Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Before you start your car, thank this auto pioneer 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When we think of many of the technological advances that impact our daily lives, we usually don’t know the names of their inventors, even when we know the businessmen who got wealthy as a result. Elon Musk did not invent the Tesla, for instance, nor did Bill Gates invent the internet or Henry Ford, the auto. The list is actually a long one.

Consider John William Lambert, mentioned in a previous Tendrils.

I remember visiting an early coworker and, upon seeing an old car with an impressive Lambert name in brass across the radiator sitting at an open garage door, I asked, “Ann? Is that car any relation to you?” She replied that her grandfather used to make them but otherwise conveyed no knowledge that he had been so prominent a figure.

Here are ten facts from his life.

This was the breakthrough vehicle.
  1. He invented the first practical American internal combustion gasoline automobile in 1890 in Ohio City in Van Wert County, Ohio, where he tested it on the village streets early the next year. It was the Buckeye gasoline buggy, a surrey-topped three-wheel runabout with one seat. It had a three-cylinder, four-stroke engine.
  2. In 1891, that horseless carriage became the first automobile offered for sale in the United States. Priced at $550, it attracted no buyers.
  3. Undaunted by the buggy’s reception, he turned his attention in 1892 to making stationary gasoline engines for farm and industrial factory use.
  4. Lambert’s base of operations was the Buckeye Manufacturing Company, which he had founded in 1884 as a farm implement manufacturer and moved in 1892 to Anderson, Indiana.
  5. His experiments with drive-train technology led to the Lambert friction gearing disk drive transmission. The gradual, or gearless, transmission became a signature feature on all of his future cars.
  6. His next attempt at an auto line came in 1895 with a model called the Buckeye. It was a four-wheel modification of the buggy but failed to find buyers.
  7. His first marketing success was the Union, released in 1902. About 300 of the tiller-steered cars were sold.
  8. In 1906 he introduced his first Lambert, establishing himself as one of the more successful automakers of the time. Production peaked from 1907 to 1910 with 2,000 cars a year.
  9. Buckeye Manufacturing, which built the cars, had moved by 1905 to Anderson, Indiana. The Lambert Automobile Company was one of its subsidiaries. Touting its Lambert Friction-Drive Automobiles and Trucks, the Buckeye factory mass-produced Lambert’s cars, gasoline engines, and auto components as well as fire engines, railroad inspection vehicles, and steel-hoof tractors before closing in 1917. At its height, the company had more than a thousand employees.
  10. Lambert held more than 600 patents and died in 1952, age 92, in Anderson.
At its prime, the Lambert came with 15 layers of hand-painted color.

 

A few things I’ve celebrated over the years

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

(Prompted by artist Jane Kaufmann.)

  • Acceptances for publication large and mostly small.
  • When newcomers return to Quaker meeting.
  • When meeting for worship settles into warm silence.
  • Fires in wood-burning stoves.
  • Truly fine pizzas.
  • Wines and cheeses.
  • Appearances by bald eagles and osprey, some of them over my yard.
  • My wife’s Christmas traditions – especially the observation of Advent and the 12 days after.
  • Retirement and the opportunities it’s opened.
  • Viewing whales from shore here.
  • Whale watch cruises, no matter what we wind up observing.
  • A week’s windjammer cruise. Twice now.
  • Great classical music performances, including opera.
  • Part-singing in choirs, chamber choirs, and Mennonite circles.
  • The renovation of our 1787 homestead.
  • Small-town life in Eastport and Dover.
  • Sunrises and sunsets.
  • Riding big-city subways.
  • Full solar eclipses and Northern Lights.
  • The Greek Orthodox festival and community.
  • Mount Rainier.
  • The election of Barack Obama.

Worshiping together, too

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Shackfords and Olmsteads had more in common than their livelihoods on and around the sea.

The oldest church in Eastport, founded in either 1798 or 1802, was the Calvinist Baptists, as some in town knew them, or more accurately, Particular Baptists, largely in line with the majority of Baptists today. That group moved into its Washington Street house of worship in 1837. (Today, it’s the Eastport Arts Center.)

The second congregation in town was the Free Will Baptists, organized in 1816 and incorporating with the state in 1820. Darius and Ethel Olmstead along with John and William Shackford and their brothers-in-law John Hinkley and John C. Lincoln were named in the incorporation papers.

Among other things, Free Will Baptists avoided alcohol consumption and, in its Northern stream, opposed slavery. As a rite, it practiced foot-washing. The denomination stemmed from the Dutch Mennoninte-influenced General Baptists in England, unlike the Baptists just down the hill. I am curious to learn how much our Shackfords and Olmsteads hewed to the denomination’s values. The General Baptists, I should point out, were earlier a strong influence on the emerging Quaker movement in Britain. My Quaking Dover book details more.

The Free Will Baptists dedicated their first meetinghouse in town in 1819, a year before the other Baptists had theirs. They were later known as North Christian Church, with the building at Washington and High streets.

Next to organize in town were the Congregationalists, 1819, and Unitarians, 1821. Roman Catholics had a chapel in 1828, early for New England.

The 1820 Census for Eastport has the brothers Darius, Ethell, and Jesse Olmstead as heads of household.

Two years later, Mrs. Darius Olmstead (Elsie Haddon) and Mrs. Ethel Olmstead (Nancy Ann Haddon) were among the charter members of the Eastport Benevolent Female Society, as were Mrs. William Shackford, Mrs. Jacob Shackford, and Mrs. John Shackford.

The Olmsteads and Shackfords obviously shared in an emerging social structure, having arrived in the Passamaquoddy region at the same time.

All of it, of course, has relevance on the house we bought.

So why did I write poetry?

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A poetry editor a decade or two ago asked why I write poems, and in response I came up with this:

I’ve been writing poetry and fiction for so long the questions of “how” and even “when” and “where” arise long before any consideration of “why.” That is, the practice quickly turns directly to “just sit down, start keyboarding, and see where it goes.” Even so, my “why” quickly turns to a succession of motivations within an evolving exploration that continued to present itself as poetry. So here are some of my primary Whys along the way:

  • Because it sustains expansive dimensions of language and thinking that have been precluded from my employment as a newspaper (and, briefly, social sciences) editor, where expression is intended to convey a single layer of factual presentation.
  • Because it allows me to pursue wordplay, surrealism, ambiguity, innuendo, absurdities, but especially my own emotions and experiences that are forbidden in objective third-person writing. (Intentionally or otherwise, my literary endeavors have worked as a reaction against and counterweight to the strictures of professional journalism, the way a pianist might balance classical and jazz or country-western performance.)
  • Because it has kept my skills as a headline writer sharp and pliant.
  • Because it collects and distills the seemingly random wanderings of my Aquarian mind and my often-obscured impressions and feelings.
  • Because it reflects the intuition and clarity that arise in my practice of meditation.
  • Because revision, a crucial element of writing poetry, pushes me beyond linear narrative to a more mysterious matrix as I looking between the cracks and broken syntax to admit other voices to appear.
  • Because it allows me mythologies for exploring and celebrating places I’ve lived and people I’ve known along the way. (If I’d taken more photos during all those years, would the drive have been lessened?)
  • Because it immerses me in a long stream of poets, troubadours, singers, storytellers, mystics, prophets, and shamans before me.
  • Because it’s a kind of prayer.
  • Because it keeps me looking at the world around me with an awareness of gratitude and wonder.

Well, that’s what I wrote at the time, and the editor fired back with a round of questions I didn’t have time to answer. Way back then. I have no idea how I would answer now. I do hope it would be less ethereal.

Sometimes a Dover connection wasn’t quite what I expected

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the things about the history of my far end of Maine is seeing how much of it springs from Dover, New Hampshire.

Neighboring Pembroke, for instance, was founded by Hatevil Nutter Leighton, a descendant of both a Dover Quaker family and one of the faith’s fiercest oppressors.

Daniel Hill, the first permanent resident of Calais (1779), came there from Jonesboro, though he had been a pioneer settler of Machias in 1763, along with a J. Hill – his half-brother Japhet.

Knowing that the Hills were a prominent extended family in the Dover Quaker Meeting, I became curious and found confirmation in the fact that Daniel is thought to have been born in Kittery, Maine – on the other side of the Piscataqua River from Dover – around 1734. Close enough. Dover Friends had a neighborhood Meeting on the Eliot/Kittery town line.

But in his case, forget any Quaker influence. That was at least two generations earlier in his line, which did gravitate in and around Dover.

Daniel fought in the French & Indian War and again in the American Revolution. He was rumored to be a skilled Indian fighter. There’s even a controversy over whether he was a Rebel or a Loyalist, considering that he apparently lived for a time on the Canadian side of the border. His father, though, died in Nova Scotia in 1782, befitting a Loyalist position.

Loyalists? You’ll hear more about them later here. Please stay tuned.

When it comes to daily bread, the French set a standard

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Among the things we truly miss living on our remote corner of Maine is a first-class bakery, the kind that can turn out genuine baguettes and croissants.

Previous posts here at the Barn have touched on these distinctively French delights, but today the attention turns to matters of what makes something as basic as bread so marvelous.

Consider.

  1. While the roots of the baguette go back at least to the 18th century, the distinctive Parisian staple didn’t even go by that name until August 1920, when the department of the Seine regulated the product, declaring that the loaf had to have a minimum weight of 2¾ ounces and a maximum length of 16 inches and not cost more than .35 francs, making it affordable for nearly everyone.
  2. Today’s baguette has a diameter of roughly two to 2½ inches, a length of about 26 inches, but that can range up to 39 inches long, and a weight of 8¾ ounces. I’m sure the price has been adjusted over the years, even before the euro.
  3. The word itself means wand, baton, or stick. Well, from baguette to baton does make a bit of sense.
  4. French bakers were already using highly refined Hungarian high-milled flour, a compact Austrian yeast, and Viennese steam oven baking. Later ovens heated to more than 390 °F use steam injection to allow the crust to expand before setting. Vive la difference.
  5. Long loaves were already part of French culture. Some of them reached to six-feet long, resembling crow bars, in the eyes of some. Pity the poor maids trying to convey them to their master’s homes.
  6. The airy, chewy, crunchy-crust elongated bread loaves are made of basically flour, water, common salt, and yeast, perhaps with a few tweaks. We’re back to the importance of really good flour and yeast. As for the water and salt?
  7. By French law, a baguette is defined principally by its dough, not its shape. No wonder so many imitators on this side of the ocean disappoint.
  8. Sometime around 1920 (the accounts vary), bakers were legally prevented from working before 4 a.m., making it impossible to make traditional round loaves in time for customers’ breakfasts, as the Wikipedia account goes. (The bakers were also banned from working after 10 p.m.) Switching from the round loaf to the previously less-common, slender shape of the baguette solved the problem, especially since the bakers could no longer work later than 10 at night.
  9. When it comes to consumption, Algeria leads the world, with 49 million baguette loaves a day, compared to France at a mere 30 million.
  10. As far as history goes, we can revisit the classic quip of let the public eat cake when they’re out of French bread, even of the pre-baguette variety. Was Queen Antoinette out of her head? In my humble opinion, cake definitely finishes in second place.