Tag: History

As a reminder from the dominant side

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The ruling Puritans in New England had reasons for opposing the Quakers, something I need to remember in the midst of my Quaking Dover arguments, They don’t get much sympathy in their objections, at least from my audiences.

As Dover First Parish historian Donald R. Bryant put it, “The Quakers did not conform with the orderly practices of the Puritan churches. They would not join in fellowship, and met among themselves, propagating their own beliefs. Many of them did not do this quietly, but in a manner that was disturbing to regular church members. They were apt to interrupt a meeting or a preacher, or to even interfere with the proceedings of a court. They insulted church order and disturbed the peace. Their conduct was described as ‘indecent and provoking.’”

Some of these points still sting as I look at today’s political and social polarization.

Sawyer Mills usually get overlooked

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The town’s textile mills don’t get a lot of attention in my book Quaking Dover, in part because I haven’t found a lot of interaction between the emerging industry and the town’s Friends. Indeed, the Quaker Meeting was seriously aging about the same time the thriving mills transformed the town into an industrial power.

Dover’s conventional histories, on the other hand, have good reason to focus on the big brick mills along the Cochecho River, world famous for the quality of their calico and their stunning print designs and execution.

You might be surprised to learn, though, that they were in operation much earlier than the legendary cotton mills at Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester on the mighty Merrimac River.

Largely overlooked, as one Friend reminds me, are the woolen mills on the Bellamy River south of Dover’s downtown and only a few blocks from the Quaker meetinghouse. These operated from 1824 to 1899 and were often innovative, employing up to 600 workers before being sold and continuing till 1954.

They were renowned especially for their flannel and were, at stretch, the largest woolen mills in the Granite State.

Today the mills and their historic housing have emerged as a charming residential district.

While there were some Sawyers in the Meeting, I’ve not yet found any connection to those owning the mills.

Based on the naming of some of their children, those were apparently Methodist.

My range didn’t expand to the whole state

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Statehood for New Hampshire was accompanied by growth in the Merrimac Valley and western side of the state, including Quaker Meetings.

Weare, especially, became a Friends center, with two large meetinghouses in town and another in neighboring Henniker. There was also the Clinton Grove academy.

Much of that growth, however, came from Massachusetts, not Dover, and so it fell outside the focus of my Quaking Dover story. They were even in a different Quarterly Meeting than the one encompassing the communities emanating from Dover.

Just in case anyone was wondering.

If you missed my latest Zoom presentation

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You can catch up with my insights on “Quaker Meeting as a nest for social justness” via YouTube, thanks to West Falmouth Friends on Cape Cod.

The event, the latest of the special presentations based on my book, Quaking Dover and the New Hampshire city’s 400th anniversary, was recorded and is now available.

Many thanks to all involved.

To see what transpired during the hour, click here.

As for a broad history of New England Quakers?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

It would be an ambitious project, and I’m not sure quite how one would structure it, spanning six states and many subjects as it would from early colonial times to today.

Dover Friend Silas Weeks’ book of meetinghouses and burial grounds remains my go-to volume, but it’s mostly about buildings rather than people.

I’m still surprised to hear Rhode Island Yearly Meeting as the body’s early name, rather than New England Yearly Meeting. When did it change officially?

Well, I have seen some genealogies that get impossible to follow after, say, the third generation.

I even feel something like that in Dover, once the textile mills take over.

Still, the conventional histories of Quakers in America focus on Philadelphia, overlooking or slighting the unique challenges and characters of New England, North Carolina, Ohio, and more.

For now, my Quaking Dover is a microcosm of the bigger picture. I’m hoping it will prompt more.

On the continuing toll of the Internet on the livelihoods of creative souls

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Fellow blogger Gary Hart recently had an eulogy for Outdoor Photography magazine, which prompted this comment from me:

“Your post mortem is one more story of the toll the Internet is taking on the income of many creative individuals. Freelance writers were devastated early on when their secondary markets for republication withered (anyone could already find the piece online). In professional photography, you lost sales to people who found your images posted online and were content with copies they printed out at home.

“Magazines faced a double whammy as content moved to the Web. Not only were sales and subscriptions shrinking, so was advertising, which paid most of the bills. In the case of photography, the products themselves were being rendered obsolete. Film, chemicals, papers, enlargers, darkrooms, and so on became ancient history and then, for the most part, so have cameras. What I’m getting with my cell phone, for instance, is unbelievable (though I know its imperfections, too).  As a parallel, you can discuss what happened to the professional wedding photographer.

“Finally, as much as I love paper, I’m using far less of it as either a writer or a reader. Downsizing is one reason but not the only one.”

That record flooding gets personal  

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Looking at the news of Vermont’s flood damage, I’m seeing places I know and have traveled. Towns I pass through on my way to and from Quaker Yearly Meeting sessions at Castleton University, for instance, all now heavily hit. I wonder about some of the covered bridges I anticipate visiting or places I stop for a stretch, too.

I’ve been waiting to hear from a dear friend, especially, though I know his home is high above the stream running through town. Still …

My wife and I retain strong impressions from seeing the devastation from Hurricane Irene nine or ten months after it delivered its wallop. You wouldn’t believe the extent unless you saw the evidence.

The mountains become a funnel for the falling water, and many of the roads have nowhere to go but beside the streams. People, of course, live along the roads … many of them at the foot of natural chutes from the hillsides.

It’s not just water, either, but the boulders and gravel it unleashes.

There are real stories that will unfold long after the TV cameras and breaking news headlines have moved elsewhere.

But it does make a difference when events do somehow seem to reflect home for you. Or when you look for what I think of as “slow news.”

So where were the Baptists in New Hampshire?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Dover’s third minister, Hanserd Knollys, no doubt laid a foundation for the Quaker message two decades after his brief tenure in the town pulpit. He was beset by controversy and even a physical skirmish or two, but he organized the church as a Congregational society even as his own theology was evolving into Particular Baptist.

Some of New Hampshire’s early Baptists did relocate to New Jersey, where they named a town Piscataway, in honor of Dover’s Piscataqua River. And Knollys himself became the pastor of London’s first Baptist church, once he had fled New Hampshire and the New World.

By the way, the number of colonists who returned to England from America still amazes me. How could they even afford it, much less the time involved?

Some of his challenges to conventional Christianity, like rejecting the baptism of infants, opened the way for Quakers to build on, once they arrived.

Still, I couldn’t get a clear picture of the existence of the Baptists as New England’s other dissident denomination in the colonial era. Was it all down in Rhode Island, where they contended with the Quakers over the governance of the colony?

My own book, Quaking Dover, concentrates on Dover Friends Meeting and its families, once they’re established, but the Baptists seem to be largely invisible until the Revolutionary War or so.

Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts now provides an understanding of the faith north of Rhode Island. Essentially, it was long comprised of one church in Boston, and its members were scattered across the region, rather like a network of solitary souls. The church underwent an evolution over the years, from lay ministry to ordained pastors, and ultimately presented less of a threat to the Puritans/Congregationalists than did the Friends.

Still, their insistence on a separation of church and state and their view of a church being comprised of fellow adult believers rather than a place one had to attend regardless of one’s heart and thinking were liberal and revolutionary.

Pestana’s description of the impact of the Great Awakening on the Baptist movement gives me a clearer understanding of why so many of its churches appeared in and around Dover – and the rest of New England – in the early 1800s.

As for Happy Hampton?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In New Hampshire, Hampton is often touted as Happy Hampton, at least in summer, reflecting its long, broad, honky-tonk ocean beach and the rock concerts at the casino. Let me warn you it can be pretty crowded this time of year. Inland a bit, it’s also known for the Hampton Tolls on Interstate 95, which can be a major travel delay.

In the colonial era, Hampton was renowned for its saltmarsh hay and related agriculture.

It was also the center of the colony’s other Quaker Meeting, one at least as old as Dover’s, as far as I can tell.

As I was researching my book, Quaking Dover, I kept wondering what happened to the Hampton Friends over time. And then I discovered that, like Dover, Hampton had small, neighborhood worship groups, or “preparative meetings,” that came together once a month to address their joint affairs and personal conduct. The monthly sessions rotated among the meetinghouses under the Monthly Meeting’s care, in Hampton’s case including Amesbury, Massachusetts, which became home to the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

Amesbury continues, while Hampton fell away long ago.

Since the boundary line between New Hampshire and Massachusetts kept shifting in the colonial era, sometimes reaching down to the Merrimack River – or Merrimac, as Massachusetts insisted – I feel safe in saying New Hampshire had two Monthly Meetings, while the Bay colony had only one, at Salem.

Either way, it could be a rich story in the telling.

Wilting as they lose local awareness

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As a newspaper editor, I was often startled in looking at coverage from the other side when something I was affiliated with was subject to a story. Or even more startling, when I was quoted and seeing how it looked it print.

It was like working in a restaurant kitchen and shipping dishes to the dining room and then, on a night off, going in for a celebratory dinner.

Seeing a report through the readers’ viewpoint really could be eye-opening. It’s not the “names-is-news” philosophy that many small-minded editors and publishers pursued, either. That approach could be even more boring than reading the phone book. Remember those?

The backbone of most of American newspapers has been the way they connect with their local communities. As one wise editor once told me, it should be news of local interest, rather than just happenings in the place itself. I spent much of my career trying to open parochial outlooks to an awareness of the wider world, both directions, and I do believe that can happen and even be exciting.

When I was calling on daily newspaper editors across the Northeast as a syndicate features field representative, I was surprised by how few of the papers gave a taste of a unique nature of each of the communities. Many of the editors thought of local news as city council and school board meetings plus high school sports scores. As I argue in my novel Hometown News, the real stories – the kind that come home – are found elsewhere and require more reportorial digging. That’s one reason I’ve long advocated local columnists (real writers, not dilettantes, though skilled amateurs are welcome). Few papers had even that much.

When former U.S. House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously proclaimed “All politics is local,” he understood those roots.

~*~

A decade after I’ve left the newsroom, I’m directly experiencing that again, or more accurately, its lack.

In the past 20 years, the number of people employed in newsrooms at American papers has dropped about 60 percent. That leaves far fewer people to write about what’s happening or even be aware of what’s going on at the grassroots level where they live. Much of the nuts-and-bolts editing is being done in clusters far from the paper itself, removing another layer of local nuance and understanding.

In my case, in my participation in events celebrating the 400th anniversary of the founding of Dover, I’m seeing the local paper is doing far less coverage than I would have expected. Not after the family that owned it for generations finally sold out to a media conglomerate.

That disconnect isn’t just print media, either. New Hampshire Public Radio no longer originates any content in the Granite State, as far as I can see. Two decades ago, appearing on one of its shows would have been a natural for a local author like me.

Quite simply, it’s disappointing and a bit scary.