I once was a boat owner. Nowadays I’m a passenger on other people’s boats, and occasionally crew. I’d like to say I like it this way, not having the expense of maintaining a boat and such talk, but once it’s in your blood you never get over not having one, no matter how often you…
On February 22, 1698 a group of Abenaki warriors raided Andover, Massachusetts and killed five people and two more (Haynes and Ladd) in Haverhill. Raids like this were somewhat common in the Merrimack River Valley at that time, as it was the frontier and friction between settlers encroaching on the lands of Native Americans who…
Yesterday I dove deep into the Cape Cod section of John Seller’s Mapp of New England. Today I’m looking at another fascinating section – the border between “civilization” and the “wilderness’. I’ve written before about place names like World’s End Pond in Salem, New Hampshire. Nothing hammers that home like seeing a map from 1675…
Wandering around New England today, it’s difficult to imagine this place as the frontier and a war zone. But you don’t have to look far to see evidence of ancient atrocities. In 1692 one of those atrocities took place in York, Maine. 200-300 Penobscot Indians led by sachem Madockawando and Father Louis-Pierre Thury, a French missionary…