On April 16 a fishmonger named David Thomson, his wife, Amias, and a handful of others became the first white settlers in present-day New Hampshire when they landed at what is now Odiorne’s Point at the mouth of the Piscataqua River. The settlement was on an elevated point of land that could be easily defended, with a good harbor and lots of fresh water. Thomson, who held title to the land, had previously visited New England and may have selected the site in advance.
The settlers built a house from shale and clay, both abundant in the vicinity, as well as structures for drying and salting fish. Their little colony received a number of visitors from New England’s scanty white population, including Miles Standish of Plymouth and Thomas Weston, the financier of the Plymouth Colony, who stumbled in after being shipwrecked and then getting robbed by Indians.
The Thomson party had hoped to make a profit by fishing and trading in furs, but like many early migrants, they found support from home meager and the New World less bountiful than they had hoped. Within a few years, probably in 1626, Thomson and his wife moved to an island in Massachusetts Bay that still bears their name. They left behind a handful of buildings and possibly some settlers. (A second small settlement remained up the Piscataqua in what is now Dover. It had been established shortly after Thomson’s arrival by the brothers Edward and William Hilton, who were also fishmongers.)
Thomson died on his island around 1628, leaving Amias and their infant son. He thus missed the arrival of the Massachusetts Bay colonists two years later. At his death Thomson did not know that he had founded the colony of New Hampshire. Not until the 163Os did settlers start arriving there in large numbers; not until the 166Os was the name New Hampshire widely used; and not until after the Revolution were the dozens of conflicting land grants and patents that crisscrossed the state finally sorted out.
1723Two Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
When Old North Was New
On April 15 the Reverend Samuel Myles laid the cornerstone of Christ Church (later known as Old North Church), Boston’s earliest surviving house of worship, whose belfry would one day hold the lanterns that sent Paul Revere on his famous ride in 1775. Although the architect of Old North has never been conclusively identified, its distinctive steeple—originally 191 feet high, and not added until 1744—is known to have been designed by William Price, a dealer in books and prints. The building bears a clear resemblance to the London churches of Christopher Wren, with which Price was familiar, though the same might be said of any church with a steeple. As befits a style transplanted from Merrie England to Puritan Boston, the design of Old North, while adopting the graceful proportions of Wren’s churches, did away with their richly textured stone and their ornament. The rather severe result, as one critic observed, looked as though it had been inspired by a print rather than the real thing.
Inside the Anglican (or Episcopal) church, center and side aisles separate the pews while a gallery wraps around the upper story amid soaring arches that draw the eyes upward. (A 1912 restoration returned Christ Church to its colonial-era appearance.) Wooden panels extending to the floor surround each pew to prevent cold drafts from inspiring profane thoughts in the worshipers. The interior arrangement closely resembles that found in St. Anne’s Church of Blackfriars, London, which was destroyed in World War II.
The church’s long association with Paul Revere exemplifies its mixture of influences. Although Revere, a Congregationalist, never joined Christ Church, he attended services there sporadically throughout his life. In 1808 his son bought a pew, which has remained in the family ever since. Revere first became involved with the church during his teenage years, when he and some other boys signed up to ring its eight sonorous bells. The articles of association of young Revere’s bell-ringing group have been preserved in the church’s archives.
While austere Congregationalists frowned on such frills, the bells and pageantry of the Anglican service attracted many youths like Revere (as did the celebration of Christmas, another Puritan no-no). Adults could be swayed as well. Old North’s first rector, Timothy Cutler, had caused a stir just before the church’s opening when he forsook his Congregational background (a degree from Harvard and later appointment as rector of Yale) and sailed to England with two colleagues to be ordained as Anglican priests. The Reverend Cotton Mather, a pillar of Congregationalism, called Cutler a “miserable apostate” and his parishioners “a little sorry, scandalous drove.”
With the central importance of religion in colonial life, Christ Church faced wrenching choices when the Revolution came. As adherents to the mother country’s established faith, most Anglicans in New England were Tories. Yet Ezra Stiles, the prominent patriot, scholar, and Congregational clergyman, described Christ Church as “Dr Biles little Flock which are more for liberty than any Episco. Congregation north of Maryland.” In fact the rector, Mather Byles, Jr., was a staunch Loyalist who eventually fled to Canada and was barred from re-entering the country on penalty of death. It was Old North’s sexton, Robert Newman, who sneaked in and lit the lanterns to signal Revere, thus keeping the rebellion from expiring in its cradle.
One of the British officers at Lexington and Concord that fateful April night was Maj. John Pitcairn, an Old North parishioner, who (according to the Dictionary of American Biography) “was perhaps the only British officer in Boston who commanded the trust and liking of the inhabitants.” He was often called on to mediate disputes between citizens and soldiers. When Pitcairn was mortally wounded two months later at Bunker Hill while leading his men in an attack on the American redoubt, his remains were buried in the crypt beneath Christ Church. Today, just as a statue of Paul Revere holds a place of honor in a plaza adjoining Old North, so a plaque in the steeple recalls the heroic death of his old antagonist.
1823One Hundred and Seventy-five Years Ago
Up the River
On April 21 the 118-foot riverboat Virginia steamed out of St. Louis with a few passengers and a cargo of military supplies. Such departures were commonplace in the bustling river town, yet this one drew attention far beyond the usual circle of waterfront workers and loafers. The reason was its destination: Fort St. Anthony (renamed Fort Snelling in 1825), an Army post on the site of present-day St. Paul, Minnesota. For the first time a steamboat was going to travel up the Mississippi River all the way to the head of navigation.
Rivers were the highways of early America, and in the West, before the arrival of steamboats, they had been essentially one-way streets. A merchant from Illinois or Kentucky could load his goods onto a flatboat and ride down to New Orleans with ease, but the return trip, in a keelboat laboriously propelled upstream by hand, would take months. Eastern rivers were placid by comparison; even the mighty Hudson could be ascended in a sailboat. Western rivers, though, combined powerful currents with treacherous rapids, islands, and shoals. The low-pressure steam engine employed by Robert Fulton in his famous Clermont of 1807 was little use against them, so a new type of engine with much higher pressure had to be developed.
Beginning around 1817, steamboats began plying the lower Mississippi and the Ohio in large numbers. Traveling from New Orleans to Pittsburgh soon became routine. But the upper Mississippi, more turbulent and more filled with obstructions, proved resistant. Long after the Virginia left St. Louis, skeptics wondered if it would ever return. Some expected it to founder or give up when it reached the fearsome Des Moines Rapids.
The Virginia did get stuck in the rapids but overcame them by removing cargo to lighten her load. Despite frequent groundings and delays, stormy weather, and a lack of navigational charts for the last two hundred miles, she reached Fort St. Anthony on May 10, having supplied other forts along the way. The journey was quite slow; traveling by daylight only, the boat had taken twenty days to cover seven hundred miles. At one point north of present-day Quincy, Illinois, for example, an Indian passenger named Great Eagle became miffed because the pilot had chosen the wrong channel. He jumped off the boat and swam ashore to join his fellow Sauk tribesmen, who were walking upstream. By the time the boat reached its next stop, the Sauks had already arrived, set up camp, and started dickering with fur traders.
Still, the voyage, sluggish as it was, proved that a steamboat could conquer the upper Mississippi. The Virginia made two more supply runs during 1823, and before long a fleet of steamers was carrying lead, furs, and grain down the Mississippi and settlers up it. The river remained an indispensable thoroughfare for decades, particularly in the upper Midwest, where no railroad would reach St. Paul until after the Civil War.
1848One Hundred and Fifty Years Ago
Days of Futures Past
On April 3 the Chicago Board of Trade (CBT) held its first official meeting in rented rooms over a flour store on a muddy, unpaved path called South Water Street. Although it would eventually become the country’s largest commodities exchange, the CBT started out as an ordinary chamber of commerce. Its twenty-five directors came from many fields, including a banker, a druggist, a tanner, a meat-packer, a grocer, and dealers in coal, hardware, and books.
Chicago’s businessmen had chosen a propitious time to form their organization. That same year the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened, linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River; the city’s first railroad, the Galena & Chicago Union, began construction; telegraph service arrived in Chicago; and the city saw its first steam-powered grain elevator and its first stockyards.
Despite all these advances, the CBT remained essentially a social club and talking shop through the mid-1850s. Since little money could be made there, few members bothered to attend its daily sessions, even when tempted with free ale, cheese, and crackers. Those who did show up mostly passed resolutions and squabbled inconclusively over such matters as whether a standard bushel of grain should be fifty-six or sixty pounds. But as Chicago’s shipping business continued to boom, particularly in grain, the CBT decided to impose some order on what was becoming a chaotic marketplace.
In the 184Os and 185Os Midwestern shopkeepers typically bought grain from nearby farmers and hauled it in sacks to a port city, such as Chicago or St. Louis. There they either sold the grain for cash or placed it with a consignment agent, who would take it to a major market city (often New Orleans) and sell it for a portion of the proceeds. Since grain varied widely in quality, purity, and cleanliness, buyers at every step had to inspect each individual lot or else rely on the seller’s honesty. The latter option often led to lawsuits. These bottlenecks made it hard to sell and resell bulk quantities, the essence of a modern commodities market.
In 1856 the CBT took a large step toward streamlining the grain trade by adopting uniform grading standards. Before, each dealer had either stored his grain separately or let the elevator owner combine it promiscuously with whatever other dealers brought in, taking his chances when he withdrew his share. Under the new system, when a dealer brought grain to an elevator, it was inspected and dumped into a common bin reserved for grain of the same grade. The owner was given a receipt for, say, a thousand bushels of No. 2 spring wheat. The CBT’s standards made these receipts universally accepted and freely tradeable. Businessmen thronged the exchange to buy and sell in huge amounts, and the board dropped its free lunch.
Once the CBT had switched from trading sacks of grain to trading receipts for grain, it did not take long to progress to the next step: trading abstract promises of grain. Members agreed to buy or sell a certain amount for a certain price at a specified later date, betting on the market to rise or fall in the meantime. When the contracts fell due, traders usually settled them in cash instead of actually delivering grain. Soon almost all of the CBT’s trade was in futures, and a colorful breed of speculators arose: hoarse, intense men who bought and sold thousands of tons of grain every day yet saw real farm produce only at the grocery store. Today the CBT and its upstart rival, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, have expanded way beyond grain to trade futures in such things as interest rates, metals, and pork bellies —besides conducting a lucrative business slaughtering unwary lambs who invest in commodities unwisely.
1898One Hundred Years Ago
A Message to Garcia
On April 9 Lt. Andrew S. Rowan of the U.S. Army embarked on a secret mission to Cuba. War with Spain, Cuba’s colonial master, looked imminent, and the Army needed to find Gen. Calixto Garcia, leader of the anti-Spanish rebels. Since Rowan spoke fluent Spanish and had recently cowritten a book about Cuba, he was a natural choice for the job.
Following a layover in Jamaica, Rowan set off in a small sailboat manned by Cuban rebels. Around midnight on April 24 he landed at a secluded spot and disappeared into the woods. After a week in the rugged terrain of the Sierra Maestra, Rowan reached Garcia’s camp at Bayamo. He offered America’s assistance and brought home two rebel officers, who provided useful information.
Rowan’s mission, though certainly valuable, was just one of many military intelligence efforts conducted that spring. It rates somewhere between a paragraph and a page in most histories of the conflict. The episode would have quickly passed from the public mind had it not caught the attention of Elbert Hubbard.
Hubbard was a retired sales manager who spent his time writing and running the Roycroft arts and crafts studio in East Aurora, New York. Hubbard published a magazine called The Philistine, and on February 22, 1899, he spent a trying day with his office staff, “endeavoring to train some rather delinquent villagers to abjure the comatose state and get radioactive,” as he recalled with characteristic vividness in 1913. That evening, over tea, Hubbard’s son brought up Rowan’s exploit of the previous year. Inspired by the contrast between the lieutenant’s initiative and his own subordinates’ sloth, Hubbard banged out a short, untitled piece praising Rowan’s gumption and inserted it in the March issue. The article concluded: “The world cries out for such: he is needed, and needed badly—the man who can carry a message to Garcia.”
Hubbard later said that he wrote the essay in an hour, and it shows. While the gist of the story is accurate, most of its details are wrong. His prose tends to the crotchety: “It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra. …” Other passages verge on the reactionary: “A first-mate with a knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting ‘the bounce’ Saturday night, holds many a worker to his place.” Or a little later: “He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-soled No. 9 boot.”
Nonetheless, Hubbard’s peevish jeremiad against inefficient personnel struck a chord with employers across the country. Requests for copies poured into East Aurora, capped by an order for one hundred thousand from the New York Central Railroad. Hundreds of magazines reprinted the piece, and it was translated into twenty foreign languages. (Every railroad worker in Russia received a copy, though Hubbard’s eat-your-vegetables brand of capitalism ultimately lost out to the communist Utopia of Karl Marx.) In the decade and a half after publication, some forty million copies were reprinted. “Carrying a message to Garcia” became a catch phrase for getting a job done without stopping to ask how or why.
Among his many eccentricities, Hubbard favored the simplified spelling that saw a brief vogue around the turn of the century. Thus physical was rendered as fysikal, worked as workt, and so forth. When Hubbard’s essay on Rowan appeared in The Philistine, this unconventional orthography yielded such disconcerting sentences as “Advertise for a stenografer and nine out of ten who apply can neither spell nor punctuate—& do not think it necessary to.” How many secretaries did Hubbard have to fire because they stubbornly insisted on spelling stenographer with a ph? No one knows for sure. But it seems entirely reasonable that his exasperation with such pigheadedness inspired him to compose what has become, for better or worse, a classic paean to both self-reliance and unquestioning obedience to authority.
1923Seventy-five Years Ago
Can’t Stop Dancin’
On April 1 Americans awoke to find their country in the thrall of a brand-new sport: marathon dancing. The fad had begun in England in early March with an effort of nine and a half hours—a virtual sprint. A pair of doughty Scots immediately did fourteen, and within two weeks French dancers had broken the twenty-four- hour barrier. At this point, with events having clearly surpassed the bounds of sanity, it was time for the Americans to step in.
Alma Cummings of New York City started things off on March 30 and 31, dancing with a series of partners for twenty-seven hours straight (with occasional short breaks). On April 6 a pair of fellow New Yorkers logged forty. The dauntless Miss Cummings, a dance instructor, hit the floor again the next day and went fifty hours, alternating the fox trot, the one-step, and the waltz. This time she wisely discarded the high-heeled French shoes of her first attempt for flat boudoir slippers.
Soon the entire country got into the act. Between April 12 and 19, terpsichoreans in New York, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Houston broke the record no fewer than seven times. This total does not include the achievement of Homer Morehouse of North Tonawanda, New York, who danced for what would have been a record eighty-seven hours but dropped dead at the end, invalidating his performance.
Government officials quickly moved to suppress the craze. (Miss Cummings suggested holding contests in Toronto, but the Canadians showed a strange lack of interest.) One marathon, which began on April 15 in New York’s Audubon Ballroom, was served with a summons after twelve hours, the legal maximum. The participants gamely danced downstairs and into a waiting flatbed truck, kept dancing as it drove to a nearby pier, and danced onto a ferryboat, which took them across the Hudson River to West Fort Lee, New Jersey.
The Garden State proved no haven for lawbreakers, however. West Fort Lee’s mayor ordered the Gotham miscreants out of his city, so they wearily reversed the previous day’s exodus, ending up in a hastily procured room near the Audubon. There the three remaining couples grimly swayed to barely discernible music from a broken-down Victrola playing the same dozen records over and over. Hours later they had to move once again. The somnambulistic hoofers maintained a semblance of dancing in taxicabs and a van en route to East Port Chester, Connecticut, where authorities also demanded a stop but indulgently waited until Vera Sheppard, a nineteen-year-old file clerk, had set a new record of sixty-nine hours. Her hardwon mark held up for two days.
At the height of the frenzy, historians pointed out that marathon dancing dated at least to 1364, when Londoners took to whirling about the streets for four and five days at a time. When Valentine Tuffit of Newport News, Virginia —three days into her own marathon—was told of this, she scoffed to a reporter that “under the ancient calendar system used in 1364 the days were much shorter than days now; that the dancing then was not done according to modern regulations, and that she did not believe it anyhow.”
By May 1 the record had been boosted to 167 hours. (On that same day a Houston musician set a record by playing piano for 66 hours and 22 minutes straight—and no John Cage numbers either.) On May 9 a Dallas man danced 168 hours, a full week. On May 27 a Youngstown, Ohio, couple lasted 182:08. And finally, on June 10, Bernie Brand of St. Louis claimed the all-time championship by shaking a leg for 217 consecutive hours, surpassing by an hour the English actor William Kemp’s famous “nine days’ wonder” morris dance from London to Norwich in 1599 (which was not, it should be noted, a continuous performance).
Around this time Americans started to notice that watching bathrobe-clad zombies shuffle across a littered ballroom floor was not very entertaining. Promoters increasingly abandoned straight endurance contests for hokey human-interest angles and theatrical gimmicks. By the 1930s marathon dancing had degenerated into a cruel spectacle designed to cheer up Depression audiences by showing them someone even more miserable than themselves.
