Journal Opinion Nov. 25, 2020
“Question
about so many tramps traveling in our streets, able bodied and some of them
young men getting their board and lodging out of benevolent people…when they
could be at work.” Bradford Opinion,
April 17, 1875.
The above was a letter to the editor of
the Bradford Opinion from a reader in Fairlee. It began a series of letters
regarding the number of tramps in the area at that time. This column deals with
several itinerate groups that made the local news in times past. These, often
unwelcomed groups, include transient poor, gypsies, peddlers as well as
tramps.
Every town is on a road to somewhere
else. There are always people just
passing through. In previous columns I wrote about transients and short-term
visitors. Readers can find my columns on short-term visitor such as summer
campers, tourists and commune dwellers on my blog at larrycoffin.blogspot.com.
There is also an article on hotels and taverns that catered to wagon drivers,
railroad workers and other commercial travelers.
To these groups we could add families in
wagons headed to or from northern parts of New England, runaway slaves seeking
freedom in Canada and migrant workers seeking short term employment. Passengers
on stagecoaches or railroad and passenger cars pass through give only a brief
glance at our hometowns. Even stranded hitchhikers wish only to pass through.
Prior to the establishment of town poor
farms in the 19th century, the transient poor were given the heave-ho by New England
towns. Voters did not want the expense of supporting those who moved from
another town, a situation that often caused hard feelings.
In New Hampshire, the practice of “warning
out” newcomers who had no visible means of support began as early as 1641. This
practice continued after New Hampshire became a state.
In 1787, Vermont granted the right to
towns to exclude strangers while supporting their own improverished residents
and a number of local towns used that option. Between that year and 1816 when
the law was repealed, Newbury warned 21 different families. Not everyone who
was warned left town, but they were ineligible for town support.
Ever since the middle of the 19th century,
every economic downturn has created homeless individuals. Generally men, these
homeless vagrants have been called bum,
hobo or tramp. While the titles are often used interchangeable, some online
sources make the following distinctions. A hobo is a migrant worker or homeless
vagrant, a tramp is one who is homeless but will seek or do work if forced to
and a bum is one who will not work at all.
In the decades following the Civil War and
again after 20th century conflicts, legions of unemployed veterans tramped the
roads or hitched rides on railroad freights cars. Many of these men could be
described as walking wounded.
During the economic depression that began
in 1873, the term “tramp” became used for a vagrant with not visible means of
support. Newspapers reports warned of “the tramp evil becoming a terror to
rural homes.”
In July 1875, the following appeared in
the Bellows Falls Times: “Crimes by tramps have become so frequent…that soon
people will have no other resource left
but to treat them as outlaws generally.“
In May 1878, “a tramp enraged the wife of
Roswell Cora while she was alone in her house at West Fairlee because she
refused him some cider.” He was arrested and confined in the tramp house in
Bradford.
The threat from “hordes of vagabonds,”
caused both states to pass severe anti-trump laws with imprisonment threatened.
Some of the leading proponents of these measures had local connections.
In New
Hampshire, Gilman Marston of Exeter was the primary sponsor of the bill. Marston was born in Orford in 1811. Ellis Bliss,
Jr. of Bradford played a similar role in Vermont’s 1878 tramp law. Bliss had
been Bradford’s overseer of the poor for 21 years and in 1878 had 518 tramps
coming to him for food and lodging.
These stringent laws caused the number of
tramps to decline briefly in both two states. The St. Johnsbury Caledonian
printed a “letter” from one tramp to another that closed with the following. “U
won’t ketch me in this stat again…ceep clere of Vermont for it iz not a good
hum for a sensitive tramp.”
However, the number of tramps subsequently
increased with each economic downturn. In 1898, the United Opinion reported
“Tramps are getting very thick.” In 1905, Piermont used its jail “to provide a
suitable place for criminals and tramps.” Each year, local towns appropriated
funds for the care of tramps.
In 1909, when Groton offered tramps “a
loaf of bread and can of salmon or piece of cheese” and allowed them to stay in
the jail, the editor of the Groton Times warned “if this continues, Groton will
be the tramp’s headquarters and the village at their mercy.”
During the Great Depression the number of
unemployed vagrants again increased. In 1932, the town of Newbury fed and
lodged 1,421 tramps. Fairlee’s overseer of the poor maintained the town’s tramp
house at the north end of Main Street. It was recalled that “tramps jumped the
train at the dump site to get food and other items offered by the town
residents.” The town provided a meal of bread and beans and one-night shelter.
Tramps were known to write messages on
telephone poles advising others who traveled from town to town in search of odd
jobs and meals. Some might warned of local police, whereas other messages told
of places that offered assistance.
One of those messages must have directed
men to my parents’ house on Bridge Street in Orford. They were never turned away. I recall one
late afternoon that a disheveled looking man came to our back door asking for
food. My Mom was preparing supper and offered him some stew. He politely replied
that he hoped for raw ingredients that he could take back to what might be
known as a “hobo kitchen.”
Martina Day
Stever recalls that during the Great Depression, tramps often stopped by the
family farmhouse in Piermont “to ask if there was any work they could do for a
meal.” There was always, she recalls, wood
to chop or other work to do. Her grandmother always fed them and they were
never afraid of the men who came to their door.
Another group of transients common to the
area was the door-to-door peddler. In the early 1800s, both New Hampshire and
Vermont gave local authorities the power to license hawkers and peddlers. Well
into the early 20th century, local peddlers carried goods from local stores to
rural locations. These along with honest peddlers of everything from tools to
domestic necessities in established territories were a welcomed sight to
isolated homes.
But there was serious concern about
unscrupulous transient swindlers, most of whom apparently ignored the law. In
the 1850s, there were warnings about itinerant liquor peddlers “who retail
their wares from the bottle.”
In the 1870s, local newspaper articles
warned against the infestation of “innumerable swindlers…who are busily engaged
in defrauding honest people, particularly farmers.” The Bradford Opinion
carried the following warning against street venders in the village: “Things
are not always what they seem.”
In the 1880s, both states attempted to
only license peddlers who had lived in the state for at least a year. However,
these laws were overturn by Federal courts as discriminatory against citizens
of other states.
While improved transportation to village
stores and the rise of catalog sales put an end to many itinerate peddlers,
some legitimate door-to- door sales were continued locally by Watkins, Grand
Union and Sunbeam. Unfortunately, as late as this year, there were warnings in
both states against swindlers who visited homes to sell everything from home
security systems to property repairs.
One group of scammers that have targeted
the two states in recent years offering home repairs are generally considered
to be gypsies. One large such families has visited the area, traveling with new
pickups and travel trailers, and selling scam-related driveway and barn roof
repairs.
Most Roma or gypsies first came to the
United States in the late 1800s. While newspaper accounts may have confused
actual Roma with Native Americans, the following is a summary of reports about
groups identified in town histories and vintage news reports as gypsies. The
terms Roma or Rom did not appear in earlier Vermont newspapers.
While most reports are of travelers, one
large extended family of gypsies were living more or less permanently near
Barrington, NH as early as the 1840s. Known for their basket making, the
so-called Leather Family was described by a reporter in 1871 as “a hard looking
lot.” The reporter was there to write a
report on two murders suspected to be connected to the group.
In the 1890s, gypsy caravans in
elaborately painted wagons and tents were seen in area towns. They were known
to camp on the outskirts of villages. In Haverhill, a band of about 40 camped
at the end of the Bedell Bridge for the summer buying and selling horses. In
Bradford, south of the village. One farmer north of Bradford met a gypsy woman
on his front steps where he traded chickens for homemade lace.
Corinth’s history includes the following:
For years each summer great bands of gypsies camped on Cilley Flats when the
East Corinth Fair was held. “They were not allowed to swap horses on the
fairground and would lure any perspective customers to their encampment for a
drink of hard liquor which was banned in the town.” It was “Yankee cunning against Gypsy
slyness,” and, when the gypsies won, “they departed quietly in the night before
violent physical action could be taken.”
Newspaper reports referred to the gypsies
in the most negative of term, creating a lasting stereotype. They were called “bloodsucker
of organized society,” pickpockets or kidnappers of children and chickens. The
threat that “strolling gypsies” would kidnap white children was mentioned in
Boston as early as 1794. This continued to be an accusation, but no cases of
child abduction were ever proven.
Around 1917, a band of about 25 gypsies
traveled through the area flash mobbing local businesses. In May, six women from the band overpowered
the owner of a local store in Barnet and seized his pocketbook. Three carloads
of the band descended on Barre stores, grabbing items and money. When the band
caused problems in Orange, someone telephone Wait River where “the storekeeper
locked up his store and hid.”
In 1926, “several automobiles with Gypsy
occupants, men, women and children, were detained in the street…pending the
return of $65 taken by a Gypsy fortune teller” from a local man. In 1935, a
Bradford man lost $22 when a gypsy woman who claimed to be a healer picked his
pocket.
In 1927, the
infamous Eugenics Survey referred to as many as 430 “Gypsy Families” in
Vermont. But according to the study, these were Vermonters “with dark skin due
to an admixture of negro and Indian blood.”
In July 1930, Bradford merchants were
alerted of a similar band and organized to repel them. Police escorted this
band to the New Hampshire border where they were met by state police and
“furnished a through escort to the opposite state border.”
In the mid-1960s, the Vermont State Police
placed merchants on Bradford’s main street on alert of a gypsy band and some
closed prematurely. The general feeling was that local towns were inhospitable
as “gypsies had outlived their welcome.” About that same time, the roof and
drive scammers made another visit to the area, a visit that has been repeated
several times since.
Within the past two years I have
finished three projects focusing on the ancestors of my wife and myself. Each one goes back at least 12 generations to
those whom initially came to New England as part of the Great Migration.
As
I looked at the hundreds of our ancestors, I came to know about those who
settled in a location and stayed and those that frequently moved on to new
locations. There were even several who were “warned out” of town.
So while this column deals with groups of
transients, individuals who just passed through our area, I am inclined to
think from the perspective of generations and centuries, we are all fairly
transient. While we may linger more or less than others, we are truly just passing
through.
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