Union Army general and Medal of Honor recipient
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23 episodes with joshua chamberlain
4 episodes with joshua chamberlain
2 episodes with joshua chamberlain
2 episodes with joshua chamberlain
2 episodes with joshua chamberlain
In honor of Memorial Day and Military Appreciation Month, this special episode of Big Blend Radio's Way Back When show explores two pivotal military history destinations—Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Gela, Sicily—revealing the powerful stories they hold and the enduring human cost of war. Author and military historian Mir Bahmanyar shares the gripping history of Gela, the first European city liberated during World War II. Hear his recent interview with us covering his acclaimed book "The Houdini Club: The Epic Journey and Daring Escapes of the First Army Rangers of WWII" here: https://blendradioandtv.com/listing/mir-bahmanyar-the-houdini-club/ Author Matthew Langdon Cost delves into Gettysburg and the heroic efforts of Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine during the Civil War's most decisive battle, depicted in his historical novel "At Every Hazard: Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War. " More than a look back, this conversation invites listeners to visit these historic places, reflect on the profound human sacrifices made, and gain a deeper appreciation for both soldiers and civilians affected by war. Learn more about our guests: -- Mir Bahmanyar: https://www.mirbahmanyar.com/ -- Matthew Langdon Cost: https://www.mattcost.net/ Chapters: 00:00 – Honoring Sacrifice: Memorial Day Reflections 03:05 – The Human Cost of War 06:01 – Patriotism and Personal Choices 09:08 – The Impact of War on Society 12:13 – Documenting the Stories of War 15:04 – The Houdini Club: Tales of Resilience 23:40 – Exploring Sicily's Historical Significance 28:01 – The Dark Side of Technology and Warfare 30:20 – The Power of Technology for Good 32:10 – Introduction to Gettysburg and Joshua Chamberlain 35:22 – The Pivotal Role of Joshua Chamberlain 41:04 – The Importance of Historical Memory 46:01 – The Significance of Gettysburg Today Listen to more episodes of Way Back When: https://way-back-when-history.podbean.com/
America's wars have produced a legion of heroes. But historian Ronald C. White focuses us on the story of Maine's Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, a Civil War lion whose service in war and in peace still resonates today. White is the author of two New York Times bestselling biographies, “A. Lincoln: A Biography,” and “American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant,” which won the William Henry Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography. His latest book, “On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain,” was published in 2023 and is a USA Today national bestseller. He has also written, “Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural,” a New York Times Notable Book, “The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words,” a Los Angeles Times bestseller, and “Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President,” which received of the 2021 Barnondess/Lincoln award. White is a graduate of UCLA and Princeton Theological Seminary and received a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is a Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum in Washington, D.C. and has taught at UCLA, Whitworth University, Colorado College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has lectured at the White House and been featured on the PBS NewsHour. He has spoken on Lincoln in England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and New Zealand. He lives with his wife Cynthia in Pasadena California.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Ronald C. White, Senior Fellow at the Trinity Forum and author of On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, joins the show to talk about the hero of Little Round Top, Joshua L. Chamberlain. ▪️ Times • 01:37 Introduction • 01:51 Why Chamberlain? • 09:01 Fighting for the Union • 14:05 The 20th Maine • 18:10 Arriving at Gettysburg • 21:34 The 15th & 47th Alabama • 24:25 “Bayonets” • 29:31 Fighting for Grant • 33:40 Appomattox • 35:53 Home • 29:31 Battle Cry of Freedom Follow along on Instagram Find a transcript of today's episode on our School of War Substack
Episode Four “The Passing of the Armies,” our continuing weekly podcast series that explores the memoir written by Civil War General, Joshua Chamberlain, and released the year after his death in 1915. We hope you enjoy the series. This is Episode Four where we begin Chapter Two, “The Overture.” Sign up for our twice monthly email Newsletter SOCIAL: YouTube Twitter Facebook Website --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-child/support
Episode Three “The Passing of the Armies,” our continuing weekly podcast series that explores the memoir written by Civil War General, Joshua Chamberlain, and released the year after his death in 1915. We hope you enjoy the series. This is Episode Three where we conclude Chapter One, “The Situation.” Sign up for our twice monthly email Newsletter SOCIAL: YouTube Twitter Facebook Website --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-child/support
PREVIEW: MAINE: 1880: Conversation with Ronald White, author, ON GREAT FIELDS, re the life of the hero of Little Round Top, Joshua Chamberlain, re the stand Chamberlain made in 1880 to face down a mob at the Augusta Statehouse. More tonight. 1879 Augusta Maine Statehouse
Episode Two “The Passing of the Armies,” our continuing weekly podcast series that explores the memoir written by Civil War General, Joshua Chamberlain, and released the year after his death in 1915. We hope you enjoy the series. This is Episode Two where we begin Chapter One, “The Situation.” Sign up for our twice monthly email Newsletter SOCIAL: YouTube Twitter Facebook Website --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-child/support
Episode One “The Passing of the Armies,” our new weekly podcast series that explores the memoir written by Civil War General, Joshua Chamberlain, and released the year after his death in 1915. We hope you enjoy the series. This is Episode One where Chamberlain provides some backstory.” Sign up for our twice monthly email Newsletter SOCIAL: YouTube Twitter Facebook Website --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/robert-child/support
Paul Harvey - Joshua Chamberlain
Ep 046 – Nonfiction. Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and professor. During the U.S. Civil War, he rose to fame as one of the North's greatest heroes. Ronald C. White joins me to discuss his book, “On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.”Support local bookstores & buy Ron's book here: https://bookshop.org/a/92235/9780525510086Subscribe to the War Books podcast here:YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@warbookspodcastApple: https://apple.co/3FP4ULbSpotify: https://spoti.fi/3kP9scZFollow the show here:Twitter: https://twitter.com/warbookspodcastFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/warbookspodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/warbookspodcast/War Books Podcast is a podcast dedicated to exploring history by interviewing today's best authors writing about war-related topics. War Books Podcast aims to spotlight the profound historical moments that have shaped war and conflict throughout history, and highlight today's best writers in the fields of military history, war studies, war writing, current events, politics, fiction, literature, history, and more. This podcast is tailored to a broad audience, from general interest to war enthusiasts to teachers and history professors. The objective is to inform, educate, and think deeply about the nature of conflict and the stories that define human beings at their most perilous, harrowing moments.#history #war #warbooks #authorinterviews #book #newbook #historyteacher #historyprofessor #bookstagram #instabooks #reels #reelsvideo #bookreels #library #historybook #reading #conflict #bookshelf #bookstore #shortsclip #shortscraft #shortsbook #shortshistory #historyfacts #historychannel #historybuff #historyofwar #militaryhistory #warwriting
The lesser known aspects of Chamberlain's life, as well as his Civil War legacy
Before 1862, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain had rarely left his home state of Maine, where he was a trained minister and mild-mannered professor at Bowdoin College. His colleagues were shocked when he volunteered for the Union army, but he was undeterred and later became known as one of the North's greatest heroes: On the second day at Gettysburg, after running out of ammunition at Little Round Top, he ordered his men to wield their bayonets in a desperate charge down a rocky slope that routed the Confederate attackers. Despite being wounded at Petersburg—and told by two surgeons he would die—Chamberlain survived the war, going on to be elected governor of Maine four times and serve as president of Bowdoin College. How did a stuttering young boy come to be fluent in nine languages and even teach speech and rhetoric? How did a trained minister find his way to the battlefield? To explore Chamberlain's fascinating story is today's guest, Ronald White, author of “On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.” He is presented from cradle-to-grave in all his ideals, tenacity, and contradictions.This show is part of the Spreaker Prime Network, if you are interested in advertising on this podcast, contact us at https://www.spreaker.com/show/3101278/advertisement
In this episode of The Thinking Leader, Bryce Hoffman and Marcus Dimbleby talk about the Battle of Gettysburg and the power of letting your front line workers think for themselves. At the Battle of Gettysburg, Col. Joshua Chamberlain held the last line of defense against the Confederates before Washington DC by considering the intent of his orders rather than following the direct wording. By empowering your frontline workers to think for themselves, your business will see much better results. Companies such as Toyota and Wholefoods have enabled their employees to make decisions in the best interest of the business. Allowing workers to make important decisions causes the wellbeing of the business to be everyone's responsibility, which builds a cooperative workplace and ultimately makes your employees feel valued. In this episode: What the Battle of Gettysburg teaches us about empowering your workforce Why it is important for your workers to understand the intent of instructions How to empower your frontline employees to do the right thing Why your front line workers are best placed to spot serious problems How to run meetings to get the best out of your employees Sign up to the Red Team Thinking Community - Use the coupon code THINKINGLEADER for a free 30-day trial: https://community.redteamthinking.com/checkout/general-membership Want to find out if you're a Red Team Thinker? Click here to take a free assessment and get your personalized report: https://www.redteamthinking.com/rttassessment Visit our website: https://redteamthinking.com Watch this episode on YouTube: www.red-team.tv Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/redteamthinking/ Connect with Bryce: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brycehoffman/ Connect with Marcus: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcusdimbleby/ Bestselling business author Bryce Hoffman and agility expert Marcus Dimbleby talk about decision making, strategy, resilience and leadership with some of the world's best CEOs, cognitive scientists, writers, and thinkers in this weekly podcast. Each episode offers new ideas and insights you can use to become a better leader and a better thinker – because bad leaders react, good leaders plan, and great leaders think!
The battle fought in and around Gettysburg, was the deadliest battle ever fought on U.S. soil. As Confederate soldiers approached Gettysburg on the first day of July, they were unaware that Union troops were already occupying the town. As opposing forces collide, a skirmish erupts almost by accident. It quickly escalates into the largest battle ever fought in the western hemisphere. Over the next three days, a total of 170,000 soldiers clashed in and around Gettysburg. Over three days of intense fighting, 50,000 men would be sacrificed. Three days that changed American history forever. Many heroic actions took place here. But according to some, it was the decision of one individual that turned the tide of the war — Joshua Chamberlain
Brigadier General Strong Vincent played a KEY ROLE in winning the Battle of Gettysburg. We'll give you one guess who told the now famous Joshua Chamberlain where to hold the line at Little Round Top.Yup...(then) Colonel Strong Vincent. Join us as we explore the life and history of a lawyer from Erie, Pennsylvania - turned hero at Gettysburg.The Life and History of Strong VincentStrong Vincent at Little Round Top the Battle of Gettysburg (on location)---Walk with History & Talk with History⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Want to have a question featured on our next podcast?⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Leave us a 5 star review and ask us your questions!!-------------------------------------------------------This is a Walk With History production
Matthew Cutler Joshua Chamberlain Society 11-11-22 by
JCS President Matt Cutler explains their mission that makes them unlike any other organization to serve veterans by "adopting" those who were severely wounded. For more about the 12th Annual Price of Freedom Gala, visit: https://www.chamberlainsociety.org/events/https://www.chamberlainsociety.org/events/
It is hard for us to comprehend the impact of one decision. But history is filled with moments where one decision changed the world. Today Reba shares one of her favorite stories from the Civil War and how one decision impacted a battle, a war, and a nation.
Gettysburg is a 1993 American epic war film about the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War. Written and directed by Ronald F. Maxwell, the film was adapted from the 1974 historical novel The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. It features an ensemble cast, including Tom Berenger as James Longstreet, Jeff Daniels as Joshua Chamberlain, Martin Sheen as Robert E. Lee, Stephen Lang as George Pickett, and Sam Elliott as John Buford.Purchase the CD used in our show at Gettysburg CD (classicalmusicdiscoveries.store)
Matt Cost was a history major at Trinity College. He owned a mystery bookstore, a video store, and a gym, before serving a ten-year sentence as a junior high school teacher. In 2014 he was released and began writing. And that's what he does. He writes histories and mysteries. "Love in a Time of Hate" is the third historical by Cost. "Joshua Chamberlain and the Civil War; At Every Hazard", was published in 2015, in which Emmett Collins grows into manhood during the Civil War. "I am Cuba" was published in 2020. It was recently awarded the silver award for historical fiction from Kops-Fetherling. Cost has also published the Mainely Mystery series including "Mainely Power" (the MHC Read ME fiction book of the year), "Mainely Fear", and "Mainely Money". The fourth book in the series, "Mainely Angst", will be published in January of 2022. He has begun the Clay Wolfe/Port Essex Trap series with "Wolfe Trap" and "Mind Trap" "Mouse Trap" will be published in the spring of 2022 and "Cosmic Trap" in the fall of 2022. Cost now lives in Brunswick, Maine, with his wife, Harper. There are four grown children: Brittany, Pearson, Miranda, and Ryan. A chocolate Lab and a basset hound round out the mix. He now spends his days at the computer, writing.https://www.mattcost.net/ Today's episode is brought to you by John's full series of crime thrillers available right now. You can get them through Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/John-A.-Hoda/e/B00BGPXBMM%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share You can also sign up for the newsletter at http://www.JohnHoda.com to get a free copy of John's new novella Liberty City Nights. Thank you for listening. If you have a moment to spare please leave a rating or comment on Apple Podcasts as that will help us expand the circle around our campfire. If you have any questions please feel to reach out to me via my website http://www.johnhoda.com
Grandpa Bill asks :What about history intrigues you? Grandpa Bill will use his years of experience to provide in-depth, actionable advice for business owners just like you. Register for this event by July 5th and submit questions relating to your business's strategic goals for a chance to VIEW INTRODUCTORY INFO for you to edify yourself and decide IS This For Me? This is applicable to both Income Streams CTFO & The Coolest Collectable Coin Club! Become part of my other Business Stream Opportunity at CTFO-upcoming webinar next Sunday 7/10/22 CONTACT ME AT MY ANCHOR RADIO SHOW if you would like to receive an invite at that event Discover just how much fun coin collecting can be when you join the Coolest Coin Collectors Club Grandpa Bill will show you how with this program you can participate in exclusive activities to collect coins and learn about numismatics, actually bid in Coin Drops and make friends in the process. Grandpa Bill Encourages ALL young person's with or WITHOUT an interest in coin collecting-to introduce yourselves to the concepts of beating inflation, recession, and even a looming depression while having fun in doing so Have fun while sharpening your coin collecting skills and numismatic knowledge with these interactive shows that I am attempting to laugh over this Summer and beyond. This is a referral business I ask and need your word of mouth help paying it forward, and of course interested parties signing up themselves. Ideas for students/parents to induce students paying them and them paying themselves in gold and silver hedging th broken Western Fiat Based System --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bhsales/message
The strangers that met at a crossroads... are dealt their fate. Let us tell y'all a story. Deadlands: The Crossroads is a 14 episode story involving 25+ players. Thank you so much for joining us. Content Warnings: horror themes, language, adult themes, violence and gore including gun violence. Lauren Hottinger as Mina Devlin: https://twitter.com/HottingerLauren Doug Holley as Joshua Chamberlain: https://twitter.com/DougGbq Caleb Miller as Jonah Ward: https://twitter.com/Ginsbergsong Katy Brennan as Willie Colestock: https://twitter.com/katyolady K. Meza as Finley Ledoras: https://twitter.com/theminiarcanist Bob McDonald as Jesse Richards: https://twitter.com/stageoutlaw Paul Vincent as Luthor Richter: https://twitter.com/TableCatGames Kerri Smith as the Game Marshal: https://linktr.ee/KerriSmith2012
20th maineJoshy chamby chamesghosts of nywritings of chamberlainsee page 896quivering moustachesmore sourcesI'm not a school child, MLA format can suck a fat one anotha onegoogle the gettysburg addressHey everybody, welcome back to another Thursday episode of nightmare now! Where we laugh about lurid lore and learn about lost languishing laments in layman's terms and lay on the levity talking about loss, life, love and in today's show, liberty. I thought it might be fitting to do our first foray into ghost and war stories on the week of memorial day. And what better american veteran to cover than the man, the myth, the legend, MC dolla bill ya boi george washington himself. Memorial day was first celebrated as a holiday in 1868, known then as decoration day to honor union soldiers in the civil war. Now as far as George Washington and the civil war goes you've got a couple of takes on it. The joke take is that sure, Washington was there in the flesh. The broke take is that Washington wasn't there at all, after all my man died in december of 1799 and the civil war wasn't for another sixty years or so. From April of 1861 to May of 65. The Woke take is that Washington's ideals and legacy inspired people on both sides to fight for the America that they believed he founded. But then we get up to the straight bespoke take that George Washington's ghost literally showed up at gettysburg in july of 1863 with a f**king lightsaber to turn the tide of battle like he's obi wan kenobi. This episode of Nightmare Now brought to you by disney plus. Glad to have you all here and I'm very excited and pleased to announce, thanks to you yes you with the headphones, that we hit 500 overall downloads, that's a fun milestone and I'm super pumped about it and the future, watching that number grow, but more importantly what that number represents, and that's you the listener deciding to listen to this greasy little show when there's millions of others out there competing for your time. It truly means a lot to me so thank you all so much!Now back to our regular scheduled programming about jedi george washington. Some of you history nerds may have heard this story before, I know I have, but I never actually looked too far into it until this week. And especially all the non americans listening might not have heard this either but lets just jump right into it. As far as the civil war goes we're zooming in on major part of it, the battle of gettysburg, but we're gonna keep zooming in further to one of the more famous parts of that most famous battle. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th maine infantry holding the strategic little round top. Gettysburg and even this particular skirmish within the three or four day battle of gettysburg are kind of outside the scope of this episode. I defineitely want to do a deep dive on the civil war, and probably gettysburg specifically, but the short version is like 6000 people died and like thirty thousand f**king people were injured, and most of them probably died later because medicine in the civil war was bascially just amputation and hoping for the best. Lotta blood lotta screaming, bullets blew apart in you and you died of infection most of the time. Not really a good time for anyone I reckon. Gettysburg ended up being one of the turning points, if not THE turning point of the American Civil war. The defense of the little round top, was part of the reason that the union won gettysburg because like the obi wan kenobi analogy from before, it was the high ground. Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine fought off two waves of a larger force of confederate troops to defend the hill but eventually ran very low on ammo. With another wave incoming chamberlain and his famously quivering mustache yelled to fix bayooonnnneeettteeesss! And led his boys to charge down the hill in a last ditch defensive offensive bluff. Nobody is gonna fault the confederates for scattering after this lunatic gambit, because seeing your buddies shot is one thing, but seeing them skewered on a bayonet by a whole company of charging berserk soldiers is another thing entirely. This scattering and screaming and battle of quivering mustaches is a quintessential moment in american history. So how does george washington, I wanted to be dramatic and add his middle name there but apparently middle names weren't' really a thing until the 1830s. Kind of a neat little tidbit there. Anyway how does george washington fit into all this?While the story is mostly legend, it's actually referenced in primary sources about the battle from members of the 20th Maine themselves and even Joshua Chamberlain himself. Big fan of this dude, being a Maine boy myself I gotta rep the home team. Sorry to all my war of northern aggression listeners. So picture the scene, the 20th Maine infantry division, at it's maximum comprised of a little over 1600 people, I don't know how many of them were actually at gettysburg, because a number of them had died or otherwise been taken out of battle by a faulty smallpox v a c c i n e, (not trying to have this episode pulled for disinformation) that'll have to be another episode. So they're walking in towards Gettysburg. They don't have tanks or cars or anything obviously but they come to a fork in the road. They're map is totally out of date and they have no idea which way to go, one road leads to where they need to go and the other will send them down a wild goose chase away from the battle in the coming days. Not to mention it is at this point nearing the dead of night and even if their map was correct it would be hard to read and hard to navigate. According to witnesses an imposing man on horseback, dressed in revolutionary costume and a tricorn hat emerged conveniently and unexpectedly from behind a tree and pointed them in the right direction, saying that they were going to be needed in the ensuing fight. The men didn't really have anything else to go on and the man had a familiar look to him that they trusted. He seemed like he couldn't lie. Something something cherry tree. A few days later the 20th Maine was in their most famous battle and ammunition was running horrifically short. If you saw jeff bridges in gettysburg or listened to the last five minutes of the show you know what happened next, the famous bayonet charge. But what the movie and textbooks generally leave out is that the mysterious figure that guided them down the right, fateful road made yet another appearance at this pivotal moment. So chamberlain weighs their options, if they stand and fight without ammo they're f**king toast, if they retreat, the confederates take the round tops and gain a huge tactical advantage over the entire hill, I'm sure there's people that wrote alternate history novels about this exact scenario, if they took the round tops it could have changed the whole outcome of gettysburg and the civil war as a whole, suddenly we've got two different united states and confedearte states in modern day. Luckily we don't have anything like a two party system that doesn't get anything done today, and we have a working government for the people by the people! Just as chamberlain was giving the order to Fix bayonets, man that's fun to do, my mustache isn't nearly long enough to do it justice right now but I'll work on that, just as he was yelling to fix bayonets, the figure appeared, this time it was clear. It was george F Washington. Since my man didn't have a middle name his middle name in the nightmare now continuity timeline is f**king. George f**king Washington himself was there at the battle of little round top right behind Joshua Chamberlain and yelled FIX BAYONETS, CHARGE! And then George Washington unsheathes his curved saber from its scabbard and as he pulls it out the thing lights on fire. (Lightsaber noise) This renews the union soldiers resolve and they all charge with him. He's up on his horse wearing his full revolutionary war gear and supposedly runs down and breaks up the confederate line in front of the rest of the 20th maine. Allegedly the confedereate troops below focused fire on him and his white horse but to no effect, so he was bulletproof as well. His sword is on fire, and at this point it's obvious to those around that it is truly George Washington, not some revolutionary war cosplayer like they thought when they first saw him at the split in the road.Georgie boy charges forward with the rest of the 20th Maine into the confederate line who I believe is composed of the 15th Alabama infantry. They aren't ready for the madcap bayonet charge, ghost of the first president or not and it helps turn the overall tide of the battle. After the initial carnage George Washington isn't seen again. At least not at Gettysburg, there's like a million other stories about george washington's ghost at his home and in other important american places. But this was the coolest and the most fitting for memorial day though. We have to ask ourselves though, is it real? I mean let's handwave whether ghosts are real and for the sake of argument say that they are. I would agree with that but I think ghosts are a complicated kind of phenomena that I'll put some more thoughtful discussion towards in another episode. But even treating the world as if ghosts are 100% real, what is the veracity of this claim? Is this historical fanfiction? The neat part is that if it is just presidential fanfiction, it started right away. First hand reports told this story, it's in the primary sources! There was an investigation! After the civil war, Lincoln's secretary of war Edwin Stanton opened an investigation into the event. Hopefully like the whole little round top and not just burning up post war tax dollars on a ghost hunt but whatever. In said investigation a few of the soldiers that were there testified that they had indeed seen him that day. Joshua Chamberlain himself when interviewed said quote “We know not what mystical power may be possessed by those who are now bivouacking with the dead. I only know the effect, but I dare not explain or deny the cause. I do believe that we were enveloped by the power of the other world that day and who shall say that Washington was not among the number of those who aided the country that he founded?” unquote it's pretty f**king cool right? Kinda weird that George Washington was from Virginia and repped the union but it also made sense that he would want to be on the side to attempt to keep his country together. I don't know. In the end it's a really cool ghost story that has a lot of primary sources backing it up, it's thematic, it's patriotic and I love it. Special thanks this episode to everyone that sacrificed for this country. As Lincoln said “We have come to dedicate a portion of that podcast, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”Thanks to all of em and thanks to everyone listening, as always, I'd say sweet dreams, but we all know it's only gonna be nightmares now
A special Encourage-Mint episode for Memorial Day! Thank you for listening to Encourage-Mint. If you've been refreshed, don't forget to subscribe, Leave a review on iTunes, and share a little Encourage-Mint with someone you love. Encourage-Mint is a podcast from Family Radio. These stories are just a taste of the stories you can hear every day. Listen at FamilyRadio.org or find more encouragement on the Family Radio app. Get daily Scripture and encouragement by following Family Radio on your favorite social media platforms: Facebook Instagram Twitter
Bullying is an obstacle for many kids navigating childhood, but what can you do if the education system that is supposed to protect you is a part of the problem? This is the question many are asking after a Black and autistic 10-year-old Utah girl died by suicide after being continuously bullied. While attending the vigil for the little girl, Izzy, Relentlisley Resilient host Michelle Scharff met Joshua Chamberlain, a young Black professional who knows firsthand what it is like to be a bullied minority student in Utah. He joins this episode to discuss his experiences, how to cultivate resilience in the fight against racism, and what everyone can do to support and protect minorities among us. Even though we live in challenging times we can become Relentlessly Resilient as we lean on and learn from one another’s experiences. Hosts Jennie Taylor and Michelle Scharf are no strangers to overcoming adversity; Michelle lost her husband to cancer, while Jennie’s husband Major Brent Taylor was killed in the service of our country. Their stories bond them together and now listeners can join them weekly as they visit with others enduring challenges and who teach us how they are exercising resiliency, finding value in their grief, and purpose in moving forward. Listen to the Relentlessly Resilient Podcast regularly on your favorite platform, at kslpodcasts.com, kslnewsradio.com, or on the KSL App. Join the Resilience conversation on Facebook at @RelentlesslyResilient and Instagram @RelentlesslyResilientPodcast. Produced by KellieAnn Halvorsen.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
You asked. You begged. We waited for the right time and that time is nigh. Garry Adelman joins us for the first of what we hope is many times to discuss Little Round Top. We try to put LRT in its true importance in the Battle of Gettysburg. Did the Union Army and perhaps the Union itself hinge on one little regiment of barely-tested Mainers? Did the fighting for Little Round Top end when Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine finished mopping the floor with the Alabama boys? What was behind Little and Bog Round Tops that might have made it an even worse day for Hood's Division had he been allowed to "go around to the riiiight"? Tune in and find out. Support the Show by: Booking a tour with an LBG from the show! Becoming a Patron- click here Grabbing some merch- click here Getting a book- click here! Donate directly via PayPal Click here Supporting Our Sponsors: Mike Scott Voice GettysBike Tours- Call 717-752-7752 to book your tour and receive 15% off if you mention Addressing Gettysburg Gettysburg: A Nation Divided. Available in your phone's app store The Heritage Depot For the Historian- Mention us for 20% off retail sales (in store) or for free shipping (online) The Badgemaker Savor Gettysburg Food Tours ($5.00 of your tour if you mention Addressing Gettysburg) Gettysburg Battlefield Tours Walk the Civil War Trails Buy Billy Webster's Music- Billy Webster arranged and performed the rendition of "Garryowen" that you hear at the end of the show.
Join us for more fun facts with Allison, Caitlin, and Jake! Today's Topics Joshua Chamberlain and the Wheat Penny The Original American Flag Sister Act's High E Improv Benjamin Franklin Does Not Approve of the National Bird Watch the podcast live on Twitch every Saturday at 11am ET! https://www.twitch.tv/hotchaigames Show Links Wordjamacallit, Inc. Oh Happy Day! Games by David Taylor
This is Dan, I screwed up, I had an episode all set for today or so I thought, but I hadn't actually recorded any of the audio, and a podcast isn't worth much without audio! So, George suggested we air this Drinkipedia episode we did back in Dec 2019 for you guys, and I thought that was a really great idea! You get to hear Producer Chris, hear us do something a little different and it's something to put out since the thing I had planned to release is just 90 mins of dead air! In this episode Chris gets drunk and tells us about Joshua Chamberlain and George gets stoned and tells us about the history of VHS tapes, it was a lot of fun and you should definitely check out Drinkipedia, Matt, Audra and Jay put out an amazing show, and they're wonderful people! Enjoy!
We had to take the week off from releasing full episodes due to unforeseen issues that were likely caused by an angry, vengeful god who listened to one episode of this crapfest and realized he probably needs to do another one of those "flood the earth for 40 days" things. And so, instead of a full fledged episode, we're giving you the story of Joshua Chamberlain, the college professor turned Civil War hero that just might have been the most badass American to ever live. We'll let you make that decision while we reconsider every single decision we've ever made ourselves. Enjoy and we'll see you next week with a full episode! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
This week we talk to Gary Kellmann one of the founders of www.chamberlainsociety.org and the owner of www.sanitizerandmasks.store. Gary breaks down the need and reason for the Chamberlain Society. you don't want to miss this conversation! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Today we make an announcement about a Live Podcast recording with Bill Barnes we will be doing on Sunday evening. We hope you can join us in attendance or through Zoom. Please RSVP. We always have our Suds With Studs segment on Fridays and today is one of my favorites. I encourage you to look up more information on Joshua Chamberlain, the hero of Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg. Be sure to contact us if you're interested about Sunday. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/15mph/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/15mph/support
Dave and Chris sit down for a talk about Maine's Civil War hero, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. If you have any questions or comments you can find the show on Facebook @SitDownsAndSession or email us at sitdownsandsessions@gmail.com
Playlist: Jake Kulak, How Much Longer, Paul Gabriel, Second Story Man, Misty Blues, No More To Give, Tom “The Suit” Forst, She Was Right, The Jimmys, Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Will Jacobs, Funky Woman, Junior Watson, Louella, Justine and the Unclean, Sweet Denial, Duke Robillard, Got The South In My Mouth, “Big” Al Dorn & the Blues Howlers, Jack Hammer, Whitney Shay, Don’t You Fool Me no More, Kern Pratt, Loving That Feeling, The Lee Boys, Turn On Your LOve Light, The Sherman Holmes Project, Rock Of Ages, Genya Ravan, Fool For A Pretty Face, Joanna Connor, Joanna In A, Pierce Dipner And The Shades Of Blue, Get Out Of Your Life, Paul Edelman & Jangling Sparrows, Joshua Chamberlain, Georgia Randall, Big Oak Tree, Andrew “Jr Boy” Jones & Kerrie Lepai Jones, She Shed, Val Starr & The Blues Rocket, If She Can Get A Man (Anyone Can), Wildmen Blues Band, Boogie Man, Frank Bey, Calling All Fools, Thorbjorn Risager & The Black Tornado, Nobody But The Moon, Bywater Call, Talking Backwards, Sugar Blue, Good Old Days, Jay Gordon & Blues Venom, Lost In Time, Popa Chubby, If You’re Looking For Trouble, Rick Estrin & The Nightcats, Bo Dee’s Bounce, Brandon Santini, Don’t Come Around Here, Dennis Gruenling, Count Chromatic, Billy Branch And The Sons Of THe Blues, You’re So Fine, Kim Wilson, Bonus Boogie, Betty Fox Band, Green Light, Tomislav Goluban, Hayloft Blues, Christian Collin, Highway Song, Eight To The Bar, Everybody Rock N Go, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media, Mark Platt @RadioCandy.com M.C. Records, Gulf Coast Records, Bigtone Records, Whiskey Bayou Records and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055
Drinkipedia will return for Year Two in mid-January 2020! Until then, enjoy our season of bonus content, with episodes like this... a podcast takeover by The Movie Cellar!The Movie Cellar are a retro movie podcast with a twist - they watch all of their movies on VHS! They're the podcast with a VHS collection and an internet connection. Here are some of their delicious links so you can listen, subscribe and follow - All that helpful stuff.Twitter: https://twitter.com/themoviecellarApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-movie-cellar/id1462942580Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Q0r5VKxUMtOAwmowITUNuYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOnZN9kN4DgTVbdThRd2Umw
Playlist: Paul Gabriel, I Feel Good, Jaqui Brown, Brought The House Down, Sean Poluk, Never Going To Lose, Ramon Taranco, Take Her Dancing, Rae Gordon Band, Got To Have You, Angel Forrest, Grace, Popa Chubby, Let Love Free The Day, Jay Gordon & Blues Venom, Lucky 13, 11 Guys Quartet, Road Trippin’, Bywater Call, Arizona, Jack Mack And The Heart Attack, Livin’ It Up, Paul Edelman & Jangling Sparrows, Joshua Chamberlain, Jim Roberts And The Resonants, Skeeters, Sugar Blue, Downhill, Black Cat Bones, Lowdown, Tom Baker, Cancel It, Davina and The Vagabonds, Little Miss Moonshine, Matty T. Wall, I’m Tore Down, Diane Blue, That’s A Pretty Good Love, Christina Crofts, Voodoo Queen, Lizanne Knott, Emmylou, Murali Coryell, All I Ever Needed, Dave Specter, Asking For A Friend, Mike Zito feat. Robben Ford, You Never Can Tell, Breezy Rodio, Pick Up Blues, Johnny Burgin, California Blues, Screamin’ John & TD Lind, Shame, Shame, Shame, Joanna Connor, Blues Tonight, Joey Batts & Them, 860, Mojomatics, Soy Baby Many Thanks To: We here at the Black-Eyed & Blues Show would like to thank all the PR and radio people that get us music including Frank Roszak, Rick Lusher ,Doug Deutsch Publicity Services,American Showplace Music, Alive Natural Sounds, Ruf Records, Vizztone Records,Blind Pig Records,Delta Groove Records, Electro-Groove Records,Betsie Brown, Blind Raccoon Records, BratGirl Media, Mark Pucci Media, Mark Platt @RadioCandy.com and all of the Blues Societies both in the U.S. and abroad. All of you help make this show as good as it is weekly. We are proud to play your artists.Thank you all very much! Blues In The Area: AND VENUE LOCATION THURSDAY 12/12 HIP HOP FOR THE HOMELESS BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD ROCKY LAWRENCE THE CRAVE (6:30 PM ) ANSONIA WENDY MAY OPEN MIC THE BLACK DUCK CAFÉ WESTPORT JIMI PHOTON JAM HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER KEN SAFETY OPEN MIC CJ SPARROWS CHESHIRE MIKE ZITO (Tribute to Chuck Berry) DARYL'S HOUSE PAWLING NY ANTHONY GERACI/JIMMY CARPENTER DARYL'S HOUSE PAWLING NY RYAN HARTT & BLUES HEARTS PHOENIX DINING & ENTERTAINING PAWCATUCK BALKUN BROTHERS THE PICKLE BARREL KILLINGTON VT LIA MARIE & JOHN JUXO PERKS AND CORKS WESTERLY RI PROFESSOR HARP START LINE BREWING CO (7 TO 10 PM ) HOPKINTIN MA ERAN TROY DANNER GOLF CLUB WATERTOWN MIKE AND CARL OPEN MIC ARCH STREET TAVERN HARTFORD ALL STAR JAM NIGHT SHAMROCK PUB WATERBURY OPEN MIC SHEA'S RESTAURANT MANCHESTER THE DEAD DAWGZ (Dead Tribute) HOG RIVER BREWERY HARTFORD OPEN MIC MOONLIGHT CAFÉ (6 PM ) BREWSTER NY ERAN TROY DANNER GOLF CLUB WATERTOWN LONNIE GASPERINI CHICKEN SHACK AT CARTER HILL FARM MARLBOROUGH OPEN MIC FAST EDDIE'S BILLARDS NEW MILFORD GREG SHERROD OPEN MIC THE BLACK SHEEP NIANTIC OPEN MIC PINE LOFT BERLIN OPEN MIC BONGO RON'S CIGAR & LOUNGE OLD SAYBROOK FRIDAY 12/13 PAULGABRIELwLIVIU, WALLY & LONNIE THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA POPA CHUBBY CHAN'S WOONSOCKET RI THE COFFEE GRINDERS CAMBRIDGE BREW PUB GRANBY JOHNNY & EAST COAST ROCKERS STEAK LOFT MYSTIC THE BALKUN BROTHERS BISHOPS LOUNGE NORTHAMPTON MA VITO PETROCCITTO & LITTLE ROCK FALCON UNDERGROUND MARLBORO NY GENE DONALDSON & STINGRAYS BIDWELL TAVERN COVENTRY 8 TO THE BAR MADISON BEACH HOTEL (6 TO 10 PM ) MADISON KATHY THOMPSON BAND BEACHCOMBER CAFÉ MILFORD COTTON GIN & SWAMP YANKEES WALRUS + CARPENTER BLACK ROCK WATKINS GLEN HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER ALBINO TREE (Christmas Show) MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY THE KINGS SOUTHWICK INN SOUTHWICK MA ERAN TROY DANNER ELECT TRIO COALHOUSE PIZZA STAMFORD THE CARTELLS LA VITA EAST HADDAM CARRIE JOHNSON CROWN AND HAMMER COLLINSVILLE MYSTIC DEAD / WOOLY MAMMOUTH KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER WESTERLY RI MATT HELM EXPERIENCE THE ACOUSTIC BRIDGEPORT THE 5 O'CLOCKS GREY GOOSE SOUTHPORT SHAWN TAYLOR REDDING ROADHOUSE REDDING CENTER LINE WINCHESTER CAFÉ PORTLAND RICH BADOWSKI BLUES BAND BRASS HORSE BARKHAMSTED B-SIDE MULLIGAN'S TORRINGTON MURRAY THE WHEEL MAG'S SEYMOUR ADAM FALCON TOWN CRIER CAFÉ (Saloon Stage) BEACON NY TWO SHOTS OF BLUE MOHANSIC GRILL & LOUNGE YORKTOWN HEIGHTS SONIA PLUMB FAIRIES (The Busted Nut) BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD SATURDAY 12/14 MIKE ZITO with A GERACI,J CARPENTER NARROW ARTS CENTER FALL RIVER MA SIX PACK OF BLUES RIC'S PLACE STAFFORD SPRINGS RICH BADOWSKI BLUES BAND CAMBRIDGE BREW HOUSE GRANBY PROFESSOR HARP BRACK'S GRILLE & TAP BROCKTON MA COLD SHOT SOUTHWICK INN SOUTHWICK MA BLACK CAT ZYDECO/OTIS & HURRICANES MACTIVITY (7:30 PM ) EAST HAVEN TIM McDONALD & GHOSTONES MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY GHOST TOWN BLUES CADY'S TAVERN CHEPACHET RI WONDERING ROOTS BILL'S SEAFOOD (7:30 PM ) WESTBROOK THROUGH THE DOORS CHAN'S WOONSOCKET RI ERIN MICHELE & COLORFUL CHAOS HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER THE SIDEWINDERS DADDY JACKS NEW LONDON GEORGE T GREGORY QUARTET FLYING MONKEY (7 TO 10 PM ) NEWINGTON DAN WATSON ROCKS 21 MYSTIC HOWIE AND THE SOUL POTATOES HOOK, LINE, AND SINKER (7:30 PM ) SHELTON THE CARLEANS (Christmas Show) STRANGE BREW PUB NORWICH MUSICIANS SHOWCASE FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH (6 TO 8 PM ) ESSEX JASON CARDINAL KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER WESTERLY RI B SIDE SAILS ROWAYTON SHUFFLEBONE BILL'S CROSSROADS CAFÉ FAIRFIELD ORB MELLON HOUSATONIC RIVER BREWERY NEW MILFORD TERRI AND ROB DUO HIGHER GROUND (11 AM ) EAST HADDAM MICHAEL CLEARY BAND SCOTCH PLAINS TAVERN ESSEX TSC ACOUSTIC URBAN LODGE BREWING CO MANCHESTER MURRAY THE WHEEL THE OFFICE OXFORD SCREAMIN EAGLE BAND PR'S BAR & GRILL THOMASTON ERAN TROY DANNER (Solo ) THE ROCK GARDEN WATERTOWN CHRIS STOVAL BROWN STOMPING GROUND (1 PM ) PUTNAM CLASSIC STONES TARRYTOWN MUSIC HALL TARRYTOWN NY FRONT ROW BAND JAM MALONEY'S PUBLIC HOUSE (4 PM ) MERIDEN SONIA PLUMB FAIRIES (The Busted Nut ) BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD SUNDAY 12/15 MIKE ZITO with ANTHONY GERACI FTC (Stage One ) FAIRFIELD CHRISTINE OHLMAN & REBEL MONTEZ CAFÉ NINE (4 PM ) NEW HAVEN GEORGE LESIW JAM CAFÉ NINE (8:30 PM ) NEW LONDON THE COFFEE GRINDERS LITTLE RED BARN BREWERY WINSTED WILLIE J LAWS STOMPING GROUND (1 PM ) PUTNAM MIGHTY SOUL DRIVERS BRASS HORSE (3 TO 7 PM ) BARKHAMSTED BIG JOE FITZ BRUNCH THE FALCON ( 11 TO 2 PM ) MARLBORO JOHNNY & THE EAST COAST ROCKERS DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR (4:30-4:30 ) MADISON CHRIS ALONE MAPLE TREE CAFÉ (5 PM ) SIMSBURY SUNDAY BLUES FLYING MONKEY (4 TO 7 PM ) NEWINGTON THE CARTELLS MUNICIPAL AUDITORIUM GROTON ERAN TROY DANNER (Solo ) BRASS WORKS BREWERY (1:30 - 4:30 ) WATERBURY OPEN MIC STOMPING GROUND (7 PM ) PUTNAM ACOUSTIC JAM (Cornbread Jam ) DARYL'S HOUSE PAWLING NY AMERICANA (Wallach, Sinetti, Friends) MAIN PUB MANCHESTER BLUES JAM THE HILLS AT CLUB ONE (6 TO 9 PM) FEEDING HILLS WHAMMER JAMMER OPEN MIC VFW PRESTON ROBIN AND FRIENDS NARRAGANSETT CAFÉ JAMESTOWN RI BLUES JAM STONEHOUSE BALTIC RICK HARRINGTON JAM CADY'S TAVERN CHEPACHET RI BLUES ROUND UP AMERICAN POLISH CLUB (4 PM ) JEWITT CITY BLUES JAM GREENDALE'S PUB WORCESTER MA SUNDAY BLUES BOUNDARY BREWHOUSE PAWTUCKET RI ELECTRIC BLUES SULLY'S PUB HARTFORD REDLINERS JAM JUNE'S OUTBACK PUB (4 PM ) KILLINGWORTH MONDAY 12/16 GREG PICCOLO STEAK LOFT (8 PM ) MYSTIC GEOFF WILLARD OPEN MIC HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER STEVE DUHAMEL OPEN MIC STRANGE BREW PUB NORWICH TERRI AND ROB DUO BUTTONWOOD TREE MIDDLETOWN OPEN MIC NOTE KITCHEN BETHEL TON CRIVELLONE BLUES JAM THE ACOUSTIC BRIDGEPORT BLUES JAM STRANGE BREW PUB NORWICH OPEN MIC JUNE'S OUTBACK PUB KILLINGWORTH BLUES JAM THE BAYOU MOUNT VERNON NY TUESDAY 12/17 RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS NIGHTINGALES (Pickin Party 6 pm ) OLD LYME DAVE SADLOSKI HUNGRY TIGER MANCHESTER GERRY MOSS THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA MICHAEL PALIN'S OTHER ORCHESTRA BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD OPEN MIC CROWN AND HAMMER COLLINSVILLE HAPPY HOUR MARRIOTT FARMINGTON WEDNESDAY 12/18 RAMBLIN DAN STEVENS STEAK LOFT MYSTIC THE CARTELLS KNICKERBOCKER MUSIC CENTER WESTERLY RI ERAN TROY DANNER (Solo ) THE MARKET PLACE (6:30 TO 9:30 PM ) LITCHFIELD FRIENDS DAY OPEN MIC THEODORE'S SPRINGFIELD MA COMMUNITY JAM f GENE DONALDSON BLACK EYED SALLY'S HARTFORD LONNIE GASPERINI B-3 JAM DADDY JACKS NEW LONDON SANDY CONNOLLY OPEN MIC COUNTRY TAVERN CAFÉ GUILFORD CODA BLUE BEST VIDEO HAMDEN JUKE JOINT WEDNESDAY PEACHES SOUTHERN PUB NORWALK LAMB JAM SEAGRAPE CAFÉ FAIRFIELD WACKY BLUES JAM GREENDALE'S PUB WORCESTER MA FREE FUNK WEDNESDAY ARCH STREET TAVERN HARTFORD PETEY HOP ROOTS AND BLUES SESSIONS FALCON UBDERGROUND MARLBORO NY OPEN MIC DONAHUE'S BEACH BAR MADISON OPEN MIC MAPLE TREE CAFÉ SIMSBURY MURRAY THE WHEEL (Solo) TOOTZY PIZZA WILTON VRBE (Christmas Party ) PUB ON PARK CRANSTON RI OPEN MIC YANTIC INN YANTIC OPEN MIC TOBACCO SHED WINDSOR https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id502316055
Not everyone can claim that they were born in Purgatory, but Andrew Tozier could, on February 11, 1838. Purgatory is a town near the Monmouth-Litchfield line in central Maine and is neither a heaven or[...]
Not everyone can claim that they were born in Purgatory, but Andrew Tozier could, on February 11, 1838. Purgatory is a town near the Monmouth-Litchfield line in central Maine and is neither a heaven or a hell - like most towns, just somewhere in between. But during his life, Andrew Tozier would see more than his fair share of the landscape bordering Hell, even if it was all man-made. In fact, he would become one of the most interesting and least noted figures of the American Civil War. Tozier's family moved from Purgatory to the Plymouth, Maine area in 1848 when he was a mere ten years old. His father, was an abusive alcoholic who wrought his anger upon his children. We do not know exactly at what age Andrew ran away from home, but it is likely he was quite young. The fifth of seven children, his absence meant one less mouth to feed at the Tozier homestead, but it also meant that young Andrew was now penniless, and on his own in a largely agrarian state, with no real prospects and no plan for the future. In that, he wasn't alone. In the 1850s before the advent of the American Civil War, there were large numbers of ‘homeless' men moving from place to place in search of work, food, and warmth in the winter. Tozier likely took a common route - he may have made his way to the coast and became a sailor. He may have been a day laborer or worked from season to season, depending on the harvest. He may have found work in the lumber trade. Whatever he did, he was surely uneducated beyond a basic grammar school experience and he was certainly a wanderer, growing up rather quickly on his own, away from any home. We do know that he reconnected with the Tozier clan in 1861 when he returned to their Plymouth home. Lincoln had called the banners and it was time for twenty-seven year old Andrew Tozier to settle into a trade, of sorts. He signed up to fight for the Union, enlisting in Company F of the 2nd Maine Infantry. In those days, local groups of men could form units and fight together within the larger companies in the army.So it was in Maine, like it was everywhere else. Andrew would have received the basic training and drill that any of the soldiers of the newly formed Army would have received. In the early days of the war, the number of battles were few and far between, but the 2nd Maine saw action in one of the early ones. Andrew Tozier was in the thick of the Battle of Gaines Mill, also known as the Battle of Chickahominy River. In Hanover County, Virginia, on June 27,1862, General Lee made the largest advance of the confederate side thus far in the war, pushing the Union troops back over the Chickahominy River in retreat. Tozier was wounded in the battle almost a year to his date of enlistment, losing his middle finger to a minie ball, breaking one rib, and receiving what must have been a lifelong ailment for him - a bullet in his left ankle that went in but never came out. Captured as a prisoner of war by the South, he recuperated in two different Confederate prisons in Richmond. He was used to hard living and managed to heal while incarcerated. He was eventually paroled and allowed to return to the north, this time with Company I of the 20th Maine. In the early part of the war, nearly every soldier was inexperienced. A soldier like Tozier, already wounded, imprisoned, battle-scarred and now back to fight again, would likely have had some gravitas with the newer recruits as someone with at least a modicum of knowledge of how to fight.His experience in battle, brief though it was, set him apart from the rest of the men. It must have been an odd thing for him to experience - the respect and admiration of other soldiers for an ill-educated rambler from central Maine. The whole unit was a little like him -it was made up of men from other units, leftovers, remnants and the odd new recruit. That's how Tozier got in to the 20th Maine. Their leader was a scholar, an unlikely military strategist who knew his martial training from reading ancient texts in Greek and Latin. Andrew Tozier didn't know Joshua Chmaberlain, not then. He was his commander and that was all he needed to know. Like all of the men in the 20th Maine, he knew how to work, how to walk, how to make do. It was something that had kept him going when everything seemed like it was going against him. He had been wounded and captured, but here he was, back in the midst of the action. Events would conspiure so that in less than a month when another soldier's drunkenness reared its ugly head, it gave him the opportunity that changed his life forever. To be a bearer of the colors for a unit was an honor among the soldiers of the day. It was generally believed by the soldiers than the man bearing the colors was the bravest of them all. He was in the front. He was bold. A color bearer led the men into battle and gave the soldiers a focal point on the field when the fighting started and the fog of battle descended on them. A soldier looked to the color bearer and followed him - no other real communication was possible on the field once the guns began to fire. Hiram Maxim, another Mainer from Sangerville, had not yet invented smokeless gunpowder and in the heat of any Civil War battle, soldiers were often limited to being able to see only a few feet in front of themselves. The color bearer might be the only sight recognized in that field, once the bullets began to fly. Sergeant Charles Proctor was the color bearer for the 20th Maine as it marched towards Gettysburg. Imbibing too much liquor one night, Proctor became so riled up and intoxicated that he began to cuss out the officers of the regiment. Acknowledging that he was not in his right mind because of drink, the officers limited their response to him by taking the colors away from him, one of the greatest of insults one could give to a soldier. There was no time to let him sober up as they marched onward to battle. Three recruits in the rear tried to frog-walk him for awhile as they moved towards Gettysburg, but they found it impossible to keep up. He was eventually left there on the side of the road and was officially listed as A.W.O.L. Proctor had been the senior enlisted man in the unit prior to this, and the colors would now be given to the next most experienced man in the 20th Maine, which was...Andrew Tozier. Marching at night, in the rain and through the mud, Andrew led the men of the 20th Maine through the dismal Maryland countryside. He had been in the 20th Maine less than a month and was now in charge of her colors. He would take this task more seriously, perhaps, than any other task in his life. By the time they had made it to Unions Mills, they had marched nonstop and covered 25 miles of hard slogging. They were now only four miles from Pennsylvania. In another day they would make it to Hanover and then, finally to a little place called Gettysburg and a hill known as Little Round Top. The significance of the Union winning the Battle of Gettysburg is that it became the turning point of the war. It was decisive because there was no guarantee that the strategy and prowess of General Lee would ever fail. The South had won battle after battle with fewer men and fewer supplies. Up to this point in the Civil War, it was not at all clear if the North could eventually muster the kind of willpower, strategy and tenacity to take on Lee and his generals and gain the kind of ground needed to take back the South. The Battle of Gettysburg became the pivot around which the war turned, and a small Company from the northern state of Maine would be given a task that, if they failed, would have given the south its biggest victory yet and all but spell the end of the war within months, in favor of the Confederacy. Late in the afternoon of July 2, 1863, Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and his 386 infantrymen found themselves running desperately low on ammunition. The 20th Maine had been given the task of holding the left flank of the Army's line. The 16th Michigan held the right flank and the men from New York and Pennsylvania held the center. Earlier in the day, Chamberlain's commander, Colonel Vincent, had told him that the thin line that the Maine men held was the left of the Uinion army's line. “You are to hold this line at all costs!” he told Chamberlain and Chamberlain took him at his word. Earlier, 44 of his men from Company B were cut off by the enemy's flanking maneuver, leaving only 314 men from Maine to hold the main line. Early in the day, over 800 Texans under General Hood began their assualt on Little Round Top. Later, the 15th and 47th of Alabama began to hammer into the Maine line. The Maine men held the high ground, but they were vastly outnumbered and their supply of ammunition was running dangerously low. There was little hope of holding this hill for long. Something had to happen. Something had to change. There are times in battle when something unlikely happens, something unexpected and so unusual that it can change the course of events for everyone involved, stirring people to action they might not otherwise take. At such moments, it is all one can do not to simply stop and wonder, to gaze upon something so unlikely, so perfect. Things were looking bad for the 20th Maine. The Alabamans were moving up the hill and the Maine men had run out of ammunition. Company B was still nowhere to be seen and Colonel Joshua Chamberlain surveyed the scene at this terrible moment, only to see something that stirred his courage into even more action and caused him to make a decision that would alter the course of the battle, the war, and the fate of his country. As he stood there, his sword drawn, he observed for a long moment the state of his color guard. All were gone, either killed or wounded, with the exception of one man - Andrew Tozier. While all possibility of snatching a victory out of the jaws of defeat seemed lost, there was one man who seemed unfazed by the carnage and confusion around him - Andrew Tozier. With the colors still flying, held in the crook of one arm and steadied against his body, he stood fast, methodically and cooly loading and then firing a borrowed musket. Later, Colonel Chamberlain would put his memory to pen. He wrote: “I first thought some optical illusion imposed upon me. But as forms emerged from the drifting smoke, the truth came into view...in the center, wreathed in battle smoke, stood the Color-Sergeant, Andrew Tozier. His color-staff planted in the ground by his side, the upper part clasped in his elbow,so holding the flag upright, with musket and cartridges seized from the fallen comrade at his side he was defending his sacred trust in the manner of the songs of chivalry.” At that precise moment, is it reckoned, a total of over forty thousand bullets had been fired by combatants in the fray. With so many bullets, nearly everyone should have been hit in some way, either mortally or incidentally. Chamberlain remained unharmed. The Alabama men still lingered at the bottom of the hill. The Maine men still held it. But Chamberlain knew if the southerners rallied, the Maine men could not take another onslaught. Spurred on by Andrew Tozier's impossible coolness in battle, Chamberlain placed himself behind Tozier and ordered a right wheel maneuver. Some say he shouted ‘Bayonets' but it little mattered. They were out of ammunition anyway and if they were to move forward and down the hill, all they had were bayonets. Andrew Tozier led them down. The outcome of that battle remains one of the most decisive in American Military history. The south did not take the high ground. The left flank held. Because of this, the course of the war shifted in the North's favor. But there was something almost unworldly about Chamberlain and his fellow mainer, Andrew Tozier, at the Battle of Little Round Top. Chamberlain had been in plain sight to the enemy - he was a classical leader, a fighter, visible to all. Twice an Alabama soldier had taken aim against him and twice the soldier, inspired perhaps by Chmaberlain's bravery and boldness, decided against pulling the trigger. In another close call, a Southern officer's pistol misfired only feet from Chamberlain's face. By all acounts, he should not have survived that battle. And then there was Tozier. He stood his ground, against all odds, inspiring his own Colonel and all who saw him. That inspiration caused the sagging middle of the regiment to bolster - if they had not seen Tozier calmly firing, loading, and firing again as he held the flag slightly askew, there is little doubt that the Alabama men would have taken the hill. His courage gave Chamberlain the chance to order an unlikely attack that drove the confederates flying. It is fair to say that without Tozier, Chamberlain would not have held that hill. Andrew Tozier, son of an alcoholic, a drifter, with no place to call his home. After the battle Tozier was offered a field promotion by Chamberlain but he asked his Colonel to withdraw it. He had more in common, it can be assumed, with the common soldiers than he did with officers. He remained in action until May of 1864 at The Battle of North Anna, where he received a wound in the left temple. Months passed before surgeons removed as many of the fragments as they could, but there would always be pieces of the minie ball in his cranium. He was not unaffected by the wound, either. Dizziness, headaches and tinnitus remained for the rest of his life. Perhaps something else happened as a result of that wound, something that changed not only his health, but his perspective, his behavior, his future. In 1864, his term ended, and Andrew Tozier returned to Maine. He got married and became the proud father of a son. We aren''t sure what he did before the war, but we know that in 1865, Andrew Tozier, hero of the Battle of Little Round Top, began a life of crime. Along with his half-brother, Lewis Cushman, he began to steal cattle, clothing and sundry other items. He did not act with honor or courage. He did not step forward bravely. He stole. He lied. He cheated. In 1869, the law finally caught up with him and he was implicated in a heist at the clothing store in East Livermore. He was sentenced to five years hard labor at the Maine State Prison in Thomaston. It can be rightly assumed that Andrew Tozier probably suffered from what we would today call PTSD - post-traumatic-stress-syndrome. His head injury alone may have accounted for his behavior after his enlistment was done. But just after he was given his cell in the prison, he received a full pardon by the Governor of the State of Maine - none other than Joshua Chamberlain, his former commander. One might think that this was a kind of honor payment, a thank you for what had happened on the sweltering day in July in Pennsylvania, but Chamberlain was better than that. He asked Tozier to move in with him and his family and he promised Tozier that he would help him change the course of his life. He taught Andrew how to read and write and gave him the kind of attention few men would have received from their former commander. A convicted felon and his wife moved in and lived with the Governor of the State and his family. In the fullness of time, Tozier's wife gave birth to a daughter and they named her Gracie, after the Governor's teenage daughter. By all accounts, Andrew Tozier was lucky to have such a friend as Joshua Chamberlain. Eventually Tozier moved out and took up the straight and narrow, never again to turn to a life of crime. His health continued to falter and he found himself working odd jobs, enduring the pain of his many wounds from the war. He moved back to the area he was born and settled down to the life of a small farm - vegetables, milk, and a job in a broom factory. He had started out in Purgatory, left, took a detour into the hell that was war, and then was saved by Chamberlain, only to move back to the area of Purgatory, where it all began. In 1890, Chamberlain wrote to the War Department, suggesting that Tozier be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on Little Round Top in 1863. Eight years later, the award was given. It arrived in the mail at Tozier's door. The citation read, “At the crisis of the engagement this soldier, a color bearer, stood alone in an advanced position, the regiment having been borne back, and defended his colors with musket and ammunition picked up at his feet.” In this letter to the War Department, the Grand Old Man of Maine wrote, “He was an example of all that was excellent in a soldier” and is “one of the bravest and most deserving men. The war took the lives of so many men. But it is safe to say that it made some men, too. Joshua Chamberlain was such a man - before the war he was a professor of languages of Bowdoin, a self-made man who taught himself Latin and Greek by shutting himself up in a garret until he understood them. He lied to get out of his teaching contract so he could join the army. He was the hero of the Battle of Little Round Top. He accepted Lee's sword at Appomatix. He became the Governor of Maine. He became President of Bowdoin. Andrew Tozier was made by that war, as well. Before the war, he was no one in particular, one of the many with no real place to call home. But after the war, he became a wanted man, a criminal on a spree that lasted years before he was caught and sentenced, then pardoned and cared for by his old commander who so fondly recalled that one moment in all of his life (that we know of) when Andrew Tozier decided to stand fast and hold his ground, against all odds. That one act changed the course of history - not just his own, but ours, as well. A single act of courage in an otherwise unremarkable life, except for that time after the war, when he lived the life of a common criminal. Not many American realize that the actions of this one man turned the events of the Civil War in the North's favor. One man and a single show of outrageous courage set into action a chain of events at led to the inevitable conclusion of the south's surrender. One has to wonder, did he even realize what he had done for his nation? The bravery of Tozier has been immortalized in a song by the Ghosts of Paul Revere that has been officially recognized by the state legislature as Maine's official state ballad. It is told from the point of view of none other than Andrew Tozier,child of an alcoholic, drifter,common soldier and color-beaer, small time farmer and broom-maker, convicted criminal and Medal of Honor winner. He died on March 28, 1910. He was 72 years old. SOURCES Christian, James A."Sgt. Andrew J. Tozier, Medal of Honor Recipient of the Twentieth Maine". Gettysburg Magazine. University of Nebraska Press. Number 54. January, 2016. pp. 81-90. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/605540/pdf https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/3604/andrew-j_-tozier "Andrew Jackson Tozier," Litchfield Historical Society. http://www.historicalsocietyoflitchfieldmaine.org/AndrewJacksonTozier.htm "Andrew J. Tozier." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_J._Tozier Desjardin, Thomas (1995). Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine. 2009. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195382310. https://www.amazon.com/Stand-Firm-Boys-Maine-Gettysburg/dp/0195382315/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=9780195382310&qid=1566070875&s=gateway&sr=8-1
[Please note – some of the descriptions in this article/episode are graphic. Use discretion with younger readers/listeners] You are lying in your bed on this hot July night. It has been a long, hot summer[...]
[Please note – some of the descriptions in this article/episode are graphic. Use discretion with younger readers/listeners] You are lying in your bed on this hot July night. It has been a long, hot summer with no rain for weeks. The ground is turning to dust and the wind is warmer than usual. Outside, the light of moon is bright as it peeks between the curtains and if you are still, you can hear the rustle of the leaves and the peepers outside in the distance. You close your eyes again and know that soon, you will drift back to sleep. There are chores to do in the morning and it will come soon enough. As you lie there drifting back to sleep, you hear a sound, something not ordinary, something not expected. You stiffen and listen more intently. Time slows down to a crawl as you attend to every single noise. What was that? Was that your mother? Your sister? And then a thump and a muffled scream bolt you to attention. Someone is in the house, someone is moving in the darkness. Another muffled sound – someone is in trouble. You jump out of bed, shouting for your father to help as you move toward the door. But it is too late. From the light peeking in at the window, for the moon shone bright, you see the glint of an ax and you see the form of a man moving toward you with dire intent. The ax falls but you are fast and it glances over your shoulder instead of into it. You are near enough to the door to make your escape into the yard, away from your assailant. As you run, your mind a whirlwind, you cannot shake the vision that fills it. That man wielding the ax, that man who is undoubtedly attacking your family as you run for help...no, it couldn't be...because he is the one who has supported and protected you your whole life. But you know it as surely as you feel the pain in your shoulder – the man who attacked you was your own father. Captain James Purington (Purrinton, Purrington) was born in Bowdoinham, Maine in 1760 and was from good Yankee stock. His father was a Cape Cod man and his mother was from North Yarmouth. Having married young Betsy Clifford of Bath, James came into an inheritance upon the death of his father that set him up as what we would today call a rich and independent farmer. Known for his frugality and his industrious work ethic, the people of Bowdoinham found him to be worthy of the rank of Captain of their militia. From what little we know of him in this time, he had every reason to be happy. After all, he had been blessed with a productive farmstead, a wife who had given him twelve children, four of whom died in infancy, and the respect of his community. Indeed, he seemed to possess everything a man could desire for the sum total of happiness. But there is always more to a person than possessions or achievements, something deeper and more essential to the true character within, something that few people even suspect might be there, hiding in the dark shadows of the mind. What makes one person successful might make another person a failure, depending on such intangible things as their outlook or their point of view. James Purington was a man with a grave countenance, a man who kept his own counsel in polite company, and who, it is claimed, had trouble looking another man in the eye while he spoke. It was, perhaps, simply an idiosyncrasy, just a way of his, but add that to his way of never believing he was wrong, never admitting to an error. James Purington always had to be right. Those who knew him claim that he was ‘easily elated or depressed,' depending on how well his finances fared. Some ideas seemed to weigh more heavily on his mind than others. For all of these qualities, he was also a tenacious worker, a man who understood what it meant to do an honest days labor. As the Captain of the Militia, he took his responsibility toward his community very seriously. Yes,if there was one word that might sum up such a man, it might be that he was responsible, for his community's safety, and for his family's well-being, in this world and the next. As prosperous as he was in Bowdoinham, he made the decision to move northward. In 1803, Maine was still the frontier of the United States. This sparsely populated area was settled mostly along her waterways and coast and whenever people of a certain disposition found the world creeping a little too closely to them, they moved north and that meant inland. Captain Purington purchased Lot#17, a hundred acre plot of land just above the established farm of Ephraim and Martha Ballard in Augusta, along what is known today as the Old Belgrade Road. The Ballard Farm was small but functional, while the Captain's lot of land was still wild and needed clearing. Having built a shelter on the land, James Purington set to work clearing it by the toil of his own two hands while his family remained in Bowdoinham. In August of 1805, he had cleared six acres of his hundred - evidence of how hard this man worked. He had done more in two years than most men did in four. The locals in his new little neighborhood respected this quiet, sober man who had tamed his patch of wilderness. Soon, he moved his family into the sturdy house he had built for them. If they shared bedrooms, there was room for the six children, whose ages ranged from 19 years old to two years old. Everyone would have to do their part to make the new farm work. It was like a new beginning for the family. Martha Ballard, whose diary is one of the primary sources we have of life in Maine in the early 1800s, claims that the Puringtons were good neighbors who often visited her. She cooked bread for them, had tea with Mrs. Purington, and often visited with the children. Martha Ballard traveled far and wide in her role as midwife in the region and once, Captain Purington even took time to bring her to and from a delivery. This was just the kind of thing neighbors did for each other. They had to rely on each other, through the good times and the bad. The move from Bowdoinham seemed like it had been a good one. But why did he move in the first place? What would make a prosperous and respected member of the community move to a much more difficult lifestyle in the wilderness, we do not know. To give up the relative comfort of an established farm for the grind of a new one must have required a push from some direction. We do not know why James Purington moved his family. Perhaps it had something to do with his standing in the faith. Most Christian circles adhere to the idea that souls are saved only if they find redemption in their faith in Jesus Christ. Those who do not find salvation or who are not ‘born again' will not enter the Kingdom and will ultimately find their souls in some other place, a place of torment, a place away from God's mercy. Early New England was a fruitful field for those who believed we were all sinners in the hands of an angry God. But as the years went on, many Christians who had been brought up with such doctrine began to doubt it, and other ideas began to form. It is possible that his beliefs contrasted with those of his peers in Bowdoinham and perhaps the move was instigated as a way to practice his new faith away from the judgment of old friends and acquaintances. Many New England towns at the time were split on the grounds of religious dogma. Free-Will Baptists believed that sinners could choose to accept or reject Christ's offer of salvation. The new Universalists believed in a benevolent God and free grace for all believers. Both of these new beliefs rejected the Calvinist idea that only a few predestined souls would enter Heaven. Purington rejected that idea, as well and to that extent, it separated him from the community that had previously embraced him. James Purington was a man who must have moved from this idea of special salvation to a new one at the time, circulating quietly throughout the land. The Universalist movement was only just beginning and how Purington first heard of the doctrine, we will never know. We do know from a pamphlet published shortly after his death by local Augusta printer Peter Edes that Purington believed in the idea of universal salvation. According to this doctrine, the divine love and mercy of God was such that anyone, any sinful human soul, no matter what they believed in life or what they had done, will be granted salvation. They don't even have to want it - it will simply happen. God's love and mercy must be stronger, better and deeper than that of human love and mercy, according to these precepts. Jesus, the adherents believed, died for everyone's sins, not just for those who want to be saved. We know that James Purington believed this. In Ede's tract on Purington, he states, “He was obstinately tenacious of his opinion and it was very difficult to convince him that he was in error. He has frequently, however, voluntarily changed his religious sentiments; and he died a firm believer in the doctrine of universal salvation. When surrounded by his family, he has been often heard to express his fond anticipation of the moment when they would all be happy; and has sometimes added, how greatly it would enhance his happiness if they could all die at once.” The summer of 1806 saw precious little rain, a reason for grave concern for the subsistence farmers of Maine at the time. In his pamphlet, Peter Edes claims that Purington seemed ‘greatly depressed' and when speaking with his neighbors, spoke of his concern that his family would suffer for want of bread and that his cattle would starve. His tendency to suffer from depression when things were going poorly made him dread the consequences of a drought. His brooding was something his family knew about, but they also must have assumed that it would pass as soon as the next heavy rain. The first suspicion that something was terribly askew occurred on Sunday, July 6. While his wife and eldest daughter went to prayer meeting, James remained at home with the other children. His daughter Martha noticed her father writing a letter. When he perceived that she had seen him in the act of writing, he quickly concealed the letter from her sight. She asked him what he was doing and he replied, “Nothing.” Then, he asked her for his butcher knife, claiming it needed to be sharpened. She brought it to him and he spent some time sharpening it. Later, daughter Martha witnessed him standing quietly before the mirror, moving his left hand over and over his throat. This singular act caused Martha to exclaim, “Dada, what are you doing?” Again, his answer was “Nothing,” as he laid the knife solemnly down on the table. When Betsy returned from church meeting, Martha told her what had transpired. A clandestine search for the letter he had been writing was made, which was found among his papers. It read as follows: “Dear Brother, These lines is to let you know that I am going on a long journey, and I would have you sell what I have, and put it out to interest, and put out my boys to trades, or send them to sea. I cannot see the distress of my family - God only knows my distress. -I would have you put Nathaniel to uncle Purrinton, to a tanner's trade - I want James to go to school, until sufficient to attend in a store - Benjamin to a blacksmith's trade, or to what you think best - But to be sure to give them learning, if it takes all - Divide what is left, for I am no more.” Betsy confronted her husband with the contents of the letter. What could they mean but suicide? What journey other than the long journey from one world to another? James Purington tried to console his distraught wife. He told her that he had no intention of committing suicide, that instead, he had a premonition that his death was near and he was merely taking precautions, just in case. According to Peter Edes, nothing could console Mrs. Purington. It was simply too terrible to contemplate. But something was horribly, terribly wrong in the mind of Captain James Purington. Perhaps he was considering suicide, except now his wife and family knew of his plan - therefore, he had to change it. If he killed himself, would not his family grieve terribly? Would not that sorrow go on for the rest of their lives? Was there a way to minimize their distress and bring the family back together again to perfect and never-ending happiness? We are presented with three contemporary documents that detail what happened in the Purington house on the night of Wednesday, July 9th, 1806. The first is the pamphlet written immediately after the events of that evening, printed and sold by Peter Edes, an Augusta area printer from Boston famous for, among other things, filling the punch bowl several times for the patriots who threw tea into Boston Harbor just before the Tea Party, and being jailed by the British for 107 days for watching the Battle of Bunker Hill from a distance and rooting for the patriots. Edes was a shrewd salesman and he knew a good story when he heard one. He moved quickly to print the details of the night, though we do not know his sources. Like the good businessman he was, he made sure that any good detail was fleshed out to become a lurid one. The other document we have is the one we must believe to be the most reliable and valid source: Martha Ballard's diary. Martha was the Purington's next door neighbor. She knew the family and she was one of the first to visit the Purington home. Her diary entry is very short, almost too brief, to describe the events. It is almost as if it was too much for her poor heart to bear. The final source is the verdict of the jury of inquiry, a succinct document that lays out the details of the crime. Together, these three documents, accompanied by the statements of the two surviving children, paint the terrible sequence of events of that fateful evening. Martha Ballard and her husband Ephraim were sound asleep when a commotion at their front door awoke them at three in the morning. Two neighbors greeted them at the door with grave news - Captain Purington had just murdered all of this family with the exception of his seventeen year old son, James, who had been wounded by his father with an ax as he fled the murder house. James had showed up at another neighbor's house in only his shirt, his shoulder covered with blood. Martha's son Jonathan accompanied Mr. Wiman, the neighbor, to the Purington house. Upon returning to his mother's, he described what he saw as he went from room to room with nothing more than the light of a single candle. Peter Ede's pamphlet is entitled, “Horrid Massacre!! Sketches of the Life of Captain James Purrinton, the night of the 8th of July, 1806. murdering his wife, six children and himself.” In it, we can read his red prose. “In the outer room lay prostrate on his face and weltering in his gore, the perpetrator of the dreadful deed; his throat cut in the most shocking manner, and the bloody razor lying on a table by his side - In an adjoining bed-room lay Mrs. Purrinton in her bed, her head almost severed from her body; and near her on the floor, a little daughter about ten years old, who probably hearing the cries of distress, alarmed and terrified, ran to her mother for relief, and was murdered by her bedside. In another apartment was found in one bed, the two oldest and youngest daughters; the first most dreadfully butchered; the second desperately wounded, and reclining her head on the body of the dead infant and in a state of indescribable horror and almost total insensibility. In the room with the father, lay in bed with their throats cut, the two youngest sons. And in another room was found on the hearth, most dreadfully mangled, the second son; he had fallen with his trousers under one arm, with which he had attempted to escape. On the breastwork over the fireplace, was the distinct impression of a bloody hand, where the unhappy victim had probably supported himself before he fell.” As grisly as Edes description is, there is also Martha Ballard's description of what her son saw that night. “They two went to (the) house where the horrid scene was perpetrated. My son went in and found a candle, which he lit and to his great surprise (saw) Purington, his wife & six children's' corpses. Martha he perceived had life remaining who was removed to his house. Surgical aid was immediately called and she remains alive as yet. My husband went and returned before sunrise when after taking a little food he and I went on to the house there to behold the most shocking scene that was even seen in this part of the world. May an infinitely good God grant that we may all take suitable notice of this horrid deed, learn wisdom therefrom. The corpses were removed to his barn where they were washed and laid out side by side. A horrid spectacle which many hundred persons came to behold. I was there till near night when son Jonathan conducted me to his house and gave me refreshment. The coffins were brought and the corpses carried in a wagon and deposited in the Augusta meeting house.” James Purington, on hearing the cries of his mother, arose from his bed and shouted to her to see what was amiss. He was able to throw his shirt on and run toward the door when his father appeared and struck at him with an ax. The ax passed over his shoulder, glancing off, making only a superficial wound. At this point 12 year old Benjamin awoke and began to run when his father prevented him from doing so with mortal consequences. James Purington later said that this was all done in utter silence. Everything was done efficiently and with a coolness colder than death. Martha also survived, but her wounds would soon prove fatal. She recalled that as the family retired to bed that evening, her father was still awake, reading the Bible. She awoke in the darkness of her room as her sister was murdered next to her. She was hit three times, but rolled away, feigning death. Within days, she perished from her wounds. What followed was perhaps the largest public funeral that Augusta had known. President Washington had died six years earlier and that event had brought the people together to publicly mourn his passing, but this even rivaled such a spectacle. Leading the funeral procession were the men who had been part of the jury of inquest, along with the coroner. Behind them were the victims in their coffins, followed by family members and citizens from all walks of life, from clergy to militia, magistrates and workmen. Each family member's coffin was carried by their neighbors and friends. James Purington's body was placed on a wagon and was the last in the procession. Strangely, someone had placed the bloody ax and razor on the top of his coffin. The bodies of Mrs. Purington and her children were ceremoniously buried together in an unmarked mass grave in the common burying ground in Augusta. Captain Purington was ‘interred without the wall,' which can be taken to mean that he was put into a hole by the side of the road in an unmarked grave, forever separated from his family. Why did James Purington kill his family and then himself? It is clear that he had a large enough estate and money enough to see them through the harshest of droughts. He had made it clear to neighbors that he worried that his family would starve. For that, we can turn to the words of Timothy Merritt in a sermon he preached at Bowdoinham not ten days after the tragedy. Merritt knew Captain Purington. He had been his minster before the Captain shifted his family north and he understood what was in the heart and mind of his old congregate. It is clear that Merritt pointed to Purington's belief in universal salvation as the cause of this heinous and violent act. In fact, with a little imagination, one might picture Merritt speaking with Purington about his wrong belief in which he persisted. Remember, Captain Purington liked to be right, all the time. How well would he take it when a man of the cloth perhaps upbraided him for straying from church doctrine, imagining that everyone, no matter how sinful, could be saved? Might he have suggested to Purington that he could no longer be a part of that congregation if he persisted in this belief. Did Purington anticipate such a thing might happen and move his family to a place where they could escape the watchful eyes of the minister? What actually happened, we cannot know, but we can read Merritt's words concerning Purington and his reasons. He writes, “You all know, that for some years past, he has professed to believe firmly that all mankind, immediately upon leaving the body, go to a state of the most perfect rest and enjoyment: and to my own certain knowledge he denied the doctrine of a day of judgment and retribution. Of course, it was no question with him whether his family were regenerate, or born again, or in other words, whether they were prepared for so sudden a remove from this world. It was, therefore, natural, and what any one would do under the same circumstances, to endeavor to prevent the anticipated trouble of his family, and make them all forever happy. There is every reason to believe that this was his real motive.” If the next world is guaranteed to be better than this one, no matter what, claims Merritt, then Purrington was only taking care of his family by slaying them in the bright moonlit night of July 9th. They were to be together forever in a blissful state. No matter how good this world is, the next one is immeasurably better, so why not hasten towards it? But Merrill made sure to drive the point home to his congregation, to the same congregation that Purrington had once belonged, that the Captain's beliefs had been in error. You don't get into Heaven that easily. Murder is a sin. Hell is real. Not everyone is saved. What James Purington believed will never be known. It must remain inexplicable and unknown. They did live in the isolation of an early Maine farm, with only a few neighbors for company. His life had radically changed with the move from an established farm to a new hardscrabble farm. With a lot of time on his hands and few people to challenge his perspectives, James Purington may have fallen victim to his own peculiar view of the world. Perhaps it was a kind of religious fervor that caused him to become the Angel of Death in his own house that night. Perhaps he was what we would today call depressed, or worse, psychotic. What we do know is that on the night of the massacre, the family Bible was open to the ninth chapter of the Book of Ezekiel, which reads, “He cried also into mine ears with a loud voice, saying, Cause them that have charge over the city to draw near, even every man with his destroying weapon in his hand. ...let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark.” Elizabeth Purrington (-1806)Polly Purrington (1787 – 1806)Martha Purrington (1791 – 1806)Benjamin Purrington (1794 – 1806)Anna Purrington (1796 – 1806)Nathaniel Purrington (1798 – 1806)Nathan Purrington (1800 – 1806)Louisa Purrington (1804 – 1806) SOURCES Edes, Peter, Horrid Massacre!!: Sketches of the Life of Captain James Purrinton, who on the Night of the Eighth of July, 1806, Murdered His Wife, Six Children, and Himself: with a Particular Account of that shocking Catastrophe: to which are Subjoined, Remarks on the Fatal Tendency of Erroneous Principles, and Motives for Receiving and Obeying the Pure and Salutary Precepts of the Gospel, Augusta, 1806. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, A Midwife's Tale, Vintage, 1991.
Joshua Chamberlain '99 came to UNH with an open mind in the '90s. His passion for reggae music has sent him south, to Jamaica - putting his political background to use to benefit a historic music school.
Joshua Chamberlain was a student of theology and a professor of rhetoric, not a soldier. But when duty called, Chamberlain answered. He climbed the ranks to become colonel of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment, Union Army. On July 2, 1863, Chamberlain and his three-hundred-soldier regiment were…
We know what The Alpha Institute is, some might know of it as Alpha School for Boys. We know of its musical legacy and the impact its alumni has had on our music, ie Yellow Man, Leroy Smart, Tommy McCook, Lester Sterling, and more. There is however, so much more to Alpha. It is an amazing institution with a history richer than the most of us know. G Cole sits with General Manager of Alpha Boys School Radio Mr Joshua Chamberlain to connect the dots www.March4MusicEd.org www.alphaboysschool.org
It is night. Darkness has fallen over the September night as the half moon rises and the stars begin to fill the sky over Penobscot Bay. Sometimes the night falls so deeply here in this Maine hamlet that it seems like the Sun might never rise again. It is a darkness full of potential. The year is 1898 and you are walking along a dark path in the small coastal town of Bucksport, Maine. You are alone, quite alone. You are sure of it. In the distance, you can see the vague outline of ships in the harbor and lights in the windows of the townspeople in houses you know well, for you are worker, a cleaner, a hired servant willing to scrub and polish and shine the possessions of others to make your living. For some, this might be a happy lot, but not for you. These people for whom you work could be your friends and compatriots, but that is not the case. You are, and forever will be, from away. These people are not your people and you are not one of them, but as you walk carefully along the lane, you remember your home in Nova Scotia. Sometimes you wonder what it would have been like had you never met the man you wed. You moved from your home to his, this place, and had his children and toiled away the years. Then you divorced, and though you tried to go back to Canada, you found you didn't belong there anymore. Where is home, you wonder as you walk the dark path on the cool September night. But those thoughts are fleeting, at best. No time for regret, you tell yourself, when there is work to do. This is your home, now. As you move forward down the lane, you put your hand on your purse and recall the payments you have collected. You had nothing when you came here, but with hard work and tenacity, you needled your way into the homes and lives of the people, at first with an offer to work and then, as the years rolled past and you accumulated some small wealth, even the offer of a loan, of course, with interest to a few select individuals whose names you will never mention. It has been grind and scrape, working all hours, but you are independent. After all, though your children have grown, you still have yourself to support and you know that you will never be included, that you will always be regarded as ‘from away' no matter how long you live among them. You may live there and walk among them, but they never truly take you in, do they? Still, there is recompense. Then you remember that you have one more stop before you head home. The stovemaker, the tin-knocker, William Treworgy owes you his payment. One last stop before bed. You reach into your purse and remove the cigarillo you just purchased less than fifteen minutes ago, the final purchase at the little store on the edge of town before they closed for the night and blew out their lanterns. They've seen you before at this late hour, making your rounds at the only time you can, because when tomorrow comes, you will be back to work again, cleaning their houses, tending to the smallest of their needs. The wind begins to blow as you light the match and inhale. It is a small pleasure, you think, to walk alone, independent and in charge of your life, with a purse full of small change and a life in front of you full of work. Your name is Sarah Ware and soon, very soon, something quite terrible will happen. In 1898 Maine had less than a million inhabitants and the only cities were small in comparison with neighboring states. Even today, it is a place of long distances, of varied customs and terrain. Before the turn of the century, the coastal towns and villages featured harbors full of ships that sailed to every corner of the globe and captains and crews who had been as part of the bedrock of their communities for time out of mind. I 1898, Everyone knows everyone else and everyone seems to know everyone else's business, too. Even the smallest newsworthy morsel of information could become the topic of hot conversation, is passed by word of mouth from one householder to another with great alacrity. It doesn't take long for the disappearance of Sarah Ware to become the subject on everyone's lips. No one has seen her since the storeholders sold her that cigarillo before closing. Then, as now, people disappeared, moved on, took to the road without telling anyone of their passing. It isn't unusual, except that people know her so well, she is a part of their lives and has been for years. Surely someone must know something about where she went? For now, 59 year old Sarah Ware is one of the missing. For two weeks, search parties scour the countryside. The nights are growing colder as the trees begin to change to the colors of autumn. After nearly two weeks of searching, no one has yet found hide nor hair of Sarah Ware. The good people who used her as their housekeeper make other arrangements. But what had been a local, albeit strange, disappearance, would soon make the front page of papers from Portland to Boston. It was the odor of death that eventually brings the searchers to her body. Not a mile from her own home, just off Miles Lane near the current high school parking lot, a path she trod daily for years, she is found. A raincoat is tucked up like a pillow underneath her nearly severed head. Indeed, searchers aren't completely sure it is her at all due to the fact that her face is gone – eaten away by some wild animals. Her purse is found nearby, as well as a knife with a ragged, serrated edge, obviously used upon her. The grisly state of the corpse tells the story of a violent crime, a murder so repugnant and vile that no one could recall anything happening in Bucksport to match the extreme nature of such a ferocious crime. Her body is carefully placed in a wagon to be transported back to town, but the brutal nature of the crime was such that during the bumpy ride back into her town, her head detached from her body. When her skull is examined, now completely detached from her body, a round hole in her forehead reveals the probable cause of death. A blow with a blunt object so strong that it penetrated her cranium. One thing is clear to investigators – someone among them had committed a horrid act of bloody murder, ripe pickings for the tabloids and sensationalist newspapers of the time. Precisely who had done such a thing became front page news and the source of talk in the town for the days and weeks to come. All of New England read the papers each morning for further developments in the case. Detectives were few and far between in the State of Maine at the turn of the century. The local constabulary was poorly equipped to solve such a case so they sent for help. First, a seasoned detective from the city of Lewiston, one hundred miles away, began his investigation, soon joined by another detective from the nearby river city of Bangor. These two men, also from away, were the ones with the power to uncover the identity of the murderer and solve this most heinous of crimes. She had taken residence with an older woman, Mrs. Miles, and was her caretaker. Mrs. Miles informed the investigators that Sarah kept her earnings in a trunk in her bedroom but when it was searched, there was not a penny to be found. When deposits were checked at the local bank, the missing money was not accounted for. So perhaps money was the motive for her murder? Sarah Ware was known for her hard work and enterprise. Being alone in the world except for her children, she had to work a hardscrabble existence just to make ends meet, and at times, she might have to wait for payment from the men she worked for, or worse, not collect payment for services rendered at all. But she was a worker and people knew it. The money she had been collecting was nowhere to be found and perhaps this was the motive for the murder. Word spread concerning the progress in the case, leading newspaper readers to speculate that someone in town owed Sarah Ware money – all they needed to do was find out who. Strangely enough, after another thorough search of the area and her house, the money that had been missing somehow had mysteriously found its way back in her trunk in her room at the Miles house. Soon enough, a bloody tarp was found in William Treworgy's wagon – and within it was a hammer with the initials W.T.T. engraved upon it. The round ‘peg' of the hammer seemed to match the round hole in Sarah's skull. Treworgy denied any knowledge of the crime. He was a divorced father whose wife had left him with two daughters to raise on his own. He known for having a quick temper and word spread about that he had not paid what he owed for quite some time. His house would have been the final stop on her usual route before heading home on that fateful night. And he knew Sarah well. In fact, she had worked for him as a live-in nanny. It was understood in the town that Treworgy was a hard man to work for and that when she left, Treworgy refused to pay her what she was owed. It is entirely plausible that before going back to Mrs. Mile's house that night, Sarah made the fateful decision to stop one more time at her old employer's house and seek recompense from him, one more time. In those days, when a town needed the services of an outside detective from another city, they had to pay the expenses.On November 28, just as William Treworgy was implicated in the murder and the investigation began to pick up steam, the funds paying the two detectives mysteriously dried up and the case was abandoned. Apparently not everyone in the community was happy with this state of affairs and a group of concerned citizens raised five hundred dollars to pay the detectives to continue their work. The case reopened. It wasn't until the following spring that a man named Joe Fogg, Jr. confessed to accepting payment from William Treworgy in return for disposing the body in the pasture just off Miles Lane. Such a witness was enough to bring the case to trial. But this is where the story of the murder of Sarah Ware becomes most confusing. There was a murder weapon, there was motive – Ware cleaned for Treworgy and he may have borrowed money – and there was a living witness who claimed to have disposed of the body, itself a crime, willing to testify. In today's world, this would seem to be more than enough to set the wheels of justice in motion. But not, apparently, in the world of small towns and villages that comprised rural Maine at the turn of the century. The local courts refused to hear the case, possibly because everyone knew everyone else and a fair trial seemed unlikely, as officials applied to higher courts. Three years into the review process, it landed in the purview of the Hancock County Supreme Court in the City of Ellsworth. The trial went forward with William Treworgy accused of murdering his housekeeper. By July, 1902, things started to happen, strange, unlikely things that seemed to be more than mere coincidences. Many of the people involved in the original investigation four years past, had died including the coroner who examined her corpse and determined cause of death, and deputies who took part in the search for her body and the discovery of the tarp and hammer. Then, Joseph Fogg, the witness who claimed to have helped Treworgy dispose of Sarah's corpse, recanted his testimony, claiming that he had been forced to lie about his role in the case by the selectmen of the town of Bucksport and others. With no witnesses, all that remained was the tarp and hammer…except that these had disappeared, as well. The only piece of evidence besides the bloody knife that was found next to her body was her skull itself, kept inside a sealed box in the Ellsworth Court as evidence. It sat there in a locked case for one hundred years. Her headless body was buried in a pauper's grave. Thirty years afterwards, the entire graveyard was dug up and moved to make way for a new man-made lake, known today as Silver Lake. Since her grave had no marker, it is not known if, in fact, her body was moved or if it lies beneath the waters, far from any marker. Oak Hill Cemetery in Bucksport does have a marker for Sarah in the Ware family plot – but all that lies there is her head. It rests in the family plot of her in-laws and near the husband she divorced. To the extent that this is still an unsolved murder in the State of Maine, this case remains active. But it is unlikely that Sarah Ware's murder will ever be solved in any official way. What we know about William Treworgy, the loss of the evidence, the bad blood between them, it seems likely that Treworgy got away with murder. Some people claim that Sarah Ware can be seen wandering the shores of Silver Lake in the mists of a moonlit night, especially if it is a mid-September night. If ever a spirit was restless waiting for closure and justice, it would be hers. If you happen to drive down that lonely road and see her, stop for a moment and let her be. She is only seeking something we all thirst for – justice, which may only be found on the other side of the veil.
It is night. Darkness has fallen over the September night as the half moon rises and the stars begin to fill the sky over Penobscot Bay. Sometimes the night falls so deeply here in this[...]
I know you don't tell other people that you've had that experience, that one singular time when you were alone in your house and it happened: something inexplicable. Maybe it was when your parents first thought you were old enough to be left alone without a babysitter and told you that they would only be out for a little while. You'd had the drill - don't open the door to strangers, don't try to use the stove, keep the door locked and just be good - everything would be okay and they would be back before you knew it. You remember, don't you, that time? It was nighttime in the autumn and you were glad to have the house to yourself, even excited by the prospect. But as the minutes turn into an hour and then another hour, you begin to feel the weight of the evening growing on your shoulders and soon enough, it begins to dawn on you that, no, it can't be, you know it's impossible, but you could swear that you're not alone in the house. First you just feel it, the way you feel it when you know you're being watched. Then, you think you hear it, think you hear it because you're not sure and you strain to listen and finally, you think you hear it again: that soft, clicking sound, that squeak from the loose floorboard upstairs, and your heart begins to pound like a hammer in your chest. Somehow, you're not alone in the house. You know it. You begin to panic, but at the same time to tell yourself over and over, “No, it can't be, I know no one has come in since my parents left.” You almost convince yourself and then, like a clock striking midnight, you see something from the corner of your eye and the darkness grows and you...yes, you...know that you are no longer safe. Something wants to get you. It's almost at your throat. I know you remember. I do. Most of us have the moment of terror etched into our memory like a tattoo on a biker's arm. We're addicted to the memory because, though we never actually made true contact with that thing that came after us, we remember the sheer terror as we ran to the door when we heard our parent's car turn into the driveway and we knew that somehow, Mom and Dad would send the evil away and we would miraculously be saved from...what? Saved from the monster in the dark? Saved from the ghost who seeks revenge? Or perhaps, we were saved from a spirit who didn't wish to harm us at all. Perhaps we were frightened by something that didn't mean to frighten us at all. Ghosts might just be that part of our imagination that reminds us of our own soul. Real or not, they haunt our thoughts, especially on dark, cold nights when we're alone. We all have our ghosts. Strangely enough, there are times we will even invite the ghost in to stay awhile, so we can bask in the truth that there is life after death. Perhaps our ghosts are only memories we can see, after all, but real enough for all of that. The northern city of Brewer, Maine has a ghost. All old towns do, especially ones like Brewer. This was a mill town, full of working men and women and their families. The folks of Brewer made ships that sailed the seven seas, bricks that built the cities of Boston and New York, and fine paper that filled the offices of senators and Wall Street magnates. Brewer was a town of workers, but on the weekend, it was a town of worshipers. It wasn't so long ago that one man in particular led his flock like Moses through the desert: Father Thomas Moriarty of St. Joseph's Parish. A former hammer-thrower at Boston College, this great mountain of a man was a worker, too - doing God's work, keeping his parishioners on the straight and narrow, guiding his sheep with a stern but loving hand. In the mid 1920s, Father Moriarty was the kind of priest you rarely see today, a warrior of the Lord, a man of great stature and even larger personality. He impacted the lives of his parishioners deeply, and not just on the Sabbath. Father Thomas Moriarty was there to baptize you, to help you through your childhood, to administer the sacrament of marriage and finally, to give you extreme unction so your soul might pass easily from this world to the next. But he was also there to make sure your family was treated fairly, that you had enough to eat and that you didn't freeze in the winter. He noticed things - he paid attention. Father Moriarty was a true believer. This was the time when the Ku Klux Klan had a large presence in the State of Maine, except they weren't discriminating and threatening African Americans - there simply weren't enough people of color in Brewer to warrant the KKK's interference in that manner. No, their target was the Irish and French-Canadian Catholics who largely made up the congregation of St. Joseph's. The story is told that one evening after he arrived in Brewer in 1926, Father Moriarty met with the local branch of the KKK as they paraded to his own doorstep in the small hours of the evening. Father Moriarty could not have been surprised. Crosses were burned on many a lawn in Maine in the twenties. The Irish had a long history of hardship in this part of the state. Back in the 1850s during the Know Nothing Movement, the Irish laborers who built St. John's Catholic Church on the other side of the river in Bangor had to work at night and under guard to safeguard their work. It wasn't unusual for the Catholics to have to stand their ground in this Bangor-Brewer area, but rarely did one man stand against so many. Imagine him then,a man in a long, black cassock and priest collar, burly as a Rugby player and as stalwart as Mount Katahdin standing his ground as a group of white-cassocked men challenge him to leave Brewer. Father Moriarty's charge from his bishop was to establish the Church of St. Joseph, to found a new parish, and to help guide it through its birthing pains. There was no way that he was going to stand these white-clad klansmen trying to stop God's work. Rolling up his sleeves, he was ready to take and then give back in style anything they had to offer. He told them to leave and never come back. One can imagine him standing his ground like Moses against the armies of Pharaoh, a stalwart defender of his people and his faith. We don't know exactly what was said, but they never troubled Father Moriarty again. The church was founded and that was largely because of the actions of one man of devotion, strength and a will of iron. Father Thomas H. Moriarty was an Irishman who did not suffer fools and errant parishioners lightly. If you missed mass, you would be asked about it and you'd better have a good reason. However, if you needed anything, food, money for the doctor, a new coat for the harsh Maine winters, like the father figure he was, Moriarty made sure you were not forgotten. In the end, he served the people of St. Joseph's in Brewer for over forty years growing old in their service. Even into his old age, he said Mass daily and continued to take part in the life of the community. It was said that he was a driven man, perhaps to the point where he frightened his flock, but as ever, everyone knew that it was better to have him on your side than not. Father Moriarty was a fixture in the lives of the people of North Brewer until his death in 1969. When he died, his funeral service was held in the very church he founded. However, it seems that the good man's work on this planet was not yet over. Strange things began to happen - strange things indeed. Father Moriarty had been the elder priest, the monseigneur of the parish, while a younger man, Father Richard Rice, took over the management and major duties until Father Moriarty's replacement arrived. Two days before his funeral and burial, Father Rice was in the rectory. He was sitting in the rectory across from the church one late afternoon, trying to catch up on some tedious paperwork. He wasn't alone: a young priest had been sent to Brewer by the bishop to help. Feeling tired, the young priest lay down on the bed in his room to take a quick nap before evening service while Father Rice worked on paperwork in his office. “It was at about one in the afternoon when I heard some footsteps on the floor above me. It sounded to me like pacing back and forth, such as a priest does saying his breviary, or his daily office. The footsteps continued for twenty minutes or so, and I thought that the pastor had woken from his nap was was saying his prayers. I went to the bottom of the stairs and I looked up, but saw that the custodian was working outside of the church, so I knew it couldn't be he who was making the noise. Then I thought it might have been a visiting priest in town for Father Moriarty's funeral service, so I went upstairs to greet him. When I got to the bedroom where the noise was coming from, though, I found it empty.” Inexplicable? Old houses breathe. They sway a little in the wind. Their floors sing when stepped upon. The sun warms the roof and when it begins to go down, the timbers snap and complain as they cool down. But Father Rice heard footsteps from a walker who simply wasn't there. Curious. But he didn't have time to linger - there were confessions to hear and a Mass to celebrate. At dinner, Father Rice asked the young napping priest if he had heard the footsteps. “Oh, that was probably Father Moriarty,” replied the priest.Father Rice smiled. The old priest had been his friend, his grandfather figure, his mentor. It gave him a little comfort to think that perhaps the old man was lingering before going to his eternal reward. But to his chagrin, the next few weeks saw a rash of unexplained events happening in the old rectory. More footsteps were heard, drawers mysteriously opening and closing, and that back-of-the-neck hair-raising feeling that someone is watching you continued to be reported. For the next seven years, strange occurrences continued to happen in the rectory of St. Joseph's. There is nothing Catholic theology that denies the existence of ghosts. The church is based upon a basic belief in the supernatural and until recently, at least one of the three in the Trinity was referred to as ‘the Holy Ghost.' The word ghost comes to us from the German geist and means spirit. Peter Kreeft, a philosophy professor at Boston College, writes that, “The dead often do appear to the living. There is enormous evidence of ‘ghosts' in all cultures.” Kreeft says that there is “no contradiction” between ghosts and Catholic theology. “Ghosts appear on earth, but do not live on earth any longer,” he says. “They are either in heaven, hell, or purgatory.” According to Dr. Kreeft, if Father Moriarty lingered, he was not really there, merely a kind of projection. But this projection kept himself busy over the years to come. In 1976 a new rectory was built and the old one was sold to Dr. John H. Hart, a local chiropractor. When he bought the place, it was made clear to him that he was also buying a ghost. Dr. Hart didn't seem to care. But as happens with so many people who seem unperturbed at the commencement of events, things began to happen in the old rectory that were curious and inexplicable. “I don't believe in these things, “ said the good doctor. In the fullness of time, footsteps were heard running in the hallway in the small hours of the night when no one was downstairs. Dr. Hart attributed it to the banging of the heating pipes as they received fresh steam from the boiler in the basement. His wife heard voices when she was alone in the house, but because the house is nearby a very busy intersection, he reasoned it was merely the sound of passers-by. One night his wife had left a Corningware ‘unbreakable' plate on the sideboard full of fresh-baked cookies overnight. In the morning the cookies were all still there, but the plate shattered beneath them. However, he reasoned, all plates break, given the right pressure over time. He'd seen it happen before. But then visitors stayed overnight with the Hart family. One of Dr. Hart's college friends and his wife and baby were staying in the room at the head of the stairs. The child was in a portable rolling crib they had brought with them. The couple was awakened by the crying of their child, but when they rose from their bed in the small hours of the morning, the child was no longer in the room with them. Neither was the crib. They stepped into the long, dark hallway half mad with panic. In their excitement, they were brought to a full, gasping stop when inexplicably, the bathroom light at the end of the hall suddenly clicked on by an unseen hand. The light from the bathroom fell upon the child and her crib, in the hallway next to the bathroom door. There was no way the child could have moved itself and its crib out of the room, into the hallway and then down to the bathroom. It was impossible. Dr. Hart's wife insisted that they were not the only inhabitants of the house. The footsteps always seemed to come from the same place, the room at the top of the stairs. “He's pacing,” she explained to her skeptical husband, “he's walking back and forth in the room, over and over again.” For the remainder of the time they lived in the old rectory, they heard footsteps and other sounds, including the sound of running water though all of the faucets that were, of course, closed tight. The Harts moved out in 1980. There are things we believe because we have no choice and there are things we believe because we choose to believe. Does the spirit of the protective Father Moriarty haunt the old rectory of the church he founded in Brewer,Maine? Even in life, he was a protective spirit, a man of principle and honor - so might he still be on duty, even after he had the call from on high? There is one anecdote of note that is worth telling that seems to point to the old priest still shepherding his flock. In his 1989 book, Maine Ghosts and Legends, Thomas A. Verde relates the following tale: “Not long ago, a new family moved into Brewer. The wife was outside in her yard washing the windows of her new home when she noticed a priest walking across the lawn to greet her. He introduced himself and then asked whether she and her family were Catholic. “Yes,” she replied. “Yes, we are.” “Then why,” thundered the priest, “haven't I seen you down at church?” The woman apologized, saying that with all the chaos of moving in she hadn't had the time. The priest made her promise to be there with her family the following Sunday and went on his way. When the woman told her neighbor about the incident, the neighbor was a bit surprised. It didn't sound like the behavior of the current pastor at St. Joseph's. “What was the priest's name?” asked the neighbor. “Father Moriarty.” Today, the old parsonage where the lingering soul of Father Moriarty is rumored to ramble is an apartment house. It is said that no one stays long in the place, with a steady stream of people coming and going. One might wonder and ask why. Father Moriarty isn't the only spirit of a priest reported by their flock. The world over, there are tales that tell of servants of God whose work is not yet finished, who stay earthbound, for whatever reason they might have, reminding their old parish that they are still watching. Suffice it to say that Maine has its own resident priest spirit who does not yet rest in peace. One day, perhaps he will. References Kreeft, Peter. Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Heaven. Ignatius Press, 1990. Sarnaki, Aislinn, “Does a late priest's spirit still dwell in his Brewer church?” WGME.COM, 10/26/2016. Verde, Thomas A., Maine Ghosts & Legend: 26 Encounters with the Supernatural. 1989 Down East Books, Camden, Maine, pp.35-40.
I know you don’t tell other people that you’ve had that experience, that one singular time when you were alone in your house and it happened: something inexplicable. Maybe it was when your parents first[...]
John Bowman sat inside his mansion as evening fell and the light between the Vermont hills faded into dusk as he had done hundreds of times before. He had finished his dinner early and the servants had all gone their respective ways, back to their own homes in the village. He was alone in the house. As the light dimmed and the colors began to disappear, he couldn't help but look out his parlor window toward the cemetery across the road. He lingered there for a long while, wondering, thinking...feeling. Would it happen tonight? Please, God, he thought, let it be tonight.As he wondered, the light of day finally shed its last rays and vanished. He was in the night country now. The moon was playing hide and go seek with the clouds, dark as pitch one moment and in the next, the entire countryside was awash with lunar light. How many times had he sat here, looking out where they lay? Had it really been years? So long to wait for a single, simple thing. The pain in his heart was as fresh as the day it happened for each of them, first his little baby daughter, then his 22 year old daughter Ella, cut down by sickness in the prime of life, followed only a year later by his beloved wife, Jennie. With her passing, a large part of him died, too. They had meant everything to him: they had been his world. Now, all he had were his memories and a belief in something extraordinary, something he held close to his heart like a treasure, telling no one. There, the moon had cast its light upon world again. He squinted his eyes to get a better view of the mausoleum steps atop the little rise next to the road. What was that? Was that...could it be...a man kneeling in front of the mausoleum that held the remains of this wife and children? Yes, it was the form of a man, stone still and kneeling, looking longingly into the locked space within holding a key in his hand. Of course it was a man. John Bowman knew him well. In fact, he had seen that same man kneeling there, seeking entrance into the house of the dead, every night for years, summer, winter, rain or snow. He looked one more time out of the window and then turned back into his parlor and with a wave of fatigue,blew out the lamp. Of course there was the form of a man kneeling out there in the pale moonlight, he thought as he made his way up the stairs to his bedroom. He thought to himself, ‘That solitary mourner, ghostly white and completely motionless, who never seems to leave the family alone in the cold fastness of stone is...after all, me.' Cuttingsville, Vermont is part of the slightly larger town of Shrewsbury,on Route 103. Like many New England towns, there isn't much of note, nothing out of the ordinary that would catch your eye except for the Laurel Glen Cemetery and the stately Victorian mansion known as Laurel Hall directly across the road. You might drive by and give it a double-take: have you just seen a ghost in mid-daylight, lingering in front of the Bowman Mausoleum? No, you haven't. What you have seen is a fine marble sculpture of John Bowman himself kneeling in front of the doorway to the family tomb. He is clutching a key in one hand and a flowered wreath in the other. The little stone structure seems quite out of place amid the other simpler stones erected in the modest cemetery. Designed and completed in 1880 by noted New York architect G.B. Croff, the Bowman Mausoleum may be the most heart-rending and expensive example of a belief in life beyond death ever constructed in New England. The story begins when fifteen year old John Bowman learns a trade. He apprentices out as a worker in a tannery in Rutland and then moves to New York state to learn the business. In the middle of the 19th century, leather goods helped hold the country together, used in almost every industry imaginable, from leather belts that drove the machinery of the New England mills to the rigging for ships and for all manner of horse-driven contrivances. In the next few years, the American Civil War would increase the demand for leather goods so such a degree that it could make a modest man rich, if he had the inclination to invest in his business. Bowman does so well that be moves back to Shrewsbury. He prospers and participates in local politics. With proserity comes a wife and family and all the happiness that a man might hold dear in his heart and be thankful for. So many Americans would lose loved ones during the war that it seems almost no one in the country was untouched by the conflict in some way. Everyone knew someone who died in that war. John Bowman may have wondered in those early days how he had been so fortunate. He had it all, it seemed. But no one escapes the trials of this world unscathed and for John Bowman, his dark night of the soul would arrive again and again over the coming years. Five years after marrying Jennie Gates from Warren, New York, the couple was blessed with their first child, a girl named Addie. Although we do not know the exact circumstances of her life, we know that young Addie only lived for four months. The couple was obviously distraught but the death of children was a more common event in the 1850s than it is today, as evidenced by the sheer number of childrens' headstones found in any cemetery of the time. Large families were the rule rather than the exception and the multitude of childhood diseases meant that it was common for families to lose a child to one of them. But that didn't make their loss any less poignant. The couple had another daughter, Ella, born in 1860. They lived in relative comfort and happiness, one must assume, for he was the most prosperous man in town and they must have wanted for nothing. It was during this time that Bowman was elected to the Vermont state legislature. The war ensured Bowman's fortune. For many years, the family prospered. But tragedy loomed ever on the horizon and when 23 year old Ella fell ill and then died in 1879, Mr. and Mrs. John Bowman's world fell apart. None of the money mattered. Their two children, the light of their lives, were gone. Then, when it may have seemed like nothing could make anything worse, Mrs. Bowman fell ill and died a year later in 1880. John Bowman was alone, utterly and completely alone. John Bowman needed a purpose, something into which he could pour his anguish and his considerable fortune to help him find a reason to go on. This was a time in America when the business of memorials was in full swing. People tended toward the sentimental and spent long hours contemplating death, erecting memorials, and for some, attempting to speak to the dearly departed. The Spiritualist movement had started not far from Cuttingsville in upstate New York where Bowman had apprenticed as a young man. Perhaps in his formative years he had met someone involved in the movement, had heard of those people conversing with the dead. There is no proof of this connection but talk of the new movement was everywhere.It gave hope to so many who had lost so much. In the 1880s, funerals were productions and even the afterlife, it seemed, was affected by the wishes and longings of those who survived. People were seeking a closeness in death like the one they had in life. Bowman determined to build a mausoleum unlike any other. Many of the larger cemeteries of this time saw a number of extravagant tombs built from imported Italian marble. Also in place were any number exquistely carved angels, shrouded figures in mourning, and other human forms set in stone to last the centuries. Bowman wanted both.The Laurel Glen Cemetery at Cuttingsville was a simpler place, with rows of white marble slabs hewn from the nearby hills as the only makers of the good people who rested below. Bowman would change all of that. He would build a structure to last the ages. Money was no object. Tons of marble were imported from Italy and cut to fit the designs of architect G.B. Croff from New York. When it was completed, people began to visit and wonder at the structure, a tiny Grecian Temple nestled between who Vermont hills. The doors were opened and Bowman, pleased that so many were taking an interest in his project, hired a keeper and set up a guestbook inside. For awhile, the Bowman Mausoleum was a tourist attraction. Perhaps people even brought the kids. As the people came to visit and as time continued to pass, Bowman had another idea. He decided to build a large Victorian house almost directly across the road from the mausoleum. When completed, he moved into it, so close to the mortal remains of his beloved family.He named it ‘Laurel Hall'. It must have been a comfort. But it wasn't enough. We don't know exactly how the idea came into his mind, but once conceived, there was no stopping its realization. Bowman must have looked out that window a thousand and one times and seen something that no one else could see, a figure of a man begging to be let into the sanctum and be reunited with the only people who brought him comfort and solace.There he was, kneeling, holding a key to the door or was it to the life beyond? He could see it was, of course, his own figure kneeling there in the moonlight, looking longingly into the crypt. Other people needed to see this solitary, eternal mourner, too. So he hired an Italian sculptor named Giovanni Turini to carve his image into stone and place it on the steps, kneeling, entreating entrance into that glorious afterlife where he could be with his beloved family again. If that was the end of the story, it would be enough to make us wonder at the man's pertinacity and devotion. But there's more. There's always more. As he settled into his life in the mansion, he spent less and less time outside of its walls and it become more and more of a tomb for him. He had servants, of course, but their nature was as taciturn as any Yankee. No one knew for sure what was taking place inside the walls of Laurel Hall. Rumors began to spread about the peculiar doings inside. He had the table set for his whole family. Beds were turned down for them. Though he ate alone, he lived as though he was whole again and the family was still with him. Rumors persisted that Bowman was studying the occult sciences, that he was seeking a way to come back from the dead and, one might assume, bring his family back with him. He grow older and more and more isolated. We can imagine him making the occasional journey across the street, opening the door with the real key and sitting amid his departed family, the carefully arranged mirrors reflecting his image over and over in the small space, making it seem enormous and empty, showing rooms beyond that simply could not exist in this world. The mirrors are situated to make the little room seem enormous, showing entrance ways to other rooms, branching off in a hundred different ways. Did he sit there quietly and seek to wander those rooms in his mind? When he looked at the little marble statue of his infant daughter reaching her arms out to him, did he reach down to gather her into his arms? His wife's elegantly sculpted face gazed at him with empty eyes - or were they full of love for him? In the light of modern science, we can point to his depression and realize that, because it went untreated, it turned into a kind of manic obsession with death and the afterlife. When he died in 1891, according to local lore, his will stipulated that each night, the hearth fires would be lit. Funds were left to pay for the servants to continue their work of maintenance and cleaning of the house and the mausoleum. The bed linens would also be changed weekly and every evening, the table would be set for everyone in the family. Did Bowman know something the rest of us don't? Why did Bowman ask for these strange requests? Why set the table and change the beds for people who obviously weren't there? Was he getting things ready, just in case, somehow, he found a way back from beyond the veil? Would the family somehow appear or did he believe that, in fact, they had been there with him all along, at least in his mind: a baby girl who never grew up, a 22 year old daughter forever in the prime of her life, and a wife of many years whose love and support carried him through the hardest of times? Is it possible that he was never, truly alone, after all? Was it a kind of insanity for him to long for comfort and to imagine that those who had passed might actually be as close as his next breath? Who can say? He's still there. You can see him for yourself any hour of the day and night along Route 103 in Cuttingsville - the white and ghostly marble form of John Bowman, slightly larger than life, gazing into the sanctum where his two daughters, his wife and he are all resting the slumber of the ages. It's an old adage that you don't know what you've got ‘till it's gone. One man's monument to his family might make you realize how important family is in your life, after all. PHOTO CREDITS: Don Shall Photos : http://www.flickr.com/photos/donshall/
He has waited for entrance into the mausoleum for well over a hundred years - learn the real story behind the enternal mourner of Cuttingsville, Vermont.
Message from Pastor Pete Lasutschinkow on July 1, 2018
Ten thousand warplanes flew from or over Maine during World War II. Over the course of the war, a total of 48 aircraft crashed in the state accounting for 143 deaths. The vast majority of those planes made it safely to their destinations, but it was certainly not unheard of for one of the thousands of planes in the sky to fall to earth before they crossed the ocean for the war. But there was a day, a single day, where two bombers crashed within four hours of each other, claiming the lives of 27 people. This day remains the worst day for aviation in the state's history. Aircraft 1: July 11, 1944 -Just after midnight, an 8th Air Force B-17G Flying Fortress heavy bomber (SN 43-38023) takes off with a 10 man crew from Kearney, Nebraska headed for Dow Army Air Field in Bangor, Maine, and then to Gander, Newfoundland, en route to a base in the English midlands, one of seventeen in a group, though it wasn't strange for Cast to be flying on his own - it wasn't actually common practice for pilots to fly in formation while on route, except during a bombing raid. Cast and crew were on their own until they made it to their destination. Everything went according to plan until...well, it will never be known exactly what happened to cause the plane to crash into Deer Mountain in Maine. All we can do is speculate. We have no way of ever knowing for certain what happened to the aircraft to cause the events that happened that July day. We do know that the weather over the Appalachians was foul and the crew must have flown high enough to avoid most of the turbulence. We can imagine that they were tossed and buffeted about with wind, thunder, rain and hail all part of the mix. Anyone who has experienced turbulence knows the feeling of being thrown about like a bb in a can.The plane can be lifted or dropped several hundred feet without any warning. Other planes from the flight group reported these conditions, so we can safely assume that Cast and crew also experienced a similar set of events. We do know that the radio operator made his last scheduled contact with ground radio operators at around 9:30 and that this was something he did every half hour to help maintain his position. At around 10 AM when the radio operator was scheduled to make radio contact with the ground to help maintain his fix, he found that he couldn't raise anyone. He may have also found that he couldn't receive any fixed signals or commercial radio stations. Perhaps they checked the radio equipment and found some smashed tubes, a common occurrence. Perhaps they even replaced the broken tubes in an attempt to make contact and determine their position. But they never make contact with the ground again. But all was not lost: there were other ways of finding their way. It is possible that the rough weather and turbulence caused the gyroscopic magnetic compass to malfunction, giving a false reading. There was also a radio compass that was quite likely not working, either. Cast and his navigator, Second Lieutenant William Hudgens, Jr., had very few tools to help them find their way. It might have seemed pretty hopeless but for their last resort for determining their position. In those days, when weather would cause a pilot to lose his position, he had to rely largely on navigation by dead-reckoning, using radio beacons and radio fixes from airfields along the way. If dead-reckoning failed, a pilot could use a sextant and navigate using the positions of celestial bodies, but it appears that Cast was unable to use either navigation system to help him find his way. It had come down to his last option: he would have to rely on his eyesight alone. This combination of bad weather and loss of radio contact probably caused Lieutenant Cast to fly off course and after over twelve hours airborne, it must have become clear to him that he was running low on fuel. Using only his vision to guide him, to see the world below he would have needed to fly below the cloud bank to look for anything that could help him determine a course. One can imagine all of the members of the crew straining at their respective windows to see something, anything, that could inform them of their position. They would have had to rely on the aircraft's intercom to communicate, with the roar of four 1200 horsepower engines whining loud and reverberating throughout the plane. We know that they were still airborne at 1:30 in the afternoon and their fuel must have been dangerously low. The B-17G burned 50 gallons of fuel per hour, per engine and had a capacity of seventeen hundred gallons, most of which was already gone. They must have checked their charts and understood that they had been circling the town of Rangeley. They must have been so relieved to know that close by was an airstrip, a runway, and a safe landing. Flying in a long circle for more than an hour, they must have recognized where they were because Cast finally steered the plane towards Rangeley's tiny airstrip. But there was still a final problem: because they had been flying low enough to look at the terrain, they needed to gain altitude to come in on their approach.But the B-17G had a relatively poor rate of climb, at only nine hundred feet per minute. To get the plane up to where it rightfully belonged to be safe would take minutes. They never made it to the runway. Details from the crash site investigation showed that they must have been flying extremely low because as Lieutenant Cast turned to bank, the B-17s wingtip caught on a treetop, causing the plane to twist and corkscrew into the ground at full speed.The wreck created a swath in the forest 200 feet wide for a distance of over 800 feet before it finally stopped. With so little fuel left in the tanks, there was no fireball or great explosion, just a sudden crashing sound and the snapping of trees and timber, followed by a long, hollow silence. No one survived. All were under the age of twenty-seven years old. The wreck was discovered three days later after an exhaustive search, the few crew remains were taken to Bangor and the remains of the plane were left to sit in the middle of the north woods, perhaps to be seen by a hunter now and again as the years went by. Eventually a logging company came upon the wreckage years later and buried the wreckage. Later, it seems, another storm uprooted some of the trees that had grown over the wreck, exposing it again to the elements and inspiring a few people to erect a stone to the memory of the fallen airmen. The remains of the B-17 lie beneath the forest and a stone marker is all that remains to mark the spot where these brave men met their end on a blustery July day in Maine. Aircraft 2: A twin engine A-26 Invader attack bomber from Barksdale Field in Louisiana, took off from Bradley Field in Connecticut after refueling. It was being piloted by a Mainer, Second Lieutenant Philip "Phee" Russell, a flight instructor, from South Portland. This journey was a kind of gift to Russell from the Army, called a "long-distance training mission" to his home state for a well-deserved break and visit home. He was almost there, with only 170 miles between Russell and his wife and daughter. Russell was a flight instructor. He knew how to pilot an airplane and wasn't a rookie by any measure. He had made it through much of the same weather that Cast and his crew had encountered and he had been lucky enough to stay on course. His wife and baby daughter were on the base, waiting in the the observation tower, ready to greet him as he exited the plane.The fog was so thick that afternoon that the base commander had actually closed the runway, but Russell was close. At 4:35 PM his voice came over the radio requesting landing instructions. He was on time to land in Portland, but time was running out. The people in the observation tower reported seeing his Invader come out of the fog at two-hundred feet. What happened next happened so quickly. Was that smoke coming from his starboard engine or just a trick of the light in the fog? The tower immediately instructed Russell to climb to 1500 feet, but didn't get a chance to finish their instructions to head to another field in New Hampshire. For a reason we will never be able to truly ascertain, Russell never touched down on Portland's runway, though he flew directly over it at high speed and low altitude.As he was circling, his wingtip caught the ground and the Invader cart-wheeled, plowing into the ground. He met his end when the plane collided with Westbrook's Redbank Trailer Camp, full of workers building Liberty Ships at the New England Shipbuilding Corporation's facility. A fireball with 100 foot flames lit up the sky as the A-26 Invader made impact and created an impact crater. Nineteen people died in that trailer park, including Russell and his flight engineer, Wallace Mifflin. In the Portland area, this incident would be remembered as the Long Creek disaster. A small memorial to the victims of the crash has recently been erected. On that fateful day, 27 people lost their lives due to a strange combination of weather, confusion and reasons we will never determine, July 11, 1944 marks Maine's worst day in aviation history. Maine remains a place where the sky seems filled with aircraft either coming from or going to Canada or Europe, planes whose contrails fill the sky with a kind of white-lace reminder that up there, too high to hear, thousands of people fly over us on their way to somewhere beyond. But every now and then, often on a quiet night, late in the evening, you might find yourself drawn to the window to see if you can glimpse whatever it is that is making that sound that's caught your ear. It's a kind of low, loud whine in the distance, a deep-throated hum that seems louder and lower than it should be ,just above your head, growing in intensity as it passes over and then diminishes into the darkness, continuing its lonely journey. I've heard that sound more than once in my life and I know it might simply be a lovingly maintained museum piece on its way to an airshow somewhere, but there is a part of me that wonders if that sound of roaring engines might also be a memory, an echo from a time when thousands of planes filled with tens of thousands of young men, flew overhead towards their own uncertain futures. Today there are many who visit the site in Rangeley that commemorates the last flight of the B-17 piloted by Lieutenant Cast. If you are interested, it's located west of Rangeley off Route 16, just before Cupsuptic Boat Launch. Sources Johnson, Alan W. "A B17 Memorial". Aziscohos Lake Preservation Council. aziscohos.org, 30 May 2011. Noddin, Peter. “Aviation Archeology in Maine”. Mewreckchasers.com. Accessed 26 June 2018. Sneddon, Rob, "The Wreck Chaser". Downeast Magazine. Memorial Stone Photo http://www.eskerridge.com/bj/303rdbg/crashsit.html
Ten thousand warplanes flew from or over Maine during World War II. Over the course of the war, a total of 48 aircraft crashed in the state accounting for 143 deaths. The vast majority of[...]
Thomas Huntington, author of "Maine Roads to Gettysburg: How Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 Men from the Pine Tree State Helped Win the Civil Wars Bloodiest Battle."
Thomas Huntington, author of "Maine Roads to Gettysburg: How Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 Men from the Pine Tree State Helped Win the Civil Wars Bloodiest Battle."
Thomas Huntington, author of "Maine Roads to Gettysburg: How Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 Men from the Pine Tree State Helped Win the Civil Wars Bloodiest Battle."
Thomas Huntington, author of "Maine Roads to Gettysburg: How Joshua Chamberlain, Oliver Howard, and 4,000 Men from the Pine Tree State Helped Win the Civil Wars Bloodiest Battle."
If you live in New England, sooner or later you'll have this experience: you'll find yourself driving down a road you've driven a hundred times before and you'll notice something is different. At first, you might shrug it off, but the idea will dog you until you realize something is wrong: something is there that wasn't there before, a small detail like a sign or a tree, or perhaps it's something bigger, like a house or perhaps a road that branches off the main drag which you can't believe you never noticed before. If you're curious or perhaps just plain foolish, you might just backtrack and turn down that road to see where it goes. What harm will it do, you ask? And where that road takes you might just be to a place from which you can never escape,not because you're lost and can't get back to your starting point, but because once you turn around and finally make your hurried way back home, you can never go back, because when you try to return down that road or to that house, you discover, much to your chagrin and mounting concern, that there is no house and no one you know, I mean no one, has ever seen that road that branched off into that place you went. You might try a hundred times to find that road again, but it just isn't there. Sound like something out of the Twilight Zone? I know. Is it possible that things like this do happen? As the writer of these stories here at Strange New England, I've done a fair amount of research about the inexplicable, but stories about disappearing places? Perhaps this it the ‘glitch in the matrix' kind of story that makes for good late night reading on Reddit. Perhaps it's more of a time slip tale? It's as though once you've slipped out of one place and into another, you don't even want to think about it, or the implications that it brings. I mean, all you have to prove you were ever in such a place or on such a road is your own recollection, and that can easily be discounted to fatigue, a trick of the light, or even a creation of an overstimulated mind. Still, such a thing happened to my wife and I when we were first married over thirty years ago and to this day, we are both convinced that we were allowed a glimse of a place and perhaps a time, that does not exist, at least on any map we can find. And we wouldn't be the first who found themselves in such a predicament. No matter where you are on Earth there are GPS coordinates that will tell you exactly where you are and they are as close as your smartphone. You can save your location like a bookmark and return to it at your leisure. But there might just be places that don't show up on the maps, places the GPS satellites don't cover and these places, if they exist, perhaps only exist in the geography of imagination. What I'm about to tell you really happened. My wife, Victoria, and I, both experienced it and it continues to haunt us to this day. Perhaps the word ‘haunt' is incorrect. It doesn't frighten us when we recall what happened. When we remember it, we do so with longing and something else...I think I'll call it hope. We met in college in the early 1980s. I was living on campus in Orono and she was commuting from Dexter three or four times a week, still living with her parents. We had an immediate connection and within two years, we were married and living in a tiny apartment in Bangor, happy and looking forward to whatever came our way. We both worked during the week and though we had almost no money at all, we really were about as happy as either of us ever expected we ever would be. We had an old red Datsun pickup and on weekends, Vic armed with her State of Maine DeLorme Gazeteer, and I would go exploring. For you to understand the impact of this story, you must know that Vic has an excellent sense of direction. I can get lost driving home from work, but not Vic. She has a nearly infallible internal compass and can easily weave her way to a place using backroads and byways that appear as only dotted lines on the maps. Be it Boston or some small hidden Maine village whose name is tiny on the map, Vic is a keen pilot. It was on a late August afternoon that we found ourselves sitting under a tree having a picnic with our friends, Thane and her future husband, James, in Newburgh, Maine, about twenty minutes away from our Bangor apartment. Situated halfway between Hampden and Dixmont, Newburgh is rural with mostly small houses and farms surrounded by wooded, rolling hills and farmland. There are many sideroads leading off Kennebec Road. As the day wore down to dinner time, we decided it was time to head back into Bangor. With little else to do, we took it upon ourselves to take the ride slowly just in case any new path came our way that we could explore. There were hours of daylight left and we had no particular place to go. We turned onto Kennebec Road and began driving back to Bangor with the lazy afternoon sun still high overhead. Vic and I both grew up in the country, she in Dexter and I in Caribou, and though we were now residents of Bangor, we were hopeful to someday find our own little place away from the hustle and flow of the city in which we now lived. We talked about it often, but only in a vague, in the distant future kind of way. We couldn't afford to buy a used car, let alone a plot of land in the country. To that end, we often turned down back roads, especially if they were narrow and tree-lined and unpaved, looking for some prime piece of real estate in which to plant a dream. You never know where you'll end up when you start down such a road. You might find a sheltered little village or at least an abandoned farm or two that you might be able to buy cheap and revamp into your own little paradise on earth, some place with only a foundation and perhaps an ancient orchard to tell us that people once lived there before the ravages of time caught up to them. We had little else back then except our dreams and each other, so it was a cheap adventure to go exploring. “Here,” Vic said as we approached a road just barely visible until you were right on it. “Turn here. Let's see where that goes.” We were perhaps three miles from our friend's house in Newburgh. It was a narrow track with barely enough room for our truck, our tires vibrating to the dirt, sending a small cloud of dust behind us as we drove, erasing the world. The trees that lined the road were deciduous, not evergreen, with maples and birches predominating. There were no houses to be seen and telephone poles, either. In fact, there was little on either side of this road to indicate that anyone lived nearby. Such roads aren't that rare in this part of the state. They are the rule, rather than the exception. As we continued on for perhaps a half mile, we noticed the road rising as we made our way up the slope of a hill. When we reached the top of that hill, what we saw was burned into each of our memories. Even today, thiry years later, we reminisce about it. Vic remembers the details better, with the eye of an artist, but without a doubt, we both remember the same place with the same details. There was a field on the right just before the old white farmhouse. Across the road from the farmhouse was a traditional red barn with perhaps a small outbuilding or two. Another field to the left of the barn rolled out down the hill into what appeared like a long private valley. We could see no other houses either nearby or in the distance. I stopped the car because it appeared to us from our vantage point that the road ended right there, in front of the little house. We sat transfixed, quietly taking it all in. Later we would each claim that this was our idea of a dream house, in a dream spot and that no other place we could ever imagine could be as perfect as this place. It was a small, two-story house with a white fence and flowers blooming next to the foundation, the kind of farmhouse you'd find in a hundred small Maine towns anywhere in the state. The medium sized-barn was well-kept and sturdy with one sliding board door, all closed. Whoever lived here took pride in appearances. It felt like home. As we looked out over the field in the distance, we saw a green valley and a wooded hill beyond, looking southward toward Dixmont. It was a secluded spot, away from the world and we felt that in a very real way. There were no cars or tractors, just the buildings and the road and the view that seemed to never end. As we sat there, a nagging feeling of having to leave entered our minds, but we lingered nonetheless. I remember putting the car in reverse to turn around when Vic stopped me and asked if we couldn't go closer to the house, to see what lay beyond. I said I didn't think so. Were we trespassing? Yes, probably, though there was no posted sign and we had turned down this path innocently enough. We contented ourselves by soaking in the view for a few more moments before I backed onto the field, turned the truck around and left, catching my final glimpse of the golden afternoon in the rearview mirror as we rose over the top of the hill and made our way back to the Kennebec Road. But for days we couldn't get the thought of that place out of our minds. How often did we talk about how perfect it seemed, how a place like that...no...how that place would make a perfect home, a hideaway with a few acres where we could settle down and build a life together. We knew we couldn't afford a place like that, not yet, but we could dream, couldn't we? For a week, we spoke of little else. The next Saturday we loaded a picnic lunch into the old Datsun and drove back to that place, this time to knock on the door and meet the people who lived in our dream house. But we couldn't find the road. At first we both laughed it off, amused that we could have missed such an obvious thing, but as the afternoon wore on, it became clear to us that we were searching frantically for something which, to be quite honest, wasn't there anymore. But how could a road vanish? How could we be so wrong about its location when both of us distinctly could recall the entire series of events that led us to that place? As the afternoon wore on and we had backtracked again and again to no avail, we shrugged our shoulders and found our way back home, completely stymied by the whole experience. We were sure we had seen it, certain that we weren't experiencing some shared hallucination, but at the end of the day one thing was clear: we couldn't find the road that led to the house that felt more like home than any place we had seen before. Time passed. Life kept us busy enough and like most people when faced with the unexplained, we shrugged it off as our own mistake. Somehow, we had simply missed the turn. We had obviously not paid attention to detail, lost in the perfect moment we spent looking out into the field beyond the house and into the isolated valley below. It was a small thing, really, and we had a life to build, but in the back of our minds, we always wondered. As the years passed, we kept looking. No one we knew had any idea what we were talking about, not that we told many about our visit to the lost valley. We scoured the maps, tried every back road and dirt path we could find, but to no end. That house and barn, that long valley, those forested hills beyond were nowhere to be found. When Google Earth came online, we made a point to scrutinize the imagery as closely as we could, expanding our search to miles beyond anywhere we had been on that late summer Saturday so many years ago. That road, that house and barn, simply aren't there. We strayed off the map. It happens from time to time. It might have happened to you and you weren't even aware of it. How could you know, unless you were enchanted by something you saw and tried to find it again and found it gone, dissolved into the space between the atoms of the world, unavailable to you, ever again. What haunts my wife and I today, more than anything else, is the feeling that we were supposed to see that place, that it was no accident that we stumbled upon it. It felt like home to us, that much remains. Everything else is just a mystery. If you've ever found yourself off the map and dare to share your story, please contact us at strangenewenglander@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you and if nothing else, assure you that in the strange world of people and doings, you are not alone.
If you live in New England, sooner or later you’ll have this experience: you’ll find yourself driving down a road you’ve driven a hundred times before and you’ll notice something is different. At first, you[...]
The cold wind blows across the empty fields. The trees have shed their rusted leaves and the moon plays hide and go seek with the thin and wispy clouds. It's the time of year when night falls soon and you need an extra blanket on the bed to get you through the dark hours till morning. October is here and with it, the New England landscape dons a different coat, as though it too is bundling itself up against winter. If you're easily startled, you might want to pull the curtains before going to bed and make sure the doors are locked tight. There are sounds in the darkness that leave you edgy. This is October and the hour is late. Time, perhaps, for a ghost story? There are so many lost highways in New England. You see them as you drive past, little narrow ways that lead into the woods, dirt tracks that go on up and beyond and though you've driven past a hundred times, for some reason, you've never turned and explored where it goes. Has it ever occurred to you to ask yourself, why not? Roads belong to everyone, and therefore, no one. What better place to take a drive and see the fall foliage than a road less-traveled? But when the sun goes down, such roads might lead to different destinations than they do in the light. One such road exists in downeast Maine. Case in Point. You might find yourself driving on a lonely stretch of road in Hancock County, Maine in Township 10 on Route 182 between Franklin and Cherryfield. This stretch of land is known as Black's Woods. The world will be close. The fog will be low to the ground and the hour will be late. You find yourself on a small mountain, called a hill by the locals and you might chance to see a young woman standing on the side of the road in a place no one should be at such an hour. You will see her from a distance, long enough to wonder why she is there. Then, as your car approaches her you will see that she is dressed in a gown of a sort that is hardly seen today. Then you will feel compelled to stop and speak with her. It's the least a decent human being would do on such a night at such an hour. You might roll your window down as you pull up to her. That's when you'll see the dark eyes, the incessant stare, the long, black hair and a face that is both beautiful and terrifying. You feel the hairs on the back of your neck begin to rise but you will speak to her, asking if she needs any help. That's where the story takes on many different forms. This specter might ask for a ride to Bar Harbor, for it seems she is intent on making an appointment there. You might have her get in and then start driving only to notice she is no longer in the car with you, but directly on the road in front of you. You might be lucky – she might stay in the car, for awhile. You'll talk to her nervously, though she doesn't answer back. You'll cast your eyes from the road to her, only to find it empty, with nothing but a puddle of cold water on the seat she occupied. But you will be allowed to go home, to make it safely back to your bed where you won't sleep because you've just had an encounter with the inexplicable. But you're alive, thank God. Her name, according to the folklore of the region, is Catherine. The hill has been called Catherine's Hill for time out of mind, predating automobiles. For over a hundred years people from the area have passed down the stories, told to them by some old family member or friend, of an encounter with the ghost girl who haunts the side of the road. In some tales, she is headless, having been decapitated by an accident that took her life. Some say she died while she and her newly married husband were on their way to Bar Harbor for a honeymoon. Some will tell you that she was killed on her prom night. Ghost stories have a way of adapting to the times in which they are told – an old tale will take on new accouterments, become modernized, even though the original tale might have been told by the very earliest of people, the Native Americans. In his excellent book of ghost stories from Downeast Maine Dark Woods, Chill Waters (Downeast Books, 2007) , Marcus LiBrizzi details variations of the death of this young woman. One such story tells of a night in the 1920s during Prohibition when wealthy flatlanders would come to Maine to run whiskey. There is a perfectly preserved Model T ford in the bottom of nearby Fox Pond that becomes incorporated into her story. She and the driver must have been going too fast, taken a bad turn, and somehow found themselves in the cold dark waters of the Pond, only to rise again as phantoms. Well, Catherine at least. The stories about her persist. The local Bangor Daily News ran a front page article about her. There are Youtube videos that tell of a musician named Dale Whitney whose encounter is usually thought of as the quintessential Catherine tale. It goes like this: Whitney is rising home alone after a gig in Bar Harbor and sees her standing on the side of the road. He stops and asks if she needs help. She speaks, “I need a man to take me to Bar Harbor.” He begins to feel that this is all wrong. Then he takes a good look at her and find that she is transparent. He answers, “I just came from there,” and slams his foot on the gas, in near panic. Just a way down the lane, he stops and his humanity kicks in. He must have been seeing things – it was late and he was tired. He turns around to find her and give her that ride, only to discover that she is nowhere to be seen. There were no other cars on the road. There was no where for her to go. But she was gone. The next day on another journey along the same road, he comes upon an accident: an overturned van, totaled beyond repair. No one could have survived. Whitney wonders, as the tales have foretold, if that van had seen the ghost but just kept driving. You must stop and ask if you can help, otherwise, Catherine's ghost will see to it that the curse is enforced. Perhaps by going back and looking for her, Whitney's humanity allowed him to survive. Perhaps? So the story goes. Ghost stories persist. They are the ones passed down from generation to generation. In the case of Catherine's ghost, the requirement of offering help perhaps serves as a cautionary tale: even the dead need help and by offering to help Catherine, you are reminded of the value of being alive in the first place. Plus, it makes a great story on a cold and rainy night when, of course, you're safely in your home where everything is as it should be. RESOURCES LiBrizzi, Marcus A. Dark Woods, Chill Waters: Ghost Tales from Down East Maine. Down East Books, 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Mountain http://bangordailynews.com/video/the-story-of-catherines-hill/
The cold wind blows across the empty fields. The trees have shed their rusted leaves and the moon plays hide and go seek with the thin and wispy clouds. It’s the time of year when[...]
It is September 11, 1976. You are sitting quietly in a living room near Maine's Old Orchard Beach. The sea air is strangely balmy as you settle down for a quiet evening. Your wife and children are out for a few hours and for once, you have the house to yourself. You are 58 years old and your name is Dr. Herbert Hopkins and your quiet life is about to encounter a road block that will send you careening into an area you've glimpsed but never visited before. Though you are a renowned allergist and have done research for years on the causes and treatment of multiple sclerosis, you have been going down a slightly different avenue in your career recently. For the past several weeks you've been engaged doing what you most enjoy: hypnosis. The most interesting work of your career has been consulting on a case of alleged UFO teleportation in Oxford, Maine of David Stephens in 1975, work you find both fascinating and difficult to dismiss. Lately, it's been keeping you up at night, pondering the possibilities of such a thing. How strange that so many people are convinced that they are experiencing things that…simply cannot be. Perhaps tonight you will review some of the tape recordings of the sessions to see if you can find your way into this strange case. Did these abductees really see strange mushroom-headed entities inside of their ships? The peaceful silence is disturbed by the ring of the telephone. You answer, hoping it is a wrong number. Instead, you hear a strange, faint voice of a man who tells you that he is the vice-president of the New Jersey UFO Research Organization calling from a phone booth. He has heard of your recent work. He wonders if he might stop by, since he is in the area, and discuss your findings. This piques your interest – another researcher into the phenomenon that is so troubling you. You agree, telling him your address. You hang up the phone and switch on the porch light so that, when he arrives, he'll know which door to approach. But when you flip the switch, you see him mounting the steps, already nearly at your door. But there he is, walking up the steps. You are puzzled, since the closest phone booth is several blocks away. Startled, you open the door and quickly allow entrance into your house the single, strangest visitor you will ever have in your whole life – a man not quite of this world. So begins one of the most famous encounters in the strange history of the Men in Black and one of New England's closest encounters with them. For the uninitiated, Men in Black are usually black-suited men, often arriving unexpected in pairs or trios, whose provenance is dubious and whose purpose is unknown. They often arrive directly after a UFO sighting to speak with those who have witnessed the lights or craft in the sky. However, whenever people have reported meeting these mysterious beings, they are often left with a profound feeling of unease and distress. Who did they really just meet? What did these people actually want? Are they even human at all? Dr. Hopkins let the man in before he even knew what was happening. His guest was impeccably dressed in an apparently new suit, pants perfectly creased, black suit coat, tie and shoes and a starched white shirt. He also wore grey leather gloves. On the top of his head was a black hat which the man removed, revealing a perfectly smooth bald head. Dr. Hopkins realized before he had even spoken a word to the man that he was totally hairless – no eyebrows or eyelashes graced the man's face. Also, even in the dim yellow light of the hall, he could tell that his visitor's skin was pale to the point of being nearly white. The only hint of color about him were his deep red lips. Later, Dr. Hopkins would swear that the man was wearing lipstick. His nose seemed too small for a man of his height and statue and his ears were very small as well as appearing to be lower on the head than they should have been. Hopkins invited the stranger into his living room and they sat opposite each other on the chair and the couch. The stranger asked about the hypnotism sessions with the supposed abductees and Hopkins answered all of his questions, even though the strangeness of the whole encounter was beginning to have an impact upon his mind: who was this man, really? He seemed to know things about the case that only someone intimately invovled with it would. Why was he asking questions if he already knew all of the answers? With every answer that Hopkins gave to his inquires, the man would repeat the exact same phrase, “Yes, that's the way I understand it.” And then it occurred to him that he did not know the men's name. Things immediately began to steer towards the unknown and Dr. Hopkins found himself in the presence of something else, something other. First, the man mistakenly brushed his lips with his gray gloves and a portion of lipstick was smeared off, revealing that he had no lips! Then he pointed to Dr. Hopkins' pocket and told Hopkins that he had two coins in it. This seemingly random observation was true, though how he would have know this was beyond the good doctor. The stranger requested that Hopkins remove one of the coins and hold it in the palm of his hand, which he did. “Watch the coin,” the stranger requested. As he observed it, his vision began to grow fuzzy and then to waver in his vision. After it changed color, it simply vanished. The man then said that no one on this plane would ever see that coin again. The conversation was steered by the guest to the Betty and Barney Hill UFO encounter from Exeter, New Hampshire in 1961. “Do you know what happened to Barney Hill?” asked the stranger. “No, I don't,” replied Hopkins, “except that he died.” “Do you know what he died from,” asked the stranger. “A heart attack, maybe?” “No. That's not entirely accurate. He died because he knew too much,” replied the stranger. Then he arose slowly and awkwardly and began to move toward the door. With slurred speech he said to Hopkins, “My energy is running low. Must go now. Goodbye.” And with that, he left Hopkins wondering who he had met and what had just happened. He rushed to the door to watch the man depart but all that he saw were very bright blue light bathing the parking lot outside his home. Were the man's words about Barney Hill a threat against Hopkins, meant to stop his research on the hypnosis case and walk away? As time passed, he became convinced of the truth of this idea. If this had simply been another human being telling him to stop, he might not have, but because of the high strangeness of this man's behavior and appearance, there was no doubt that he would comply., He erased all of the tapes from the prior session and stopped working on the UFO abduction case altogether. He discovered later that, of course, there was no New Jersey UFO Research Organization and like so many people who have claimed to have had interactions with these beings, he felt like he had been contacted and threatened by these entities. Were the man's words about Barney Hill a threat against Hopkins, meant to stop his research on the hypnosis case and walk away? As time passed, he became convinced of the truth of this idea. If this had simply been another human being telling him to stop, he might not have, but because of the high strangeness of this man's behavior and appearance, there was no doubt that he would comply., He erased all of the tapes from the prior session and stopped working on the UFO abduction case altogether. He discovered later that, of course, there was no New Jersey UFO Research Organization and like so many people who have claimed to have had interactions with these beings, he felt like he had been contacted and threatened by these entities. The 1976 Herbert Hopkins case remains one of the most detailed reports of an interaction with a possible Man in Black. People who study the phenomena often cite this case as the most important and informed report ever recorded about the ominous visitors in the night. However, a good story doesn't have to be real to be appreciated. It is possible that the experience as reported by Dr. Hopkins was a fabrication designed to draw attention to his work and his own odd need for attention. Though the source of the following information is no longer available on the Internet, it is available at the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. It is in the form of a blog written by his nephew, author Herbert Hopkins. (see references for link to the blog). In his entry for January 13, 2008, he reveals to the world his intimate knowledge of the whole episode and explains how the whole thing was a desperate grasp for attention from a brilliant but troubled man. Herbert Hopkins writes: “My uncle was, unfortunately, a fantasy-prone individual, craved the center of attention and limelight and on a base level he sometimes just made things up—no matter how hyperbolic—to top everybody else. As brilliant as he was in many areas, however, he was unskilled at fiction. And for much of the ‘70s and 80s, he was an alcoholic. Every night was spent alone with a magnum of wine…The bottom line for this particular Man in Black tale is unfortunately pretty mundane. This mysterious being in black, inspired by cheap fiction and alcohol, probably less of malicious intent and more from some sad need for attention, was, alas, a simple lie, one that needs to be corrected for those into serious research in this area.” So, who are we to believe? The good Dr. Hopkins or his nephew? Was he truly threatened or was he simply seeking attention? Whichever one you choose, the story remains interesting and continues to dwell in the annals of the mysterious in the lore of New England. Perhaps when we consider the truly strange, the strangest of all might be the people who claim impossible things. Sources Hopkins,Herbert. “The Truth About a Man in Black”.Dark Bits, 13 Jan 2008. Hopkins,Herbert. “The Truth About a Man in Black”.Dark Bits, 13 Jan 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20080524015547/http://howardhopkins.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html Citro, Joseph A., Passing Strange, 164-167, 1997 Chapters Publishing Ltd., Shelburne, VT. For a list of Herbert Hopkins' works, visit www.herberthopkins.com
It is September 11, 1976. You are sitting quietly in a living room near Maine’s Old Orchard Beach. The sea air is strangely balmy as you settle down for a quiet evening. Your wife and[...]
Join me in conversation with Dr. Glenn Cummings, President of the University of Southern Maine. He talks about leading USM's efforts in becoming a Best Place to Work and ends our interview with a special story about Joshua Chamberlain. He touches on Macro Accountability and Micro Freedoms; and holding Administration accountable. USM is embracing diversity, customer service (student satisfaction), and leadership training. Glenn shares his views on the difference between a manager and a leader and building employee loyalty through a little flexibility.
It won't be long now. The night winds begin to gather the chill that will eventually drill into our bones once the damp, grey skies of November gather overhead, anchoring us to the sunset and the dark. Trees are explosions of color and then nothing but skeletons, their gnarled hands reaching for the sliver of moon left to us - the only light left in the dark. October is a country full of spirits and innuendos of the unknown and we are no strangers to its paths. Some of us even enjoy the quickening of the heart that comes with the unexplained shadows and sounds from the dark corner of unlit rooms. As Halloween arrives, I thought Strange New England might serve as a place to recall some of the stranger aspects of living in New England and how this landscape of long shadows keeps us in our place and makes us whistle in the darkness. Though we report the stories, legends and tales that populate the pages of Strange New England, I can only claim to have experienced the edge of normal a few times in my life. It takes more than a little courage to come out and share them, so I'll begin with a simple thing.. I would like to share my experience of the phenomenon known as Death Knocks. I was a senior in high school when my experience occurred and it haunts me to this day. The seemingly inexplicable events of that one stormy winter night has never been something I could explain to my own satisfaction. Perhaps my readers will think I'm stretching the truth, but I invite you also to help me determine what really transpired that cold December night in 1979 in the cold expanse of far northern Maine.. We lived on the Back Presque Isle Road, seven miles from Caribou and fourteen miles from Presque Isle. We had neighbors, but they were not exactly next door neighbors. I was a junior in High School and I was staying up late watching television on Saturday night. I was used to staying up late and on the weekends, I had permission from my parents to set my own bedtime. Like most teenage boys, I got a thrill from staying up until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore and this was such a night. My parents were down the hall asleep and I was camped out on the couch watching Saturday Night Live. Outside, the snowstorm quickly developed into a blizzard, the wind whipping great gusts of snow against the windows and walls, trying to get in at every little crack. At the end of the show, WAGM played its customary film of Old Glory fluttering in the breeze as it played the Star Spangled Banner and then everything turned to static. I had already fed the woodstove an extra helping of birch and was about to see if anything was on CHSJ, the Canadian channel from over the border when it happened. There was a pounding on our porch door. Three loud thuds resounded in the living room and brought my heart directly to full throttle as it tried to jump out of my chest. As I try to recall the events of that night, I remember that there was essentially a blizzard raging without, one of those that erased all of the hard edges of the world and covered the darkness with the fainted, palest white. I remember that I froze in place, trying to make sense of what I had just heard. It didn't make any sense. Our porch was fully enclosed and was a room in its own right. The only entrance to that porch was a sliding glass door that was locked firmly closed by a piece of maple cut to the exact length of the door and set carefully in place to block the door from sliding. There was no way anyone could have gained entrance to that door without breaking the glass or somehow lifting the piece of maple from the groves of the bottom of the casement. The question in my mind had no real answer: no one could be out there. No one. Three more knocks, this time even more pronounced, hammered against the door. This time, I sprang off the couch and ran down the hallway to awaken my father. Dad had been a deputy sheriff and had a small handgun he kept in a drawer next to his bed. When I recall, I find it odd that he didn't reach for it. He simply got out of bed and went to the living to room to hear for himself. Three more thuds. “Who's there?” my father said loudly. Two words - a simple question, really. But the answer was not forthcoming. He stood next to the door and said, “I'll ask you one more time. You are you and what do you want?” Silence. “Go see if you can see onto the porch,” he told me. Our porch door had no peep hole and was solid. There was a window in the kitchen that looked out onto the porch, but there was nothing out there but darkness, but because of its placement, I couldn't see to the door itself. “I can't see anything,” I whispered to my dad. “Come back here,” he whispered back. A minute that seemed like a slice of eternity passed and then, a single thud, the loudest so far, resounded in the air and shook one of the pictures off the wall. “I'm doing to get my gun,” my father said firmly to the air. “When I come back, I won't hesitate to use it. Now, one last time, who the hell are you?” Silence. And that was that. No further sounds, no other knocks. Simply the long silence after the fact. We waited near the doorway for perhaps three or four minutes. Dad took the opportunity to put on his winter coat and boots, still not actually retrieving his weapon. Then, he turned on the outside light that lit the driveway and our front yard. Though the driving snow reduced our visibility, we could see that there were no footsteps onto our porch in the snow. The driveway and lawn were a pristine white blanket of snow, undisturbed by any mark of passage. We both went outside, but not before Dad got his pistol. As the snow and ice stung our faces, we took a flashlight and examined the sliding glass door to the porch from the outsider looking in. It was secure and tight, the measured piece of maple board still blocking the door from opening. The tight beam lit the interior of the porch - it was empty of anything that didn't belong there. Whatever had caused the knocks was not currently on the porch or anywhere that we could see. Whatever had tried to gain entrance into our little home on the freezing cold night was nowhere to be seen. I wish I had something to tell you that would help to explain what happened. At the time, we had no idea what this strange occurrence meant or how it could have transpired in the first place. It has become of the strangest mysteries of my life. I learned later that in some cultures, such as my own Franco-American, but also the Scots-Irish tradition, there is such a thing as a death knock. They come in the night and are supposed to announce the oncoming death of someone in or connected to the household. The knocks usually come in sets of three and are supposed to signify that in three months, three weeks, or three days, someone will pass away. Death knocks, then, are a portent of doom. Strangely enough, no one in our house died in three months, three weeks or three days. But I have kept one of the most disturbing details for the end of my story, which is that even my father, the bravest man I have ever known, didn't dare to go out onto that porch until the next morning when the sun finally rose. We unlocked the door and slowly opened it. There, on the floor just in front of the door, no bigger than a saucer plate, was a small puddle of red, red blood. Happy Halloween!.
It won’t be long now. The night winds begin to gather the chill that will eventually drill into our bones once the damp, grey skies of November gather overhead, anchoring…
How do we knew when a body is truly dead? Modern science shows us that the body dies slowly, not all at once as we used to suppose. It takes…
How do we knew when a body is truly dead? Modern science shows us that the body dies slowly, not all at once as we used to suppose. It takes time. The body is a rather vast and complex ecosystem of enzymes, processes and functions that rarely, if ever, stop all at once. With our modern sensors and advanced medical knowledge, we usually determine the moment of death as the time when the brain ceases to show any sign of activity. However, if the heart stops beating and breathing ceases, there's just no way that a body can function much longer. Today, an coroner always double-checks to makes sure the recently deceased is actually and fully gone, but in the past, not so long ago, we did not have the precise knowledge that we have today. What follows is a horrific example of what may have happened on a rather regular basis in the days before electricity. The thin line between life and death was often out of focus and those whose task it was to pronounce a person living to dead may have had a tough time getting it right all of the time. The Howe family was one of the oldest founding families in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Of note is their founding of the Wayside Inn at Sudbury, Massachusetts which was later lovingly restored by Henry Ford. It is also famous for Elias Howe's invention of America's first lockstitch sewing machine in 1846. Such a family had established itself as memorable by the time they settled in Damariscotta, Maine after the War of 1812 and began their strange association with the phenomenon of American Spiritualism that ushered in one of New England's saddest and possibly darkest burials. Colonel Joel Howe, the family patriarch and veteran of the War of 1812 had nine children, all curious, well-read and very interested in the new ideas of science and invention beginning to take hold in the popular imagination. Of particular interest are son Edwin and his little sister, Mary Howe. Author Harold W. Castner who researched the legend for Yankee Magazine, actually interviewed people who were present and witnessed the events that passed in the Howe family home, fourteen people, in fact. Their stories corroborated the events described in local newspapers in the Newcastle and Damariscotta area at the time. The Howe Family made their income from the stagecoach tavern known as the Howe House Inn. It was in that house that the family began their attempts at communication with the dead. This might sound like something out of a 1960s Hammer horror film, but the Spiritualist Movement in America was a bona fide religious organization that still exists today. It first appeared not far from Maine in the 'burned-over district" of upstate New York with the Fox sisters and their supposed communication with the dead. Devout spiritualists at the time were often protestants who were using the idea of a life beyond the physical form in which a person could still learn and grow and, to the great interest of the believers, could communicate from beyond the veil with the living. Fueled by the written works of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, spiritualists believed that there is not a single Heaven for all to enter, or even a single, solitary Hell. Instead, there was a hierarchy of both, much like Dante's leveling of the Underworld in his Inferno. Spiritualists ascribe to the idea that the spirits of the dead act as a kind of network of connections between God and his living world. Through the souls of the deceased, Spiritualists believed that they could commune with the Almighty. In order to speak directly with the dead, one needed a medium, a gifted living person who could, through a kind of self-hypnosis, get themselves into a mental or spiritual state that was amenable to contacting the dead. Once that state of mind was achieved, the medium became the terminal in the network that connected both worlds. All you had to do was sit quietly and ask questions. If someone on the 'other end' was willing, the medium spoke or wrote your answer. This practice still exists today, but in 1882, it was all the rage. In the forty years since its birth in New England, Spiritualism had grown into a recognized religious organization. Which brings us to young Mary Howe and her brothers and sisters, all living together under the same roof in Damariscotta. The family was gifted with the ardent belief in life after death coupled with a kind of ingenuity of invention that was the hallmark of a 19th century Yankee. Brothers Edwin and Lorenzo crafted a 'perpetual motion' machine and a way to counterfeit half dollars. Mary devoted her intellectual hunger toward her faith and the family discovered that she had a strong gift as a medium. Her fame spread throughout the Spiritualist community and beyond. Like so many people who have attended a seance or had their palms read, many visitors to the Inn were simply curiosity seekers wondering what this spiritualist stuff was all about, but some were as devout as the Howes. What they discovered when they attended one of Mary's trance sessions might be a quiet conversation with a loved one, a long session of silence, or they might be treated to something quite theatrical. Once, convinced that she was graced with the gift of flight, Mary Howe jumped off the stairs, her arms spread wide like a bird wings, her mouth speaking in a strange, inhuman tongue. When she landed in a heap at the bottom of stairs with a broken ankle and a panoply of bruises and scrapes, it only served to increase her popularity as THE medium to visit if you wanted speak with Uncle Albert about where he buried his money. A witness to one of the Howe sessions was author Castner's own grandmother. Her question to Mary was a simple one: when would her relative return from his visit to New York. Mary's answer was mumbled and quiet, but she communicated, "I can see him clearly. I see many lights! Wait! He will not return! When all those lights appear, he will die!" According to Castner's grandmother, Mary's prediction came true. Her relative died of apparent heart failure as he witnessed the first nighttime illumination of the lights on the Brooklyn Bridge. One can only imagine how quickly that story spread throughout the community. Though Mary entertained many guests with her sessions, she also practiced another kind of spiritual connection with the world of the dead: she claimed that she could travel there. Her trances were deep, lasting much longer than any visitor could stay. Many mediums in the 1880s did not explain exactly what they were doing or how they achieved their mystical trances, but today we might classify these as self-hypnosis sessions or even as out-of-body experiences. They would need the help of others because their body would remain in an apparent state of sleep for long periods of time. During that time, they would fall into a deep sleep and then, into something deeper, sometimes for days. In order keep the spiritual journeyer's body warm, they practised a strange habit. Normally, the infrared energy created by a sleeping body can be easily captured by blankets and even on the coldest night, the body's own chemistry will keep itself warm. Not in the case of some of these mental journeyers, like Mary Howe. As she lay on her couch or bed, we never discover which, they would lovingly surround her with stones they had warmed on the stove. These stones maintained, they claimed, enough body heat to keep the medium's body preserved and ready for when he or she returned from their spiritual wanderings and could reinhabit the body. It was claimed by those attending the bodies that these medium were indeed still alive, even though no breath fogged a mirror and no heartbeat could be found. Such practitioners might be doubted if it weren't for our own modern understanding of both the coma state and the trances that various shamans enter in indigenous societies around the world. Mediums who practiced this deep type of trance almost always came out of them fully refreshed with no apparent harm to their physical body. If you waited long enough, they always woke up. Which makes the story of Mary Howe so mysterious. In 1882, in her house on Hodgdon Street, Mary entered one of her deep trances. This was a commonplace happening and her brother Edwin knew the routine. He would keep the stones warm and keep replacing them around her body until she awoke and told of her journeyings to the other realm. By this time, Mary's trances were an item of curiosity and many people visited the house to see her lying supine, her mind elsewhere. Edwin welcomed his neighbors and friends in to witness his sister thus. One can imagine the conversations, the cups of tea, and the convivial nature of the guests as they wondered about where she was and who she was visiting. Perhaps someone voiced the question, "What might happen if the spirit found itself astray and lost its way back to its earthly vessel?" People marveled when they visited after a week and still, she hadn't returned to her body. Edwin reassured everyone not to worry - that this was not unusual. But after two weeks had passed, someone must have asked the question, "Is she in a trance, or is the poor girl dead?" Dr. Robert Dixon was a man of science. He did not relish the idea of visiting the Howe household when the sheriff ordered him to make the determination. There were laws, as well as common sense, that dictated that a dead body was a source of disease and must be buried as quickly as possible. Funeral homes existed, but in 1882, it was common practice to lay out the deceased body of your loved one in your own parlor so that friends might visit to say one last goodbye. This is almost exactly the scene that the good doctor witnessed when he entered the Howe home. Edwin admitted Dr. Dixon and led him to the room in which the body of his sister lay in her trance. He explained to Dr. Dixon that the stones were arranged thusly to keep her body warm. Dixon did note that the body did not present as though rigor mortis had set in. The skin was supple and the flesh of her cheeks was both warm and flexible. Edwin assured the doctor not to worry. His sister was merely in a trance. The body had been lying in a warm room for two weeks and there was no smell of putrefaction evident. Though she appeared to be alive, Dr. Dixon knew that all living people had two things in common: they breathed and their hearts beat. Neither was true for Mary Howe. Knowing that life did not inhabit a body that was neither pumping blood nor breathing, he had no choice but to pronounce her dead. Of course her brother protested. So did many in the town who were used to her strange trances. That evening, a deputation on three men entered the Howe household and transferred Mary's body into a coffin. Protesters waiting in the community determined that the authorities were about to bury a living woman. With the authority of the law behind the sheriff, there was little anyone could do. Dr. Dixon, the sheriff, and the undertaker began the process of burial. However, the owner of the Hillside Cemetery, Benjamin Metcalf, possibly refused permission to bury Mary in his ground. He was one of those in town who believed that she was possibly still in one of her trances and he would not be a part of such a horrific misdeed. Glidden Cemetery in nearby Newcastle would have to serve as her final resting place, but once at the cemetery, no one could be found who was willing to dig the grave for the very same reason. With determination to finish this episode, the doctor, sheriff and undertaker rolled up their sleeves and grabbed the shovels. After the grave was dug, the undertaker's assistant began to realize the possibility of what was about to happen and he refused to help lower the coffin into the ground. Realizing that they were going to receive no help from anyone else, the three men took it upon themselves to lower Mary into her final resting place. They did not mark her grave, again possibly because they did not want anyone from the community to undo their official work and retrieve her from the cold, cold ground. To this day, no one knows her true final resting place. Today, people are pronounced dead usually after all brain function ceases. The body can be kept alive in a state similar to Mary Howe's state in 1882. However, in 1882 Dr. Dixon might not have been able to determine without a shadow of a doubt that Mary might have been in a deep coma. In such cases, the heart beats very slowly and respiration is neither deep nor easily perceived. Is the comatose person aware? Can a comatose person reawaken after weeks or months. The answer is yes, if their body is being properly fed and if fluids are being administered. But in 1882, there was no way of keeping Mary hydrated or her body fed if she was in a deep coma, or what her brother referred to as a trance. Is it possible that Dr. Dixon and his two compatriots buried poor Mary Howe alive? One must assume that it is possible. In fact, when one considers the incidence of comas in the modern world and tries to determine the number of coma cases that must have occurred in the past, it is quite possible that a large number of comatose people were buried alive, given their incomplete knowledge of the condition. This is why some people chose tombs instead of graves and why some had strings attached to external bells so that, if a person awoke entombed, they could tug on the string and be 'saved by the bell.' Burial would be a faster death due to lack of oxygen. Given Mary's supple flesh, the lack of rigor mortis, the lack of the odor of death, and her previous trance experiences, it is not only possible that she was buried alive, but probable. In 1888, six years after the possible living burial of Mary Howe, the Fox sisters of upstate New York, whose interactions with the spirit of a dead peddler supposedly buried in their cellar started the Spiritualism movement in America, confessed in public on several occasions that they had made the whole thing up. The movement did not lose any ground after their confession. True believers merely brushed them off. Years later, upon the renovation of the Howe Inn , various contrivances were found in the walls: wires with no discernable connection, pipes that led to or from no water source, and other devices whose function defied explanation. This discovery makes for a strong case that many of the trance sessions held by the Howe brothers and sisters were merely parlor tricks after all, perhaps with brother Edwin in an upstairs room moaning through a pipe that led to a hollow space in the wall, amplifying the voice of a long dead relative, strange and distant. As the days and weeks passed, members of the Newcastle community avoided passing the cemetery if they could. Children were frightened and held their breaths as they passed. One can imagine the quiet of an early evening when the sun bathed the darkening world with a fire in the western sky and the wind died down leaving a deep silence, that perhaps, if you listened carefully, you might hear the quietest of sounds and wonder, is that a moan or a cry? Has Mary Howe finally awakened from her trance?
“Stand Firm Ye Boys From Maine” With a new preface and updated maps and illustrations, Stand Firm Ye Boys of Maine offers a compelling account of one of the most crucial small engagements of the Civil War. This powerfully narrated history tells the story of the 20th Maine Regiment, the soldiers who won the battle of Little Round Top. The culmination of years of detailed research, the book uses more than seventy first-hand accounts to bring the personal experiences of the soldiers to life, relating the story from both sides. Thomas Desjardin was born and raised in Maine and did his doctoral work in American History at the University of Maine. He has worked as an interpreter, giving programs on the Gettysburg battlefield for the National Park Service. The author of These Honored Dead: How the Story of Gettysburg Shaped American Memory and Through A Howling Wilderness: Benedict Arnold's March to Quebec, 1775, he is working on a TV documentary on Joshua Chamberlain.
Here's a quick question that will make you wonder: which son of Maine has affected more lives upon the planet than any other? Seems like a silly idea, really, perhaps because there is no real way to answer such a subjective question. In the arts we have Stephen King, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Edwin Arlington Robinson. In sports we have Louis Sockalexis, Cindy Blodgett, and Joan Benoit. Our political influence includes Lincoln's first vice-president, Hannibal Hamlin, the hero of Little Round Top, Joshua Chamberlain, and Margaret Chase Smith. For inventors, though, I believe there is a clear choice. Yes, Milton Bradley was born in Vienna, Maine. He invented games we still play and was the first person to print kindergarten materials in the country. Yes, we have Chester Greenwood, our beloved inventor of the earmuff. We even have Alvin Lombard, who invented the rolling track we see on snowmobiles and tanks. Of course, we can't forget L.L. Bean, the fellow who finally invented a waterproof boot. But to say that any of these inventors' creations changed the world for the majority of humans on the planet might be forcing the issue. There is one man, however, whose life changed the world for almost everyone. His contribution impacted peoples' lives so intensely, so devastatingly, that many will never be able to forget, or even to forgive him. His name is Hiram Maxim. During his time on earth he was responsible for 221 patents. Named a knight by by Queen Victoria and knighted by King Edward, he was known to royalty and world leaders. H.G. Wells was a great personal friend. He knew and spent time with the Wright Brothers. His patents include curling irons, amusement park rides, steam pumps, light bulbs and flying machines - all fairly important and mostly benign inventions, making the world a better place. So what on earth could this inventor from Sangerville, Maine have created that links him so inextricably with human suffering and bloody death? The same invention that links him inextricably with national defense and sovereignty. Hiram Maxim is the inventor of the first portable, fully automatic, self-loading and self-firing machine gun. How a poor boy from the wilds of Maine could have invented such a device and how he rose to such prominence is a fascinating tale, a true Horatio Alger story. Born in a humble shack by the side of the road near a brook at Brockway's Mills, Maine, Hiram began life as the son of a poor farmer and found as he grew that he was good at working with his hands, tinkering and making things work. Born in 1840, he and his brother Hudson lived in the wilds of the northern woods and found that hunting, fishing and farming were his main interests as he grew. There wasn't much else to do. He was adept with his hands and the use of tools. One day, he and his brother stood on a boulder on the edge of the family farm in Sangerville and each vowed that one day, they would be successful and wealthy men, a vow that ultimately saw fruition. At fourteen, he apprenticed out to a carriage-maker in East Corinth and was a handy hand at small boat-building. He invented a new mousetrap that kept the grist mill in Abbott free from vermin. But was too humble and quiet a place for his roaming mind and he left it to move to Fitchburg, Massachusetts to work at his uncle's machine works. During his time in there, he found work as a draftsman and an instrument maker and it seemed that nothing he put his mind to eluded him. He disliked working with others and found solace only in situations where he was ultimately in charge. When the Civil War broke out, Hiram refused to enlist. He would not become involved in that conflagration for moral reasons. He did not believe in war as a way to solve humanity's problems. How strange that in years to come, in the war to end all wars, his contribution would lead to more casualties than any other human on the planet. His brother Hudson Maxim was a skilled inventor in his own right, but his specialty was explosives and he put his considerable talent to the task of solving one of the most perplexing problems of modern war. At the time, gunpowder produced a cloud of impenetrable white on the battlefield and very soon after the firing commenced, confusion ensued. Soldiers could barely see the person next to them, let alone the enemy a hundred yards away. The gunpowder also left heavy residue that could gum up the workings of the mechanism. The government was eager to find a replacement for the old recipe for gunpowder, one that would give them the advantage on any battlefield. Hudson delivered and we do not know how much he was assisted by his brother Hiram, but there was a major falling out between them over the patent. Hudson had the greater knowledge when it came to chemicals and ordinance, but when the patent was applied for from the patent office, the applicant only wrote the name "H. Maxim" was on the form. Hiram claimed smokeless powder for his own. Hudson disagreed, claiming that he was the rightful inventor. Though we may never know which of the brothers created smokeless powder, it was enough to split the two men apart for the rest of their lives. Shortly after this, Hiram Maxim left the shores of America to work for the US Electric Lighting Company in London. He found life in Britain very much to his liking and he would eventually give up his United States citizenship to become a naturalized British citizen. His fortunes grew, as did his creativity. He created the world's first automatic sprinkler system that not only put out the fire but notified the local firehouse, though there was little commercial interest in the invention. Riveting machines, inventions that prevented the rolling of ships at sea, and pine-menthol inhalers to assist those with asthma were all ideas he brought to the world. He dabbled and tinkered and was generally successful, but he was still restless and nowhere near as wealthy as he would like. But then, in 1882, he met another ex-patriot while visiting Vienna, Austria who gave him a piece of advice that would change the world. He said to Hiram, "Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others' throats with greater facility." It was the seed that grew into a nightmare. Maxim lived in a rather palatial country house in West Norwood. It was there that he threw his mind to the task of creating an efficient killing machine, one that would make him fabulously wealthy. The Gatling Gun, invented for the Union Army during the American Civil War by Richard Gatling, was the world's best known rapid-fire weapon. It's cyclical nature meant that the barrels did not overheat as long as it was not fired any higher than a certain rate. Perhaps its most problematic issue was that it was extremely heavy and once in place, it tended to stay there for the duration of the battle. Something lighter and faster was in Maxim's mind. Hiram Maxim had spent his youth hunting bears in the Maine woods and he recalled the kickback that the large caliber rifles gave his young shoulder whenever he fired. His genius lay in the idea that the force of the kickback, if properly harnessed, might be used to load the next bullet. It might even be used to have the gun actually fire itself, in effect, pulling its own trigger. The new smokeless powder that he may or may not have had a hand inventing meant almost no gumming up of the mechanism and with the later addition of a water jacket to act a radiator of heat for the barrel, Hiram Maxim found himself the proud inventor of a rifle that was capable of firing bullets over and over again with accuracy until the bullets ran out. Maxim founded his company based upon the promise of this new weapon. With financial backing from railroad tycoon and steel foundry owner Edward Vickers, "Maxim, Son & Vickers" began creating the gun in the mid 1880s. The American friend's advice had been sound. European governments bought so many automatic machine guns that the foundry ran day and night. Though he lost credit for the invention of the light bulb to Edison, he would now forever be remembered as the man who singlehandedly created the automatic rifle. Hiram Maxim had made the fortune and gained the fame that he and his brother vowed to achieve long ago on the boulder on the edge of property in Sangerville, Maine. In June of 1890, the tall, white-haired and nearly deaf inventor and entrepreneur found his way back to his roots. He returned to the place where he grew up to meet with old friends and show the folks how he had fared in life. He brought one of his automatic rifles with him. Word of his visit quickly circulated and a rather large crowd gathered on the June day on the hill looking down on Dexter's Lake Wassokeag. His aim was a demonstration of his invention to the locals, but this would also notably be the first time an automatic self-loading, modern machine gun would be fired anywhere in North America. With a grateful crowd's silence, he announced that he would discharge the weapon first, and then others could have a 'shot' at it. All was ready and he gently squeezed the trigger, pointing the weapon at the same spot on the ground without moving it, effectively digging a hole. The gun fired at a rate of 666 shots a minute, a truly coincidental number for an invention that would later be called, "The Devil's Paintbrush." Then, he told the audience to imagine an army trying to run up at them from the edge of the lake. He squeezed the trigger again, but this time he swept the aim of the weapon back and forth along the shore, shots ringing, water splashing, clods of dirt flung high into the air. One gun, he claimed, could lay an invading force low very quickly. Though it had not yet been used in battle, his prediction was frighteningly accurate. Next, he asked for Mrs. Bryant to come try her hand at the machine gun, probably because she was the oldest person present from the town. Then, his cousin Caroline Maxim True, had her turn at the trigger. Then, the show was over. He informed the crowd that it was expensive to fire the thing, costing him over $14.00 a minute. He traveled the landscape of his youth for another week or so before returning to England where, in 1900, Queen Victoria would recommend him for a knighthood, though it was her son Edward who would eventually knight the boy from Sangerville. His weapon had proven itself in the Russo-Japanese War and several smaller British conflicts. Those in power who had possession of the new weapon were confident that it would give them the advantage in the next conflict. Soon enough, the Great War would begin. Since his machine gun had been in service for over twenty-five years, it had been made and copied over and over again by other arms factories throughout Europe and America. Variants of the Maxim gun were used by both sides in World War I. Though his invention would be used by the ground troops extensively, it would be attached to the newly invented tank and to the the aircraft flying the skies above the lines in France.How does one calculate the amount of human carnage caused by a weapon that could also cut down trees? How many of the 9 million combatants and 8 million civilian casualties of that war died from a bullet fired from a Maxim-designed gun? One need only look at the Battle of the Somme. On the first day of this battle, over 60,000 men died, 85% of them by machine gun fire. The other battles follow suit. Some historians have subtitled World War I as the "machine gun " war. The boy from Sangerville who as a lad had designed a mousetrap that rid the mill in Abbot, Maine entirely of its infestation, was the man who also made it possible for the nations of Europe to embark upon wholesale slaughter on the battlefield. Most of the deaths of World War One can be directly attributed to machine gun fire and man's blind indifference to his fellow man. As he sat at his table sipping his coffee and reading the lists of the fallen from his morning paper in West Norwood, did he ever cast his mind back to the quiet, tranquil setting of Sangerville Maine? Did he recall the pleasure with which he hunted bear and deer and did it ever concern him that his invention was at that moment taking the lives of millions? We will never know. Maxim was a man of his times and as a power-player, it is easy to think that he had no qualms about his invention. He might have liked the modern adage, "Guns don't kill people; people kill people." Sir Hiram Maxim died in his adopted homeland at Streathan on Nov. 24, 1916, at the age of 77. The only formal education he ever had was from five years in the one-room schoolhouse of Sangerville, Maine, but his informal education made him the epitome of the term 'damned Yankee.' It can be easily argued that no other son of Maine has ever affected the world to the extent that this one man has with his creative mind and his gift of the automatic weapon, the "Devil's Paintbrush." Bibliography Bangor Daily News "Maine's Hiram Maxim lead rags to riches life but remembered Yankee roots" 11-19-1975 Sir Hiram Maxim Biography - Sangerville Public Library Hiram Maxim - Wikipedia Article Encyclopedia Britannica Article - Hiram Maxim PBS - They Made America Series entry - Hiram Maxim PHOTO CREDIT: Wikipedia Commons
On this week’s episode, I address a listener question on the distinction between coaching and mentoring. The question we received is, “What are the differences between coaching and mentoring, and does the distinction really matter?” I think the distinction does matter, at least financially. Mentoring is less in your face, and it’s a little more guidance oriented. When a specific relationship is outlined and you have a detailed goal, you are getting into the coaching area. I’ve been mentored by people that don’t know it and people who are already dead. George Washington Carver and Joshua Chamberlain have been mentors for me — people who have been written about or have a large volume of work that I can follow. The length of time is a defining feature. I could coach you for 15 minutes, but mentoring is an ongoing process. A buddy of mine a few years ago told me that his mom left him some money, and he was thinking about hiring a person he knows as a financial planner. I asked how much money the financial planner made, and he said it was a lot like himself. Wouldn’t you want someone with a higher level of financial success to guide the results you are after? Questions for Listeners Do you have a question? Call in and your question might be featured on the show! Phone: 1-800-726-ANDY E-Mail: InTheLoop@AndyAndrews.com Facebook.com/AndyAndrews Twitter.com/AndyAndrews
"The church was never meant to be a noun. And when it turns into a noun, it becomes a turn-off. The church was meant to be a verb, an action verb... In fact the last week of His life is called "Passion Week." So regardless of personality type, His followers ought to be the most passionate people on the planet" (from Mark Batterson's "All In", p. 50). As the church of Christ are we ready to look beyond the burdens of this life and live out the mission God wants us to be passionate about? Story of Joshua Chamberlain. Story of Joshua and Caleb (not playing it safe or shrinking back in fear). Numbers 13, Philippians 2:12 (MSG)
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