1. "Fairhaven Map 1895"
Posted by FairhavenGuy on Mar-19th-04 at 3:22 PM

Please pardon me if I don't attach this image correctly. I haven't tried doing this before.


The map is a detail from the Bristol County Atlas of 1895. I have added arrows showing the Moses Delano House at 19 Green Street where Emma was staying and the two nearby livery stables. Off to the right you can see railroad tracks, but the Fairhaven Branch Railroad just ran from Tremont (Wareham) through Marion and Mattapoisett to the Ferry Wharf in Fairhaven. It did not connect directly to the New Bedford line across the river.

The dashed line along Main Street near the botton of the map indicated the horse-drawn trolley route that Emma may have taken to New Bedford if she didn't take a carriage.

There is a barn shown on the lot for 19 Green Street, but I don't know if the Delanos or Brownells had a horse or carriage.

(Message last edited Mar-19th-04  10:33 PM.)

Thanks for the map, Christopher.  Leonard Rebello wrote an article "Emma in Fairhaven" the cover story for the July 2001 LB Quarterly.  He also has an 1895 map of the street area.  His does not show a barn.  It does show one of the stables.

I found this postcard photo of Green Street quite a while ago.  Maybe you can tell us if the area is near number 19.  The church would act as some sort of orientation point.



(Message last edited Mar-19th-04  4:10 PM.)

Harry, Mr. Rebello's article misidentified the 1871 atlas map, which shows the Delano name on 19 Green but doesn't show the barn, which was probably added later. I have access to both maps. The one I posted is 1895, as it shows both the Millicent Library and the Town Hall, which were built between 1891 and 1894.

Your postcard, Harry, shows Green Street looking in the direction of 19 Green (north) from about the intersection of Green with the railroad tracks. The English gothic tower you see belongs to the Unitarian Memorial Church. The church was built between 1901 and 1904 on the block between Union and Center streets. (The map I posted shows a large home on that block, just to the left of E.G. Paull's house.)

Incidentally, my 1902 Fairhaven directory lists Miss Helen Brownell living at 23 Walnut Street, which was the center house on the Walnut Street side of the church block. The church was being built in her back yard in 1902.

Maps and postcards/photos like these are a great help to me in understanding and appreciating what real people associated with the Borden case saw and experienced in their daily comings and goings. The "birds-eye" hand-drawn maps we looked at sometime back are another great tool. Thank you both, FairhavenGuy and Harry, for your informative posts here.

A question for FairhavenGuy: Is the Delano mentioned in association with this map from the same family as Sara Delano Roosevelt?

Doug, partially blocked by my arrow marking 19 Green Street is the name "Warren Delano" on the block surrounded by Green, Center, Washington and Walnut streets. Warren Delano was Sara's father. (It's not unlikely that young FDR was at the Walnut Street "Delano Homestead" during the summer of 1892.)

All the Fairhaven Delanos descended from Lt. Jonathan Delano, who settled in what's now Fairhaven in the 1660s. He and Mercy (Warren) Delano had 13 children, and most of them had large families, too. Other descendants of Lt. Jonathan, besides FDR, include Ulysses S. Grant, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Alan B. Shepard Jr.

Moses Delano, a prominent shipbuilder, and his sister Rebecca (Delano) Brownell, are descended from Lt. Jonanathan, too, but their line split off from FDR's line pretty far back.

Thank you, Christopher and Harry!  All these things help bring time, place, and people to life!

--Lyddie

Thank you guys for the interesting info!
It does make things more clear to have such visual aids.

Thanks for the Delano family information, Christopher. The other day in my town's public library I was browsing the "new books" section and came across a 2003 biography of FDR, titled "Franklin Delano Roosevelt - Champion of Freedom" by Conrad Black. The first chapter contains background information on the Delanos of Fairhaven.

Is this the family that made its fortune in drug-running Big Time?
"My money doesn't smell" said a Caesar.

True.

Ray refers to the fact that Warren Delano II was one of America's most prominent "China Traders" during the 1830s to 1860s, working for Rusell and Co. The Americans were illegally smuggling opium into China so they could use the cash to buy tea, silk and spices to ship here. Delano is also said to have shipped some opium directly to America for use by the Union army during the Civil War. There was nothing illegal about selling opium here at that time.

Fairhaven Guy,
Do you have any old information of ships in port in 1892? I wonder who was in town then, just back from a fresh jaunt to China. Those ships used to pick the opium up from the islands and transport it to mainland China under the guise of picking up Chinese oriental goods to bring back to the US. Made some quick cash but also made the Emperor VERY mad! The order went out to kill anyone caught doing such things. No due process, just do it!

Gramma

Sorry, I'm not up to speed on all the maritime history. New Bedford wasn't a home port for the China Traders anyway. This was a whaling port, primarily.

Actually, by the 1870s, it was a nearly dead whaling port. New Bedford, like Fall River was a cotton mill town in the 1890s, with some fishing going on, too.

Wouldn't opiates be shipped into Salem?  They got lots of China goods for some time, I know.  As for getting them to the wounded soldiers, can you imagine the horrors they would have gone through WITHOUT?  Without proper anesthetics, I think I'd prefer to take my chances on living through the healing process or dying without writhing in agony from gangrene.

--Lyddie

So none of the East India Clippers put into port at New Bedford or Fairhaven? Trip to the Whalng Museum in my future! I do know they put in at Salem. Been there and done that research. That is where the opium trade stories entered my brain and destroyed any illusions of the Clipper ships romantically connecting the east and the west in a perfect cultural exchange. Strange how the things you are taught as a child ain't necessarily so!

Gramma

That is true, but the opium smuggling was against Chinese law; it weakened both their economy and people. I think they made a modern movie (in China) about the "Opium War" (when British imperialism attacked China to force them to buy it!!!).
Don't expect to see it in your local theatre or TV.

I didn'y mean to imply that none of them did. I don't really know.

I do know that Warren Delano and his brother Ned, though Fairhaven natives, worked with Russell & Co., which I think was based in Boston. I just think much of this trade was to bigger ports than ours.

Having lived here my entire life and having read most of the local history books, I haven't heard much with regard to China Trade, here.

The Forbes family was a part of it,too, if I remember right, and they worked out of Milton, MA just outside of Boston but had strong New Bedford ties. Until you mentioned it in the context of Fairhaven I had not thought about the ships doing "hops" up the New England coast from port to port and that got me wondering if they ever stopped at Fairhaven or New Bedford.
Somewhere around here is an old article on the place in Milton. I'll see if I can find something.

Gramma

Well here is the Fairhaven connection for you!
What surprised me was I found out Providence was one of the ports for Russell & Company, along with Boston, Salem, and New York.
Warren Delano stopped the China trade for a while but went back to it in 1860 when things got economically tough. He didn't just do some trading for Russell & Company, he was a senior partner!

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v97/n196/a03.html
"In 1823 a 24 yearold Yankee, Warren Delano, sailed to Canton, where he did so well that within seven years he was a senior partner in Russell & Company.  Delano's problem, as with all traders, European and American, was that China had much to sell but declined to buy.  The Manchu emperors believed that the Middle Kingdom already possessed everything worth having, and hence needed no barbarian manufactures.

The British struck upon an ingenious way to reduce a huge trade deficit.  Their merchants bribed Chinese officials to allow entry of chests of opium from British ruled India, though its importation had long been banned by imperial decree.  Imports soared, and nearly every American company followed suit, acquiring "black dirt" in Turkey or as agents for Indian producers.

Writing home, Delano said he could not pretend to justify the opium trade on moral grounds, "but as a merchant I insist it has been .  .  .  fair, honorable and legitimate," and no more objectionable than the importation of wines and spirits to the U.S.

Yet as addiction became epidemic, and as the Chinese began paying with precious silver for the drug, their Emperor finally in 1839 named an Imperial Commissioner to end the trade.

Commissioner Lin Tsehsu proceeded to Canton, seized vast stocks of opium and dumped the chests in the sea.  This, plus a melee in which drunken sailors killed a Chinese villager, furnished the spark for the Opium War, initiated by Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, and waged with determination to obtain full compensation for the opium.  The Celestial Empire was humbled, forced to open five ports to foreign traders and to permit a British colony at Hong Kong.

But as noteworthy, the war was denounced in Parliament as "unjust and iniquitous" by 30yearold William Ewart Gladstone, who accused Palmerston of hoisting the British flag "to protect an infamous contraband traffic." The same outrage was expressed in the pulpit and the press, in America and England, thereby encouraging Russell & Company and most other American businesses to pull out of the opium trade.

Warren Delano returned to America rich, and in 1851 settled in Newburgh, N.Y.  There he eventually gave his daughter Sara in marriage to a wellborn neighbor, James Roosevelt, the father of Franklin Roosevelt.  The old China trader was closemouthed about opium, as were his partners in Russell & Company.  It is not clear how much F.D.R.  knew about this source of his grandfather's wealth.  But the President's recent biographer Geoffrey Ward rejects efforts by the Delano family to minimize Warren's involvement.

The family's discomfort is understandable.  We no longer believe that anything goes in the global marketplace, regardless of social consequences.  It is precisely this conviction that underlies efforts to attach human rights conditions to trading relations to temper the amorality of the market a point that, alas, seems to elude the Socialist soontobe masters of Hong Kong."

Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company

Gramma, I know the stuff about Warren Delano. Some of the things you quoted are incorrect. Warren Delano II was born in 1809. He graduated from the Fairhaven Academy in 1824, at the age of 15. He first went to China in 1833. He and Ned were there during the Opium War. In 1846 he returned to Fairhaven and four years later he created River-Side Cemetery here. (Walking tour scheduled for May 30th.) He built Algonac, his mansion on the Hudson in 1851, then lost his fortune in the Panic of 1857. In 1860 he returned to China to rebuild his fortune. He died in 1898 and is buried in the Delano family tomb at River-Side Cemetery, with all his children but Sara, who is buried at Hyde Park.

I don't think Warren Delano landed ships in Fairhaven, though.

This is very interesting you guys.  Even the points made which have been verified as faulty.
I have heard it said many times that for those long-ago stories, The New York Times was not so hot- at least in the case of the Fall River murders.

The overall picture is becoming more clear tho and I welcome always the ability of those to find web-sites and the ability of others to point out the errors!  Way to go you guys!

Here's the site of the Delano Homestead Bead & Breakfast. (Yes, another historical home  B&B!)

The owner used the Delano family chronology that I had created for the magazine my wife and I publish. Click on the "History" link for that. (Another error. They misspelled my last name. I don't have an S on the end of Richard.)

Delano Homestead Bed and Breakfast

Also check the photo archives. FDR was ten years old in 1892. The family often summered at the homestead. There are photos of FDR taken in New Bedford a few years later.

Opium / morpine, quinine, and calomel were the three big drugs in general use around the Civil War. The first two are still in use.
Mercuric Chloride creates a high temperature and sweating. It was the drug "that could cure you if it doesn't kill you" for syphilis and other diseases.

I also read that Fall River was part of the "Triangular Trade".
Sugar from Cuba to New England for distilling into rum. Rum to Africa to trade for slaves. Slaves to Cuba to trade for sugar. This died out after 1808 when the slave trade was banned. "Anything for a buck."
...
I've read that marijuana is one of the biggest cash crops in today's America, especially in the central plains region (?). Its near relative, hops, has been put into beer for centuries. It used to be much stronger before Prohibition.
Coastal shipping was used like railroads and trucks today. You can read "Two Years Before the Mast" for details on California trade.

(Message last edited Apr-5th-04  1:10 PM.)

There is a chapter in the "History of the Great American Fortunes" circa 1910 about this and other scandals. OF course they knew!
When somebody questioned a Caesar how a divinity could profit from a monopoly 'night soil' collection, he replied "my gold doesn't smell".
The big corporations who benefit from imported drugs will tell you the same thing, if they were honest about.
Terry Reed's "Compromised" tells about the drug smuggling and gun running out of Arkansas: the G Bush - W Clinton connection. Read it if you dare, and can find it still available!

"I don't think Warren Delano landed ships in Fairhaven, though."

Could he have come sailing home on one?
Did the Roosevelts sail into New Bedford on occasion?

Kat, the New York Times site is the one I chose to quote because the other one I found was a bit too far out there for me. Talk about aggressive! There were discrepancies in dates between the two and I welcome the corrections by Fairhaven Guy! Nice to have a local history buff on board!

Gramma

Here are some Fair Haven things I found on this computer.  I don't know the date of the map.  The summer home is really Cool!





(Message last edited Apr-9th-04  7:10 AM.)

Kat,

The map is from 1871. Rebello included it in his July 2001 article in LB Quarterly on Emma in Fairhaven, but he identified it as 1895.

Henry Huttleston Rogers' mansion was torn down in 1915, six years after his death. Rogers (1840 to 1909) was a director of Standard Oil, and on the board of U.S. Steel, Amalgamated Copper, and many railroads, gas companies, etc.

Oh crud!
That stinks the house was torn down so soon.
Was Rogers to FairHaven as Charlton was to Fall River?

I don't know about Charlton in Fall River, except for the hospital.

Rogers was born in Fairhaven in 1840 and graduated from the town's original high school in 1856. In 1861 he went to Oil City, PA, and started a refinery with a partner. Later became manager of the Pratt Oil Co., which was absorbed by Standard Oil.

In Fairhaven he built a grammar school, Rogers School, 1885; the Millicent Library, 1893, the Town Hall, 1894; the George H. Taber Masonic Lodge building, 1901; the Unitarian Memorial Church, 1904; the Tabitha Inn, 1905; Fairhaven High School, 1906. He also drained the mill pond to create a park, installed the town's public water system, served as superintedent of streets and a few other things.

(In August 1892, when Emma was visiting Helen Brownell, both the Town Hall and the library were under construction.)

Rogers straightened out Mark Twain's finances--Twain spoke at the dedication of the Town Hall and was a frequent visitor to town. Rogers put Helen Keller through school--her first book is dedicated to him. He gave thousands of dollars to Booker T. Washington for schools in the south.

On the other hand, on Wall Street he was known as Hell Hound Rogers, "The Brains of the Standard Oil Trust," and was considered one of the great "robber barons" of his day.

There's way more, too.

Can you tell that every Thursday morning from June through September I guide a Henry Huttleston Rogers walking tour through the center of Fairhaven?

By the way, although a couple of the old maps read "Fair-Haven" or "FairHaven," the town, since it broke from New Bedford and incorporated in 1812, has always been Fairhaven, one word, lowercase H. Earlier, though, the village had sometimes been called Fair Haven.

(Message last edited Apr-9th-04  10:21 PM.)

That's cool, and I am glad to know the correct spelling of Fairhaven, thanks.  I'd seen it a few different ways.

Charlton was the richest man in Fall River and his money is still endowing things there to this day.

Earle P. Charlton, was born in Chester, Conn. on June 19, 1863. 

He met and went into business with Mr. Sumner Woolworth, Mr. Fred Kirby and Mr. Seymour H. Knox who were owners of stores and were beginning  the five and ten cent chain store business.   Charlton opened his frst store in Fall River in 1890.  He had a partner, Mr. Knoxr for a while, and they opened stores in other cities, but the partner left him in 1895.  They picked the stores they wanted to keep, and Charlton kept the FAll River store.
He became a part of the F.W. Woolworth chain which was organized in 1912 and by his death in November, 1930, he was the richest man in Fall River, and none of his wealth was inherited, but earned over 40 years.

He was the chief sponsor for the Charlton Mills in 1919, he financed the construction of a new wing to the Truesdale Hospital at a cost of half a million dollars, he completed the equipment of a modern medical center, was a director of the city’s largest bank, and also of the largest bank in the State;

and:
"He was a director of the New Haven Railroad and trustee of the State-controlled street railroad.  President Coolidge chose him as chairman of the Coolidge Fund for the Clark School in Northampton, and he served as a member of the War Industry Board by appointment of President Wilson.  For his services in the First World War the French government awarded him a decoration."--The Phillips History Of Fall River
  
also:
http://www.lizzieborden.org/details.asp?ID=12
for picture

http://www.s-t.com/daily/02-97/02-06-97/a01lo004.htm
endowment 1997



"Earle P. Charlton Lectureship, 1998", etc

(Message last edited Apr-9th-04  11:56 PM.)

Thanks, Kat.

Although Fall River is only a short distance from Fairhaven, there has traditionally been such a territorial division at the Westport line that it might as well be halfway across the country. Charlton is a little late to be in the more regional history books I own, which generally cover the 1600s to about 1900. I am becoming more regional in my historical interests, but I've got a long way to go.

There is considerable difference between Charlton and Rogers, although both were entirely self-made men. Henry H. Rogers is in the top 25 wealthiest men in America of all time. He is #22, ranking ahead of #23 J.P. Morgan, #31 Bill Gates, #35 William Rockefeller, #39 Warren Buffett, #67 J. Paul Getty and #82 Frank W. Woolworth.

Wealthiest 100

Notice #36, Hetty Green, a New Bedford native and the only woman on the list.