past and present
Everyday items and special objects both inspire blog posts. Our past shapes our futures. Sometimes I search these ideas out, sometimes they just come to me. I always learn something and am so happy to share it.
April 11, 2025
The poor came to Massachusetts and the state tried to step up
You’ll have to excuse me if I think the Tewksbury Hospital, with its brick buildings, turrets and gates, is a bit unwelcoming. Don’t be fooled, the people at the Public Health Museum are happy to see you and share the history. But this was not always a happy place.
March 28, 2025
We already fought this war
The other day, I went to the town clerk’s office in Townsend, a small Massachusetts community. She was ready for me. A nondescript bound book, almost like a ledger, was open on a desk, next to a pair of white gloves. Kathy told me if I wanted to touch the book, I needed wear the gloves.
February 22, 2025
January 6 vs. The Bonus Army: How the poor won government support
The attack on the Capital on January 6, 2021, filled many with horror. Armed domestic insurrectionists invaded the building in an attempt to keep their chosen presidential candidate in office after he lost the election. If we look at an earlier time in Washington D.C., when the Army attacked Americans, the need for a government that puts the needs of the people first becomes apparent.
February 13, 2025
Moxie Man!
It’s not every day that Modern Moxie Man shows up at my door with two cans of the fabled tonic. Yes, tonic. You might call it a soda, but the dark beverage was marketed as a patent medicine named Moxie Nerve Food when it was first produced in the 1870s. With soda water added around 1884, the “delicious blend of bitter and sweet, a drink to satisfy everyone’s taste” was sold in bottles and at soda fountains. The drink’s inventor Augustin Thompson, a homeopathic doctor in Lowell, was on the road to wealth and fame. For a time, the drink with a bitter aftertaste was more popular than Coca-Cola, which now produces the soda.
Train Depot Open
When I see an unexpected sign on the side of the road, sometimes I follow it. I’d never really thought about Troy, New Hampshire, …
I hope he died well
“I hope he died well and I hope he died clean. Or, young Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?” from The Green Fields of France….
Clothing for a Union soldier
In September 1861, Thomas McNabb, a 35-year-old Irish-American laborer in Lowell, the father of four daughters, enlisted in the 26…
Lowell Bleachery — immigrant labor
In 1850, the Lowell Bleachery was important enough to merit the upper left-hand corner of a huge wall map. A service industry, it …
Thomas McNabb
A Civil War veteran’s stone sees daylightWe will never know Thomas McNabb. Did his friends call him Tommy? Why did he join the U…
The Lowell Offering
At the dawn of the industrial age, in the newest republic, wealthy corporation owners strove to enrich their workers’ lives with m…
Visiting the neighborhood
For my father Jack, doing the graves immediately before Memorial Day (so the flowers would make it through the weekend) was like a…s\
Tommy, we hardly knew ye
Nearly 160 years ago, men from the poorest, most despised ethnic group signed up to fight for the cause of a United States. The Ir…
The end of the road
Flying across the room
Not quite symmetrical, the wooden flying shuttle is purely utilitarian. The slots where a metal bobbin rested inside the bottomles…