Cheryl Lassiter's Blog

Writing in the Hampton Union in the 1930s, historian Caroline Lamprey Shea informed her readers that the Puritans of Hampton had kept a bowling green in a field near the lower end of the road to the sea (Winnacunnet Road). Now, Puritans aren’t remembered for their tolerance of games and other time-wasting pursuits, but Mrs. Shea, who was the first secretary of the Meetinghouse Green Memorial and Historical Association, and whose ancestral roots sprang from the bedrock of the town’s earliest history, seemed sure of her information.

While it’s true that 17th-century immigrants brought games like English lawn bowles, card-playing, and shuffleboard to America, a reading of the Bay Colony’s laws, written by strict religionists, leads one to conclude that it wasn’t the Puritans who were doing the bringing. In England the game of bowling, along with most sports, was illegal for the poorer classes, and in Puritan Massachusetts (which until 1680 included Hampton) it was banned from inns and taverns—places where people were most likely to squander their time on such idle recreation. The Hampton bowling green, then, must have been in private hands, and its owner of sufficient wealth and status to silence any would-be critics.

The Rise of the Ten-Pin Alley
By the early 19th century, the game of bowling had crept indoors. The wooden lanes, scornfully referred to as “ten-pin alleys,” were cropping up everywhere, although the old Puritan mistrust of frivolity was still a strong deterrent. It wasn’t the game that detractors found objectionable, but the infernal rumbling and crashing noises that tended to interfere with Sunday sermons. Or so they said.

To address the issue, in 1845 Mr. Marston of Exeter proposed a bill in the New Hampshire House of Representatives to suppress bowling alleys once and for all, with a rather cranky Mr. Quimby of Danville moving that all bowling alleys should be deemed public nuisances. More moderate heads stepped in to satisfy the ministers, specifying that alleys were to be kept at least 25 rods (412.5 feet) away from any house, store, shop, school house, or church. The amended bill became law and was given to the towns as a local option. It’s unclear whether Hampton adopted its provisions, but Portsmouth did, and over the next several decades the congested Old Town by the Sea spent much time and energy trying to rid itself of its alleys, with little to no success. Newspapers of the day were filled with salacious reports of the shootings and stabbings that occurred in and around the alleys, which had become the “resorts of loafers, gamblers, and drunkards.”

The First Alley on Hampton Beach
The earliest known Hampton bowling alley was located on the premises of the first Ocean House Hotel. Built in 1844 by a member of the Nudd family, this hotel was an impressive four-story structure with an encircling piazza, full dining facilities, and room for 250 guests. It was operated on “strict temperance principles,” and there were no incidents of weapon-wielding troublemakers in its entire 41-year lifespan. Hampton, it seems, had more luck attracting a better class of people than her rowdy seaport neighbor.

The Village Gets an Alley
In spite (or because) of the regular bouts of bad press, the game steadily gained acceptance, and by 1900 had become an approved activity in the village of Hampton. Otis Whittier, the proprietor of the Hotel Whittier, felt confident in buying a two-lane alley, building and all, from an estate owned by Mrs. White of the Little Boar’s Head district in North Hampton. In June, local contractor Curtis Delancey used some three dozen horses and two yoke of oxen to transport the 60-foot-long building to the hotel on Lafayette Road, a distance of four miles. This alley, the first in Hampton village, was welcomed as a “healthful exercise” for the people of the town.

On a frigid winter’s day in 1917 the Whittier went up in flames, an apparent victim of arson (a common ending for tired old buildings). Firemen were able to save the bowling alley and other outbuildings, but, like Melzar Dunbar’s curiously round pool table at the Franklin House, the fate of the alley is lost to history. Was it moved to another location or torn down? Its lumber may have been salvaged to suit a different purpose, such as the “refreshment parlor” and cottages that were built on the site of the old hotel a few years later.

The Carnival Cottage Cold Case Solved
Some mysteries are never solved, especially where old buildings are concerned, but in this case, where one mystery began another one came to an end, as the question of the whereabouts of the missing “Carnival Cottage”—the subject of my April History Matters column—has been lately laid to rest.

As part of the Carnival Week celebration in 1923, the Hampton Beach Board of Trade awarded the cottage, a fully furnished and functional five-room house, to the holder of the winning Carnival Queen raffle ticket, one T. W. Litchfield of Lexington, Massachusetts. The winner had to move the house off the beach to a new lot, but news of its removal from the beachfront or the location of its eventual resting place never made it into the newspaper. A search for the deed of sale in the Rockingham County Registry of Deeds turned up empty.

Recently however, Hampton Historical Society President Candy Stellmach discovered a 1930s deed of sale for the cottage in the old Hampton Personal Property registers that are now part of the Society’s collections. According to the deed, the cottage was located on the south side of C Street, on a leased lot owned by the Exeter, Hampton and Amesbury Street Railway. A little more detective work found that the L-shaped house and the leased lot on which it stood had changed hands several times, finally passing into the possession of the Hampton Casino Associates—who in 1979 sold it to a former Vermont couple, Henry E. and Golda Campbell Farr. Through their efforts, what was once known as the Carnival Cottage became one of the most beloved summer eat shacks on the beach: Farr’s Famous Fried Chicken. If you're ever at Hampton Beach, a visit to Farr's is a must!

Original post (with photos) at https://lassitergang.com/2016/08/15/t...

Originally published in "History Matters, " Hampton Union, August 12, 2016.

Cheryl Lassiter's History Matters is devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Cheryl is the author of several books of local history, including “Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.” Her website is lassitergang.com.

A History Matters column by Cheryl Lassiter

(originally published in the Hampton Union, April 7, 2016).

During the thirty-nine years from 1915 to 1953, Carnival Week at Hampton Beach, New Hampshire was a Labor Day holiday tradition. Created by the local Board of Trade to extend the summer season, it was a week-long exhibition of vaudeville, games, parades, fireworks displays, and, until 1940, the Queen of the Carnival contest and coronation.

For the young ladies who vied for the title of Queen, the only requirement was the ability to sell “popularity votes” at ten cents apiece. The one who sold the most tickets was declared the winner, and the selling was amazingly sharp—in 1915 seventeen-year-old Blanche Thompson of Haverhill, Massachusetts sold 3,000 tickets to win the title of Queen of the Carnival; in 1922 sixteen-year-old Constance Block of North Hampton, New Hampshire sold 11,000 tickets to win.

The nexus of the first twenty-six Carnivals was the Mardi Gras crowning of the Queen, a fanciful affair held on a temporary, open-air stage set between the police station and bandstand on the beachfront. Led by the Hampton Beach concert band, hundreds of costumed revelers—including the Queen, her chosen king, and a retinue of ladies-in-waiting, heralds, pages, and court jester—paraded down the boulevard to the stage. The royalty-elect were crowned with as much pomp and circumstance as King Carnival and his “bold, bad pirate gang” of merry-makers could muster.

Thousands of spectators crowded the hotel verandas, the boulevard, and the beach to witness the splendiferous pageantry and the confetti battles that followed.

Once the Queen was safely crowned and the contest-ticket connection severed, the Board of Trade was free to recycle the tickets into a drawing for a new Ford or Chevrolet car. It was a clever way to get around the state’s lottery laws, and only once, after complaints by local church groups in 1920, was the contest shut down as an illegal raffle.

The Portable House

In 1923, rather than give away another $500 automobile, the Board of Trade offered a five-room “portable” house worth several thousand dollars, which they managed to squeeze in between the entertainment stage and the police station. Contractors plumbed and electrified the house, and the Atherton-Peoples Furniture Company of Haverhill, Massachusetts furnished it. The Queen of the Carnival contestants sold twenty-five cent admission tickets for a tour of the interior, although the Board of Trade hardly bothered to disguise the fact that the price of admission also bought a chance to win the house. The winning ticket holder would have to move the prize to his or her own lot, at an estimated cost of $100.

The presence of this “carnival cottage” was not welcomed by everyone. “Do You Know,” pondered the editor of the Hampton Beach News-Guide in his usual tongue-in-cheek style, “That many beach residents believe that the town authorities are absolutely wrong in allowing a summer house to occupy a choice space on the beachfront merely because the house happens to be mounted on wheels and is propelled by a gasoline engine?”

Despite grumblings that the house took up too much prime real estate at the height of the summer season, it remained in place on the beach. The ladies continued to sell their tickets, even enlisting family and friends to help. The winner that year was Bertha Dupleissis of Manchester, New Hampshire, who chose as her king James Coffey of Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

At the close of Carnival Week a ticket was drawn in the name of T. W. Litchfield of Lexington, Massachusetts. What happened to the portable house after that is a mystery. Did Litchfield take the house or walk away? Was it moved to a lot on Hampton Beach? We may never find out, but I’m hoping some wise reader might know the answer to the question: “Where’d it go?”

100-Year History of the Hampton Beach Queens

Please join me at the Tuck Museum, Thursday, August 18, 6:30 p.m., when Karen Raynes and I will present a program on the 100-year history of the Carnival queens and Miss Hampton Beach.

Link to article with images of the 1923 Hampton Beach Carnival cottage.

History Matters is a monthly Hampton Union column (seacoastonline.com) devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Cheryl Lassiter is the author of “Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.” Her website is lassitergang.com.

Even though it seems that the world is rushing all around us into the future, we are living in a time of gathering together the past. People everywhere are seeking their roots, wanting to know - whom am I? where did I come from? I like to do my tiny part from my area of New England by unearthing little-known or unknown stories in which their ancestors may have played a part. The payoff to that research is a happy reader - like Jonathan from San Antonio, Texas, who is researching his New Hampshire Jenness ancestors. I received an email from him recently in which he says:

I want to thank you for your wonderful work putting together "The Mark of Goody Cole" and "A Meet and Suitable Person.” What a true pleasure to read, and you have my most sincere respect. I love the way you navigate the historical story while you keep and command the mystery and excitement of its unfolding...You brought those somewhat confusing court transcripts into the light. I wasn't certain I knew exactly what to make of my early Great Grandmother Mary Estow Marston's testimony, when I found it a few years ago. Now I am clear, and I understand more about the other characters and happenings of that time. You have opened my world."

I have to admit, that kind of response makes my whole month, and is a great shield for fending off the inevitable (but no less valuable) slings-and-arrows reviews.

With much appreciation to my readers,

Cheryl

Thanks to all readers who entered my last giveaway of Marked. The books are in the mail to the two winners. I hope they enjoy the story and take the time to post a review on Goodreads!

With much appreciation,

CheryL

The Witch: A New England Folktale is the debut film of writer/director Robert Eggers, who hails from southern New Hampshire, one of the oldest English-settled regions in America, famous for creepy folktales and ghostly hauntings, and, of course, steeped in the memory of the Salem witchcraft trials and Goodwife Cole, the Witch of Hampton.

Aside from wanting to see a good horror flick, I was curious to see the results of Eggers's efforts to accurately portray a 17th-century setting and capture the Puritan zeitgeist. I'm no expert, but I was impressed with the attention lavished on the details of dress, speech, culture, and living spaces.

Seventeenth-century Massachusetts was a dirty, grubby, sickness-infested wilderness - yet one in which the majority of the people managed to thrive, mainly by sticking together as a community -- so when Eggers's antinomian farmer and his family are banished from the town, the lesson they learn (the hard way) is that conformity is a good thing...if you want to survive.

Like The Witch, my own book, Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole (1656-1680), is set in the Puritan world of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Eggers' film offers a little window into that tumultuous time --when the veil between the worlds was especially thin -- in a most entertaining and spooky way.

Show your support for 2016's extra day of reading by entering my Leap Day giveaway of MARKED: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.

"Puritan superstition meets an indomitable will in this richly researched, groundbreaking biography of Goodwife Unise Cole, the woman known as the Witch of Hampton."

A History Matters column first published in the Hampton Union on February 19, 2016.

IT’S NO SURPRISE THAT OUR PRESIDENTAL elections always fall in the Year of the Monkey, a Chinese astrological cycle rife with the potential for all manner of monkey business—trickery, discord, even chaos to the point of pandemonium.

The year 1692 had been a Monkey year, too, one that in New England fully lived up to its reputation.

To set the stage, in June 1689 Hampton (New Hampshire) town clerk Henry Dow was going about his business as usual—planting his corn, mending his barn, cutting timbers for a vessel he was building. On Sunday the twenty-third, his day of weekly rest was shattered by an Indian alarm raised in Portsmouth. Coming as it did during a period of relative peace, the alarm had its skeptics. Better safe than sorry was Henry’s creed, and for the next five days he set aside his saw and hoe to “hail” his townsmen to the danger of attack. Twenty miles to the north at Cocheco, the famous Indian deceiver Major Richard Waldron also had received rumblings of strange Indians in the area, but unlike our vigilant Henry, he foolishly chose to ignore them.

The tomahawk fell in the early morning hours of June 28. Houses sacked and burned, scores of settlers captured or killed, 80-year-old Waldron tortured to death in his home, his body gleefully mutilated by enemies who had come to settle old scores. Before the sun had reached its zenith, messengers were shouting out the dire details from horseback as they raced south to alert the Massachusetts militia. The English would point to Cocheco as the spark that ignited the nine-year conflict known as King William’s War.

King William’s War

Since the overthrow of the sitting English monarch in late 1688, the imperial glue that held the New England colonies together had dissolved, their governor-general deposed and held captive in Boston. With Roman Catholics and Anglicans occupying the highest seats of power, this sudden vacuum of authority failed to distress the Puritans of Hampton, an independent-minded lot if ever there was one. They were, however, in a state of alarm over the Cocheco massacre.

One week after the raid, the men of Hampton chose Henry Dow and others to attend a meeting of the New Hampshire towns to decide what should be done for their “peace and safety.” And, “to secure themselves and their families from the violence of the heathen,” they voted to build a fortification around their meeting house.

Hampton was made part of a cobbled-together regional defense force. Every man over the age of 16 was bound to serve, and many fathers, sons, and brothers took up arms together. The Towle twins, Joseph and Benjamin, went to Wells under Captain Sam Sherburne; Thomas Nudd and his son Samuel, Sgt. John Smith and his son John, Abraham Drake and his son Robert, Joseph Dow, Sr. and his son Joseph—all did garrison duty together. Henry Dow, now in his mid-50s, did garrison duty several times a month, sometimes “a-warding” for his sons Simon and Samuel.

Henry also kept account of the town’s militia men. The preserved remnant of this mouse-eaten record divulges that the standard time served was 37 days, at a rate of one shilling per day; that Hampton men scouted the nearby woods; posted messages to Portsmouth, Haverhill, and Exeter; soldiered at Wells, Cocheco, Exeter, and Lamprey River; chased Indians north to the shores of Winnipesaukee and west to Pennecook on the Merrimack River. Men who stayed at home billeted and fed out-of-town soldiers and took up arms “in defense of their garrison the town and country.”

The Year of the Monkey

The year 1692 more than satisfied the Monkey’s potential for chicanery and chaos. The tragedies of that time still haunt us today, their effects frothing into the following years like an overfilled pot of misery. It began in January with the French and Wabanaki visiting death and destruction on the settlement of York, Maine and the heretofore well-mannered girls of Salem Village unleashing their own bizarre brand of terror. They writhed, twitched, and in time accused nearly 200 persons of witchcraft. Town constables and jailers were hard put to keep up with the bedazzled magistrates’ thirst for arrest warrants and imprisonments.

Into the midst of this welling cauldron of conflict stepped Sir William Phips—swashbuckling, barely literate, stamped with the reluctant imprimatur of the English Crown—to reimpose the royal will and to save the northern colonies from their “thousand perplexities and entanglements.” Boston took the measure of Sir Phips, and as usual, observed where best to insert the blade.

The men of Hampton, meanwhile, having endured three years of a huddled existence within their meeting house palisade periodically awash with distraught goodwives and crying children, voted to expand the cramped fortification by rebuilding it “between the minister’s house, the prison, and the meeting house.” Men would have “liberty” to build private houses inside the fort, “according to the custom in other forts.”

The Monkey marched on. By the time the corn in Salem Village was waist-high, six women had been convicted of witchcraft and hanged. The people of Hampton could hardly be blamed if they worried that the contagion might leak northward. They had endured their own brushes with the Devil, the last one just twelve years earlier (another Monkey year). Rachel Fuller, a young mother of three who fancied herself a healer, had been accused of murdering her neighbor’s child with witchcraft. She was jailed but never brought to trial. The memory of the trauma had faded, but Rachel and other named witches still lived in town. Now under constant threat of Indian attack, striving to settle a permanent minister, their land rights jeopardized by a carnival of inept officials, it seemed that a new storm of witchcraft might just well destroy the town.

Sir Phips ceded the witchcraft worries to the experts while he concentrated on matters more mundane, commissioning Major Benjamin Church, who knew a thing or two about fighting Indians, to lead a force of men into Maine to fight their earthly foes. To that end, Henry Dow was out and about on July 28 rounding up men for the “present expedition to the eastward.” By the next day he had the names of eight volunteers; all were unmarried, the youngest, twenty-one, the oldest, forty-four: Ichabod Roby, Abraham Cole, Jr., Jonathan Moulton, Ben Taylor, James Crafford, Joseph Cram, Nehemiah Hobbs, and Henry’s youngest son, Jabez. Henry shepherded his volunteers to Great Island, where they boarded a ship to join the main force of 450 soldiers at Boston.

Accompanying the Church expedition, Phips supervised the building of a large stone fortress at Pemaquid, a jut of land on the rocky Maine coast, the Crown’s eastern line in the sand between English and French America. The Hampton volunteers may have worked on the fort, named William Henry, or they may have gone with Major Church on what would prove to be a fruitless search for the enemy.

In-mid August, Hampton tavernkeeper Love Sherburne received news that her mother, Frances Hutchins of Haverhill, had been carted off to Salem’s jail, accused of afflicting the Salem girls. She would ultimately be spared, but by late September the count of those hanged at Salem Village had reached nineteen. One man was pressed to death for obstinately refusing to enter a plea when he was charged with witchcraft. When Phips returned to Boston at the end of the month, he was appalled to learn that his own wife had been accused. No longer able to sidestep the issue, he ended the trials, and as a salve to his outraged chief justice ordered a new court to try the cases, but without the use of “spectral evidence.” By May 1693 he had pardoned the remaining accused and ordered their release from prison.

Treaty of Pemaquid

Phips had quelled the juvenile terrorists of 1692, but the war dragged its feet until he and the chief sagamores of the eastern tribes smoked the peace pipe in late summer 1693. When a copy of their treaty made its way to Hampton, Henry Dow wrote down its most significant passage (in his own unique shorthand) along with the names of the native signers and the three Indians taken hostage as a “pledge of good faith.” ** This treaty turned out to be little more than a much-needed cease fire.

“The people had a respite from hostilities for about a year,” wrote Joseph Dow, the fourth great grandson of Henry Dow. Then, on a warm summer day in 1694, “a large number of Indians fell upon the settlement at Oyster River (Durham); took three garrisons, burned thirteen houses, and killed or carried into captivity ninety-four persons. Other outrages followed,” including the destruction of Sir Phips’s Pemaquid fortress.

All things run their course, including men, munitions, and the money to pay for them. War had exhausted both sides, and in 1697 the English and French concluded a treaty of peace. The following year the eastern Indians made peace with the English. This ended the hostilities—for the next four years, anyway, another Monkey year.

**The shorthand notation reads: “In a due course of Justice the Indians submit to be ruled by their Majesties laws and desire to benefit of the same.” Translation by Cheryl Lassiter from Henry Dow's Journal 1672-1702. The Herbert H. Dow Museum in Midland MI owns the original journal; the Hampton Historical Society was given a bound copy. To see the journal page, go to http://lassitergang.com/2016/02/21/th...

History Matters is a monthly column devoted to the history of Hampton and Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. Cheryl Lassiter is the author of “Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.” Follow her @hamptonwriter, on Facebook, or at lassitergang.com.

LEAP DAY GIVEAWAY! To show my gratitude for one extra day of reading this year, I'm giving away two (2) copies of Marked: The Witchcraft Persecution of Goodwife Unise Cole.

The giveaway starts February 22, 2016 and runs through February 29, Leap Day. Watch for it and enter for a chance to win a signed copy.

"Puritan superstition meets an indomitable will in this groundbreaking biography of Goodwife Unise Cole, the woman known as the Witch of Hampton."

"An excellent story told in wonderful detail, this book beautifully captures life in the 1600s. Goody Cole is at times portrayed as a sympathetic character; she was also her own worst enemy. Painstakingly researched, this is a treat for anyone who wants insight into the witch mania of early colonial days." – Mike on Goodreads.

A big !!Thanks!! to the over 500 Goodreads readers who entered my giveaway for A Meet and Suitable Person. And, of course, congratulations to the two winners!

The signed copies are in the mail. As with my other giveaways, winners receive a bookmark (fancy tassel and all!) and a surprise bonus book.

I hope the two winners will favor me with a review (for better or worse) on Goodreads. To paraphrase rock guitarist David Gilmour, "where would writers be without feedback?"

With much appreciation,
Cheryl

January has been a good month of sales for Marked. I just wanted to thank all those who have been opening their pocketbooks and wallets to buy the book.