History

In today’s edition of This Week in Brattleboro History, Joe Rivers and his crack staff of Brattleboro Area Middle School student historians explore the discovery of the famous Brattleboro Rat and provide a peek behind the curtain of TWiBH’s production.

Thanks to Chris (cgrotke) for his question about the TWiBH research process. It inspired a rather startling addendum to this podcast from the kids.

Oh, sure, it’s the name of a corporation, but do you know the origins of the name?

A face book is/was a booklet given out to freshmen at colleges at the beginning of the school year. It was an alphabetical listing of all fellow freshpeople and their pictures. The stated reason for producing it was so that new students could get to know one another more quickly if they could look one another up in a guide.

It was a mini-yearbook, to give social interaction on campus a boost.

It was 115 years ago this week that the Dunham brothers held their annual banquet for employees and their two-day school for traveling shoe salesmen.

This week BHS trustee, Joe Rivers, and his intrepid band of young historians at the Brattleboro Area Middle School examine the Dunham Brothers shoe company

Joe Rivers presents his slideshow, Brattleboro’s Main Street Through the Years, at the Brattleboro Historical Society’s annual public meeting, 16 November 2015.

This video was created using the actual slides and a recording produced for archival purposes, rather than public release. We mention this by way of a disclaimer, because the audio isn’t always great, and for that we apologize. The presentation, however, was great and we thought our gentle viewers would forgive a few seconds of spotty audio in its reproduction.

The slideshow was created and presented by BHS trustee Joe Rivers. You’ll also hear the voices of John Carnahan, Bill Holiday and many other in the audience of this well-attended, annual public meeting of the Brattleboro Historical Society.

BHS trustee, Joe Rivers, and his band of young historians at the Brattleboro Area Middle School examine the West River Railroad and Robert Burns.

It was 101 years ago this month that Island Park weathered its worst ice flood!

BHS trustee, Joe Rivers, and his band of young historians at the Brattleboro Area Middle School examine the fraught relationship between Island Park and the Connecticut River.

Dartmouth professor Allen Koop will discuss the history of America’s troubled, promising, and unique health care system in a talk at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro on February 3 at 7 pm. His talk, “The History of Health Care in the US,” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council’s First Wednesdays lecture series and is free and open to the public. Koop will discuss how America’s health care system has been shaped not only by developments in medicine but also by social forces, economics, politics, and historical surprises.

Koop graduated from Dartmouth College and then earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches courses in the History Department at Dartmouth College, primarily on 20th century European history and on the American health care system.

BHS trustee Joe Rivers and his group of young BAMS historians investigate ex-slave Jacob Cartledge.

According to Wikipedia:  “Myra Goodwin played the leading lady in Sis, an 1885 production of the 14th Street (Manhattan) Theatre.” 

It was one 120 years ago this week that a fancy dinner party at the Brooks House was attended by 125 of the most prominent citizens in Brattleboro, and a local paper reported to each attendee wore extremely rich and handsome toilets.

Eh, toilets?

BHS trustee, Joe Rivers, and his history students at the Brattleboro Area Middle School answer this riddle with a story of history and etymology, on this week’s edition of This Week in Brattleboro History.

Brattleboro Historical Society trustee Joe Rivers and his BAMS student historians investigate selective enforcement in 19th century Brattleboro.

An item in iBratt’s Today in Local History sent me on an Internet hunt on this lazy New Year’s Day.
Dummerston’s big block of granite landed just south of the Basketball Hall of Fame until 2008.

1886:
The largest piece of granite ever quarried at Dummerston, and the largest one, probably, that ever passed through Brattleboro was brought down on Monday [likely Dec. 28, 1885]. It was 12 feet long by 9 feet 6 inches wide, and 6 feet thick. It went to Springfield, Mass., where it will form the top step of the new jail entrance.

Joe Rivers and his history students at Brattleboro Area Middle School discuss the closure of Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which began one year ago this week

For our final December historical advertisement, let’s see what I. B. Thorn has to offer downtown on Main Street, across from High.

Thorn is thinking ahead. Not only does he offer Christmas gifts, but also gifts for the New Year. It’s “the finest display of holiday novelties ever seen in town,” after all. Not bad for a drug store.

Hawley sells clothes. Each season he goes to New York City to find the latest and greatest fashions and best prices for his Brattleboro customers. He returns with a new load, tells us all what he has for sale, and we buy it from him.

Here is his complex advertisement for December 1886. Get your holiday goods and staple supplies!

1888: Seventy-seven feet of Faraday cable have been added to the telephone circuit this week to take the place of the wires which run from the switch-board in the exchange to the large standard on Harmony block. This makes a total of 481 feet of the cable in use.

Essentially, this means they are replacing bare wires with insulated wires and a multi-wire system.   That’s the nutshell version; it took a lot of research and technological advances to get there.  A lot of that work was spurred on by the effort to lay a transatlantic telegraph cable, which finally succeeded in 1866, and made use of Michael Faraday’s research into electromagnetism and induction.

http://ethw.org/Transatlantic_Cable

Mr. Drown is excited to share the news of holiday sales of soles. He has good goods!

In this ad, we see a cannon exploding with shoes and slippers, blasting them to residents of Brattleboro and all of Windham County. Trade is “booming,” of course. Get it?

Ambrose Knapp has some business news to share this holiday season. A new partnership has been formed between Knapp and Santa Claus.

The text says that “they expect by their joint efforts to give everybody a good time,” and warn us “Do not let anyone deceive you into believing that Santa Claus is in any way invested in any other stock or store.”

It was 116 years ago this week that Booker T. Washington came to Brattleboro…