Gerhardt's Civil War Memorial - Brooklyn, CT

From World War II battleships, we move to one of the common representations of the Civil War memorial, a lone soldier standing picket duty. This one is located in Brooklyn, Connecticut, sculpted by Karl Gerhardt.

The bronze figure stands atop a gray granite pedestal, approximately 30 feet in height, and was manufactured by the Ames Bronze Company of Chicopee, Mass. See this previous post on the Ames Manufacturing Company and its resident family of bronze founders, the Mosmans.

The Soldiers and Sailors Monument was dedicated June 14, 1888, the same day as the General Putnam statue in Brooklyn, as described in this previous post. It was a gift to the town from Thomas Smith Marlor, who had moved to Brooklyn, CT from New York City in 1870.

The sculptor, Gerhardt, who lived in Hartford, was a protégé of Mark Twain, and was 24 years old when he created this sculpture.

USS Massachusetts - Fall River

Stepping onto wooden deck on the USS Massachusetts, crowned by the jumble of steel tower, a maze of lower decks lined with seemly ended rows of canvas “racks”, and narrow ladders, and overall topped by a brass ship’s bell, you seem to step back in time. But step carefully.

The battleship was launched in September 1941, just a few months before Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese Empire and the United States formally entered World War II. It was built in Quincy, Mass. at the Fore River Shipyard. “Big Mamie” went into action in November 1942 off Casablanca.

Now, her lower decks containing displays of artifacts and memorabilia, and she lies as part of a smaller museum fleet here in Fall River, Mass., at Battleship Cove, along with the submarine Lionfish, and ships from the Cold War including the USS Joseph P. Kennedy.



For more on the history of the USS Massachusetts, and the displays at Battleship Cove, have a look at this website.

Bennington Moosefest

This painted moose greets you in Bennington, Vermont. He has several friends. All over town. Painted in all kinds of silly and beautiful designs.

The Bennington Moosefest is unlike any old home day you’ve probably been to, and I regret that I did not report on it in October when the Moosefest was in full swing. However, the moose are seen here and about all over the Bennington area, so if you’re looking for a pleasant drive with a series of most unusual photo ops, Bennington is the place for you.

Here is a website with more detail on the Moosefest, and be sure to mark your calendars for next year.

The Pilgrims and the Printing Press

Before we leave Thanksgiving behind us for another year, let’s recall that one of the items brought to the New World on the Mayflower we believe was a printing press, a large iron piece of which was used to shore up a splitting beam on the voyage.

The Mayflower Compact was handwritten, but this replica of the 1669 printed copy shows the printing press was just as instrumental at founding, and preserving, an equitable nation as the bonds of commonwealth established by the Mayflower Compact.

This 1723 printing of the Thanksgiving proclamation by the Lieutnant Governour and His Majesty’s representative in Massachusetts Bay boldly ends with the typical flourish GOD Save the King. While the Pilgrims may not have quite gone along with that, they might have been still more amazed at the level of freedom which a free press achieved, and would continue to thrive in a democracy the likes of which they never conceived.

Here is the Massachusetts Spy out of Worcester in 1775, only a few weeks after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, when “God Save the King” was replaced by “Liberty or Death!”

Here we have a less incendiary newspaper from Northampton, Mass. in more placid times of 1826, and from Holyoke, Mass. in 1882, when we see the dawn of the 20th Century brought advertising to a more prominent place in the media. The Holyoke Transcript, later the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram, has followed the path of many newspapers of the last twenty years and is now defunct.

Today we are losing our newspapers with alarming rapidity, but communication continues in its myriad forms. Keeping an open mind rather than choosing to read only news which pleasures but does not challenge, and opinion in which we are already in agreement is the worst form of tyranny, because it is self imposed. We seem to need to re-learn that every once in a while through the centuries.

These printing press photos are from Sturbridge Village. Go have a look at the printer plying his trade.

Pilgrim Monument, Plymouth, Mass.

Before there was Thanksgiving, and before there was Plymouth, Mass., there was this thin, curling, arm of sand upon which the Pilgrims landed before looking for more hospitable and more promising land to choose for new home.

This is the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown, at the very tip of Cape Cod. The tower, perched on High Pole Hill, rises 350 feet above sea level. The tallest all-granite tower in the U.S., it was constructed from 1907 to 1910, when President William Howard Taft came to dedicate the tower, a campanile in the design of Torre Del Mangia in Sienna, Italy. Next year in 2010, the monument celebrates its centennial.

The view from the top is spectacular, for there is nothing as tall as this for miles. The curve of the Cape can be seen (more clearly on some days than others when the fog and mist set in), and the cozy town of below, the wharves stretching outward, are all indications that Provincetown would not continue to be so bleak of prospects as the Pilgrims had imagined.

Looking eastward, we see the beginning of the Cape Cod National Seashore, with its natural setting, its dunes that are only some inches to some feet high and yet with a curious trick of perspective, seem like great hills. This part of Provincetown is likely how the Pilgrims saw the place when they first landed here, and how fortunate it is that has been preserved.

When they arrived on the Mayflower, sailing from Plymouth, England some 67 days before, the 102 passengers moored here for some five weeks while small parties explored the windswept, barren land. They composed and signed the Mayflower Compact, which they acknowledged and vowed that they were “straightly tied to all care of each other’s good and of the whole by everyone.”

You'll note that though the Pilgrims found on the tip of the Cape what they considered to be barren land, there was at least ample free parking.



Then it was a brief sail across Cape Cod Bay to a new “Plimoth”, and a new adventure.

For more on the Pilgrim Monument of Provincetown, Mass., have a look at this website.

Bridge of Flowers - Shelburne Falls, Mass.

One last look at one last flower before the snow falls. This bloom resides, or did reside, on the Bridge of Flowers in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. You can see through the rail another bridge opposite on which a car is passing. That other bridge is still in use for motor vehicles, but this bridge is active only for pedestrians and plants.

It had been a trolley bridge in 1908, curving over the Deerfield River, uniting one section of town with the other on the Shelburne Falls & Colrain Street Railway. This company went out of business in 1928. The following year, the abandoned trolley bridge was turned into this Bridge of Flowers by some ingenuity and perhaps a desire to not see such a practical piece of infrastructure go to waste.

Volunteers, and donations from the public, and a paid gardener, keep the bridge this way, season after season. For more on the Shelburne Falls Bridge of Flowers, have at look at this website, and this one.

1918 Influenza Epidemic in New England

We had touched upon the Influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 on my Tragedy and Comedy in New England blog last week. With the H1N1 flu and the regular flu season upon us, references are inevitably made to that mysterious pandemic which killed over 50 million people around the world. That flu likely had its origins at a Kansas military base in the spring of 1918, but by the autumn, Boston had noticed beginnings of the epidemic.

Navy physician Lt. (jg) J.J. Keegan was one of he earliest doctors puzzled by the new illness in August, 1918. Stationed at the Chelsea Naval Hospital, he began to see the wards filled with sailors of the First Naval District. The illness spread with frightening speed, and moved quickly beyond the service personnel into the civilian population by September. More than 1,000 died in Boston by the end of that month.

Navy personnel reported the first cases in New London, Connecticut on September 11th. By the end of October, there were over 180,000 cases in Connecticut. Boston’s situation was so severe, that an urgent plea was made for Connecticut doctors and nurses to come help. Similarly in Maine, naval ports of call such as Eastport and Portland were the first to receive reports of the illness.

New Hampshire suffered less than the other New England states, with more deaths occurring in the cities of Manchester and Nashua than in rural areas. Vermont, though similarly predominantly rural, suffered a greater outbreak of the illness. Rhode Island suffered about 50 days per day from September through November.

People nationwide were starting to die by the thousands. According to the excellent material here on the National Archives website on the epidemic, one-quarter of the U.S. population caught that flu, and the national life expectancy dropped 12 years. More information, including individual stories, is here on the website of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (including photos such as the one taken at Ft. Devens, Mass. above).

The epidemic, also called The Spanish Flu, killed more people than died in World War I. A strange and horrific finale to that war, this major disaster seemed to have been omitted from the study of popular history for decades, at least until new threats of the past few years with swine flu and avian flu made the old specter raise its head. We learned then, and need to remember now, that the best way to fight the flu is to take care not to spread it.