Flights of fancy tour (Oct. 18, 1997)
This feature was a pure lark for me. I’ve always been fascinated by how many offbeat day trip destinations there are in the Bay State, most of which people have never known were there, let alone visited. Beginning with the Seuss house, I started my own flight of fancy in this possibility of writing about the Mary who really did have a little lamb, Jack Kerouac, Elsie the Cow and more. Features editor Roger Bowman seemed to take vicarious pleasure as I listed possible destinations. There are so many more I could have included, but my challenge was doing the entire tour in a day while still allowing myself time to actually stop and take in some of the attractions.
Tired of traveling with bus tours that leave you exhausted but explore the same ol’ same ol’?
Stumped by where to take your visiting relatives, who’ve been everywhere?
Hungry for something completely different?
Here it is. The Recorder’s Toura Obscura. Or: ”Bet you never knew the Bay State had something for everyone.”
There are at least two ways to enjoy this flights of fancy tour. One is to actually hop on your whim-cycle, grab your map, friends and imagination, and leave yourselves plenty of time to explore other sites you happen to find along the way. If you don’t have an entire day to spend, try it in sections.
There’s also the virtual tour, which you can do right in your own home. After ”visiting” each site, close your eyes and just imagine how each fits into its surroundings.
In researching this seeming tour de farce — which is for real — we purposely left out the obvious and tried to place these sites in some sort of geographic order for easy travel. The Emily Dickinson House in Amherst, the former home of Minute Tapioca in Orange or Laughing Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Hampden may be on plenty of other lists. But here’s your chance to visit some less noted but still notable sites:
ELSIE THE COW — America’s most famous actress of all time was a knockout Jersey whose real name was You’ll Do Lobelia. She won plenty of prizes for Elm Hill Farm in Brookfield before being spotted by an agent for Borden’s and leased as the nation’s Number 1 bovine superstar.
By the time she died at age 9 in 1941, she had appeared in an array of improbable places, from the bridal suite in New York’s Waldorf Astoria to leaving her hoof-prints at Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theater. She also appeared at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and starred as Buttercup in the 1940 movie version of Louisa May Alcott’s ”Little Men.”
But she always came home to her 1,050-acre farm, on East Main Street, where she was best loved and is best remembered.
John Spencer, who worked on his grandparent’s farm as a boy and still works on what is now a vegetable, horse and sheep farm, even recalls when Elsie was photographed going up the steps of Brookfield Town Hall for a dance. Orlando Streeter, now in his mid-80s, still has a framed picture of Elsie to recall the days when he worked on the farm.
Elm Hill, with well-appointed barns and a splendid view of the surrounding countryside, was recently donated to the National Audubon Society as a wildlife sanctuary.
(Speaking of Elsie Borden, there is, of course ,in Fall River the home of Lizzie Borden, who is infamously accused of giving her father and stepmother 40 and 41 whacks with an ax, respectively, in 1892.)
Closer to Elsie’s old stall, though, is the well where Joshua Spooner was murdered and thrown into by three Revolutionary War soldiers ”at the urging of his wife, Bathsheba Spooner, on March 1, 1778. All four were executed in Worcester, four months later. The well, with a stone marker, is less than a quarter-mile down the road from Elm Hill Farm.
MARY’S LITTLE LAMB in Sterling (Route 62, north of Worcester) — Yes, there really was a Mary, who had a little lamb that really did follow her to school. The old Redstone Hill schoolhouse, on the road to Clinton, is no longer in Sterling, because Henry Ford had it moved in 1927 to Longfellow’s Wayside Inn on Route 20 in Sudbury. But you can visit the lamb, or a stone facsimile thereof, on the Sterling Town Common.
You can also see the homestead of Mary Elizabeth Sawyer (1806-1889) who became a matron at McLean Hospital in Belmont, and who really was followed to the school along with her brother, Nathaniel, in about 1815, according to a sixth-generation descendant of Nathaniel, Diane Malone. Malone, with her sister, owns the corner house on Maple Street, which runs just off the center of town, and is trying to have it restored with the help of the Mary Sawyer Foundation.
”I did not have many playmates outside the dumb creatures on the place,” Mary Sawyer Taylor wrote in later years. ”There were not many little girls to play with, and I had few dolls. But I used to dress up my lamb in pantalets, and had no end of pleasure in her company.”
Taking the lamb to school, she wrote, was Nat’s idea. Placed under the seat and covered with a blanket, the lamb reportedly rested quietly and was undiscovered until Mary went forward to recite. ”There was a clatter, clatter, clatter on the floor, and I knew it was the pattering of the hoofs of my lamb.”
All six stanzas of the rabid doggerel were included in McGuffey’s old second reader, along with these study exercises: ”What did Mary have? Where did the lamb go with Mary? What did the lamb do? Why did he love Mary? How can we make animals love us?”
The lamb, which was sent out of the classroom by teacher Rebecca Kimball, and whose visit was recorded by one John Roulstone and later by Sarah Josepha Hale ”to inculcate moral truths and virtuous sentiments,” later gave birth to three lambs of her own and was gored to death by a cow when she was nearly four years old, according to a 1889 letter written by Mary.
JOHN (JOHNNY APPLESEED) CHAPMAN was born in Leominster on Sept. 26, 1774, one of three children of Nathaniel and Elizabeth Chapman, and his birthplace is noted by a stone marker on Johnny Appleseed Lane, off Mechanic Street, near Route 2.
The suburban lane, complete with new homes, runs beside Route 190. But the marker is surrounded by trees, not one of which is a fruit tree.
Johnny Appleseed, as he came to be known, was a practical nurseryman who saw a business opportunity in the westward migration, and moved ahead of the pioneers to supply seeds and seedlings, starting nurseries throughout the Midwest.
Chapman, who was born here in 1774 and appeared in Ohio by 1800, quoting from the Bible but not necessarily wearing an overturned saucepan for a cap, as Disney suggests. He owned many tracts of land throughout Ohio and Indiana, and used this land to transplant seedlings and set out orchards.
LAKE CHARGOGGAGOGGMANCHAUGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGUNGAMAUGG in Webster is commonly known as Lake Webster, and you can see why. Locals refer to it as Lake Chargogg, and it makes any other American Indian place name pale by comparison. My map listed it as simply Lake Chaubunagungamaug, which is braver than Webster, but a far cry from the 47-letter name, which has been very loosely translated as ”You fish on your side, I fish on my side, Nobody fishes in the middle.”
In fact, says 89-year-old Bertha Hart, the 14-syllable phrase is the combined name of the three Nipmuk bands that laid claim to different parts of the water body: the Chargoggagoggs, the Manchaugagoggs and the Chaubunagungungamauggs.
Hart, who grew up on the lake and is president of the Webster Historical Society, says her father hand-carved three signs that spell out the lake’s Indian name. One of those signs — several feet across — still hangs at the marina on Point Breeze. The name is also painted on a girder beneath Interstate 395 to welcome visitors entering Webster’s Memorial Park.
The most endearing memory in this town along the Rhode Island border may be the Tin Pan Alley song that Blanche Fiddes used to sing with her fifth-grade classes at Webster Elementary School, written in 1935:
”Down beside the rippling water, it will set your heart agog,
On Lake, Chargog-gagogg, manchaugagogg—chau-bun-a-gun-gungamaugg.
And the rhythm of the bullfrogs, with their lovelorn dialogue, at Lake etc.
Oh there is lots, oh such a lot to do, you lose all track of time,
Nobody knows it’s Sunday ’til you hear the church bells chime!
You can find out where this place is, if you look up your geog. It’s Lake Char … (etc.)”
The DR. SEUSS HOUSE is not on Mulberry Street, as you might expect from the Seuss book title, but on Fairfield Street in Springfield, just a block from Forest Park, where author Theodore ”Seuss” Geisel’s father was zookeeper.
The Springfield Library and Museums Association is planning a Seuss Sculpture Garden, but despite the fact that Seuss brought fame to Springfield’s zoo (”If I Ran the…”) and Mulberry Street, where his grandparents lived (”And to Think that I Saw it on…”) there are precious few markers that point out he lived his early years here.
The exceptions, unmarked and privately owned, are the house at 74 Fairfield St., the site of his birth, 22 Howard St.,…and the stone at Oak Grove Cemetery, off Bay Street, where his parents, Theodore and Henrietta, are buried.
There are no signs that show the way,
The house is there, not blue but gray.
It’s gray you say? The house that stands there to this day?
At Oak Grove his folks are laid to rest,
But Seuss, alas, lies way out west.
Don’t fret…sweat…regret! It’s all for the best.
LOWELL remembers its native son Jack Kerouac, who was born on Lupine Road, is buried in Edson Cemetery and even has his knapsack on display at the Lowell National Historic Park Working People’s Museum.
Beat writer Kerouac is memorialized also in a commemorative park, where excerpts from his spoken-language ”songs” describing life in this Merrimack mill city are etched onto six granite columns beside the canal.
”The mystery of the Lowell night extends to the heart of downtown. It lurks in the shadows of the redbrick walls,” he wrote in ”Dr. Sax.”
Lowell attracts hundreds of Kerouac fans each year, according to Mark Hemingway, president of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac. Walking tour maps are available at the national park visitor’s center.
You can visit St. Jean Baptiste Church, called by Kerouac ”the ponderous cathedral of the slums,” where his funeral was held; ”Funeral Row,” a series of funeral homes, including the one where his wake was held; Nicky’s Bar on Gorham Street, where he hung out; and a 1911 replica of the Grotto at Lourdes, about which he wrote, ”Everything there was to remind of Death, and nothing in praise of Life.”
Each October, Lowell hosts a Kerouac festival, and this year’s festival (Oct. 2 to 5) was complemented by a photo exhibit at the Whistler House Museum of Art. The museum, the birthplace of the 19th century painter James McNeill Whistler, is, like the park, an attraction itself.
If you go, advises Hemingway, make sure you’ve read ”Dr. Sax” first. ”It’s all right here!”
CAL COOLIDGE, the laconic lawyer whose path led from Plymouth, Vt., through Amherst and Northampton on his way to the Boston Statehouse and ultimately the White House, is still something of a presence in the Hampshire County city where he practiced law as part of the firm of Coolidge, Hemenway, Hemenway and Graife. His $200-a-year law office, upstairs in the Masonic Building at 25 Main St. (above Fitzwilly’s) is as unassuming as the man himself. In fact, the door marked with the names of Coolidge and his law partners was removed a couple of years ago by the building’s owner and given to Forbes Library, where it can be seen.
Coolidge, who reportedly continued to be briefed on probate cases weekly by a law partner who took a train to Washington, D.C., moved after his election as president from a two-family house at 21 Massasoit St. (”Nominate a man living in a two-family house? Never!” Henry Cabot Lodge told the 1920 Republican National Convention) to a 13-bedroom house, The Beeches on 15 acres on Hampton Terrace. Both are private homes.
MORE OBSCURE than Coolidge is Lydia Marie Child (1802-1880), who lived from May 1836 at an Elm Street boardinghouse on Northampton’s Round Hill Road and who moved near the site of what was to be the Pro Brush factory in Florence after a year, until 1841.
Medford-born Child, best known for her 1844 poem ”Over the river and through the woods,” came to Northampton with her husband as part of his sugar beet research, apparently disliked the city and left him to continue his research as she moved to New York to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard and to champion women’s rights.
An avid abolitionist, Child wrote several novels, including one she worked on in Northampton about the interracial marriage between a white settler and a native American woman. Her other works included Afro-centered revisionist histories for the children of freed slaves and ”The Frugal Housewife,” a popular domestic advice book. After abandoning popular novels, she concentrated on abolitionist works that are said to depict some of the more conservative people she’s had brushes with in Northampton.
A committee is now working on erecting a statue to Child, who Amherst biographer David Dill called, ”The best known female novelist of her time.”
(Compare with the Julia Child, whose home on Francis Street in Cambridge is most likely the one with the aroma of sauteed onion, mushroom and je ne sais quoi, with a bit of sherry, wafting out from the kitchen window at dinnertime. Then again, in the shadow of Harvard, this is a part of town known as ”Smart Street” because it’s home to economist John Kenneth Galbraith and other alleged intelligentsia. Gray smoke coming from the houses may be from all the brainstorming going on.)
NORTHAMPTON was also the home of Sylvester Graham, the inventor of the graham cracker and 19th-century temperance lecturer. Graham, whose home is now the site of the Pleasant Street restaurant that bears his first name, advocated vegetarianism, fresh foods, cold showers, lighter clothing and coarsely ground whole wheat flour.
(Related bakery item destinations may also include the former home of Kennedy Biscuits in Newton, which was the originator of the Fig Newtons, the state’s official fruit cookie. The state’s official non-fruit cookie is of course the tollhouse cookie, named for the Toll House Restaurant in the Boston suburb of Boston.)
Those that didn’t quite make the cut:
ASHFIELD: The birthplace of pioneering Hollywood director D.W. Griffith, just east of the Ashfield Hardware Store on Main Street. Also noteworthy is the home on Williamsburg Road, beyond Chapel Falls, where Liz Taylor and Richard Burton stayed during the filming of ”Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe?”
CONWAY’S birthplace of Chicago department store magnate Marshall Field, on the family farm at Field’s Hill and attended school in Pumpkin Hollow. Born in 1834, Field started his merchandising in 1851 in a store in Pittsfield.
(See also the R.H. Macy’s birthplace on Nantucket.)
DEERFIELD: Eaglebrook School’s log cabin, used as a warming hut for skiing students, is known on campus as Kipling Cabin, after Rudyard Kipling, who used it as a retreat when his in-laws in Brattleboro got in the way of his writing. Kipling, who had a commanding view of the valley from the cabin, wrote part of ”Captains Courageous” there.
NORTHFIELD Mount Hermon School’s Moody Hall, the dormitory on the Northfield campus, which actress Uma Thurman, Class of 1988, called home. (See also home on Zerah Fiske Road in Shelburne where the never-completed movie with Brooke Shields, ”Morning, Afternoon and Night” was filmed.)
NORTHAMPTON’s Spoleto restaurant: the table where Hilary and Chelsea Clinton dined when they were shopping for colleges last year.
– RICHIE DAVIS