Abby Epplett, Historian

I recently watched the movie Young Washington directed by Jon Erwin and distributed by Angel Studios. It is worth noting the context of this film upfront. Erwin is an American Christian film director who is part of the Erwin Brothers with his brother, Andrew. Angel Studios is a publicly traded film distributor based in Utah that allows paid members to vote on what films they will release. They were formerly the distributors of the popular series The Chosen , which follows the life of Jesus Christ. (I saw an exclusive film in that franchise while visiting the Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC .) While not as heavy-handed as A Great Awakening , a film about the friendship between George Whitefield and Benjamin Franklin which I reviewed several weeks ago , the beautifully shot movie does take liberties with historical events to support a specific point of view, not unlike most movies.

Before this essay, I did not know much about mountain men besides a handful of names: Aragorn, of course, local legend Grizzly Adams (whose grave I visited a few months ago) , Daniel Boone, and Davy Crockett. During my research, I learned the stories of these wanderers and considered how I might take inspiration from tales in the Real World combined with musical motifs to write the brief instrumental of this section.

I recently read the award-winning graphic novel Dragon Hoops written and illustrated Gene Luen Yang , colors by Lark Pien , published in 2020 by First Second . Part memoir and part history, Yang recorded his time as a teacher at prestigious Bishop O'Dowd High School Oakland , a private Catholic school in California known for its basketball teams. Yang followed the boys team en route to their first California State Championships victory, learning about the rules of the sport and its history along the way. The book reminded me of One Goal by Amy Bass , which covered a state champion soccer team from Maine, combined with what I had learned from the Basketball Hall of Fame earlier this year. As for awards, Dragon Hoops  was a 2021 Michael L. Printz Honor Book  and  2021 Eisner Award for Best Publication for Teens .

On the same day I visited Sutton Center and Manchaug , I finished up my adventure in Douglas, another former mill town in the Blackstone River Valley. I took so many pictures and saw so much history that I am dividing the quick history stops into two parts. In the first part , I visited two churches, a former general store turned historical society, a building with a really high curb, and a library. In the second part, I visited war memorials, a church, and several houses.

In this week’s essay, I introduce the next musical selection, which includes an instrumental and the song “The Wood Is Full of Rumour”. While not treated as a song in the original text, I wrote the piece by borrowing information provided by Gandalf to Frodo while he discussed the interaction of the Woodmen and Wood-elves who live in Mirkwood and could not catch a monstrous “ghost who drank blood” . I also drew inspiration from music of the Middle Ages, including the medieval method of creating harmony and the instruments that originally played this music.

On the same day I visited Sutton Center and Manchaug , I finished up my adventure in Douglas, another former mill town in the Blackstone River Valley. I took so many pictures and saw so much history that I am dividing the quick history stops into two parts. In this first part, I visited two churches, a former general store turned historical society, a building with a really high curb, and a library.

I recently read Feeding Ghosts: A Graphic Memoir written and illustrated by Tessa Hulls and published by Macmillan Publishers in 2024 . Hulls expertly crafted a cohesive four-hundred page work that follows three story lines: three generations of family trauma and mental illness, the history and linguistics of the Chinese diaspora, and the relationship between the author and her mother as they attempt to reconcile. I am not alone in admiring this book, as it was named one of the best books in its year by Time magazine , a 2025 Libby Award for Best Comic/Graphic Novel , and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography to name only three of a multitude.

On the same day I visited Sutton Center Historic District, I drove down the road to Manchaug Village Historic District, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. Part of the town of Sutton, MA, its time as a mill village lasted between 1826 and 1921, much like other village in the Blackstone River Valley. Besides a historic mill, cute post office, former mill store, beautiful mansion, and a unique church, Manchaug is home to Vaillancourt Folk Art , a rare chalkware shop where collectables are made onsite. Much of my research on this are came from the 1999 Sutton Comprehensive Survey Data Sheet , which you can access on Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System (MCRIS).

This week, I take a deep dive into the folklore of man-eating beasts based on a line in “The Shadow of the Past” . Gandalf told Frodo of a rumor he heard from the Woodman: “some new terror abroad, a ghost that drank blood”, allegedly Gollum. To be clear, in the era before CCTV, nobody saw or recorded Gollum eating a baby animal or baby Woodman, and any statistician knows correlation does not equal causation. Neither the Woodmen nor the Wood-elves nor Gandalf would deliberately lie about a dangerous creature in Mirkwood . Something was certainly eating the contents of nests, holes, and cradles, but whether it was Gollum is not provable. The concept of a man-eating or blood-drinking creature is nearly universal folklore, from ghosts and vampires representing the undead remains of a restless human to human-like monsters stalking the borders of a community to hungry wolves terrorizing medieval villages. I take a look at each of these concepts, as the works of Tolkien drew...

Back in late June 2026, I visited the Sutton Center Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places , part of the Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor (BHC) in Massachusetts. So many historic buildings, monuments, and stories were packed into this highly walkable area that I am dividing my adventure into three parts. The first part focused on a church, town common, municipal building, and several houses. The second part focused on the little school house, cemetery, town pound, and a house. The third part includes a church, historic houses, a memorial, a blacksmith shop, and a nature area. Aiding in my trip were easy-to-follow walking tours created by BHC over a decade ago and by Sutton Historical Society as part of America250.