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Louis B. Mayer Goes to Hollywood — By Way of a Run-Down Burlesque Theater in Haverhill, Mass.

In 1907, 23-year-old Louis B. Mayer visited a run-down, dingy burlesque theater in Haverhill, Mass., and saw his fabulous future.

Then called the Gem, locals called the theater the Germ. Or they called it the Garlic Box because of its poor Italian customers. Respectable women, they said, wouldn’t go within a block of it. Whores performed on its stage.

Nevertheless, Louis B. Mayer scraped up the money for a six-month lease on the place, fixed it up and renamed it the Orpheum.

And if it hadn’t been for the Orpheum, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would never have produced Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz Ben-Hur and The Philadelphia Story. Nor would it have launched such stars as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Elizabeth Taylor, Buster Keaton, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

Louis B. Mayer

Young Louis B. Mayer

Lazar Meir was born July 12, 1884, near Minsk in Belarus. When he was two, his family fled the pogroms in Russia. They moved to St. John, New Brunswick, where his father worked as a scrap metal dealer and a peddler.

Louis foraged for junk metal in streets and garbage cans. From time to time his father sent him to Boston to sell the scrap metal. At 19, he decided to change his address to a room in the Jewish immigrant section of Boston’s South End.

“I hadn’t the price of a sandwich,” he later remembered.

He eventually changed his name to Louis Burt Mayer and his birthday to July 4.

He got a job scavenging metal from the bottom of Boston Harbor. Within six months he married Margaret Shenberg the daughter of the kosher butcher across the street. They moved in with her family. Soon after their first daughter was born a year later, they moved to Brooklyn. Things didn’t go well and Mayer, broke and depressed, moved his family back in with the in-laws two years later.

The Germ Theater

A Boston nickelodeon.

By then, a craze for nickelodeons swept America’s immigrant neighborhoods. They intrigued Mayer. He hung out at a South End nickelodeon, sometimes taking tickets and making friends with the owner, Joe Mack. One day Mack told him he saw a newspaper ad for a burlesque theater for rent in Haverhill, Mass.

In 1907, Louis B. Mayer took the train to Haverhill with Joe Mack and $50 in his pocket. They visited 8 Essex St., off Washington Square.

The place was a dump.

The theater had been built only seven years earlier, but it had already accumulated dirt and damp. It had 600 rickety seats and tobacco juice stains along the baseboards.

Legends grew up around the Gem during its short existence. According to one story, a show’s announcer once declared, proclaimed, “Miss Blanche Fernandez will now sing White Wings.”

“Blanche Fernandez is a whore,” yelled a man in the audience.

“Nevertheless, Miss Blanche Fernandez will now sing White Wings.”

Louis B. Mayer later said he didn’t see a dingy theater, but he saw what it could become.

Success

The small city of Haverhill, population 45,000, proved an excellent place to open a movie theater. Its shoe workers, small shopkeepers and tradesmen were an ideal demographic for cheap entertainment.

Washington Square, Haverhill, Mass.

Louis B. Mayer scraped and borrowed to come up with enough money for a six-month lease.

He and his wife and a handyman cleaned the Gem and put a fresh coat of paint on it. He converted the manager’s office into a small apartment and moved his family into the theater.

On Nov. 28, 1907, Thanksgiving Day, Louis B. Mayer opened the Orpheum, ‘Haverhill’s Home of Refined Amusement.’ A newspaper advertisement promised ‘clean, wholesome, healthy amusement, no waits, no delays.’ (For a picture of the Orpheum, since razed, click here.)

After a slow start, the Orpheum succeeded. Factory workers began to line up outside the theater after their shifts.

Up the Ladder

Louis B. Mayer enjoyed a growing reputation in Haverhill as he moved his family into better and better neighborhoods. Soon he owned all five theaters in the city. He branched out to Lynn, Brockton and Lowell.

In 1915, he bought the rights to distribute D.W. Griffith’s film, Birth of a Nation throughout New England. He made so much money on the deal he could set up his own production company.

On Dec. 29, 1918, Louis B. Mayer took a train to New York City for the premier of his first film, Virtuous Wives, starring Hedda Hopper.

The silent film was enough of a hit that Louis B. Mayer could devote the rest of his career to moviemaking. He had outgrown New England. Shortly after Virtuous Wives came out, Louis B. Mayer moved his family from his Brookline estate to Hollywood.

He then built Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer into the country’s biggest and most powerful movie studio.

Louis B. Mayer died of kidney failure on Oct. 29, 1957.

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The Six Oldest Synagogues in New England

The oldest synagogues in New England were built well after the first Jewish settlers arrived.

Touro Synagogue, the only surviving synagogue from the Colonial era, was consecrated in 1763, nearly a century after the first Sephardic Jews arrived in Newport, R.I.

Several synagogues in New England were built on bequests from Judah Touro, the son of the Touro Synagogue’s hazzani. In his will he left endowments to 23 Jewish congregations in 14 states—including Hartford and Boston. (He also saved the Bunker Hill Monument.)

New England’s oldest synagogues were all built in cities within walking distance of their congregation. Many of them have since been converted to other uses, as their members moved to the suburbs.

Here are the six oldest synagogues in each New England state.

Beth Israel, West Hartford

Charter Oak Cultural Center, formerly Beth Israel Synagogue. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Connecticut law allowed only the Christian religion until 1843. That year, Hartford Jews asked the General Assembly for the right to worship. Lawmakers passed a law that said, “Jews who may desire to unite and form religious societies shall have the same rights, powers and privileges which are given to Christians of every denomination.’

When the law changed, Connecticut Jews immediately incorporated two congregations: Congregation Mishkan Israel in Hamden and Congregation Beth Israel in Hartford (now West Hartford).

A small group of mostly German Jews organized Beth Israel as an orthodox congregation. For 19 years it was the only Jewish congregation in Hartford. In 1855, Judah Touro left in his will money for the congregation to buy its first building, a former Baptist church. After a fire destroyed the building, the congregation in 1876 hired an Irish architect to design what is now the oldest synagogue in Connecticut.

Beth Israel moved to its current building in 1936, leaving its synagogue to become the Charter Oak Cultural Center.

In 1991, the Connecticut Historical Commission and the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Hartford conducted a survey of 46 historic synagogues in the state. By the mid-1990s, 15 of Connecticut’s oldest synagogues were placed on the National Register of Historic Places, more than any other state at the time.

21 Charter Oak Ave., West Hartford, Conn.

Shaarey Tphiloh, Portland

Shaarey Tphiloh’s first synagogue, Portland. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

In 1900, Portland had 80 Jewish families among its 50,000 residents. The oldest had arrived in the 1860s from Poland and Russia, and many were clothing and dry goods merchants. They had shops in the Lower Munjoy Hill area.

Up until 1900, three orthodox congregations worshipped in members’ homes, in rented spaces or at the Middle Street synagogue of the Sharith Israel congregation. The congregation ran a B’nai B’rith lodge, a Hebrew elementary school and a Jewish cemetery in Cape Elizabeth.

That year, the two other congregations decided to band together, build a synagogue and hire a rabbi. By 1904, the congregation raised enough money to build Shaarey Tphiloh, ‘Gates of Prayer,’ on Newbury Street. The first rabbi, Isaac Marcus, was a Russian who held services in Yiddish. Not until 1917 were services held in English.

Rabbi Marcus was followed by Rabbi Chaim Shohet, a distinguished Talmudic scholar who disagreed with the temple’s board of directors when it fired the cantor. The board then fired Rabbi Shohet, and according to legend moved his chair from the sanctuary to the bathroom. Some members of Shaarey Tphiloh followed him to Congregation Adas Israel on Middle Street.

Shaarey Tphiloh followed its congregation to the suburbs after World War II and built a new synagogue on Noyes Street in 1956. In 2016, the shrinking congregation moved to a smaller building nearby.

145 Newbury St., Portland, Maine

Beth Israel, Boston

The first Beth Israel synagogue. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

Puritan Boston didn’t exactly welcome Jews or any other outsiders, so the city’s Jewish population remained tiny for its first two centuries. In the 1830s, Boston’s booming commerce attracted Jewish immigrants from the German provinces, as well as second- and third-generation Jews from other U.S. cities. They were peddlers, shopkeepers, merchants, opticians, furriers, jewelers and tailors.

Boston’s first significant Jewish congregation started when young Jewish families and single men gathered at a bris for the firstborn son of a Polish capmaker. They decided to organize, Ohabei Shalom, and elected a German jeweler and real estate trader as its president.

Ethnic rivalries eventually tore the congregation apart. The Poles, or ‘Polanders,’ lived in the North End; the upwardly mobile Germans, or ‘Bayards,’lived in the South End. Services had been conducted according to the more formal German customs, but the Poles soon outnumbered the Germans, rejected the Bavarian rabbi Joseph Sachs and began to conduct services their own way.

In 1854, 25 families from southeastern Germany broke from Ohabei Shalom along with Rabbi Sachs. They tried to keep the name Ohabei Shalom partly because Judah Touro had left money in his will to the congregation. A two-year lawsuit followed, and the dissidents lost. They called themselves Kehillah Kedosha Adath Israel, or Congregation Adath Israel.

(Rabbi Sachs, by the way, left Boston in 1869 to start a school in New York. His sons, Julius and Samuel, married the daughters of Marcus and Bertha Goldman. Samuel Sachs and Marcus Goldman founded Goldman Sachs.)

Massachusetts’ Oldest Synagogue

In 1885, Temple Israel built what is now the oldest synagogue in Massachusetts on Columbus Avenue. It was designed in a historic revival style, popular in German-speaking lands, called Rundbogenstil. With twin towers and a rose window, the synagogue reflected the growing wealth and prestige of its members. Today that first synagogue is the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

In 1906, the congregation built Temple Israel on Commonwealth Avenue as a replica of Solomon’s Temple. The congregation then moved to the suburbs and in 1967 sold the building to Boston University, which now uses it for large lectures and events.

Temple Israel began building another massive synagogue in 1926 near the Brookline border, but the stock market crash of 1929 put a halt to construction. Today Temple Israel, the largest Reform congregation in New England, holds services in its modern synagogue on Longwood Avenue near Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital.

600 Columbus Ave., Boston, Mass.

Temple Israel

Temple Israel Synagogue, Portsmouth, N.H. Photo courtesy Google Maps.

The first of New Hampshire’s Jewish synagogues was built in Portsmouth in 1905, though Jews had lived in the city since the 1790s. For more than a century they worshipped in private homes. They buried their dead in public cemeteries or in Jewish cemeteries in Dover and Somersworth.

Abraham and Rachel Isaac, Portsmouth’s first Jewish settlers, came from Prussia in 1789. He started out as an auctioneer, then opened a china shop. The Isaacs worshipped at their home on State Street, observed religious holidays and closed the store on Saturdays. They adopted a son, who moved away and married a minister’s daughter.

Abraham died in 1809: A local poet wrote his epitaph, including the words, “A faithful steward and an honest man.” Rachel moved away to be close to her son. For 50 years there was no record of Jewish people in Portsmouth.

By 1880, about 16 Jewish families lived in Portsmouth. By 1900 that number nearly doubled. In 1905 a Jew named Morris Port came from Newburyport and persuaded Portsmouth’s Jewish community to organize. By 1911 they had a rabbi, bylaws, the name of Temple Israel and a rented space in which to hold services. In 1912 they bought the old Methodist church on State Street and redecorated it in 1912.

The Jewish community grew around the synagogue in an area known as Puddle Dock, now Strawbery Banke. There were two kosher butchers, a Jewish bakery and three Jewish grocery stores.

Temple Israel renovated the building in 2007 and today congregants still sit on pews that date to 1827. A plaque stands outside Temple Israel, proclaiming it the first permanent Jewish house of worship in New Hampshire.

200 State Street, Portsmouth, N.H.

Touro Synagogue, Newport

Touro Synagogue. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Touro Synagogue, consecrated on Dec. 2, 1763, is the only synagogue built in Colonial America that still survives. Newport easily had the largest Jewish population in colonial New England, and Touro Synagogue is by far the largest and grandest of the early synagogues.

In 1658, 15 Sephardic Jewish families that escaped the Inquisition via Barbados arrived in Newport. They left a permanent mark on Newport by establishing a cemetery in 1677. Several more waves of Jewish families arrived from Curacao in 1690 and from New York in the mid-18^th century. For all that time, Newport’s Jewish population met for worship in private homes.

Many Jews prospered as merchants in the sea trade. What is now Bellevue Avenue was lined with Jewish shops. By 1758 the Jewish population had so grown in size and prominence a permanent house of worship was needed.

Newport architect Peter Harrison, born and trained in England, volunteered to design the synagogue. He planned a building with a plain Georgian exterior that hides an elaborate interior. (Harrison also designed the Redwood Library in Newport and King’s Chapel in Boston.)

Isaac Touro, born in the Netherlands, the synagogue’s first hazzan, or minister. Grateful for England’s protection, he was a Loyalist and stayed in Newport when the British captured the town in 1776. Three years later he moved with the British to New York, where he had to depend on charity. In 1782 he moved to Kingston, Jamaica and died a year later.

Two of Touro’s sons, Judah and Abraham, became quite wealthy and gave generously to Jewish and Christian causes. Abraham gave enough money to maintain Touro Synagogue and the cemetery.

Washington and the Oldest Synagogue

Many of the congregation had been Loyalists like Isaac Touro and left with him for New York. The Jeshuat Israel congregation dwindled and disappeared for a time, but in 1790 it was still functioning.

That year, George Washington famously visited Newport. Moses Seixas, a leader in the Touro Synagogue sent him a letter thanking God for a nation that did not tolerate bigotry.

Washington’s reply strongly supported religious freedoms for non-Christians. The government of the United States ‘gives to bigotry no sanction,’ Washington replied. The letter is recited annually at the synagogue.

The Jeshuat Israel congregation dwindled and turned Touro Synagogue over to a New York congregation, Shearith Israel. Jeshuat Israel reformed in 1903 and leased the building for $1 a year from Shearith Israel.

In 1946 the Touro Synagogue was designated a National Historic Site. Sixty-five years later, Jeshuat Israel tried to sell some of its historic artifacts. A lawsuit resulted. In an opinion written by retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter, a federal court ruled the Shearith Israel congregation owned the Touro Synagogue. In August 2022, a judge ruled that Shearith Israel could not evict the Jeshuat Israel congregation. Jeshuat Israel then sought a long-term lease.

85 Touro St., Newport, R.I.

Ohavi Zedek, Burlington

The old Ohavi Zedek Synagogue.

Ohavi Zedek is the oldest Jewish congregation in Vermont, and its original synagogue is one of the oldest synagogues still standing in the United States.

Eighteen Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, mostly Lithuanian, founded Ohavi Zedek in 1876. The congregation built the synagogue in 1885, and later sold it to another congregation, Ahavath Gerim.

Most were Lithuanian peddlers who discovered Burlington when they were traveling between New York and Montreal.

In the 1950s, Ohavi Zedek moved to a larger building not too far away. Then in the 1960s, hippies moved to Vermont and more Jews – including Bernie Sanders – followed.

Corner of Archibald and Hyde Streets in Burlington, Vt.

Images: Old Ohavi Zedek By Mfwills; cropped by Beyond My Ken (talk) 02:00, 24 October 2013 (UTC) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29160508. With thanks to Becoming American Jews: Temple Israel of Boston by Meaghan Dwyer-Ryan, Susan L. Porter, Lisa Fagin Davis. Featured image of Touro Synagogue interior: By S.d.touro – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48760457. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Fall River Skeleton in Armor

The Fall River skeleton discovered in 1832 in a sand bank near a church had an unusual feature: It was clad in armor.

Sketch of the Fall River skeleton in armor.

Not 20 miles north another mysterious discovery had been made: Dighton Rock, a 40-ton boulder with strange writing carved in it.

And some 30 miles south in Newport, R.I., stood a stone tower that some – including a famous poet — thought the Vikings had built.

The discovery of the Fall River skeleton so near those other artifacts inspired theories that an ancient people had colonized America well before Columbus. Maybe they’d written their epitaphs on the rock found in Dighton.

If the skeleton survived, modern scientists might have solved the mystery. But the skeleton and its armor remained intact for only 11 years after their discovery.

Fall River Skeleton in Armor

Laborers uncovered a skull as they dug down a sand bank in the town of Fall River. They dug further and found a body in a sitting posture, enveloped in a covering of coarse dark bark. Copper bangles, brass arrowheads and triangular copper armor surrounded the Fall River skeleton. It had a belt made up of 41 small brass tubes.

Most people at the time thought the skeleton belonged to a Native American chief. Given Fall River’s location, he could have belonged to the Narragansett or Wampanoag tribe.

Some thought the Fall River skeleton belonged to a Phoenician, Carthaginian or Egyptian mariner who discovered North America.

Longfellow

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1868

The skeleton took up residence in the Fall River Athenaeum, where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow went to see it.

He liked what he saw.

“The skeleton in armor really exists. It was dug up near Fall River, where I saw it two years ago,” he wrote. “I suppose it was one of the old northern sea rovers who came to this country in the 10th century.”

Longfellow wrote a poem, The Skeleton in Armor. “I was a Viking old,” the narrator declares.

The Newport Tower

He included the Newport Tower in the poem. The Viking brought to the new land a wife, “a blue-eyed maid,” he wrote. She died, and “Under that tower she lies.”

Fall River Fire

The fire of 1843 destroyed both the athenaeum and the skeleton inside it. It happened when two boys playing with a small cannon set 20 acres of Fall River on fire, burning the post office, custom house, shops, banks, churches and the homes of 200 families.

The fire made it impossible to date the remains of the Fall River skeleton in armor. But it couldn’t have lasted more than a few centuries because it was buried in moist soil. That rules out the ancient mariner theory.

In 1881, Henry E. Chase of Brookline, Mass., debunked the theories about a pre-Columbian colony in an essay, Notes on the Wampanoag Indians.

Chase pointed out the Indians had a custom of stringing tubes of copper or brass in wide belts, and they buried their dead in a sitting position.

“We may regard him as a very ordinary and vain Indian, buried in his finery,” he wrote. “[O]r we may think of him as a successful warrior safely returned from a secret participation in King Philip’s war, and afterwards buried in the spoils which he had stripped from a fallen foe.

Several decades later, archaeologists discovered the brass arrowheads to be the same as those the Iroquois used.

Archaeologists eventually determined the Newport Tower was actually the remains of a 17th-century windmill.

But they never solved the mystery of the Fall River Skeleton in Armor.

Click here to read Longfellow’s poem, The Skeleton in Armor.

This story about the Fall River skeleton in armor was updated in 2022.

Images: Newport Tower By ajay_suresh – Newport Tower – Newport, RI, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110188720.

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How the Greek Immigrants Came to New England

In 1860, U.S. Census takers recorded 328 Greek immigrants living in America. Among them were 40 young men and boys. They arrived after the Greek War of Independence, which had left them orphaned.

Michael Dukakis, son of Greek immigrants

They received college educations in the United States. Most succeeded in their adopted country, while a few others returned to their homeland.

The orphans were followed decades later by waves of desperately poor Greek immigrants looking for work. The later arrivals didn’t always succeed. But ever since those 40 orphans were brought here, the tiny Greek community has had a disproportionate impact on New England.

Greek-Americans have given us politicians, athletes, actors, scholars and architects. Red Sox first baseman and college football star Harry Agannis, the Golden Greek, was born in Lynn, Mass. And former governor Michael Dukakis and his cousin actress Olympia Dukakis were born in Brookline.

New England has more than a hundred Greek Orthodox churches, which sponsor Greek festivals throughout the year. Greek-Americans gave Manchester, N.H., the Puritan Back Room and the best onion rings in town. They also gave the Greek amphitheater at the University of Connecticut.

Most of all, they gave us the Greek diner, along with spanikopita, baklava, gyros, Greek pizza and the ubiquitous Greek salad.

The 1^st Greek Immigrants

The first Greek to land in America is believed to be a sailor named Don Teodoro, who came with Spanish explorer Panfilio de Narvaez in 1528. Indians killed him in Florida.

Lucas Miller

The Greek War of Independence brought autonomy to the country in 1832, but it also caused the massacre of tens of thousands of civilians. A Congregationalist missionary society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, brought the orphaned sons of distinguished families to the U.S. for education and conversion to Protestantism.

Some of the orphans came with supporters of the Greek revolutionaries, such as Samuel Gridley Howe. Educated in the United States, they went on to enter the ministry, medicine, law, and education professions, or they succeeded in business.

Michael Anagnos married Samuel Gridley Howe’s daughter and followed him as director of the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston. Anagnos hired Anne Sullivan, who taught Helen Keller.

John Zachos became an educational pioneer, teaching freed slaves. Lucas Miltiades Miller served as the first U.S. congressman from Wisconsin. Evangelismos Aspostolides Sophocles taught Greek at Harvard. George Pericardis taught at Amherst College before amassing a fortune in New Jersey.

Then in the mid-19th century, a trickle of Greek sailors and merchants came to the United States. The merchants set up import-export businesses in American cities; the sailors worked on steamboats in the Great Lakes and Mississippi River.

The Great Wave

Lowell mills today

In 1890 came the first great wave of Greek immigrants. They were 90 percent male, extremely poor and looking for work. Most found it in the mills and factories of the Massachusetts cities of Lowell, Haverhill, Lynn, Boston, Peabody, Chicopee, Springfield and New Bedford.

The new Greek immigrants also settled in Nashua and Manchester, N.H., and in the Connecticut cities of Bridgeport, New Britain and Norwich. Between 1890 and 1924, more than 400,000 Greeks arrived in the United States. Many intended to return to Greece with their American earnings.

From 1924 to the end of World War II, the United States closed the door to immigrants. Only about a thousand Greeks arrived each year. And pressure increased on immigrants to assimilate.

World War II and the Greek Civil War devastated the Greek countryside, and once again the United States welcomed Greek immigrants. So from 1947-1967, 5,000 Greek immigrants arrived a year. Then in 1968, Congress relaxed immigration laws and an average of 11,000 Greeks came to America each year until 1979.

The postwar era was the golden age of Greek diners in America. The first diners originated in Providence, and soon Worcester, Mass., was manufacturing now-classic diners. Six hundred diners sprang up in the New York metropolitan area, many in Fairfield County, Conn.

Olympia Dukakis, daughter of Greek immigrants

In Connecticut, Italians had dominated the pizza business, but they started to retire after World War II. Greek families bought up the pizzerias, and by the late 1970s, 76 percent of Greek families worked in Connecticut pizza shops.

Greek Towns

According to the 2000 U.S. Census, the New York-Newark-Bridgeport area has the most people of Greek ancestry in the country, with 202,304. Boston-Worcester-Manchester ranks second, with 96,871.

Lowell has special importance to the Greek-American community. It had the first and most extensive Greektown. One of the first Greek churches in America was built there in 1906. By 1913 Lowell also had 30 Greek groceries. One of them, DeMoulas Market Basket, started in 1917 and now has 79 stores throughout New England.

The sons of Greek immigrants have also succeeded in politics. Paul Tsongas represented Lowell as a U.S. senator and later became a candidate for president of the United States.

Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who also ran for president, was the son of a Greek immigrant who settled in Lowell. Likewise, Nick Mavroulas grew up in nearby Peabody and became a congressman from Boston’s North Shore. Ted Gatsas served as mayor of Manchester, N.H. And political commentator George Stephanopoulos grew up in Fall River, Mass., the son of a Greek Orthodox priest.

The New England community with the densest Greek-American population today is Nahant, Mass., with 5.3 percent. That makes it the ninth most Greek-American community in America. Next comes 16^th-ranked Peabody, Mass., with 4.3 percent. Dracut, Mass., follows as the 19th most Greek-American community, with 3.9 percent.

New England also attracts recent Greek immigrants to Massachusetts towns such as Raynham Center, West Falmouth, Watertown, North Lakeville and Arlington.

Photos: Miss Worcester Diner By Improbcat – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7813073. Harry Agannis By Vintage Card Traders, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2293374. If you enjoyed this story about New England’s Greek immigrants, you may also want to read about the region’s Portuguese immigrants here, or Italian immigrants here. This story was updated in 2022.

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Old Home Days: Frank Rollins, the New Hampshire Man Who Invented Them

June marks the start of Old Home Days season not just in New England, but throughout the United States, in Canada and Australia. The birth of the celebration can be traced to one man: Frank Rollins. He set in motion the first Old Home Days – 44 of them, all in New Hampshire – in 1899.

Canaan, N.H., decked out for Old Home Days.

Frank Rollins was born into a prominent political family in New Hampshire. His father, a railroad executive, had served in the New Hampshire Senate and then won election to the U.S. Senate. Frank also won election to the state Senate and then as governor in 1898. He also worked with John Wingate Weeks on writing the National Forest Act.

Rollins worried, as well, about the decline of the state’s rural communities because people began to move away.

They’d begun to move a lot in 19^th century New England. Yankees went west, looking for better land and a warmer climate, or they went to work for the mills in the cities. Newcomers from Europe also arrived seeking work. It was a big change from the settled population patterns of the previous centuries.

Frank Rollins

Farms were abandoned and rural towns started to look shabby. One New Hampshire farmer urged his neighbors not to move west: “Had you not better be content to keep and improve the old homestead, so near the school house where you can hear the church bell and where you can enjoy the association of good neighbors?”

Rollins, New Hampshire’s governor from 1899-1901, encouraged people to buy old farms, spruce them up and use them as summer homes. He encouraged town centers to get facelifts with new monuments and renovated municipal buildings.

Rollins had an interest in promoting investment: He and his father, Edward H. Rollins, had started a banking house. It then became one of the largest in the United States until the crash of 1929.

Old Home Days

In 1897, Rollins broached the idea of Old Home Week:

“I wish that in the ear of every son and daughter of New Hampshire, in the summer days, might be heard whispered the persuasive words: Come back, come back!” he wrote in 1897.

“Do you not hear the call? What has become of the old home where you were born?…Do you not remember it — the old farm back among the hills, with its rambling buildings, its well-sweep casting its long shadows, the row of stiff poplar trees, the lilacs and the willows?”

He founded an Old Home Week Association, and presided over the state’s first homecoming as governor.

In 1899, 44 New Hampshire towns held Old Home Week celebrations during the last week in August.

“They celebrated with bands and bonfires, parades and poetry, dances and dinners, and statesmen and speeches,” wrote Gary Crooker, in New Hampshire Old Home Celebrations.

Old Home Days in Newmarket, N.H.

The first Old Home Day in Concord on Aug. 31, 1899 ended with a 53-part fireworks show. Each part had a theme, such as No. 22 Design Portrait of Admiral Dewey, the hero of Manilla, No. 45 Starry Flags and No. 52, Aladdin Jeweled Trees.

Notable Days

At other notable celebrations:

Rollins came to Woodstock’s Old Home Day and 100th anniversary celebration in 1900. An 1812 cannon was fired from Sunset Hill.
Rollins also attended Mont Vernon’s Old Home Day in 1900, which featured a performance of the Tobasco Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar Club of Lowell, Mass.
In 1913, Fitzwilliam held an Old Home Day party in mid-August. The invitation included a poem about the ‘latch string,’ a term often used in Old Home celebrations. Putting the latch string out meant ‘welcome.’
Brookline celebrated Rural Free Delivery and Uncle Sam (who came from nearby Mason) in its 1921 Old Home Day celebration.
In 1933, Swanzey celebrated its bicentennial with a mile-long parade featuring 49 floats.
In 1936, Salisbury celebrated Old Home Day with a baseball game between the Sand Crabs and the Sand Fleas in a ‘Little World Series.’

Old Home Days Catches On

Maine and Vermont adopted Old Home days in 1901, and soon Massachusetts and Connecticut followed. By 1907, the custom spread to New York, Ohio, Alabama, Virginia, North Caroline, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and onto Nova Scotia, Ontario and Australia.

Bradford, Vt., readies for Old Home Days.

Old Oaken Bucket

Old Home Days included parades, church services, reunions, band concerts and poetry – lots of it. Come Home to Your Mother was typical, describing, “the pond where you skated, the lake where you fish’d and the great elm shadows, where you swung all you wished.”

Poets described the vanished farm, the ticking of the old clock, the flowers in the yard, the old oaken bucket, the fleecy clouds, the granite mountains and the omnipresent latchkey.

There was even an Old Home Week songbook. In 1906, one observer wrote, “In every New England town observing the festival the local poet has been burning the midnight oil so assiduously that it is no wonder the price of kerosene has been advanced a cent or so a gallon.”

After the world wars, Old Home Week celebrated the return of the men and women who fought. Then eventually Old Home Week season spread out from June until September.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Fiction Becomes Fact – Murder on the Herbert Fuller

In July 1896, the Herbert Fuller put to sea from Boston with 11 people on board. The barkentine was loaded with lumber, boards stacked high upon its deck.

Her next stop was Rosario, Argentina – only it wasn’t. After just 18 days at sea, the Herbert Fuller turned up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, carrying only eight as she sailed into the harbor flying a black distress flag.

Herbert Fuller photo

The ship’s jolly boat trailed behind with three murdered corpses. Just nine days into her voyage, the Herbert Fuller had turned into a slaughter house. Someone had taken an ax to the captain, Charles Nash, and his wife Laura, of Harrington, Maine. The second mate, August Blomberg, a Russian sailor, had also been killed with the ax.

All three had been murdered on the night of July 13-14, and the remaining crew had decided to put into Halifax – some 750 miles away – as the closest port available. They spent a harrowing seven nights at sea trying to keep an eye out for their safety and suspiciously watching their fellow passengers.

The Herbert Fuller Mystery

At first the crew tried to develop a theory that Capt. Nash and Blomberg had killed each other. Perhaps Blomberg had attacked the captain’s wife and the captain attacked him and her. In the struggle, all three were hacked with the ax and died.

But clearly the theory made no sense. So by the time the ship arrived in Halifax, the crew whittled the suspects down to three men.

Three Suspects

Lester Hawthorne Monks, the sole pleasure passenger on the ship. A Harvard University student, his doctor advised him to take a sea voyage. Perhaps the doctor hoped to slow Monk’s drinking. If so, he failed. Monks’ baggage included whiskey, brandy and 60 bottles of beer. But suspicion fell on Monks because he couldn’t account for his whereabouts during the crime. He had also discovered the murders.
Justus Leopold Westerberg, a Swedish sailor with certain peculiar behaviors. Though a jovial and popular member of the crew, he often talked to himself. He once went to a Rotterdam hospital after he grew feverish and suspicious of fellow train travelers. In the hospital, doctors once startled him awake and he fired off his pistol. Then, after the murders, he had to sew the bodies into cloth. Afterward, he threw his bloody coveralls overboard. Westerberg had also acted jumpy and odd after the murders, and he stood at the wheel of the Herbert Fuller when they occurred. Police theorized he tied the wheel long enough to go into the cabins behind the wheel and commit the crimes.
Thomas Bram, the first mate, hailed from Saint Kitts. He acted suspiciously after the murder. Bram discovered the murder weapon and tossed it overboard. He said he wanted to protect everyone from further attack. Bram had also destroyed other evidence by doctoring the ship’s logs. He initially proposed the Herbert Fuller should continue on its voyage and deliver its cargo. And well before the ship departed, Bram had warned Monks that he shouldn’t go on the trip.

The Investigation

Thomas Bram prison photo

With the Herbert Fuller in Halifax, the police took over and began sorting out the tangled mess. They made inquiries about Monks and concluded the case against him was not realistic. The police cleared him.

Then Westerberg made a startling revelation. He had seen Bram striking someone in the cabin where the bodies of the captain and his wife later turned up. He had been too frightened to say anything until the ship arrived ashore safely.

The police took this charge to Bram. His response: “He couldn’t have seen me from the ship’s wheel.”

The comment astounded the police. It seemed to them Bram had slipped and admitted he had been in the cabin where Westerberg said he was. Further evidence came out about Bram’s criminal history. On one occasion he had been charged with delivering cargo on a ship. Instead, he sold the ship’s contents and the ship itself, then told the owners it sank. He had been fired another time for planning a similar crime.

Another witness came forward to tell of a time he had taken another voyage with Bram. Bram had suggested killing the captain and stealing the vessel and its cargo. When the man objected, Bram suggested another captain would do; the two men could hook on as crew on another vessel to carry out the plan.

Courtroom Sensation

Mary Roberts Rinehart

The trial, conducted in Boston, was a sensation. The jury convicted Bram, sentencing him to hang. A procedural error meant Bram received a second trial. He was again convicted, but this time did not receive a death sentence. In 1898 Bram went to prison, and the matter might have stayed settled but for a prolific, pulp mystery writer named Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Rinehart was casting about for story lines for a book when she stumbled upon the Herbert Fuller murders in 1914. She liked the story, but decided it needed a plot twist. In her fictional account of the murder, The After House, she made the Herbert Fuller into a yacht and added some glamour to the trip. And to make it even more interesting, in her story Westerberg’s character actually committed the murder, not Bram.

Roosevelt and Wilson

In Rinehart’s story, Westerberg suffers from mental delusions that lead him on killing sprees. Rinehart said that in real life Westerberg showed a pattern of violent, psychotic episodes that extended long after the trial.

Rinehart’s books were extremely popular, and she had a fan in Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt took an interest in the case and bought Rinehart’s version of events. He lobbied President Woodrow Wilson to pardon Bram.

Bram won his release from a Georgia prison in 1913, but found his criminal record a disadvantage. Wilson acquiesced and, though he didn’t specifically declare Bram innocent, he did give him the pardon in 1919. Bram spent the rest of his life as a businessman in Georgia.

This story about the Herbert Fuller was updated in 2021.

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