Posts tagged ‘Lowell National Historical Park’

December 10th, 2011

Charles Dickens Turning 200: London and Lowell Take Note

by PaulM

Today’s NYTimes includes a brief report about a Charles Dickens app from the Museum of London, produced for the 200th anniversary of Dickens’ birth, which will be on Feb. 7, 2012. Sam Antonacio has been working on something similar as a way to experience Lowell’s history, with the help of the Deshpande Foundation’s Merrimack Valley Sandbox.

Lowell will have a vast array of Dickens events in 2012, including a museum exhibit at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum and activities throughout the city from late March through October. On top of Charles’s 200th birthday, next year is the 170th anniversary of Dickens’ day-trip to Lowell on Feb. 3, 1842, which he famously wrote about in his book “American Notes.”

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November 2nd, 2011

Pres. Obama Announces New National Park at Fort Monroe, Praises Civil War Gen. Benjamin Butler of Lowell

by PaulM

Lowell National Historical Park Supt. Michael Creasey and Asst. Supt. Peter Aucella have both called attention to the President Obama’s announcement of the newest National Park at Fort Monroe in Virginia, which mentions the historic decision by Lowell’s own General Benjamin F.  Butler to declare Southern slaves as contraband of war and “served as a forerunner of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.”—PM

THE WHITE HOUSE, Office of the Press Secretary: For Immediate Release November 1, 2011

ESTABLISHMENT OF THE FORT MONROE NATIONAL MONUMENT BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Known first as “The Gibraltar of the Chesapeake” and later as “Freedom’s Fortress,” Fort Monroe on Old Point Comfort in Virginia has a storied history in the defense of our Nation and the struggle for freedom. Fort Monroe, designed by Simon Bernard and built of stone and brick betweenm1819 and 1834 in part by enslaved labor, is the largest of the Third System of fortifications in the United States. It has been a bastion of defense of the Chesapeake Bay, a stronghold of the Union Army surrounded by the Confederacy, a place of freedom for the enslaved, and the imprisonment site of Chief Blackhawk and the President of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis. It served as the U.S. Army’s Coastal Defense Artillery School during the 19th and 20th centuries, and most recently, as headquarters of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.

Old Point Comfort in present day Hampton, Virginia, was originally named “Pointe Comfort” by Captain John Smith in 1607 when them first English colonists came to America. It was here that the settlers of Jamestown established Fort Algernon in 1609. After Fort Algernon’s destruction by fire in 1612, successive English fortifications were built, testifying to the location’s continuing strategic value. The first enslaved Africans in England’s colonies in America were brought to this peninsula on a ship flying the Dutch flag in 1619, beginning a long ignoble period of slavery in the colonies and, later, this Nation. Two hundred and forty-two yearslater, Fort Monroe became a place of refuge for those later generations escaping enslavement.

During the Civil War, Fort Monroe stood as a foremost Union outpost in the midst of the Confederacy and remained under Union Army control during the entire conflict. The Fort was the site of General Benjamin Butler’s “Contraband Decision” in 1861, which provided a pathway to freedom for thousands of enslaved people during the Civil War and served as a forerunner of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Thus, Old Point Comfort marks both the beginning and end of slavery in our Nation. The Fort played critical roles as the springboard for General George B. McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign in 1862 and as a crucial supply base for the siege of Petersburg by Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant in 1864 and 1865. After the surrender of the Confederacy, Confederate President Jefferson Davis was transferred to Fort Monroe and remained imprisoned there for 2 years.

Fort Monroe is the third oldest United States Army post in continuous active service. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It provides an excellent opportunity for the public to observe and understand Chesapeake Bay and Civil War history. At the northern end of the North Beach area lies the only undeveloped shoreline remaining on Old Point Comfort, providing modern-day  visitors a sense of what earlier people saw when they arrived in the New World. The North Beach area also includes coastal defensive batteries, including Batteries DeRussy and Church, which were used from the 19th Century to World War II.

WHEREAS section 2 of the Act of June 8, 1906 (34 Stat. 225, 16 U.S.C. 431) (the “Antiquities Act”), authorizes the President, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments, and to reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with the proper care and management of the objects to be protected; . . . NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK  OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by the authority vested in me by section 2 of the Antiquities Act, hereby proclaim that all lands and interests in lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States within the boundaries described on the accompanying map, which is attached to and forms a part of this proclamation, are hereby set apart and reserved as the Fort Monroe National Monument (monument) for the purpose of protecting the objects identified above. . . .

All Federal lands and interests in lands within the boundaries of this monument are hereby appropriated and withdrawn from all forms of entry, location, selection, sale, leasing, or other disposition under the public land laws, including withdrawal from location, entry, and patent under the mining laws, and from disposition under all laws relating to mineral and geothermal leasing. Lands and interests in lands within the monument’s boundaries not owned or controlled by the United States shall be reserved as part of the monument upon acquisition of ownership or control by the United States. . . .

Nothing in this proclamation shall be deemed to revoke any existing withdrawal, reservation, or appropriation; however, the monument shall be the dominant reservation. Warning is hereby given to all unauthorized persons not to appropriate, injure, destroy, or remove any feature of this monument and not to locate or settle upon any of the lands thereof.

IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand this first day of November, in the year of our Lord two thousand eleven, and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and thirty-sixth.

BARACK OBAMA

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October 19th, 2011

‘Lowell Morning’ by Richard Marion

by PaulM

“Lowell Morning” by Richard Marion (c) 2011

See more artwork at www.richardmarion.net

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September 25th, 2011

Lowell ‘Foodways’ Highlighted in Globe

by PaulM

Photo courtesy of Maggie Holtzberg from blog.massfolkarts.org. See also Keepers of Tradition on the blogroll to the right.

Nine, count ‘em, nine color photos of details from Lowell’s multi-ethnic market scene grace page one of the Globe North section of today’s Boston Sunday Globe. The article by Taryn Plumb recounts a recent bus tour of ethnic markets organized by folklorist Maggie Holtzberg of Lowell National Historical Park. The well-attended bus tour and resulting publicity illustrate just how big a draw the city’s multi-cultural cuisine is. An authentic resource, these businesses are a key to deriving as much value as possible from the creative economy slice of the region’s economic pie. We can’t buy this kind of positive publicity with the money in the City’s marketing budget. Presented to the public in innovative ways, aspects of Lowell sell themselves to the media—which is a big plus.

At Cote’s Market the other day, I picked up a pint of beans, stuffed peppers, Chinese Pie, and a square of salmon puffed pastry that was warm from the oven. Owner Roger Levasseur said the tour and related buzz led to an immediate boost in activity at the long-standing Salem Street store that offers Franco-American specialities and a wide array of ready-to-heat comfort foods. “A couple of days later my big refrigerated case of prepared foods was practically wiped out by mid-afternoon,” he said. “All kinds of people had heard about us. It was great.”

Kudos to the small-business owners who keep these traditions alive, and kudos to Maggie Holtzberg and David Blackburn of the Park Service for their creative approach to designing public programs. Here’s an example of the challenge Lowell seeks to achieve in its presentation of cultural experiences. How can the experience had by the 35 people on the bus be offered to larger numbers of people without disrupting the operations of small distinctive businesses that are clearly an attraction? Residents can easily enough buy in the stores once they know about them. For visitors, do we point to these special places and encourage people to discover them on their own or should there be regular tours enhanced by the knowledge of folklorists and Park Rangers? How do you “organize” the experience and keep it genuine—steering clear of a packaged ”theme park” feeling? This is what’s different about managing a National Park in the middle of a living city. The Park Service on this tour showed how it is done.

 

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September 23rd, 2011

Kerouac Festival Schedule, Oct. 6 – 10; New Exhibit Opens at National Park Visitor Center

by PaulM

Here’s the schedule of activities for the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! festival, which starts on Thursday, Oct. 6, and runs through the Columbus Day holiday on Oct. 10.

Note that on Thursday, Oct. 6, at 5 pm, there will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony and reception to officially open the new permanent exhibit about Kerouac at the Lowell National Historical Park Visitor Center. The display introduces people to Kerouac’s life and literature and orients them to the Kerouac literary places in Lowell. This is the project that UMass Lowell Prof. Mike Millner and I worked on for the past year with Park Service staff David Blackburn and Jack Herlihy. To do this, Mike and I were awarded a grant from the Creative Economy Initiative of the UMass President’s Office. John Sampas of the Kerouac Estate generously provided certain images and permission to reprint book excerpts. For the smaller Visitor Center space, Chris Danemeyer of Proun Design adapted the look he created for the “On the Road” scroll manuscript exhibit at the Boott Mills Gallery in 2007.

 

 

 

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September 4th, 2011

Labor Day, 1992: NYTimes on Lowell

by PaulM

On September 7, 1992, Labor Day that year, the lead editorial was about Lowell and Lowell National Historical Park. It was tremendous exposure for the city and our history. Read the editorial here from the NYT archives, and get the paper if you want more.

Here’s how it begins:

Youngsters who are made to troop through America’s historic landmarks might reasonably conclude that in the past, rich was typical. Ordinary people are shown mainly as servants, or as slaves, in the sumptuous mansions and town houses that predominate in what are grandly called “heritage tours.”

Labor Day is a powerfully apt occasion to celebrate an exception: the Lowell National Historical Park, set in a gritty Massachusetts city. Here America’s working men and women have starring roles in the epic called “The Industrial Revolution.” A thundering score sets the mood, provided by 88 belt-driven looms in an unusual factory museum run by the National Park Service.

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August 22nd, 2011

Dickens Bicentenary in 2012

by PaulM

On Facebook, I received a notice about the people at Penguin Books saying they are re-reading all of Charles Dickens’ books in anticipation of the 200th anniversary of his birth next year. 2012 also marks an anniversary of Dickens’ visit to Lowell, which he wrote about in “American Notes.” UMass Lowell, Lowell Nat’l Hist. Park, and various community partners will offer a major exhibit at the Boott Mills Museum, talks by scholars, youth programs, and more.  The project website is up at UMass Lowell. Check in for details.

On a site called charlesdickenspage.com, I found these references to the Lowell visit. There is much more out there, but these are brief and colorful.

Boston Evening Transcript
February 5, 1842

Mr. Dickens visited Lowell on Thursday the 3rd, and examined the several manufacturing establishments in that city. Yesterday he paid a visit to our venerable alma mater-Harvard University. He will leave town this afternoon for Worchester in company with Governor Davis, where he will remain until Monday, when he will proceed to Springfield, thence to Hartford, where he has accepted an invitation to a dinner to be given there on Tuesday.

Lowell Advertiser (Lowell Massachusetts)
February 5, 1842

Miffed at not receiving a personal visit the Lowell Advertiser reports:

Boz was in this city last week. The reason we did not mention it was because he passed our office without calling. He didn’t call in the Courier or the people either. How in the name of reason can he expect puffs and popular applause?

 

 

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August 18th, 2011

Andover & Boston

by PaulM

My wife and I did the be-a-tourist-in-your-own-state thing again yesterday as part of our “stay-cation” approach this summer. We started and ended our day in Andover, but spent most of the bright blue-sky day in Boston, which looked very good in the parts we visited.

Boston King Coffee on Main Street in Andover was our first stop for something different to begin the day. It’s a fine local eatery with a “Rainbow Scramble” egg dish (diced colored peppers, tomatoes, tofu, and ham) that we highly recommend. The menu lists Richardson’s Ice Cream, so I asked if it was from Richardson’s Dairy in Dracut—it’s from Middleton. The magazines on a side table included several issues of Forbes and a fancy wine publication. Just like the Owl Diner.

We moved right along to Boston after the rush hour and parked at a pricey garage near Faneuil Hall for convenience. We wanted to walk the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greeenway, which has been on our “to do” list. The day was perfect, sunny with a slight breeze off the harbor and powder blue overhead. We traversed the whole string of parks (North End, Wharf District, Fort Point Channel, Dewey Square, and Chinatown).

Web photo by Pennington courtesy of panoramio.com

Along the way we encountered fountains, magnificent flowers of many varieties, a vegetable garden, permanent and temporary sculptures, stretches of thick and well-maintained grass, plenty of benches and individual red steel chairs, swaths of sunflowers and black-eyed Susans, a mass of bamboo and a bold red angular arch referencing the familiar old ornate gateway to Chinatown, an artificial brook, and lots of people of all ages enjoying being outside. The Greenway makes a second Boston Common, only long and narrow. On either side of the Greenway the city presents itself as an attractive, energetic capital. My impression is that Boston post-Big Dig is so much more vivid and so much less gritty and hard-edged. With the ocean and Harbor Islands providing a vista to the east and the greened-up streetscape, recycled seaside commercial buildings, and steel-and-glass towers forming the land’s edge in that district, Boston really feels like a world-class city on the order of London or New York.

We circled back to the Wharf District via an inland path that took us through Downtown Crossing, past the failed huge Borders Bookstore and bronze Irish Famine Memorial, to the North End through Christopher Columbus Park with its own Rose Kennedy tribute rose garden whose caretakers are the Friends of the park. We wound our way through the always interesting North End, stopping at the iconic Paul Revere on horseback statue and stepping into the Old North Church at 193 Salem Street, dating from 1723 (“the oldest standing church building in Boston”). We learned something new: the two lanterns hung from the steeple on April 18, 1775, were displayed to watch guards in Charlestown for “one minute” only, according to the guide in the church. That was enough to foil British plans to disrupt rebel activity in Lexington and Concord.

By 12.30 pm, we were ready to eat again and picked a small pizza place on Salem Street, one whose compact dining room opened onto the street. As of yesterday, it was the best pizza we have tasted—maybe being so hungry helped. The place, whose name I can’t recall, has a white decor with a bar on the left and small kitchen in the back. There are tables for maybe 20 people. On the way to lunch we bought Italian cookies at a tiny bakery, also on Salem St., which we sampled when we sat for a while along the waterfront before retrieving our car.

On the way home we retraced our route through Andover, where we bought a few books and a cool, collectible “On the Road”  orange steel water bottle from Penguin Books at the Andover Bookstore (founded in 1809). We walked up and down Main Street, loaded with small businesses that appeared to be doing well enough. We spotted a couple of For Rent signs on side streets, but overall the downtown is lively. Near 4 p.m., we left town to do one last errand.

One local note for my friends at LNHPark. The Harbor Islands National Park info pavilion near the Aquarium was stocked with brochures from every Park in Massachusetts except Lowell and Saugus Iron Works. Either Lowell is popular or they need a supply of the standard brochures down there. The interpretive signage at the pavilion and all over the wharf district is top-notch. Boston collectively has done an excellent job on its public spaces in that part of the city.

 

 

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August 7th, 2011

More Folk Festival Coverage

by PaulM

Folklorist Maggie Holtzberg of Lowell National Historical Park and the Massachusetts Cultural Council posted many photographs with commentary from the recent Lowell Folk Festival on her blog Keepers of Tradition, which you can find on the rh.com blogroll to the right on the home page. Here’s the connection.

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August 1st, 2011

Debo Band and Fendika

by PaulM

I second the emotion of the Globe’s Stuart Munro when he writes in today’s review of the Lowell Folk Festival that he was “bowled over” by the surprising performances of the Boston-based Debo Band with guest singers and dancers from Fendika of Ethiopia. Yesterday afternoon at the Dance Pavilion off Dutton Street, Debo and friends must have softened the asphalt in the parking lot under the wooden dance floor with their super-hot funked-up jazz inflected with Afro-pop sounds. They had many hundreds of people moving every which-a-way and clapping on-and-off rhythm under the could-have-been revival tent. Big blasts of golden horns, peppery runs on harmonica keys, drumbeats that bounced in all the chest cavities, driving guitar licks, and jet-powered singing—all this from about 15 artists making one huge sound.

You want to see something new when you are walking around the Festival, whether it’s your first close-up view of a man carving wooden ducks or a different brand of music and-or dancing. When Fendika’s lead man started ecstatically shaking in place at the climax of one of the group’s towering numbers, my wife and I saw something new. He was like strawberries in a musical blender revving at top speed. When he peaked out he just stopped and threw his arms wide. Everybody was spent.

The group had CD’s for sale, but I don’t think a plastic disk can transmit anything close to what we experienced. The “live” aspect of the Lowell Folk Festival is the game-changer. The Quebe Sisters might be pleasant listening on Prairie Home Companion radio waves, but you have to lean on the black iron fence at St. Anne’s churchyard to soak up their harmonies for full effect. The same goes for The Rhythm of Rajasthan performers with their music from northern India and the Birmingham Sunlights and their Alabama gospel songs, both of whom enchanted audiences at Boarding House Park and on other stages this weekend. Where else is one person going to bounce from one cultural tradition to another so easily as at the Lowell festival?

My final words for this post are about the food. Is Lowell a food-fest or what? From delectable bbq ribs at the Thai tent behind Market Mills and lamb shish at the Athenian back lot to brain-freezing Richie’s Italian Ice scooped out by a cart-man on John Street to the vegetable-stuffed eggrolls at the Filipino booth, what more can a festival-goer expect? And plenty of cold drinks everywhere.

Final, final words: A job well done by the hundreds and hundreds of people who put together the weekend show, put up the money for the talent and travel and equipment, and put out a thousand-percent effort in support of this community treasure called The Lowell Folk Festival.

Final, final, final words: Is this the one weekend when downtown Lowell really functions like “a park” in answer to the familiar question, Where is the Park anyway? The blocks of preserved downtown buildings on festival weekend become the architectural props around which the story is told, as Pat Mogan way back said they would. People, not cars, owned the streets, and there was still room for needed vehicles and electric carts. The scene is more real than “Main Street” at Disney, and an authentic “adventureland” and a hint of  “tomorrowland” for people who want the good things that small cities can offer.

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