Tag: History

Wilbur and Orville weren’t the only Wright Brothers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

THEY WERE “PKs,” meaning “preacher’s kids,” a difficult role for nearly every child put in its unwanted spotlight. Beyond that, theirs does appear to be a tight-laced family, even with its strong strain of moral and social progress. We can even wonder what the brothers’ diagnosis would have been today; there are speculations of “somewhere on the spectrum.”

Still, they did put humans into the air and, more importantly, brought them down safely.

We’ll put their technological breakthroughs aside today and instead focus on the more personal surroundings of Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948), sons of Bishop Milton Wright and Susan Catherine Koerner Wright.

Like me, they were both born in Dayton, Ohio, and we were members of a congregation their father had founded. (He also founded a seminary.)

And, gee, a photo of the house they grew up in looks almost identical to my grandparents’.

Here are ten more interesting points gleaned from the Web:

  1. Neither one graduated from high school. They were, however, friends of classmate Paul Laurence Dunbar, the school’s only Black student, now an acclaimed poet, and in time, at their print shop, they published a newspaper he created. Yes, they were printers and bicycle manufacturers before they built airplanes.
  2. They learned many of their mechanical skills from their mother, who had attended Hartville College, a small United Brethren school in Indiana, at a time when few women were permitted such an opportunity. Her focus, tellingly, was literature, science, and mathematics. In 1853, she met the future bishop. He had joined the church in 1846 because of its stand on political and moral issues including alcohol, the abolition of slavery, and opposition to “secret societies” such as Freemasonry, values she shared. Working together as his ministry developed, they brought their boys to 12 different homes across Indiana and Iowa before returning permanently to Dayton in 1884.
  3. A year or so later, while playing an ice-skating game with friends Wilbur was struck in the face with a hockey stick by Oliver Crook Haugh, whose other claim to fame would be as a serial killer. Wilbur lost his front teeth. Up until then, he had been vigorous and athletic, but the emotional impact left him socially withdrawn, and rather than attending Yale as planned, he spent the next few years largely housebound, indulging in the family’s extensive library and caring for his mother, who was terminally ill with tuberculosis.
  4. More befitting a PK, in elementary school Orville was prone to mischief, including practical jokes, and even expelled once.
  5. They weren’t the only Wright brothers. Reuchlin (1861-1920) was their oldest sibling. Born in a log cabin in Indiana, he grew into a restless young man, failed college twice, then moved to Kansas City in 1889, distancing himself from his family. He worked in Kansas City as a bookkeeper until 1901, then moved on to a Kansas farm with his wife and children to raise cattle. Though he built a good life for his family there, he remained estranged from the rest of his family in Dayton.
  6. Lorin (1862-1939) spent time on the Kansas frontier before attending Hartville College in 1882 and returning to Dayton, where he had difficulty making a living. So he left for Kansas City in 1886 (before his elder brother), struggled, briefly, returned to Dayton, and then headed west again, where he scraped out a living on the Kansas frontier for two years before returning home in 1889, lonely and homesick. He worked as a bookkeeper for a carpet store in Dayton and married his childhood sweetheart, Ivonette Stokes, in 1892; they had four children as he settled down to a quiet life. In 1893, he worked for Wilbur and Orville in their print shop, and in 1900 helped sister Katharine manage the Wright Cycle company while their brothers were in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. He visited Wilbur and Orville at Kitty Hawk in 1902, notified the press in 1903 after their first powered flights, and lent them his barn to build the machine that eventually became the first United States military aircraft. In 1911, he helped test the first airplane autopilot and in 1915, spied on Glenn Curtiss to gather information for the Wright patent suit against the rival airplane manufacturer. After Orville sold the Wright Company, Lorin bought an interest in Miami Wood Specialties, the company manufactured a toy that Orville designed. He also was elected a city commissioner in Dayton.
  7. Twins Otis and Ida (1870) died in infancy. He, of jaundice; she, five days later, of marasmus – malnutrition.
  8. Their youngest sibling, Katharine (1874-1929), could be the subject of a Tendril all her own. She was only 15 years old when her mother died of tuberculosis in 1889. As the only female child, it was taken for granted that she would assume her mother’s role—which she did – caring for the family and managing the household. She was especially close to Wilbur and Orville, and when her mother died it became her responsibility to take over the household, seemingly ending any prospects of marriage. Yet she also graduated from Oberlin, at the other corner of the state, in 1898, the only Wright child to complete college. She then became a highly respected teacher at Dayton’s Steele High School. After Orville’s injury in a 1908 test flight for the military at Fort Myer, Virginia, she took a leave of absence from her teaching job to nurse him back to health and never returned to teaching. Instead, she became a central figure in her brothers’ aviation enterprises. In 1909, the French awarded her, along with Wilbur and Orville, the Legion d’Honneur, making her one of the only women from the U.S. to receive one. After Wilbur’s death in 1912, Orville became more and more dependent on Kate, as his old injuries had him in severe pain. She looked after his correspondence and business engagements along with his secretary, Mabel Beck, and ran the household as before. In the 1920s, Kate began to renew correspondence with an old flame from her college days, a newspaperman named Henry Haskell, who lived in Kansas City. (What is it with Kansas City for this family?) They quickly began a romance through their letters, but she feared Orville would become jealous. After several attempts, Henry broke the news to Orville, who was devastated and refused to speak to the couple. When they finally wed in 1926, Orville refused to attend the ceremony, and wouldn’t speak to them up until they moved to Kansas City. She was ridden with guilt for choosing Henry over her brother, and tried many times for a reconciliation, but Orville stubbornly refused. Two years after her marriage, Katharine contracted pneumonia. Even when Orville found out, he refused to contact her. It was their brother Lorin who eventually persuaded him to visit her on her deathbed, and was with her when she died. She was 54.
  9. None of the Wright children had middle names. Wilbur and Orville were “Will” and “Orv” to their friends, and “Ullam” and “Bubs” to each other.
  10. The parents and siblings, minus Reuch, are buried at Woodland cemetery in Dayton.

For a broader view, let me suggest The Bishop’s Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright  by Tom Crouch.

The United Brethren denomination also figures prominently in my posts at Orphan George.

 

Situating the experiences and place

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We can wonder how much of the history I could have captured if I had owned a camera. The images I’m digging up for this series help some, but skirt much of the grittier realities I faced.

Binghamton panorama in a Jeremy Purdom photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The city itself was already well into Rust Belt decline and probably would have been intolerable apart from the hippie-era adventure of living in a college-town slum.

This was my introduction to the East Coast, and my first time of living in proximity to mountains, albeit the Allegany foothills of the Apalachin range (New York spellings). I was still spellbound. The region was called the Southern Tier, to the west of the Catskills and south of the Finger Lakes. The city,- or Tri-Cities when neighboring Johnson City and Endicott were included, was generally working-class and infused with a spectrum of ethnic minorities.

Historic map via Wikimedia Commons shows the emerging city at the conjunction of the Susquehanna and Chenango rivers.

The city was nestled into the valley and once had water-powered mills along the riverbanks.

The factories were long gone by 1970, when I lived two blocks away. The dam and bridge, closed to traffic, however, remained.

The Susquehanna itself was a fascinating river, as I present in my chapbook of poems carrying its name.

A typical highway scene in Broome County, New York, by Dougtone at Wikimedia Commons. Those foothills were quite different from what I had known growing up.

 

Back to the Baskervilles

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Working downward in time for our old house history meant starting with Anna M. Baskerville, the subject of a Dec. 4, 2002, post here.

We finally met her son, Reggie, and learned much more than we had already gleaned.

He and his mother came from Yeadon in Delaware County, Pennsylvania — suburban Philadelphia. Landing in Eastport was nearly accidental. His first wife had a friend who skied in Maine, and on a lark, they visited the coast, including Eastport.

That led to buying the property in rundown condition, as he says, in November 1996 to use as a vacation house. As he notes, the house wasn’t habitable beyond that but you could buy homes in town dirt cheap. His words.

Somewhat of a handyman, he set to work. The cellar was prone to flooding, two to three feet, and its sump pump, like many in the neighborhood, fed into a line that had been cemented shut on the other end. The city finally corrected that. So it wasn’t a septic problem, exactly, but definitely storm infiltration, with water shooting dramatically through the cellar walls. Somebody definitely curbed that problem before we took over. Reggie also installed covered the cellar floor with plastic sheeting topped by gravel to reduce water infiltration and make walking easier. By 1999, the house was improved enough that his mother could move in. He and his wife and their two small children also lived here a few months before moving to their own home nearby. Like ours, it was old and needed lots of work. Credit Reggie for learning to do better work than many of the local tradesmen.

As he tells it, Anna had worked hard from age six in the South, where a Black child could be hired out. From that point on, she was always at the service of others, including a large family. Once Eastport came on her horizon, she declared this would be her house. For once in her life, she could sleep as late as she liked, eat whenever she wanted, and come and go as she willed. And she pretty much did.

Eastport’s the kind of small-town community where people know where you live not by your address but by the last name of a previous owner. Give them a street and a number and they take a moment to try to determine which house you’re in., even when you tell them it’s on the corner and briefly describe the exterior. Give them the family name, though, and they immediately light up.

To everyone we’ve met, ours is the Baskerville House and likely to remain so.

I love the literary allusion, of course, to Sherlock Holmes and The Hound of the Baskervilles (and the fact it takes place largely in Devonshire, which plays into so much of my history of Dover, New Hampshire, where we previously lived.). Hound/house are, of course, nearly homonyms. Beyond that, there’s also the fact that Baskerville was a basic serif typeface back in the letterpress days when I entered journalism. The high school newspaper I edited used it for the body type. It’s an old style that largely didn’t make the leap to digital, though I see it has recently joined my Windows options. (Not so for my beloved Caslon of the same era.)

What we liked about the place, besides its location and TLC potential, was the fact it felt good inside. Close-your-eyes good, even when the room’s chilly. I’ve certainly felt comfortable in extended solitude and all the writing that’s come within it.

Something that struck me after moving to New England was how often people — even highly rational professionals — calmly asked new homeowners if their place had ghosts. I’m not kidding. And Maine seemed especially prone to that.

Nobody’s asked us, though. Instead, they confirmed that ours always felt good to them, too.

The Baskerville at the heart of this period of ownership was Anna, arriving in Eastport as a retired Black nurse.

From what I’m told, she was stout, had red hair, and loved to sing — especially in all of the churches, where she was always welcome. And she, too, found this place hard to heat but stayed in it and loved it.

When I said we’ve sensed no ghosts but the place feels good, others piped up that’s likely Anna’s presence or spirit. I’ve known similar imprints elsewhere, especially in old Quaker meetinghouses.

Naturally, we want to know more about her.

~*~

One story I heard was about her introduction to the town. She had a longstanding fear of deep water, and because her new residence was only a block from the ocean, the family arranged for her to arrive after dark and get used to the house first. Maybe they figured they could deal with any distress better in the morning.

So, as I’m told, when Anna M. Baskerville awoke and opened the blinds and saw the expanse of water, she inhaled and, as she proclaimed later, “I knew I was home.”

Yes, we know the feeling, too. And we still want to know more.

She was fond of sitting in front of the wood fire in the kitchen cook stove and singing gospel songs and spirituals. In warmer weather, she’d open the front door and sit behind the storm door, basking in the sun.

She had raised a large brood, ruling with what Reggie calls a firm hand and a low tolerance of nonsense. She was also a woman of few words. Typical was the time the Commons gallery was opening. During an open house, when the guests were conversing and eating, she began singing without any preamble. The room fell silent as she delivered “Bless This House” in her rich, deep voice. She was described as warm and supportive.

She was also a very devout member of the Congregational church in Eastport, as a fellow parishioner told me.

Everybody we’ve met who knew her has had only positive things to say. That in itself is a rarity.

In the meantime, we’re trying to keep our renovations in line with what we hope she would have approved. There are good reasons to respect the past.

~*~

So, at Registry of Deeds in Machias, I found the most recent entry by using the property plot number, the one to us in December 2020. No surprise there.

It led to the Baskervilles, of course, but before them, the Tennesseans.

Our winters from the perspective of neighboring St. Croix Island

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The French learned some harsh lessons in their attempt to establish their first North American settlement on a small island perhaps ten miles north of where I know live.

“It was difficult to know this country without having wintered there; for on arriving in summer everything is very pleasant on account of the woods, the beautiful landscapes, and the fine fishing for the many kinds of fish we found there,” Samuel Champlain wrote. “There are six months of winter in that country.”

I’ve previously contended that New England has a five- or six-month winter, so that passage offers me some confirmation.

As that winter dragged on, however, more than half of the men and boys developed what Champlain called a “mal de la terre,” or “land sickness” – scurvy, a disease caused by Vitamin C deficiency. It was common among sailors stuck on ships for months at a time, and many captains knew to keep citrus fruits on board, or beverages made from evergreen tree needles. During the European Age of Sail between 1500 and 1800, it was assumed that half of all crews would die of scurvy.

It wasn’t pretty.

“Their teeth barely held in place, and could be removed with the fingers without causing pain,” Champlain wrote of the horrific suffering the settlers endured over the winter of 1604-1605. “This excess flesh was often cut away, which caused them to bleed extensively from the mouth.”

Eat your apples and oranges and grapefruit, then, as well as lemons and limes.

Reading a history with your own hand in the game

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Here we are, Thanksgiving Day, and I’m finally getting around to my reactions to Nathaniel Philbrick’s 2006 hit, Mayflower: Voyage, community, war.

Admittedly, having examined some of the period he covers, from the origin of the faithful and their sailing in 1620 through their struggles up to 1677, but from the settlements north of Boston, I come at the book from a different perspective than most readers. I appreciate his efforts to present the Separatists – the term he settles on rather than “Pilgrims” – as distinct from the Puritans who would invade New England a few years later. I also appreciate his emphasis on the non-members of the faith who participated in the Plymouth Colony settlement as well as the heavy financial burden the enterprise carried, which are details I develop more briefly in my own volume, Quaking Dover: How a counterculture took root and flourished in colonial New Hampshire.

What struck me in my reading was how little awareness Philbrick conveyed regarding the activities not just on the Piscataqua watershed, the center of my book, but north of Boston in general, including Salem, especially in the years before the Puritan influx. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, whom I see as the godfather of New England, is not even mentioned, though he and his investors were active behind the scenes in England. The Piscataqua venture was a source of food for the desperate Plymouth settlement and provided twice as much funding for anti-piracy efforts, among other things.

Philbrick, not surprisingly, takes a conventional gloss on Thomas Morton and the Merrymount settlement without noting that its roots were in Devonshire folkways, not just in personal eccentricities. Dismissing him as “a jolly down-on-his-luck lawyer from London” overlooks the argument that the settlement was thriving and apparently more successful, economically and as an attraction, than Plymouth.

Philbrick’s examination of the attempted Wessagussett settlement as a Plymouth satellite clarified some of the events for me, since it falls between Plymouth and Dover as the oldest permanent settlements in New England. I am also glad that he included the struggles and near devastation of the Jamestown settlement for perspective. The Virginia colony, like the Mayflower, tends to be romanticized in the public eye. The gritty realities need to be spotlighted, too.

He acknowledges the second ship to the Plymouth settlement, the Fortune, in the fall of 1621, which doubled the population of the colony as well as its growing pains. The next ships, the Anne and Little James, arrived in the summer of 1623, but only one is named, briefly. I follow their impact through immigrant William Hilton, the brother of the founder of Dover, New Hampshire, and a Fortune passenger. His wife and children came on the Anne. Though he’s often erroneously identified as co-founder, he didn’t arrive north until he was ejected from Plymouth after he and his wife had a child baptized by the Anglican John Lyford, an event that triggered events that Philbrick briefly notes. I am now wondering if Lyford later, in 1628, performed the first Anglican wedding in New England, the one uniting Samuel Maverick and the widow Amias Cole Thomson on an island in Boston Harbor. That, too, weaves back to my book.

Within the period covered in Mayflower, Quakers were making inroads into the Plymouth colony, though Philbrick makes only fleeting reference to the persecutions led by the Puritans.

While he goes into great detail regarding the Pequot War and the one after, known as King Philip’s, he makes no mention of the mock war games in Dover in 1676 that sent an estimated 400 or more Natives into captivity and is often credited as bringing the King Philip’s conflict to an end. Some were hanged but many, women and children, especially, were sold into slavery and exported.

Still, he develops a much more complex understanding of conflicts among the varied tribes and their leaders than is usually seen. The concept of a unified “Indian” front quickly crumbles away.

I’m also interested in the Winslow lines that left Plymouth, including those who came to the Piscataqua region about the time William Hilton did and others who joined with Dover Friends in establishing a Quaker presence in what eventually became Greater Portland, Maine.

For southern New England, the closure of King Philip’s War, where Philbrick’s book ends, essentially ended the conflicts with the First Peoples. Not so in the north, where fresh outbreaks would hammer on for decades, abetted by the forces of New France, ending only with the Treaty of Paris in 1763.

Welcome to Middle End, maybe the only one on earth

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I moved to Eastport nearly five years ago, old-timers began telling me of the intense antagonism between the North End, or Dog Islanders, and the South End, aka Assault and Battery (for Battery Street) or Sodom and Gomorrah. Their antagonism toward Lubec just to the south was the only thing strong enough to unite them.

Yes, when it came to the antagonism toward Lubec, the town to the south, they unified in their venom, which was something like the reaction of Dog River residents toward Wolverton in the Canadian comedy series Corner Gas.

Only four months ago, at a historical society forum, did I first hear that the residential section between them – where I live – was known as Middle End, a designation that many of those who grew up here had never heard yet was common in usage by others.

It’s the neighborhood containing the majority of the homes in town, much of it proposed for National Historic Registry recognition as the Eastport Central Neighborhood district. Well, it does have its merits.

Our house would be the oldest within its boundaries, built by the man who originally held title to half of Middle End. His brother-in-law, Caleb Boynton, held the other half. Shackford’s sons and sons-in-law and presumably their wives were active in developing their share, what they surveyed with numbered plots as Majorville.

A middle, by definition, is between ends rather than being an end or even having one, I suppose. For me, that leads to a quaint contradiction. Is there even another Middle End on the planet? Google maps proffer a nada.

The Eastport neighborhood is largely to the west of downtown, with a little wrapping around to the south and north, so it wouldn’t exactly form a West End. And to the east of downtown? It’s all water and very quickly beyond that, Canada.

Well, if they had only called these “sides,” but for whatever reason, they didn’t see things that way.

The End.

Captain John’s incredible view

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I investigated the history of the rundown house we had bought, I was puzzled by a description that placed it at the corner of Shackford and Water streets, the other end of our block. Only later did I see that as the reality until Captain John Shackford senior sold off two lots a year before his death and the subsequent appearance of Third Street, perhaps the third east/west street in his tract but remaining the only numeral street in the entire city.

I keep trying to imagine his sweeping panoramic view from that time, with the waterfront below and its wharves still in his possession, and then out over the bay and the fields around him. None of the neighboring houses existed through most of that. The lot across Water Street, down to the tides, was steep and the upper part remained attached to our property until the late 1970s or so. My, how we’d love to still have that unobstructed view of Passamaquoddy Bay, the part known as Friar Roads!

As I consider the loss, let me mention it’s what’s too often hailed as the price of progress.

At least we have some great neighbors.

As for some fresh historical perspective

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Eastport has an active energy committee, which is good considering how many times we get hit with electrical outages. We live at the edge of the grid, after all, as well as on an island subject to some wild weather.

So while lunching at their Earth Day set of presentations, the man opposite me was asking about our house renovations. This is a small-town, after all, and everybody knows everything – or will.

As I explained the history of our place and some of its makeshift, even shocking, carpentry over the centuries, he interrupted me with an account of a father and son working on a project.

I thought he was talking about John Shackford senior and junior building our place.

As the two were working on the rafters, the son questioned his dad, “That’s six inches off, let me fix it.”

Naw, came the reply: “Just nail it!”

~*~

Sadly, I’m having to admit my realization of how often in my life that’s been the case.

And also, in our home project, how grateful I am that our contractor Adam would never settle for such sloppiness.

We fully intend for this house to last another 239 years.

 

Glories and quirks of AM radio, back in the day

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

My kids don’t even know what it is. How shocking!

Let’s look at a few based on their call letters.

  1. WLW, Cincinnati, the Nation’s Station, with ten times the wattage than permitted today. It lighted a barn a mile away. Back in those days, it had its own staff musicians.
  2. WOR, New York, with comedians Bob and Ray as the drivetime crew and storyteller Jean Shepherd in the evening. They originated on WHDH in Boston.
  3. WSN, Nashville, home of the Grand Ol’ Opry.
  4. WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, Country Jamboree.
  5. WCKY, Cincinnati, with a very directional nighttime signal that plastered the South with its WCKY Jamboree country programming. It also made Reds baseball highly followed far into Dixie.
  6. WNOP, Radio Free Newport, an eclectic daytime jazz station broadcasting from Kentucky to the captive peoples across the Ohio River, or so they proclaimed.
  7. WAVI, the daytime big-band station in Dayton revolving around retired trumpeter BJ, who always signed off decrying the “arcane rules of the FCC in Washington that make us give way to a station in Philadelphia that can in no way serve the Greater Dayton area.”
  8. WJR, Detroit, with a full mix of original programming, including Adventures in Good Music with Karl Haas, the Redwings, and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays.
  9. WBZ, Boston, with its all-news format when I arrived in New England.
  10. If you’re of a certain age, you can add your own fond memories of a local station’s wild rock ‘n’ roll DJ or two who fed your adolescent rollercoaster with machine-gun delivery and often took requests in addition to a Top 40 countdown. Sometimes he even mentioned you by name. In my hometown, that was WING.