Tag Archives: Disasters

The Death of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Little Sister

I’m seeking to cast some light on relatively or completely unknown Salem women for my #SalemSuffrageSaturday posts, in addition to the usual suspects, who live on in perpetual sunshine. Sometimes this is difficult to do, as the sources simply aren’t there, and sometimes you can only illuminate these women through their association with something or someone who leaves a source-strewn trail. Today my focus is on Maria Louisa Hawthorne (1802-52), the younger sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne: we can get to Louisa (which she was called) through Nathaniel, but also, unfortunately, through her tragic, even sensational death. In a very telling and consequential mid-nineteenth-century moment, Louisa found herself, after a lifetime of service to the various family members in Salem whom she was also quite dependent on in her single state, and after a rare vacation to that celebrated hotspot Saratoga Springs, on board the paddle-wheel steamboat Henry Clay on its journey from Albany to New York City on July 28, 1852 when a ravenous fire on board forced her to choose: conflagration or the deep, dark Hudson. She choose the latter, and drowned, in one of the River’s worst maritime disasters, in the conspicuous company of former NYC Mayor Stephen Allen, landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, the granddaughter of a President and the sister of a Senator, among many other victims.

Hawthorne NYT Aug 2 1852 Inquest (3)

63.550.101

ArmeniaNew York Daily Times, Aug. 2, 1852; Nathaniel Currier, “Burning of the Henry Clay Near Yonkers,” Metropolitan Museum of Art; The survivor: the Armenia, Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen, Christie’s.

It wasn’t just the distinction or associations of some of the victims, it was the way they died. In a display of what can only look like wanton recklessness to us, the Henry Clay was engaged in a fiercely competitive race with another steamboat, the Armenia, on their way to New York City, passengers be damned. Apparently this was common: the fastest steamship (not the safest!) drew the most passengers. The Henry Clay was apparently well in the lead, its engines bursting to capacity, when the fire broke out in their compartments. The ship’s pilot aimed for the banks of the Hudson, but those passengers in the stern (like Louisa) were trapped, and faced with that very difficult choice. To make matters worse, the ship’s paddle wheels kept spinning, further imperiling those who did jump into the river. Louisa was on this journey with her uncle John Dike, the husband of her maternal aunt Priscilla Manning, who survived the wreck and traveled directly to Concord to tell Nathaniel. The siblings were close, as Nathaniel’s letters testify: Louisa was the first person he had written to after his marriage to Sophia Peabody, asking her to come and visit them at the Old Manse, and just before her death, he had written and asked her to come and live with his family permanently. Sophia Hawthorne recounted Mr. Dike’s appearance in a letter to her mother a few days later:

This morning we received the shocking intelligence that Louisa Hawthorne was lost in the destruction of the steamer “Henry Clay” on the Hudson, on Wednesday afternoon, July 27. She has been at Saratoga Springs and with Mr. Dike for a fortnight, and was returning by way of New York, and we expected her here for a long visit. It is difficult to realize such a sudden disaster. The news came in an appalling way. I was at the toilet-table in my chamber, before seven o’clock, when the railroad coach drove up. I was astonished to see Mr. Pike get out. He left us on Monday morning,–two days ago. It struck to my heart that he had come to inform us of some accident. I knew how impossible it was for him to leave his affairs. I called from the window, “Welcome, Mr. Dike!” He glanced up, but did not see me nor smile. I said, “Go to the western piazza, for the front door is locked.” I continued to dress my hair, and it was a considerable time before I went down. When I did, there was no Mr. Dike. “Where is Mr. Dike?–I must then have seen his spirit,” said I. But upon going to the piazza, there he stood unaccountably, without endeavoring to enter. Mr. Hawthorne opened the door with the strange feeling that he should grasp a hand of air. I was by his side. Mr. Pike, without a smile, deeply flushed, seemed even then not in his former body. “Your sister Louisa is dead!” I thought he meant that his own sister was dead, for she also is called Louisa. “What! Louisa?” I asked. “Yes.” “What was the matter?” “She was drowned.” “Where?” “On the Hudson, in the ‘Henry Clay’!” He then came in, and my husband shut himself in his study. Their son Julian recalls in his memoirs that after receiving the news, Mr. Hawthorne went out, and was seen no more that day. 

At this point (July 30), Louisa’s body had not been recovered, but it was three days later, and Sophia then wrote to her sister Mary: I find that Louisa was not burned, but drowned.

Hawthorne NYT Aug 2 1852

Sophia_Letter_NYPL_DG-removebg-previewNew York Daily Times, August 2, 1852: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Letters at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

The deaths of Louisa Hawthorne and her fellow victims were consequential: given the proximity of the tragedy to New York City (Riverdale) and the prestige of some of the victims, this was a story that did not fade away, all summer long and into the fall. Inquests were held, and trials, as the Henry Clay‘s owners and officers were tried for manslaughter. They were all acquitted, but in August the Steamship Act of 1852 was passed in Congress, imposing inspections, regulations and licensing on the industry, and expressly outlawing racing, “to provide for the better security of the lives of passengers on board of vessels propelled in whole or in part by steam.” A tragic and consequential death, but what of Louisa’s life? I’m sad that I can’t flesh it out a bit more: beyond the childhood companion to her brother and sister, the seamstress, the young woman always taking care of one Manning or another, the maiden aunt who was a favorite of Nathaniel’s and Sophia’s children. I’m sure she was all these things and a lot more, and I’m not sure whether she preferred to spell her family name Hathorne or Hawthorne.


A River of Molasses

Today marks a big disaster anniversary in our region: the centennial anniversary of the Great Molasses Flood of January 15, 1919, which killed 21 people, injured 150, and laid waste to several blocks of the North End of Boston. I don’t really have much to add to the narrative of events of that day, but I feel like weighing in anyway, primarily because this tragedy is the perfect example of unmoored history, lacking context and consequently inhibiting understanding for many. There’s a great book about this event (Stephen Puleo’s Dark Tide: the Great Molasses Flood of 1919) but whenever you bring it up in general company, people generally smile or laugh because molasses is trivial in our society; it’s akin to people being drowned—-or smothered?—in jello. But molasses was a major industrial product in 1919, recognized simultaneously as both beneficial and potentially dangerous but above all, vital. And when you look at what happened on January 15, 1919 with a historical perspective, it’s possible to see both major precedents and consequences.

molasses panorama bpl

molasses bpl 4901511479_88c285b656_o

molasses bh bpl4902097496_f15e748c9c_o

molasses bpl

molasses page 2Headlines and pictures from the day after in the Boston Daily Globe and the Boston Herald: “Red Cross Ambulance and Nurses making their way through the River of Molasses”, Boston Public Library.

Molasses was not only much more integrated into our cuisine a hundred years ago, but its importance in alcohol production had intensified with the increasing demand for industrial alcohol, which entered a golden age of production following the passage of the 1906 Denatured Alcohol Act, permitting the production and sale of tax-free alcohol for industrial purposes. The author of The Practical Handbook on the Distillation of Alcohol from Farm Products, including the processes of malting : mashing and macerating : fermenting and distilling alcohol from grain, beets, potatoes, molasses, etc., with chapters of alcoholometry and the denaturing of alcohol…., issued the year before the Great Molasses Flood, cannot contain it his enthusiasm for this development, which “opened the door of a new market for the farmer and the manufacturer”, as Alcohol leaped at once into fame—not merely as the humble servant of the pocket lamp, nor as the Demon Rum, but as a substitute for all the cheap hydrocarbon fuels,  and as a new farm product, a new means for turning the farmer’s grain, fruit, potatoes, etc…into that greatest of all Powers, Money. Molasses had long been lauded as feed for cattle, horses, and poultry, but now its uses seemed limitless, in everything from road construction to the manufacture of varnishes, paints, and munitions. The 1907 act provoked a wave of hastily-built distilleries, such as the Boston tank owned and “maintained” by the Purity Distilling Company, which began leaking almost immediately after its construction in 1915 and finally burst open four years later. But the North End flood was not the first molasses disaster: it wasn’t difficult to find stories of exploding tanks and bursting hogsheads in the first few decades of the twentieth century—and just in the Boston papers. There are far more stories about the “adulteration” of molasses, however (generally with tin): and thus it is easy to understand how regulation, of industrial construction, production, and labor, would emerge as a major consequence of the Great Molasses Flood of 1919.

picmonkey image

molasses june 12 1886 boston heraldMolasses accidents in March of 1908 and December, 1911 reported in the Boston Journal; report of adulterated molasses (one of many!), Boston Herald, June, 1886. 

 

The Great Molasses Flood & Fluid Dynamics: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/26/science/boston-molasses-flood-science.html.

The Great Molasses Flood &  “Misunderstood History”: https://www.masshist.org/calendar/event?event=2762


Postcards from the Fire

On June 25, 1914 an industrial fire broke out in the northwest corner of Salem, in a neighborhood of tanneries called “Blubber Hollow”, and marched aggressively and incessantly towards the Harbor, consuming more than 1300 buildings along the way.  This was the great Salem Fire of 1914, which turned 253 acres of the city into an apocalyptic wasteland.

The fire received national attention, obviously, and there is a very good visual and documentary record of it, to which I can’t add too much of value.  I am struck, however, by how many postcards of the fire and its aftermath I come across.  So many survive, there must have been hundred of thousands produced.  At first I thought this was oddly sensationalistic:  can you image buying a postcard of the recent devastation from tornadoes in the Midwest and western Massachusetts?  Or of people standing knee-deep in water in a post-Katrina New Orleans?  Then I realized that in this pre-TV news era postcards must have functioned as much as news as greetings.

Particularly poignant, I think, are the before and after images of  the St. Joseph’s complex, the recently-completed church that was at the heart of the French Canadian neighborhood (now The Point) which was so devastated by the Fire.  Images of an unrecognizable Derby Street are also pretty powerful, especially the one below, with the eighteenth-century Miles Ward house standing alone.

Lots of the extant postcards feature the aftermath of the fire with somewhat dazed Salem residents and various military officials standing guard over the ruins.

I wish I had a better image of Lafayette Street, Salem’s grand nineteenth-century boulevard, half of which was destroyed by the fire.  Here’s a few “before” images, but I only have one “after”.

A Frank Cousins stereoview of Lafayette Street, circa 1900, NYPL Digital Gallery

Lafayette Street, 1910

Leach and Lafayette Streets after the Fire

If you walk down Lafayette Street today, you can see what was taken and what survived.  A century ago, people wanted to rebuild very quickly after a disaster, and they managed to do so, largely with private financing and insurance payments rather than government programs.  Given the timing of the disaster, 1914, a Colonial Revival Salem emerged in the wake of the fire, complementing the colonial and federal buildings in the parts of the city that were somehow (miraculously) spared.


%d bloggers like this: