Abby Epplett, Historian

During my trips to the North Shore earlier this year, I spent time walking around Ipswich, MA. I really outdid myself with picture-taking in this colonial-era town, and accordingly will present a four-part miniseries of quick history stops. Special thanks to my sister who lives locally and tolerated me finding local history in everything. For the first part, I will share a pair of banks, a post office, murals on a factory building, and a story from the Industrial Revolution.

I last compared Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday to famous parties in the summary of Book I, Chapter 1 “A Long-Expected Party” , where I referenced biblical celebrations, parties gone wrong in France, PR stunts in Ancient China, and exclusive musical scores in Great Britain. This installment focuses on what the hobbits might have eaten at that party. While discussing “Prologue, 3 On the Ordering of the Shire” , I determined that hobbits appeared to live in two timelines with their political system and architecture reflecting the early 17 th century or post-medieval period while their technology, interior design, and fashion reflected the early 19 th century or Industrial Revolution. Their foods likewise are split into different time periods, with some staples being invented during ancient times in the Real World, others appearing in Europe due to the trade of the late medieval period, and still others dating from the Victorian era or mid- to late 19 th century. As the self-pr...

After visiting the Major Taylor Museum on my birthday trip, I took a pair of walks in nearby Marlborough, MA. Lake Williams Boardwalk completed a recreational trail with a floating walkway, while The Grove Conservation Land was a forested area beside Fort Meadow Reservoir, which borders both Marlborough and Hudson. This was a relaxing way to spend a warm and sunny day.

Tolkien wrote his legendarium from the 1930s to the 1970s, and while he was ahead of his time in many aspects, he could not have anticipated modern understanding of mental health. He experienced significant childhood trauma and two world wars, which are known to cause mental health disabilities. This installment will not speculate on the state of Tolkien’s mental health and its potential effect on his work. Instead, I will study the text as if it was written by in-universe characters describing themselves and those they know. This will serve as the basis for case studies reviewing explicitly stated symptoms along with the history behind the diagnosis.

In October 2024, I checked off another Blackstone Bucket List item by taking the forty-passenger Explorer boat cruise on a fifty-minute guided river tour. Departing from Central Falls Landing in Central Falls, RI, the tour reviewed the ecology and history of the Blackstone River Valley, providing a great refresher to those familiar with the story at a relaxing pace. As an added bonus, the day was unseasonably warm and sunny.

On Thursday, April 10 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., I watched the fifth and final Parked at Home webinar of the 2025 season. This is the fourth year of the Parked at Home series of virtual talks hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BLRV) and other sites in the National Park Service, along with the third year of summaries appearing on my blog. The presentations this year are interpreted into American Sign Language (ASL) by Sherrolyn King. The hour-long webinars will be uploaded to the BlackstoneNPS YouTube channel and available to view at any time. The last installment to this year’s series was Saint Croix Island International Historic Site featuring park ranger Karin Magera.

On Thursday, March 27 from 7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., I watched the third Parked at Home webinar of the 2025 season. This is the fourth year of the Parked at Home series of virtual talks hosted by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BLRV) and other sites in the National Park Service, along with the third year of summaries appearing on my blog. The presentations this year are interpreted into American Sign Language (ASL) by Sherrolyn King. The hour-long webinars will be uploaded to the BlackstoneNPS YouTube channel and available to view at any time. The third installment to this year’s series was Carlsbad Caverns National Park featuring park ranger Tim Bone who formerly worked at Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area in Wyoming , Grand Portage National Monument in Northern Minnesota , Russell Cave National Monument in northern Alabama , and Blackstone River Valley and Roger Williams National Memorial in Rhode Island .

I first learned about the documentary Whitin through a Blackstone Heritage Corridor newsletter upon its release about five months ago in November 2024. The documentary was edited, written, and produced by filmmaker Heather Riley of North Grafton with significant input from members of the Whitin family. The documentary is about twenty-seven minutes in length and currently hosted on the ValleyCAST YouTube channel.

This is the final essay before I begin my analysis of the dialogue portion of The Lord of the Rings . I hope to begin moving more quickly through the text now that I have laid a solid foundation and framing to my metaphorical house, but seeing as I tend to overanalyze, I cannot promise any amount of speed. Today I discuss Hobbiton, the famous hometown of Bilbo Baggins and possibly his father, Bungo Baggins. This was not the hometown of Frodo, as he was born in Buckland, but he was permitted to live in this area after Bilbo made him the heir to Bag End. I will cover the ownership, architecture, and layout of Hobbiton while comparing it to real-world history before providing the first animatic of the project.

I recently decided that the hypothetical animated musical needed a logo and one appearing completely different from the other logos found across the vast franchise of The Lord of the Rings . Book covers have varied greatly over the past seventy years, but the most iconic logos tended to be the same gold color as the ring and use fantastical or distressed serif fonts. As one not wanting to do what has been done before, I conducted a thorough review of past logos so as not to repeat anyone else’s work.

During my winter holiday break, I began working through my pile of history books. I had found The Poison Eaters: Fighting Danger and Fraud in Our Food and Drugs by Gail Jarrow in a giveaway pile at my local library and decided to give the book a new home. I was familiar with the story of the poison eaters, young men who volunteered in a study to assess how food preservatives altered the human body, after listening to the episode “A Pure Food Father and His Poison Squad” for the podcast Stuff You Missed in History Class , which was released in 2011. The two questions I needed to answer were 1) What else was there to this story? and 2) Why was this book “weeded” from the library collection?

In this week’s essay, my loves of historic house tours and The Lord of the Rings combine for the first time as I present my map of Bag End, also spelled Bag-End by the older generations of Hobbits. Since Tolkien was a philologist, it is fitting to take a brief break to explain the naming scheme around the property, along with the clan name of the family who built it. Tolkien studies expert Tom Shippey noted in The Road to Middle-earth that “bag-end” is a literal translation of “cul-de-sac”, which was further elaborated upon by Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull in Reader’s Companion . The current meaning of a road terminating at a house or collection of houses dates from 1819.

In August 2024, I went on a five-day trip to Cape Cod, MA where I visited many museums and cultural organizations, along with quick history stops and trails. On the third day of my trip, I visited Dexter Grist Mill in Sandwich, MA, located across the street from the Sandwich Glass Museum and next door to the Town Hall. This building is owned and maintained by the town just like Hoxie House , so the tour was of similarly high quality.

While in Bridgewater, MA, I had quick history stops at McElwain School and Bridgewater Iron Works Park, two parts of industrial history that have been repurposed to serve the community.

Universally disliked by the Free People of Middle-earth, Orcs seemed to exist only to kill and destroy, and yet these people presented a moral dilemma: if orcs were truly evil and not human, they deserved death; however, if they showed an understanding of good and evil, even if they repeatedly did wrong, then targeting them was a race-based genocide. Tolkien was uncomfortable with the concept of his heroes being racist towards their enemies, yet the heroes were frequently racist towards each other, so this was not what set apart their treatment of orcs. The key difference was that orcs could be killed without repercussions. While Elves participated in kinslayings, Dwarves and Elves fought each other, and Men joked about hunting Hobbits, these actions were eventually seen as reprehensible, while the mass killing of orcs was viewed as acceptable, even a game.

This past Saturday — July 6, 2024 — I visited three stops in the Passport to History developed by Old Colony History Museum , along with one bonus stop. Attleboro Area Industrial Museum was the second stop on my trip. I had been meaning to visit this museum since learning about it at the Industrial History New England Lunch on Day 1 of NEMA Conference 2022 , so this visit checks off another item from my very long museum bucket list.

Last Saturday — June 15, 2024 — I went on a history adventure in New Bedford, MA. Between my three major stops of New Bedford Art Museum , the Rotch-Jones-Duff House & Garden Museum , and Fort Taber Park , I made several quick history stops around the city. Highlights included neoclassical architecture, memorials, repurposed factories, and flood prevention infrastructure.

I had been meaning to watch the Ann & Hope Documentary by David Lawlor from  Run of the Mill , which debuted on YouTube in August 2023, and I finally got around to doing it! This fact-paced film gave the history of the three iterations of Ann & Hope — a boat, a mill, and a department store chain — through twelve chapters, with plenty of interviews, drone shots, music, and animation segments. Rhode Islanders who grew up near an Ann & Hope store will have the chance to reminisce, historians will enjoy the fact-packed content, and cinefiles will appreciate the clever editing. After an opening music video, “Chapter 1: The Creation of the Blackstone River Valley” and “Chapter 2: William Blackstone” focused on the history of the Blackstone valley before the Industrial Revolution. The film introduced park rangers Allison Horrocks (who frequent readers of the blog will remember from Parked at Home ) and Kevin Klyberg of Blackstone River Valley National Historical P...

After my visit to the nearby American Heritage Museum , I walked around downtown Hudson, MA to see a series of quick history stops. I used the Hudson Walking Tour to guide me down Main Street, along with visiting the riverwalk and Assabet Rail Trail.

Last night — April 11, 2024 at 7:00 p.m. — was the sixth and final installment of the webinar series Parked at Home hosted by the Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BRVNHP) . Park ranger Allison Horrocks led the session with guest speaker Andrew Donovan, supervisory park ranger at Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site and Salem Maritime National Historic Site , which I most recently visited in October 2022 . Sherrolyn K. provided American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation. I had last visited Saugus Iron Works about eight years ago and appreciated the opportunity to refresh my knowledge about post-medieval mills leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Horrocks explained that Saugus, MA and Pawtucket, RI — one of six sites within BRVNHP — shared a business connection. The founder of Pawtucket in 1671, Joseph Jenks Jr. , originally settled in Saugus with his father, iron worker Joseph Jenks Sr. Years earlier while in England, the Jenks Sr. had worked for ...