The boys’ club at Taunton’s St. Thomas Episcopal Church in the 1940s was known as the Knights of King Arthur, a “grand bunch of harum-scarum lads,” according to their rector, J. Holland “Skipper” Beal (1904–1981). When the first snow fell each year, these choir boys — literally — knowing their Rector’s fondness for the White Mountain slopes, began badgering Rev. Beal for a ski trip north.

Heading to Cranmore Mountain in North Conway, New Hampshire, from Taunton Green today is a three-and-a-half-hour, 175-mile journey via Route 24 and I-93 to NH-16. It’s predictable and a little dull until the White Mountains appear. Cruise control and Dunkin’ stops make the trip as routine as the GPS warnings of speed traps in Hooksett.

In 1945, however, the same trip could take nine hours. I-93 didn’t exist until the late 1950s, so the route from Taunton to North Conway meant two-lane local and state roads through small towns in Essex County, to U.S. Route 3 through New Hampshire to Route 16. Cruising speed might sometimes reach 40 miles per hour, with white-knuckle driving in bad weather. In the years following World War II, a trip from the Old Colony to the slopes of Mount Cranmore could feel like a journey to another world.

Three chaperones, Rev. Beal, and more than a dozen of his young St. Thomas knights made it to North Conway without incident, spent a day and a half skiing, and began their drive home on Saturday at 4 p.m. Four vehicles started down Route 16 in moderate snow, hit a blizzard in Rochester, N.H., and were down to three vehicles by Portsmouth. Retreating a couple of miles, the knights used shovels and ropes to pull their fourth vehicle back onto high ground. Once their caravan hit the Newburyport Turnpike (Route 1), they were muscling through a foot of snow.

On a large hill in the Essex County town of Topsfield, traffic was blocked by a three-vehicle accident, so the good Reverend headed north with his flock to the comfort of St. Paul’s Church in Newburyport, which produced 15 army cots in their parish hall. Calls were placed to anxious parents in Taunton. Beal phoned the Topsfield police barracks every hour until, at 3 a.m., he received word that Route 1 was clear.

Cruising through Boston at dawn on the morning of Sunday, December 30, 1945, the four-vehicle convoy reached Taunton five minutes before the 8 a.m. service of Holy Communion at St. Thomas, to which four faithful parishioners had trudged through two feet of snow to attend. Beal showered and shaved at St. Thomas’s McKinstry House rectory and was ready for the 9:30 and 11:00 services later that morning.¹

One of the choir boys on that 1945 ski adventure was Joseph Betz, a long-time Taunton banker (sometimes affectionately referred to as “the Loan Arranger”), and a director of the Old Colony History Museum from 1988 to 2006. “Skipper had a station wagon,” Joe recalled of his rector, “and he would remove the seats, and we’d all pile in — six to eight in a car — with the skis. Now, when I think about the liability . . .” Joe laughed, “but we had plenty of room because we boys didn’t take much luggage,” he added. “Maybe a clean pair of socks.”²

“You had to show up for choir practice and church,” Joe recalled. “That was your ticket to skiing and sailing. I learned so much from Skipper,” he added. “Not just how to ski and sail, but respect, looking after one another (“the buddy system”), and following instructions. He was a positive influence on many of us.”

The Rev. James Holland “Skipper” Beal (1904–1981) was formed in the classic mold of mid-20th century Episcopal clergy. Born in Nahant, he graduated from Harvard in 1927 and worked at the tail end of the Roaring ’20s, selling stocks and bonds for Kidder, Peabody and Company in Boston. Until the 1929 Crash, Beal wrote, “all you had to do to make money was spit on the ticker tape, purchase the stock so designated, and watch it go up in value.”³

Kidder sent Beal on an initial assignment to Providence, where his first bond sale was to Brown University psychology professor Edmund Delabarre, who wrote extensively in the early 20th century to support his theory that the carvings on Dighton Rock were Portuguese in origin. “As far as I could see,” Beal wrote, “the markings on Dighton Rock looked more like the doodlings on a telephone pad,” not realizing in 1929 that he would soon make his home and his own “markings” on the Old Colony just a few miles north.⁴

Skipper’s father, William Field Beal (1870–1939), had negotiated the sale of the old Waldorf Astoria Hotel site on which the Empire State building now stands. Skipper’s grandfather founded the Second National Bank of Boston.⁵ The Beals of Nahant were a sailing, skiing, outdoorsy clan wired into old Northeast money and families, including the Adams and Roosevelts. Skipper’s maternal great-uncle Will, for example, had married “Aunt Rosie,” who happened to be the daughter of New York Governor Samuel Tilden, who lost the US presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes by one electoral vote. Beal’s Great-Uncle Will was better known as Willis Seaver Paine (1848–1927), appointed by Grover Cleveland to be New York’s State Banking Superintendent and subsequently President of State Trust Company, “before resigning,” his obituary noted, “to tour the world.”⁶ Skipper could trace his ancestry through his mother, Louisa (Adams) Beal (1836–1920), to Henry Adams (1583–1646) of Braintree, who was also the immigrant ancestor of John and John Quincy Adams. You get the idea.

However, the story of old money networks and patrician good fortune sometimes misses the accompanying sense of moral responsibility and obligation to public service. In Skipper’s case, his sense of gratitude, sharpened by the Panic and Crash of 1929, led him to the ministry. He graduated from theological school in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1934, and began as a Student Assistant at St. Thomas’ Church in Owings Mills, Maryland, and Epiphany Church in Washington, D.C.⁷

By 1936, Rev. Beal was the acting rector of Grace Episcopal Church in New Bedford, and from 1938 to 1940 served as rector at Emmanuel Church in Braintree. For 18 years, from 1940 to 1958, home for Skipper Beal, wife Georgette, and their four children was St. Thomas’s rectory, the beautiful and historic McKinstry House.⁸ However, Beal’s ministry was not his family’s first venture into Taunton.

Skipper’s great-uncle, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston Adams, Jr., (1829–1902) was likely the first of the extended Beal clan to plant roots in the Silver City when he was appointed resident physician of the State Lunatic Hospital in Taunton (later Taunton State Hospital) in 1855, shortly after its opening.⁹ His appointment just happened to coincide with Richard Upjohn’s design of Skipper’s future home, St. Thomas Church, where construction began in 1857.

Rev. Beal held a commission in the Coast Artillery for 15 years, and in March 1942, he was given a fond farewell by 250 members of the St. Thomas congregation as he temporarily transferred to the Quartermaster Corps as chaplain at Camp Lee, Virginia.¹⁰ Three years later, he helped to officiate a united service of churches at St. Thomas in memory of the late Franklin Delano Roosevelt, supported by the church’s “harum-scarum” boys’ choir, which also included Old Colony’s Joseph Betz.¹¹ That same year, he officiated at the wedding of Dorothy Kendall Russell and Commander David Longfellow Patten, who served on General MacArthur’s staff and was aboard the USS Missouri when Japan surrendered and was later awarded the Legion of Merit by MacArthur in Manila.¹²

Skipper Beal was a fixture in Taunton for nearly two decades, presiding over countless baptisms, marriages, and funerals, including the burial service for Superior Court Judge Joseph E. Warner, which included 500 mourners packed into St. Thomas on June 3, 1958, with large delegations from the Superior Court, the Massachusetts Trial Lawyers Association, and the Taunton Bar Association.¹³ Rev. Beal’s Dachshund, Weenie, also became a fixture at St. Thomas, attending services every Sunday seated at the back of the church as he “meditated on what it was all about but never made evident a canine presence.” Weenie also went on every parish call with Rev. Beal, ensuring that no visit lasted longer than 20 minutes before he would bark his (and their) way to freedom.¹⁴

While Taunton and St. Thomas were central to Skipper Beal’s activities, and skiing the White Mountains brightened every winter, the sea — as his nickname implied — was never far from his thoughts. Beal was an accomplished sailor, plying the waters around his hometown of Nahant and along the shores of Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod at every available opportunity. In August 1943, cruising off the coast of West Yarmouth, for instance, he rescued two girls learning to swim near Great Island, and recovered the body of a third who drowned.¹⁵ Several years later, Beal salvaged a bell that had warned sailors away from Dumpling Rock, off South Dartmouth, for half a century. “Dumpling Rock lighthouse and the bell were flung into the sea by the hurricane of 1938,” one report noted, but “Mr. Beal had kept an acquisitive eye on the submerged bell ever since.” Along with “a crew of husky youngsters,” Rev. Beal hauled the bell ashore, confirmed with Dartmouth that “finders are keepers,” and toted its half ton to Taunton, where he had blacksmiths fit it with a new clapper. His goal was to hang it in the belfry atop St. Thomas, providing a “strangely familiar sound” to any mariners visiting the Silver City.¹⁶

One of Skipper’s sea adventures occurred early in his career off the coast of Nahant when he decided to sail to the wedding of his friend, James Roosevelt. Also in attendance that day were President Roosevelt and his family, which meant a large complement of U.S. Navy and Coast Guard personnel surrounded Nahant. After being informed that the town was closed, followed by explanation and much pleading, Rev. Beal found his 28-foot sloop, “Plum Duff,” heading to a mooring near the church with a coast guard escort on either side. Decades later, on the morning of August 31, 1954, Beal found himself and a crew of three in a different sort of storm, this time aboard his sloop in Plymouth Harbor, riding out Hurricane Carol.¹⁷

Skipper’s adventures on slope and sea continued after his retirement from St. Thomas and until his death in 1981. Even today, however, he remains a bright presence in Taunton, not just in the memories of choir boys such as Joe Betz, but also in the beautiful stained-glass windows that memorialize him, his wife, and his mother, that grace the chapel of his beloved St. Thomas Church.

J. Holland Beal left two amusing books about his exploits, both written in the style of short, secular sermons, “White Mountain Yesteryears” and “The Mountains, The Man and Members of Our Tribe.” St. Thomas will celebrate its 300th anniversary in 2028.

Notes

[1] For more on the McKinstry House, see “Basely Murthered”: The Shocking Death of Elizabeth McKinstry | by Old Colony History Museum | Medium.

[2] This story is told with great humor by the Rev. J. Holland Beal in White Mountains Yesteryears (North Conway, NH: The Reporter Press), 1966, 53–55. Thanks to Joseph Betz for speaking with the author on February 6 and 22, 2026, and for permission to quote him. Joe was a good friend of my father, Richard Schultz, another of the choir boys caught in this snowstorm. The Blue Hill’s “greatest snowstorms” list includes the Dec 29–30, 1945 storm at 18.8 inches total snowfall, which, rounded up (as folks tend to do), was two feet of snow. See bluehill.org/Data/2011/january/jan14.txt. The Taunton Daily Gazette (December 29, 1945) reported that Skipper and his skiers found a place to sleep at the Newburyport Y.M.C.A., “where they were royally treated.” They arrived in Taunton at 8:05 a.m., not 7:55 a.m., minor if less dramatic differences in Beal’s recollection from 20 years later.

[3] J. Holland Beal, The Mountains, The Man and Members of Our Tribe (North Conway, NH: The Reporter Press), 1969, 140.

[4] Ibid, 140.

[5] “The Lewiston Daily Sun,” Lewiston, Maine, Tuesday, January 24, 1939, 7.

[6] “W.S. Paine, Banker, Dies at Age of 79,” New York Times, Thursday, April 14, 1927, 27.

[7] “Accepts Call to Braintree,” The Standard-Times, New Bedford, Monday, June 15, 1936, 4. Also, the dust jacket of White Mountain Yesteryears.

[8] “Rev. James Beal, 77 was Taunton minister,” The Boston Globe, Boston, MA, Wednesday, December 9, 1981, 75.

[9] See https://biographies.framinghamhistory.org/zabdiel-boylston-adams/ for more about “Zab.”

[10] “Rector Leaves for Army Post,” The Standard-Times, New Bedford, Massachusetts, Tuesday, March 24, 1942.

[11] “Present Holy Cantata at St. Thomas Church,” Taunton Daily Gazette, 1945.

[12] Captain David Longfellow Patten (1894–1981) — Find a Grave Memorial. See also “Navy Officer To Wed In Dartmouth,” The Standard-Times, New Bedford, Massachusetts, Sunday, October 28, 1945.

[13] “Bench, Bar, Civic Officials Attend Warner Services,” The Boston Globe, Wednesday, June 4, 1958, 23. We also have Warner to thank for compiling a history of St. Thomas, held in the archives of OCHM.

[14] Beal, The Mountains, 77.

[15] “Rector Rescues Two Girls From Water and Recovers Body of 3rd,” Montpelier Evening Argus, Montpelier, Vermont, Wednesday, August 25, 1943, 7.

[16] “Church Has Light Bell,” The Standard-Times, New Bedford, Massachusetts, Sunday, December 2, 1945. The author finds no evidence that this bell was hung or rung according to Beal’s plan, nor does St. Thomas have a belfry. Still, it’s a good story.

[17] We told this harrowing story in an earlier blog post. See Fire and Ice: Some Calamities of the Old Colony: Part III | by Old Colony History Museum | Medium.

Dawn brought clear but chilly weather to Taunton on Tuesday, November 2, 1920. It was election day, and adherents of every political persuasion realized that a new epoch in the nation’s history was at hand. After decades of debate and frustration, this day would see women cast ballots in national and state elections for the first time.

For a state that has produced many of the best known supporters of liberal causes, it’s interesting to note that Massachusetts was not in the forefront of the women’s suffrage movement. The drive for voting equality in the Bay State was slow and uneven with advocates and opponents of suffrage distributed among both men and women of all ethnicities and social classes. The Taunton women who would turn out to vote on that November day in 1920 were the beneficiaries of years of struggle.

Although there were supporters of women’s suffrage well before the Revolutionary period, it was clear that the political rights espoused in the Declaration of Independence and guaranteed by state and federal constitutions were reserved to men. The historian Susan Goodier has noted that equality for American women was very unpopular even through much of the nineteenth century. Anti-suffragists argued that women belonged at home caring for their husbands and children; that women weren’t intellectually or emotionally able to handle complicated political questions; and, most conclusively, that most women simply didn’t want the vote.¹

The immediate post-Civil War years saw an increase in pro-suffrage agitation throughout Massachusetts. In 1871, for example, the Women’s Suffrage Association of Taunton met for the first time. Pro-suffrage conventions were held in public halls throughout the state, including three in this city during the period from 1871 to 1873. In addition to the public rallies, suffragists flooded the state legislature with petitions demanding the enfranchisement of women. Tauntonians joined in this effort. On February 19, 1874, for example, the city’s first suffrage petition of the year was sent to the State House, and three more would immediately follow. The initial petition, reported the Taunton Daily Gazette, held 106 signatures, of which 53 came from women.²

In Massachusetts the earliest progress for suffragists came in local elections for school committee. In Taunton, for example, the 1870 Republican municipal delegate convention nominated Mrs. Amelia F. Southgate for a one-year term on the school committee. She won, and according to the Boston Evening Transcript, her successful election represented “the first vote ever recorded in Taunton for a woman.”³

Serving on a school committee, however, was different than voting for school committee candidates, and women statewide had to wait until 1881 for that right. In the meantime, however, those women who registered to vote in school committee elections didn’t have to register again once wider suffrage rights were granted.

In the mid-1890s the issue of allowing women to vote for all municipal offices inevitably came to the fore. In 1894, the Massachusetts House of Representatives voted to grant that right, but the state Senate failed to pass the measure.⁴ Suffragists pledged to continue the fight.

One of the most durable claims of the “antis” was that Bay State women were either against their own enfranchisement altogether or were at least apathetic toward the subject. This assertion was heavily exercised in November 1895, when a non-binding statewide referendum was held on the question of allowing women to vote in municipal elections. When the measure was soundly defeated by almost 77,000 votes, each side was left to explain why it failed. The Boston Evening Transcript found clear meaning in the defeat. “For women suffrage,” said the paper, “the result was a sort of Bunker Hill. . . . Nobody on either side expected any such decisive demonstration as this so-called referendum has resulted in, publishing to the world that woman suffrage for municipal elections is indorsed by one voter to every two against it.”⁵

In addition to Boston, voters in the four largest cities in Bristol County also soundly defeated the 1895 measure. In Fall River, where the referendum was trounced by more than 2,000 votes, the Daily Evening Standard pulled no punches. “The woman suffrage referendum has been called a sham referendum,” opined the editor, but “. . . the result is a decisive verdict against the proposition. . . . The vote shows that a far larger per cent of men are ready to concede women this right than there is of women who desire it.” The defeat, concluded the newspaper, was “extremely discouraging to the advocates of woman suffrage. The light registration of women proved that they were either apathetic or hostile to the measure.”⁶

A writer for the pro-suffrage Taunton Daily Gazette, in a city where the referendum had been defeated by more than 700 votes, saw the loss in another way. The critical fact that the measure was non-binding, said the paper, had guaranteed that voters wouldn’t take it seriously. It “met the fate that was conceded months since. It was a sham for which thousands who really believe in suffrage declined to vote. It meant nothing which was at all binding on any legislature and marking for or against it was a waste of good pencil lead.” Two days later, the newspaper noted that only 120 out of 181 women who were registered had voted, leaving 61 “who stayed at home to tend the babies or through bashfulness.”⁷

The early years of the twentieth century saw the battle for equal suffrage continue with no loss of passion on either side. By 1915, two pro-suffrage measures had been soundly defeated in Massachusetts. The first came in April 1911, when the General Court, with both House and Senate galleries packed with women, voted down a resolution to remove the word “male” from the state constitution. Later, in November 1915, an amendment to the Bay State’s constitution that would have allowed women’s suffrage was rejected by voters by a two-to-one margin. As the proposed Massachusetts amendment was going down to defeat, similar pro-suffrage measures failed in New York and Pennsylvania.

In analyzing the suffragists’ latest setback, the Taunton Daily Gazette said, “Taunton declared itself opposed to equal suffrage Tuesday [November 2, 1915] by a vote of 1,542 in favor to 2,905 against.” The loss was expected, wrote the editor, and he knew who to blame. “Equal suffrage is certain to come some day, but it will come when the women are practically united in its favor. At present this condition does not exist and the strong division of opinion among the women themselves is undoubtedly the chief cause of its defeat in all the three states on which it was voted yesterday.”⁸

More than a century later it’s impossible to determine the real depth of anti-suffrage sentiment in Taunton, but contemporary accounts lead us to believe that, at least until America entered World War I, it was significant. In fact, on the state level, one of the most prominent opponents was a Tauntonian. She was Flora L. Mason, a peripatetic speaker who traveled throughout the state advocating on behalf of the anti-suffrage position. A familiar figure in the corridors of the State House, she had been born in Lakeville, Massachusetts in 1871 and moved to Taunton at age ten. Educated at the prestigious Abbot Academy in Andover, she also attended Radcliffe College. Never married and residing with her parents, Ms. Mason lived a zealous life of religious and civic involvement. Active in in the Congregational Church, she was also a founding member of the Taunton Woman’s Club. She played a leading role in the Taunton Female Charitable Association and served as a trustee of the Westboro State Hospital. When, in 1906, she ran for a seat on the Taunton School Committee, her defeat left her undeterred and she sought political influence elsewhere. For several years she served as a member of Taunton’s planning board. Not last — or least — were her decades of service on behalf of the Old Colony Historical Society.⁹

Despite the best efforts of the anti-suffragists, the tide turned against them in the years surrounding America’s 1917 entry into World War I. In fact, societal changes had been underway for some time, and in hindsight they make political equality appear inevitable. The historian Ellen Carol Dubois has written about the “New Women” who appeared in the 1890s. Better educated, more mobile and with more promising employment options, they set the stage for the political victory that waited just over the horizon.¹⁰

Also critical to the success of the suffrage movement was the First World War, in which women played an essential role overseas as well as on the home front. In addition to serving as nurses at home and in Europe, women replaced men in factories, sold war bonds and volunteered with the Red Cross. Taunton women were at the forefront of mobilization, running the voluntary food and fuel rationing programs and lending their efforts to raising thousands of dollars for the purchase of Liberty Bonds.¹¹

Despite the continued efforts of the anti-suffrage movement, there would be no postwar retreat for American women. A critical decision was made when pro-suffrage leaders decided that instead of working state by state, they would devote their efforts to passing an equal voting rights amendment to the federal constitution. This worked, and on June 4, 1919 Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. Massachusetts governor Calvin Coolidge favored the measure and referred it to the State Legislature for passage. Accompanying it was a petition signed by more than 118,000 Bay State women demanding a favorable outcome. The lawmakers got the message and on June 25, 1919 Massachusetts became the eighth state to ratify the women’s suffrage amendment.¹²

Thirty-six states were required to ratify the amendment before it could become law, and it seems that Taunton women were uncertain about whether that would ever happen. As the months passed and the measure was making its way through the states, city officials were organizing special voter registration dates. Turnout was disappointing enough to cause the Gazette to complain that “Women Evince Small Interest in Registering.”¹³
Later that summer, however, ratification accelerated and on August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to endorse the Nineteenth Amendment. This, incidentally, took place just seven months after national Prohibition took effect.

With a presidential election set to take place in November 1920, voter registration increased quickly. “Women Throng City Hall for Registration,” cried the Gazette on August.¹⁹ The newspaper estimated that in Taunton, 8,000–10,000 eligible women had yet to register, but many were expected to enroll before the deadline. In speaking with women waiting in line at City Hall to register, the reporter encountered mixed emotions. “Taunton has not . . . been a strong suffrage city,” he explained. “On the contrary, there was for several years a strong anti-suffrage organization here, among the women themselves.” The writer stated that more than one woman he spoke with admitted that she didn’t favor suffrage, but since it had been passed, she felt it her duty to gain full citizenship. Apparently, this woman was not alone in her determination to be an informed citizen. On September 23, 1920 the newly organized League of Women Voters presented a lecture on the American political system. More than 800 Tauntonians were present.¹⁴

All of which brings us back to Election Day, 1920, and the Gazette’s headline:

“Women Led the Way at All the Precincts and Had No Difficulty in the Preparation of Ballots”

“Thousands of Taunton women took advantage of their first chance to have a real part in a national or state election,” said the newspaper. “Hundreds of them were manifestly interested in the result.”¹⁵

Equality in voting had finally been won. While we have no way of knowing how many Taunton women went to the polls for the first time in 1920, we’re certain that the 8,629 ballots cast represented a gain of 3,315 over the number cast in 1916. Likewise, the increased interest shown by local females was considered remarkable. Taunton was a Republican city in 1920, and Senator Warren G. Harding, the Republican candidate, beat Ohio governor James M. Cox by more than 3,600 votes. Women were credited with getting the Republican vote out. Some served as poll checkers while others used their own automobiles to take registered Republican women to the correct polling places. The Gazette reported that the newspaper’s office had fielded calls all that night looking for election results. The majority of callers, said the paper, were women.¹⁶

End Notes

1. Susan Goodier, “With All Due Respect: Understanding Anti-Suffrage Women,” History Now, Issue 56 (Spring 2020) published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. This is an online resource found at: https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/all-due-respect-understanding-anti-suffrage-women. Retrieved on February 26, 2026.

2. Taunton Daily Gazette, February 19, 1874.

3. Boston Evening Transcript, December 6, 1870.

4. Cornelius Dalton, ed., Leading the Way: A History of the Massachusetts General Court, 1629–1980 (Boston: Office of the Massachusetts Secretary of State, 1984), 170–71.

5. Boston Evening Transcript, November 6, 1895.

6. Fall River Daily Evening Standard, November 7, 1895.

7. Taunton Daily Gazette, November 5, 7, 1895.

8. Taunton Daily Gazette, November 3, 1915.

9. Flora L. Mason died at 87 in December 1958. Her obituary is found in the Taunton Daily Gazette, December 31, 1958.

10. Ellen Carol Dubois, Women’s Long Battle for the Vote (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2020), 134.

11. For an overview of the Taunton home front and the part played by women see William F. Hanna, A History of Taunton, Massachusetts (Taunton, Mass.: Old Colony Historical Society, 2008), 340–42.

12. Dalton, 170.

13. Taunton Daily Gazette, August 13, 1920.

14. Taunton Daily Gazette, August 19, September 24, 1920.

15. Taunton Daily Gazette, November 3, 1920.

16. Taunton Daily Gazette, November 3, 1920.

“How many you-all ever rode a Pullman?”

That question was posed by a U.S. army officer at a Hattiesburg, Mississippi railroad depot in the early winter of 1943. Standing at attention in front of him were fifty Black recruits, most from the rural South, who had just completed their basic training at Camp Shelby and were awaiting assignment. Given their humble circumstances the officer may have believed, incorrectly, that none of these men had ever stepped foot near an overnight train.

“I have, sir, plenty of them.”

The unexpected response came from Tommie Dukes, who almost forty years later remembered that when he spoke up, “All the guys bugged their eyes on me.” The officer pulled him aside and informed him that they were about to take a long train ride — in segregated cars — and that he would be in charge of the other Black soldiers for the duration of the journey. Dukes wanted no part of it, but experience had taught him to keep his thoughts to himself.¹

After the troops boarded the train they were told they were heading to Camp Myles Standish, up in Taunton, Massachusetts. As they rode, Dukes realized that his nomadic life had set him apart from the other Black soldiers. “I noticed they kind of shunned me, you see, because I told them I’d been doing this all across the years; traveling, that’s all I do.”²

Private Dukes was a professional baseball player, known throughout the Negro National League as both a talented catcher and a reliable hitter. Born a couple of decades too early, an unyielding color line had kept him away from a chance to play in the white major leagues. Several of his younger teammates, however, were more fortunate and had successful careers in big league baseball after its integration in 1947.

It took the train two days to cover the 1,400 miles up from Hattiesburg, and on the way the soldiers noticed a dramatic change in the landscape. Arriving at the Camp Myles Standish railhead, Dukes remembered that “snow was everywhere.”³ The newcomers disembarked and were directed to their segregated barracks. They were to be part of the camp complement, soldiers permanently assigned to Standish. Most would be detailed to what one historian has called “menial but essential” supply or service duties.⁴

Opened in October 1942, Camp Myles Standish was the main staging area for the Boston Port of Embarkation. Located three miles from Taunton Green and thirty-eight miles from Boston Harbor, the camp was the last stop in stateside mobilization. GIs came here for a final physical exam, refitted equipment, and a forty-minute train ride to the ships that would carry them to war in Europe.

Once they were settled, Dukes and the other recent arrivals were asked to a state a duty preference. Based on a long ago conversation with a World War I veteran, he requested kitchen duty and was shortly thereafter placed as a steward in the camp’s mess hall. A hard worker and natural leader, he quickly gained the trust of the camp’s superior officers.

When the snow melted and the weather finally warmed, the camp began a full program of outdoor athletic activities. Although the many thousands of GIs passing through Myles Standish stayed only three or four days before heading overseas, the camp’s complement of 2,500 men and women needed both physical activity and entertainment. Fortunately, Standish’s 1,620 acres provided ample room for both.

Early in the spring of 1943, notices were placed throughout the camp announcing try-outs for the Standish baseball team. The only Black player who showed up was Dukes; the others formed an all-Black team and played an intramural schedule against white teams from within the camp. Dukes occasionally offered the Black players hitting and fielding suggestions, but most of his efforts were directed toward refining his own game.

The Myles Standish team, called the Pilgrims, was coached by Lieutenant Clarence “Bo” Bohanon, a native of Salem, Massachusetts. Earlier in the war, while employed as an executive at a Brookline hotel, Bohanon had been recruited to run the food services operation at Myles Standish. An athlete and outdoorsman, he was well qualified to coach the Pilgrims.⁵

We can only wonder what Coach Bohanon thought of Dukes as he built his team’s roster, but he certainly came with an impressive resume. Born in Richardson, Mississippi in 1906, as a boy he had sharpened his batting skills by hitting rocks with a broomstick. With little interest in school, he briefly attended Alcorn College with the single purpose of playing on the baseball team. An area scout brought Dukes to the attention of the owner of a semi-professional club, and the young man’s baseball career began.

By the time he walked onto the field at Standish, Dukes had played fifteen years of professional baseball. Standing five feet, nine inches tall and weighing 160 pounds, after his semi-pro apprenticeship he completed nine seasons as a catcher with four teams in the Negro Leagues. Both his teammates and opponents included some of the best players in the game’s history. The prime of his career began in 1932, with the Nashville Elite Giants. In 1935 and ’36, he was the starting catcher for the Homestead Grays, where his teammate was the future Hall of Famer Buck Leonard.⁶ In 1937, the Grays acquired the illustrious Josh Gibson, one of the greatest catchers ever to play the game. Dukes became Gibson’s back-up for part of the next three seasons until he moved on to the Toledo Crawfords in 1939. During that campaign his teammate was future Hall of Famer Oscar Charleston.

Many ballplayers, but especially Blacks, used the offseason to earn extra money by playing on barnstorming teams. They traveled throughout the southwestern U.S. as well as in Mexico, Cuba and Central America. For the Black teams, the money was good and racial prejudice didn’t follow them south of the border. Neither did the color line as they often played against white teams made up of major and minor leaguers.

Tommie Dukes took full advantage of barnstorming opportunities. In the 1932 and ’33 off-seasons, for example, he played in the California Winter League, which was the first integrated professional baseball league in modern American history. He was the starting catcher for the Nashville Elite Giants, and he anchored a team that included future Hall of Famers Willie Wells, James “Cool Papa” Bell and Norman “Turkey” Stearns. Their pitcher, and Dukes’s battery mate, was the legendary Satchell Paige. Dukes and Paige, both born in 1906, had known and competed against each other for years, going back to their semi-pro days. In the two seasons that Dukes played in that California league, he saw action in sixty-four games, hit fourteen home runs, and ended with a batting average of .343.⁷

Throughout the 1930s and early ’40s, in addition to California (where he once hit a home run off Dizzy Dean), Dukes played winter ball in Puerto Rico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. His favorite location was Mexico, and it was there that a U.S. official advised him that he’d better return to Mississippi and register for the draft. He did that in December 1942, and from there it was a short hop to basic training at Camp Shelby.

With Dukes firmly ensconced as the starting catcher and clean-up hitter for the Pilgrims, Lieutenant Howard Ferguson, the camp’s athletic director, set about arranging a schedule of games with nearby college and industrial league teams, as well as with other New England military installations. Dukes, when not practicing, could be found working in the mess hall or relaxing in the barracks. His Black colleagues, when they could get passes, tried their best to convince him to accompany them on one of their forays into Boston. He never agreed, and his answer was always the same: “I’m as far as I want to go right now. . . . Ain’t nothing new to me.”⁸

It’s difficult to document Dukes’s 1943 campaign with the Pilgrims because with the exception of the August 5 game against the Boston Red Sox, all of the newspaper accounts came from local dailies. Their coverage was spotty and sometimes incomplete. What we can say for certain is that the Pilgrims weren’t a very good team. Dukes sat out the early intra-camp and club team games and played only against other military installations. In the twelve games that he played between July and September, Standish won two, lost nine, and tied one because of darkness. It’s also true, however, that individually, he was a force. He was consistently billed as the team’s “heavy hitter,” and of course his history with Satchell Paige was widely broadcast. In only one game was he kept off the bases, and his timely hitting was often the only bright spot in a losing contest.

Dukes’s best game came against the Red Sox on August 5, 1943. Played at Taunton’s Hopewell Park, temporary bleachers were built to accommodate the crowd of 6,500 soldiers and civilians. Despite the loss of several starters to military service, the Boston team fielded two future Hall of Famers against the Pilgrims. Infielder Bobby Doerr was still early in his stellar career, while outfielder Al Simmons was at the end of his.

Coach Bohanon picked eighteen year old Eugene “Lefty” Collins to face the Red Sox line-up. Collins was a recently-arrived Black soldier, a “fast, cagey colored boy” according to the Taunton Daily Gazette. He went six and two-thirds innings and got rocked by the major leaguers. He was relieved in the seventh by Cy Seithal, who finished the game. The Red Sox starter was George “Pinky” Woods, who went three innings and was relieved by Eddie Lake, who pitched six. The longest hit of the game, courtesy of Lake, was a 400-foot eighth-inning moonshot by Dukes, who also had a double. The Standish catcher was also credited with outplaying Johnny Peacock, the Boston backstop.⁹

The Red Sox defeated the Pilgrims by a score of 8–3, but looking back on the entire season Dukes had to wonder what might have happened if luck had intervened. In his oral interview given in 1980, he remembered that one day as he was working in the camp’s segregated mess hall, he noticed that an all-Black engineering outfit had entered. He immediately recognized one of the soldiers as Monte Irvin, a brilliant young Negro Leagues outfielder with whom he had played winter ball in Cuba. After greeting his friend, Dukes asked him what he was doing at Standish. Irvin replied that he was passing through the camp on his way overseas and was leaving the next day. Dukes assured him that he wasn’t going anywhere because the camp’s commandant was a baseball fan who was always on the lookout for talented players. Dukes promised to alert the officer to the presence of a great outfielder; strings would be pulled and Irvin would soon be a Pilgrim. That might have happened except that the commandant was on a two-day pass; he returned the day after Irvin’s departure. What might have happened had the commandant been at the base when Irvin arrived? Even so, it turned out well for Irvin. The young ballplayer fought in Europe and after the war signed a major league contract with the San Francisco Giants. He had a fine career, became a mentor to Willie Mays and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1973.¹⁰

By the time the 1944 baseball season approached, Dukes had been promoted to staff sergeant in the mess hall. His success during the previous campaign had made him well-known among the region’s athletes, coaches and sportswriters. His season opened on May 1, 1944 but ended only two weeks later. By then the Pilgrims had won two games and lost two. In Dukes’s last contest, a victory over the Brown University varsity squad on May 17, he had three hits, including a double, a triple and a long home run. He scored four runs and even stole a base.

Shortly after the Brown game the newspapers reported that Dukes was no longer stationed at Camp Myles Standish. Instead, he had been transferred to an army all-star team that was preparing to make a world tour of U.S. military camps. Where that information came from is unknown, but it was false. He was actually at Fort Huachuca, Arizona preparing to be discharged from the service. During his four weeks there, the commanding officer implored Dukes to decline the discharge and instead manage the camp’s baseball team. Definitely uninterested in that offer, he was soon on a train heading home to Lumberton, Mississippi.

Back in civilian life, Dukes hoped for a return to the professional game. In 1945 he signed with the Chicago American Giants of the Negro American League. At thirty-eight years old, though, his body no longer answered the call as it had in better times, so after a mediocre sixteen games he said good-bye to baseball and went home to Lumberton. In reviewing his ten-year career in the Negro Leagues, Baseball Reference counts 245 games played, with 244 hits, including thirteen home runs and 131 runs-batted-in. He retired with a lifetime batting average of .301.¹¹

In Lumberton, Dukes found a second career working in local lumber mills. He and his wife Irma raised their five children, and Irma took special care of the scrapbook she had amassed over the years covering every aspect of Tommie’s baseball career. He was eighty-four years old when he died in January 1991.

Tommie Dukes spent only seventeen months at Camp Myles Standish, but for the next fifty years people who saw him play remembered him; some because he was routinely the only Black player on the field; others because he had caught the great Satchell Paige, and most others because he had starred in the 1943 game against the Red Sox. Everyone who was at that game had a memory of it. Years after the war, Coach Bo Bohanon was discussing the Sox game with his son, Robert, when he said he was sure that somewhere Dukes’s home run was still in the air, and had not yet fallen back to earth.¹²

End Notes

1. “Oral Interview with Mr. Tommie Dukes, Sr.” Taken by the Mississippi History Program of the University of Southern Mississippi on August 20, 1980, p. 5. This source is found online at: https://usm.access.preservica.com/uncategorized/IO_50759240-81f1-4d96-84f8-da92a15fb2f4 and is hereafter cited as Dukes oral interview.

2. Dukes oral interview, p.5.

3. Dukes oral interview, p. 28.

4. Gail Buckley, American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military from the Revolution to Desert Storm (New York: Random House, 2001), 258.

5. Robert Bohanon telephone interview, December 19, 2023; hereinafter cited as Bohannon interview.

6. In 1971 Satchell Paige was the first Black player admitted to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Buck Leonard followed in 1972.

7. William F. McNeil, The California Winter League: America’s First Integrated Professional Baseball League (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2002), 253.

8. Dukes oral interview, p. 4.

9. The Red Sox game is covered in the Taunton Daily Gazette, 5–6 August 1943.

10. Dukes oral interview, p. 8; William F. Hanna telephone interview with Monte Irvin, February 6, 2006; Irvin also tells the story in Monte Irvin and James A. Riley, Nice Guys Finish First (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1996), 99.

11. Dukes’s season with the Chicago team is summarized online by Baseball Reference at https://www.baseball-reference.com/teams/CAG/1945.shtml. Retrieved on February 2, 2026. The Baseball Reference statistical summary of Dukes’s Negro Leagues career is found online at: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/d/dukesto02.shtml. Retrived on February 2, 2026.

12. Robert Bohanon telephone interview.

In his book, Upjohn’s Rural Architecture, the New York architect Richard Upjohn wrote that a man who designs a building “should be a poet, and the building should be his poem.” That statement comes to mind now because it was one hundred years ago, specifically on April 22, 1926, that the former Bristol Academy building, designed by Upjohn and completed in 1852, became the home of the Old Colony Historical Society. Over the past century the stewards of the building have been careful to respect Upjohn’s artistry, even as they adapted the structure to meet the needs of changing times and a growing organization. The OCHM’s archives and old newspaper files help us understand what a challenging task that has been.

The Upjohn building was actually Bristol Academy’s second home. It replaced a two-story wooden structure built on land that had been purchased for $75.00 in 1794. Opened in 1796 at a cost of $5,000, the original academy faced Summer Street and featured a path of elm trees leading from the school’s front door out to the road. As enrollment increased, the trustees acquired at least two more acres, giving the school a larger footprint than today’s museum now occupies.

Known in its earliest days as simply the Taunton Academy, the private school made an effort to attract students from a wider geographic area and thus became Bristol Academy. As one of a number of smaller private schools, it was offered as an effective alternative to public education, which in those days suffered from unevenly enforced attendance laws and inadequate funding from local governments. The fact that Bristol Academy accepted both boys and girls in separate courses of study enhanced its appeal. Throughout its existence, the school promoted academic excellence, with many of its male graduates moving on to Brown or Harvard. Several Bristol Academy alumni enjoyed distinguished careers in law, politics, business or the ministry. Over the years they formed an energetic and generous constituency acting on behalf of the academy.

As the school entered the mid-nineteenth century enrollment approached 200 and it was clear that larger quarters were needed. Richard Upjohn’s work was well-known throughout the Northeast and in 1851 he was engaged to design a new, larger and more modern building. The architect’s original instructions to his contractors are held in the OCHM archives, and his high standards are apparent even after the passage of 175 years. Everything used on the Church Green project, wrote Upjohn, including bricks, wood and glass, must be “the best of their several kinds, and all work [must] be done in the best manner. . . .” Walker & Sherman were joined by Levi Hale as contractors and builders and they set to work in the summer of 1851.

Designed in the Italianate style of architecture, construction of the academy building proceeded over approximately one year and carried through much of the summer of 1852. Coincidentally, Upjohn had two other projects within walking distance of the new school. On Elm Street, almost within sight of the academy, builders were at work on the Fairbanks-Williams House, which still stands, while closer to downtown workers had begun on Broadway building what is today the Pilgrim Congregational Church.

The new Bristol Academy building was dedicated on August 25, 1852. Cornelius C. Felton, president of Harvard University, gave the main address, in which he admired the building’s design for including “all the modern facilities for teaching and improvements in arrangement. A new method of ventilation has been adopted; a well has been dug on the premises; large furnaces have been placed in the cellar; and ample room has been provided for scholars to remain in the interval of the noonday.”

With the new building ready for use, the original 1796 schoolhouse, located nearby, became obsolete. The contents were removed, the bell tower taken down, and the trusty old school bell, cast in 1806 in Brookfield, Massachusetts by a former apprentice of Paul Revere, was retired and brought inside the new building, where it sits today. Without its bell, but still useful, the old schoolhouse was moved through town and to the rear of St. Mary’s Church, where it now stands as an apartment house at 124–128 Washington Street.

While Bristol Academy blossomed throughout the quarter century after the Civil War, time was not on the side of many of the region’s smaller private academies. Free public education steadily improved in the second half of the nineteenth century, and this drew students away from schools like the one on Church Green. By 1900, Bristol Academy’s enrollment had declined to the point of no return. Faculty, staff and programs had been cut and unused land had been sold. The trustees had no choice but to announce that the school would close at the end of the 1908 academic year. In the years immediately following the closure the trustees allowed part of the building to be rented as a private kindergarten, and then for a brief time afterward as an “academy of sciences.”

The school’s demise ultimately brought good fortune to the Old Colony Historical Society. Organized in 1853, the group’s meeting place over the previous four decades had been located on Cedar Street, in a former chapel that the society had purchased in 1886 and renamed Historical Hall. Because the OCHS had an active membership as well as a growing museum and archival collections, by the 1920s the organization had long since outgrown its headquarters. In the spring of 1925, when the Bristol Academy trustees (at least one of whom was an Old Colony member) offered to sell the Church Green property to the society, the OCHS board acted as quickly as possible to take advantage of the proposal.

The historical society’s first priority was selling its Cedar Street headquarters. Although the Bristol Academy trustees had offered their former school building at a “nominal” price, society officials knew that converting the structure from a former school to a museum would be extremely expensive. And yet luck again smiled on the OCHS when Robert Leach came forward and offered $15,000 for the hall on Cedar Street. He intended to make it the new home of the local chapter of the American Legion.

On January 5, 1926, the OCHS voted to accept the Bristol Academy offer and the sale was finalized on April 22. Throughout the spring and early summer volunteers moved the society’s collections from Cedar Street over to temporary storage in the Registry of Deeds building on Court Street. The Taunton Public Library also offered temporary space to house the society’s books.

With Cedar Street sold, the collections moved, and title to the Academy building in hand, the OCHS was ready to get to work inside its soon-to-be museum. In early August 1926, contractor Franklin Williams, with the assistance of Boston architect Alfred L. Darrow, presented the society’s board with plans for the building’s conversion. The board accepted Williams’s proposal with the stipulation that the work had to be completed by the third week in October.

[Editor’s Note: Reader, let’s step away from 1926 for just a moment to look at a mystifying predicament that has frustrated OCHS officials for 100 years: Try as we might, no trace of Richard Upjohn’s original drawings of the building have ever been found. Thus our only idea of Upjohn’s interior design comes from later descriptions of what was changed when the building was converted. For these, we have only newspapers upon which to rely.]

On August 13, 1926, as contractor Williams set to work, the Taunton Daily Gazette ran a front page story informing readers of what changes were about to take place. The article, though a bit lengthy, is of value to OCHM historians :

“Starting at the front entrance of the building a corridor running the length of it will be built, thus setting off the two large school rooms on the right and the four smaller rooms on the left. The two rooms on the right will be united, forming one large lecture hall with a stage at the further end. The first room on the left will be fitted and equipped to accommodate the secretary of the society. The room will be made slightly larger by the tearing down of the present partition and the addition of a portion of the lavatory. The remainder of the present lavatory will be remodelled [sic] for the same purpose.

“The third room on the left will be built into a brick fire-proof vault for thestoring of valuable papers, documents and books, belonging to the society. The lastroom will be completely altered and made into a kitchen with all modern equipment.

“The second floor of the building will not be remodelled [sic], but completelyrefinished. The work will include new flooring, ceiling, wall paint, and general repairs. The exterior of the building will not undergo any decided improvements but will be replastered and reinforced.”

While the Gazette story accurately described most of the changes made to the structure in 1926, a few interesting details were omitted. For example, the floors in the central corridor and in the rooms on the left side of the first floor were fabricated from poured concrete. This was perhaps to accommodate the demands of the reinforced fire-proof vault. Still to be seen in the museum’s cellar are the field stone pillars and reinforced beams upon which the heavy walk-in vault rests. Also omitted was the news that most rooms in the remodeled building were finished in cream and light green, the green forming the background and the cream the woodwork and trimmings.

The dedication ceremony was held on December 9, 1926. The keynote speaker was James Angell, president of Yale University, whose grandfather had graduated from Bristol Academy on the way to a distinguished career as a professor of astronomy. A special guest that day was Miss Caroline Crandell, 94 years old, who had sung at the earlier dedication of the Bristol Academy building in 1852. A heavy snowfall earlier in the week didn’t dampen the spirits of the 350 people who attended the celebration.

Even as they hailed the opening of the new facility, the society’s leadership recognized that the way forward would be challenging. The conversion of the former school to a museum cost the historical society $14,736 (approximately $150,000 in 2026). That left little money for anything other than daily expenses. The new building was a wonderful but demanding treasure, and there were no funds available for a long range plan covering its maintenance or improvement. This situation would linger for three decades.

A look at the society’s records covering the twenty years after the acquisition of Bristol Academy gives a clear indication of the Spartan conditions that prevailed on Church Green. First, there was no full-time staff. Most of the clerical and janitorial work was done by willing volunteers. The office of Secretary (today titled Executive Director) was filled part-time and was always held by a retired older gentleman willing to work well beyond the call of duty. Aside from holding monthly lectures or musical recitals, museum hours were limited and so was revenue. Money came from membership dues, hall rentals, bequests and donations. When a serious problem arose, such as a leaking roof or a broken furnace, the board sometimes secured a small loan from a local bank to cover the costs. Presiding over a historic building filled with priceless objects and manuscripts must have been a worrisome task because until the 1960s the building had no police or fire alarm systems.

In the period following World War II, as the nation’s economy surged, the Society’s circumstances began to improve. This could be seen first in its building and grounds. In 1951, for example, the William Hale Reed Memorial Fund raised more than $1,800 to renovate the fire-proof vault. Throughout the following year new paint and lighting brightened its interior, and part-time clerical help assisted with cataloguing, etc. Outside the building more attention was given to landscaping, and in 1957 the board voted to accept the offer of Edmund Bassett to present the society with a gold-leaf weather vane. Still in operation in 2026, this replaced an older one that had been in service for more than 100 years. The Bassett weather vane looked down upon a new driveway and parking lot, black-topped for the first time in June 1958.

It was events of the late 1960s that brought the Society and its building into the modern age. First, a generous bequest by Louis L. Lincoln, and then a much larger endowment bequeathed by Harry S. Hathaway, gave the Society the opportunity to place its building, grounds and collections on a more secure footing. In the words of Society president Gordon M. Owen, the Hathaway Trust would allow the organization to renovate, improve and expand in the immediate future. Thus, in 1969 the OCHS purchased the Harry Carlow House, next door to the museum. This building was used for storage until it was sold by the society in 1981. In the spring of 1969, the museum building received new wiring, lighting, decoration, and new exhibit cases. Two years later, in June 1971, the new Silver Room opened on the second floor, and in May of 1975 the downstairs meeting hall was redecorated.

In 1982, the OCHS hired its first professionally trained museum director. While she and her successors have worked diligently to make sure the museum’s collection and conservation policies meet industry standards, they have also focused on carefully preserving the historic building. In December 1990, with renovations completed, the William and Mary Hurley Memorial Library was dedicated, thanks to the generosity of the Hurley family.

Among the many benefits of having a full-time, professionally trained staff is the opportunity to appeal to granting agencies for financial assistance. In November 2004, for example, the OCHS received a $100,000 matching grant from the Massachusetts Historical Commission for the construction of a handicapped accessible walkway at the front of the building. Thanks to the generosity of Tauntonians and faraway friends the project was fully funded and the walkway was dedicated in June 2006.

Even as the planning and construction of the walkway was in progress, work was also underway inside the building. In 2005, a separate executive director’s office was added to the first floor and the restrooms were modernized.

In 2015, as the society’s membership grew, the board decided to “rebrand” in an effort to reach a wider audience. Henceforward the OCHS would do business as the Old Colony History Museum. This coincided with the emergence of an enthusiastic and committed staff, under whose direction an extensive restoration of the property, both inside and out, has been ongoing. In 2018, the first floor museum gallery was completely redesigned, and the renovation of the upstairs gallery followed one year later.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the museum to close to the public for three months in 2020, and during that period the staff focused on upgrading the building’s infrastructure. Back in 1936, for example, the board had actually discussed having the cupola removed from the building. It was expensive to maintain, and especially troublesome was the fact that there was no way to gain entry into it from inside the museum. In 2020, for the first time in its history, contractors secured access to the cupola from inside the museum’s second floor. This makes its maintenance and repair much more convenient. The COVID hiatus also provided the opportunity to upgrade the building’s fire detection system and to install new lighting fixtures in the upstairs gallery.

The final piece of the interior renovation of the building came in 2024, with the completion of the redesigned Military Room. Dozens of artifacts, many important but never before shown, were able to be placed in new exhibit cases with interactive interpretation. A few of them were Civil War artifacts originally used and then donated by men who had founded the Old Colony Historical Society.

And that brings us to the present. Back during the most discouraging months of the pandemic, the staff planted a garden on the museum’s front lawn. Simple as it was, its message was one of hope, endurance and renewal. As we celebrate a century of careful stewardship from inside Richard Upjohn’s beautiful building, those are the very qualities with which we welcome the next 100 years.

The year 2025 marks the one hundred eleventh anniversary of the first holiday lighting of the Taunton Green. Every year since 1914, with the exception of three years of World War II blackouts, the historic Common has been the centerpiece of lighted displays that included Santa Claus and his reindeer, holiday carolers, religious scenes and giant Christmas trees. A tradition that began as a downtown marketing plan grew quickly so that within just a few years Taunton became known throughout eastern Massachusetts as the Christmas City.

The idea of staging Christmas on Main Street originated in Salem, Massachusetts and was brought to this city by Charles L. Wheeler, the secretary of the Taunton Chamber of Commerce. In the fall of 1914 Wheeler met with several business and civic leaders at the old Taunton Inn on the Green and pitched the notion that a lighted and decorated Christmas tree on the Common would attract more holiday shoppers to downtown.¹

It was no surprise that Wheeler’s plan won the enthusiastic approval of the entire delegation, and sub-committees were formed to handle various duties. It was the presence of just a few men, however, that guaranteed the eventual success of the project. One was James H. Murphy, who would later be recognized as the “father of Christmas decorations on the Green.”² He was superintendent of the Bay State Street Railway Company. Born in 1865 and the son of Irish immigrants, Murphy was a talented organizer who had begun his career in public transportation on the very bottom rung of the employment ladder. Hired as a seventeen-year-old “hill boy,” Murphy’s first job was to harness an additional, and usually uncooperative, horse to street cars as they approached the challenging hills in the city’s Whittenton section. Armed with a ferocious work ethic and a genial personality, Murphy rose quickly through the company’s ranks. In the late nineteenth century area trolley companies were consolidated and their lines extended. Meanwhile, Taunton’s streetcars were electrified in1893, and before the turn of the twentieth century Murphy was Bay State’s superintendent.³ At the 1914 Chamber of Commerce meeting he committed his own efforts and the resources of his company to raising and decorating a spectacular Christmas tree.

Also attending the planning session was Nathaniel Jarvis Wyeth Fish, mayor of the city and a larger than life figure even in his own time. Born in Taunton in 1859 and trained as a civil engineer, Fish spent the first part of his career on horseback surveying the vast plains of Texas and the Southwest. Returning to Taunton in 1889, he entered politics while also distinguishing himself as a multi-sport athlete. Fish provided one example of his boundless energy just a few months after he completed work on the Christmas display. In August 1915, at age fifty-six, he challenged one of Taunton’s municipal councilmen to a walking race from Taunton to the New Bedford City Hall. The challenge was accepted, and that story was covered in an earlier blog: “The Great Race of 1915: New Bedford or Bust!”.⁴ Like his friend James Murphy, the peripatetic mayor was fully committed to the success of the Chamber’s plan.

Two other men, among several more, deserved credit for the ultimate success of the project. Assigned to handle the music were Walter J. Clemson and William R. Park. Clemson, born in London and educated at the University of Cambridge, was a distinguished musician with a forty-three year career as a composer, organist and concert soloist. William R. Park, although not a professional musician, was a talented man who enjoyed a long life participating in community performances. A gifted organizer and the owner of a successful plumbing and heating business, Park was well-known for his civic and charitable endeavors.

Early in December 1914 Chamber secretary Wheeler announced that the downtown celebration would begin on December 17 and continue until Christmas Day. The highlight of the festival would take place on Christmas Eve, with caroling on the Green. The money needed to pay for the tree and lights was to come from donations given by the city’s merchants. Within just a few days more than $400 (equal to $13,000 in 2025) had been collected. As the money continued to arrive, several church and civic choral groups volunteered to participate.

The thirty-five-foot Christmas tree arrived in the city on December 15, and the next day Murphy’s men from the streetcar company set to work raising it and then stringing three hundred and fifty colored lights on its branches. They also placed tinsel and other decorations from top to bottom. When the Bay State men were finished, crews from the Taunton Municipal Lighting Plant moved in to install the electrical equipment needed to power the lights and guarantee the safety of the revelers on the Green.⁵

On December 17, the Taunton Daily Gazette published an announcement inviting the public to witness the official tree lighting ceremony scheduled for later that afternoon. Well before the appointed hour the downtown streets were packed with merrymakers, and as darkness fell over the city thousands of people waited to get a look at the spectacle about to unfold. Remember that this was a time before most families had an automobile, and in 1914 there was no radio, television or internet to provide entertainment.

Just at dusk and on a given signal, Superintendent Murphy hit the switch turning on the electricity — the tree lighted beautifully — and a jubilant roar rolled from the Green and down the length Main Street. The Common looked wonderful and Secretary Wheeler’s promotion had worked like a charm, for despite a winter cold snap, crowds of shoppers would pour into the city’s business district throughout the next week.

After the initial tree lighting, attention turned to arranging the musical program to be performed on Christmas Eve. A chorus of three hundred voices had been assembled by Walter Clemson, and a heavy schedule of nightly rehearsals was underway at the State Guard armory on Pleasant Street. That building, adjacent to the Taunton Public Library, was demolished in 2007 and today it’s the site of a municipal parking lot. Clemson had decided that at the conclusion of the concert on the Green the chorus would be divided into three divisions, with one group dispatched to serenade the Weir while another group went to Whittenton. The third division, directed personally by Mr. Clemson, would carry music out to the streets in the vicinity of downtown.

When Christmas Eve 1914 finally arrived it came in cloudy and cold. By late afternoon a light snow had begun to fall and by evening Main Street and the Taunton Green were, in the words of a Gazette writer, “packed with humanity.”⁶ In an effort to allow downtown stores to stay open as late as possible, the choral program wasn’t scheduled to start until 10:30. Throughout the evening families, many with small children, dropped into the stores for a few minutes of warmth before returning to their window shopping along Main Street. The huge crowd was joyful, and familiar Christmas songs could be heard coming from several businesses.

The evening’s musical production started precisely at 10:30, after the chorus filed onto the Green. Mayor Fish, lighted by the big Christmas tree, thanked everyone who had helped organize the week’s events and then turned the program over to the musicians. Mr. Clemson started with a surprise when he mounted the conductor’s platform, turned his back on the singers, and with an electric torch signaled to the members of a brass quartet stationed on the balcony of the Taunton Inn. This building once anchored the corner of the Taunton Green and Broadway, where 30 Taunton Green stands today. The quartet, consisting of cornets and trombones, sounded a regal fanfare and then the chorus, 300 strong — 301 if we count the ever-exuberant Mayor Fish — began a wide selection of Christmas favorites.

The program on the Green was all that its organizers had hoped it would be, and at its conclusion Mr. Murphy’s streetcars drew up to take the smaller choral groups to their assigned neighborhoods. Allston E. Williams took charge of the carolers heading for the Weir, while Fred W. Howes led the group departing for Whittenton.

Mr. Clemson and his group piled into private automobiles and rode to the first stop on their neighborhood program. They opened the show at the junction of Winthrop and High Streets and then moved out on foot. After walking for a time they serenaded Morton Hospital and then headed west toward Agricultural Avenue (today’s Kilmer Avenue). Long after the evening was over they still remembered seeing an elderly lady who lived on Oak Street. As they passed her house, she stood in a window holding a single lighted candle. The chorus stopped, faced the old woman and started to sing. She listened appreciatively as they presented “The First Noël” and then “Silent Night.” With the opening notes of “Adeste Fidelis,” however, she could no longer resist: Throwing open her window, she joined in with the carolers.⁷

The group traveling through the Weir also had a memorable experience. When they arrived on Plain Street they found two choruses already singing there. In a scene perfect for today’s Saturday Night Live, the two groups attempted to sing over each other and a fight broke out. Chaos ensued, punches were thrown and loud un-Christmasy messages were exchanged. One young man was assaulted with a cornet and a few others received minor injuries. The battle ended when the combatants grew tired, and the field was left open to the chorus arriving from the Green.⁸

After consulting with downtown merchants, members of the Chamber of Commerce committee immediately took stock of the week and declared the celebration an unmitigated, greater-than-expected success. Pledging to begin planning earlier in the year, they promised that the 1915 lighting of the Green would be even more spectacular than the one just completed. That news was met with sustained joy throughout the city.

No one knows exactly when decorating the Green for Christmas passed from an experiment to a tradition, but it did. Even in 1914, immense changes were waiting, unforeseen, just over the horizon. In only a little while it would be an entirely different world. And yet, across the last century, while the ornaments have become more elaborate and the lights more beautiful, the lights-on ceremony has continued to remind us of the abiding comfort we find in family, friends and community.

Embracing that spirit of grateful celebration, we at the Old Colony History Museum wish all our members and friends a very Merry Christmas.

End Notes

1. William F. Hanna and Charles E. Crowley, Lights On! A Century of Christmas in Taunton (Taunton, Mass.: n.p., 2014), 1.

2. Taunton Daily Gazette, 1 March 1941. For more on the city’s trolley lines see William F. Hanna, A History of Taunton, Massachusetts (Taunton, Mass.: Old Colony Historical Society, 2007), 261–63, 282.

3. Taunton Daily Gazette, 1 March 1941. James H. Murphy’s obituary provides an interesting overview of his life.

4. See William F. Hanna, “The Great Race of 1915: New Bedford or Bust,” Old Colony History Museum Blog, September 3, 2019, available online at:

https://ochm.medium.com/the-great-race-of-1915-new-bedford-or-bust-86cae507255a

5. Taunton Daily Gazette, 16, 17 December 1914.

6. Taunton Daily Gazette, 26 December 1914.

7. Taunton Daily Gazette, 26 December 1914.

8. Taunton Daily Gazette, 26 December 1914.

A 1953 graduate of Dighton High School, Andrew “Andy” C. Carr was drafted unexpectedly, at 31 years old, into the U.S. Army. It was 1966, the height of the Vietnam War. A graduate of BU Medical School, Dr. and (suddenly) Captain Carr was the second neurologist to be assigned to Vietnam.¹

“I thought I was too old to be drafted,” Andy told me during a “Zoom” conversation we had in early September 2025. Now 90 years old, a long-time resident of California, Andy’s memories of his boyhood years in Dighton and school years leading up to Vietnam are still sharp, with an occasional gentle prompt from his wife, Roberta R. Carr.²

Together, Andy and Roberta, a successful novelist in her own right, captured Andy’s experiences in Vietnam in The 8th Field Hospital (second edition, 2022), a book that details the improbable, often wise, and sometimes laugh-out-loud stories of his time in Vietnam.

“At 31, I thought my draft notice was some kind of mistake,” he laughed, “until I learned that physicians could be drafted up to age 35.”

Ripped from his two-year fellowship in Boston at the Tufts University School of Medicine, Dr. Carr reported for his pre-induction physical at the Boston Naval Shipyard, where he managed to fail both his eye and hearing tests. Nevertheless, he was given passing scores, being informed (with a wink) that physicians didn’t need the vision and hearing of a combat soldier.

He chose not to protest. Andy had another “out” he might have exercised, too. His equally talented older brother, James “Irvin” Carr, Jr., M.D. (Dighton High class of 1950), was an ophthalmologist who had served five years as a Surgeon Full Grade in the US Public Health Service, one of the nation’s eight uniformed services. Irvin died tragically of a blood disease in 1966 during Andy’s residency, about the time Andy was drafted. Under the military’s “surviving son” doctrine, Andy could have petitioned for exemption from the draft.³

Instead, just a few months after receiving his draft notice, Dr. Carr found himself in Nha Trang, working in a field hospital as part of the 98th Medical Detachment KO (knockout) Team. It was a role in which resourcefulness, a sense of humor, and a willingness to color outside the lines were critical to saving lives and protecting his own sanity.

“He followed his brother,” Roberta told me. “He married the first girl that he met. He did everything he should do. Vietnam was everything he shouldn’t have done. But,” Roberta added, “Andy embraces a new opportunity, and I think he loved being pulled out of his routine.”

Andy’s goals in Nha Trang were to heal soldiers, navigate a new culture, and stay alive. But his primary role, as one of the first American neurologists in Vietnam, was to keep soldiers in the field. “My main purpose for being there was not necessarily to cure people,” he recalled, “but to keep them from being evacuated. When a soldier came in and a doctor examined them, the patient might say, ‘Well, I’ve got these terrible headaches.’ And the doctor would say, ‘Maybe you’ve got a brain tumor. We’d better get you back to Japan, where they can evaluate you better.’ And so, the Army was evacuating loads of soldiers who were delayed in returning to combat. So, I was put there to stop the evacuation.”

Above all, Andy was forced to make sense of a violent, war-torn land that was so different from his quiet upbringing in Dighton.

Dighton Days

Andrew C. Carr was born in May 1935 in Wilmington, Delaware, to James Irvin and Catherine (Carothers) Carr. The family moved to New Jersey when Andy was a baby and to Dighton in 1941 when he was six years old.

“We moved to Dighton because my father’s job was in South Dighton at the Anchor Color and Gum Works. They had a big factory that made dyes. He was a dye chemist.”⁴ The Carrs first lived in Segregansett, in a home a few doors down from Dighton High School (and later Dighton Junior High, a building that burned to the ground in January 1991 and is today the site of the Dighton Town offices).

“After about two years in Segregansett,” Andy continued, “we moved to South Dighton on Water Street. Our home was three houses down from the Yacht Club, and we were right across the street from the Taunton River. During hurricanes,” he remembered, “we got flooded.”

During WWII, Andy recalls dirigibles flying up and down the Taunton River in search of submarines.

Finally, “my parents moved to another house, almost at the end of Center Street, between South and North Dighton. There was a farm called ‘Hundred Acres.’ We rented the original house, which was built in the 1700s. There was a pond, and the farm’s owner had a dam built across it. He generated electricity and was, I think, the first person in the area to have electricity.”⁵

Andy’s junior high years were spent attending the North Dighton School near Pearl and School Streets, later the VFW Hall, and now a private residence. Andy’s father eventually retired from ICI. His mother retired after 15 years of teaching in Barrington, Rhode Island. The Carrs moved to Florida but are still remembered fondly by Dighton residents.⁶ And, Andy writes nostalgically, “the scent of baking bread instantly transports me back to my mother’s kitchen in Dighton, Massachusetts.”

Andy and Roberta visited Dighton about 30 years ago. “Everything I remember has changed now,” Andy said. “The pond is gone because they knocked down the dam where electricity was being made.”

During battlefield simulation training at Fort Sam Houston, Andy found himself near first in his group to complete the course. “I attribute my agility to years of practice sneaking up on ducks in my youth,” he wrote. “I did my duck hunting on the Taunton River, and sometimes on freshwater lakes,” he told me during our recent conversation. “We sometimes hunted near where I was living for a time, near the Yacht Club.”

Humility and Common Sense

For all his accomplishments, Dr. Carr is remarkably humble. He doesn’t present himself as brilliant, nor as a hero, but only as a person who tried to serve his country and do his best under difficult circumstances. His stories are as likely to feature generosity, friendship, the beauty of Vietnam, and the absurdities of military rules, as they are heroic medical interventions — though there were some of those, too. In every instance, we get to see the “big history” of the Vietnam conflict through the “small history” stories of someone who lived it.

For example, Carr writes, if a U.S. Army guard in Vietnam was caught sleeping on duty, he’d be arrested and court-martialed, with a chance of spending ten years in a federal prison. The JAG officers who represented the guards used narcolepsy as their primary defense. As the only neurologist at the 8th Field Hospital, and without the proper equipment for diagnosis, Dr. Carr could only rely on a patient’s oral history.

Strangely enough, every case he examined had identical, textbook symptoms of narcolepsy, “almost” as if the soldiers had been coached. In his wisdom, Dr. Carr decided that his obligation was to take a history, make a diagnosis, and propose a treatment plan. The possibility of manufactured symptoms was, he wrote, irrelevant.

“The phrase ‘pick your battles’ took on a whole new meaning,” Dr. Carr concluded. If shipping soldiers with headaches out of Vietnam to Japan was a bad idea, shipping them out to Leavenworth because of exhaustion was just as harmful. “Managing capable men to other assignments seemed like the best way to manage the sleeping-on-the-job problem.”

Andy’s reflections on the war and his time in Vietnam are especially poignant when he recalls his return to the country in 2004.

“When I returned to Vietnam, the people at the airport were all dressed in Army uniform,” Andy told me. “It made me a little nervous. But when I talked with my guide, who happened to be South Vietnamese and spent a long time going through rehabilitation and concentration camps, he said that ‘Bygones were bygones. The war was a long time ago. We’re happy to have you with us.’ That was true of everybody,” Andy said. “I’ve never met anybody who seemed to have any animosity towards me because I was an American.”

Dr. Carr brought home a bagful of souvenirs from Vietnam, including crossbows and a rifle. They still adorn his home office and guest room. Why show souvenirs after all these years? “I suppose for the same reason I wrote this book,” he explained. “I want people to know that I served my country. I want them to ask questions about Vietnam, and how living there changed me.”

To that end, Andy includes his email address at the end of the book: AndrewCarrMD@gmail.com. We at Old Colony History Museum invite you to purchase this entertaining and accessible book (on Amazon or in our bookshop at Church Green), enjoy and be inspired by its many stories, and reach out — at the author’s invitation — to one of Dighton’s living heroes.

After returning from Nah Trang, Andy was stationed at the Presidio in San Francisco for the remainder of his enlistment. In 1968, he began his career as a Neurologist for Kaiser Permanente in Southern California, where he spent his career.

Notes

¹ National Library of Medicine, web October 2, 2025, Neurology in the Vietnam War: CPT Carr’s patients — PubMed.

² Roberta and Andrew were married in 1985. All quotes not from The Eighth Field Hospital are from a September 8, 2025 conversation between the author and the Carrs.

³ The “surviving son doctrine” (sometimes called the sole surviving son policy) is a U.S. military policy designed to protect families from losing all their children in wartime service. If a family has lost one or more children in military service, the remaining sibling(s) can be exempted from combat duty or even from compulsory service. It is not automatic — it requires the family or the service member to request the protection, and the military must approve it.

⁴ Anchor Color and Gum Works was established around 1861 in Dighton. It initially produced furniture-related chemicals, oil paint, and watercolor products. Over time, the operation expanded into a full-fledged chemical manufacturing facility. According to the U.S. EPA, the plant operated from 1861 to 1994, manufacturing a broad spectrum of chemicals: pigments, paints, halothane (an anesthetic), firefighting chemicals, concrete superplasticizers, soap, cornstarch-based products, textile dyes, antioxidants, adhesives, and more US EPA. Throughout the 1950s to the 1970s, the plant discharged waste directly into Muddy Cove Brook, resulting in significant environmental contamination. In 1992, the owner at the time, ICI Americas, rebranded as Zeneca, Inc., and began phasing down operations at the Dighton facility by 1993 US EPA. The legacy disposal practices included the burial of drums contaminated with chemicals. The EPA intervened around 1999–2000 to supervise the excavation and safe disposal of these buried drums.

⁵ The Hundred Acre Farm, described in online reminiscences, was located on Center Street about where the Segreganset River crosses under it (between Williams Street and Elm Street). People recall the farm’s water-powered generator upstream from the Briggs mills, so this places it along the upper Segreganset River, north of Briggs Street. There are references to the Hundred Acres dam impounding part of the Segreganset River to power machinery and (later) a small hydroelectric setup for the farm. In state records of dams, you can still find “Briggs Pond Dam” and other small private dams on the Segreganset, which shows how common these structures were in Dighton. Oral history mentions that Hundred Acres Farm had a picturesque mill-style building at the dam.

⁶ Author’s conversation on September 14, 2025 with Gil Garnett, who knew the Carrs and helped teach a North Dighton author the highways and byways of Dighton proper.

On Saturday morning, September 1, 1906 a locomotive hauling a special car pulled in to the Taunton Central Depot on Oak Street. Extensive pre-arrival publicity had guaranteed that a good crowd would be on hand hoping to get a glimpse of the strange contraption that was about to be unloaded. This was the city’s first look at the Beachey airship, a dirigible lifted by hydrogen and propelled by a gasoline engine. Touring the country less than three years after the Wright Brothers’ success at Kitty Hawk, Beachey’s flying machine and others like it were pushing the frontier of manned flight. This was billed as the first airship flight in New England.¹

Once the several parts of Beachey’s craft had been loaded onto wagons it was a short trip from the Central Depot up Oak Street to the grounds of the Bristol County Fair. Organized in 1820, the Bristol County Agricultural Society sponsored an annual end-of-summer carnival, complete with a wide variety of entertainment. Over four days in September singers, dancers and musicians, not to mention more exotic denizens of the midway were showcased. The Taunton Daily Gazette caught the spirit of the midway when it touted the appearance not only of the “wild man,” but also “ladies from the far east . . . a score or more of dancing girls, with scant draperies and a desire to kick high and often.”² The fair also showcased races featuring automobiles, dogs, horses, people, bicycles and almost anything else considered worthy of a small clandestine wager. Prizes were awarded for the best livestock, poultry, pigeons, fruit and vegetables. Many offices and businesses closed for a few hours so employees could attend the fair, and it was enjoyed as an event that promoted a stronger sense of community.

Whenever possible, county fairs also featured daredevils of one kind or another, and this is what brought the Beachey airship to Taunton. The dirigible was designed and built by its pilot, Lincoln Beachey, and his older brother Hillery. Anybody who flew a powered aircraft in the years before World War I more than qualified as a genuine daredevil. Commensurate with the risk to his life, Beachey’s fee was expensive, but fair organizers saw it as an investment that would help sell tickets.

Beachey, who was nineteen years old when he came to Taunton, was already gaining fame within the ranks of aeronautic daredevils. Born in San Francisco, he had dropped out of school at age thirteen to become a “mechanician,” able to build and repair gasoline engines. He took his first ride aloft in a tethered balloon when he was fifteen, and in 1905 he contracted with promoter Thomas Baldwin to fly his dirigible at the Lewis & Clark Exposition in Portland, Oregon. Hillery Beachey signed on as his younger brother’s manager and spokesman.

In 1906 the Beacheys designed their own airship, and, with Lincoln as its pilot, they worked their way across the country performing at county fairs and air shows. Among the better publicized appearances were flights in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Scranton and Washington, D.C. In June, Beachey captured his first international headlines when, after taking off from a field four miles away, he circled the Washington Monument and the dome of the U.S. Capitol building and then landed on the White House lawn for a ten-minute visit.³

With the Bristol County Fair scheduled to open on Monday, September 3, the first order of business was to get Beachey and his machine settled at the fairgrounds and then provide whatever assistance he needed to assemble the airship. This was done during the remainder of Saturday and throughout the day on Sunday. Newspapermen and invited guests were summoned to the fairgrounds on Sunday for a late afternoon luncheon with Beachey. In addition to a meet-and-greet, they were promised an up-close look at the airship, which was hidden inside a large tent and located behind a sturdy fence.

The man of the hour didn’t have much to say that afternoon. The Gazette reporter described Beachey as “a modest man [who] did not care to talk about his own achievements.” That was left to his manager (probably Hillery), who gave a full description of the Capitol adventure and then tried to build excitement for the upcoming Taunton flights. Afterward, the guests were invited to take a guided tour of the famous airship.⁴

Since Beachey was scheduled to fly above the city on Monday, the airship was almost ready when the visitors saw it on Sunday evening. They were shown a cigar-shaped cloth balloon comprised of 750 yards of oiled or varnished Japanese silk, sewed in squares and filled with highly explosive hydrogen gas. Attached beneath the balloon was a wooden undercarriage upon which Beachey, unsecured by any safety restraint, maneuvered when gaining or losing altitude. At the stern of the dirigible was a five-horsepower gasoline motor which turned a propellor, and a rudder which was used to steer the craft. When ready to fly, the airship was sixty-five feet long, sixteen feet in diameter and weighed only 210 pounds, not including Beachey’s 140 pounds and fifty pounds of sand used as ballast. The flying machine could reach an altitude of 3,000 feet.⁵

Committee members recognized that the weather could make or break their outdoor county fair. The unpredictable New England climate had them worried. If they had known in advance that the first week of September would bring glorious summer sunshine and cool breezes to the fairgrounds it might have buoyed their spirits and quieted their apprehension. That, however, would have only intensified their disappointment, for while aeronautic daredevils loved sunshine, “cool breezes” were another matter entirely.

Monday, September 1, was Labor Day and more than 15,000 tickets had been sold for the fair’s opening. The midway was teeming with revelers, many of whom had come with the single purpose of watching the fearless Beachey fly.

But he never left the ground that day.

It was up to fair officials to announce that Beachey’s launch had to be aborted because of high winds, later defined as gusts above fifteen miles per hour. Not only were such winds hazardous to both pilot and machine, but the rules stipulated that if a dirigible was forced down anywhere other than at its starting point, the trip would not count as an airship flight. The newspaper noted that the cancellation caused a “great deal of disappointment,” among the crowd, and that was certainly shared by the airman, whose contract stated that he would be paid only for successful flights.⁶

While members of the fair committee may have been disheartened by the cancellation, they surely understood the need for caution. Aeronautics was a dangerous business, a fact that had been brought home by a tragedy on their own Taunton fairgrounds. Four years earlier 30,000 people had seen a parachutist fall 400 feet to his death when the basket of his tethered balloon tipped him over the side. Two other jumpers, including a woman, survived the accident.⁷

Tuesday, the second day of the fair, brought perfect flying weather. Beachey and his crew were up early and they wheeled the airship outside for a 7 a.m. shakedown flight. “I am going to say good morning to the people of Taunton,” said Beachey as he departed. Everything looked good as the craft rose above the fairgrounds and he decided to head east, in the direction of Highland Street. Trouble arrived immediately, however, when the airship lost enough altitude to allow a drag rope to snag a telephone wire. This caused the craft to pitch so severely that its propellor sliced a hole in the gas bag. Hydrogen escaped rapidly, which brought the dirigible low enough to tangle with another wire. The craft was finally allowed to descend to the street where Beachey and his men packed it up and returned it to its tent at the fairgrounds. Beachey promised to repair the ship quickly and held out the possibility of another flight in the late afternoon. However, since it took eight hours to refill the gas bag with hydrogen, there were no more flights that day. The newspaper reported that given the difficulties of past two days, many people were coming to believe that the notion of airship flight was “slightly visionary.”⁸

But when the sun came up on Wednesday promising another beautiful day, and with only a light wind blowing, fair organizers and thousands of Tauntonians became hopeful yet again. The Bristol County Fair was half over and the airship hadn’t yet made a successful flight, but word spread quickly when an 8 a.m. telephone call from the fairgrounds notified the newspaper that Beachey was set to launch. His destination was not just downtown, but specifically the Superior Courthouse lawn.

“Hundreds of pairs of eyes were turned in a westerly direction upwards into the heavens,” wrote the Gazette man, when suddenly “the airship appeared in full view far up in the air” bringing “exclamations of surprise and astonishment.” Never before had such a thing been seen in Taunton. From time to time both tethered and free-floating passenger balloons had been launched from the Green, but local people had never witnessed the flight of an aircraft powered by its own gasoline motor. “City Square was crowded with people in a few moments, even at that early hour,” said the reporter, “and thousands of other people all over the city and vicinity witnessed the positive proof that the Taunton fair had not deceived the public when it announced that it had an airship that really flew.”

Beachey gave those who saw the flight a memory that would be passed down through most of the twentieth century. But there was no landing on the courthouse lawn that morning. Instead, once over the city, he turned the dirigible back in the direction of the fairgrounds and sailed away. Early word from fair officials was that the craft’s steering mechanism had malfunctioned, but later they announced that the wind had buffeted the aircraft so much that its motor had overheated.⁹

Beachey’s forced retreat back to the fairgrounds after a successful flight had two results. First, the trouble had occurred early enough in the day to let people think there might be another ascent before dark, and second, the successful flight had created a strong market for both Wednesday’s and Thursday’s fair tickets. Thousands of hopeful people waited for the aeronaut’s next move.

Little did the excited public realize that in Beachey’s mind there was no next move, at least on Wednesday. All day, as people headed for the fairgrounds, or at least kept their eyes on the sky, neither dirigible nor pilot were to be seen. Frustrated and angry, fair officials confronted Beachey in the late afternoon to find out whether there would be another flight before dark. According to a Gazette writer, when they were told that mechanical problems would prevent another launch, agitated fair officials “insisted that Beachey show the people something.” Consequently at 6 p.m. the airship was rolled out and as 50 volunteers held it down, Beachey mounted up. At his signal the men released their grip and the airship rose “leisurely” as the crowd cheered wildly.

In summarizing the Wednesday evening launch the Gazette noted that, considering the craft’s mechanical problems, “grave chances” had been taken in making the flight. As it lifted off, the machine shook, with its undercarriage “swinging about in a way to encourage most people to stay on the ground.” The dirigible rose and Beachey performed basic turning maneuvers above the fairgrounds. After a few minutes he landed the airship “as prettily as a bird alighting on a roof.” The fifty volunteers secured the craft and Beachey dismounted to cheers. Simple as it was, this exhibition satisfied fair managers that the aeronaut had acted in good faith.¹⁰

Wednesday evening’s ascension was Beachey’s last in Taunton. Something — wind, mechanical problems or another issue — prevented a Thursday flight. The airship was packed up and sent on to its next stop. Four days later, on September 10, 1906, Beachey repeated his flight over Washington, D.C., again visiting the Capitol and White House.

It’s doubtful that in 1906 many people in the Taunton area had any idea of what Lincoln Beachey would one day become. Gaining increased notoriety, he continued with dirigible flights throughout the first decade of the twentieth century and then, in 1910, turned his attention to fixed-wing aircraft. Within months Beachey was numbered among the most daring — and perhaps reckless — pilots in the sky. As the fledgling aircraft industry developed, he emerged as a contemporary of aviation pioneers such as the Wright Brothers and Glenn Curtiss.

Until World War I, daredevil flying promised pilots great wealth, international fame, and a truncated life span. Beachey, for example, was paid $500 just for his Taunton flights in a dirigible, and Frank Marrero in his excellent biography, points out that every day Beachey flew he earned more than the national average yearly income.¹¹

Marrero and other historians have also documented why Beachey, over an approximately five-year career as a fixed-wing stuntman, gained world fame. For example, he was the first pilot to develop a method of stall-recovery, the first to fly inside a building, first to fly over Niagara Falls, first to fly over New York City, Washington, D.C. (and Taunton), the first to pick up a handkerchief from the ground with his wing tip, and perhaps the first to fly at night. In 1911, Beachey set a world’s record for altitude, reaching 11,642 feet above Dubuque, Iowa. His signature stunt, called the “Dip of Death,” had him ascend to an altitude of 3,000 feet and then send the plane into a completely vertical dive, managing to pull up at the very last moment.¹²

Beachey became one of the premier attractions of the period before World War I. Frank Marrero compiled a catalogue of superlatives. Among many others, Beachey was called “The Man Who Owns the Sky,” “The Genius of Aviation,” “Master Birdman,” and “The Divine Flyer.” In 1914 he toured 126 U.S. cities (including an appearance at the Brockton Fair) and drew 17 million people.”¹³

Beachey is reported to have once said, “I will never be killed in flying. Only the careless or overly daring die in falls. I am too careful.”¹⁴ He surely knew that wasn’t true, that every daredevil made room in his plane for both hubris and the Grim Reaper. He was killed in San Francisco on March 15, 1915, two weeks after his twenty-eighth birthday. Curiously, the Taunton Daily Gazette marked his death by reporting that repeated mechanical problems had made his appearance here “more or less a failure.”¹⁵

End Notes

1. Taunton Daily Gazette, 5 September 1906.
2. Taunton Daily Gazette, 4 September 1906.
3. Boston Evening Transcript, 14 June 1906; The World’s News [Sydney, Australia], 4 August 1906.
4. Taunton Daily Gazette, 4 September 1906.
5. Frank Marrero, Lincoln Beachey: The Man Who Owned the Sky, 2d ed. (Marin County, California: Tripod Press, 2017), 30; The Record-Herald [Waynesboro, Pennsylvania], 17 August 1906. The Marrero book presents the best biographical treatment of Beachey’s life.
6. Taunton Daily Gazette, 4 September 1906.
7. The Daily Globe [Fall River, Mass.], 25 September 1902.
8. Taunton Daily Gazette, 4 September 1906; Beachey’s intention of greeting Tauntonians is found in The Plain Dealer [Cleveland, Ohio], 5 September 1906.
9. Taunton Daily Gazette, 5 and 6 September 1906.
10. Taunton Daily Gazette, 6 September 1906.
11. Taunton Daily Gazette, 15 March 1915; Marrero, xi.
12. Marrero, p. xiii; John T. Pregler, “From the Archives: Beachey Amazing Dubuquers,” The Lens of History, December 23, 2024, an online source found at: https://thelensofhistory.com/2024/12/beachy-amazing-dubuquers/. Consulted on September 29, 2025; also Rae Alexander, “The Tragedy of SF Stunt Pilot Lincoln Beachey — and the Daredevils Who Followed Him,” from KQED [San Francisco, Cal.] and broadcast March 9, 2023 and updated September 19, 2024. This is an online resource found at: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13925848/lincoln-beachey-stunt-pilot-crash-panama-pacific-exposition-1915-san-francisco-bay/. Consulted on September 29, 2025.
13. Marrero, xi-xii.
14. Rae Alexander, “The Tragedy of SF Stunt Pilot Lincoln Beachey — and the Daredevils Who Followed Him.”
15. Taunton Daily Gazette, 15 March 1915.

Six year old Tom Silvia had never ridden in a police car before, but from his home at the head of busy County Street the young Taunton boy had become well familiar with the wail of their sirens. On Sunday, September 4, 1955, it was his turn, and as the police cruiser sped toward Boston the boy was more interested in the siren than in anything else.

Tom was too young and too sick to realize it, but he was critically ill and on his way to Boston’s Floating Hospital for treatment of poliomyelitis. Upon arrival he was rushed into an isolation ward and placed in an iron lung to support his breathing. Doctors told his distraught parents that he was “skating on thin ice,” and might not recover.¹

Polio was classified into two types: non-paralytic, suffered by a significant majority of patients, presented flu-like symptoms which usually abated in about ten days leaving no lasting effects. Paralytic polio, on the other hand, could be fatal, with the virus affecting the brain and/or the spinal cord. If muscles in the chest became paralyzed, swallowing and breathing could be inhibited to the point of death. Tom Silvia was diagnosed with the paralytic form of the disease.

Although there were other frightful illnesses afflicting the innocent — tuberculosis and influenza among them — polio held a special place of dread for Americans during this period. Craig Kumerfield writes that contributing to their apprehension was the fact that the disease appeared to strike randomly, that its transmission wasn’t completely understood, and that in some cases death or permanent paralysis resulted.² The disease also seemed to prey upon the young. During the epidemic of 1955, for example, Boston’s Children’s Hospital admitted more than 650 children affected by the virus. At the peak of the crisis Children’s admitted almost forty new patients a day.³

Tom Silvia was the twenty-first Tauntonian to be stricken during the long polio summer of 1955. His would be counted among the 3,950 cases recorded in Massachusetts in that year.⁴

By the mid-twentieth century, polio was no stranger to the American public. Future president Franklin D. Roosevelt had been diagnosed with the disease in 1921, and although confined to a wheelchair, he was a tireless advocate for research into the nature of the disease. As FDR gained stature in the political world, he and his former law partner, Taunton native Basil O’Connor, enlisted the help of scientists and philanthropists in a crusade to end polio. Their efforts resulted in the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, soon to be known popularly as the March of Dimes. This organization took shape in 1938, during Roosevelt’s second term in the White House, and it would prove to be a formidable weapon in the fight against the disease.⁵

Even with research underway, polio continued to cast a shadow over the country. By the late 1940s and into the ’50s, outbreaks of the disease reached epidemic levels. The 58,000 cases reported in 1952 were the most in American history. That year saw 3,200 deaths and left 21,000 with some degree of paralysis.⁶

As the yearly toll from polio continued to rise, so did the hope for medical intervention. Good news came in 1954, when Dr. Jonas Salk received permission to conduct field tests on an inactivated (killed) polio vaccine. Approximately 1.3 million children took part in the trials, and of those 600,000 were vaccinated at least once.⁷ On April 12, 1955, the National Institutes of Health Division of Biologics Standards ruled Salk’s serum safe and licensed several companies to produce the vaccine.

This was good news, but nothing was simple. Dr. Paul Offit writes that during the last week in April, as states began mass vaccinations of school children, authorities announced that the Cutter Laboratories, a California-based firm, had mistakenly released a defective serum using live polio virus. Cutter pulled the vaccine from the market and explained the error, but confidence in the safety of the inoculation program was temporarily shaken, causing a delay of approximately two weeks. It was later reported that 200,000 doses of the Cutter vaccine had been administered, resulting in 40,000 cases of polio. Although the vast majority were non-paralytic, varying degrees of paralysis had affected approximately 200 children and had claimed the lives of ten.⁸

By early May, inoculations had resumed with priority given to children in the first and second grades. In Taunton, the board of health and the school department accepted a three-dose schedule that began on May 20, 1955, with 127 children at the Mulcahey School. Parental consent was necessary for a child to be vaccinated in school, and families were allowed to seek treatment from private physicians. Students in the city’s public, parochial, and private schools whose parents had consented numbered 1,348, which was 83% of the total eligible population. It was later reported that 272 parents had rescinded their approval, while fifty-seven students had been absent on the day of the inoculations. Nevertheless, on June 8, the Taunton Daily Gazette reported that 1,122 children had received the first round of the Salk vaccine.⁹

The second round of inoculations was scheduled to begin on June 8, but because of serum supply problems this was postponed until the beginning of the next school year. Even though complete immunization required three doses, authorities believed that one shot would provide “some degree of immunity.”¹⁰

While the schedule of inoculations in Taunton might have been delayed, the polio virus would not be deterred. The city’s first case was reported on July 17, when a nine-month-old baby was rushed to Boston Children’s Hospital and diagnosed with the paralytic form of the disease. The city had never reported more than three polio cases in one year, but that number was reached only ten days later, when two more children, neighbors who lived on Pine Street and both paralytic, were sent to Children’s. They were followed a day later by a brother and his sister, also both paralytic, who had contracted the disease while vacationing in Wareham. Statewide, the numbers by then were reaching alarming levels. On July 22, the Gazette had reported that the total cases in Massachusetts so far in 1955 numbered 217, more than triple the number at the same point in 1954.¹¹

August was worse as Taunton reported fourteen new cases. On the fourth day of the month, a nine-year-old girl brought the city’s total to six victims, even as it was announced that both Boston’s Children’s Hospital and the Haynes Memorial Hospital were filled to capacity. According to the Associated Press, there were 799 cases throughout the six New England states, and 602 of those were Massachusetts residents. New cases were reported in Taunton on August 5, when a nine-year-old boy took sick at a Middleborough camp, and then three more cases followed during the second week of the month, bringing the city’s total to ten. It stayed at that level for less than a day because two more cases were reported on August 9. One of those victims was, in the words of the Gazette, “a housing project youngster.” Also on the ninth, the newspaper reported that total cases in New England had jumped to 1,183. There had been only 240 on the same date in 1954. The region’s death toll on August 9 stood at forty-eight.¹²

These numbers represented unchartered territory for the people of the six New England states, and a person could be forgiven for being afraid. On August 13, two more cases were reported, and three days later, the Associated Press stated that the region’s total cases had increased to 1,759, with 1,371 of those victims living in Massachusetts. On the same day, the Taunton Daily Gazette ran a story saying that the Emergency Room at Morton Hospital was packed with people wondering if their various symptoms were indicators of polio.¹³

Five additional Taunton cases were recorded during the last week of August raising the city’s total to nineteen. The twentieth case came on September 2, and then Tom Silvia became the twenty-first victim two days later. After Tom was hospitalized, the disease took a respite in Taunton until the week of September 26, when the final three cases were reported. The last victim, a two-year-old boy, brought the city’s 1955 total to twenty-four.¹⁴ Needless to say, the polio outbreak raised havoc throughout the summer of 1955. The opening of school, scheduled for September 3, was delayed more than two weeks. Inoculation did not resume after the summer vacation, and by the time schools reopened there was a new plan, this with the objective of immunizing all children under fifteen years of age. Priority would be given to those who were five to nine years old, as well as pregnant women. Next in line would be children aged one to four years, and finally those youngsters between ten and fourteen. The inoculation program wasn’t set to resume until after that year’s polio season.¹⁵

The summer of 2025 marks the seventieth anniversary of the 1955 epidemic. We began our story with Tom Silvia, the critically ill six-year-old who was rushed to a Boston hospital suffering from the paralytic form of the disease. He survived, as did the other Tauntonians stricken during that polio summer. Like many of them, Tom faced an intense period of recovery, the memories of which are still vivid.

When Tom was taken ill, he had not yet been inoculated. He had just completed a year of kindergarten at St. Mary’s School and was looking forward to entering first grade. Instead, he spent that time out of school and in physical therapy, working to regain the use of his legs. He remembers the painful spinal tap taken in Morton Hospital’s Emergency Room and then the rushed trip to Boston’s Floating Hospital and the iron lung. Both parents visited him every day. He remembers the kindness of the staff and the grueling therapy. “Every night they would wrap us in these hot, wet blankets,” he says. “To this day I can’t stand the smell of wet wool.”¹⁶

Tom gradually got better. He returned home in a wheelchair, then graduated to crutches with back and leg braces. He eventually walked without the crutches but had to wear the braces until sixth or seventh grade. But these victories were hard won. After his release from Floating Hospital his treatment continued at home. Part of his therapy consisted of daily exercises in the full bathtub, an ordeal which he remembers as extremely difficult. A member of his family told him later that it broke their hearts to hear him cry out in pain, day after day.

Tom was tutored at home by a teacher sent by the city, but he missed a year of school. By the end of 1956 he was off crutches and entered the first grade at St. Mary’s. He did well and, after elementary school enrolled at Monsignor James Coyle High School, where he was a member of the Class of 1968, and where he earned a full scholarship to Providence College. After graduating, he entered upon a successful career in the trucking industry.

All these years later, when asked what he remembers most about his experience with polio, Tom offers a reply that perhaps stands for all of those children whose lives were disrupted by the disease and its challenges. “I remember the first time I went back [to the hospital] for my therapeutic evaluation,” he says, “and the therapist . . . asked me to do something. I said, ‘I can’t.’ She told me that ‘can’t’ wasn’t allowed in her presence. After that, I reluctantly took it to heart, and I was persistent in working to improve and in sharing that determination to achieve. When I say a blessing at special occasions, I will offer a special blessing for the youngest members of our family, and finish with ‘Never give up, never give in, and never quit.”¹⁷

End Notes

1. Thomas Silvia, interview by William F. Hanna, 24 January 2024; hereinafter cited as Silvia interview.

2. “Remembering the polio epidemic of the 1950s,” by Craig Kumerfield https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/dell-rapids/2017/08/22/remembering-polio-epidemic-part/104718400/

3. “The Polio Epidemic of 1955: Lessons from an Epidemic,” Boston Children’s Hospital, web article posted May 14, 2020 by Joanne Barker. This is an online source found at: https://answers.childrenshospital.org/polio-outbreak-1955/. Consulted on July 29, 2025.

4. “Poliomyelitis in Children — Experience with 956 Cases in the 1955 Massachusetts Epidemic,” by P.A.M. Auld, et. al. New England Journal of Medicine, Dec. 1960, Abstract. Online source found at : https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM196012012632201. Retrieved 19 July 2025.

5. “Baystate infectious disease doctor to talk on history of polio,” in MassLive, 8 January 2020. An online resource found at: https://www.masslive.com/living/2020/01/baystate-infectious-disease-doctor-to- talk-on-history-of-polio.html/ Retrieved on 28 July 2025.

6. Kumerfield.

7. David M. Oshinsky, Polio: An American Story (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 199.

8. Michael Fitzpatrick, in a review of Paul A. Offit’s The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to a Growing Vaccine Crisis, published in 2006 and appearing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. An online resource found at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1383764/ Retrieved on July 29, 2025.

9. Taunton Daily Gazette, June 8, 1955.

10. Taunton Daily Gazette, June 3, 1955.

11. Taunton Daily Gazette, July 27, 27, 28, 1955.

12. Taunton Daily Gazette, August 4, 5, 8, 9, 13, 1955.

13. Taunton Daily Gazette, August 16, 1955.

14. Taunton Daily Gazette, August 23, 24, 31; September 4, 6 26, 28, 29.

15. Taunton Daily Gazette, October 15, 1955.

16. Silvia interview.

17. Silvia interview.

The newest publication from the Old Colony History Museum, Tetiquet to the Sea: A History of the Taunton River by Katie MacDonald and William F. Hanna, is filled with fascinating stories drawn from centuries of life along this historic waterway. But the river holds more stories than any single volume can contain. One remarkable event that didn’t make it into the book is the dramatic World War II crash of two P-47 fighter planes over Somerset — a tragedy witnessed by thousands and remembered for generations. Historian William F. Hanna recounts the gripping tale below. (You can order your copy of Tetiquet to the Sea here.)

As William O’Brien drove through the village of Assonet, Massachusetts at around 4:15 on the afternoon of Saturday, July 17, 1943, a man wearing a parachute suddenly dropped to the ground about thirty yards in front of his car. O’Brien stopped and went to the man’s assistance. While helping to unharness his parachute O’Brien learned that the flyer was suffering from an injured shoulder as well as from burns on his neck. The pilot told O’Brien that he had been flying his P-47 fighter in formation with another plane at about 29,000 feet when suddenly the aircraft caught fire forcing him to bail out.¹

The injured flyer was Lieutenant Thomas J. Harding, of Gypsum, Kansas, a member of the U.S. Army Air Forces 310th Fighter Squadron posted to Green Field at the Hillsgrove Army Airfield at Warwick, Rhode Island. Harding was soon attended to by a nurse who was passing by the scene as well as by an off-duty sergeant assigned to the Medical Detachment at Camp Myles Standish, in nearby Taunton. Before leaving in a civilian ambulance on his way to Truesdale Hospital in Fall River, Lt. Harding asked a bystander to call army authorities at Green Field (now T.F. Green International Airport) to report his whereabouts. He said that the other
P-47 pilot flying in his formation would have already returned to base and could provide further details on the mishap.²

Lt. Harding was yet to learn that the other pilot would be of no assistance. He was Lieutenant Benjamin Norris, Jr., of Denver, Colorado. A few moments earlier, as Harding’s parachute was carrying him across the river toward Assonet, Lt. Norris’s plane, in the throes of a high speed dive, slammed into the waters of the Taunton River and rapidly disappeared. Norris was killed instantly.

According to The Somerset Spectator, this was a tragedy witnessed by thousands of people in that town and its environs. Some were running errands in the central village while others were enjoying a summer afternoon at one of the beaches along the river. Many had observed the two planes performing high altitude maneuvers in the moments before the disaster. With wartime mobilization in full swing, the presence of military aircraft above the waters of Mount Hope Bay was an everyday occurrence.³

Within hours of the tragedy the army had a three-man crash investigation team in Somerset. Its members were responsible for determining exactly what had happened to the two planes, and why. With the help of local officials the investigators began identifying and interviewing those who had seen some part of the disaster.

The Somerset newspaper speculated that the P-47s must have collided in mid-air because as they came down they “scatter[ed] torn [airplane] parts over the northern section of town.”⁴ This was a notion, however, that was flatly denied by Lt. Harding. In his statement, given to investigators one week after the crash, Harding reported that the training mission had started from Green Field as a four-plane formation, led by Lt. Norris. Mechanical problems forced two of the pilots to return to Green, but Norris and Harding continued with the exercise. After flying for about ten minutes at an altitude above 25,000 feet, Lt. Harding said he noticed smoke in the cockpit. He opened the canopy hoping to clear the air, but as he adjusted his controls he saw “flames leaping up from the floor,” so he prepared to bail out. Within seconds, recalled Harding, “the flames in the cockpit were burning me,” so he exited the plane quickly, injuring his shoulder as he jumped.⁵

Harding dismissed speculation that his plane collided with Lt. Norris’s P-47. “At no time while at altitude,” he stated, “did I come within two hundred feet of Lt. Norris and am positive I did not hit his ship while at altitude.”⁶

As prevailing winds pushed Harding eastward across the river toward Assonet, his airplane crashed in flames into the woods on the Preston H. Hood farm on County Street in Somerset. The scene was quickly overrun by sightseers and this, according to the Spectator, caused serious problems for the local police. A week after the crash the newspaper reported that the downed P-47 had been carrying ammunition and that several men from Somerset and Swansea, including army men home on furlough, risked their lives while removing ordnance from the burning plane.⁷

As this spectacle was unfolding on County Street, another was taking place just to the southeast, where Lt. Norris’s P-47 crashed into the Taunton River. Of all the eyewitness accounts collected by the army investigation team, those of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Singleton were judged to be the most reliable. They and their two children were on the family’s boat, which was anchored in the river about seventy-five yards from the Somerset shore. They had seen Lt. Harding jump from his burning plane but had lost sight of the aircraft in the distance when it fell below the tree line. “At about this time,” stated Mr. Singleton, “we saw another plane traveling at a very high rate of speed coming almost directly at our boat. I called to my wife and two children to ‘Hit the deck’ as the plane passed over our heads.”⁸

Gladys Singleton estimated that the plane passed about thirty feet above them before crashing approximately one hundred yards away. Her husband quickly launched a skiff and rowed to the site of the crash. He saw only oil, mud and scattered debris on the water, and he also noticed that air bubbles came to the surface for a few seconds after he arrived.⁹

Coast Guard vessels were dispatched shortly after the crash and began the grim work of dragging the river in search of the plane. The operation was centered in water opposite Harrington’s Switch, located off Riverside Avenue and a short distance south of today’s Somerset Marina.¹⁰ Although the water in that area was less than fifteen feet deep, locating the plane was a difficult task that had officials searching throughout a long Saturday night and well into Sunday. On Monday, July 19, a U.S. navy vessel arrived on scene from the Quonset naval base equipped with machinery capable of raising the wreckage of the plane. The Somerset newspaper reported that no large sections of the P-47 were found; the plane had been torn apart by the impact of the crash.¹¹

The remains of Lt. Norris were recovered with his plane and even in the midst of a world war his story was a sad one. Just twenty-one years old and the son of a career army officer, the young pilot had graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in the Class of 1943. His bride of nineteen days received the awful news at their home near Warwick, Rhode Island.

Although the accident had been witnessed by thousands, the army’s crash team was unable to pinpoint a specific cause. However, its members reported that even in the absence of definitive evidence, a “possible likely cause” was that Lt. Norris, while attempting to observe Harding’s burning P-47 as it hurtled toward the ground, had gone into a “compressibility dive,” and that upon recovering from this he may have “blacked out.” That would have caused him “to stall and go into a spin,” from which he would not have had enough altitude to recover. His plane, reported the crash team, had hit the water at a thirty-degree angle and at high speed.¹²

Several days after the tragedy The Somerset Spectator reported that townspeople were “still breathless” over what they had seen.¹³ They would have their stories for the rest of their lives, but in July 1943 the world at war continued to turn. The men of the 310th Fighter Squadron finished their training and then shipped out to the Pacific Theater of Operations, where they served for the duration of the conflict. Closer to home, Lt. Norris’s body was returned to West Point, where he rests today in the U.S. Military Academy Post Cemetery.¹⁴

End Notes

1. Statement of William O’Brien, Jr., 18 July 1943. Eric Wiberg has compiled several official army documents, including witness statements, relating to the crash over Somerset and has shared copies with the Old Colony History Museum. For the purposes of this article, we will state the subject and date of the document being cited and note that it is found in the Wiberg Collection at the OCHM.

2. William O’Brien statement, 18 July 1943. Wiberg Collection, OCHM.

3. The Somerset Spectator, 22 July 1943; hereinafter cited as Spectator; see also “Somerset, MA. — July 17, 1943” in New England Aviation History, an online source found at: https://newenglandaviationhistory.com/tag/somerset-massachusetts-plane-crash/ and retrieved on June 1, 2025.

4. Spectator, 22 July 1943.

5. Statement of Thomas J. Harding, 24 July 1943. Wiberg Collection, OCHM.

6. Thomas Harding statement, 24 July 1943. Wiberg Collection, OCHM.

7. Spectator, 22 July 1943.

8. Statement of Frank. E. Singleton, 17 July 1943. Wiberg Collection, OCHM.

9. Statement of Gladys E. Singleton, 17 July 1943. Wiberg Collection, OCHM.

10. Placing the exact location of Harrington’s Switch has been problematic. At least two online sources generated by AI provide conflicting information. One places the location on the east side of the Taunton River in Freetown, while another puts Harrington’s Switch in the south end of Fall River. We are relying on Mary Ann McDonald, ed., Somerset, Massachusetts: Portrait of the American Experience in a New England Town (Somerset, Mass.: Somerset Historical Commission, 1981), as our source. This is found in the “Somerset Historical Tour,” p. 152 n.1 with enclosed map.

11. Spectator, 22 July 1943.

12. U.S. Army Air Forces Report of Aircraft Accident. Accident №44–7–17–55. Wiberg Collection, OCHM.

13. Spectator, 22 July 1943.

14. For information on Lt. Norris’s burial see: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/12388987/benjamin-norris

By Eric B. Schultz

“The greatest war game ever played in America will begin on the Massachusetts coast, south of Boston, at one minute past midnight next Saturday morning,” August 14, 1909, The New York Times proclaimed, “when two armies, one representing a great European power and another the United States, will begin a seven days struggle for the possession of some strategic point between Narragansett and Portland, Me.”¹

The strategic point, unknown to either side until “hostilities” commenced just after midnight, would be the capture of Boston. Neither the Red Army invaders nor the Blue Army defenders would fire a single bullet during the coming week of warfare. Nevertheless, the Times added, both sides would use powder in such great quantities that anyone living within earshot of the Massachusetts coast would be entertained for a week “with the liveliest concert heard in that vicinity.”²

The Great War Game of 1909 was a large-scale military exercise conducted by the U.S. Army. Nine thousand “foreign invaders” from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia landed along the coast of Buzzards Bay, meeting resistance from 7,000 Massachusetts National Guard defenders positioned in the woodlands and bogs of Plymouth and Bristol Counties.

This little-known chapter of Old Colony history was critical for assessing and improving US defenses before WWI. With global tensions rising and fear of England’s and Germany’s massive navies, the war game was designed to test mobilization, strategy, command structures, and logistics for a feared large-scale invasion of the Eastern seaboard.

Technological breakthroughs such as the automobile and bicycle, the mining of harbors, and wartime use of the telegraph would be tested across the mock battlefields of the Old Colony.

Leadership

Major-General Tasker H. Bliss (1853–1930), an 1875 West Point graduate who later taught at the military academy, led the 9,000 invading Red Army soldiers. During the Spanish-American War (1898), he had been involved in logistics and supply planning. In 1917, Bliss was named Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, overseeing America’s initial military mobilization for World War I. His initial headquarters were established in Acushnet.

The 7,000 Massachusetts Blue Army defenders fought under Brigadier-General William A. Pew, Jr. (1858–1933). Pew had served as commander of the 8th Massachusetts Infantry during the Spanish-American War, where his regiment was recognized for its excellent discipline and the strong rapport between officers and enlisted men. His first base was established in Bridgewater.

Overseeing the exercise was Major General Leonard Wood (1860–1927), a key figure in early 20th-century military reforms. Wood began his career as a surgeon in the U.S. Army, earning the Medal of Honor in 1886 for his actions during the Apache Wars. In 1898, he helped organize the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry — better known as the “Rough Riders” — alongside Theodore Roosevelt, who assumed command from Wood. In 1899, Wood was appointed military governor of Cuba (1899–1902).

Wood maintained his headquarters at Lakeville’s King Philip Tavern on the shore of Lake Assawompsett, an establishment founded that same year to take advantage of the rising trade in automobile travel and vacations.

Drawn from regular army officers and the War College, Wood’s staff of umpires was central to this War Game. Each body of troops was accompanied by an umpire who could declare soldiers safe or “dead.” A “dead” soldier was retired for the day but resumed fighting the next day so that his battlefield education continued. A record of killed and wounded on each side was tabulated each day.

For example, in a field outside of Middleborough, the Blue Army occupied a farmhouse while a large force of Blue hid behind a stonewall. A half troop of Red cavalry charged both locations. The umpire, a lieutenant of the Eleventh Cavalry, rode with the troopers, whom he declared had been routed with severe loss. But the farmhouse, he said, had been overrun 4-to-1 by the Reds.

But the umpire also determined that the Blue defenders had not fired in the range their officers gave, leaving part of the Cavalry intact. Based on the use of revolvers by the Cavalry, however, he also determined that many of the men in the front ranks would have been shot by friendly fire from the rear.

The soldiers didn’t always agree with the umpires but recognized that most had acquired real combat experience in Cuba, the Philippines, or China.

“The next time I saw that same troop in action,” war reporter Richard Harding Davis wrote, “they had benefited by the lesson of the fight at Middleboro Green, and, having left their horses under cover, were creeping up on foot upon the enemy, and, by taking him in the flank, won a glorious victory.”³

Davis (1864–1916) was the fourth important figure on the battlefield during the Great War Game of 1909. A novelist, adventurer, and the most famous American journalist of his generation, Davis brought the importance of the War Game home to the readers of one of America’s most popular magazines, Collier’s. He had been the first American war correspondent to cover the Spanish-American War and the Second Boer War. Eventually, he reported from the battlefields of World War I.

Davis had a clean-shaven look so popular at the start of the 20th century (with the launch of Gillette’s replaceable safety razor blades in 1901) that he was thought to be the model for the “Gibson Man” — Charles Dana Gibson’s epitome of the athletic, chivalrous, confident, and well-dressed gentleman to which American men aspired in the early 20th century.

Davis knew that Generals Wood, Bliss, and Pew’s activities in the Old Colony were serious, even if no soldier died. Writing for Collier’s magazine, he described the exercises as “the most important war game ever attempted in America,” an activity that expanded the largest ground area in the U.S. ever covered by maneuvers from twenty square miles to two thousand.⁴

Davis was annoyed that the average American, who considered baseball’s Spring Training essential and watched his favorite football player block dummies in practice, thought the War Game to be ridiculous because a bridge could be destroyed by pasting a label to it, or “an umpire should declare a troop of cavalry shot to pieces when no bullets had touched it.” He told his reader, “To disembark nine thousand troops and march them through an unknown country and bring them into and out of action and to feed them is no mean problem” in itself.⁵

Taunton got its first glimpse of the Game on August 12 when the United States regulars, the 10th Cavalry, trooped through the city headed for Freetown. These 400 so-called “colored soldiers” (in an Army that was to remain segregated until 1948) were fresh from serving in the Philippines. They had camped in Mansfield, marched into the city with post riders, a wagon train, and a field ambulance, passing through Oakland, around the Taunton Green, and then heading for New Bedford. Hundreds of Taunton residents lined up to see these troops, an impressive show of military force that hadn’t been witnessed in the city since a battery of artillery from Newport made an overland hike twenty years before.⁶

The Game Takes Shape

By Saturday morning, the Blue defenders had deployed throughout Bristol and Plymouth counties. They knew the Red Army was marching north but were unsure of their location or goal.

By the next day, Taunton was threatened by the Red Army advance. “Early Sunday morning,” the Taunton Daily Gazette reported, “the city was a scene of military activity. Mounted pickets were passing through the streets, automobile and motorcycle dispatch bearers and scouts were bustling to and fro, carrying orders from the commander to his outposts, and later on, now and then, a squadron of cavalry or a detachment of infantry passed through to occupy strategic points.”⁷

For a time, it appeared that the central bodies of both armies might collide in Taunton.

On Monday morning, commuters in the city found placards indicating that the Weir, Neck O’ Land, and the Williams and Mill River bridges were “destroyed.” Whole companies of Blue Army soldiers were guarding some. Meanwhile, light field artillery and cavalry had been called into service to guard the city’s main entrances.

By Tuesday, August 17, the Blue Army had formed a long, thin defense from Plymouth to Freetown, across the outskirts of Middleborough and Wareham to Taunton and beyond. Observation balloons flew overhead, seeking the location of the Red Army. Residents who spoke with the Blue defenders found many were already exhausted. “It’s a hard job for chaps who are working indoors 51 weeks in the year to get to the grind of a campaign of this kind,” one soldier said.⁸

Restaurants in the city did a booming business serving observers and occasional AWOL soldiers looking to supplement their rations. Camp activities at Assawompsett and Long Pond threatened Taunton’s water supply, which was forced to rely entirely on Elders Pond.

The Pivotal Battle

With bridges across the Taunton River “blown up,” the Red Army was cut off from advancing on Boston from the direction of Fall River. This forced General Bliss to choose a route along the coast. The “triangle of country between Taunton, the Taunton River, and the coast” was full of Red scouts and lookouts. A few days into the exercise, observing the movements of the Red Army, it was apparent to the Blue defenders that Boston was the prize.

Camped overnight at Eddyville on the Atwood farm in Middleborough, the Reds broke camp at 5 a.m. on Monday, August 16, and marched directly toward Plympton, where they encountered the Eighth Massachusetts Infantry. The entire First Brigade of the Red Army, consisting of five field artillery batteries, routed the Blue Army’s Eighth Massachusetts Infantry.

“Driving the panic-stricken Blues before them,” the Taunton Daily Gazette reported, “the Reds pushed on toward Boston, taking the road leading toward Plympton and Halifax.”⁹

However, the Red Army soldiers soon shifted their line of march to the coast, where a fleet of “battleships” that had been patrolling around Marblehead, Beverly, and Salem came to their support. The Blues were faced with defending the coast from landing parties or opposing the main force on land. The Reds also threatened a full-scale attack of the Blues at East Bridgewater. The Blues fell back just south of Brockton as the skies opened, soaking both armies.

The pivotal battle came on August 19 on the South Hanson Road at Hanover Four Corners. Skirmishing from Middleborough along School Street in Pembroke to Mayflower Grove and on to Hanover Four Corners, the Red Army turned the flanks of the Blue, opening up the road to Boston. The expenditure of powder was so great that it looked as if the woods surrounding Four Corners had been set on fire. Seeing the outcome of Hanover Four Corners, General Wood closed the campaign.¹⁰

None of the drenched soldiers were sorry to have the Game stopped. An hour later, both sides were fraternizing over the same campfires.

It was “the colored cavalry, the larger part of whom were with the Red Army, that performed a large share of the work for General Bliss” and received the highest praise in this final battle, especially in their ability to dash around the battlefield and keep Bliss appraised of conditions. The benefit of their battle experience in the Philippines was clear to Bliss, Wood, and his umpires.¹¹

These were the same segregated troops that the residents of Taunton had admired on August 12 as they marched through the city.

Epilogue

The soldiers involved in the Great War Game of 1909 found the invasion to be serious business. Hungry, tired, and soaked to the skin for two days, 16,000 men marched around Massachusetts for a week, following orders and behaving themselves. Total damage to private property was less than $1,000.¹² Davis calculated that the Great War Game cost less than $100,000, but the lessons learned were far more significant. The Red Army won, but every participant became a better soldier, citizen, and asset to the country.¹³

Wood and his staff saw weaknesses in the Blue Army’s defensive strategies, highlighting the need for improved coordination and battlefield communication. They also found that the National Guard was not well-trained or equipped to respond quickly to a major invasion. One key takeaway was the difficulty defending against a well-planned amphibious landing, leading to later military readiness reforms.

While General Pew and his Blue forces lost the decisive battle at Hanover Four Corners, General Wood was complimentary. “Much credit is due him. His forces made some splendid marches . . . His column arrived at Hanover only four minutes behind General Bliss.” Wood concluded that the war game of 1909 “got the old officers of the war college up on their toes with enthusiasm.” One observer noted, “Nothing in real battle was any more warlike.”¹⁴

The troops from Connecticut suffered severely, the New York Times later reported, “exhausted to the point of prostration by their experience before Boston. Nearly all have taken to their beds and still required many days to recover from the heavy colds, the blistered feet, and the muscle bruises.”¹⁵

“The real lesson derived from the Massachusetts war games is that the physical standard of the national guard must be kept practically as high as that of the army itself.”¹⁶ The guardsmen, The New York Sun opined, “received their seasoning in counting rooms and dry goods stores and went to the field almost with pens behind their ears . . . The majority of the men are not ready at a moment’s notice to undergo a severe test of their leg muscles and lung capacity, as is required of them when the commander of the Red Army attempts to double up the right wing of the Blue.”¹⁷

Despite these hardships, Davis viewed the exercises as a win for the Army. Pew’s forces learned more in one week than they “had guessed in a lifetime,” he wrote. At the same time, the 9,000 invaders from New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia under Major-General Bliss were taught “the inestimable value of a map, of scouting and reconnaissance, and how it is possible for men to live on the country through which they are fighting their way.”

“The maneuvers held the other week in Massachusetts,” Davis told his readers, “were the most successful that has ever been pulled off in this country.”¹⁸

Postscript

Students of military history will recognize the innocence of Richard Davis’s summary. The lessons of the War Game of August 1909 in Old Colony had little relevance to the Guns of August 1914 in Europe and the brutality of World War I. General Wood and his umpires had structured a game based on their experiences in the Spanish-American War, when Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, on foot and armed only with revolvers, stormed San Juan Hill and overwhelmed an entrenched Spanish position.

The lessons of the Great War Game of 1909 relied on 19th-century tactics and weapons, like slow-firing bolt-action rifles and artillery limited in range and firepower. Cavalry still played an essential role, advancing under fire in frontal assaults and winning quick, decisive victories like the battle at Hanover Four Corners.

By the time Americans entered World War I in the summer of 1917, industrial warfare had generated millions of casualties. Machine guns had ended the days of frontal assaults. Tanks created a new kind of cavalry. Precise, lethal, heavy artillery was the primary cause of battlefield death. Planes engaged in dog fights and bombing. Soldiers were pinned for months in trenches, facing constant bombardment, hobbled by trench foot and hunger, fearful of poison gas, and returning home suffering from shell shock (PTSD).

In retrospect, the war game that upended life in the Old Colony for a week in August 1909 was a vestige, a form of warfare that soldiers would never see again.

Notes

¹ “Biggest War Game Ever Played Here,” New York Times, August 11, 1909, 2.
²“Ibid.
³Richard Harding Davis, “The Capture of Boston,” Collier’s, Vol. XLIII №24, September 4, 1909, 11.
⁴Ibid, 10.
⁵Ibid.
⁶“Colored Regulars Made A Find Appearance Passing Through the City,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 12, 1909, 1.
⁷“Taunton Gets a Taste of the Mimic War — Bridges are Blown up on Sunday — Cannon Mounted in Streets,” Taunton Daily Gazette, Monday Evening, August 16, 1909, 1.
⁸“Mimic War,” 1.
⁹“Blue Forces Routed in Pitched Battle By Invading Reds,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 18, 1909, 1.
¹⁰See Roger Antilla’s Mayflower Grove: 1901–1945, Valerie Kroon, “Recalling Bryantville,” Wicked Local, Web March 16, 2025, Recalling Bryantville. Also, “Gen Bliss’ Red Army Officially Declared the Victors,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 19, 1909, 1.
¹¹“Soldiers Glad War Game Ends,” Taunton Daily Gazette, August 20, 1909, 1.
¹²Davis, 10.
¹³Ibid.
¹⁴“Maneuvers Big Success,” The Patterson Morning Call, August 21, 1909, 9.
¹⁵“Boston Captured: War Game Closed,” New York Times, August 20, 1909, 3.
¹⁶“Maneuvers Essential,” Our Southern Home, Livingston, Alabama, November 3, 1909, 6.
¹⁷The War Games to Go On,” The Sun, New York, October 19, 1909, 6
¹⁸Davis, 10.