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five states and a commonwealth on a cold rock.

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Herald News, Fall River ‘75

[magictransistor]

John White, the Indian Manner of Fishing: from A Short and True Description of New England, 1585.

[michaelcevoli]

A few details from a series on industrial workers in New England. 

[colortransparency]

In Front of the School

Sometime in 1946 North High School Worcester, Massachusetts Photo by Andrew Love

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this photo is so Bay State

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"A lot of people don't realize that there has been a lost cultural frontier in New England that we are only discovering now."

"Lost" New England Revealed by High-Tech Archaeology

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In no place as in New England, or where New England's sons and daughters sojourn, does the Thanksgiving season seem complete; and no sort of homely feasting ever attains the absolute comfort of an old-fashioned New England Thanksgiving Day dinner. The many scattered children of that rocky soil from which their forefathers wrung scant living will welcome this recall of the old-time festivity, even if they cannot perfectly reproduce it. There is a distinction without much difference in the dinners at the coast and in the interior; on farms and in villages away from the railroads fresh fish is seldom used, while on the coast baked tautog is a prime Thanksgiving luxury; oysters reach the interior both in cans and in the shells, and are regarded as special rarities worthy to be served at the greatest festivals; then, too, away from the large towns game birds are rarely cooked, partridge being the exception...Even the interior dinners might be varied with game, for the addition of the partridge there are plenty of woodock, wild duck, and herons, to say nothing of the Gargantuan widow's cruse full of young rooks for pies.

Family Living on $500 A Year, Juliet Corson [Harper & Brothers:New York] 1905

The Food Timeline--Thanksgiving food history

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Herald News, Fall River '75

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In Maine, French-Canadians are the largest ethnic group - about a quarter of the population. But many here no longer speak French and are forgetting their family history. At Christmastime, some Mainers reconnect with those fading cultural roots by making cretons, a spiced pork pâté similar to the trendier French spread, rillettes. It's like a spreadable scrapple, as central to French-Canadian cuisine as chopped liver is to Eastern European Jews.

'Canadian Peanut Butter' Connects Mainers To Their Acadian Roots

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The third day at Fort Francis Williams was no longer able to avoid the church; his Indian captor dragged him there by force, just as the priests had warned. Williams sat as close to the door as possible, fascinated and repulsed by what he witnessed. He had never heard a Catholic Mass before, and what he “saw [was] a great confusion, instead of Gospel Order.” The elaborate liturgy, the polyphonic music, and the overabundance of priestly noises paired with the ungodly passivity of the silent congregation, were indeed far from a Gospel Order that privileges congregational comprehension and participation. One priest delivered the “Mass in a Tongue Unknown to the Savages”—what use was such a performance, Williams wondered, if those who listened couldn’t understand the words? What’s more, another priest was “singing Prayers among the Indians at the same time”—cacophony and nonsense! Williams grimly noted the ceaseless chanting as “many others were at the same time saying over their Pater Nosters, and Ave Mary, by tale from their … Beads on a String.” Compared to the simplicity and clarity of Puritan worship, the Catholic Mass was incomprehensible idolatry, the music aimed at seducing rather than inspiring sincere conversion. Williams was appalled.

Psalms and Silence: The Soundtrack of John Williams’s Captivity

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"the witch's house", Maine '36

[atlasobscura]

Dighton Rock - Berkeley, Massachusetts 

Dighton Rock has been the subject of curiosity and wonder for longer than the U.S. has been a country. In 1690 Rev. Cotton Mather wrote,

Among the other Curiosities of New-England, one is that of a mighty Rock, on a perpendicular side whereof by a River, which at High Tide covers part of it, there are very deeply Engraved, no man alive knows How or When about half a score Lines, near Ten Foot Long, and a foot and half broad, filled with strange Characters: which would suggest as odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument.

As far back as 1783, people were making wild accusations about the origins of the rock. Congregationalist minister and academic Ezrz Stiles was convinced the rock was made by Ancient Phoenicians. This gave way to speculations that the Norse did it, then that early Portuguese explorers carved it (possible), and most recently (and most unlikely) that the Chinese did it, proposed in the 2002 book “1421: The Year China Discovered America" which proposes the Chinese got here 70 years before Columbus.

Despite a few hundred years of speculation, the extensive petroglyphs on the rock have still not been explained conclusively…

[bygoneamericana]

Bottles of Coca Cola buried in the surf to keep them cool. Cape Cod, 1940.

By Alfred Eisenstaedt

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purchased May 2013, Moultonborough, New Hampshire

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Circus train wreck, Farmington NH 

[jellobiafrasays]

connecticut, 2003

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(Credit to Wicked Dark Photography; check out their fantastic stuff!)

In Dublin, New Hampshire up near Keene there is a series of mansions. These mansions were once part of a farm estate that had its own barns and carriage houses all within a half-mile radius. One of the barns has been...

[dandelionseeds]

O! Relentless Death! Old Bennington Cemetery. Bennington, VT