Jud's New England Journal

May 1, 2012

Exploring a Few New England Oddities

To discover some of these, you'd need to look UP...

Current Episode

Archives

Subscribe

Download [2.5MB MP3]

Listen

Jud’s New England Journal For May 2012

Welcome to the May 2012 edition of Jud’s New England Journal, the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, the Editor-in-Chief of Yankee Magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, N.H.

Exploring a Few New England Oddities

To discover some of these, you’d need to look UP. . .

My favorite New England oddities are those with which I’ve had some personal connection. For instance, I’ve snooped around a certain little house nestled in some pines on the shores of a river in Hopkinton, New Hampshire — a little house made from the crate used to ship Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis back to America on board the U.S.S. Memphis after his historic trans-Atlantic flight to Paris. I’ve been told that an officer aboard the Memphis, who happened to be a native of Hopkinton, made a deal with Lindbergh en route to acquire the crate which he eventually turned into a small house. I assume it’s still there.

And I didn’t need my binoculars to see plainly the large pointing hand on top of the steeple of the Methodist Church in Milton Mills, New Hampshire, when I was investigating the “Church with the Hand on Top” for Yankee Magazine one September day. It was made, I later learned, of a solid block of wood and had been carried to that dizzy height in a half-bushel wicker basket by one Aratus Shaw who, with others, built the church as a labor of love in 1871, using only donated materials.

It makes history real for me to see and touch and ponder the perfectly-preserved bullet hole in the shed wall of the Elisha Jones house (not open to the public) in Concord, Massachusetts, a British soldier’s parting shot as his regiment was retreating following the Concord fight on April 19th, 1775. It’s almost as if it happened last week. Same with the plainly visible tomahawk marks on a door at Old Deerfield, Massachusetts.

Speaking of my binoculars, I did use them one day to study the top of the steeple on the First Baptist Church in Hampton Falls, New Hampshire. I was trying to determine whether or not there’s really a five-and-a-half-foot high beer bottle up there. Well, it’s up there, all right. The most popular explanation is that during the 1850’s a brewery in Portsmouth offered to donate the money necessary for a brand-new steeple, if the symbol of their product was placed at the top for all the world to see.

“Smacks a little of soul-selling,” the then-pastor, Reverend A. Scruton, told me. “but that was the only offer they had.” Since then, generations of Hampton Falls residents can be thankful that the Trueform Brassiere and Corset Company, then a major employer in town, hadn’t decided to make a better offer.