Sex Lives of the Puritans, Part 1: The Courting Tube

Today's post is short, but a little spicy.

When most people hear the word Puritan today, they think of dour people in black who never had sex. That's not quite true. The Puritans encouraged lots of sex within a marriage, and the New England Puritans had a very high birth rate.

In order to ensure a successful marriage, and therefore a successful sex life, young people went through a lengthy courting process. One goal was to make sure both families approved of the union, but another was to let the young man and woman become well acquainted.

Unfortunately, a few factors made this difficult. Courting couples could not be left unchaperoned, so young beaus had to visit their sweethearts in their families' homes. If you've ever been in a house built in the 1600s you know they are often quite small. Private conversation between the couple was impossible, what with the whole family sitting in one small room, and a watchful grandmother seated between the young man and woman.

How then, were a young couple supposed to get acquainted, and maybe even whisper some sweet nothings into each other's ears?

From this page about the history of hearing aids.

Through a courting tube, of course. A courting tube was a long wooden tube through which the lovers could talk to each other without being overheard. The young woman would place one end in her ear, and her beau would speak softly into the other. To hear her reply, the young man would then put his end in his ear when she spoke. The tube could be passed in front of or behind grandma, so it worked even with a chaperone separating the couple. Ingenious! Repressive social rules were overcome with a cumbersome, but effective, device.

The courting tube is sometimes also called a speaking tube or courting stick, but by whatever name I first read about it in Albion's Seed by David Hackett Fisher.

Next week - more shocking Puritan sex secrets!

The Pigman of Northfield, Vermont

The time? 1971.

The place? A high school dance in picturesque Northfield, Vermont.

I'm sure you can imagine the scene. Crepe paper streamers, teens dancing to Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven", bell bottom jeans, mediocre orange punch. A scene of small town serenity.

However, small towns often have weird secrets, and Northfield's most shocking secret came to light that night when a group of students ran into the dance. They looked scared, and some of them were in tears.

They had been drinking beer in a sandpit behind the school, they said, when something strange came out of the woods. It was tall, naked, and covered in white hair. And although it walked on two legs, it had the face of a pig.

Whatever it was, it scared the hell out of the teens - they even abandoned the beer in their panic! Some of the braver students ventured out of the dance to investigate the sandpit. They didn't see the monster, but did find the grass and underbrush had been trampled down. Something had been there. And thus the Pigman appeared in Northfield.

Artist's rendering of the Pigman from Joseph Citro's Weird New England.

After the dance was disrupted, the locals made some strange connections. A farmer said he had seen a hideous naked figure rummaging through his trash a few nights earlier. More eerily, people remembered how a teenage boy disappeared from his family's farm six months ago. At the time authorities thought he had run away, but now people wondered if something more sinister had happened. Could he have been transformed into this strange monster? Or perhaps been eaten by it for dinner? A monster had to eat, and an awful lot of animals had gone missing recently...

The Pigman was seen in Northfield off and on for years, often around an area called the Devil's Washbowl. Motorists saw him run across the road, and teens who went to make out in the Washbowl sometimes had a surprise guest disrupt their romantic interlude.

Although the creature himself was somewhat elusive, physical evidence suggested he was real. A local man named Jeff Hatch and his friends found some caves near the Washbowl filled with animal bones, and found a similar stash of gnawed bones in the town's only pig farm. Strange cloven footprints were also found in the soft ground.

I don't know if we'll ever know who (or what) the Pigman is. The top two theories are that the missing teenage boy somehow devolved and became feral, or that some lonely farmer and a particularly friendly pig ... well, you know what I mean. I don't think genetics work that way, but try telling that to the teens in Northfield, who still get spooked at night when they go drinking out in the woods.

You can read more about the Pigman in books by Vermont author Joseph Citro, particularly Weird New England and Green Mountains, Dark Tales.

Ghosts Steal the Spotlight at the Huntington

This area probably has more weird folklore per square foot than any other part of the country. You're most likely walking past a haunted building or site of strange happenings every day without even knowing it.

Just this week I realized I had been doing this myself. I was looking through Holly Mascott Nadler's Ghosts of Boston Town when I came upon the chapter about the Huntington Theatre. I've walked by this building for years, and seen several shows there, without knowing there was a legend attached to it. In fact, multiple legends!

According to Nadler's book, there are several ghosts haunting this historic 1925 building. A misty woman in a white dress is sometimes seen hovering around dress rehearsals. Known appropriately enough as the Lady in White, it is believed she is the spirit of a wardrobe mistress. The ghost is harmless, but still can cause quite a shock when she appears to the unsuspecting.

Boston's Huntington Theatre

A second ghost is believed to be local actor Henry Jewett. The Huntington Theatre was built as a home for Jewett's theatrical troupe in the 1920s, but the timing was unfortunate. Talking motion pictures were providing cheaper entertainment for the masses by the time construction was completed, and the troupe disbanded in 1930. Jewett died that same year, and the building ironically became a movie theater. Maybe his spirit is still annoyed about thsi? A portrait of Jewett as MacBeth hangs in the Huntington's lobby today.

Other ghosts have been encountered on the catwalks above the stage, and in the building's various storage rooms and workshops. At least one actress has reported feeling hands on her neck and hips when she was completely alone in a quiet part of the building. Creepy!

The last ghost in the Huntington (for now) is a grainy, shadowy figure called the Sentry. The Sentry's footsteps are often heard in the halls outside the Green Room, and it has been seen many times. Many actors consider the Sentry a benevolent and protective spirit who watches over them.

As far as the restless dead go, the Huntington's ghosts seem like a harmless bunch. Don't let them stop you from buying a ticket! It seems like they're as devoted to the stage as their living counterparts are.

A Pickle for the Knowing Ones: Lord Timothy Dexter

Lord Timothy Dexter (1748 - 1806)

Work has been super busy, so unfortunately I didn't get to update my blog last week. So here, delayed a little bit, is my final post inspired by our trip to Newburyport. It's a town that has a lot to offer: ghosts, Bigfoot, and a famous American "nobleman."

Timothy Dexter was a Newburyport merchant who lived in the 18th century. The town had lots of merchants at the time, so that's not why he's famous. It's because he was so very, very, very eccentric.

When Dexter started his mercantile career his rivals, thinking him an idiot, deliberately gave him bad advice. Apparently being an idiot, Dexter took it, but through good luck things always worked out to his benefit.

For example, he sent a ship full of bed-warming pans to Jamaica, a tropical island where obvioulsy no one needed warm beds. However, the locals bought them as molasses dippers for the sugar plantations. On the same trip he also sent dozens of cats. Luckily, the island was experiencing a plague of rats and people snatched them up at high prices.

He later sent a shipment of mittens to Jamaica. Again, this would normally be a terrible decision, but Asian merchants visiting the port bought them to re-sell in Siberia.

Have you heard the saying, "Selling coals to Newcastle?" Newcastle was a coal producing area in England, so it means doing something pointless or doomed to fail. Dexter actually did ship coals to Newcastle. Once again, he was lucky. The miners were on strike, and his coal sold at a high price.

Dexter soon became one of the wealthiest merchants in Newburyport, which enfuriated the town's wealthy elite. They ostracized him, and in return Dexter, who was always a little eccentric, became downright outlandish.

For example:

He declared that he was a Lord, a title that was totally meaningless in the U.S. The title stuck, though, and most local historians now refer to him as Lord Timothy Dexter.

Lord Timothy's first large home in Newburyport

He bought a large house in town (now part of the public library), but when he upgraded to an even larger house he filled its garden with 40 statues of important historical figures like Adam and Eve, Napoleon, and himself.

He told everyone his wife had died, and the nagging woman they saw in his house was just her ghost. His wife was still very much alive.

He hired a large retinue of servants, which included a personal fortune teller, poet laureate, and a professional idiot.

An inscription outside his house read: "I am the first in the East, the first in the West, and the greatest philosopher in the Western World."

To prove his philosophical learning, Dexter eventually wrote a book, A Pickle for the Knowing Ones or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress. Here's a brief sample from this rambling tome, which contains no punctuation:

IME the first Lord in the younited States of A mericary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and I cant Help it and so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foller many more Lords pretty soune for it dont hurt A Cat Nor the mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare then goue on all is Easey...

Although it's almost incomprehensible, it went through multiple editions. Was it Dexter's luck again? You can decide for yourself by reading the full thing online.

Later in life, Lord Timothy staged his own funeral so he could see how it would all play out when he really shuffled off this mortal coil. Although thousands (!) of people came, it didn't go to his liking. His wife didn't cry, which angered him so much he beat her. Honestly, what did he expect after telling everyone she was just a ghost?

Lord Timothy Dexter died in 1806, a few years after his mock funeral. There's no record of whether his wife cried, but I'm guessing she didn't.

I got a lot of this information from Joseph Citro's book Weird New England, and also from Wikipedia. This site, LordTimothyDexter.com, has a ton of information as well.

Patriotic Ladies in Drag

This Monday is Patriots' Day, which has been celebrated since 1969 in Massachusetts and Maine to commemorate the Battles of Lexington and Concord. I'm sure there will be a big crowd in those towns this weekend to watch the historical re-enactors do battle. It's a fun thing for tourists to do, and I'm sure the reenactors enjoy pretending to be someone else for a day. It's their day in the spotlight!

If we were able to travel back in time to the Revolutionary War, and if we looked closely, we'd see that some people in the American Continental army were also pretending to be something other than they really were.

I'm talking, of course, about women who disguised themselves as men to join the army.

I don't know how many there were across the thirteen colonies, but there were at least two cross-dressing patriots from New England. The first, Ann Bailey, was a Massachusetts native who enlisted in August of 1777. Ann served under Brigadier General John Patterson in the Boston Regiment under the name Samuel Gay. Her pseudonym seems very appropriate to a modern reader, but stop that giggling - gay didn't acquire it's current meaning until the 20th century.

Unfortunately, Ann's gay time in the army didn't last very long. Her femininity was discovered, and she was arrested. For attempting to serve the young nation she was sentenced to two months in jail and fined sixteen pounds plus court costs. (Interestingly, there is another more famous Anne Bailey from Virginia who wore men's clothing and joined the army.)

Deborah Sampson, 1760 - 1827

A different Massachusetts woman had a more successful military career. In 1782, Deborah Sampson joined the army under the name Robert Shurtleff. She fought admirably in several battles, and even treated her own wounds to avoid being discovered. Deborah eventually came down with a fever that she couldn't treat and was forced to seek help from a doctor. Surprisingly, he didn't reveal her secret and Deborah served until she was honorably discharged in 1787. Her true identity of course eventually came to light, but she still received pensions from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States, thanks to advocacy from Paul Revere.

What motivated these two ladies to cross-dress and join the army? Patriotism? Poverty? A need for adventure? And how do we fit them into modern categories like gay, straight, or transgendered?

Those are tough questions that I can't answer. Deborah Sampson did marry a man and have three children, but may have dallied with other women while she was disguised as a man. Herman Mann, the author of her 1797 biography, wrote the following:

To mention the intercourse of our Heroine with her sex, would, like others more dangerous, require an apology I know not how to make. It must be supposed, she acted more from necessity, than a voluntary impulse of passion.

I guess even then the official policy was don't ask, don't tell!

I got most of this information from the History Project's Improper Bostonians. Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland. As always, the Web provides a wealth of information.