Abby Epplett, Historian

On Thursday, March 30 at 7:00 p.m., I attended the fifth installment of the 2023 Parked at Home series hosted via Zoom by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BRVNHP) and Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor . During this Parked at Home talk, park rangers Mark Mello and Andrew Schnetzer of BRVNHP were joined by Claire Casey of Ste. Geneviève National Historical Park in Ste. Geneviève, MO , one of the newest parks in the National Park Service. The talk began with a brief presentation by Schnetzer as he described commonalities between the Blackstone Valley area and Ste. Geneviève. He recalled the beginning of English colonization in New England, including the first settlements at Jamestown , the Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony during the 1620s, and the Puritans in Massachusetts Bay Colony from the 1630s onward. At the same time, French colonists arrived in Nouvelle France , hoping to become rich from fur trapping and fishing in areas like Acadia...

Back in early October of 2022, I visited Gedney House in Salem, MA, one of the oldest properties owned by Historic New England (HNE) and on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974. Built in 1665 by Eleazer Gedney (1642-1683), whose day job as a shipwright or boat builder gave him plenty of carpentry experience, the house was intended for twenty-three year old Gedney and his wife-to-be, sixteen year old Elizabeth Turner Gedney (1648-1677). The house is among a handful of extant structures from the First Period of American architecture, part of the early British colonial era in what is now the United States. It predates the better known House of Seven Gables , made famous by American author and Salem resident, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864), who wrote a book by the same name . Salem was a small community, and Gedney's brother-in-law, John Turner (1644-1680), built the House of Seven Gables in 1668.

On March 26, 2023, at 2:00 p.m., multiple cultural organizations based in Uxbridge, MA collaborated to host award winning author Nathaniel Philbrick as he talked about his latest book Travels with George: In Search of Washington and His Legacy . The talk was hosted at Community House of the First Evangelical Congregational Church , near the Town Common and across the street from Unitarian Church, now the home to the Uxbridge Historical Society (UHS) . The Uxbridge Free Public Library , also located by the Common, assisted with registration, while the Samuel Slater Experience , a museum in nearby Webster, MA, had a booth at the event. Vice President of the UHS, Jim Beauchamp , read opening remarks, also acknowledging his wife, Mary Beauchamp , as the Chairperson of the Uxbridge Historical Commission . This event was truly a community effort with an impressive turnout to match. Philbrick began his talk by recalling on a phrase used by American politician Tip O’Neill (D-MA),...

On Thursday, March 23 at 7:00 p.m., I attended the fourth installment of the 2023 Parked at Home series hosted via Zoom by Blackstone River Valley National Historical Park (BRVNHP) and Blackstone River Valley National Heritage Corridor . During this Parked at Home talk, park rangers Allison Horrocks and Mark Mello of BRVNHP were joined by Richard Cordon of Reconstruction Era National Historical Park (RENHP) in the Sea Islands, including the city of Beaufort, South Carolina on Port Royal Island . Horrocks began the presentation by noting the commonalities between BRVNHP and RENHP. Both parks are comprised of multiple historic sites connected by themes, with evolution of industry as the theme of BRVNHP. Horrocks reminded the audience about the different definitions of reconstruction. Lowercase r  reconstruction refers to rebuilding, repairing, or restoring a physical structure, just as people in the Blackstone Valley have worked on historic mill buildings, while the...

Early today — Wednesday, March 22 — at 4:00 p.m., I attended the webinar “ Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory ” hosted by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, MA . This talk featured five speakers who each held a unique perspective on the life and work of Revolutionary War era African-American poet Phillis Wheatley Peters . The first presentation was given by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers , an English professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of The Age of Phillis , published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020 and long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry . Jeffers described her first encounter with the works of Wheatley Peters while an English student at Talladega College , an HBCU in Alabama. In 2003, she read The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. When Jeffers became a Robert and Charlotte Baron Artist Fellow at the AAS in July 2009, she read the memoir of Margaretta Matilda Odell , a White woman and f...

Last October, I visited Salem Maritime National Historic Site in Salem, MA. I had visited the city of Salem several times in the past and had taken a ranger-led tour of the area, but I had never completed a Junior Ranger badge for the site, so the revisit was a must. The National Historic Site designation within the National Park Service in the United States originated with Salem, as it was the first National Historic Site. Created on March 17, 1938, the park celebrated its 85 th anniversary last Friday. Salem Maritime NHS can be divided into three parts: the Salem Armory Visitor Center, the tall ship Friendship of Salem at Derby Wharf, and historic buildings. Each of these parts is important for understanding the history of the city.

On Thursday, March 16 at 7:00 p.m., I attended the third installment of the 2023 Parked at Home series hosted via Zoom by Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park (BRVNHP) . Park rangers Mark Mello of BRVNHP and Joshua Bell at Eisenhower National Historic Site discussed the role of the Blackstone River Valley in military productions from the Civil War to the present, along with the career of five-star general and 34 th United States President Dwight “Ike” David Eisenhower . Mello began the presentation with an overview of the United States presidents, forty-five men serving forty-six terms in office with the obligatory reminder that Grover Cleveland served as 22 nd and 24 th . He reminded the audience that twenty-one NPS sites preserve birthplaces, homes, and other important monuments to the presidents . The Blackstone River Valley has strong connections to 27 th president William Howard Taft , whose family lived in the area and whose ancestor, Lydia Chapin Taft ,...

On Wednesday, March 15 at 7:00 p.m., Boston University professor of archeology David Carballo presented Collision of Worlds: An Archaeological Perspective on the Spanish Invasion of Aztec Mexico . The talk was based on Carballo’s similarly titled book , which was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. As part of AIA Archeology Hour , a virtual evening lecture series organized by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) , this event was moderated by Rabun Taylor, professor of classics at the University of Texas at Austin , and hosted by the Central Texas (Austin) Society, a chapter of the AIA . Carballo began his talk by explaining that his book covers three main perspectives about the Spanish Invasion of Aztec Mexico. The Archaeological Perspective focuses on material culture and the world, like “landscapes, places, and things”. The Transatlantic Perspective , traditionally used to emphasize the technological differences between the Spanish ...

On Thursday, March 9 at 7:00 p.m., I attended the second session of the 2023 Parked at Home series hosted via Zoom by Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park . This webinar was presented by park rangers Allison Horrocks of BRVNHP and Lauren D’Elia of Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration , part of Statue of Liberty National Monument . Horrocks began with an introduction to Ellis Island, describing as an “Island of Hope and Island of Tears” for immigrants coming to the United States. Prior to the opening of Ellis Island, immigrants experienced very different circumstances. English immigrant Samuel Slater, who built the first industrial textile mill in Pawtucket, RI, arrived in the winter of 1789 as a twenty-one year old who could not afford to pay the tax on his trunk. He did not have to pass through a checkpoint, as was the experience of later immigrants. “Slater’s experiment” was a turning point in the young United States, during the country into an industri...

Last August, I visited Sarah Orne Jewett House & Visitor Center in South Berwick, ME, a property of Historic New England . At that time, I experienced a disjointed and unpaced tour. Hoping to better capture the spirit of the house and gain more information, I signed up for a members-only virtual tour held via Zoom on Thursday, March 9 at 6:00 p.m. and was not disappointed! This version of the tour was presented by Marilyn Keith Daly , the site manager of the two South Berwick, ME houses for HNE, the other being Hamilton House . The Jewett House was last curated by HNE employee Nancy Carlisle in 2018. Daly began with an overview of the house before it became the property of author Sarah Orne Jewett . Her home was built in 1774, and Jewett was born in the house in 1849. The house belonged to her grandfather. Her childhood home next door, which now serves as the visitor center, was built in 1854 when Jewett was 5 years old. Jewett grew up with her older sister Mary Rice ...