and the Chinese Educational Mission

2011-09-20T10:11:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, September 16, 2011.

See caption below. Photo courtesy of Phillips Exeter Academy.

The rolls of Phillips Exeter Academy students for the 1880s include the names of seven students from China. Their presence here was a unique experiment of the Qing government called the Chinese Educational Mission, which turned out to be both a great success and a great failure.

The original idea behind the mission was to send Chinese students to educational institutions in the United States to learn about Western technology and military arts. It was hoped that the boys would eventually attend such venerated military institutions as West Point and the Naval Academy, but before they would be eligible for college-level study, the boys had to attend prep schools.

Led by Yung Wing, who had himself studied in the United States, the program was headquartered in Connecticut. The boys were the brightest students in China. Schooled for a time in Shanghai to acquire enough skills in English, the first group of 30 boys set sail for the United States in late 1872. They attended many of New England’s finest prep schools and, in 1879, five boys arrived in Exeter. Two more would come the next year.

The boys boarded in local homes, the largest number staying with retired minister, Jacob Chapman at his house on Middle Street. They were required to return to Connecticut several times each year to continue their Chinese studies, but the remainder of their time was spent in Exeter. Even with the preparation they had received in Shanghai, the boys found life in New England to be very different from that of China, an empire traditionally suspicious of all things foreign. They had been instructed to maintain their Chinese identity and habits. Commissioner Woo Tsze Tun, in a letter to the boys in 1880, reminded them, “since your stay here is brief, as compared with the time you have to spend in China, foreign habits should not become so rooted as that you cannot change them.” They were not to violate Chinese tradition by cutting off their long braided queue. They were not to become U.S. Citizens. They were not to take an American bride. They were not to become Christian. And they were not to succumb to “western” frivolities – especially the playing of sports.

But not all of their time was taken up in study. It was true that they attended to their schoolwork – these were scholarly boys by their very nature – but they also went to baseball games, attended dances and went to church with their host families. Living with a retired minister and attending a school that began each day with prayer, it would have been impossible for them to ignore the importance of the central messages of nineteenth century Protestant theology; that of redemption, personal responsibility and individual saving grace.

Iris Chang, in her book The Chinese in America, noted, “what the Qing government did not recognize until much later was that these American-educated students would be internally transformed.” By 1881, it had become apparent that the boys, although doing well academically, were picking up American customs and habits. It was also becoming obvious that the United States government, far from extending goodwill to China by allowing students to attend public schools, was not going to allow any of them to study at West Point. The United States was on the brink of passing the Chinese Exclusion Act, which forbade Chinese immigration into the country. Bad feelings on both sides led to the end of the program. All the boys, regardless of how far they had come in their studies, were recalled to China in 1881.

The Exeter News-Letter sadly announced in early August, “It seems that the cause of the action was report by a dignitary sent to inspect the schools, which stated that the boys were forgetting the customs of their country and becoming rapidly Americanized. No amount of subsequent explanation was able to correct the erroneous impression thus conveyed, and the order to return is preemptory.”

The return to China was difficult for most of the boys. They had been promised a full education and had been looking forward to returning to their country as respectable men. Instead, they were treated as failures – boys who had forsaken their great nation. Kin Ta Ting, who attended Phillips Exeter Academy from 1879 to 1881, wrote to Reverend Chapman, “The Chinese consider denationalization a great crime. This is the chief reason for our recall.” He was bitter and it shows in his early letters.

Most of the Chinese Educational Missionary students went on to do well for themselves in China. A few managed to make it back to the United States, but most did not. Those who remained in China were assigned to military positions or further education. Kin Ta Ting was assigned to the Beiyang Medical School and became a medical officer in the Imperial Army. He was killed in action during the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. Of his time in Exeter, he fondly recalled:

“I think the P.E.A. Professors ought to be proud of their pupils in China when they hear of their good standing in various schools. That shows the good instructions have been given by them. Their names will never be forgotten by us so long as we live. We often talk of them. How we would like to see their faces again in classrooms! We all want very much to be present at the hundredth anniversary of the Academy. It make us homesick to think of it.”

Photo: One of the boys from the Chinese Educational Mission joined the Phillips Exeter Academy baseball team and posed for this 1881 photo. Baseball was seen by the Chinese government as a particularly insidious expression of "westernization". The team had a particularly bad year in 1881 - losing to Andover 5 - 13. Courtesy of Phillips Exeter Academy.

A Labor Story

2011-09-03T12:18:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, September 2, 2011.

In 1899, a shoe worker at the Exeter Boot and Shoe Company earned, at the top pay-scale, two dollars and forty-three cents per day if he could stitch 90 dozen pairs of men’s shoes in one day. Women and children at the factory earned far less.

During the waning years of the 19th century, prices for most manufactured goods dropped. Factory owners responded by cutting costs in the easiest way they could – reducing workers’ pay. In 1898, most New England manufacturers, primarily in the textile and shoe industries, instituted a “cut down” of 10% for the majority of workers.

At the Exeter Boot and Shoe Company, General Stephen Gale notified all the workers in October that the cut down was the only way to keep the factory going. He assured them that it would last no longer than six months. The cut down began in December and the shoe workers tightened their belts, grateful to still have a job.

But by the following summer, it became apparent that there was more to Gale’s strategy than nobly saving their livelihoods. He opened another shoe shop in Hampton and hired workers there, but didn’t restore the cut down rates, as other New England mill owners had. The Exeter Gazette reported in April that, “the restoration in the wages of the employees of many of the mills of New England to practically the same basis as that in existence before the general cut down of a year ago went into effect yesterday, and the result is generally a satisfactory one to all concerned.”

Mills at Lowell, Massachusetts, and the mighty Amoskeag mills of Manchester reinstated pay rates for their workers, but Gale held back. Instead of paying his employees their original wage-rate, he began to play games with the economics of his factories.

The workers at Exeter produced three types of shoes: men’s, boys’ and youths’. According to the workers, in a statement published in both the Gazette and the Exeter News-Letter, “previous to the winter of 1898, the employees were paid the same price for men’s and boys’, while they did 72 pairs of youths’ for the price paid for 60 pairs of men’s or boys’.” But after the cut down, Gale began to pay for the boys’ shoes at the same rate as the youths’. Then he moved the more lucrative men’s shoe division to his new Hampton shop where he paid the workers less than his more experienced Exeter workers. Regardless of the fact that boys’ and youths’ shoes were smaller, they took the same amount of time to produce as the men’s because the tight turns required more accuracy and skill.

In August, the workers had had enough. On August 4th, 300 workers at the factory walked off the job.

Gale was incensed – particularly when it was noted in the Gazette that, “General Gale has a finely trained and well organized body of workers with a reputation outside of Exeter. A representative of a Boston shoe firm was in town yesterday looking after employees and another Boston firm offers positions to 15 stitchers.” Did this prompt him to offer the workers what they demanded: a restoration of pre-cut down wages? Of course not. Instead, he blamed the workers for their own predicament. In a letter sent to the newspapers, he whined that the workers should have put the six month deadline in writing when it was negotiated the previous year, “It would have been better for them to have given notice that it was their intention to ask for an advance to go into effect at some definite time, thereby giving both parties an equal opportunity to adjust themselves to the situation. The reduction of 10 per cent in the Exeter Boot and Shoe Co. was by mutual concession, and before it went into effect ample opportunity was offered the employees to look around and seek other situations where conditions might offer as good or better wages.”

At a mass meeting held at Foresters Hall, the workers issued a response to Gale, “This is unfair to the employees. They are not attorneys to be exact as to forms. They consider that there should be general good faith from employer to employed. If Gen. Gale wishes to remind us that we have been unbusinesslike in not having a written agreement, we shall gladly remedy that mistake in the future.”

Gale stood his ground and, as was usually the case in early labor relations, the workers suffered the most. Facing long-term unemployment, they had to decide whether to fight on for better wages or take whatever they could.

By December, the strike had dissolved. Gale never increased wages and would, in later years, put down any attempts his workers made to unionize. John Donovan, the leader of the strikers, found work in an iron foundry. The Gazette reported in January of the following year that “a party of button hole operatives leave here today for Norway, Maine, where they have secured employment with Spinney Brothers.”

Exeter never became a union town in any of her industries. Stephen Gale went on to serve several terms in Congress – happily elected by the other leaders of industry.

Photo caption: The Exeter Boot and Shoe Company (later Gale Brothers). The business began operations in 1885 and quickly became the town’s largest employer. In 1899, 300 of the 700 employees went on strike due to a reduction in pay.

Bowling in Exeter

2011-08-25T14:25:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas

In celebration of the 20th anniversary of Shooter's Pub, we are posting this "Historically Speaking" column which appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on September 1, 2006.

When Robert Lincoln was told his father had been nominated as a candidate for President in 1860, he was standing in a bowling alley in Exeter. “Good!” he is said to have replied, “I will write home for a check before he spends all of his money in the campaign.” He was probably hanging out in the bowling alley because Phillips Exeter Academy had forbidden the students from the town’s billiard parlors. Gambling at the pool hall was “the first big step on the road to the depths of degradation”. Bowling seems to have had only a slightly better reputation in American life.

The game itself is quite ancient and was brought to the New World by some of the earliest European settlers. By the early 1800’s it had evolved into the ninepin game that Rip Van Winkle encountered in New York State. But, like billiards, the frequent gambling that accompanied ninepins prompted most communities to outlaw the game. Enterprising bowlers simply added another pin to create a new legal game they creatively called “ten-pins”. By 1895, when the rules were standardized and the American Bowling Congress was officially created in New York City, ten-pin bowling had evolved into a wholesome national game.

However, in New England and the eastern provinces of Canada, ten-pin bowling had been overtaken by a quirky variation called candlepin bowling. Created by a bowling alley owner named Justin White in Worchester, Massachusetts, candlepin bowling is played with smaller balls and tall lanky pins. The rules of candlepin bowling vary from ten-pin in that three balls are played in each frame and dead pins are not removed from the field of play. Most candlepin bowlers will tell you that it’s a much more challenging game to play then ten-pins, which is another way of saying it’s harder. My own experience on the Exeter Hospital bowling league in the early 1990s would back this up, famous as I was for the “three gutter” frame and an overall average of about 45.

We played at the Exeter Bowling Lanes on Columbus Avenue. Built in 1946 by Frank Wentworth and originally called the Exeter Bowling Alley, the business is now celebrating its 60th anniversary. Designed before automatic pinsetters were developed in the 1950s, the pins were originally set up by teenagers called pinboys. Automation arrived just in time for the golden age of bowling in the 1950s and 60s. Father and son, Mike and Rob Ficara, have owned the Exeter Bowling Lanes since 1986. During this time, there have been more major changes – one of the most significant was when the facility went non-smoking. Shooter’s Pub was added in 1991 and the old grill was removed from the bowling area.

Bowling continues to be a popular sport in Exeter. Fall leagues will be forming soon with divisions for kids, seniors, men, women, mixed and competition. Rob Ficara says that some of the most exciting bowling in Exeter was when the New Hampshire State Tournament was held at the bowling alley from 1995 – 2000. It would have most certainly been more exciting than the game Robert Lincoln played back in 1860. At least Robert was able to find a lane – his father, also trying to kill some time that day, found that the bowling alley in Springfield was filled to capacity and he was turned away.

What's in a Name?

2011-08-19T11:55:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, August 19, 2011.


The Exeter Combination, July 4, 1639 (see image below)

How did Exeter get its name? The simple answer, and ultimately the correct one, is that Exeter, New Hampshire was named for Exeter, Devon in England. David Corbett, now of this town but originally from Britain, wrote me a quick note on the origins of the name ‘Exeter’ and its Roman origins: “The Romans called their fortress town Isca Dumnoniorum. In the ancient Celtic language, ‘Isca’ meant river and ‘Dumnoniorum’ was the name of a Celtic tribe – hence, ‘the riverside settlement of the Dumnnonii.’ So how did Isca Dumnoniorum become ‘Exeter’? One theory is that after the Romans left Britain in the fifth century A.D., the Anglo Saxons called the town ‘Isca-Castra’ (castra being Latin for a military camp). By the ninth century it had become Escanceaster. That, in turn, became ‘Exeter’.”

When John Wheelwright arrived in 1638, a religious outcast from Massachusetts Bay Colony, it had already been decided – by someone – that the area was to be called Exeter. Before gaining its English name, the place was generally referred to by its proximity to the river – the Squamscott River, or sometimes the Piscataqua River, but it never seems to have been called simply ‘Squamscott’. There is no evidence that Wheelwright named it Exeter. He wasn’t from Exeter, which is located in the south western part of England, he was from Lincolnshire, which is 240 miles to the northwest.

Charles Bell, author of History of Exeter, NH, noted that, “of course this name was borrowed from Exeter in England. The cause of its selection is unknown. There is no evidence that Wheelwright ever had any acquaintance with the English Exeter, and the only one of his companions who is known to have come from that place, or its vicinity, was Godfrey Dearborn.” So, we don’t really know who decided upon the name.

We can, however, look to other towns named Exeter to see how the name spread around the world. There are at least 13 Exeters in the United States according to our most reliable source, the National Weather Service. Two of these, Exeter Green, Maryland and Exeter, Virginia, aren’t really towns at all. Exeter Green is called a ‘populated place’ on the U.S. Census, whatever that means.

Two more Exeters can be directly linked to Exeter, New Hampshire. Exeter, Maine, population 997, was named by some of its original settlers who were from Exeter, New Hampshire. Exeter, Nebraska, according to Nebraska Place Names, by Lilian Fitzpatrick, was so named because it was, “suggested for this town by a family that came to the neighborhood from Exeter, New Hampshire. The name happened to fit in with the alphabetical system of naming towns along the Burlington railroad, so it was adopted.” It sounds like Exeter, Nebraska, came within a hair’s breath of being named Epping.

The remaining Exeters in the United States- those in Wisconsin, Connecticut, Missouri, Illinois, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, California, and Michigan- were all named for Exeter in England. Each one seems to have some major claim to fame. Exeter, Missouri, was originally named El Paso. Exeter, California is famous for a 1929 Anti-Filipino Race Riot. The best story of all, short of our claim as the UFO Capital of New England, is in Exeter, Rhode Island. Their town Wikipedia entry boldly states, “Exeter is noted by folklorists as the site of one of the best documented examples of vampire exhumations: the Mercy Brown Vampire incident of 1892.” There’s definitely a story there.

Australia has three places named Exeter. Exeter, New South Wales, population 397, is most famous for its fatal railroad accident in 1914. Exeter, South Australia, is actually a suburb of Adelaide and doesn’t seem to consider itself an actual town. Exeter, Tasmania, with a population of only 339, is located in Tasmanian wine country, although there do not seem to be any vintners who print “Exeter, Tasmania” on the label, which is a shame as something like that would make a fabulous Christmas gift.

Exeter, New Hampshire, home of the annual UFO Festival and former home of the Alewife Festival, is sadly and soundly outdone by Exeter, Ontario. Bragging that it is “Home of the White Squirrel” – a genetic variant of the lowly gray squirrels seen around here – the town hosts the annual White Squirrel Festival , primarily a folk music event, each May. The town mascot is Willis the White Wonder, who appears at many local events. We just don’t have anything like that.

Outside of Exeter, England we are the largest Exeter in terms of population. Here at the Exeter Historical Society we often get emails requesting information about the other Exeters. Occasionally, this has led to hours of time searching for records for someone who lived hundreds of years ago in another state, but more often we’re able to quickly realize that they’re looking for the wrong town. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no vampire exhumations here.

On July 4^th, 1639, John Wheelwright, the founder of Exeter, New Hampshire, penned a document called “The Exeter Combination”, a framework for the town’s governance (see above). In his own handwriting, he spelled the town’s name “Exceter.” The misspelling shouldn’t trouble current residents – he incorrectly spelled his own name “Whelewright” later in the same document.

The "Bandstand" Turns 95

2011-08-13T12:08:00.000-04:00

"Exeter in Perspective" by Nancy Merrill, appeared in the Exeter News-Letter, January 28, 1971

Swasey Pavilion, or Exeter's "Bandstand", between 1916 and 1929.

“Start at the Bandstand…” begins many a direction given by an Exeter resident to either a newcomer or a passing motorist. What is this Bandstand? When was it built? What story does it have to tell?

Some accounts of Exeter say it was built in 1913, others say 1917. One way to find out is to look in the old News-Letters, but more important -- first ask the town clerk, Evelyn Zarnowski, who keeps a little book of the most frequently asked questions.

Looking under “B” for Bandstand or “S” for Swasey Pavilion, she finds that 1916 was the year; then you are referred to the town records for 1916 and find that a special town meeting had been called for a Saturday evening. John Templeton read the resolution as is recorded in the town records and also The News-Letter for Jan. 14, 1916: “The citizens of Exeter, in a special town meeting assembled, hereby accept the offer of Mr. Ambrose Swasey to beautify the Square by erecting an ornate Pavilion therein, and the town clerk is directed to convey to Mr. Swasey, a loyal and distinguished son, the deep appreciation of the Town of Exeter for his beautiful gift.

“And the Hon. Edwin G. Eastman, the Rev. Dr. S.H. Dana and the hon. Albert S. Wetherell are hereby appointed a committee to act with the donor and architect in the erection of the Pavilion and in locating a new granite watering trough, also the gift of Mr. Swasey, in such place as seems advisable.”

Subsequent perusals of The News-Letter reward the reader with the following weekly observations:

Ambrose Swasey

May 5 -- The Swasey Pavilion

“The material for the marble pavilion which Mr. Ambrose Swasey is to erect in the Square as a welcome gift to his native town has been shipped. The work will begin upon its arrival and will be completed before July 4.”

May 12 -- Work on Swasey Pavilion
“Work preliminary to the erection of the Pavilion in the Square, the welcome gift of Mr. Ambrose Swasey began Wednesday when the fountain was removed to a site at the Town Hall corner. There it is intended to place it in temporary operation.
“On Wednesday also began the digging required for the Pavilion foundations. At a depth of four feet was found a deep layer of oyster shells. The trusses and other steel material was hauled to the Square yesterday.
“As announced, the Norcross Brothers Company, Worcester, Mass., is the contractor for the work of erection.”

May 26 -- The Pavilion
“Much has been done this week on the Swasey Pavilion. The three courses of Milford pink granite which constitutes the ashler have been set and nearly all forms for beams of re-enforced concrete which will support the platform are in place. The granite curbing around the space which will form a grass plot is being set. Delivery of marble is being made.”

June 9 -- Work In The Square
“The marble floor of the Pavilion is nearly laid and the laying of curbing around the enclosure has begun.
“The base of the granite drinking trough has been set in deep foundations of concrete and the water main from the opposite side of the Square has been laid. The base, a fine block weighing nearly seven tons, was put in place by Contractor Irving W. Brown without the use of a derrick.”

June 23 -- Town Affairs
“The last marble column of the Pavilion in the Square was set Tuesday and the last stone of the architrave Wednesday. The placing of the steel roof trusses in position was then begun.”

July 7 --
“At the initiative of Mr. Edward E. Norwell and with consent of the Boston and Maine, the fountain which until recently has stood in the Square will at once be placed on railroad land beyond the freight house and slightly back from Front Street. There it should do good service.”

July 14 --
“The Pavilion floor is receiving its finishing touches, beautiful mosaic work around the central bronze plate. The roof has received its copper covering, with pine cone finials and several lion heads as gargoyles to discharge rain water. (During our recent cold weather, several of the lions looked as though they had icicle goatees.) The material for the mosaic ceiling, shipped a fortnight ago and delayed on the way, arrived yesterday.”

The Pavilion under construction

July 21 --
“The ceiling of the Pavilion is completed save for a narrow stripe around the border, which is partially filled in. The design and color effect is eminently pleasing. The grading contract has been awarded to Mr. C. Charles Hayes, who will begin work as soon as possible.”

July 28 -- Town Affairs
“On Tuesday the Norcross Brothers Company, Worcester, Mass., completed its work upon the Pavilion and Mr. C. Charles Hayes finished the grading around it. Stripped of staging the Pavilion reveals a beauty that compels admiration. Approval of the architect and delivery to the town have yet to be made. The beautiful bronze chandelier for electric lighting made to special design, should be delivered early in August. It is hoped to have the dedication on a day when the generous donor, Mr. Ambrose Swasey can be present.”

August 4 -- Dedication of the Pavilion
“The Pavilion in the Square will be dedicated at 8 o’clock next Wednesday evening. Hon. Albert S. Wetherell will preside. There will be music by the Exeter band and addresses by Rev. Dr. S. H. Dana and, probably Hon. John Scammon. (Hon. Edwin G. Eastman had died before the Pavilion was completed.) The donor, Mr. Ambrose Swasey, will present the Pavilion key to the selectmen.
“After the exercise the Pavilion will be open to the public.”
“Following is the program of next Wednesday evening’s band concert, to be given after the Pavilion dedication, if rainy, the next fair evening.” (Eleven tunes were listed.)

It did indeed rain that Wednesday evening, August 9.

The “next fair evening” proved to be August 10, when many gathered in the square to thank Mr. Ambrose Swasey for his “sumptuous gift to his birthplace.” “It was said” that Daniel Chester French got his idea from a pavilion in the gardens at Versaille.

The dedication was largely attended. Hon. Albert S. Wetherell, of the committee which had supervision of the erection, presided. Its other member, Rev. Dr. S. H. Dana, made a felicitious address. It will be recalled that in the summer of 1915 no little curiosity was aroused by Mr. Swasey’s visit to the Square with a distinguished son of Exeter, Mr. Daniel Chester French, and Mr. Henry Bacon, of New York, one of the country’s most eminent architects. Alluding to this visit, Dr. Dana outlined its results and devoted much of his address to the notable trio. Greeted by hearty cheers and applause, the public-spirited donor then presented the Pavilion keys to the selectmen, with acceptance by Chairman Clarence Getchell. Music by the Exeter Band completed the programme.

“The Pavilion is of exquisite beauty. Upon deeply laid foundations of concrete rest three courses of pink Milford granite, which constitute the ashler. Then comes a course of white marble, from which rise eight graceful columns of marble which support the marble architrave. The steps are marble. The floor is of re-inforced concrete, with marble surface save for the central bronze plate showing the zodiac, especially fitting in view of the donor’s interest in astronomy, and the encircling mosaic work. The enclosing railing and gate are of bronze.
“The mosaic ceiling, in its design and the rich colors of its central sunburst and delicate tracery, is a gem. From its center hangs a bronze chandelier of pleasing design, with eight arms pointing to the columns. There are electric lights at the extremities of the arms and a ninth pendent from the center.
“There is much ornamental work in the copper roof, notably the 16 gargoyles, lions’ heads, and the pine cone finial.
“About the Pavilion is a narrow plat which turfed Monday, enclosed by granite curbing, and around this is a finely paved border.
“Mr. Swasey’s gift also includes a granite watering trough set at the west side of the Square.”

Architect Henry Bacon

“As the above implied, the architect was Henry Bacon, of New York, and Exeter is fortunate in the possession of a sample of his work. The principal contractor was the Norcross Brothers Company, Worcester, Mass. (According to Perley Gardner, this company had done larger jobs, but none any better.) The chandelier was made to special design by E. F. Caldwell and Co., Inc., New York, and the electric wiring was done by C. Fred Fifield, Of Exeter, C. Charles Hayes did the grading and turfing.”

The News-Letter of Sept. 15, 1916 shows a picture of the bronze plaque in the floor of the Pavilion. There is the “conventional sun in the center and a border formed of the signs of the zodiac. The first of these plaques was made for the Swasey Observatory at Denison University, O. The second and third are in scientific buildings in China. This one in Exeter is the fourth. It will reward a close inspection. The marble floor itself is of artistic design, and the mosaic ceiling is one of the most beautiful in the country.”

The Lincoln Memorial, designed by Bacon, under construction in 1916

The Squamscott Oxbow

2011-08-05T10:05:00.004-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, August 5, 2011.

When John Wheelwright first arrived in Exeter in March of 1638 he complained of the deep snows that he had to traverse, “it was marvelous that I got thither at that time…by reason of the deep snow in which I might have perished.” He waited a few months before sending for his wife and children so that they could make the trip more easily by boat. As she traveled up the Squamscott, Mary Hutchinson Wheelwright must have wondered about the unusual course the river took as it made its way to the headwaters at the falls where her husband was waiting.

About three miles out of town, the river took an unexpected twist to the right and just as suddenly looped back to the original path. This loop would trouble navigators for the next 250 years.

Called an oxbow, the loop is a natural formation caused by meandering of the riverbed. Sometimes an oxbow can curl all the way around stranding the land in the center. The Squamscott oxbow showed no signs of closing at the base. Its only contribution to Exeter’s busy seaport was to snarl up river traffic.

Exeter residents traveled the river in small crafts until the 1700s, when shipbuilding became an important industry in town. The river was deep enough to accommodate ships – providing they could be transported downstream to Great Bay. That oxbow, or “great roundabout” as it was sometime called, created no end of trouble. To navigate the double twists in a time before motorized engines, the crew would resort to pushing the vessel with long poles or casting the anchor forward and pulling it to get around the bends. William Saltonstall noted, in his Ports of Piscataqua, “no wind could have been fickle enough to get a boat equipped with sails through the Great Roundabout” and Olive Tardiff followed this in Exeter Squamscott: River of Many Uses, with, “Sometimes it was necessary for a vessel to wait as long as a week for favorable winds and tides in order to reach Exeter.”

By 1880, Charles Bell observed, “the navigation of the channel had become so obstructed by rocks and shoals that it was found necessary to petition Congress for an appropriation for its improvement.” The petition was granted and it was decided that instead of simply cleaning up the oxbow, it would be cut through. At the point where the looped ends nearly came together, a channel would be dug to allow a straight entrance to Exeter’s harbor.

Work began in the early Fall of 1881. Although it was nothing like the digging of the Panama Canal, it was made more difficult by an unusually hot Indian Summer. The Exeter News-Letter noted that Wednesday, September 28th was the “hottest day since July 14th.” It was muggy and already 70 degrees at sunrise. To get the miserable job done quickly, the News-Letter advertised, “It is intended to push the work of cutting off the ox-bow as rapidly as possible, and for that purpose, we are informed, employment will be given to any number of laborers from this town at $1.50 a day. As many hands as are wanted can readily be secured from other places, but the contractor prefers as far as possible to secure his laborers from this town.”

You’d think there would have been an excited and jubilant outcry in the newspapers once the oxbow was finally bypassed, but instead the news was silent. It must have been one of those satisfying, but nearly invisible triumphs – like cleaning the oven – that affects only a few and excites even fewer. Nonetheless, river traffic picked up for a time and coal schooners routinely made the trek up river.

The oxbow was still navigable by small boats after the cut was made. John Hurlbert wrote an account of a schooner trip up the Squamscott in 1897 and noted, “A short way down from Exeter there is a triple bend of the river which is called the oxbow. The river winds from shore to shore in graceful curves, but grace and utility cannot always be combined, so a few years ago there was a channel cut close to the right bank. As we sailed down between the high banks of clay we envied the little boat that flitted around the curves, dipping in the breeze like a swallow, and doubtless the occupants envied us as they put about to look at us.”

Fun, perhaps, for a small pleasure craft at the time, but today the oxbow is nearly gone. It can be viewed from above or by zooming in on Google Earth. From the river, if one is in a kayak or canoe, the entrances to the oxbow are tantalizingly broad enough to lure the paddler in. But, unless you are very adept at back-paddling, it is inadvisable to attempt to navigate the entire oxbow. After several hundred feet of pretty surroundings and tall grass the channel narrows until the kayak becomes mired in the spongy undergrowth and shallow water. The wildlife of the area will offer no assistance to the desperate paddler and will only mock you with deep throated croaking. I did get out, eventually, a tired but wiser adventurer.

The images: Top - The Squamscott Oxbow, here called “Roundabout Marsh” as seen on the 1802 Merrill Map of Exeter. The oxbow impeded the easy flow of river traffic in Exeter for nearly 250 years. Today it is almost gone. Bottom - The Oxbow today, courtesy Google Maps

Engraved Tusk will Celebrate Lincoln's 1860 Visit to Exeter

2011-08-02T15:08:00.000-04:00

To some it may be an unusual way to commemorate history, but to William Markey it's the perfect way to make use of an elephant tusk that has been in his family for more than 70 years.

With the help of a scrimshaw carver from New York, Markey is using the two-foot-long tusk to commemorate Abraham Lincoln's 1860 visit and speech in Exeter.

The tusk will be engraved with Lincoln's image and will have the date of his visit to the town on it.

Markey is hoping to present the tusk as a gift to the town upon its completion this fall.

Markey said the tusk once belonged to his father and was just sitting around his Newmarket home. Because ivory dries up, he knew he needed to do something productive with it when he started to see cracks developing. "I wanted to do something good with it, something the family could be proud of," he said.

The 77-year-old's love for history and Lincoln helped to inspire the idea, along with an article written in a civil war magazine that talked about Lincoln's 1860 visit to Exeter and other Granite State communities.

"I figured I got a story, an idea and a tusk that I don't know what to do with," he said.

Markey said the article he read put great emphasis on the importance of Lincoln's visit to the state in 1860.

"I went through the schools in Exeter and then went to school at UNH (University of New Hampshire) and not a breath was uttered about Abe Lincoln's visit to Exeter," said the Newmarket resident.

Lincoln in 1858.

Lincoln gave speeches in Concord, Manchester, Dover and finally Exeter, where he also visited his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy.

His visit to the state went a long way to winning over the support of seven of the state's 10 delegates four months later during the Republican convention in Chicago, Markey said.

New Hampshire, which was mostly a democratic state at the time, eventually supported Lincoln in the presidential election. "New Hampshire had an important say in Lincoln's election," Markey said.

Markey later contacted the author of the article he read, Ron Soodalter, who is also an accomplished scrimshaw artist, about his tusk idea.

"He loved it," Markey said. "He wanted to help out."

Soodalter is currently working on the tusk in New York.

Markey expects the tusk to be finished in September, at which point he plans on giving it as a gift to the Exeter Public Library.

Markey and Soodalter are still working on ideas for mounting the tusk and the display case. Markey said the tusk should be in a glass-enclosed case for the proper protection and kept at the correct humidity to avoid cracks.

He is also currently examining insurance options for the tusk, so it's insured in case of an unexpected loss.

Exeter Public Library Director Hope Godino said the library plans on accepting the tusk as a gift and would likely display it on its adult services floor for awhile before moving it to the historical collection area.

Markey is hoping to have a presentation ceremony when the tusk is complete.

Markey is a retired Air Force officer and once survived a jet bomber crash in 1961 that killed three of his co-pilots.

Article appeared in the July 29, 2011 issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

The Grand Regatta

2011-07-22T10:05:00.001-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, July 22, 2011.

In 1872, there were over 150 regattas held in North America. The schoolboys of Phillips Exeter Academy decided they should hold a regatta of their own. The Boat Club at the academy was still in its infancy and had not yet begun to encourage rowing as a team sport.

Exeter’s downtown merchants still shipped goods up and down the river in 1872. Gundalows carried lumber, bricks and fish and schooners were towed into the harbor with tons of coal. Alongside the commercial traffic were many different types of small boats. Some were pleasure boats, others were tough little rowboats and canoes used by sportsmen for fishing and hunting. True rowing sculls, as we are used to seeing today, were rare on the river.

They set their ‘grand regatta’ for a Wednesday afternoon in late Spring. Then, as now, students at the academy had only a half day of classes on Wednesdays and Saturdays. The afternoon was free and the boys were only lightly supervised. They scrounged boats from wherever they could and determined to hold four separate races.

The first race was single scull. Four boys were set to start the race, but when the starting line-up was called two of them dropped out. “Harwood and Hodges, nursing their strength to keep it fresh for the four-oared race, failed to make their appearance,” reported the Exeter News-Letter. Perhaps they were unable to find a boat small enough for the race. The remaining two racers, Charles Bell, class of 1872, and Robert Blodgett, class of 1873 had decidedly different types of boats. Blodgett had a racing scull, but the best Bell was able to come up with was a heavy dory called a ‘wherry’. He’d fitted it out with racing outriggers to hold the oars high above the water, but it still wasn’t up to the challenge. The judges generously gave him a 12 second handicap.

The News-Letter’s fledgling attempt at sports writing read as follows, “The word ‘go’ is sounded, and the race begins. Blodgett with a firm and steady stroke pulls as for dear life; Bell keeps along space, when a sad mishap occurs; his out-riggers break, and Blodget wins the race and the prize, a silver ladle; time, 6.58; course, 1 ¼ miles.”

Three boys were entered in the sailboat race, but as in the first race not all of them made it to the starting line. William Swift, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, didn’t quite get there in time with his lapstreak centerboard boat. Lapstreak, or lapstrake, boats are made with overlapping planking like a Viking boat. They’re strong, but slightly less agile in the water. The two remaining boats in the sailing race were a flat-bottomed boat called Mary Jane, captained by Trueman Heminway, class of 1873 and the keel-bottomed Flying Dutchman with Isaiah Thomas, class of 1872 at the helm.

The Flying Dutchman took an early lead, but ran aground on the third tack, leaving the Mary Jane as the only survivor to cross the finish line. Heminway won a silvered fruit dish as his prize.

Neither of these first two races satisfied the onlookers – considering both had been won due to mechanical problems. The real race of the day was the four-oared contest. Two teams readied themselves for the race; the Una, a lapstrake racing shell representing the Class of 1872 and the Wyoma entered by the class of 1873. Both carried crews of five boys – four rowers and one coxswain. “While the Una crew boasts the best oar – Jones, the popular man of his class, the Wyoma’s friends rely upon the unyielding pluck of her crew; and even feign to believe that intelligence and scholarship must count in their favor,” observes the News-Letter. But intelligence would not rule the day. The Una quickly outpaced the Wyoma to win the race a full minute ahead. Each boy was awarded a prize cup.

The final race of the Grand Regatta was a tub race. “The gazing throng now prepare for a laughing excitement; for the tub race is announced. Six ordinary tubs are launched upon the water, and the sportive youths enter the same, each ‘to paddle his own canoe’ to gain the coveted prizes. The leaky and unstable condition of the novel vessels results in many an overturn and apparently sinking hopes; but a cooled person and uncooled ardor lead to braver exertions, and the race is won by Brown of ’74; Harwood of ’73 was ahead most of the time, but a luckless foul with another boat, when nearing the shore, lost to him the prize.” The winner received $2.00 – perhaps by this time they were fresh out of silver kitchenware to award.
For all of its mishaps, the Grand Regatta was pronounced a success and for years afterward, at least until rowing became a more organized sport at Phillips Exeter Academy, a regatta was held each spring.

Lady Justice is Watching You

2011-07-08T14:18:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, July 8, 2011.

High above the street level in downtown Exeter, Lady Justice stands guard over the town. In 1855, when our town hall doubled as the county courthouse, the statue was erected with little fanfare. It was the town hall itself that attracted everyone’s attention. The decision to build a new town hall was the culmination of a two year battle between bickering factions of townspeople. Should it be a simple structure reflecting a small town or a grander design reflecting a vision of Exeter as commercial center?

In the end, the visionaries won, and the new Town Hall housed both the offices of the town of Exeter and Rockingham County – including the county court. As part of his design, architect Arthur Gilman included a large wooden statue of Lady Justice standing tall on the very top of the cupola. Construction began in May of 1855.

There was little statuary in Exeter in at that time. Although the town wasn’t aware of it, we had in our midst a little boy who would one day become one of the nation’s most treasured sculptors. Daniel Chester French was born on Court Street in 1850. His young eyes must have wondered about the magical lady atop the town hall cupola. French would go on to sculpt the Concord “Minuteman” and the Lincoln Memorial’s seated Abraham Lincoln. But in his younger days, Lady Justice was the only statue he knew.

She was hoisted aloft when French was 5 years old. The Exeter News-Letter commented, “Since the elevation of Justice, which we confess looks perplexed at its location on the dome of that building, the community, having the fear of her two-edged sword and scales before their eyes, are walking soberly and discreetly, and if vice is still abroad, she shrinks into cellars or retreats behind the good lady’s back.”

Popular depictions of Justice often involve the elements seen on our statue. In a tradition dating back to ancient Greece, justice is portrayed as a woman. In one hand she holds a set of scales for weighing the evidence before her. In her right hand, she grips a double bladed sword of justice, ready to mete out punishment quickly and efficiently. A bit like your own mother, really. Maybe that’s why Justice is always a woman.

Exeter’s Justice, like many similar courthouse statues, is blindfolded. Although it may seem that justice should be eagle-eyed, checking into every bit of possible evidence, the blindfold is symbolic of objectivity. Justice should not be swayed by outward appearances or the court of public opinion. The evidence is weighed carefully and a decision is reached.

Her presence in the town square was quickly used to bolster the temperance movement. Before the Town Hall was even officially dedicated, a letter writer to the News-Letter advised that she should, “make it certain that nothing is yet sold in Water Street which ‘men may put into their mouths to steal away their brains.’”

Justice was never able to avoid the one thing that was irresistibly attracted to her – lightning. Over the years she was struck many times and an intricate system of lightning rods was installed. Two main rods jutted from behind her like antennae and attached to a grounding system that encircled her waist. Close-up, the statue must have looked like she was caged in a medieval torture device.

A Halloween storm in 1917 nearly destroyed her. “In Exeter,” reported the News-Letter, “the most notable damage wrought by the wind was to the statue of Justice surmounting the Town Hall cupola. This was tipped to a dangerous angle and there were grave fears that it might topple over. Fortunately, lightning rod wires and other supports averted this misfortune.” The statue was carefully taken down and assessed for damage. “Exposure to the elements for more than three score years has much damaged the statue, and much of the wood is badly decayed.” However, repairs were made and the statue was re-set on the cupola in time for the New Year.

By 1991, she had taken quite a beating. Aloft for 136 years, she was nearly blown to bits by the remnants of Hurricane Bob. Town officials decided that the piecemeal repairs were no longer enough. The statue was removed and carefully reproduced by sculptor Langford Warren of Kittery, Maine. His pencil marks can still be seen on the original statue that now resides in the Exeter Historical Society. Her twin, made of sturdy mahogany rather than the original’s pine, stands proudly atop the Exeter Town Hall. The building no longer doubles as a courthouse, but the intent of the statue still holds. As a letter writer to the News-Letter wrote back in 1855, “the artist and sculptor may paint and mould the form, but the fire from heaven which makes it a living soul can neither be stolen nor created.”

Moving the Tenney House

2011-06-24T11:48:00.007-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, June 24, 2011.

In order to move an enormous house across a river you need an enormous bridge. Exeter’s “Great Bridge” is hardly suitable for the job; in fact, its name seems like a put-on. In spite of its small stature, the bridge has actually had a huge house trundle across it. It was back in 1893.

Samuel Tenny wasn’t born in Exeter, he was from Byfield, Massachusetts. He was educated at Dummer Academy and Harvard, graduating with the class of 1772. He studied medicine with Dr. Kittredge in Andover after leaving Harvard. There were few medical colleges at that time, and it was more common for a physician to learn the trade under the tutelage of another doctor. The New Hampshire Medical Society History, published in 1966, notes, “It would be a mistake to assume that the establishment of medical schools in the colonies attracted throngs of students to their lecture halls, or that their degrees were looked on as requisite to practice. The 3,500 physicians active at the beginning of the American Revolution included a mere 400 with medical degrees. The remaining 3,100 qualified themselves mainly under the apprenticeship system, learning by observing and assisting in practice of experienced physicians.”

Tenney arrived in Exeter in 1775, intending to set up practice, but quickly got caught up in the American Revolution. When the fighting began at Bunker Hill, Dr. Tenney signed on and treated the Continental Army throughout the war – including during the long winter at Valley Forge with General Washington.

After the war, he returned to Exeter and formed a circle of friends – among them some of the most innovative and intellectual men in town. He was a member of many literary and historical organizations, writing a description of Exeter for the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1795. In it, he expressed his enthusiasm for education and a outright distrust of ‘common labourers’; “this, at least, is certain, that the morals of the inhabitants of country villages, which, in New England, are tolerably pure, would run a great hazard of being contaminated and depraved, by an intermixture of too many foreigners of the lower class of manufacturers, who, it is well known, are too generally idle, intemperate, and disorderly.”

In 1797, he and Oliver Peabody, Benjamin Abbot, Gideon Lamson and Ebenezer Clifford incorporated the first library in Exeter. He also took a bride – successfully wooing and winning the elegant and intelligent Tabitha Gilman.

But his interest in medicine waned. Politics held more of an attraction and he successfully ran for Congress, serving three terms in Washington. It was lucky, perhaps, for him that the ‘lower class of manufacturers’ were barred from voting thus giving him an edge with the property owning men who did elect him. Before he and Tabitha packed up for Washington, they hired his friend, Ebenezer Clifford, to build a house in the center of town.

Clifford styled the house on an English mansion and, with the assistance of Bradbury Johnson, who was himself a fine architect, built the house in Exeter’s town square right next to the newly erected First Parish Church, which the two men had also erected.

The magnificent house they created was striking. The façade was so unusual that when Phineas Merrill sketched his map of Exeter in 1802, he carefully reproduced the profile of the Tenney house instead of inserting his usual cartoonish and very generic house outline to mark the owner’s address.

Samuel Tenney lived in the house until his death in 1816. It was sold following the death of Tabitha in 1837, to Tristram Shaw, who, like Tenney, served in the United States Congress. The house’s location – right in the center of town – made it desirable, or at least made the property desirable.

In 1893, the Rockingham County Commissioners decided to build a new courthouse in Exeter, which was then the County Seat. The most obvious location for such an edifice was the town square. The Tenney house would have to go. Rather than tear the old building down, it was sold with the understanding that it would need to be moved. The ell was separated from the house and moved around the corner to River Street. Dana Baker, who purchased the main house, wanted it on his new lot on High Street.

Moving the house must have been the highlight of the summer of 1893, yet there is barely any mention in the local newspapers. Great Bridge, which had been reinforced heavily with solid timbers, bore the strain heavily on a Wednesday afternoon in June. No doubt everyone involved heaved a great sigh of relief. The house then traveled to its current location. “The Dr. Tenney house has this week been moved to a lot on High street and when located, with alterations and improvements, will be occupied by Mr. D. W. Baker,” commented the Exeter Gazette taciturnly, as if hundred year old houses of Revolutionary War veterans commonly wandered around town. It stands today, a member of the National Registry of Historic Places, on the corner of High and Gardner Streets.

Exeter High School Students Win Naval History Award at National History Day Contest for Documentary on Portsmouth Peace Treaty

2011-06-21T12:34:00.000-04:00

Exeter High School NH History Day Senior Group Documentary team with their medals

The Exeter High School team who won top honors in the statewide History Day competition in April won the runner-up national honors for the Naval History prize and “Outstanding Senior Entry” among all New Hampshire participants at the national competition held at the University of Maryland, June 12-16, 2011.

Chandra Boudreau, Zachary Keefe, Charles Rickarby, Arielle Fleischer, and Ian Smith competed against more than forty films from U.S. states and territories. The students spent eight months researching, filming and editing their 10-minute documentary, “The Portsmouth Peace Treaty: A Victory for the World.”

“It was an outstanding experience, from start to finish,” said Chandra Boudreau. “When we were doing the research and interviews and then editing down all the material we had, it seemed like it would never end. But then when we were in Baltimore, representing New Hampshire and competing with all those others kids and some really amazing projects, it was all worthwhile. We definitely increased awareness of the Russo-Japanese War and the lasting importance of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty."

In addition to research in original source documents related to the Portsmouth Peace Treaty that was negotiated at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard over nearly 30 days in August 1905, the students toured the Shipyard Building 86 Peace Building Museum and the Portsmouth Peace Treaty exhibit in downtown Portsmouth. They interviewed Charles B. Doleac, chairman of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Forum and author of An Uncommon Commitment to Peace: Portsmouth Peace Treaty 1905, Peter Randall, author of There Are No Victors Here: A Local Perspective on the Treaty of Portsmouth; Navy Public Affairs Officer Gary Hildreth at the Shipyard and Barbara Rimkunas, curator of the Exeter Historical Society. The students’ documentary includes clips of the interviews and historic photographs of the Russian and Japanese envoys in Portsmouth in 1905 and their welcome by local citizens.

The students' film also competed against fifty-six other student productions at the New Hampshire Student Short Film Festival. Their film was a Jury Finalist and earned the Audience Choice Award.

In congratulating her students, Ms. Stevenson said "This is authentic learning at its best. The students did the work of historians and added to the public's understanding of a past event and why it still matters today."

According to the website, “National History Day (NHD) is a highly regarded academic program for elementary and secondary school students. Each year, more than half a million students, encouraged by thousands of teachers nationwide participate in the NHD contest. Students choose historical topics related to a theme and conduct extensive primary and secondary research through libraries, archives, museums, oral history inter views and historic sites. After analyzing and interpreting their sources and drawing conclusions about their topics’ significance in history, students present their work in original papers, websites, exhibits, performances and documentaries.”

The Kenneth E. Behring National History Day Contest in June is the final stage of a series of contests at local and state levels, across the country. The contest is named for Mr. Behring in recognition of his support of NHD. The theme for 2011 was “Debate & Diplomacy in History: Successes, Failures & Consequences.” In addition to discovering the exciting world of the past, NHD also helps students develop the following attributes that are critical for future success such as critical thinking and problem-solving skills, res earch and reading skills, oral and written communication and presentation skills, self esteem and confidence and a sense of responsibility for and involvement in the democratic process.

For more information on National History Day, visit www.nationalhistoryday.org
For more information on the Portsmouth Peace Treaty see www.portsmouthpeacetreaty.org

The Legacy of Richie McFarland

2011-06-10T08:40:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas
This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on Friday, June 10, 2011.

Richie McFarland (courtesy of Jane McFarland)

In the summer of 1970, Richard and Jane McFarland received the heart-breaking news that their one-year-old son, Richard Jr., was suffering from a rare genetic disorder known as Hurlers Syndrome. Unless there was a medical breakthrough within the next few years, Richie’s prognosis was grim. Facing a gradual decline in mental abilities, physical strength and language skills, the boy’s life was destined to be short. His parents, faced with this future, sought ways to make Richie’s life full.

In a letter written several years later, Jane McFarland said, “Richie is thoroughly enjoying his life; he is a beautiful, happy and very active child; he seems to thrive on being with other people. It was when I first sensed this that I began to make inquiries about a nursery school for special children. A pediatrician at the Exeter Clinic informed me that we were very sadly lacking any such facility in the area. Subsequently a group was formed involving interested parents, physicians and others.”

By 1971, there was a growing consensus that early intervention for handicapped children would greatly enhance their ability to learn later on, but there were few resources for parents to turn to. The child’s specific needs made families feel isolated from the rest of society – particularly when there were no places that would accommodate the child’s needs. The group Jane McFarland spoke of in her letter first met in July of 1971. They quickly determined their goal: open a nursery school for handicapped children ages 3 to 6 by October. They hired a professional teacher, obtained space at the Bixler House on Center Street and called their school the Rockingham Children’s Center. The main goal of the school, according to a press release in the Exeter News-Letter that ran in September was, “to provide early educational experiences and socialization,” for “youngsters who are handicapped and who would be ineligible for other nursery schools.” With eight students enrolled, the school opened three days a week on October 5th, 1971.
Before the advent of mainstreaming, students who were physically, emotionally or educationally challenged were sent to schools outside the public school system. In Exeter, the similarly named Rockingham School for Special Children had served the needs of school-aged children of varying needs since 1959. But it was unable to provide services for very young children. The new Rockingham Children’s Center sought to fill that gap. Emphasis was placed on self-care, socialization, language skills and music. During its first year, the school functioned with one paid teacher, two music volunteers and a number of volunteer aides. By 1973, the school had grown to include 20 children - some handicapped and some not - with an expanded staff of one head teacher and two teacher aides. Occupational therapy was now offered, but the school had outgrown its location and, in 1974, moved to 11 Prospect Avenue.

In February of 1974, Richie McFarland’s short life ended. The board of trustees immediately proposed a name change for the center to honor the little boy who had inspired its creation. In a unanimous vote, the Rockingham Children’s Center became the Richie McFarland Children’s Center.

The center moved to its permanent location in Stratham in 1985 and continues to serve young children in Rockingham County. An additional center is now located in Portsmouth at the Pease International Tradeport. The mission of the center has not changed much from its original intent, providing developmental and support services for children with special needs, assistance to their families and assistance in the use of community and health resources. Countless families in Rockingham County have been helped by this organization, started 40 years ago by a small group of people who envisioned a better future, not just for their own, but for all children.

You can learn more about the Richie McFarland Children's Center by visiting their website, www.richiemcfarland.org, "liking" their facebook page, following their Twitter feed or by calling 603-778-8193.

Schooners in Exeter

2011-05-31T15:07:00.002-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas, "Historically Speaking", Exeter News-Letter, May 27, 2011

“The three-masted schooner, Benjamin T. Biggs of Exeter, H.W. Anderson controlling owner, was abandoned Sunday in a water logged condition 55 miles south-west of Seguin, an island off the mouth of the Kennebec,” related the Exeter News-Letter in July of 1900. The Biggs was a frequent visitor to the wharves of Exeter, hauling coal by the ton for H.W. Anderson. But she didn’t survive her trip down the Kennebec River. When Anderson traveled to Maine to check on his schooner, it was too late.

The Squamscott River connects to Great Bay and ultimately the Atlantic Ocean. In the early part of the 19th century, salt, bricks, paper, fish, cotton and textiles made their way up and down the Squamscott in elegant schooners. The final miles were accomplished with the help of a tugboat, as the twisting nature of the riverbed made navigation difficult. On the river, the schooners faced few risks. Out at sea, the trip could be far more perilous.

The Mary Manning hauled coal for H.W. Anderson, but this wasn’t the only type of cargo she hauled. In 1900, she was carrying a full load of ice out of Bangor, Maine when she grounded at the mouth of the Penobscot River. The inquest placed the blame firmly on the tugboat Seguin, which had allowed too much towing line. The ship wasn’t badly damaged and was soon put to work again. In March of 1906, the Mary Manning left Florida with a full load of yellow pine and railroad ties headed for New York. Off the coast of Boston a gale blew up and the ship was struck by lightning. “Before the storm had reached its height a bolt struck the main boom, which broke off, carrying away the mainsail and foretopmast staysail. The vessel was swamped by heavy seas and all the boats were swept away or smashed. The schooner carried a donkey engine to hoist the sails, but a giant sea flooded the engine room, smashed the forward house, and ruined all the provisions except the canned goods,” reported the New York Times on March 7th.

The ship soon sprung a leak and the desperate crew tried to keep it afloat for 110 hours. “With two of his ribs beaten in by a shifting deckload of lumber, Ingebard Gjerteen, a Norwegian sailor, dived from the wrecked Mary Manning, a four-masted schooner, in the height of a gale on Saturday last, and saved the life of Joseph Arie of Waretown, N.J., the mate, who had become delirious and jumped overboard,” the Times continued. The ship was going down when the crew was rescued by the Casilda. All hands were saved, but their condition was “so grave that it was difficult to keep life in them.” The Mary Manning was last seen sinking to the bottom of the sea.

Anderson’s Benjamin T. Biggs didn’t fare much better. Loaded with Maine lumber for New York, she, like the Manning, hit a gale and quickly swamped. The crew was picked up 17 hours later. The Exeter News-Letter quoted Captain Tibbetts as saying, “When we left the vessel she was beginning to break up forward and at one place in the cabin floor. We had quite a rough experience. We saved only our dunnage.” Tugs were sent out to tow the ship to shore, but Anderson would find that his ship – which should have been able to recover – was destroyed by the rescuers.

By the time the wreck was towed back to Rockland, “attempt had previously been made to burn her as a dangerous derelict, and she was ablaze when picked up. As a result of this fire, which destroyed her deck and upper works, the Biggs is a hopeless wreck, and only her anchors and chains can be saved,” reported the News-Letter.

Anderson had lost one of his most dependable schooners. The following year he began hiring sturdy gundalows to haul coal. “Each year sees a dimunition in the number of small schooners and Mr. Anderson finds it difficult to charter all he needs. He has been compelled to have 600 tons of coal delivered at Portsmouth to be brought up river by his own and chartered gundalows,” the News-Letter reported.

Within two decades, most of the coal used in Exeter would be brought in by rail and freight trucks. They may not have had the majesty of the schooners, but they were much safer for the crew.

The Civil War Begins

2011-05-31T14:58:00.000-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas, "Historically Speaking", Exeter News-Letter, April 15, 2011

When Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election in November of 1860 there was celebrating in the streets of Exeter. The Exeter News-Letter reported, “the streets were filled with the multitude of men, women and children. The wide awakes, in uniform and with torches blazing marched through the principal streets, throwing off fireworks and giving hearty cheers as they passed along preceded by the Exeter Cornet Band, whose excellent music was frequently praised by the spectators. The bells of the several churches were ringing during the evening until 10 o’clock.”

But the celebrations were tempered within a week with threats of secession from South Carolina and Georgia. In Exeter, as in other parts of the country, the sword rattling seemed premature and uncalled for, “They know, or they ought to know, that Mr. Lincoln will not interfere with slavery in the States where it is established by law,” commented the News-Letter editor. The Constitution allowed slavery, and, as far as most Exeter citizens were concerned, it could continue to exist in those states that allowed it. Lincoln was opposed to the spread of slavery in the western territories. Why should his opposition to slavery in, say, Kansas, be cause for breaking up the Union?

As the New Year arrived, Americans were still in disbelief that the South could take such steps. “The Constitution, which all the states have adopted, makes no provision for the secession of a state, however much she may feel herself aggrieved. It is her duty to try to redress her grievances in the Union,” noted the News-Letter. “The present rebellion will probably terminate after much bloodshed, unless the government of the United States consents to let the secessionists have their own way and go out of the Union without opposition.” They worried about Lincoln’s inauguration – his election was the only reason given by the southern states for disunion.

“There is nothing of importance transpiring now, except the disunion movement which is the topic of conversation in every circle,” wrote Exeter resident B. Judson Perkins in his diary. On March 4th he noted, “This is a beautiful day. Pres. Lincoln was inaugurated today without any opposition. It was celebrated in this town by the ringing of bells and firing cannon.”

The new president made no overt moves to eliminate slavery, but the south still threatened to leave the Union. When a brief mention was made that the Exeter Town Hall had settled slightly into its foundation, the News-Letter’s editor used it to make a point – “Perhaps the basement is seceding, who knows? Gravitation admits of no compromises with her principles, and Constitutions should not. The Court would rule, that the walls should be coerced by bolts and bars; indeed this would be a decision of habit.”

When the war actually began in April, Exeter was quite clear on why it was happening: the South was in rebellion against the Union because it feared for its system of slavery. It was a Constitutional requirement that the Union be maintained, and that was what drew young men to join the army and the general population to support the effort.

“Our country has cost us too much blood and is of too much value to ourselves and to the world, to be sacrificed to a lawless band of desperadoes,” wrote a clergyman from Exeter in an open letter to the president. Elias Nason, pastor at the First Congregational Church in town, preached a fiery war sermon the week after war was declared in which he pronounced, “Down with the Rebellion! The South of this great country is on fire for war. Rebellion anarchy and ruffianism on the one hand; liberty, law and order on the other. Our nation’s flag has been insulted; our integrity broken and hatred and full defiance backed with cannon in the hands of traitors, hurled against the supporters of the law.”

New Hampshire didn’t have a trained army when war broke out and it took some time to get one organized. In late May the first group of Exeter men left town, “The volunteers who have enlisted at Exeter N.H. and been residing here for some time, left Saturday afternoon for Portsmouth. They were escorted by the Exeter cornet Band to the railroad station, and followed by the company of Students of the Academy, who have been in the practice of drilling for several weeks past,” reported the News-Letter.

The war had begun, and Exeter committed itself to preserving the Union. The problem of slavery didn’t seem to be the cause they were fighting about in 1861. Even Exeter historian, Charles Bell, titled his chapter on the Civil War as “The War for the Union”. But patriotism ran high, as this incident in the News-Letter attests, “On Thursday morning last, as a butcher from South Newmarket was stopping near the Post Office in this town, one of the soldiers lately enlisted placed a small flag, the Stars and Stripes, in the horse’s harness. This so incensed the butcher, that he took down the flag, and rent it in pieces. The last seen of said butcher he was fleeing down Stratham road at 240 speed, with about 30 of the soldiers following him.”

Sunday Baseball in 1917

2011-05-31T14:27:00.003-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas, "Historically Speaking", Exeter News-Letter, May 6, 2011

In the years just following the Civil War, baseball began to be referred to as the “national sport”. The soldiers had played the game whenever they hadn’t been fighting and it was brought home to the thousands of small towns across America. Exeter was no exception and baseball became quite popular in town.

According to an Exeter News-Letter article published in 1943, the first baseball team in town was formed in the early 1870s. A purely amateur team, the Exeter Eagles played any other team that challenged them. The News-Letter mentioned that, “by and large only a few towns have had a baseball team strictly on an amateur basis and composed entirely of representatives of the town as Exeter had in the Eagles in their day.”

The game was played quite differently in its early years, “the players used no gloves at all and the modern ‘baskets’ worn by the players of today would amaze them,” continued the News-Letter, “They had no masks or pads. The distance of the pitcher from the home plate varied and there was no well defined box. Later he was allowed to run a few steps before pitching. The catcher stood back and caught the ball on the bound as a rule so that base stealing was easy, but he always came up behind the bat when there was a runner on third base.”

The Eagles disbanded after a few seasons, but other teams were formed in town. The fire department’s Hook and Ladder Company took on the M.D.F. Steere Company of Amesbury in 1899 and won 16 to 3. Always good hosts, both teams then repaired to the Hook and Ladder house for a hearty supper – which was interrupted twice by working fires. The Amesbury team pitched in to help and neither fire kept them from their dinner and dancing for very long.

Phillips Exeter Academy and Exeter High School both brought to the sport to their students. The annual Exeter –Andover game became a local event.

As enthusiasm for baseball grew, the sport became more organized. The New England League got its start in 1886 and went through several incarnations before finally folding in 1949. New Hampshire had minimal participation in the league due to restrictive blue laws – most of the games were played on Sunday, which was against the law in the state. Although officially on the books, the ban on playing sports on the Sabbath was largely overlooked in the amateur level. When, in 1917, the New Hampshire General Court proposed, and then rejected, taking the ban off the books, J.D. Leach wrote an angry letter to the News-Letter:
“I have been in Exeter for two years and am returned for a third. During the last two years baseball is played in this town during the months of May and June on pleasant Sundays. This isn’t heresy, it is a fact. Baseball was played last Sunday. When the House of Representatives overwhelmingly defeated that bill to allow Sunday baseball the inference is that the above law holds good. Will it in Exeter? What will the officers do in upholding this law? Are they waiting for someone to make a complaint? If they are it will be forthcoming. I will everlastingly denounce and condemn any form of lawlessness whether it is participated in by society so-called or mob rule.”

Leach doesn’t seem to have attracted many fellow-travelers to his baseball ban. The games continued on Saturdays and Sundays. Some teams, like the firefighters, challenged other teams in their profession. In 1891, the Exeter Printers defeated the Haverhill Printers 16 to 11.

The Clippers were a favored Exeter team for many years and the Exeter Bears, the town’s only semi-pro team, went all the way to nationals in 1950. By that time, the game was standardized and the teams played on the high school field. It was a far cry from the way the Eagles had played, on the Park Street plains eighty years earlier. The News-Letter remarked, “While the Eagles were a splendid team in those days and in a class all by themselves they would probably make a poor showing today if stacked up against a team of only moderate ability due to the change in playing. Although heavy batters in their day they would probably be helpless before a good pitcher now.”

Ranesford Rogers and the White Caps

2011-05-31T14:16:00.005-04:00

by Barbara Rimkunas, "Historically Speaking", Exeter News-Letter, April 1, 2011

Tucked away in the back of Charles Bell’s History of the Town of Exeter, New Hampshire, is a small anecdote about a group of treasure hunters who were duped by a transient rogue named Rainsfield Rogers. Bell was a cautious historian who wouldn’t have included the story if he wasn’t sure it was true, but he also didn’t want to embarrass the people involved. And so we have a somewhat funny story which, due to Bell’s reticence, has few verifiable elements.

In the tale, Rogers arrives in town and is able to convince about a dozen Exeter men that there is treasure buried somewhere within the town limits. The men formed a work gang and night after night they followed Rogers into the woods and swamps to dig for gold. That they never found anything didn’t seem to have discouraged any of them – nor did it make them question Roger’s ability to pick the sites for digging.

In 1800, around the time this incident seems to have occurred, Exeter was still a strict Protestant town. Parish taxes were collected and church membership was considered a civic duty. But within this stringent society there was still an undercurrent of the occult. “White magic” practitioners were occasional visitors to the landscape and were granted a certain amount of credibility. These people, sometimes known as cunning folk, were contacted to help find lost items or to locate water by dowsing. Among the many types of cunning folk were money-diggers. Tracing their trade back to ancient alchemistic traditions, it was commonly believed that mists and gasses deep within the earth produced hordes of precious metals – particularly mercury and gold. Or the belief might have been that there were piles of gold coins buried by the ancients, or even pirates. However it may have gotten there wasn’t as important as the absolute fact that there was gold in them thar hills.

The New Hampshire Sentinel reported in 1822, “Every country has its money diggers, who are full in the belief that vast treasures lay concealed in the earth. So far from being a new project, it dates its origin with the first man who ever wielded a spade. Even in these latter days, we find men so much in love with the ‘root of all evil’ and so firm in the belief that it may be dug up, that they will traverse hill and dale, climb the loftiest mountain, and even work their way into the bowels of the earth in search of it. Indeed digging for money hid in the earth, is a very common thing; and in this State, it is even considered an honorable and profitable employment.” So perhaps it’s not too surprising that Rogers was able to convince the treasure hunters in Exeter that quick riches only required some digging.

What the Exeter men didn’t know was that Rainsford Rogers had a long history of swindling gullible people out of their own money. He’d been involved in a well-publicized scheme in New Jersey that was published in a book called, “The Morris-Town Ghost: An Account of the Beginning, Transactions and Discovery of Ransford Rogers, who seduced many by pretended Hobgoblins and Apparitions, and thereby extorted Money from their Pockets,” in 1788. He slipped away from Morris County, changed his name to “Rice Williams” for a while and continued to ply his trade as a dowser of gold until he arrived in Exeter sometime around 1800. Charles Bell picks up the story from there, “he came to Exeter, bearing his true name of Rainsford Rogers, which had, perhaps, not acquired so bad an odor in New England as in some other quarters.” He asked the men to wear white caps while digging, perhaps to make it easier to spot them all in the dark.

At one point in the Exeter escapade, Rogers used a tactic he’d used before – he dressed up as a ghost to further convince the diggers that they were in the right place. The ghost muttered something unintelligible, to which one of the men inquired, “a little louder, Mr. Ghost; I’m rather hard of hearing!” The men dug with renewed enthusiasm.

Bell continued, “After a time Rogers disclosed what he declared to be the reason of their want of success. The golden deposit was there, beyond question; but they needed one thing more to enable them to find and grasp it. That was a particular kind of divining-rod.” Naturally, this would cost money. The men raised several hundred dollars, loaned Rogers a horse and off he rode to Philadelphia (or so they thought) never to be heard from again.

Exeter, being a small town, had long been aware of the midnight digging sessions of the “secret” little group. When it was revealed that Rogers was gone, the men involved received no end of ribbing from the population and were thereafter branded with the moniker “white caps.” According to Bell, “The deaf man who required the ghost to ‘speak a little louder’ never heard the last of his unfortunate speech.”

Baby Week 1917

2011-05-31T14:15:00.002-04:00

"Historically Speaking", by Barbara Rimkunas, Exeter News-Letter, May 13, 2011

“Health authorities unite in saying that public interest is now needed to put into operation methods for infant welfare which are well ascertained and tested. The observance of a Baby Week is an expedient for securing attention to facts about the needs of babies which are well known by scientific authorities and which if popularized will greatly reduce the loss of infant life throughout this country,” so said Julia Lathrop, the director of the United States Children’s Bureau in 1915.

Lathrop was a social reformer during a period known as the Progressive Era, which stretched from the 1890s through the 1920s. During this time, social reform became governmental policy – often spearheaded by women. The reformers tackled the problems of unsafe working conditions, substandard wages, overcrowded housing, poor education, food safety and public health.

In large cities, disease and early death were endemic. Overcrowded housing and a lack of basic hygiene created a cesspool of pathogens that could easily overwhelm neighborhoods. When the Children’s Bureau was first created in 1915, there were few statistics kept regarding the health of infants because there had never been adequate recordkeeping. One of the first steps the bureau took was the creation of mandatory birth registration. The new records revealed horrifying infant mortality rates of up to 10% in many places.

Inspired by this new statistical method of gauging infant mortality and public health, the town of Exeter launched its own social survey in 1915 and found that Exeter mirrored many of the larger cities. In the previous nine years, the usual birth rate for the town was just over 100 live births; of these, anywhere from 7-14 would result in the death of the baby before the age of one. “A little child,” read the report, “should have a better chance of reaching the age of one year than he has had during the last nine years as indicated by our figures. For we do not have to contend against the conditions which make the infant mortality rate so high in the cities, where the death rate is in some cases lower than in Exeter.”

Babies died from a number of causes, including diarrhea, pneumonia and infection. The survey committee recommended draining the old tanning pits on Academy Lane. The standing water in the unused pits was a breeding ground for mosquitoes, which had recently been discovered to be carriers of malaria. They also declared that they would, “through the health officer, provide for the proper disposal of garbage and for such care and treatment of stable manure as will prevent the breeding of flies.”

It was also recommended that, “a definite attempt be made to impress parents with the importance of the subject of personal hygiene both for themselves and their children.” Hygiene lessons were introduced into the schools, but this would not necessarily trickle into the home. Although attempts were made to teach the ‘little mothers’ (or older sisters of infants), it was really the actual mothers who had to be reached and educated. This could only be done through a public campaign highlighting the importance of healthy babies.

Large cities held week-long events that celebrated babies. Exeter couldn’t quite involve as many people, but the Exeter Women’s Club was able to garner support in 1917 from the local merchants, who were more than willing to highlight their baby-related merchandise in attractive window displays. The Social Welfare Department of the Women’s Club hosted the eminent Dr. John Lovett Morse, author of Diseases of Nutrition and Infant Feeding, at a public lecture. Dr. Morse believed, “saving babies is essentially the privilege and duty of the mother. These little lives are not preserved by heroic or spectacular deeds, but by the patient, tireless devotion to routine details, hour by hour, and day by day, thus making the debt of the child to its parent so great that it can only be repaid by the same self-sacrifice to the next generation.” He encouraged breastfeeding and, aside from discouraging too much interaction with a baby, which he felt would upset it, his advice was not much different from childcare advice we receive today. Keep the baby clean. Keep the baby well-fed. Take the baby out into the fresh air as much as possible.

The Baby Week Campaign succeeded in improving conditions and survival rates for infants , even though it was held only once in Exeter. With the outbreak of the First World War the following year, people had other public efforts to attend to. The influenza struck at the war’s end and the lessons of public health became more critical as Exeter faced this crisis. Medical advances following World War II would further improve infant health, but it was the pioneers of public health – arising from the Progressive Era – who realized that the health of the individual strengthened the health of the community. Right down to its smallest members.

Exeter Historical Society's New Exhibit: The Art and Archaeology of William White

2011-05-31T11:34:00.000-04:00

Join the Exeter Historical Society on Saturday, June 11 from 12:00 pm to 2:00 pm for the opening of the new exhibit, “The Art and Archaeology of William White”. The reception will include light refreshments and will take place at the Exeter Historical Society, 47 Front Street, Exeter. After the reception, the exhibit will be open to the public during the Society’s open hours and is free, though donations to help cover the costs of our programs are always welcome.

Born in 1916, Bill White worked on the Linden Street farms of Frank Brown and Frank Wadleigh while still a schoolboy. Here, weeding carrots or hoeing corn, he found his first “arrowhead” and a lifelong interest in prehistory was born. As a young man he collected many artifacts while working on farms in Kensington, cultivating the fields of Frank Kimball, Hibbert Baker, Sherman Shaw and others. He widened his explorations by walking or cycling to search plowed ground in surrounding communities.

These pursuits were interrupted by World War II, in which he saw combat in New Guinea and the Philippines. After returning to Exeter, Bill came to know Laurence Crosbie, then teaching at Phillips Exeter Academy and a well-known collector of prehistorical artifacts. In 1947, Bill, Laurence Crosbie and others founded the New Hampshire Archaeological Society. Soon Bill was participating in the Society’s excavations, some of which were conducted on sites that he had discovered. He shared his interest in archaeology with such friends as Mike Jenkinson and Zike Burke, both of whom became serious amateurs attending or hosting “digs”. With Eugene Finch, Bill co-authored several reports, including one on the important site at Newfields Road. In 1982, he received the Society’s highest award, the Chester B. Price Memorial Award, in recognition of his contributions to the archaeology of the state of New Hampshire.

Today, the plowed fields around Exeter where Bill collected have all but vanished, lost to development or abandoned to a returning forest, but his sharp-eyed and energetic searching has yielded a wealth of material from the area’s long and complex prehistory. His collection of thousands of pieces, each carefully marked to locality, was generously donated to the New Hampshire Archaeological Society in 2004.

In addition to his archaeology, Bill was also a prolific artist, primarily working as a sculptor and painter. Here are two examples of his artwork. In the photo, Bill is on the left, working on a stone sculpture. The other image is one of his striking watercolors. For more information, contact Barbara Rimkunas, curator, at the Exeter Historical Society at 603-778-2335 or info@exeterhistory.org.

The Exeter Historical Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to the research and preservation of Exeter’s past. The Historical Society is open to the public on a weekly basis, Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2 – 4:30 pm, and on Saturdays from 9:30 am to noon. Exeter Historical Society, 47 Front Street, PO Box 924, Exeter, New Hampshire, 03833, 603-778-2335, info@exeterhistory.org, www.exeterhistory.org.

Footsteps of Heroes: Civil War Walking Tours of Newburyport

2011-05-10T12:16:00.001-04:00

As part of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War commemoration, please join the Civil War Roundtable on Memorial Day, Monday, May 30, 2011 at 2 p.m. for walking tours of Newburyport.

The 90 minute walking tour features sites and stories of Newburyport’s Civil War history including Albert W. Bartlett and the first troops who left the Clipper City; stories of the shipyard; a local politician (and dear friend of Jefferson Davis) who almost ran against Lincoln for president; stories of Frederick Douglass’ visit; a Newburyporter who would become a Confederate General; and more!

The tour begins and ends at 57 State Street (Arthur Page Insurance Co). Please wear appropriate clothing and comfortable shoes. Tips are welcome, a portion of which will go to historic preservation.

For more information, please email William Hallett.

Civil War Sword Discovered

2011-04-26T13:21:00.001-04:00

Fitz John Porter is seated in the chair.

PORTSMOUTH — An American Civil War-era sword once belonging to Portsmouth native Fitz John Porter and recently discovered for sale online was unveiled at Strawbery Banke Museum Tuesday morning.

The artifact, which dates back more than 125 years, will be the star attraction of a new exhibit at the museum entitled “Fitz John Porter: Portsmouth's Civil War Hero or Coward?”

The U.S. Army presentation sword, which is mentioned in Porter's letters while he sought exoneration from his 1862 court-martial, was discovered online earlier this year by curator Kimberly Alexander and was purchased for the museum by a local benefactor.

Opening on Sunday, May 1, in the Rowland Gallery, the exhibit will offer a glimpse into Porter's past, which historians say is full of political intrigue and controversy.

The exhibit is just one part of how Strawbery Banke plans to commemorate New Hampshire's role in the Civil War, according to president Larry Yerdon.

Source Article: This article is from the Portsmouth Herald, by Charles McMahon, April 26, 2011

The First Casualty of the Civil War?

2011-04-13T12:17:00.000-04:00

It is often difficult to determine the first casualty of a war. What date do you use to begin your discussion? In order to count as the first, is it necessary that the person died due to wounds inflicted in battle? What about freak accidents? How about non-soldiers who were "worked to death" as a consequence of the war? (Enslaved people come to mind when discussing this particular war.) Well, if we use the Battle of Fort Sumter as the beginning point of the Civil War, then we can at least say with certainty that Private Daniel Hough was the first soldier to die at Fort Sumter.

From the Fort Sumter National Monument's website:

How many men were killed at Fort Sumter? One Union soldier was killed and another Union soldier was mortally wounded during the surrender ceremony. Fifty two Confederate soldiers were killed there during the remainder of the war. While a number of slaves were killed while working at the fort, unfortunately the exact number is unknown.

Were any men buried at Fort Sumter? We don’t know for certain, but it is generally believed that the first soldier to die at Fort Sumter, Pvt. Daniel Hough, was buried on the parade ground. It is unknown if he is still buried there, or was perhaps relocated during the course of the Civil War (if he was ever buried there at all). It’s interesting to note that Hough died an accidental death when a cannon discharged while he was loading it. This occurred the day after the battle ended, during a surrender ceremony.

For more information, go to the Fort Sumter National Monument's website.

The Money Diggers

2011-04-06T16:03:00.000-04:00

This (non-Exeter) man is dowsing for water.

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the April 1st issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

Tucked away in the back of Charles Bell’s History of the Town of Exeter, New Hampshire, is a small anecdote about a group of treasure hunters who were duped by a transient rogue named Rainsfield Rogers. Bell was a cautious historian who wouldn’t have included the story if he wasn’t sure it was true, but he also didn’t want to embarrass the people involved. And so we have a somewhat funny story which, due to Bell’s reticence, has few verifiable elements.

In the tale, Rogers arrives in town and is able to convince about a dozen Exeter men that there is treasure buried somewhere within the town limits. The men formed a work gang and night after night they followed Rogers into the woods and swamps to dig for gold. That they never found anything didn’t seem to have discouraged any of them – nor did it make them question Roger’s ability to pick the sites for digging.

In 1800, around the time this incident seems to have occurred, Exeter was still a strict Protestant town. Parish taxes were collected and church membership was considered a civic duty. But within this stringent society there was still an undercurrent of the occult. “White magic” practitioners were occasional visitors to the landscape and were granted a certain amount of credibility. These people, sometimes known as cunning folk, were contacted to help find lost items or to locate water by dowsing. Among the many types of cunning folk were money-diggers. Tracing their trade back to ancient alchemistic traditions, it was commonly believed that mists and gasses deep within the earth produced hordes of precious metals – particularly mercury and gold. Or the belief might have been that there were piles of gold coins buried by the ancients, or even pirates. However it may have gotten there wasn’t as important as the absolute fact that there was gold in them thar hills.

The New Hampshire Sentinel reported in 1822, “Every country has its money diggers, who are full in the belief that vast treasures lay concealed in the earth. So far from being a new project, it dates its origin with the first man who ever wielded a spade. Even in these latter days, we find men so much in love with the ‘root of all evil’ and so firm in the belief that it may be dug up, that they will traverse hill and dale, climb the loftiest mountain, and even work their way into the bowels of the earth in search of it. Indeed digging for money hid in the earth, is a very common thing; and in this State, it is even considered an honorable and profitable employment.” So perhaps it’s not too surprising that Rogers was able to convince the treasure hunters in Exeter that quick riches only required some digging.

What the Exeter men didn’t know was that Rainsford Rogers had a long history of swindling gullible people out of their own money. He’d been involved in a well-publicized scheme in New Jersey that was published in a book called, “The Morris-Town Ghost: An Account of the Beginning, Transactions and Discovery of Ransford Rogers, who seduced many by pretended Hobgoblins and Apparitions, and thereby extorted Money from their Pockets,” in 1788. He slipped away from Morris County, changed his name to “Rice Williams” for a while and continued to ply his trade as a dowser of gold until he arrived in Exeter sometime around 1800. Charles Bell picks up the story from there, “he came to Exeter, bearing his true name of Rainsford Rogers, which had, perhaps, not acquired so bad an odor in New England as in some other quarters.” He asked the men to wear white caps while digging, perhaps to make it easier to spot them all in the dark.

At one point in the Exeter escapade, Rogers used a tactic he’d used before – he dressed up as a ghost to further convince the diggers that they were in the right place. The ghost muttered something unintelligible, to which one of the men inquired, “a little louder, Mr. Ghost; I’m rather hard of hearing!” The men dug with renewed enthusiasm.

Bell continued, “After a time Rogers disclosed what he declared to be the reason of their want of success. The golden deposit was there, beyond question; but they needed one thing more to enable them to find and grasp it. That was a particular kind of divining-rod.” Naturally, this would cost money. The men raised several hundred dollars, loaned Rogers a horse and off he rode to Philadelphia (or so they thought) never to be heard from again.

Exeter, being a small town, had long been aware of the midnight digging sessions of the “secret” little group. When it was revealed that Rogers was gone, the men involved received no end of ribbing from the population and were thereafter branded with the moniker “white caps.” According to Bell, “The deaf man who required the ghost to ‘speak a little louder’ never heard the last of his unfortunate speech.”

Exeter High School Students Win New Hampshire History Day Contest for Documentary on Portsmouth Peace Treaty

2011-04-05T13:39:00.001-04:00

Five students from Exeter High School traveled to Plymouth State University on April 2^nd to compete with 110 other students from 14 school districts (an all-time high for the contest) around the state for honors in the 8^th annual New Hampshire History Day competition. The Exeter students won first place in the Senior Group Documentary category for their 10-minute film, “The Portsmouth Peace Treaty: A Victory for the World.” The Exeter High group also earned a special certificate from the National Archives in Boston for their “Outstanding Use of Primary Sources.” They are now eligible to travel to the National History Day competition in Maryland, June 12-16, 2011 and will be working between now and then to raise the funds necessary for the trip.

The students, who spent eight months researching, filming and editing their winning entry, are: Chandra Boudreau, Ian Smith, Charles Rickarby, Zachary Keefe and Ariel Fleischer. Their teacher is Molly Stevenson.

In addition to research in original source documents related to the Portsmouth Peace Treaty that was negotiated at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard over nearly 30 days in August 1905, the students toured the Shipyard Building 86 Peace Building Museum and the Portsmouth Peace Treaty exhibit in downtown Portsmouth. They interviewed US Navy Public Affairs Officer Gary Hildreth at the Shipyard, Charles B. Doleac, chairman of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Forum and author of An Uncommon Commitment to Peace: Portsmouth Peace Treaty 1905.and Barbara Rimkunas, curator of the Exeter Historical Society. The students’ documentary includes clips of the interviews and historic photographs of the Russian and Japanese envoys in Portsmouth in 1905 and their welcome by local citizens.

Zach Keefe spoke for the team in crediting all of those who assisted with the project. “It was a true team effort to research, interview, and construct the film,” he said. “We hope the film can raise awareness about New Hampshire's role in establishing multi-track diplomacy and the possibility of peace.”

In congratulating her students, Ms. Stevenson said, “As this competition was not part of any course, the students should be especially commended for their hard work and ceaseless desire to make the best documentary possible. Not only have they learned so much in the process, but they have also produced an engaging, quality documentary teaches about the Portsmouth Peace Treaty.”

The film was shown to an audience of more than 500 participants, faculty and guests at the Awards Ceremony at Plymouth State. National History Day NH co-director Dr. Patrick May commented, “I’m always pleased that projects that focus on local history are entered. It’s exhibiting to see students using our state’s historical resources.”

Dr. John Krueckeberg, NHDNH co-director, noted that recent research on National History Day participants shows that students who participate in the NHD program do better in college and in their later careers. He said, “While not everyone receives a medal, you all leave here today with a unique and important educational experience.”

Dr. Cynthia Vascak, Dean of the new College of Arts & Sciences at Plymouth State University, host for the event, quoted Albert Einstein, saying ‘Imagination is more important than knowledge’ and continued “This experience has allowed you to engage critically with the past, to observe closely, wonder and envision… You are each engaged in the challenging scholar’s journey… and can now vision forward with a deeply rooted understanding of our past.” The winning Exeter High School team will present their documentary during the annual Youth Day program at Exeter Historical Society on April 21^st at 7 pm.

The Kenneth E. Behring National History Day Contest in June is the final stage of a series of contests at local and state levels. The contest is named for Mr. Behring in recognition of his support of NHD. Each year roughly 2,400 students and their parents and teachers gather at the University of Maryland, College Park for the week-long event. These enthusiastic groups come from all over the United States, Guam, American Samoa, Department of Defense Schools in Europe, and even Shanghai, China. “The National History Day excitement can be felt across the campus,” says the National History Day website. “After spending months on research and preparing their projects, and competing at local and state contests, these students are eager to show their hard work at the national level.” For more information on National History Day, visit www.nationalhistoryday.org

For more information on the Portsmouth Peace Treaty see www.portsmouthpeacetreaty.org and to help the students raise the funds needed to participate in National History Day, contact Molly Stevenson at msteveson@sau16.org or 603-395-2574.

Can you Identify the Sons of Abraham & Mary Lincoln?

2011-03-23T14:38:00.001-04:00

This c. 1861 painting shows the Lincolns and their three sons.* (Their second son, Edward, had died in 1850, missing his fourth birthday by just over a month.)

To learn more about Robert, attend the Exeter Historical Society's next meeting on Tuesday, April 5th at 7:30pm. In an illustrated presentation entitled "Whatever Happened to Robert Todd Lincoln?" curator Barbara Rimkunas will explore the somewhat challenging life of Abraham Lincoln's only surviving son.

*Robert, the eldest -- who attended Phillips Exeter Academy -- is standing. Willie, who died in 1862, is seated in front of the table, and Tad (Thomas) is with his father.

Historian Tweets about Civil War to Bring Back Era

2011-03-23T13:47:00.003-04:00

A new Twitter feed commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War by tweeting recorded letters from the period
from Salon.com
by Tom Breen, Associated Press

Two months before the start of the Civil War, a North Carolina belle named Catherine Ann Devereux Edmondston tapped out a frustrated message about her secession-opposing sibling in a tweet to her followers: "Sister Frances is a terrible Unionist!"

She might have tweeted, that is, if Twitter had existed in 1861. Instead, Edmondston and other long-dead North Carolinians from a bygone era are having their social networking done for them posthumously. A Raleigh-based historian is using the popular service to bring the home front of a war to modern day audiences nearly a century and a half later.

"We're not imposing any of our words. This is purely from men, women, and even teenagers who stayed at home and fought the war in their own ways," said LeRae Umfleet, the historian who manages the collections at the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources.

Since last week, Umfleet has been tweeting from the account @CivilianWartime with the words of an escaped slave, a woman whose husband owned a plantation and others. The tweets are moving roughly in chronological order along with the war, meaning that so far the messages mostly express the foreboding and uncertainty of people in North Carolina as they watched war clouds build.

"I have just seen the President's message," Umfleet tweeted in the March 11, 1861 words of Mary Bethell. "Mr. Lincoln, I think he intends to coerce those seceding States."

The Twitter account is part of the ongoing effort of the cultural resources department's ongoing effort to mark the 150th anniversary of the bloodiest conflict in American history. It seeks to highlight the experiences of those who remained at home while others went off to war -- a conflict ever more dire as the battles drag on.

"By the end of the war, we will have seen conflict on North Carolina soil, and we'll have heard from people with firsthand knowledge of that," Umfleet said.

from Tom Breen's article, "Historian Tweets about Civil War to Bring Back Era" in www.salon.com, March 22, 2011.

We Have a Winner for our Surprise Historical Artifact!

2011-03-22T11:38:00.008-04:00

David Linehan, of To the Point Marketing System, is the winner of our facebook posting challenge! David is now the proud owner of the 1938 Exeter Tercentenary Commemoration booklet. Congratulations, David!

Fire at the Box Factory

2011-03-19T10:40:00.014-04:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the March 18th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

In the early morning hours of March 10th, 1899, the Exeter Fire Department was called out to a fire at John H. Fellows’s box factory on Rockingham Street. Clarence Warner had arrived at the stables adjoining the factory just before 5 a.m. to feed the horses when he noticed smoke issuing from the main building. He raced to the railroad depot where the telegraph operator turned in the call. Within minutes, two nearby hose companies had arrived and attached lines to the hydrants, but with the notoriously low water pressure of Exeter’s west end, it would do little good against the fast moving fire. They would need the pumper – Exeter’s magnificent Amoskeag Eagle Steamer – if they were going to make any headway with this fire.

The steamer was housed in the downtown on Water Street a mile away from the fire. On a clear day with dry roads it would have been a quick trip up Front Street to reach the box factory, but because Warner had gone to the depot and the alarm had been sounded from there, the steamer mistakenly traveled up Lincoln Street, losing valuable time as it had to turn around to circle back to Rockingham Street across the railroad tracks. Had Warner run just a bit further down Railroad Avenue and turned the alarm from the shoe factory, the steamer would have made a more direct trip.

Compounding the misdirection was the fickle New Hampshire weather. March has the potential to be a beautiful Spring-like month, but it can also spew Winter right back at you. On the day of the fire the Exeter News-Letter had noted, “The weather of the past week has been extraordinary in its variety. A downpour of rain was followed early Sunday morning by three vivid flashes of lightening and loud bursts of thunder. Tuesday was typical of the most blustery days of March. The wind fairly howled from the northeast, and at times one could scarcely see for the clouds of snow, of which half a foot fell. In the afternoon, as another remarkable phenomenon for this season, came more thunder and lightning.” The coldest day of the month was the day before the fire when the temperature plummeted to 8 degrees. The west end of town had not yet cleared the snow from the streets when the Eagle steamer was making its trip to the box factory.

The Exeter Gazette noted that, “the steamer was delayed by the deep snow, and from going down Lincoln street, so it took a full half hour to get around.” The delay would be costly, but not devastating, to the box factory.

John H. Fellows was a relative newcomer to town when he bought the old Elwell box-making plant in 1896. The production of both wooden crates and paperboard boxes was a lucrative trade.

The bulk of Fellows’s work was making shoeboxes. When he purchased the plant he immediately began enlarging this part of the business. The News-Letter had enthusiastically reported on the expansion, “the plant will include a well equipped office for two or three printers to print great variety of labels required for shoe boxes.” Within a year, Fellows had increased the number of employees from 40 to 60 – mostly young women. His shoeboxes and packing crates were being shipped all over New England.

The cause of the fire was never fully determined. The machinery was entirely run by a steam engine housed separately from the shop floor and when the Gazette spoke with the boiler room engineer it reported, “Mr. Hayes says it was all swept clean about the engine room at 6 o’clock, Thursday night, and there was no fire in the building that he knows of.” There was no electrical supply to the factory and they eventually concluded that the fire had been set by arsonists.

Fighting the fire proved to be difficult. With several wooden structures filled with flammable materials, the firefighters could do little to save the wood shop that was fully ablaze when they arrived. “The hydrant streams were rather weak, but sufficed to keep the other parts of the factory wet down. The brick boiler house annex had its roof burned off, and the flames were creeping along the L to the paper box factory when the steamer began to get in its work, knocking the cinders away and heading off the flames.” When the fire was finally knocked down, it was estimated that forty percent of the factory was destroyed. Fellows immediately began planning its full reconstruction.

As the smoke began to clear, the Gazette’s headline of the fire was “GOOD LUCK THAT IT DID NOT SWEEP THE ENTIRE PLANT.” The men of the Eagle Steamer Company knew better, noting in their official log, “It looked awhile as if the whole plant would be destroyed but by hard work on the part of the firemen the largest part of the buildings were saved.” Luck had little to do with it.

Smithsonian Uses Social Media to Expand Its Mission

2011-03-17T10:52:00.001-04:00

From the New York Times...

by Elizabeth Olson

The Smithsonian Institution is shaking off its image as “the nation’s attic” brimming with arcane treasures and using Web and mobile projects to enlist the public in delving into its collections, expanding its research and, sometimes, just adding interesting postscripts to history.

Best known for its stately museums on the National Mall, the 164-year-old Smithsonian also conducts wide-ranging scientific research, part of its original mission to increase and spread knowledge. But instead of relying on its small cadre of experts, the institution is embracing social media to involve the public.

“We are more than museums,” said Michael Edson, the Smithsonian’s director of Web and new-media strategy. No more than 1 percent of the huge complex’s 137 million items are on public display at any time.

“We’re operating telescopes in space, preserving ancient languages, studying biodiversity, evolution and history — a vast distributed network of scholars and researchers active in over 100 countries,” he said.

In addition to bolstering scholarship, social media also is helping the Smithsonian solve puzzles like identifying an early 20th-century woman whose illustrations humorously conveyed economic data to the public, or the purpose of the “perforating paddle” used by early postal workers.

Also, the Smithsonian has been able to uncover new information about historic events like the trial of John T. Scopes for teaching evolution, and assemble a worldwide network to capture wild animal behavior and another to map American tree species.

“What we are doing is more lively and accessible than developing an exhibit and providing a catalog,” said Mr. Edson.

Crowd-sourcing and user-generated content are not new to the Smithsonian, said Pamela Henson, the institution’s historian, pointing to the creation in the 1850s of what later became the National Weather Service. The Smithsonian’s first secretary, Joseph Henry, enlisted volunteers around the country to gather observations about storms and other weather occurrences and to mail or telegraph them to Washington.

“The volunteers helped us establish weather patterns,” she said, “Also, a source of our earliest collections were trappers, explorers and others who collected plants and animals and gave them to the Smithsonian.”

Even so, the 21st-century Smithsonian was somewhat slower to embrace unfettered public involvement, fearing it would undercut the institution’s scientific credibility. After debate, the Smithsonian began moving ahead in the social media realm in early 2009, encouraged by its new secretary, G. Wayne Clough, who had served as president of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“We’re now broadcasters of knowledge,” Mr. Edson said of the Smithsonian’s efforts. “It’s invigorating, and a real collaboration.”

The use of social media led to identification of a photograph that had been on the Smithsonian “Portraits of Scientists” since 2003. The Smithsonian added the image to its photo-sharing Web site,. Flickr users began contributing clues, like a wedding announcement, to pinpoint the woman in the picture as 21-year-old Ida Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin, an artist hired in the 1920s at a science news service.

Her granddaughter, Linda Sabin Eisenstadt, recognized the Flickr photo and contributed details of her grandmother’s life and some of her drawings — noting that she had found two unknown cousins as a result.

Ms. Goodwin’s “cartoonographs” amusingly depicted rising commodity prices, political campaign spending, spending on oil and the impact of new communications technologies, all still timely topics, said Effie Kapsalis, head of Web and new media for the Smithsonian Archives.

Previously unpublished photos of the Scopes trial in Tennessee posted on Flickr resulted in a donation of 10 black-and-white photographs from Henrietta S. Jenrette, who said they had been taken by her father, who attended the trial with his former high school biology teacher. She wanted them to be online for anyone to see.

With more than six million objects, and only four curators, the National Postal Museum created an online database called Arago for those who want to study particular objects, said Marshall Emery, the museum’s internal affairs manager. While the postal museum is small compared with other Smithsonian museums, its Web site, named after Francois Arago, a French scientist and friend of the Smithsonian’s founder, James Smithson, drew 26.4 million page views from 158 countries in fiscal 2010.

Philatelic experts around the world can research — and sometimes pinpoint inaccuracies in — the museum’s collection, which includes every United States postage stamp, Amelia Earhart’s flight suit and unusual objects like an 1899 perforating paddle that was used to stab holes in mail envelopes so it could be fumigated inside railway mail cars. The purpose was to prevent letters from carrying yellow fever, then thought to be spread by such contact.

A recently introduced Smithsonian digital endeavor to discover what environmental factors most influence the size of wildlife populations relies on a broad network of volunteers, rather than specialists. In late February, its Museum of the Natural History introduced “Smithsonian Wild,”, with links on Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. It can “can only be accomplished using citizen scientists — not unlike the annual bird counts — only this is for mammals, which are mostly nocturnal,” said Robert Costello, the museum’s outreach program manager.

The site brings together 202,000 wildlife photos from various Smithsonian and other research projects where motion-sensitive cameras were installed to capture close-range images of elusive species like the jaguar.

This gives the public “a better sense not only of the diversity of wildlife, but also of the diversity of the Smithsonian’s wildlife research,” said Mr. Costello.

On the heels of that project, the Smithsonian began broadening its mobile offerings with a free new app, called Leafsnap, to identify tree species by their leaves. Smartphone apps typically help users to navigate their visit — the Smithsonian has them for its popular National Air and Space Museum as well as the Postal and Natural History — and to complement specific exhibitions.

Leafsnap is the first of a series of electronic field guides that researchers from the Smithsonian, Columbia University and the University of Maryland have developed to help identify species from photographs. The Web site field guide currently includes the trees of New York City and Washington and will expand to include trees across the continental United States.

The app can also be used to map tree diversity and location by sending global positioning data back to scientists. Other apps to raise awareness of biodiversity will be introduced in the future.

“A few years ago, it was unusual for a museum to have social media,” said Mr. Edson. “Now it’s just assumed to be part of what museums offer — like the heat.”

Article is from the New York Times.

Town Meeting in Exeter

2011-03-08T12:50:00.004-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the March 4th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

Our venerable New Hampshire practice of holding town meetings each year dates to the 1630s. Back then, the practice was simple enough – get all the voting men together for the day, grease them up with a fair amount of rum or hard cider, talk about the important town issues and vote on how to act on the issues.

Shortly after Europeans began arriving in Exeter in 1638, meetings were held fairly frequently to divvy up the land and make sure everyone got a share. These early town meetings probably weren’t very exciting – at least as far as the records tell us: “ Robert Smyth 6 acers 30 poole butting as aforesayd: Goodman Littlefejld 4 acers 20 poole butting as aforesayd….” the lists go on and on. It takes a fair amount of reading before you finally get to the town’s real issue in 1641:
“Its ordered yt Goodman (name obscured) shall allow the Indeans one bushel of corne for yr labor wch was spent by ym in replaynting of yt corne of yrs wch was spoyld by his swine, and hee to make up yr lose at harvest according as yt corne may be indged worse then there corne wch was nevr hurt.”

Although the spelling might lead one to believe that early Exeter citizens were the inventors of text speak that our kids use, it really indicates a much larger problem within the town. The Squamscott natives had been guaranteed the right to plant and harvest their own crops, and one of the townsmen had been foolish enough to let his pig run wild through the fields. Pigs were the biggest problem in early Exeter. Mandatory fencing laws quickly followed.

Under the old calendar system the year began in March, so that was when the meeting was held. There were quite a few drawbacks to a March meeting. Travel is poor during the mud and slush season and some of our biggest snowstorms have taken place in March. Nonetheless, March it was and March it would continue to be.

The tradition of town meeting continued, unchanged, after the American Revolution. The town was small enough that most of the men could fit into a single space. Not all of the men would show up anyway, so they never realistically had to make room for everyone. Those who did appear, it was thought, were those who really mattered. In Exeter, as in most towns, it was vital to hold the meeting in the center of town near the local taverns. Town meeting was a long day and refreshment, of one kind or another, was needed.

Once the beautiful Exeter Town Hall was erected in 1855, the meeting took on a more distinguished locale. The men could gather on the floor and the ladies could listen – but not participate – from the gallery above. The floor was strewn with sawdust to absorb the inevitable mud tracked in from the street and the participants argued the warrant with enthusiasm. In 1890, the Exeter News-Letter advised: “Every voter should carefully read the town warrant and decide upon his course of action before he becomes confused with town meeting oratory.”

There was no secret ballot at the town meeting, a vote of “aye” or “nay” would carry or defeat such important issues as were brought up. In 1890, the issues involved approving the new street gas lights, extending sewers to Grove, Elliot, Court and Elm Streets and where to place the new hose company house. They also appropriated $800.00 to purchase a pair of horses for the fire department.

When the secret ballot (or Australian ballot as it was known) was approved for the November elections, the News-Letter sadly commented, “whatever may be merits or demerits of Australian balloting, it has certainly robbed election meetings of nearly all interest to the spectator.” Luckily, it was never used for town meeting. Town meeting was all about entertainment.

In 1898, Exeter judge Henry Shute complained about the general levity of town meeting. “The hall is full of smoke, there are not seats enough, and the people walk restlessly to and fro, talk gossip, laugh and pay but little attention to the speakers, unless the discussion waxes warm, when there is a rush forward, and the speakers are loudly applauded or roundly hooted, as their opinions find favor or otherwise with the audience. Small boys and some not so small chase each other and wrestle, and the occasional attempt of some inebriated gentlemen to harangue the crowd in the back part of the hall meets with great favor.” In spite of his indignation, there is little evidence that the atmosphere changed much over the years.

In 1996 New Hampshire towns were allowed to adopt a balloting system. Hated by some and loved by those of us who could never attend town meetings because of work schedules or lack of childcare, it was adopted in Exeter in 1998. Voting on a ballot may not be as entertaining as getting caught up in the verbal sparring at a town meeting, but it does calm down the mob rule feel of the old days.

Greenhouses in Exeter

2011-02-23T13:59:00.002-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the February 22nd issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

The first commercial greenhouse in Exeter was built by Daniel Hayes on Jady Hill near where Bittersweet Lane is located today. Hayes was a local farmer who also had a milk route in town. Of him, the Exeter News-Letter said, “While still keeping his farm in full and successful operation, he had since 1866 been a leading florist of the town, from time to time adding to his plant until he had in successful operation three large greenhouses, in the aggregate covering a space of 6,000 square feet and excellently equipped and stocked.”

Within just a few years, Hayes’ greenhouses were joined by others in town. The 1874 map shows two greenhouses on Pine Street. The first was operated by Charles Burley, who described himself as a florist in the town directory. His advertisement in 1887 offered, “garden flowers, fine roses, cut flowers, bouquets and decorations – orders by mail or express promptly attended to.”

The other Pine Street greenhouse was owned by Nathaniel Gordon. Gordon was a lawyer by training who had decided to leave the profession in the 1850s and go into business. He invested in California silver-mining and government bonds during the Civil War. As his profits grew, he was able to purchase a large homestead on Pine Street that had formerly belonged to Judge Henry Flagg French. French had maintained the property as a model farm with modern drainage and a steady water supply. Gordon began tinkering with the idea of hothouse flower cultivation and eventually built several large greenhouses.

Both of the Pine Street greenhouses were eventually leased and then purchased by George W. Hilliard in the 1890s. Hilliard was one of Exeter’s most active businessmen. According to Nancy Merrill’s History of Exeter, New Hampshire, “Mr. Hilliard’s business enterprises included billiard and pool rooms in Exeter and a large summer hotel in the White Mountains. His greatest success, however, was as a florist; his rose conservatories were known throughout New England.”

Hilliard moved Burley’s greenhouse from Pine Street to Grove Court. He then expanded the enterprise over the next few years. By 1893, his Grove Street greenhouses were heralded in the Exeter News-Letter, “five houses, each of 100 by 15 feet, of which the first is stocked with violets, carnations and orchids, a particularly rare and handsome variety of the latter now in bloom being the odontoglossum grande. The other houses are successively stocked with perle de jardin and nephetos roses; with mermet and bride roses; with bride and Wootten roses, and with Woottens, lilies of the valley, colei, smilax, chrysanthemums and bavardia.”

But Hilliard’s greatest triumph was his American Beauty roses, cultivated in the former Gordon greenhouses. He partnered with Hilding Karlson, to create the firm of Hilliard and Karlson. Karlson, a native of Sweden, was, according to the News-Letter, “not only exceptionally skilled as a florist, but ambitious to master all sciences that bore upon his profession. For two years he had made private studies with Mr. White, of the Academy faculty, in agricultural chemistry, the two often working till the small hours of the night at the Academy laboratory.” Together Hilliard and Karlson began the cultivation of roses fine enough to enter regional flower competitions. The partnership was cut short when Karlson was killed during a freak storm on the 4th of July at Hampton Beach, but his level of scientific skill marked Hilliard’s later successes.

In early 1899, the American Florist noted that “Exeter had the honor of sending to Boston the finest American Beauty roses in the market for Christmas. They came to Welch Brothers from Hilliard and Karlson and no better blooms have ever been seen here.”

Hilliard renamed the business “Exeter Rose Conservatories.” In 1901, his roses took second prize at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society exhibition with stiff competition from other florists throughout New England, New York and New Jersey. Five years later at the same show he would win the Kasting Cup – top prize for the best 50 blooms – and the Welch Brothers’ Cup for the best vase of roses in the show. He shipped over 5,000 roses to Boston and Maine markets for Easter alone in 1907. By 1910, the Exeter Rose Conservatories was one of the largest in New England. The business flourished into the 1920s.

These pioneers of early greenhouse propagation led the way for later flower and nursery businesses in Exeter. John Lovering established the first greenhouse on Lincoln Street that would later become Dot’s Flower Shop. Forrest Ellison started his business on Brentwood road in 1910 with a converted chicken coop. Today greenhouse and garden establishments show no signs of disappearing from the landscape. During the dry frigid days of winter there is nothing as uplifting as a visit through the lush fragrant climate of a well-maintained greenhouse.

5th Annual Nancy Carnegie Merrill History Award Contest 2011

2011-02-05T11:04:00.005-05:00

Every winter the Exeter Historical Society invites students in grades 6 to 12 to compete for the Nancy Carnegie Merrill History Award in honor of our esteemed former curator for her invaluable contributions to the preservation and interpretation of our local history.

Students at the Cooperative Middle School and Exeter High School, as well as from the greater Seacoast area, are invited to enter by contacting faculty members in their social studies departments or the historical society directly for further information.

This year, the theme is "Exeter at the Time of the Civil War". We ask that in their research papers, the students explore an aspect of life in Exeter at the time of the Civil War, such as life on the homefront, family life, politics, industry, transporation, education, recreation, military life, or fashion, etc. The papers must be turned in to the student's faculty liaison, to to the Exeter Historical Society by Tuesday, March 22, 2011.

A panel of judges will choose one entry from each division (Middle School and High School) that best meets the criteria of outstanding achievement in format, historical accuracy, originality, and style. A $100 prize will be awarded to each winner. Also, winning papers will be read by the authors at our annual Youth Night awards ceremony on Thursday, April 21 at 7pm. For the fifth consecutive year, Youth Night is sponsored by Seacoast Credit Union. It is our hope that the Nancy Carnegie Merrill Award will foster an appreciation for our community and an interest in its past.

For additional information, please contact Laura Gowing, Program Manager. Also, see the Flyer and Cover Sheet for 5th Annual Nancy Carnegie Merrill History Award. (To download the flyer, click the green "Download" button in the right bottom corner, choose "PDF" and save to your computer.)

Have You Checked the Forecast Lately?

2011-02-04T14:30:00.001-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the February 4th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

In 1892, the United States Weather Bureau decided that the town of Exeter should have a weather notification system. The Weather Bureau had been transferred the year before from the U.S. Army Signal Corps to the Department of Agriculture, and some changes were occurring quickly. And so the town decided to notify the population through a series of steam whistle blasts from the Exeter Machine Works near the railroad depot. Although crude, it was still an improvement over previous systems.

In the nineteenth century, most people relied on folk wisdom and the farmer’s almanac for weather information. “Clear moon, frost soon,” went one old saying, along with, “much noise made by rats and mice indicates rain.” Some folk wisdom was actually scientifically accurate – anvil-shaped clouds do frequently indicate a thunderstorm, for instance. But “Hark! I hear the asses bray, I think we’ll have some rain today,” wasn’t really a good prognosticator of the weather.

Almanacs then, as today, were also very poor predictors of the weather. The Old Farmer’s Almanac for 2011, for instance, lists the weather for February 1-4th as “sunny, mild”. It may boast of being 80% accurate, but it really only manages about 10%, and even that is only because it correctly predicts that winter will be cold and summer will be hot.

The most popular almanac in New Hampshire during the nineteenth century was Leavitt’s Farmer’s Almanac, first published in 1797 by Exeter-born Dudley Leavitt. Leavitt, and later his son William, provided weather forecasts similar to the modern Old Farmer’s Almanac. Checking the accuracy of Leavitt’s weather predictions is easier than one might think. Exeter’s Nathaniel Shute kept records of the weather from 1873 until just before his death in 1886. For February 1st, 1878, Leavitt predicted the weather would be “mild”. Shute recorded the day’s actual weather as “a violent snow storm.” Good thing he hadn’t relied on the almanac and planned a sleigh ride to Boston that day.

Actually, Leavitt didn’t get a single weather event correct that month. When Leavitt said it would snow, Shute recorded the weather as “fair”; when Shute recorded“rain and sleet,” Leavitt predicted fair skies. Really, the most reliable way of predicting the weather may well have been grandpa’s trick knee.

It was the telegraph that made weather forecasting practical. It had been noted for a long time that weather systems moved across the country in a predictable manner. But when it took four days to ride from Philadelphia to Boston, the weather usually got there first. It was impractical to send weather dispatches by horse and rider. Even the railroad wasn’t quicker than a storm front. But a telegraph operator in Buffalo could send word of an impending snowstorm in seconds. The Army Signal Corps had capitalized on the extension of the telegraph system and began gathering and disseminating weather data at the request of President Ulysses S. Grant.

By 1891, when the Weather Bureau became a civilian organization, there was a definite desire for accurate weather forecasting. Exeter had to figure out how to get the information to its citizens. Earlier attempts, in the 1880s, to use signal flags had proved costly and impractical. Placing the flags on the roof of the Exeter News-Letter building on Water Street was more difficult than anticipated during winter. The flags were expensive and quickly became tattered. The practice was discontinued within two years.

It was decided in early 1892 to use the steam whistle at the Exeter Machine Works. Close to the telegraph office and nearly central to the town, the Machine Works was an ideal location. The whistle was already being used as a fire alarm system. The Exeter Gazette noted, “Signals will be sounded by the Exeter Machine Works whistle daily, Sundays excepted, at 12:50 P.M., immediately after the fire alarm whistle. Indications are for 24 hours following. The warning signal, to attract attention, will be a long blast of from fifteen to twenty seconds duration. After this warning signal has been sounded, long blasts (of from four to six seconds duration) refer to weather, and short blasts (of from one to three seconds duration) refer to temperature; those for weather to be sounded first.”

A signal card was available at Wetherall’s Drug Store to decode the blasts, but the system was simple: one blast was fair weather; two blasts meant rain or snow. Short staccato blasts indicated changes in temperatures and three such blasts meant a cold spell was on the way.

The system was only used for a few years. Perhaps the noise began to wear on people’s nerves (count twenty seconds and try to imagine a long, loud steam whistle blast of that duration every single day, excepting Sunday, of course). The new Weather Bureau tried a number of new ways to notify the public, but by the early twentieth century telephones made communication even faster than telegraph and by the 1920s, radio broadcasts brought news - including weather - right into people’s homes.

Brewing in NH Program RESCHEDULED

2011-02-03T12:49:00.001-05:00

Rescheduled, Tuesday, February 8

Brewing in New Hampshire: An Informal History of Beer in the Granite State from Colonial Times to the Present
Glenn Knoblock will explore the fascinating history of NH’s beer and ale brewing industry from Colonial days to today’s modern breweries. This program is sponsored by the NH Humanities Council.

Exeter's Country Doctor

2011-01-22T10:04:00.004-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column will appear in the January 25th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

When Dr. William G. Perry opened his office in 1847 in Exeter, he knew he had stiff competition. His father, also named Dr. William Perry, had been practicing medicine in town since 1814 and showed no signs of slowing down. The two men, designated “Old Dr. Perry” and “Young Dr. Perry,” worked in town together for the next 40 years, each serving his own patients but overlapping with great frequency.

“Old” Dr. Perry was not a native of Exeter. Born in 1788 in Norton, Massachusetts, he was a farmer’s son. His father sent his two older brothers to college but had to be coerced into doing the same for his third. It seems he hoped that William would be the one to inherit the farm, but the boy had other ideas. He headed to Union College in New York in 1807, but quickly decided to transfer to Harvard. On the trip home, he just happened to come upon a new-fangled invention called a steamship that was making on if its first voyages down the Hudson River. Hopping aboard, William became one of the first people in America to ride on Robert Fulton’s steamship.

In 1814, in the same year Perry earned his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, the town of Exeter found itself in need of a new – younger- physician. According the Exeter News-Letter, “About this time the people of Exeter were in want of a doctor. Some of the resident physicians were getting old and others lacked moral standing. A number of leading citizens wrote therefore to Dr. Warren, asking him to recommend a young man of promise to fill the vacancy. He at once selected Dr. Perry.” With his mentor’s approval, Perry set up his practice in February of 1814.He would remain in practice until shortly before his death, at the age of 98, in 1887.
He soon proved himself to be an excellent physician and surgeon. In the early years of his practice, doctors performed operations without the benefit of anesthesia, which was frightening for both doctor and patient. The News-Letter would say of Perry, “He was not a rash practitioner, but he could be heroic when heroism was required. A grateful patient whose life was saved by amputation performed when the sufferer was apparently at the last extremity, remarked that his own pain was half forgotten – this was before chloroform was known – when he saw the big drops of sweat upon the surgeon’s brow.”

Doctors in the nineteenth century had to be made of tough stuff. They ministered to all people at all times of day or night, frequently for little or no payment. He wisely allowed himself to be vaccinated for small pox even when advised that the disease was dying out. The advice didn’t seem to apply to Exeter, as small pox was still seen in the town, “he had abundance of work in this line, however. He attended numberless cases, sometimes burying with his own hand, those, who having died of the worst forms of the disease, had been abandoned by their terror-stricken friends.” Such was the life of a village doctor.

Perry didn’t confine himself to the study of medicine; he was also interested in the mechanics of the industrial revolution that came to town in the form of textile mills. Finding that the materials used for sizing cotton fabrics had to be imported from England, he devised a way to make the same type of starch from potatoes. His potato starch mill on the Exeter River just above the Great Bridge operated for several decades, providing sizing for the mills in Lowell. Burned twice, the mill finally was put out of business by its own success. Dr. Perry, had forgotten to patent his discovery and lost customers when a competitor stole his process and set up his own potato starch mill.

Perry also dabbled in dentistry, carving replacement teeth from hippopotamus tusks. He filled cavities with such skill that local dentists remarked on their durability. It may have been his work in dentistry that led him to invent a simplified packing for the treatment of nosebleeds. Exeter’s cotton mill provided the cotton wadding and strong thread that Perry used to pack the nose and later extract the wadding easily – without the use of damaging instruments. It was a simple solution for a difficult problem.

Dr. Perry continued to practice well into his eighties, performing three delicate hernia operations at the age of 87.His skill was such that the News-Letter noted, “a fourth time, when ninety-two, he was equally successful” with another hernia repair. It speaks well of his abilities that his patients harbored no reservations about letting him operate at such an advanced age.

At the time of his death, Perry was the oldest resident of the town of Exeter. “Few men will be more missed by all classes in our community than Dr. Perry,” the News-Letter wrote in his obituary, “He was firm, and sometimes blunt even to roughness, with hypochondriacal patients or those he believed to be shamming. Toward real sufferers he was as gentle and sympathetic as a woman.”

The Dangers of the Horse and Buggy Days

2011-01-19T11:57:00.003-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the January 7th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

If the thought of driving on a snowy day keeps you at home, you’d do well to remember that horse-drawn vehicles weren’t much safer than cars. Yes, carriages and sleighs traveled at much slower speeds than we do, and yes, there were fewer drivers out there, but most of our accidents are caused by driver error and cars have become much safer in recent years. There was never anything safe about an open carriage – being ejected from the vehicle was just as dangerous then as it is today. But the primary reason for carriage accidents wasn’t driver error. It was that killer horse.

On July 2, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary, was riding into Washington when the driver’s seat on the presidential carriage became loose, pitching the driver off. He was fine, but the terrified horses began to run – taking Mary Lincoln with them. Fearing they would crash, Mary jumped from the carriage. Newspapers reported that the president’s wife was merely bruised, but she suffered a head injury that triggered migraines for the remainder of her life.

Even if the passengers managed to escape, an out of control horse could create havoc for miles. At least car usually stop moving. In May of 1898, the Exeter Gazette, reported, “The most exciting runaway which has taken place for many a day, occurred here Saturday, no less than six teams being mixed up in the affair. Only one person was hurt, however, although nearly every wagon was smashed to kindling wood.”

A horse belonging to O.H. Sleeper, but driven by photographer William Hobbs, suddenly took a fright on Franklin Street tossing both Hobbs and a young companion over the side. The driverless wagon then careened up Water Street smashing into J.W. Berry’s milk wagon before hitting Charles Haley’s fully hitched meat wagon. Haley’s horse then reared and smashed through the glass plate window of the billiard parlor before grazing the wheel of Frank Engel’s wagon. He narrowly missed B. Judson’ Perkin’s carriage, overturned John Sanborn’s buggy and raced down Water Street finally being stopped by the gas house at the base of Green Street.

Meanwhile, the horse who had started it all – Sleeper’s horse – crossed String bridge and headed for Jady Hill, where he was finally captured, “but not enough was left to the wagon to bring home.” Such excitement could really liven up a dull afternoon. At least this incident only resulted in minor injury to Mr. Hobbs.
Hannah Brown, who lived on River Street, reported a sad tale in her diary on February 2nd, 1854; “William and his wife, Fanny, and Charles Warren came over to pass the evening. About ten o’clock they started for home. When they got about half a mile, the horse became unmanageable, the harness gave way going down hill, cause the sleigh to come on the horse feets it frighten him so that William could not hold him, the sleigh upset, they were all thrown into the wall. Lydia was mortally wounded, she survived six days after the accident, Fanny had her teeth broken and her face very much bruised. William and Charles escaped unhurt.” The Exeter News-Letter added, “at the foot of the hill, the horse instead of following a turn in the road, passed straight on over a stone wall into the field.” No amount of defensive driving will help when a horse has lost his senses.

So many accidents were caused by horses that the newspapers were full of accounts. “”L.B. Tilton’s horse, attached to his butcher cart, started on a run from the top of Tower hill Thursday went up Spring street and into the academy grounds, where he was caught by students,” reported the News-Letter in May of 1898. Later that same year, the Conner’s horse fell into a culvert at the corner of Center and Water streets, “Luckily the animal escaped with only a few bruises, but the ladies in the carriage were considerably frightened,” commented the editor.

Author Sarah Orne Jewett, of South Berwick, Maine, ended her writing career after a carriage accident in 1902. “The horse stepped on a rolling stone and fell, throwing Miss Jewett, who held the reins, and Miss Rebecca Young, her seat companion, over the horse’s head. Miss Young escaped with a severe shaking up, but Miss Jewett was considerably injured about the head and spine.” She never fully recovered from the accident.

Although quaint and seemingly rather slow and steady, a wagon or carriage could easily turn into more of a death trap than a Ford Pinto if that one uncontrollable element – the horse – decided to take flight.

We're Back in Business (and even have heat)!

2011-01-11T11:59:00.001-05:00

We have a new beautiful furnace, and it is working efficiently and dependably. Yay!!!

Therefore, we are back in business! We hope that you will stop by for a visit to our WARM building during our open hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2 pm to 4:30 pm and Saturdays, 9:30 am to noon.

The Furnace is Down!

2010-12-29T13:33:00.005-05:00

The Historical Society's furnace ceased functioning on December 28th, so the Society will be closed for the next couple of weeks while the furnace is being replaced. Our January program, The History of the Wentworth, will be held at the Baptist Church on Wednesday, January 5th, at 7:30pm. You can reach us by email: info@exeterhistory.org. We thank you, in advance, for your patience with us during this process.

Here are a few photos of our progress:

Removing the furnace.

Thank you for all of the hard work!

The remains of the furnace...

The Kingston Stowaways

2010-12-28T10:34:00.000-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the December 24th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

In June of 1896, Albert and Lucy Tyler set out from Exeter for a trip west. The two had been married just over two years earlier and must have been looking for a bit of adventure. The trip would not turn out exactly as expected, although it definitely did become an “adventure” and they would justly earn their 15 minutes of fame.

The trip appears to have begun as a pleasure excursion. The Exeter Gazette, a rival of the Exeter News-Letter, noted that they set out from Kingston, “in a pneumatic run-about wagon, drawn by a horse, Peter. At Des Moines, Iowa, they purchased another horse and then made the rest of the trip to the Pacific with two horses. They were nine days on the Great American desert, and arrived at Los Angelos, Cal., after being on the road just 180 days.” A “run-about” was a small lightweight carriage. It was the favored type of transportation for doctors and fire chiefs because it could be pulled by a single horse and hitched up quickly. With air-filled tires, it was well-suited to town and city roads that were well maintained. But it was hardly the type of transportation one might take on a long arduous cross-country trip. It had neither fenders nor heavy tops to weigh it down and little space for luggage.

The two lingered in California for a while before heading to Seattle. It may have been the lure of gold that brought them north. Gold had been discovered in Alaska and the Yukon River basin in Canada while the Tylers were making their trip and 1897 would prove to be the summer of the Klondike Gold Rush.

Albert and Lucy were nearly there, but their finances had mostly run out. Albert had tried to support them by “trade” – perhaps dealing in merchandise as his father, Rolla Tyler, of Exeter, did back home, but it wasn’t enough. The Gazette reported that the couple found themselves, “living in a tent near the corner of Second Avenue and Virginia Street.” At this point, they decided they had to get out of Seattle one way or another and hatched a plan to get out. Mr. Tyler would later tell a railroad official that, “little obstacles to a pleasure trip across the country like those they had just encountered, did not discourage them, and that sooner or later they would go out of Seattle.” And so, they determined to head back east to Boston.

“Being without funds,“ the Gazette continued, “they hit upon the scheme of getting a piano box and fitting it out for a transcontinental trip to the bean-eating town.” An upright piano box would have been three feet deep, five feet tall and six feet long. Not roomy by any stretch of the imagination, but they weren’t planning to spend too much time actually in the box. “One side of the box was fixed so that the boards could be removed and thus allow exit. The plan was to open up the box, once on the road, and then enjoy the freedom of the car,” noted the Gazette.

Unfortunately, once they had packed themselves inside, the freight wagon delivered them to the rail station 15 minutes after the train left. The box was moved to storage where someone began to hear noises from within. Opening the top, a woman’s voice piped up and said “Hello!” “Freight Agent Allen could hardly believe his ears. He looked down into the box and discovered that the salutation came from a little woman clad only in her night gown. Further inspection revealed also a man clad in abbreviated costume. The remainder of the box was taken up with a supply of provisions, including apples, crackers, figs, bread, onions and water. The human freight was not shipped.”

Because they hadn’t actually been taken on the train, Albert and Lucy hadn’t broken any laws. Albert produced his marriage certificate as proof of their identity and they were apparently free to go. They called an express wagon, packed up their supplies and, “as they went away from the station the man waived his hand derisively toward the railroad people saying: ‘Ta, ta, I’ll see you in the Klondyke!’” perhaps to throw them off his track.

But the railroad got its revenge on Albert and Lucy, releasing the story to the newspapers. It hit the wires and was picked up by the Boston Journal, which quickly relayed the story to Exeter. When the couple finally arrived in Exeter a few weeks later – by train, no less – they were embarrassed to find themselves a media sensation. The Gazette caught up with them and asked about the incident. “This story they both deny, and say that the parties who made the attempt, were caught and gave their names, thus making it appear as if it was Mr. and Mrs. Tyler, when in fact, it was not.” But the News-Letter gave them no such denial, stating only, “Mr. and Mrs. Albert Tyler, whose attempt to ship themselves east from Seattle, Wash., in a piano box, was a recent sensation, are now at Mrs. Tyler’s old home in Kingston.” And with that, their brush with fame ended.

Quarantine

2010-12-14T11:07:00.002-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the December 10th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

“Mom, I don’t feel good.”

These are the most dreaded words a parent can hear first thing in the morning. The day’s plans are shot, the school has to be notified, possibly a doctor’s appointment has to be made and met, maybe a workplace has to be called, coverage found, ginger ale purchased and always the potential threat looms that any other children in the family might be similarly afflicted within a few hours or days.

But except for a few rare cases, most of the time our main concern is all the inconvenience. Kids get sick. Kids get better. We take for granted this usual progression of illness. A century ago it wasn’t quite so simple. For one thing, your child was likely to come home from school with something a lot worse than a stomach bug.

In 1900, the main childhood killers were infectious diseases such as scarlet fever, measles, diphtheria and whooping cough. All of these are highly contagious and would spread like a wild fire through classrooms. There were no vaccines and no effective treatments besides supportive care. The only tried and true way to prevent an epidemic was quarantine.

By the late 1880s, most states, including New Hampshire, had created a board of health. Regulations were enacted to close down ports if cholera was detected. Sanitation systems were improved to create cleaner streets and safer drinking water. And procedures were developed to make some illnesses “reportable.” Local doctors were required to report and, if necessary, isolate any suspected cases of these illnesses.

The New Hampshire quarantine regulations from 1916 included the entire family of a sick child: “When a child is sick and suspected of having a contagious disease, other children in the family must not attend school until they produce a certificate from a respectable physician that there will be no danger of their communicating the disease to other pupils.” A sign was placed on the family’s house notifying everyone of the quarantine.

Usually, the father would escape to stay with a neighbor or other family member. His income was too important to lose because of a child’s illness. But if both mother and father were employed – and in Exeter many families had both parents working in the factories – quarantine created a financial hardship. And the quarantine period was very long. Today if your child misses three days of school it’s considered unusual. The 1916 regulations required – at minimum – a 15 day quarantine for measles and chicken pox and up to six weeks for scarlet fever and whooping cough. Why all the fuss? The following account from the Exeter News-Letter in January of 1901 illustrates the difficulties and tragic outcomes that could happen. In this case, a teacher was the first to notice that one of her pupils had missed a number of days of class:

“Miss Annie l. Davis, teacher of the Prospect hill primary noted her absence on Monday, and on inquiry of her scholars was told that she had the measles. Miss Davis promptly notified the school board, and that in turn the board of health. Dr Nute made an immediate investigation Monday afternoon, having almost to force his way into the tenement. The girl, who the father declared was not very sick, was found by Dr. Nute to have not measles, but scarlet fever in pronounced form. He promptly quarantined the house, and gave the requisite instructions to its occupants, the men being unreasonable and hard to deal with. An hour later Dr. Nute had occasion to revisit the neighborhood, and found one of the children at a neighbor’s and other violations of the quarantine. The board of health consequently invoked police aid.”

The police placed a watch on the house and the entire neighborhood, but it was too late. The children next door quickly developed symptoms and their mother and older sister, who worked in the household of Phillips Exeter Academy professor John Kirtland, brought scarlet fever into his home. The professor and his three sons developed the disease and became gravely ill. The two younger boys, aged 10 months and 3 years, both died within a week of one another.

This particular episode took place before quarantine rules were well-known among the general public and it is of note that the violators were all recent Polish immigrants who were unschooled in the newfangled rules of public health. The News-Letter’s article was meant as a cautionary tale, as the account of the events was preceded by a notice from the school board; “Even if new cases, already contracted, should develop, the teachers are on the watch for any symptoms of illness and will promptly report any case at its earliest stage.”

Parents were under advisement that the children’s health was being monitored. Sick children were reported and children who missed school were investigated. As restrictive and financially devastating as quarantine could be, there was too much at stake.

Plupy's Thanksgiving

2010-11-30T11:09:00.000-05:00

Since we just celebrated Thanksgiving, we thought we'd share this chapter about the holiday in Exeter from Henry A. Shute's Plupy: "The Real Boy".

It was a custom in those days which I am glad to say is practically obsolete to-day, at least in Exeter, for the children of the lower classes to spend the early hours of the night before Thanksgiving in going about the town begging for Thanksgiving supplies. The housewife of the well-to-do class would be called to the door and would find there a boy or girl who would greet her with the time honored request, “please gimme suthin’ for Thanksgiving’.” Sometimes a few kindly questions would elicit sufficient information to convince the good woman that it would be a real charity to case a little bread on the waters, and the ordinary result was that the small beggar went away well laden with goodies. Again a severe cross-examination would frequently end in the headlong flight of the mendicant and his shrill yells of derision when at a safe distance.

This custom was regarded rather tolerantly by the good people of Exeter, and was not looked upon strictly as begging by those who regularly indulged in it, but rather as a fascinating game of chance. Indeed it was by no means an uncommon thing for children of the better classes to yield to its fascinations and, evading the vigilance of their maternal guardians, to solicit alms with a persistence that in any good cause would have been most praiseworthy, and a fertility of prevarication that was appalling.

With these shining examples in mind it was not surprising that our young friends became interested in any project affording the alluring alternative of excitement and probable gain. And so one rainy afternoon when they gathered in Fatty’s barn and had exhausted the possibilities of “rassling,” “knocking off hats,” “punching,” and that most delightful pastime known as “pilin’ on,” in which when one of two wrestler was squarely thrown and was recumbent under the body of the victor, any boy present could by throwing himself on the bodies of the fallen and yelling, “pile on, pile on,” at once produce a confused mound on squirming, shouting, struggling boys, whose combined weight crushed the unfortunate victim almost flat, that the conversation turned to the delightful subject of Thanksgiving dainties.

“Do you know what Fatty Melcher did last year?” continued Beany. “He and Pewt went begging and they dressed up in old clothes and they got a lot of cookies and a whole mince pie and a half of a squash pie and a big turnover and they went down back of Fatty’s father’s shop and et it all.”

“Gosh,” again exclaimed the boys as the same idea struck them simultraneously, “less we fellers go.”

“What if they ketch us?” demanded Plupy anxiously.

“Twont do any hurt,” said Bug, “everybody expects somebody round begging night before Thanksgiving, and they don’t care much who it is.”

“My father would lam the stuffing out of us fellers if he should find it out,” said Whack.

“Fatty can’t,” said Beany, “because everybody wouldn’t know him.”

“I won’t do it,” said Billy Swett with decision.

“Then ‘twill have to be Pewt or Beany or Plupy.”

“I won’t unless Pewt does too,” announced Beany decidedly.

“I’ll tell you what,” said Fatty. “Pewt and Beany and Plupy can go Wednesday night. Thanksgiving comes Thursday and we will meet here Wednesday night and eat what they get.”

“Aw now,” scoffed Beany. “I guess you fellers think you are pretty smart to get us to take the risk and do the work and then help us eat it up. I guess not much, Fatty.”

“Oh come now,” said Whack. “What is the use of your being so mean about it? They will know Fatty every time, he is so fat, and they will know he don’t need nothin’. If my father hadn’t said he would lick us if he ever heard of our going out begging we would do it. Your father hasn’t never said he would lick you for it Plupy, has he? Or yours neither Pewt, or yours, Beany.”

The boys addressed admitted that no such injunction had been laid on them, but sagely opined that paternal relations might be a trifle strained in the event of their detection, whereupon the other boys loudly reassured them.

“Course your father wouldn’t be mean enough to lick you when they hadn’t never told you not to do it,” asserted Pile Wood. “I tell you, Whack,” said Fatty, in audible tones aside to that gentleman. “It takes a pile of pluck to do it. Plupy and Beany and Pewt is jest the fellers to do it.”

“Aw come on now, Plupy,” said Bug, “jest think what fun it will be. You can lie so good too,” he continued.

“Huh,” said Plupy, plainly pleased at the flattering words. “I can’t lie so good as Pewt. He can lie jest bully, and Beany can too.”

And so after much urging and specious flattery, the three worthies, Plupy, Beany and Pewt were persuaded to undertake the task, upon the other boys’ promise to go with them and hang round in the neighborhood of the houses they were to favor with their patronage. This latter arrangement was a suggestion of Fatty’s, who evidently distrusted the generosity of the three in an impartial division of the spoil.

The agreement so pleased that luxurious youth that in order to show his appreciation of their noble conduct, he tip-towed into the kitchen and in the absence of the cook successfully raided the pantry and brought away a squash pie and about a peck of doughnuts stuffed into his pockets, which he distributed with the utmost impartiality.

The next Wednesday evening just after supper the boys met as per agreement at Fatty’s barn and arranged for a plan of the campaign. It was deemed advisable that the initial demand should be made at the house of one William Morrill, a most worthy and kindhearted citizen, whose only failing was a belief that every man, and in fact every boy, was as honest as he.

Straws were drawn for first chance and Plupy, always unlucky in games of chance, drew the shortest straw, and in high spirits the boys shinned over the fence and out through Elm to Court street, where the old gentleman lived with his sister, old Mother Moulton, the best natured, talkative old soul in the town.

Plupy, urged on by his friends, approached the door with much diffidence, and in answer to his timid knock the door opened and disclosed the ample figure and wrinkled face of the old lady, peering at him through her iron rimmed spectacles.

“Please gimme suthin’ fer Thanksgiving?” stammered Plupy, pulling his hat down over his eyes, while a row of heads peered over the board fence of the school house yard, awaiting with much anxiety the result of negotiations.

“Why, bless your soul, you poor little boy. Come in, come right in,” said the kind old lady, vigorously hooking the dismayed Plupy, who tried to escape, into the room.

“Now, my poor boy, tell me all about it,” she continued, “and take off your hat, it isn’t polite to keep your hat on in the house, didn’t you know that?”

Thus urged, the desperate Plupy shamefacedly removed his hat, and as he was perfectly well known to the old lady, she instantly recognized him.

“Sakes alive, Harry Shute, if it ain’t you. What in the world are you up to such doin’s as this for?” she demanded sternly.

Now if Plupy had told her frankly she would have laughed and let him go, but abashed at his position and somewhat terrified at her sternness, he unfortunately tried to lie out of it.

“We ain’t goin’ to have any Thanksgiving at our house,” he said sadly. “We ain’t goin’ to have no turkey, nor mince pie, nor nothin’.”

“For massy sakes, child, what is the matter? Is anyone sick,” snapped the old lady, on fire with philanthropic zeal.

“No marm,” said Plupy, with a sigh, “nobody is sick, but father has lost his place in the Custom House, and we can’t afford any turkey.”

“What, George Shute lost his place, and with a wife and seven children to support! I don’t wonder you feel pretty bad about it. Does your mother know you are begging?”

“No marm, she wouldn’t like it, but I thought if I could get a nice chicken or a nice mince pie, I could leave it in the pantry, and perhaps she might think she had made it.”

“Well, Harry Shute, I allus did think you was no-account sort of boy, but you have got a kind heart, a kind heart,” quavered the old lady, wiping her eyes on the corner of her apron. “I’m going right straight down to your house and see your poor dear mother,” she continued, greatly to Plupy’s discomfiture, who knew that interesting developments would result from her visit.

“I don’t believe mother could see you to-night for she went to bed with a awful headache,” said Plupy, lying desperately and shamelessly.

“Well, well, well,” said the old lady, “they are going to have an awful hard time now. Hum, hum,” she continued as she packed two mince pies nearly in paper, and filled a paper bag with cookies, and urged them upon the shrinking Plupy, as with many kind words of encouragement she led him out and closed the door behind him, and returning for her shawl and bonnet, made a hurried round of visits through the neighborhood, freely imparting the information that George Shute had lost his place in the Boston Common House, and what he would do to support a wife and seven children she for her part couldn’t imagine, and what was going to become of them all she didn’t for the life ‘o her know.

Upon his return to the boys, Plupy was greatly troubled over the magnitude of his lies, but the reassuring flattery of the boys and the appetizing smell of the provender soon put him at his ease.

Pewt having drawn the middle straw next applied at the house of George Smith on Elliott street. Unfortunately Pewt was of so ambitious a nature as to desire above all things to tell a bigger story than Plupy had, and as he was not recognized by Mrs. Smith he began to pour out a pitiful story of how his father and two sisters were down with the small pox, and was elaborating further and harrowing particulars, when he was told to leave or she would have him arrested, the door was slammed in his face with great violence, and a few minutes later a wild-eyed woman with a shawl over her head was acquainting the neighborhood that small pox of the most virulent type had broken out in town and they were all likely to take it before the week was over, and that everybody must take belladonna and fumigate their houses at once, and what would happen next she for her part didn’t know.

The boys were somewhat depressed at the barren results of Pewt’s first trial, but at the next place, Mr. John Kelley’s, having concocted an equally pitiful but less dangerous recital of a poor father dying with consumption, he so excited the kind hearted hostess that he came away with a whole roast chicken and an apple pie.

It was now Beany’s turn and at the first place he applied he invented a wholly original story. As he was not recognized, he took the opportunity of representing himself as the son of a beloved pastor of the Second Congregational Church, and to disarm suspicion, further informed her with engaging frankness that his father had not been paid any salary since May, and that they couldn’t have any Thanksgiving.

Now as this good woman was an ardent supporter of the First Church of the same denomination, and inasmuch as veiled but bitter rivalry had for years existed between the two churches, she lost no time after she had dismissed “the pastor’s little son” laden with good things, in putting on her shawl and acquainting the prominent members of the church that the pastor of the Second Church was actually in need of the necessities of life, that his salary hadn’t been paid for a year, and that for her part she should think that people who held their heads so high as the Second Church people had better pay their minister. That she always thought they were upstarts and that now she knew it.

Now while the boys, affluent in dainties, were hugely enjoying their feast in the rear of Fatty’s barn, the most sinister rumors were flying through the little town, to the effect that George Shute had lost his place in the Boston Custom House under very suspicious circumstances, that several cases of small pox had been discovered and that one or two deaths had already occurred; and of the extremely humiliating position in which the pastor of the Second Church was placed by the inability of the parish to meet the demands upon it.

Three such disquieting rumors were sufficient to stir the whole community to a boiling heat, and great was the amazement of Plupy’s father the next day at receiving many visits of condolence from his friends, all of whom had already sent in written applications for the supposedly vacant office.

And great was the annoyance of the pastor of the Second Church a most independent and high minded gentleman, at receiving many donations and offers of financial aid from members of the alien congregation.

But the feelings of the harassed and much abused slectmen after spending the early hours of the forenoon in trying vainly to locate the infected district, and to suitably fumigate and effectually quarantine the same, were beyond language vitriolic enough for adequate expression.

Indeed for a long time the source of the information was unknown, but the promised visit of good Mother Moulton gave the first clue to the elder Shute, who promptly acting on this clue elicited from the terrified Plupy sufficient information to implicate Pewt and Beany and they with their respective fathers were promptly summoned to a conference, at which the full nature of their atrocious doings were divulged.

It is doubtful if those three miscreants ever spent a more unhappy day. That they lost their Thanksgiving dinner, which they had for weeks looked forward to was bad enough, but to be obliged to spend the greater part of that day accompanied by irate parents, in making reiterated apologies and explanations to their victims and the friends to whom they had imparted the information gained, was bitterness itself, and the sound and deserved thrashings they each and everyone received formed the culminating tragedy of a sorrowful and memorable day.

And as the three fathers, weary but triumphant, separated after their energetic search for the truth, they repeated to each other the familiar and oft quoted words, “Did you ever see such cussed boys?”

Thanksgiving Before Lincoln

2010-11-27T20:29:00.000-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the November 26th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

We don’t know when Thanksgiving really got started in Exeter. Generations of Native Americans lived here long before written language began creating a reliable record. There were probably days set aside to acknowledge the bounty of the harvest, and these were most likely joyous.

Thanksgiving didn’t officially become a fixed holiday until 1863, when President Abraham Lincoln placed it on the fourth Thursday in November. Before that time, individual states got to decide when it would be observed. The basic traditions of Thanksgiving, like the food served, haven’t changed much over the years. Elizabeth Dow Leonard, when writing about her Exeter childhood in the early 1800s, recalled, “A Thanksgiving dinner of the olden time baffles description. It was anticipated for weeks, and preparations for it were on a scale of stupendous magnitude. Such choppings and poundings and apple parings and raisin stoning as were heard throughout the length and breadth of the land were never known on any other occasion. Such havoc among fowl and stalled oxen, such exhibitions of every kind of pastry that the soul of woman ever conceived!“

The feast was the task of women. Except for possibly applying a hatchet to the neck of the unfortunate turkey, the menfolk did what they did best in the kitchen – basically nothing. While the women were hard at it for a week in advance, their husbands and sons simply waited until the big day when, to their minds, food fell from the sky onto their plates. This probably explains why it was so difficult to find any accounts about the day in the early editions of the Exeter News-Letter. Aside from cookbooks and a few memoirs written by women, the preparations are wholly unregarded. Elizabeth Leonard dryly commented that after this, or any other feast, the men, “when they had taken a sufficient quantity of wine, paid us with some complimentary toast, spiced according to the number of glasses drunk.” Thanks, honey.

In earlier times, Thanksgiving Day was preceded by “begging night”. Henry Shute grew up in town in the 1860s. He remembered, “It was a custom in those days which I am glad to say is practically obsolete today, at least in Exeter, for the children of the lower classes to spend the early hours of the night before Thanksgiving in going about the town begging for Thanksgiving supplies. The housewife of the well-to-do class would be called to the door and would find there a boy or girl who would greet her with the time honored request, ‘please gimme suthin’ for Thanksgivin’.”

In Elizabeth Leonard’s day, the practice was heartily accepted, although she did describe it as “a carnival to the giver and the recipient.” It was viewed as an extension of the holiday and, “flour, sugar, fowls and money were freely given, and to the better class of the poor, pies and other luxuries were sent, so that when we sat down to our own abundant table, we felt we had contributed to help every poor person’s table in town who would accept our offerings. People who never asked charity at other times were not ashamed to ask and receive from the abundance of God’s Harvest at Thanksgiving.” Preparing for the onslaught of the petitioners could be quite a task. She recalled, “I have known my poor mother to make seventy pies to eat and give away!”

Fifty years later, begging night still persisted, although there was some cheating going on. Henry Shute commented, “This custom was regarded rather tolerantly by the good people of Exeter, and was not looked upon strictly as begging by those who regularly indulged in it, but rather as a fascinating game of chance. Indeed it was by no means an uncommon thing for children of the better classes to yield to its fascinations and, evading the vigilance of their maternal guardians, to solicit alms with a persistence that in any good cause would have been most praiseworthy, and a fertility of prevarication that was appalling.” If the tricksters were caught there were harsh penalties to pay. By the twentieth century, begging night was no longer part of the Thanksgiving tradition, having moved to Halloween.

Even our current frustration with Thanksgiving travel has a long history. In 1850, when Exeter was still new to the railroad age, the Exeter News-Letter noted, “The 3 o’clock train from New York, over the New York and New Haven Railroad on Wednesday, P.M. was made up of fifty-two cars. A moderate allowance of passengers for each car would give about 3,000 persons to this single train, nearly all of whom, doubtless, were going home to Thanksgiving.” If that doesn’t seem like a lot of people, keep in mind that in 1850 the population of the entire town of Exeter was about 3,000 people. Imagine cramming our whole town on a train nowadays.

Robert Luist Fowle: Exeter’s Tory Printer

2010-11-17T15:23:00.000-05:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the November 12th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

By Barbara Rimkunas

In 1776, when most American colonists were considering independency, Exeter printer Robert Luist Fowle found himself in something of a quandary. The capital of New Hampshire had been moved from Portsmouth to Exeter, and there would be plenty of printing work for him. But he really wasn’t comfortable with the idea of breaking away from Great Britain. Whether this was common knowledge to the people of Exeter is unknown, but certainly it would cause problems if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.

Robert Luist Fowle had apprenticed with his uncle, Daniel Fowle, in Portsmouth. Daniel had been an able printer in Boston until he was arrested in 1754 for the publication of a pamphlet entitled The Monster of Monsters, which was critical of the government of Massachusetts. Daniel’s brother, Zachariah, had been the true engineer of the piece, but Daniel bore the brunt of punishment. Upon his release, he left for Portsmouth, fed up with the Massachusetts government and firmly dedicated to the idea of freedom of the press.

In Portsmouth, Daniel and Robert Fowle printed together, founding the first newspaper in New Hampshire, The New-Hampshire Gazette. But by 1775, the two men had a falling out concerning politics; Daniel firmly planted on the Patriot side and Robert leaning toward the British Loyalists. The schism caused the break-up of the printing firm. Robert took one of Daniel’s presses and set up shop in Exeter. There he began publishing his own newspaper, The New Hampshire Gazette or Exeter Morning Chronicle. With his political inclinations under cover, he was able to settle amongst the rebellious Exeter townsfolk with little notice.

Exeter was a smaller town than Portsmouth, and Robert Fowle found it necessary to take what work he could find, even though it might mean printing items that went against his own politics. New Hampshire declared itself independent of Britain in January of 1776 with the adoption of its new constitution. Exeter, as the new capital, was now a hotbed of the rebellion.

On July 16, 1776, Robert Luist Fowle printed a special edition of The New Hampshire Gazette, or Exeter Morning Chronicle, containing the full text of the newly approved Declaration of Independence. John Dunlap’s original Philadelphia printing of the document had recently arrived in town and Fowle had rushed getting it to press. He printed it within his newspaper and then as a separate broadside. One can only imagine what was going through his mind as he set the type. As a loyalist, or “Tory,” he would have been quite uncomfortable with the idea of revolution against Great Britain. Historians have estimated that 15 – 20% of the American colonists were loyalists, but in New England the numbers were much lower.

The only edition of Fowle’s New Hampshire Gazette or Exeter Morning Chronicle in the collections of the Exeter Historical Society was printed in August of 1776. In it, he prints an act passed by the Committee of Safety of New Hampshire to prevent the forging and altering of Bills of Public Credit – the paper money issued by the state. The publication of this act becomes ironic when, in early 1777, Fowle is arrested on suspicion of forging paper money.

The evidence against him was strong – there were no other printing presses in Exeter and Fowle had received the commission for printing paper money from the state. Thrown into Exeter’s notoriously permeable jail on Chestnut Street, Fowle offered to name the other conspirators if he were given bail. As the court was considering this offer, he slipped away and escaped behind British lines, most likely remembering the words he himself had set to type concerning the punishment for forgery: “every person so offending…shall be punished by being set on the gallows for the space of one hour, with a rope round the neck, and pay a fine for the use of this colony, not exceeding fifty pounds, and suffer six months imprisonment, and be publickly whipped, not exceeding thirty nine stripes, and be incapable of holding any office under the government of this colony, or shall suffer all or any of the foregoing punishments in the discretion of the court.”

Fowle’s brother, Zachariah, took over the Exeter press and continued, unmolested, throughout the war. Robert returned to town around 1790 after Zachariah’s death. He married his brother’s widow and became a merchant downtown. Although he received a loyalists’ pension from the British Crown, Fowle still felt the need to demand repayment for the pamphlets and paper he’d lost when his printing shop was looted. Eventually, he felt it best to move, with his wife, to Brentwood where she had inherited some land. It was there that he died in 1802, having lost his trade, but kept his principles.

Robert Luist Fowle’s printing press now stands in the museum room of the Exeter Historical Society. As an artifact of the American Revolution it is an odd accident of fate that it is a British press, used to print the Declaration of Independence by an American Tory. A rare copy of this broadside will be up for auction at the Skinner Auction House in Boston on November 14th.

A Fine Undertaking

2010-11-02T14:46:00.000-04:00

The latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the October 29th issue of the Exeter News-Letter.

by Barbara Rimkunas

When Exeter’s large cemetery on Linden Street was created in 1843, it was designed to be park-like – a place one might stroll through on a warm afternoon. It was a far cry from the stark graveyards of earlier times. Funeral rites and furnishings had changed considerably since the town’s settlement in 1638 and the new cemetery reflected some of those changes.

When John Wheelwright and his small band of Puritan dissenters first arrived in Exeter, the necessary graveyard was located near the meetinghouse, somewhere in the vicinity of Salem Street. The grave markers of these earliest residents are gone now. Most likely, they weren’t marked well and when the new meetinghouse was built in the center of town, the graveyard was abandoned.

Not that it would have been a pleasant place to visit. Puritans considered one’s mortal remains to be relatively unimportant. Death brought with it a frightening uncertainty about a loved one’s eternal soul. No one knew whom God had elected to salvation or damnation and this terror of the grave was reflected on the carving that can still be viewed on older headstones. A quick walk through the Winter Street cemetery will reveal numerous examples of the “winged death’s head” – a cold reminder of man’s mortality – on the stones. The people buried are never “beloved” or “dear”; in fact, the men are never described at all, they’re just a name with dates attached. Women are nearly always attached in some way to a man. She’s a “widow of,” “wife of,” “consort of, “or even “relict of,” someone else. Rarely is she her own person, even in death.

Children- and there are a startling number of children buried in the Winter Street cemetery- are treated the same way as adults with the same type of headstone art. Children weren’t sheltered from death; it was all around them. When one of their playmates died, the children were part of the funeral rite and frequently carried the coffin of their friend to the graveyard. This was done to remind them of their own mortality. They didn’t fool around back then.

Over time, the harshness of the Puritan worldview began to melt. The flying skull softened into a winged cherub and later an urn and willow took the place at the top of headstones. By the time the Exeter Cemetery was laid out, there were no more harsh symbols to be found. Funeral practices and care of the dead began to change as well.

When James W. Field opened his undertaking business in Exeter in 1895, it had evolved into a specialized field. In previous decades, the dead were simply washed and laid in a crude homemade coffin in preparation for burial. In the United States, the Civil War changed this practice.

During prior wars, fallen soldiers were simply buried where they’d fallen. It was a rare, and usually wealthy, family that was able to retrieve their dead. Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, who was killed at the Battle of Trafalgar, was famously preserved in a cask of rum until his fleet returned to London. But his treatment was rare. More often, soldiers’ remains were returned years later after temporary internment. By then, there was little left but dried bones.

During the Civil War, the railroad allowed quick transportation for the fallen. It was quick, but not quick enough to fend off the obvious effects of decomposition. Ice proved to be impractical for a trip of several weeks, so surgeons began to use various concoctions to preserve the body long enough for the trip and subsequent funeral. Formaldehyde wasn’t discovered until after the war, so these early embalmers tried other substances such as arsenic, creosote, mercury, turpentine or alcohol. It’s no wonder that the embalming profession itself had a high mortality rate. As crude as the practices were, grieving families were grateful to have their loved ones returned home and embalming became nearly standard practice in North America.

With this greater care of dead came a desire for more elegant coffins. The traditional shape, six sides tapered at the shoulders, gave way to a rectangular casket that looked more like a piece of fine furniture. The field specialized as a branch of cabinet-making, which was why James Field’s business was “Fine Furniture and Undertaking.” Today we’d never think of going to a furniture store to pick up a casket, but it didn’t seem morbid at all in 1900.

Although some funerals were still held in private homes in the early 1900s, the advent of the funeral parlor made the practice less common. Caskets ceased to be sold in furniture stores, so you could no longer browse through stacks of them while shopping for a new dining room set. Field’s Undertaking services ceased to be listed in Exeter’s business directory by 1920, and by the 1940s there are almost no home funerals listed in obituaries. Death had become quite separate from the everyday world of the living.

Field Trip Day 1913

2010-11-02T14:16:00.000-04:00

This "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on October 15, 2010.

by Barbara Rimkunas

The Exeter Historical Society and American Independence Museum recently hosted a field trip of over 100 students from the Cooperative Middle School. As we put them through their paces; writing with quill pens, identifying map features, transcribing impossibly hard documents and analyzing features of puzzling artifacts, the day was a reminder of the value of field trips. They’re not some new idea invented by helicopter parents who want to give their kids an ‘enrichment’ experience. Field trips have been around a long time.

In 1914, the Exeter News-Letter reported that “Miss Elizabeth H. Baker last Friday took her Seminary Class to Salem, Mass., to inspect places of historic interest. This was her 18th trip.” Although she wasn’t an English teacher, perhaps the Salem trip was meant to counter the prevailing opinion then (as now) that some of the classroom reading was a tad dull. “We are reading House of Seven Gables,” Seminary student Louise Tyler wrote in her diary in 1910, “I hate it.”

Young Helen Tufts recorded the same exciting excursion in her diary, “My class went to Salem on special car. Ate lunch on the train! Visited all sorts of historical places. Got back at 5:30.” Considering she didn’t mention which ‘historical places’ she visited, it’s easy to conclude that the trip’s highlight was lunch.

Maybe a better strategy was to give the students an actual assignment while on a field trip instead of a vague ‘inspect places of historic interest.’ The first and second year students took Nature Study as their science class. Every fall, they’d head out into the wilds of nature to take notes and study the flora and fauna of New Hampshire. Emma Kimball kept her school notebook and it now belongs to the Exeter Historical Society. In penmanship that is enviable in an 11-year old, she wrote notes about the “cricked” and “muscrates.” “Crickeds,” she wrote, have “feelers longer than the whole body.” Her teacher, Miss Maud Jewell, who’s dual teaching roles of nature study and penmanship (Palmer Method) may account for the quality of Emma’s notebook, encouraged the girls to get outside. Emma had a list of “Things to do in the Fall,” which included: “Learn to stand still; Go in every variety of weather; Don’t expect to find all the animals in a row; Use your ears and your eyes; Go raccooning; Go cacooning”

After being prepped in this style, the girls went on a Saturday afternoon field trip to Fort Rock Farm. Starting at the Seminary on Lincoln Street at 10:30, they headed north towards Forest Street and there enjoyed some fresh water from the jailhouse spring. “The water here was refreshing and after filling our bottles and cans we prepared for a long march into the woods .” They reached Fort Rock at noon and, after a quick lunch, went on to the ledges - a granite outcropping with a pool of water below. Although some of the girls went climbing, others stuck to the task at hand, “They used the nets for dredging the pool and found many interesting (things). While some of us finished our lunch, the girls were bringing us tadpoles, polliwogs, frogs, common leeches, back swimmers and American newts, - these last are easily confounded with lizards, but they had so smooth a skin, we could readily see they differed from the scale-covered lizard.” They captured a garter snake and Emma noted, “The girls of our class did not scream and run at the sight of a snake – for that is unreasonable.”

The following year, the class ventured to Hampton Beach on the streetcar on a Tuesday. “The weather was lovely, although it was the coldest September 29th that had been known in thirty-one years,” Emma wrote. They scoured the beach for specimens finding sea urchins, starfish and sand dollars in great abundance. But it was the crabs that the girls found most intriguing. “At first we could scarcely tell where the head was, but we noticed the position of the eyes and that settled the question. Walking, as they do, forward, backward, and even sideways with equal ease, it seems as if they, too, might be slightly puzzled about their formation, and so, not stopping to decide which part is intended to go foremost, they dart off on a venture, and in the oddest manner possible.”

Emma’s observations make us realize how important field trips can be. They get you out of the classroom for a while and perhaps out of one’s comfort zone. Field trips can make you brave even when you’re a little scared, whether it’s a slithery snake or a crazy historical society curator wielding an 1812 musket with full bayonet attached. The experience itself links together the sights, smells and textures of a different place – different from a classroom or computer screen – and that, in itself, is the value of a field trip. Even if the best part is lunch.

AHSNH Public Programming Award Goes to Exeter Historical Society

2010-10-27T16:14:00.000-04:00

The Association of Historical Societies of New Hampshire Recognizes the Exeter Historical Society in Celebration of Local History Successes

The Association of Historical Societies of New Hampshire honored the Exeter Historical Society for its Lincoln in Exeter Sesquicentennial Celebration, along with eight other projects throughout the state, at a ceremony at the Peterborough Historical Society on October 23. These awards pay tribute to outstanding examples of preserving, interpreting or promoting appreciation and understanding of an aspect of New Hampshire history.

“We feel that this awards program is an important way to thank people for their innovative and generous contributions, and to inspire others,” said AHSNH president Tom Haynes.

Criteria include the significance or impact of the undertaking on a community, region or the state; the use of professional practice, volunteer engagement, and degree of support; and projects or people that act as a model for others seeking to preserve or interpret local history.

The Association praised the Exeter Historical Society’s Lincoln project by noting that: “Exeter Historical Society’s Lincoln Sesquicentennial Celebration organized a town-wide school, church, artistic, historic, and business collaboration that produced ten public events and sixteen school visits to commemorate Abraham Lincoln’s historic visit to Exeter in March, 1860.

“This initiative was a comprehensive, well thought-out, and masterfully coordinated series of events that reached extensive audiences, enriched the community, and was of a caliber befitting an organization many times the size of Exeter Historical Society. From the credentials and stature of the presenters, to the imaginative nature of the public events such as walking tours, children’s activities, band concert, and celebratory procession, to the high quality of publicity and collateral materials, this event was first-class in every respect. Exeter Historical Society has set a very high standard for public programs – in the words of the New Hampshire Humanities Council, which supported the program, this was a ‘spectacular celebration,’ with which the Humanities Council was ‘proud to be associated.’”

Other 2010 award winners include
• Carol Christian and the Walpole Historical Society’s costume rescue project for outstanding collections management
• Paula Robbins Page and the Westmoreland Historical Society’s A Historical Tour of Westmoreland, New Hampshire for outstanding public education and programs
• Strawbery Banke Museum’s N.H. History Explorers Program for outstanding public education and programs
• Partners Around Lake Sunapee (PALS) Collaborative for outstanding public education and programs
• Hopkinton Historical Society’s Cemetery Walk for outstanding public education and programs
• Jeff Dalzell and the Hopkinton Historical Society’s Talent and Luck: Walking in Fellowship with Deacon Philip Brown exhibit for outstanding public education and programs
• Toppan’s History of Hampton: The Early Settler by Lori White Cotter for outstanding research and documentation
• Wallace Rhodes for excellence in documenting, promoting and preserving Belmont’s history

The Association of Historical Societies of New Hampshire was formed in 1950 to encourage and assist in the study, preservation, and understanding of New Hampshire’s history. It acts as a networking organization to serve the state’s historical societies and organizations, cultural institutions, and other interested organizations and individuals. For more information, please contact Ann Sprague, President of the Association at 603-279-7172, or Laura Gowing, Program Manager at the Exeter Historical Society at 603-778-2335 or via email at info@exeterhistory.org.

Arthur Fuller

2010-09-08T09:27:00.000-04:00

Barbara's latest "Historically Speaking" column appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on September 7, 2010.

There were two Arthur Fullers living in Exeter in 1907. The elder was Arthur O. Fuller, well-respected local lawyer, police commissioner, state congressman and town selectman. His son was a dreamy-eyed schoolboy attending Phillips Exeter Academy. In his diary, now part of the collections of the Exeter Historical Society, the younger Fuller illustrated his surroundings from memory with a refined ability that is quite impressive. His sketches of the wildlife of the area, particularly the animals and birds of the Exeter and Squamscott Rivers, are detailed and beautifully rendered. His diary reflects a boy who valued his time outdoors much more highly than his time in the classroom.

If his son’s love of nature bothered the elder Fuller he had only himself to blame. He, too, loved the outdoors. His friend, Henry Shute, later wrote of his neighbor’s attentiveness to his children, “the boats that he provided for them to use on the big river, and the canoe he built for them to be used only on Little River and from which the entire family cheerfully fell and were thoroughly ducked; the fishing rods, shot guns, butterfly nets and everything else that tended to keep them in the open, testified to his affection for them.” Young Arthur seems to have taken to the wild more than his many siblings.

During his years at Phillips Exeter Academy – during which he prepared for admittance to Harvard – he garnered more enjoyment from the wild ducks he raised, than from his studies. He carefully collected eggs from nests along the riverbank and then placed them under a broody hen in the family chicken coop. His illustrations follow the progress of the ducklings as they hatched and the peculiar sight of a mother hen surrounded by her flock of baby ducks. Whether she was any the wiser about her unusual offspring is unknown. Arthur, meanwhile, was neglecting his studies and reported in his diary, (on January 28th), “School all day. Flunk all day”.

Luckily, he was bright enough that he could overcome his failures in daily schoolwork. Like many smart kids who won’t do homework, Fuller usually comfortably passed his exams. Though it took him several tries in the spring of 1907 to pass the Harvard entrance exams, he entered Harvard in the fall after giving his ducks to his neighbor, Stafford Francis.

If his father had any illusions about his son following him into the study of law, he was to be sadly mistaken. Young Arthur’s love of art and nature blossomed after his graduation from Harvard. He attended the Fenway School of Art and later studied with Harvey Dunn at the Leonia School of Illustration in New Jersey. There he met and married fellow student Sylvia Ditchett in 1918.
Fuller went on to become a successful illustrator for magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post , Field and Stream, Liberty, Cosmopolitan, Collier’s and McCalls.

His son, Harvey Fuller, described his father’s work, “(his) first love, however, remained the theme of the outdoorsman, the hunter, and woodsman, incorporating the myriad facets of color and beauty which are to be found in the lonely sea marshes, mountains, lakes and forests; the ever-diminishing solitudes haunted by sportsman and (for want of a better word) nature-lover alike.”

His illustrations became his bread and butter but he never lost his enthusiasm. His son remarked, “(his) pictures attained a unique distinction (which was widely recognized) because of their absolute authenticity and the authority born of first-hand knowledge, coupled with a zealous, almost boyish enthusiasm that remained strong in his personality even to the last. The birds, hunting dogs and wild animals he depicted were never static. They soar…poise for the chase…crouch or slink…with a sense of movement like life itself.”

Fuller eventually moved to Westport, Connecticut on the north coast of Long Island Sound – close enough to New York City to meet with his clients, but always within a short walk to the marshes and water life that mirrored the wild places he’d grown to love during his boyhood in Exeter.

George Lewis Stokell – Exeter Postmaster

2010-08-25T10:39:00.000-04:00

Barbara's latest "Historically Speaking" article appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on August 20, 2010.

When Ruth Stokell Challis wrote her essay, “I Grew Up in New Hampshire,” in 1944, she mentioned her father as a kind man who gave her a set of encyclopedias for her birthday. The large ever- expanding family lived on the outskirts of town on Epping Road near Old Town Farm Road. She recalled that “One of the earliest things I remember is the birth of one of my sisters.” It was the kind of memory that would be repeated often as her mother produced 11 children, eight of whom survived to adulthood.

Ruth’s memories about growing up in Exeter in the late 1800s included stories of school and play and losing (and later finding) a little sister. She mentions her parents as a child might, with little specific detail. She left out the most obvious feature of her father – he had only one arm. One might think that a one-armed father would be an interesting part of one’s childhood, but to Ruth he was simply “Father” and the arm, or lack thereof, didn’t seem to matter much.

George Lewis Stokell was born in Lowell, Massachusetts on April 1, 1846. His father, also named George Stokell, headed for California in search of gold in 1849 and told tales of the gold fields for the rest of his life. He didn’t strike it rich, however, and returned home to his family, moving them to Portsmouth, New Hampshire where he worked in the building and construction industry. Young George was quick to sign up when the Civil War broke out. He enlisted in 1861, at age 17, in his birth state of Massachusetts with the 18th Massachusetts Regiment and re-enlisted three years later.

The War took him to most of the engagements of the Army of the Potomac, including the Second Battle of Bull Run, Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. While fighting in the Battle of the Wilderness in Spotsylvania, Virginia in May of 1864, his regiment lost track of him. He was listed as “missing in action” and was presumed dead. The Wilderness was the first battle that pitted General Ulysses S. Grant against General Robert E. Lee. Both sides saw heavy casualties.

After the battle, the Confederate Army found Stokell still alive on the field. His right arm had been shot. Ruth would later write, not in her memoir but in a letter to her daughter, “the old soldiers did not like to talk about those things, and he had a hell of a time. He had a gold ring like an old wide gold band his mother had given him. The Doctor took it off his right hand and put it on his left finger,” shortly before his right arm was amputated. He told his daughter, “If it hadn’t been for the Southern Women, coming nights to give him hot soup, and food, dressings and such he would have died.”

After his recovery, Stokell became a prisoner of war for nine long months. Imprisoned at various camps, including Andersonville, Lynchburg, Danville, Florence and Charleston, Stokell survived and was repatriated during a prisoner exchange. Conditions in the camps were so harrowing, so appalling, that Stokell couldn’t bring himself to talk about it in his later years. All he told his children, according to Ruth, was that, “they were starving, Southerners and prisoners.”

He was discharged in March of 1865 – just a month before the war ended. He returned to Boston to take up business, but later returned to New Hampshire where his parents were living. In 1882, already a widower with a young son, he bought a farm on Epping Road in Exeter and married Alberta Carroll – the twenty year- old daughter of Exeter’s Dr. Albert Carroll. Alberta was a graduate of the Robinson Female Seminary. The farm was able to support the growing family for many years. When the town of Exeter decided to close down the District Three School on Epping Road because of low attendance, Alberta simply set up her own school room and taught the children at home.

It was common, for decades after the War, to appoint veterans to public office. In 1904, according to historian Nancy Merrill, “the office of postmaster became a matter of rivalry between the current postmaster, George N. Julian, and Judge Thomas Leavitt. About forty influential citizens sent a petition to President Theodore Roosevelt favoring a third candidate, George L. Stokell, Jr. Stokell’s nomination appealed to the president and was accepted by the Senate. Mr. Stokell began his new duties on April 1, 1904.”

The family moved to Gill Street to be closer to the public schools and the post office. Stokell served the town as postmaster for eight years, a well-deserved reward for his army service. When his final term was up, he moved to Medford, Massachusetts where he became commander of the Grand Army of the Republic post. In 1931, at the age of 87, the old soldier died. He’d been looking forward to marching in one last Memorial Day parade, but missed it by two weeks. The flags in Medford were put at half-staff in his honor.

The Exeter Water Works

2010-08-10T14:28:00.000-04:00

"Historically Speaking" by Barbara Rimkunas, Exeter News-Letter, August 6, 2010.

Exeter’s location on the falls between the Exeter and Squamscott Rivers, gives it an aura of water abundance, but the earliest residents of Exeter were faced with the problem of procuring clean drinking water. The Squamscott River, which looks appealing, is salty, thanks to its tidal nature coming in from Great Bay. The freshwater of the Exeter River was only available to those living close by and it became fouled when lumber mills began dumping copious amounts of sawdust into the water in the mid-1600s.

Most people would sink a well on their property if they wanted fresh water. It was an easy low-tech way to get water for your own family and animals. But by the late 1800s, it was becoming increasingly evident that small family wells were not the best solution for the town’s water problems. They dried up easily in summer and harbored a load of unsavory bacteria and natural contaminants, like arsenic.

As an added problem, the lack of water made firefighting difficult in certain parts of town. Townspeople looked enviously at places like New York City, which had created a reservoir and set up a gravity fed system to supply the entire city in 1842. By 1880, Exeter was still supplied by a haphazard system of wells, springs and private cisterns.

In spite of the obvious need, the citizens of Exeter refused to build a water works. It was too expensive. Seeing an opportunity for profit, a group of local businessmen banded together and in 1885 created the Exeter Water Works Company.

A small stream off Portsmouth Avenue, called Wheelwright’s Creek, provided the water. To create a reservoir, Nancy Merrill wrote, in her History of Exeter, NH: 1888 – 1988, “this venture involved a tremendous amount of hand-digging and horse-hauling. It was reckoned that when the area was flooded, it encompassed almost twenty-three acres, with a depth ranging from nine to twenty feet, and held twenty to thirty million gallons of water.” The town of Exeter made a deal with the Water Works to supply the town with water for firefighting and municipal purposes for $2000.00 annually. It also gave the town the right to eventually buy the water works.

Although the water works itself was privately owned, the town paid for a sewerage system and required most homeowners to hook into it. At the same time, inspectors condemned many of the private wells and residents had no other option than to tie into the new water mains. None of this happened without the typical grumbling. One annoyed taxpayer wrote to the Exeter News-Letter, “Will you please inform me through the News-Letter where the statue can be found which makes it legal for the selectmen of the town to lay a sewer and raise the rate of taxation on property to pay for it – then compel owners of real estate to enter their drains into it at their own expense – and then assess them a large percent to pay for the privilege of entering the sewer? Can this be right?” The editor grimly replied that the town health officer could indeed compel abutters to link into the sewer lines when it was for the public good.

The new system may have been for the public good, but the water wasn’t good for at least the first two years. Residents accustomed to cold crisp, if unsafe, well water were taken aback with tepid sometimes foul smelling public water. One letter to the editor said, “When first drawn from the pipes the water is hardly suitable for domestic purposes, cooking especially, and, if allowed to stand any length of time, its unfitness is still more apparent. There is danger that a cold bath, even, may become a penance instead of a pleasure. The water, after being heated, takes on a strange color and quality, clothing washed in it looks dubious, and dish-washing ceases to be an unalloyed delight.”

The water was tested every six months and judged safe. The strange taste and color were caused by vegetative matter in the holding pond. This was eventually alleviated through the installation of filtration systems.

The Exeter Water Works Company served as a local monopoly for decades, but not necessarily because it wanted to. The town repeatedly discussed buying the water works so they could control the quality and pricing of water. Each time, from 1893 until 1950, the voters refused to pay for the system – even when it was determined that the Exeter Water Works pricing, based on the number of spigots, animals and cars one had, would be reduced if home meters were installed. When, after much discussion and debate, the water works was finally sold to the town, the meters went in a mere month after the purchase was made. Water quality quickly improved when new deeper wells were dug and the stagnant Water Works Pond was no longer used as the primary source for the town’s water.

Exeter in the Age of Polio

2010-07-27T11:12:00.000-04:00

"Historically Speaking", by Barbara Rimkunas, Exeter News-Letter, July 23, 2010

Under the headline of “Great Medical Victory,” the Exeter News-Letter announced in April of 1955, “A crowning achievement, and a milestone in medical history came Tuesday with the announcement of success for the Salk polio vaccine.” Within a week, the Rockingham County Medical Society was discussing plans to hold mass immunizations in the county. Time was of the essence; polio season typically occurred during the summer months. By late May, the first clinics were underway. “It is a tribute to the common senseness of adults that a vast majority of parents reasoned that the advantages of child inoculation far outweighed the over-publicized risks,” commented the News-Letter.

Strangely, Polio epidemics were fostered by improvements in sanitation and medical care. Transmitted by fecal-oral route, it was easily passed around among children. In earlier - and less hygienic - times, most children encountered the virus early in life. As the germ theory became better understood in the 20th century, personal hygiene took a great leap forward simply by encouraging children to wash their hands before eating. By the early 1900s, most of the fecal-oral illnesses could be prevented by simply keeping clean. But oddly, this meant that there was little early exposure to the poliomyelitis virus.

The belief that sanitary methods would save the nation continued into the 1940s and 50s. Mothers were encouraged to give up breastfeeding in favor of clean controllable bottle feeding. But bottle-fed babies do not receive their mother’s immunities, making them vulnerable to pathogens like polio. Further reducing many children’s natural immunity was the common practice of performing tonsillectomy procedures on children in the post-war period. Tonsils are the first line of defense against inhaled or swallowed foreign pathogens. In the 1950s, the connection between tonsillectomy operations and polio was noted and it was recommended that the procedure not be done during the summer months when polio outbreaks were common, but it never occurred to anyone that perhaps relatively healthy tonsils should be left alone.
Even as researchers worked tirelessly to create a vaccine for the disease, polio cases increased dramatically in the post-World War II period. The peak of the epidemic was in 1952 when 58,000 cases were diagnosed in the United States.

Exeter and Rockingham County reported numerous cases of polio in the 1950s. Even though it was still statistically a small number of children who were affected, the fear of polio was profound. Parents were advised to keep children from getting exhausted or chilled. Many towns closed public swimming pools, although Exeter had none to close. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who grew up during the polio years in New York, recalled in her memoir, Maybe Next Year; “Lack of understanding about the spread of polio created a vacuum which parents and editorialists filled with a thousand admonitions: avoid crowded places where you may be sneezed or coughed upon; beware of contacts in trains, buses, or boats; keep children away from strangers; avoid swimming in cold water; don’t sit around in wet clothes; don’t play to the point of getting overtired; avoid public drinking fountains; avoid using one another’s pencils, whistles, handkerchiefs, utensils, food; burn or bury garbage not tightly covered; wash your hands before eating; call your doctor immediately if you’ve got a stiff neck, upset stomach, headache, sore throat, or unexplained fever.”

Local cases were publicized by the March of Dimes campaigns to help encourage donations. President Franklin Roosevelt’s National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis helped cover the staggering costs families faced when a member needed round the clock care and rehabilitation. Mild cases were treated at Exeter Hospital; those requiring iron lung treatments were sent to the Children’s Hospital in Boston or Elliot Hospital in Manchester. Long- term rehabilitation was done at New Hampshire’s Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center, which was built in 1950. The photos and news stories did a great deal to increase donations, but they also served as a source for a steady stream of parental fear in a time when there was already plenty to fear. If the increasingly frightening Cold War and atom bomb weren’t enough, polio could strike your child during the hot summer months and leave him or her as a cripple for life. Was it any wonder, then, that when a viable vaccination was created parents were quick to sign up their children?

The first mass vaccination in Exeter occurred in May of 1955. Limited to children in the first and second grade, the clinic was a cooperative effort. The Exeter News-Letter reported, “Upon arrival at the gym, accompanied by their teachers, the children were given basic medical tests by volunteer nurses and they then stood attentively in line while the classmate ahead was given the quick but nonetheless skillful and painstaking treatment by Dr. Nolan and Dr. Tuthill. Teaming up with the two doctors were Mrs. Dean J. Thorp, Jr., R. N., and Lieutenant Commander Angelica Vetullo of the Portsmouth Naval Hospital. Seven naval corpsmen provided valuable assistance by measuring the serum for the individual doses.”

There were a few more years of dangerous outbreaks; Phillips Exeter Academy delayed opening in 1955 – the first year of the polio vaccine – because of the fear of outbreaks among students arriving from Massachusetts. In 1956, vaccination clinics were opened up for all children under the age of 15 as well as pregnant women. By 1957, teenagers and adults were encouraged to get vaccinated. The development and widespread use of the Sabin oral vaccine in 1962 further slashed national polio rates. In 1964, only 121 cases of polio were reported in the entire United States. Summers filled with the fear of a dread disease were a thing of the past.

Exeter Historical Society Announces Programs for '10-'11 Season

2010-07-21T11:42:00.000-04:00

Every year, October through May, the Exeter Historical Society hosts a series of programs -- or "meetings" -- featuring presentations by local historians and authors (and occasionally meteorologists, musicians and stone masons). All of these programs are free and open to the public -- though donations are always welcome to help defray the cost. Historically, the programs have fallen on the first Tuesday of the above-mentioned months, but last year we mixed it up a bit, alternating between the first Tuesday and the first Wednesday, to appeal to those who had announced over the years that they'd love to come to our programs if they weren't always on Tuesdays. So, unless otherwise noted, all meetings are held at the Exeter Historical Society at 47 Front Street in Exeter, New Hampshire, at 7:30 pm. Refreshments are served at 7:00 pm.

A quick overview of our upcoming meetings:
Tuesday, October 5, 2010: "The Great Sheep Boom & Its Enduring Legacy on the NH Landscape" by Steve Taylor**
Wednesday, November 3: "Our National Thanksgiving: With Thanks to President Lincoln and Mrs. Hale" by Steve and Sharon Wood**
Tuesday, December 7, 5:30 - 7:30pm: our annual Holiday Open House
Wednesday, January 5, 2011: "The History of the Wentworth Hotel" by J. Dennis Robinson
Tuesday, February 1: "Brewing in NH: An Informal History of Beer in the Granite State from Colonial Times to the Present" by Glenn Knoblock**
Wednesday, March 2: "Fish, Trees, Sheep and Factories: Environmental Change in NH" by Jeff Bolster
Tuesday, April 5: "Whatever Happened to Robert Todd Lincoln?" by Barbara Rimkunas (our curator & "Historically Speaking" column writer extraordinaire)
Wednesday, May 4: our Annual Meeting, "What NH Thought was Funny 200 Years Ago" by Charles E. Clark.**

We hope that you can join us for some of these presentations! If you have ideas for future programs, please email program manager Laura Martin Gowing at programs@exeterhistory.org with your suggestions.

**These programs are sponsored by the New Hampshire Humanities Council's Humanities To Go program.

2010-07-20T16:02:00.000-04:00

In honor of the Squamscott River Festival on Thursday, July 22, we are posting Barbara's "Historically Speaking" column on the Gundalow, which appeared in the Exeter News-Letter on July 15, 2005.

Before there were trucks and adequate highways, Exeter was a seaport by necessity. The Squamscott River provided the only reliable transportation network available – but it had some severe limitations. Originating on Great Bay, the Squamscott’s waters, like all the rivers in the Piscataqua estuary, ebb and flow with the tide. Combine this with its treacherous currents, described as “cross-grained and wily waters” by the late William Saltonstall, former principal of Phillips Exeter Academy and local historian, and one can easily imagine the difficulties involved in shipping goods up or down the river.

To tame the rivers of the Piscataqua region a new type of vessel was required. It needed to be rugged, maneuverable, and low-keeled. It had to haul heavy loads without overturning and it had to handle the shallow waters of low tide. By the colonial period, movement in the Piscataqua region was dominated by the packet – a small sturdy vessel powered by wind and tide. It was excellent for transporting people, but the keel was too deep for heavy loads and shallow water. Shipwrights began to create a flat-bottomed barge suitable for transporting large loads of lumber. By the early 1800’s, the design had been perfected to meet the needs of the region with a spoon shaped bow and elegantly rounded stern. A lateen sail was added to take advantage of wind power. This sail, on a short mast, could be lowered to pass under a bridge. A rudder and leeboard provided the maneuverability required to glide into and out of deep currents.

The gundalows were never meant to be used on the open sea, although there are a few accounts of trips made to Boston. Their job was primarily to shuttle goods between the port of Portsmouth and the inward towns of Exeter, Dover, Berwick, and Newmarket. Although similar craft were found in Maine, the triangular sail marks the Piscataqua gundalow as a vessel unique to the region. That they traveled with the tides is clear in the ledger of Joseph Fernald, an Exeter shipper who operated several gundalows from a wharf once located on the current site of Swasey Parkway. Fernald charged Exeter business men for “freighting” and noted in the ledger the goods going “down” river to Portsmouth, or “up” river to Exeter.

Captain Fernald’s busy gundalows hauled lumber, paper, furniture, and leather goods to Portsmouth on the ebb tide and returned later on the rising tide with molasses, lime, fish, candles, and rum – lots of rum. Exeter was a thirsty place before the temperance movement got going. The flat-bottomed gundalows could strand on the mud-flats and wait out the tide if necessary (not a particularly fun experience if you’re unprepared). Gundalow crews were scorned by other seamen as the lowest of their profession and schooner captain Johnson Stevens of Kennebunk was once quoted as saying, “A man that would sail a Gundilo would rob the church yard.” Perhaps all that rum was too much of a temptation when stranded on the mud flats.

Notwithstanding the good Captain’s comments, the gundalow’s crews were really able seamen considering the difficulties they encountered on their hauls. Gundalow traffic began to falter when steam powered vessels began to move barges up the rivers. By the turn of the twentieth century, gundalow traffic had all but ended on the Squamscott River.

When President Polk Came to Town

2010-07-14T11:02:00.000-04:00

Check out Barbara's most recent column:

"Historically Speaking", by Barbara Rimkunas, Exeter News-Letter, July 9, 2010

In July of 1847, President James K. Polk decided to take a goodwill tour of the northeast. Washington, D.C. is well known for its unlivable climate in the summer, and Polk’s Attorney General, Nathan Clifford, hailed from the breezy and cool state of Maine. The President yielded to temptation and boarded a train north.

Polk dearly needed to raise some support for his programs. Most New Englanders weren’t entirely convinced, as Polk was, that the United States’ “manifest destiny” included extending the nation all the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They were also highly suspicious of the on-going Mexican American War that would result in the annexation of Texas. They knew that Texas would bring with it vast tracts of slave-owning territory that would upset the careful balance of slave and free states. Still, both Maine and New Hampshire had supported Polk in the 1844 election, so it was considered friendly territory.

Whether Polk had planned to stop in Exeter is unknown. Although Rockingham County had gone for Polk in the election, Exeter had not. According to the Exeter News-Letter, “Exeter gave the largest Whig majority” in the returns of 1844.

But the election was three years gone by the time Polk planned his New England excursion and Exeter seems to have remembered its manners. Although it wasn’t quite certain whether the President’s train would actually stop, a suitable greeting was readied.

“On the arrival of the cars,” noted the News-Letter, “a national salute was fired and the bells of the several churches were rung.” This seems to have been enough to get the president’s train to stop, although the noise of the train probably drowned out the church bells. Weare Shaw, of Kensington, later remembered, “The station then was at the crossing on Front Street in a little building that spanned the track. The part on the west side of the tracks was used as a freight room.”

“The President immediately stepped from the cars to the front of the Depot,” reported the News-Letter, “where he was received on behalf of the citizens by Henry F. French, Esq. in a short and appropriate speech, and which was replied to by the President.” Judge French served in the New Hampshire Court of Common Pleas, but he has become better known as the father of sculptor Daniel Chester French, who produced Concord’s Minuteman, and the Lincoln that now gazes down from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Although French would later become an anti-slavery Republican, in 1847 he was a Democrat and therefore the most appropriate local dignitary to greet President Polk.

The Exeter News-Letter continued, “He then was introduced to many of our citizens who availed themselves to shake hands with the first President that has ever honored Exeter with his presence since the visit of Washington.” One of those citizens, recalls Shaw, was a crusty veteran of the southern Indian Wars and the War of 1812 named Waddy Cobbs. “Cobbs was an old soldier and could not walk, so was wheeled up on his chair and into the station, and when the cars stopped the President was then told of his being there. He came out of the cars and greeted Cobbs very pleasantly.”

Traveling with the President were a number of other dignitaries, including Henry Hubbard, the former Governor of New Hampshire and future President James Buchanan, who was then serving in the capacity of Secretary of State. They, along with Nathan Clifford, Attorney General, Edmund Burke, Commissioner of Patents and a few others, were all introduced to the crowd.

The visit to Exeter was short, lasting only a few minutes before the President’s train pulled away from the depot to continue on to Portland.

Abraham Lincoln later visited the town of Exeter in 1860, arriving at the same Front Street depot; but Lincoln hadn’t been elected President yet when he was here. There would be no other presidential visits to town until Benjamin Harrison arrived in 1889. Polk had pledged to serve only one term in office and followed through on his promise. The election of 1848 found New Hampshire men supporting another Democrat, Lewis Cass – a native of Exeter. Although the town voted heavily for its native son, the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, won the Electoral College. Perhaps if Taylor had made a visit to town before the election he might have fared better in the election returns from Exeter.

2010-07-01T10:22:00.000-04:00

Join Water Street Bookstore
& the Exeter Historical Society
for a Book Signing by T.H. Breen
of his new book,
American Insurgents, American Patriots
Wednesday, July 7th at 7pm
at Water Street Bookstore
125 Water Street, Exeter

Challenging and displacing decades of received wisdom, T.H. Breen's strikingly original book explains how ordinary Americans -- most of them members of farm families living in small communities -- were drawn into a successful insurgency against imperial authority during the American Revolution.

T.H. Breen is the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. An authority on the culture and politics of the early Atlantic World, he has written six major books, including Tobacco Culture and Imagining the Past.

Take a Historic Walk through Exeter

2010-06-30T13:56:00.000-04:00

It's a beautiful day in downtown Exeter, New Hampshire -- a great day for a historic walk!

As many of you know, this year marks the sesquicentennial (150th) anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's visit to Exeter. In honor of this occasion, the Exeter Historical Society created The Abraham Lincoln Walking Tour, which highlights key sites in the town relating to Lincoln's 1860 visit. The walking tour is available to download on our Lincoln online resource center, or you can pick up the printed version at the historical society (47 Front Street, Exeter) or at the Exeter Area Chamber of Commerce (24 Front Street, Suite 101, Exeter).

This publication was made possible by a grant of the New Hampshire Humanities Council. It was written by Deborah Kanner and Barbara Rimkunas, and designed by Nate LaMontagne.

The Perilous Voyage of Lizzie J. Call

2010-06-29T10:06:00.000-04:00

Check out Barbara's most recent column:

"Historically Speaking" by Barbara Rimkunas, Exeter News-Letter, June 25, 2010:

At the dawn of the 20th century, river shipping on the Squamscott had declined to a trickle. In earlier times, the river was necessary to haul raw materials to town for the factories and mills. The Exeter Manufacturing Company shipped raw cotton up river and then sent finished cloth out to market. The Flagg and Wiswall paper mill brought in loads of rags to make into paper and the town's many merchants used the river to bring in goods from Boston.

But by the mid-1800s, the railroad had taken over most of the transportation of goods. Newer factories were built on the western part of town clustered around the depot. The only materials shipped on the Squamscott were heavy goods — lumber, coal and bricks — that were still best moved by water.

Harry Anderson didn't give up on the river. By the turn of the century, the town had developed an insatiable hunger for coal. Coal ran the steam machinery of the Exeter Manufacturing Company. It heated the homes, schools and public buildings in town. Exeter's Eagle Steamer fire engine pumped 7,000 gallons of water per minute through the use of a coal-fired engine. Anderson was well aware that the cheapest and quickest way to transport hundreds of tons of coal was by water. In 1893 he almost single-handedly revived river transport for a brief period of time.

Anderson had a great love of sailing and put this to good use by bringing his coal supplies up river on schooners. Nancy Merrill, in her history "Exeter, New Hampshire: 1888-1988," states that "at one time (he) owned five schooners home-berthed in Exeter." One was the Lizzie J. Call.

Built in Portsmouth in 1886, the Lizzie J. Call had a regular crew of five, including the captain. During the six-month-long coal strike of 1902, she brought in the last load of anthracite coal; preferred for heating because it burned hotter and smoked less than soft coal. But even that load wasn't quite enough. "Schooner Lizzie J. Call arrived Saturday morning with 250 tons of broken coal for H.W. Anderson, her managing owner. It was bought the day before the coal strike, 300 tons not being available," wrote the Exeter News-Letter. During the next six months, only inferior soft coal was available and this was snatched up by the Exeter Manufacturing Company and the town. Anderson scrambled to purchase coal from Wales — but only at an increased price. When the Pennsylvanian coal miners finally resolved the strike in mid-October, it took another month before coal was available to householders.

The Lizzie J. Call nearly met her end in 1908. The Exeter News-Letter reported on June 5, "After narrowly escaping being sent to the bottom by passing steamers on three different occasions, the three-masted schooner, Lizzie J. Call, of Exeter, was driven ashore on the rocks at Winthrop, Massachusetts, during the gale early Sunday morning, and those on board gave up all hope of rescue." Heading out of Perth Amboy, N.J., with a load of 278 tons of coal, the ship had encountered dense fog — so dense that three times they were almost struck by passing ships. The gale increased and the ship soon found itself in great danger. The Exeter News-Letter account tells what happened next:

"They were peering through the mist when suddenly the vessel crashed onto the rocks off Winthrop at 12:30 Sunday morning and her masts nearly went by the board when she struck. She was thrown higher up on the beach by the tremendous seas, and the waves beat against her hull and dashed high into the rigging. The men on board were drenched to the skin, and they clung to the rigging to prevent being swept into the sea.

"The vessel pounded so badly that her seams opened and she began to leak. The tug Leader happened along and seeing the predicament of the vessel ran down to render assistance. A heavy hawser was made fast to the vessel and the tug straightened out and pulled on her. After considerable tugging the schooner began to move and she was soon hauled into deep water."

The ship had taken on so much water that even after her rescue from the rocks she was still in danger. The bilge pumps barely kept her afloat long enough to make it to port in East Boston. There she was repaired enough to make it home to Exeter.

The Lizzie J. Call continued to travel up and down the Squamscott River until barges and trucks proved to be more efficient. Anderson sold his coal company to William McReel in 1910. McReel preferred to ship his coal from Portsmouth and Kittery, Maine by barge and the swift running schooners were no longer needed for long trips at sea. Once coal faded from use in the late 1940s, the days of dusty coal mounds piled alongside the river were over. The days of the schooners on the Squamscott River were also over.

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20100625-NEWS-6250356