Headed to the usual tourist spots like Boston and St. Augustine? Don’t miss these often overlooked landmarks just down the road.
With the summer travel season upon us, many families are gearing up for trips to historic hot spots. Gettysburg, Philadelphia and Mount Vernon are all crowd-pleasers, but there are many other interesting sites that don’t always attract throngs. Some are in national parks, some off the beaten path and some in the shadow of more familiar landmarks — literally, just a few miles away. Here are a handful of places from America’s hidden history, involving tales that your textbooks might have left out:
Headed to Boston?
Beantown tops New England’s list of historic stops, yet don’t forget Haverhill, Mass. The town features one of the first permanent statues erected to honor a woman in America: a murderous Massachusetts mother who was one of America’s most famous women. Hannah Duston was captured by Abenaki Indians in 1697 and, after a long march, she and two other captives managed to kill and scalp the Indian family holding them — six of them children. Duston made her way home and became a legend in her time. The statue in her honor — scalps in one hand, hatchet in the other — was erected in Haverhill in 1874. (The scalps are gone now, but the dispute over the spelling of her last name rages on. Some historians argue that it should be Dustin.)
Headed to St. Augustine?
While tourists flock to this Florida town to visit the first permanent European settlement in America, fewer visitors find their way to Fort Matanzas, about 14 miles south. Its name comes from the Spanish word for “slaughters.” The fort is near the site of a mass execution of shipwrecked Frenchmen in the fall of 1565, killed because they were Protestants. Victims of a religious war, they were America’s true first pilgrims, having come here in search of a place to worship 56 years before the Mayflower sailed.
Headed to Independence Hall?
A few blocks from this famous place in Philadelphia, a plaque at Walnut and Third streets marks the site of Fort Wilson, named for a little-known founding father. Scottish-born James Wilson came to America in 1765 and became a successful attorney. He was a leader in the independence movement and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. But during the American Revolution, militiamen angry about food shortages and price gouging attacked Wilson and other city leaders in Wilson’s Philadelphia home. During the “Fort Wilson Riot,” five men died before Wilson and his colleagues were rescued by Continental Army troops. As a framer of the Constitution, Wilson is credited with creating the system of “electors” to choose a president but also was the first and only Supreme Court justice to be jailed.
Headed to Saratoga Battlefield?
Saratoga National Historical Park in New York hosts a statue of the boot of Benedict Arnold, where he led a charge in one of American history’s most important victories and was wounded in the leg not long before he became America’s most notorious traitor. Nearby is Fort Ticonderoga, set above Lake Champlain. It was here in May 1775 that Arnold helped capture the British fort, securing the cannons that later chased the British army from Boston. Arnold’s role in this crucial attack, however, was deliberately “airbrushed” out of most history books.
You can read and learn more about the background of these places in my bestseller America’s Hidden History
This blog is excerpted from my article that originally appeared in USA Weekend.
Grateful appreciation to webmaster Ron Tuell for permission to use the
illustration of Hannah Dustin, taken from the website http://www.ci.haverhill.ma.us/
