The Roger Williams National Memorial, at 282 North Main St., is home to a spring that was donated to the city of Providence by Judge J. Jerome Hahn in 1932- in memory of his father, Isaac Hahn (1845-1909), a businessman and textile manufacturer,  who became the first Jewish resident of Providence to be elected to public office.   Judge Hahn believed that the spring was a historic and almost sacred place, as it was there that Roger Williams and his followers first found fresh water in the settlement that would become Providence.   Isaac Hahn’s parents came to the United States from Germany in the mid-19th century and made their home in New York City, where Isaac was born and raised. They later moved upstate, where Isaac married Rose Stern. In 1870, Isaac brought his wife and young son to establish a new life for their growing family in Providence. Isaac owned a dry goods store on Westminster Street, and later invested in  banking, factories and real estate. In 1884, he became the first Jewish state representative from Providence in the Rhode Island General Assembly, in which he served one term. Isaac was also deeply involved in the Jewish community, helping to build a new  synagogue for the Congregation of the Sons of Israel and David (founded in 1854, this congregation survives today as Temple Beth-El).

For more (including 2 images) view the original article

With careers marked by a series of firsts in New Bedford politics, Rosalind Poll Brooker (1928-2016) and Rosemary Tierney (1932-2020) were trailblazers for women in law and politics. Rosalind, the first woman elected to the City Council, the first female City Council president, and the first female City Solicitor; and Rosemary, the first and only woman to be elected mayor, as of 2021, used political office to mobilize change from within the walls of City Hall.

Rosalind Poll Brooker overcame every obstacle to make her community a better place. Not only did Rosalind enter the fields of law and politics at a time when women were expected to focus on home and family, she also did not let polio, which left her using crutches, hold her back. She began her public service career in 1969 when she was elected to the New Bedford City Council. Although she was first passed over to be City Council president, Rosalind was elected to the role at the next opportunity. Her colleagues described her as tough, kind, fair, and tenacious.

Mayor John Bullard, who named Rosalind as New Bedford’s first female City Solicitor, the chief legal officer of the city, stated “As a city councilor she had a strong personality. She was a great lawyer and a dynamic person.” Former New Bedford City Solicitor Irene Schall remembered Rosalind as an intelligent leader dedicated to advancing women attorneys. Shortly after her 1969 election, Rosalind stated, “I’m not going down in history, I’m going up.” She continued to rise up throughout her life bringing other women with her.

Committed to public education, Rosemary Tierney was elected to the New Bedford School Committee in 1971, where she served for several years. Beginning in 1984, she was elected to the Massachusetts Governor’s Council three times. Rosemary’s trademark grassroots campaigning style, which she perfected in these early elections drove her to victory in the 1991 mayoral race. Former Mayor Scott Lang remembered Rosemary as someone who "understood that door-to-door neighborhood campaigning and personal relationships drove public policy. No one in the City has ever built coalitions to drive an issue like Rosemary Tierney."

Rosemary succeeded in the arena of male-dominated politics by working hard to create programs and policies that included all New Bedford residents. During her first year in office, she unveiled her “Cornerstone for Change” plan to rebuild New Bedford. Perhaps her most important accomplishment was restoring New Bedford’s financial stability through tough budgetary controls.

As firsts in their offices in New Bedford, Rosalind and Rosemary encouraged other women to be politically active by supporting female lawyers and harnessing the networking power of women and women’s groups to strengthen grassroots campaigning. They brought traditional community-based organizing into the formal halls of city government, opening new avenues for women to enact change in areas dominated by men.

For more (including 6 images) view the original article

Sunny von Bülow, a wealthy Newport resident active in charity and social organizations, was found unconscious and undressed on the floor of her bathroom. Sunny had suffered catastrophic brain damage and would likely remain in a persistent vegetative state for the rest of her life.  Before this, Sunny appeared to have it all. In her younger years, people said she resembled actress Grace Kelly. She knew literary giants, aristocrats, and movie stars. She was the beneficiary of a fortune conservatively valued at $75 million. All this and she had a suave spouse to boot: Claus von Bülow.  Claus and Sunny met while she was wed to her first husband, Prince Alfred von Ausberg of Austria, whom Sunny wished to divorce. A witty Dane and lawyer who had spent much of his young life in London, Claus was tall, handsome, and eccentric, but with impeccable manners. Sunny saw him as a knight in charming armor. Claus and Sunny wed in 1966, and moved with Sunny’s two young children to the United States, where the family split their time between a spacious Fifth Avenue apartment and this immense mansion in Newport. Less than two decades later, Claus’ new family accused him of trying to kill Sunny and the court of public opinion soon agreed.  During trial at Newport’s Municipal Court, the prosecution contended that Claus had injected Sunny with an overdose of insulin and he was found guilty of Sunny’s attempted murder and sentenced to serve thirty years. This verdict was overturned on technical grounds during an appeal led by Professor Alan Dershowitz, one of Harvard Law School’s most illustrious faculty members.  In 1986, Dershowitz published a book based on the case, Reversal of Fortune, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film in 1990 by director Barbet Schroeder. Ron Silver’s performance as Dershowitz garnered wide praise, and Jeremy Irons won the Oscar for Best Actor for his portrayal of Claus. Critics also marveled at Glen Close’s portrayal of Sunny, though her children publicly disputed its accuracy. Claus eventually moved to London, where he wrote theatre reviews and remains a fixture on the city’s social scene. Sunny, meanwhile, never woke from her coma. She died in December 2008, surrounded by her children, at a nursing home in New York City, almost twenty-eight years to the day after she lost consciousness. 

For more (including 6 images & 2 videos) view the original article

“Young man, if you don’t get out you’re going to end up with a little round hole in the middle of your forehead.”

The words were polite and calm, but ominous, spoken to a youthful group of summer people during a late night visit to Briggs Beach during Prohibition, according to local resident Howard Huntoon.

Little Compton’s fourteen beautiful miles of coastline have long attracted tourists and sun bathers, but during Prohibition, the beaches also provided a convenient route to smuggle illegal alcohol. “Rum running” became an important way for locals to earn money, especially during the early years of the Great Depression.

Although the rum runners broke the law, their friends and neighbors usually looked the other way and even lied to local enforcement agencies to protect this income stream. Seasonal residents returning for the summer sometimes found cash in their mailboxes, payment for the use of their empty barns and land as hiding places for illegal booze.

Prohibition banned alcoholic drinks from 1920 until 1933, the result of the passage of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Most residents of Little Compton didn’t support Prohibition, and some took advantage of the demand for liquor to earn much-needed money for their families. Eleanor Simons, the daughter of Little Compton farmer John Flores, remembered her father’s secret rum running:

“I think people didn’t want anybody to know but I think they survived better because of it. Dad’s farm wasn’t as profitable to carry us through.”

The potential profits also enticed businessmen from other areas of the East Coast to set up shop. Manuel Avila came to Little Compton after Prohibition closed his bar in New Bedford, looking for a place with less of the competition and violence that was associated with the illegal liquor trade. In Little Compton he became a central figure in rum running.

Avila kept a safe house on Amesbury Lane where his trusted runners could eat, wash, and rest. In 1927, he bought the old Cornell farmhouse on Adamsville Hill. The house became the center of operations for his “gravel business,” a cover for his rum running. Located uphill from the Westport River, the house allowed for secret liquor deliveries at night and there were numerous places where the booze could be quickly hidden on the farm.

Today, the rum runners are often portrayed as exciting figures—cowboys on boats—but rum running required rough edges and desperate deeds, more than the romantic stories indicate. Rum runners faced the constant threat of being arrested or shot, either by the Coast Guard or by their rivals. Smuggling liquor during Prohibition was a dangerous, illegal business in an economically desperate time.

Many people also remember the Little Compton rum runners as farmers and fishermen, husbands and brothers. Manny Avila was known as a strong family man. His godson, Barry Federman, remembered Manny and his wife Nettie as “very fine, generous people, some of the nicest people you would ever want to meet.”

For more (including 3 images & 1 audio file) view the original article

Jane Tobes, possibly an enslaved woman, admitted that she brought rum to the men working in the fields, enticing them to neglect their work and get drunk. So, on July 7, 1772, the judge of the Tiverton Court, Job Almy, laid down the law: “I do sentence her to be whipt ten lashes on her Naked back well laid on.”

Shortly after Almy’s pronouncement, the crack of a whip sounded as a man lashed Tobes’ back while she stood topless, tied to the stone whipping post that stood in what is now a parking lot.

By 1838, Rhode Island had replaced corporal punishment like whipping with a plan for its first state prison. But according to local lore, the scourging of women ceased in Tiverton decades before, when a group of the town’s women engaged in civil disobedience to save one of their own from sharing the painful fate of Jane Tobes.

There are a couple of versions of the story, but both of them involve Isaac Wilbour, a Quaker from Little Compton. Wilbour is still the only person from Sakonnet to serve as Rhode Island’s governor, from 1806 to 1807, which allows us to date the supposed events.

In one version of the story, Governor Wilbour was on his way home to Little Compton when he happened upon the scene of “a woman, her back bared, tied to the whipping post,” while a sheriff read the sentence. In another version, it was Wilbour who read the court’s decision that “the condemned prisoner shall be tied to an upright post and flogged.”

In both versions, a mob of enraged women surrounded the condemned, demanding she be set free without being whipped. Wilbour pondered a moment, and then judiciously said, “But ladies, if it happened there should be no ‘upright post’ then how could the law be carried out?” Taking his hint, the women worked together to pull down the whipping post, leaving it lying in the dirt.

If the story is true, we might hope that the whipping post and it intended purpose disappeared forever, but a 1957 photograph shows it standing here, against the clapboard shingles of the John Almy House, which bore a plaque reading, “Whipping Post 1719—1812.” In 1957, Almy’s house was razed for the parking lot of the new Gray’s Ice Cream, and the whipping post disappeared.

Don’t be fooled by the granite obelisk across the street that looks something like the genuine article. Some local people believe that a history-minded person rescued the real whipping post from oblivion as a landscaping stone, wrapped it in burlap, and buried it near Four Corners. When word of the hiding place got around, the people who wished to preserve the post dug it up and hid it elsewhere.

Maybe the whipping post will reappear one day, perhaps in the corn crib at the Chace-Cory House, or leaning against the wall at Gray’s, as if waiting in the long line to place an order. Or maybe the people who preserved it will present themselves for the credit they deserve. Perhaps Jane Tobes would prefer that it remain hidden, just as she hid the scars on her back.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

A tall man in a long, dark coat and a broad-brimmed hat walked the 2,000 feet across Stone Bridge from the Portsmouth shore to the Tiverton side, where a toll keeper waited to collect his fare. The man passed the money to the keeper, William Cranston, and remarked: “It is a cold blustery day.”

The Stone Bridge keeper’s house provided a warm refuge from the chill of that day, December 20, 1832, but the man declined Cranston’s invitation to come in, saying he was bound for Fall River.

“I shut the gate about sundown,” Cranston later testified, when the man, the Reverend Ephraim Avery, stood trial for the murder of Sarah Maria Cornell, a pregnant Fall River mill worker, whose body was found at sunrise on December 21, hanging from a pole on Job Durfee’s farm.

“There is a way by which passengers can get round the gate at night, after it is closed,” Cranston said. “They have to get down the wall on the beach just where the tide flows, and step up the other side; I sometimes look to see if any people have left tracks passing that way.”

On the morning after the tall man crossed the bridge, Cranston saw tracks “fresh and distinct” in the sand, leading around the toll gate toward the Portsmouth side.

It’s not surprising that Tiverton’s Stone Bridge played a key role in the salacious Avery-Cornell murder trial. For more than 150 years, Stone Bridge acted as a funnel through which anyone traveling across the Sakonnet River on foot, horseback, wagon—or later, automobile and street car—had to pass.

From the 1680s until 1795, when the Rhode Island Bridge Company built a wooden bridge here, a ferry shuttled goods, horses, wagons, and people across the Sakonnet River. The first bridge lasted two years before a high tide swept it away. The rebuilt bridge lasted one year, and ferry service resumed for a decade until subscribers raised $80,000. In 1810, travelers began to cross the new bridge constructed of 280,000 tons of stone at a cost of more than $200,000.

The Great Gale of September 1815 bit a 200-foot chunk out of the bridge, and a gale in 1868 caused a similar breach, prompting the state to take control of a new, toll-free bridge in 1871. The free bridge became a popular spot for hooking striped bass, blue fish, and shark, with one reported landing of a 500-pounder.

Trolley cars from the Newport and Fall River Street Railways began crossing the bridge in 1898, which required replacing the old wooden draw with iron and steel strong enough to hold 20 tons.

On the Tiverton side of the bridge, a village of stores, fish markets, and blacksmith shops blossomed. For more than 100 years, a succession of inns at the foot of the bridge served weary travelers and hosted milestone celebrations for town residents until the 1980s, when the Stone Bridge Inn was razed.

The last car crossed the Stone Bridge on May 6, 1957. The Hurricane of 1938 and Hurricane Carol in `54 weakened the bridge’s approaches and caused service interruptions, leading to construction of the steel Sakonnet River Bridge about a half-mile north of the Stone Bridge. The Sakonnet River Bridge served from 1956 until its replacement was completed in 2012. After almost 150 years of free crossings over the Sakonnet River, tolls may be imposed on the new Sakonnet River Bridge.

Finally, despite testimony that the Reverend Ephraim Avery crossed the bridge into Tiverton, met with Sarah Maria Cornell, and crossed the bridge back to Portsmouth on the night of her murder, he was found not guilty.

For more (including 5 images) view the original article