Abby Epplett, Historian

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.

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.

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.

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 will focus on a church, town common, municipal building, and several houses. 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.

Back in June, I took a day trip to nearby Milford, MA to walk on the Upper Charles Trail and explore the downtown area on foot. I was born in Milford and have spent my entire life visiting the town but never did quick history stops there! This is the third of three parts about Milford. The first part covered the trail, a memorial, two churches, and a pair of repurposed buildings. The second part included an armory turned youth center, two town halls, and several churches. In the third part, I will discuss a funeral home, a library and its dog statue, an opera building, two war memorials, a church, and a post office turned police station.

Back in June, I took a day trip to nearby Milford, MA to walk on the Upper Charles Trail and explore the downtown area on foot. I was born in Milford and have spent my entire life visiting the town but never did quick history stops there! This is the second of three parts about Milford. The first part covered the trail, a memorial, two churches, and a pair of repurposed buildings. The second part includes an armory turned youth center, two town halls, and several churches.

Back in June, I took a day trip to nearby Milford, MA to walk on the Upper Charles Trail and explore the downtown area on foot. I was born in Milford and have spent my entire life visiting the town but never did quick history stops there! This is the first of three parts about Milford, which will cover the trail, a memorial, two churches, and a pair of repurposed buildings.

Frodo was originally incredulous that Gollum, also called Sméagol, could be “of hobbit-kind”, even as Gandalf explained how he was likely related to “the fathers of the fathers of the Stoors”, the ancestors of the Brandybucks and other hobbits in Buckland and the East Farthing. As mentioned many months ago when discussing the three breeds of hobbits , this group had distinctive features. They were broad and strong, enjoyed boating along the river, and may have had unusually blue eyes. However, their culture was distinct from that of their distant relatives in the Shire. They appeared to respect matriarchal authority rather than patriarchal, and they built boats of reeds rather than wood. In this essay, I’m going to explore those differences and how they inspired my design of Sméagol and his relatives.

Back in March 2023, I took a long weekend trip to western Massachusetts and visit three museums. The first of these was the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, MA. The Hall is famously built inside a round building shaped like a basketball and in the same city where James Naismith invented the game in 1891. Like other modern museums, the Hall combines artifacts with digital interactives, but its most unique (and potentially annoying) attraction is a full-sized basketball court with a variety of basket types in the center of the museum.

In January 2026, I saw Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: The Exhibition created by SEE Global Entertainment during its stop at Warwick Mall in Warwick, RI, which was advertised as Providence. The exhibit contained life-sized reproductions of the frescoes found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican sporadically and reluctantly painted by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1541 and restored between 1984 and 1994. The tour came with an audio guide app describing the artwork and sharing fun facts about the UNESCO world heritage site .

Yesterday, as part of celebrating American250, I watched the historical fiction movie A Great Awakening produced by Sight & Sound Theatres  during a visit to Elm Draught House Cinema in Millbury, MA. Featuring talented actors, its signature musical style, and beautiful cinematography, the movie introduced the story of renowned traveling minister George Whitefield through his somewhat embellished relationship with Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. At two hours and nine minutes, the film captivates a receptive audience with a carefully constructed storyline, and yet it does not cover some key points in the lives of its subjects.

The One Ring was famously engraved with the final line of its dark theme song, “One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them”. In this essay, I am exploring motifs and myths surrounding goldsmiths, the history of goldsmithery in the Real World, how to make gold things, and attempting to answer a physics question concerning the One Ring.

I recently listened to the thirteen-episode podcast series Witch hosted by India Rakusen on BBC Sounds / Radio 4 and released in 2023. Rakusen’s other work for BBC is similarly focused on women’s lives, including 28ish Days Later about the menstrual cycle and Child about pregnancy, birth, and the first year of life. I became interested in this podcast after reading Witch Hunt by Kristen J. Sollée and was curious to learn other perspectives on the topic. Similar to the book, this podcast blends European medieval history with modern witchcraft practices.

Among the most famous fortresses in modern English-language literature, Orthanc was a stone tower at the center of the fortification Isengard located in Gondor and built during the Second Age. As described in Book III, “Chapter 8 The Road to Isengard” in The Two Towers , the “black and gleaming” tower was made of “four mighty piers” holding up a narrow floor of polished stone that allowed a visitor to stand at a height of “five hundred feet above the plain” . The black stone contrasts the White Towers near the Shire and the Grey Havens of Lune , playing into the themes of darkness, shadow, and light that appear throughout the text.

While I have been a fan of Tolkien’s writing for about twenty years, I saw his depictions of Mirkwood for the first time only a few weeks ago. Initially, I was surprised by the orderly rows of trees that looked no more than a hundred years old. Then, after considering the history of Middle-earth as a place of severe habitat destruction from millennia of wars, the apparently recent rehabilitation of the forest made sense. Unlike the Old Forest in the Shire with its massive trees, much of Mirkwood was restored as a shadow of its former arboreal glory. In this essay, I discuss the name of the kingdom and its place in folklore, how the elves’ respect for trees may have been inspired by Finnish culture, and how silviculture or active forest management has been practiced in Europe from ancient times to the present day.

Celebrimbor is best known in The Lord of the Rings as the creator of the “three rings for the elven-kings under the sky” while he lived in Hollin, also known as Eregion. In Tolkien’s posthumous work, the character was greatly expanded. Readers learn that he was a powerful and talented Elf who loved crafts and his family, befriended Dwarves and a dangerous stranger, and sometimes let his pride get the best of him. Celebrimbor began life as the only grandchild of Fëanor, the greatest of the elven smiths, and spent his immortality attempting to become even more skilled than his famous ancestor.

In early September 2025, I visited Brimfield, MA for the annual Brimfield Flea Market, a tradition that began back in 1959. Before a day of walking among vendors to find vintage bargains, I made a few quick history stops around the center of town, called Brimfield Center Historic District and on the National Register of Historic Places since 2006 . Like many other small New England towns, its center included a picturesque white church, town hall, war memorials, and a historic school.

Back in August 2025, I visited the Clara Barton Birthplace Museum in North Oxford, MA. I had previously visited the museum about twenty years early, and I wanted to see how the tour had changed. This small house tour focuses on the life of Clarissa “Clara” Harlowe Barton , founder of the American Red Cross, along with describing her family. Also on the property is The Barton Center for Diabetes Education, Inc. , a camp for children with Type 1 Diabetes. The property has been on the National Register of Historic Places as the Clara Barton Homestead since 1977. It is also one of the northern-most towns in The Last Green Valley , formerly known as Quinebaug-Shetucket Rivers Valley National Heritage Corridor.