Monroe Williams and the 12th Regiment

While researching the 7th Massachusetts Regiment for the Saturday blog, I visited Google Books to see if a regimental history was available for free. It was and in the history was this picture of First Lieutenant Monroe Williams:

Probably created from a carte de visite, the most common photograph size of the Civil War, to the best of my knowledge this engraving is the first portrait of an Easton man in uniform to be rediscovered. There may be a group photograph that includes Sergeant Philander Fecto of Easton, but I have not seen it for many years. It is ironic that Lt. Williams is pictured with an engraving rather than a photograph since he made his living as a photographer. His photo shop was on the west corner of Williams and Main Street. The old building disappeared when Williams Street was widened in 1905. Williams was severely wounded in the left shoulder at the Battle of Chancellorsville on May 3, 1863. The author of the regimental history was also wounded in that battle and his history details the suffering of the men as they were moved from hospital to hospital. "Moved" is not precisely the term as at one point the wounded had to crawl from one field hospital to a safer location. Williams remained in hospital for months before being discharged in August. His war experience may have given him post traumatic stress disorder since he didn't marry for seven years at the advanced age of 40. I admit that's pure speculation based on the age and the haunted look in the eyes of the engraving.

A quick word about the 12th Massachusetts Regiment to finish our Memorial Day Special about the first three year regiments to enlist. The 12th claimed to be the first three year regiment to be formed which is true to a point. The unit formed in April as another short term regiment under the command of Daniel Webster's son Fletcher. It was not included in the call that lead to the formation of the 2nd and 7th Regiments as three year units because it was already in training. A little wire pulling by Webster quickly rectified this and the 12th became a three year unit. Company F was recruited in Brockton and had a few Easton men at the start with more later. Martland's Band of Brockton enlisted en masse to become the regimental band. The regiment had a man named John Brown in it, and, while training at Fort Warren in Boston Harbor, the boys took an old southern hymn learned from a regular army unit posted at the fort and turned it into "John Brown's Body" as a joke about their friend and the famous abolitionist.  The 12th sang the song at every opportunity-the line about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree being particularly well received-and it became a national sensation. When Julia Ward Howe heard another unit singing the song while marching through Washington, she took the tune and added new lyrics creating "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." Martland's Band continued in operation after the war and performed at the dedication of the Civil War Memorial in Easton on Memorial Day, 1882.

Arden Schofield

Ellen Sheridan called me last night with the very sad news that our friend Arden Schofield had passed away at age 93 last Wednesday. Arden was a remarkable person who made a tremendous impact on a generation of students with his stories of being a prisoner of the Germans in World War II.

A Thayer Academy graduate and retired Braintree school teacher, Arden devoted many hours of his retirement to speaking to students in many towns, but we all like to think of him as a member of the OA staff. Beyond a coffee and doughnuts and a free school lunch, Arden never charged for teaching 200 students a year about World War II.

Arden enlisted in the service in 1941 while a student in the BU music department, but the focus of his story was 1944's Battle of the Bulge. An assistant chaplain in the headquarters artillery company of the 106th Division, Arden remembered playing hymns on an organ in an abandoned church on December 15, 1944 at the behest of Captain Jack Pitts. The next day "all hell broke loose" and Captain Pitts was killed as German troops camouflaged in white quickly surrounded their position. Arden and others in his unit were marched through the snow during the coldest winter of the war to boxcars for transfer to Bad Orb, a notorious German prison camp. Along the route the train was bombed by the Royal Air Force. Arden spent five months in the prison camp. Fed on bread made mostly from sawdust, he was suffering from dysentery and had dropped to just 80 pounds when the camp was liberated by General Patton's troops. Arden always brought the few possessions he had in the prison camp to show to students.

Beyond his story, Arden was one of the most charming men I have ever met. A gentleman of the old school, he radiated a love of life and a gentle humor that easily won over even the most disinterested students. His great spirit brought him back to OA year after year even as mobility problems increased. Arden stopped visiting us during the construction of the new high school, and during that time he moved with his wife to a nursing home in Chatham close to their daughter in Brewster. The army chaplain had continued with his music in the Braintree schools and as a church organist. In Chatham Arden took on another career playing classics and show tunes for his fellow residents. Needless to say, he became a local sensation and even issued a CD which has gone threw three printings. According to the staff, the music was wonderful therapy for all the residents.

Arden returned to the new OA one last time. The landscape had changed completely the history department office where he would visit with me between classes had disappeared and the rooms where he taught had become the English Department. Even the teacher's room where he would have lunch with his many OA friends was gone, but Arden enthusiastically embraced the changes and enjoyed his visit as did the students in Ms. Sheridan's classes. Just a few weeks before his passing Arden told his story one last time to his grandson's class on the Cape, a teacher to the end.

 What a wonderful man and a great teacher, I could go on and on with Arden stories, but I'll give the last word to Wes Paul. In Arden's obituary our Principal  says it best: Arden "was a man of great integrity who touched the lives of hundreds of our students. Everyone here will forever miss his visits, love of life, and enthusiasm. He was a great man."

The Bristol County Regiment

Wiilliam Hanna's brilliant History of Taunton is one of the sources for today's blog. Published in 2007 the book is available at the Old Colony Historical Society in Taunton. Other material comes from the survey of North Easton properties that was paid for by CPA funds and a state matching grant.

Secretary of War Simon Cameron gave Massachusetts Governor Andrew permission to raise six three year regiments in early May. They were designated the First, Second, Seventh, Ninth, Tenth, and Eleventh Massachusetts Regiments. The Seventh Massachusetts was soon named the Bristol County Regiment because eight of its ten companies came from there. Company C was the Easton regiment with 39 of its approximately 100 men from our town. Captain Ward L. Foster and all his subordinate officers and non-commissioned officers came from Easton. Foster was a married man of 37 with two children including a daughter called Victory. He is listed in the 1860 census as a shoe manufacturer, a designation suggesting more entrepreneurship than the more common shoemaker. He lived in North Easton, probably along Main Street and had $500 of real property and $1,000 of personal property. His Second Lieutenant Monroe Williams was born and raised in a house still standing at 175 Main Street. Other homes of men of this regiment still stand as well, silent and forgotten monuments to these brave men.

The first commander of the Seventh was Darius Couch (pronounced Coach), he had graduated thirteenth in a class of 59 at West Point in 1846 and served in the Mexican War and Second Seminole War as an artillery officer. In 1854 he led a scientific expedition to Mexico. His health was never strong after his return from Mexico and rather than continue to serve on the frontier he left the service. He had married a Taunton girl and, after a brief career in business in New York, he took an executive position in his father-in-law's  Taunton Copper Company in 1858. Despite being a Democrat who had not voted in the 1860 election, when war broke out, Couch offered his military expertise to Governor Andrew.

 Darius Couch

The Seventh Massachusetts was mustered into service on June 15, 1861 and went into a training camp at the Bristol County Agricultural Society's fairgrounds about a mile from Taunton Green. Along with the 39 men in Company C there were a few Easton men in Company H. Like the units that formed in Boston, the people of Taunton did their best to support the regiment. Couch paraded his troops on Main Street on June 28th, and the men were the guests of the city at a 4th of July celebration at the Green.

The reality that the unit would soon be called to the front caused Eastoners Thomas McNamara, William O'Rourke, Charles E. Williams, and Philip Fay to seek their discharge. One of the men actually left on Independence Day. On July 12, the regiment shipped out by train for Washington, D. C.. As they marched to the train "a huge crowd of friends and relatives cheered their passage." The regiment took the train as far as Groton, Connecticut where it switched to a ship for New York. From New York it was back on the train to Washington.The men spent their first night in the city sleeping under the unfinished dome of the Capitol before being ordered to a camp in Georgetown. The unit would spend much of its first year  in garrison duty defending Washington.
 

A Civil War Weekend

Memorial Day was created by the widows and daughters of the Civil War so it's fitting that the three posts this weekend will about Easton and the Civil War.

By the end of April, Washington had been secured by the arrival of the short term regiments like the 4th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment with its large complement of Easton men. Hopes for an early end to hostilities had begun to fade so the Lincoln administration called for volunteers who were willing to enlist for three years service.

Chaffin's History of Easton says that the Second Massachusetts Regiment was "the second enlistment of men from Easton" and "the first loyal regiment raised for three years service in the war." Chaffin called the Seventh Regiment that enlisted in Taunton in April and May "the third enlistment of volunteers" from Easton. On the other hand the Twelfth Massachussetts Regiment is generally considered to be the first of our state's three year regiments to enlist and it had half a dozen Easton men in it. The argument comes down to dates of formation versus mustered in date which was the date a regiment was officially accepted by the U. S. Army. We'll look at all three regiments this weekend and talk about the 12th's special relationship to Memorial Day in Easton.

Company H of the 2nd Regiment was mustered in May 25, 1861 with 19 Easton men. David Ambrose Middleton won the exalted rank of corporal and most likely the good natured barbs of the company including James McCready who grew up in the same shovel company boarding house with Middleton. Corporal Middleton did not stay in the army long. Instead he resigned and became one of a handful of Easton men who served in the Navy. His biography will be printed in the latest edition of the Historical Society's Reminiscences.

The 2nd Mass trained at Brook Farm in West Roxbury. As with all the early regiments the patriotic citizens of Boston took a great interest in the men and the ladies of Boston presented the unit with its colors. Basic training lasted for a month before the men shipped for Hagarstown, Maryland. They joined General Patterson's brigade at Martinsburg, Maryland on July 12th. In 1861 the regiment did picket duty on the upper Potomac River near Frederick, Maryland with occasional skirmishes with the enemy. Heavy action would follow in 1862 as the unit would be involved in opposing Stonewall Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley, fighting with General McClellan on the Peninsula and participating in the Battle of Antietam. You can see a re-enactment of the 2nd at Antietam in the movie Glory where Captain Robert Gould Shaw played by Matthew Broderick is wounded in the battle.

Lyme Disease

We are now in the peak time of Lyme disease danger (May to July). By now we all know to spray our pants or legs with deet, wear light colored clothes, do tick checks, and stay out of the woods unless you're on a trail that doesn't bring you in contact with low vegetation. This post is not about preventing or treating Lyme disease, it's about how tightly this miserable disease is tied into the life of the forest.

 The carrier of this dangerous disease is the tiny deer tick, which has three separate life stages: larva, nymph, and adult. Newly hatched larvae emerge in mid-summer. They are the size of the period at the end of this sentence and are 99% free of Lyme disease bacteria. These tiny bugs can't move around very much so they need an animal to pass close by in order for them to latch on. At this point the tick can't afford to be picky so it will latch onto almost any mammal, bird, or even reptile that passes by. After drinking blood for three to five days, it drops off and in the course of a month changes into a nymph which remains quiet in the leaf litter throughout the winter and early spring. The nymphs are the size of a poppy seed and they are active now. They climb onto low vegetation to wait for a passing meal. At this time between a quarter and a third of the ticks carry Lyme disease. After feeding for the second time in their life, the nymph lies low and transforms into an adult. The peak time for adult activity is midautumn. Now the size of a sesame seed, the tick can climb up to a meter high on plant to wait for passing large animals like the deer that give the tick its name. Female ticks latch on for another blood meal while males search out females to mate. At this time 50-75% of the ticks carry Lyme disease. The well fed females drop off and live through another winter laying their eggs early the next spring and starting the cycle again.

That all seems very straightforward, but things get complicated quickly. Bambi has gotten a bad rap regarding deer ticks-it's actually the king of the Magic Kingdom Mickey Mouse that is the problem. It turns out that white footed mice are carriers of the Lyme disease bacteria. There are lots of white footed mice running around in the woods so a larval tick has a great chance of sucking on a mouse and picking up Lyme disease. The chance increases again if a nymph attaches to a mouse. The poor deer, like us, are not normally carriers of the disease, they are victims and, unfortunately, public transportation for adult ticks.

We often hear how winter weather can affect tick populations. A snowy winter like the last one is good for dormant ticks because the snow cover protects them from drying out and dying due to frigid winter winds. A less well known factor in tick production are, believe it or not, oak trees.

Oaks have evolved a strategy to beat acorn predators by "randomly" producing boom and bust years for acorns. Whole forests of oaks will produce very few acorns in some years which starves out squirrels, chipmunks, and white footed mice. After a bust year reduces acorn predators, a boom year swamps whatever predators are left with extra acorns leaving many to germinate and make new oaks. Of course, a bumper year also allows the predators to bounce back quickly which is OK with the oaks since white footed mice also eat bugs that attack the trees.

So a bumper year means the next spring there are more white footed mice for baby ticks to bite increasing the chance they will end up carrying Lyme disease. Here's where the deer public transportation system comes in. Normally deer eat tender branches of woody plants. Given their druthers they would prefer to nibble on maple trees rather than oaks because oaks have developed additional defenses for their leaves and branches. In a non-boom year for acorns, you are likely to find a lot of deer ticks in maple forests. Unfortunately, deer love to eat acorns so in a boom year, they and their adult tick riders spend more time in the oak woods. There the female ticks drop off and lay their eggs right in the path of the coming white footed mouse population explosion creating the "perfect storm" for a major outbreak of Lyme in humans.

Now if this wasn't bizarre enough. Let me tell you why gypsy moths are your friend in the fight against Lyme disease. As an invasive species gypsy moths have been able to exploit a loop hole in the oak trees defenses. Normally, gypsy moths are kept in check by, you guessed it, white footed mice which feast on late stage gypsy moth caterpillars, but when an acorn bust causes the mouse population to crash, the moths can defoliate oak trees enough to kill them further suppressing the mouse population and allowing more trees to be killed. Now there are a gazillion baby ticks out there so the population is not going to be wiped out by gypsy moths, but what happens is without mice to latch onto, the larval ticks fasten onto things that don't carry Lyme disease as often as the mice reducing risks for humans.

So what's the answer for controlling ticks?  Should we release more thousands of feral cats into the wilderness to eat the mice? According to Richard Ostfeld who has spent his entire career studying Lyme tick ecology, there are three answers. One is to know tick ecology and avoid places that are having large tick outbreaks. Second is to promote biodiversity. A woods that has an uninterrupted food web is a tick smorgasbord that gives them a chance to suck on something that isn't carrying the Lyme bacteria. For example, cats and humans have made things more difficult for ground nesting and ground feeding birds which are alternate tick hosts that don't carry Lyme disease. And third, deet and tick checks should always remain part of your woodsman's arsenal.

A Tooth on the Internet

Science Daily announced the finding of a Peking Man tooth in a Swedish museum. Peking Man belongs to the species Homo erectus, the first human ancestor to leave Africa. These fossils were excavated during the 1920s and 1930s in a cave system near the Chinese capital at Dragon Bone Hill (named for its dinosaur fossils). The first discoveries were made by representatives of the University of Uppsala during the 1921 an 1923 digging seasons. The 1926 announcement of the discovery of human molars in the material from those digs set off a digging spree that eventually unearthed skulls and stone tools. This was a gigantic discovery at a time when human fossils were extremely rare and the Scopes Monkey Trial reflected the generally hostile view of the average American towards the idea of evolution.

Plaster casts of the skulls were made and distributed to museums around the world, but the actual fossils remained in China until November, 1941 when they were loaded on a train to keep them away from the invading Japanese. The initial destination was a Chinese port city and then the United States. Somewhere en route to the port they disappeared. Speculation abounds about what happened, but a good guess is that they were waylaid by the Japanese and sank on a freighter called Awa Maru in 1945.

All that was left were three teeth at the University of Uppsala, or so it was thought. In reality the first Swedish researcher at the site had sent home about 40 cartons of mixed fossils that were stored in the Swedish museum and forgotten. Dragon Bone Hill also had numerous dinosaur fossils, and the museum has the best collection of Chinese dinosaurs outside China. As viewers of the Discovery Channel know Chinese dinosaurs are "hot" right now so when some Chinese experts visited the  museum, the old boxes were dragged out of storage and unsealed leading to the new discovery. Untouched since it was boxed up, the fractured canine tooth may have "microscopic mineral granules from plant remains" that could tell us what these early humans ate.

I was not the first entity to read this article. The computer program at Science Daily also read it and added links to archived articles about Chinese fossils, mammal tooth marks on dinosaur bones, CSI analysis of the bones of Copernicus, and cold adaptation of Peking Man. It also added advertisements for teeth whitening (the fossil could really use it), a dentist, tooth caps (the skull, if found, will definitely need caps or implants), and Japanese Red Pine Oil-guaranteed to kill all parasites, bacteria, viruses and molds. See for yourself at this link.

Deadline for Comments on the Train is Friday

Friday is the deadline to submit comments on the train through Easton. Nice to know that an agency that pays bonuses for on time performances to train operators who weren't on time and who loses millions in a ticket scam wants to run trash trains through town. Makes you wonder how seriously they'll take the issue of mitigation. Or how about the Army Corps of Engineers performance along the Mississippi? That should fill you with confidence also.

There have been many excellent letters to the editor on the train in the Easton Journal, but most miss an important part of the state's plan: "smart" growth. The trainiacs see North Easton as a target for more intensive development. With sewerage available in North Easton, won't pressure increase to develop 40R projects in the Historic District? Remember that our cash strapped town received a substantial bonus from the state to approve the Queset on the Brook 40R development, and remember also that the cost of town services will increase if the train cuts through the heart of our town.

Meanwhile the Historical Society must already be calculating whether it's possible to have a meeting place and museum next to an active train platform that plans to use its parking lot for a "drop and go." The T has already told the Society it's not their job to police illegal parking so there may be more dropping than going. Always said paint the arches gold and the train station would make a great McDonalds.

We invariably hear from the T that people love to live near train transportation. We better hope that they want to live really, really close to train transportation because the greatest payback for the town's participation in the Beacon project at the Shovel Shop depends on people being willing to buy condominiums there in the future. Let's see: passenger trains, freight trains, trash trains, blocked intersections, traffic, noise, "grab and go" crime, rubbish on the platform. Not going to be showing that in the prospectus for the project any time soon, I bet.

Fly Fishing in Easton

Well, I had an entire blog ready to go on fly fishing when I realized just how incredibly boring it was. Fishing is apparently one of those things that one does and enjoys, but that bores everyone else silly like your great uncle's slides of his trip to the Grand Canyon. Let me try again. If you remember using a spinning rod as a kid and watching a bobber for what seemed like hours, that's not fly fishing. Fly fishing is to regular fishing what NASCAR is to Formula 1 racing. Both great sports, but the need to turn right occasionally makes Formula 1 just a little more interesting for me. Since the noble trout, salmon, or steelhead doesn't exist in Easton, fly fishing here is all about the gear and trying to fool the fish with a little twist of yarn not about catching something to eat. Every once and a while you catch a fish, but that's not really the point.

Successful fly fishing depends on something called "matching the hatch" which means knowing what kind of bugs are either hatching from our waters or laying eggs on them. Different fish eat different things at different times although blue gills, the most common fishable fish in our waters, will usually eat anything that fits in their mouths. The trick is to match the bugs or other imitations to whatever the kind of fish you are looking to catch are actually eating at the place they are actually eating it. This requires a little study of a part of nature most of us are not very familiar with. The reward for correct study is catching the fish you were looking for not the embarrassed bass or pickerel that takes blue gill bait because it was a boring day in the pond.

Personally, I practice catch and release fishing, but would be almost as happy if the fish had a little buzzer they could press to tell me they'd eat that if it was real because the catch and release part is where the ethics of fishing gets complicated. Folks have debated for years whether fish have the brain power to "dislike" being hooked and landed and whether they feel pain in the same way we do. Yes to the first and the jury is still out on the second. Good fisherman now debarb their hooks to give a fish a better chance to escape and make release after a catch quicker and easier, but if your hands are dry, when you catch a fish you can damage their protective layer of slime. Ethically catching blue gills shouldn't be too much of a problem-all the ponds in Easton risk being overrun by them which is bad for the overall population and the ecosystem as a whole. But for me and the individual fish on the end of the line it's always a big deal. Principal Wes Paul tells the story of a man who was walking the shore of the ocean after a storm and came upon a person throwing stranded starfish back into the sea. "There are thousands of starfish on the beach; you'll never save them all. What can it matter?" "It matters to this one," the person says as another starfish gets thrown back.  Estimates indicate that between 50 and 90% of fish released after being caught survive. Time out of the water is a key factor as is re-entry into the water-a difficult proposition for a non-wading fisherman since fish have no sense of balance in the air unlike a cat and can land very awkwardly. Today is Farmer's Market Tuesday, and I'm having salmon for supper so I guess I'm philosophically conflicted.

By legend fly fishing was invented by a 15th century nun with a willow rod, a piece of string, and a twist of wool. The gear has gotten "slightly" more complicated over the last 600 years. There are choices to be made in everything from rods and reels to lines and flies. Aside from a couple of specialty shops aimed at advanced folks and sporting goods stores where no one actually knows what a fish looks like, there are two spots to go for fly fishing gear around here. The best is L. L. Bean in Mansfield. For $15 you can take a fly fishing lesson to see if you like this art form. The folks in the store are very helpful-particularly Greg and Richard. Both will fit you out with basic gear and answer any questions. From there you're free to make things as complicated as you want and here's where the conversation can get esoteric and boring for the non-fisherman. Bean has a good selection of flies that last long, but are relatively expensive $1.85-$5. Bass Pro Shop has a good selection of equipment and a ton of stuff to tie your own flies, but I've always found the Pros there stand-offish and not very interested in helping. Price range for equipment and flies are about the same as at Bean, but the quality of the flies seems a little less. The Blue Fly Cafe on the Internet sells flies for 65¢ each and if they are likely to end up in a tree that's a good price!

Hope you weren't too bored!

Questions

You heard it here first-the President's visit to the ancestral home of his great-great grandfather in Ireland is the first step in his 2012 election campaign. Expect the man who was born, somewhere, as Barry Obama to petition to change his name to Barack Kennedy in an effort to "energize the base." And since the President's genealogy shows a connection to the Bush family as well, can the announcement that he'll be running in both the Republican and Democratic primaries be far behind? Given a glance at the current Republican field he may actually have a better chance for the Republican nomination than running unopposed as a Democrat. Of course, he'd have to promise to renounce Mitt Romney's universal health care plan, but that didn't seem to be a problem for Mitsie. By the way, with both John Kerry and Mitt Romney as Massachusetts leaders, should the flip-flop become the official state shoe?

One thing we didn't take into consideration when we voted for the Chestnut Street property was the possibility that aliens would land and entice our children on board. But doing some research I discovered this genuine alien crop circle across the street from our future sports complex:

OK, so it's more of a crop rectangle, but it's clearly a landing zone for space ships. Did the town government check this out? Have they already been co-opted by the aliens? I have seen plans for the new indoor parking garage at the Shovel Shops; it could definitely be used for hover craft and even small saucers. Oh, wait a minute here's a close-up:

Oh, there seems to be a tractor out there. Whew, the circle wasn't made by alien space ships. Maybe the kids will be safe…or, could it be, omigod I bet it is- a space ship that's been disguised as a tractor??? The town government is on notice-We, the People want answers.

Tomorrow-the dreaded, by many, Fly Fishing Blog.

A Day at Sheep Pasture and an Interesting Read

The sun finally came out yesterday, and the Farmer's Market and the barn swallows returned to Sheep Pasture. Also the world didn't end at 6 so I'll finally have to mow my lawn today.

After several years of trying I think the Farmer's Market at Sheep Pasture is finally in the right place. This year it's under the pine trees to the east of the foundation. What we lose in visibility we gain in safety and prettiness. The turn out on opening day was very good because the farmers have helped with publicity. New vendors have been added this year including a pickle salesman, a full service bakery, and an organic cranberry operation. Four farms vie for your business with a surprising variety of early season offerings and Jordan's seafood is back again. Some thoughts:
1. You should never cook pea tendrils! I was told that the pea tendrils-the baby shoots of pea plants- could be eaten raw or cooked. Raw, even without a dressing, they are delicious with an earthier version of pea flavor. Quickly sauteed they lose quite a bit of flavor and get very stringy. Definitely worth a try raw, they are available, briefly, from Adam who was also offering heirloom tomatoes plants.
2. The A-1 Pickle Company has three all-natural varieties: a sweet dill, a full sour-The Pucker Pickle, and a hot version, Kickin Kukes, with jalapenos and habeneros. The super sour has no sugar added and really lives up to its name; it's excellent. The dill is tasty but too sweet for me. The hot pickle has that same sweetness followed by a quick hit of heat that quickly drifts away; it seems like a perfect pickle for hamburgers. Fans of kosher dills will have to "make do" with the delicious sour pickle because the natural ingredients used in the pickling process turn garlic, the main component in kosher dills, an ugly black.
3. The organic cranberry lady has craisins in three antioxidant varieties at five dollars a half pound-cheaper than Ocean Spray and plumper and juicier. One version is sweetened with apple juice making it a good snack choice for diabetics.
4. Spring is radish season, and there were lots on display. Adam had his colorful varieties with full radish flavor, Langwater Farms had perfect red salad radishes, and Marie had my favorite giant radishes with the mild, mild flavor. I hear Germans traditionally snack on radishes with beer which I discovered is an excellent idea.
5. O'Brien's Bakery is a full service bakery with everything from cakes and cookies to doughnuts and multiple types of bread. I bought a loaf of cheese bread and a multigrain loaf. A slice of the cheese bread tastes just like a toasted cheese sandwich. The multigrain bread includes herbs as well which gives the bread an interesting scent and a delicious taste.
6. Support your local musician. We're hoping to have more music at the farmer's market. The country fiddler yesterday afternoon was awesome. She and any other musicians at the market aren't being paid by the NRT so you can help by tossing some change into their instrument cases.

For many years barn swallows nested in the basement of the Stable Barn. Unfortunately English sparrows also moved in causing the staff at Sheep Pasture to close off the basement. Shelves under the eaves of the barn for the swallows never materialized, and the birds disappeared. They are back! I saw a pair building a nest in our Sheep Barn near the main entrance yesterday. The typical swallow seen at Sheep Pasture is the tree swallow like the one below:

These little birds are spectacular flyers who nest in our bluebird boxes. Unlike any other bird I know, immature females-with dark gray backs instead of shiny blue-often help a nesting pair with their brood. I don't think I've ever seen a tree swallow sitting on the ground.

Barn swallows can often be seen on the ground-the first one I noticed yesterday was gathering nesting materials. Here's a barn swallow:

Also excellent flyers, the barn swallow has an orange belly and a forked tail. The birds are related to the ones that make the nests used in Chinese cuisine, and like those birds they also use spit to hold the unmistakable nest together:

Keep your eyes open for these interesting birds.

The Globe's Ideas section is a welcome addition to my Sunday reading. It's a chance to look at  interesting things that normally don't make the news. Here's the Easton Curiosity Shop version of that Sunday supplement. It's an article from the June issue of National Geographic that's available online here. The story is about the dawn of religion at an unusual archaeological site called  Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. It not only details this site, but explores new explanations about the origins of civilization in the Fertile Crescent. Don't miss the excellent photos and the video on the construction of a site model-available in a side bar or at the top of the article.

End of the World-Early Edition

The Rapture is supposed to take place by 6 pm today with all the Good People called up to Heaven and the folks in South Easton left behind to enjoy the peace and quiet for six months before the actual end of the world. Don't count on it! Word has it that God intended to bond this expensive project in order to leverage His ability to pay for a flood of biblical proportions on Alpha Centauri, but He was talked out of it by some members of our FinCom. Folks intending to be rapturized will now have to take commercial flights to Heaven. No word yet if frequent flyer mileage can be used for the trip, but, of course, travelers will have to have a full soul scan before boarding.

Fanny Holt Ames spent a little less than two days in Hong Kong, still a British colony in 1954. The restaurants she mentioned are gone, but Eileen Kershaw, Ltd., purveyor of flowers and gifts (apparently including fine porcelain and jade),  survived the transition to Communist China.  Fanny also mentions shopping at Hong Kong Mary's and meeting the woman herself. Hong Kong Mary Sue, seen in the picture below from 1945, was originally from San Francisco. She started a restaurant in the city before World War II, but soon added a fleet of sampans that collected trash from all arriving ships. Anything valuable was recycled. Mary managed to survive the Japanese occupation of the city and parlay her earnings into buying other Hong Kong properties. No city in the world loves its business success stories more than Hong Kong so Mary became quite the legend there.

Fanny also mentioned visiting the Tiger Balm Gardens and finding it hideous. Tiger Balm Gardens was an 8 acre amusement park founded in 1935, and it apparently was as tasteful as the knick-knack counter of a bad Chinese restaurant with the added downer of really awful looking erotic statues. It was demolished in 2004. An artist named Brian the Brain is offering a suitably tacky poster of the famous dragon wall for a mere $44 at his website. Please do not show this poster to a member of the Lion's Club-I'm used to their Christmas/Easter display at the Rockery, and don't want them getting ideas for changes. The pagoda on the property was worth a look, however.

After this short stay in Hong Kong , the President Monroe sailed for Manila where we will find Fanny next week.

Nikko

Remember Shogun, the miniseries starring Richard Chamberlain as the English sea dog who gets dropped into 17th century Japan? The historical event unfolding there was the rise of Tokugawa Ieyasu as the first modern ruler of the country. This leader was buried in Nikko, a town northwest of Tokyo, and since he founded a dynasty his descendants turned the isolated spot into one of the most beautiful in Japan. Ironically, when the Meiji revolution kicked out the Tokugawa shogunate, Nikko took off as a tourist destination. When LaFarge and Adams visited Nikko, they had to go by mountain roads. A railroad reached the town in 1890 so Fanny Holt Ames and her group could leave Tokyo at 8:55 and arrive at Nikko station by 11:15 after a cross country run that showed her "more white herons than Maine has ever shown us." Fanny mentioned the famous lacquer bridge and the shrine to Tokugawa Ieyasu. Here's what those things looked like 60 years earlier when LaFarge was there:

The picture immediately above is one of the gates in the temple complex. LaFarge did a watercolor of the shogun's actual tomb:

Fanny mentions the "magnificent Cryptomerias" that lead to the shrine and can be seen in the background here. Nikko was and is famous for its gardens:

The stable for sacred horses (seen below) in the temple complex is famous for its carving of the famous three wise monkeys.

Summing up her visit Fanny says "Quite impossible to describe, but will never forget it-the three monkeys in original guile different from their reproductions-and the throngs of children. The whole fairy story come to life."

Fanny's tour continued on to Kyoto where one of the events was a "Sukiyaki dinner with 3 Geishas girls to entertain (2 half Geishas and 1 full Geisha. I felt sorry for them-one really exquisite and quite young." The tour focused  on shopping in Kyoto, and Fanny complained that she missed so much of the historic city. Trips to Nara and Kobe completed her stay in Japan. Very interesting that her journal makes no mention of the war. Elegant Southern gentlemen of the 1870s referred to the Civil War when speaking to northern friends with the euphemistic term "the late unpleasantness," but its interesting that a sharp observer like Fanny never mentions rebuilding or the attitude of the people.

By May 19th the ship was docked in Hong Kong which will get a brief mention tomorrow.  

Japan, 1954 and Before

It will take us several days to catch up with Fanny Holt Ames' tour around the world. She spent May 9-May 14, 1954 in Japan. Japan had been opened to the world by Commodore Perry in 1853. The Commodore was distantly related to the Perry's of Easton Furnace. While researching the LaFarge windows at Unity Church, I learned that John LaFarge had married into the Perry family. Installation of the Angel of Help window was delayed when LaFarge joined Henry Adams on a trip to Japan in 1886. LaFarge was in the first wave of American tourists to visit Japan and we can follow his steps through his own excellent watercolor sketches and a wonderful series of 19th century photos collected at the New York Public Library. Fanny, on the other hand, was among the first wave of post-World War II American tourists. How had tourism changed? LaFarge spent several weeks drifting through the same area that the determined Fanny "covered" in two days!

After arriving in Yokohama on May 9th Fanny's group set up shop in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

The second Imperial Hotel was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright between 1918 and 1923 in "Maya Revival Style." It became instantly famous for surviving the great 1923 earthquake that reached 8.3 on the Richter scale and destroyed much of Tokyo. That was the earthquake that allegedly prompted the ultimate headline to Bostonian insularity-TOKYO DESTROYED BY EARTHQUAKE-HUB MAN FEARED DEAD! The hotel also managed to survive the fire bombing of Tokyo during World War II. It was demolished in 1968 to make way for a high rise although elements of the building are preserved in a museum at Inuyama.

LaFarge and Adams avoided the big cities of Japan due to an epidemic that was raging at the time. They found congenial quarters at Nikko and also visited the Great Buddha at Kamakura, and, of course they also saw Mt. Fuji. Here are pictures and paintings from that era.

Henry Adams' wife had committed suicide and LaFarge had been made the artistic executor of her gravesite which was to be executed by Augustus St. Gaudens. Adams and LaFarge were partly in Japan to seek artistic inspiration for that statue the idea for which, according to Adams was the "acceptance of the inevitable." It is said that LaFarge found his inspiration in the Great Buddha, and that the image haunted him throughout much of his later work including the figure of Wisdom in his second window at Unity Church. The beautiful watercolor reflects the unchanging repose of the Buddha among the windblown leaves and clouds.

Fanny visited the same and saw the same things as LaFarge. Here is the commemorative photo at Kamakura taken for Fanny's group of tourists.

There's no indication in Fanny's diary that she saw this as anything other than a tourist photo op. Her take on Nikko was somewhat more sophisticated as we'll see tomorrow

A Science Pot Pourri

We'll be catching up on Fanny Holt Ames tomorrow. She's already toured Japan and Hong Kong. I want to compare her visit to one made by John LaFarge, the man who designed stained glass for Unity Church, and Henry Adams in the 19th century. We'll also be catching up with Easton's Civil War soldiers and Sailors very soon.

Here's a feel good story from Scientific American Ugandan Chimpanzees may be hunting Red Colobus Monkeys to extinction in a national park. Evidence points to a 89% decline of the endangered monkey due mainly to hunting. This is the first evidence that somebody other than us is screwing up the environment. Apparently, the "don't give a damn about the environment gene" is part of the 98% humans share with chimps.

An interesting little article also from Scientific American refines the Turing test. The Turing test suggests you can tell if a computer is conscious by holding an e-chat conversation with it. At some point the human will get an oddball response and realize it's not human. Even though Watson was programmed with zillions of Jeopardy answers, had a good knowledge of natural language and was able to beat the human champions, it eventually failed the Turing test. The article suggests another way to get a computer to flunk the test is to show it a picture with something odd in it-an elephant perched on top of the Eiffel Tour for example. Unless programmed with the idea that elephants don't belong on pointy structures computers and presumably Frenchmen with hangovers won't be able to tell you what's wrong.

The Toronto Star notes that China has an exploding watermelon problem as many farmers overdosed the plants with growth hormone. Just another example of why we should buy American? Well, the growth chemical is legal here for grapes and kiwi fruit. Probably an argument for only buying from an organic farm that you watch carefully.

Not strictly scientific, but perhaps an indication that some people might have more chimp genes than others is a New York Times blog summarizing the debate between Rick Santorum and John McCain on whether torture helped us bag bin Laden. Mr. Santorum apparently lacks the intelligence sources of Senator McCain and lacks the intelligence to remember that the Senator might know a thing or two about torture. I am still willing to try "enhanced interrogation methods" on Dick Cheney to find those weapons of mass destruction he says were in Iraq, but he's probably out hunting red colobus monkeys in Uganda.

Virtual

We haven't talked about art for quite awhile, but yesterday at lunch Dr. Bob M. suggested there is a great virtual tour of the Sistine Chapel. It's been "open" for about a year, and it is indeed impressive. It's also frustrating. The tour works by plopping you down in the middle of the chapel and giving you the ability to look at anything from the marble floor to the famous Michelangelo painting of God giving Adam the Finger on the ceiling right above your head. You also have the ability to zoom and this lets you cheat a little on the panorama effect, but with your feet nailed to the floor you just can't get close to the corners to get a good view of some of the less famous paintings. I know I'm probably the only person faced by the magnificent art of Michelangelo who is complaining about not being able to read the Latin inscriptions in the corners, but if you're going to have magic why not let us fly around? The World Gallery of Art has a tour of the chapel with much less impressive photos, but detailed discussion of the artists whose work is there. Did you know that Luca Signorelli did some of the wall painting in the chapel? I never heard of the guy either, but there is a detailed biography at the WGA site. Luca, by the way, was the fellow who finished the wall frescoes when Botticelli and three other more famous painters went on strike due to slow payments by the pope. Us union members would call him a scab!

Taking a quick look around the 'Net it seems that the Sistine Chapel and the two virtual sites we've talked about before-the prehistoric caves and the Google Art Project-have really got this virtual stuff down pat. Has anyone found any other great sites for the arm chair traveller? Too many of the VR sites have really clunky navigation that spoils the effect as well as other problems.

Town Meeting Monday at 7

I am urging the few, the proud, the brave-the readers of this blog to attend town meeting. There are plenty of important things to discuss this year, and I have strong opinions about many of them. However, I'm not going to spend any time here urging you to vote my way. I'm just asking you to show up and help save the town meeting form of government. Town meeting is threatened by two groups who want to have a smaller government they can more easily control.

On one hand are the ideologues, mostly the folks that want the federal government to be smaller and equate town government with the evils of Washington. They're the folks who never want to spend money on anything-probably a wise idea when talking about subsidies for oil companies or foreign aid for Pakistan, but what this group forgets is that in town government there is no evil "them" stealing our money. Town government is us. Everything we do directly effects ourselves, our friends, our neighbors. If there is ever a reason for government to do something, it has to be at the local level. Who better to decide than all of us who take the time to show up for town meeting rather than some small representative body that is all too easily controlled by the ideologues.

Ironically, the other threat to town meeting comes from people who work hard every day to make our town government succeed. I've often heard elected officials complain that they have spent months and numerous meetings planning something. Then they are faced at town meeting with people who never attended a single meeting or spent more time thinking about an issue than it takes to read the warrant article. Frankly, I've never thought much of this complaint, and today I suddenly understood why-I did this 180 days a year for 35 years as a history teacher. At least, the folks at town meeting are there voluntarily and presumably have an interest in the topics at hand! History isn't rocket science and as a history teacher I felt that if I explained something well, kids would understand it with their native intelligence even if they hadn't done their homework. Patience was my hardest lesson to learn (I'm still learning). I also had to learn that on any given day someone in my class would have something to teach me whether they had studied or not. For the most part, town government isn't rocket science either. Knowledge of what can and cannot be done under the chapter and verse of the Massachusetts General Laws and Regulations is a skill that the average citizen should respect just like my students should respect my ability to list all the President's in order with accomplishments for each (Andy Jackson #7-the spoils system, Trail of Tears, Panic of 1837), but the recognition that dear Andy was an egotistical ass is something any student with a knowledge of human nature can understand. I think most things we do at town meeting: buying land, balancing spending among several competing options, and making rules for ourselves are comprehensible for everyone too. Of course, my faith in town meeting isn't always justified-I believe, for instance, that Don Bennett's concerns about pharmaceuticals in our drinking water weren't well understood by the members of town meeting when we approved Doug King's 40R project. On the other hand town meeting clearly understood the value of Dean Mill while the Finance Committee, the Chair of the Conservation Commission, and the Zoning Board of Appeals were out of touch.

I think citizens lately have been more informed about town meeting issues thanks to an improved town website and better coverage in the media, but knowledge isn't enough-you have to show up. It's the leaders job to provide direction, data, and a check on the enthusiasms of crowds, but the town meeting is also there to provide a check that the knowledge of the expert is valid, accurate and responsive to the needs of the community. You can't do that sitting at home, and if you have time to go to a Christmas Party don't tell me you're too busy for town meeting!

Great Brook Farm State Park

With all the wonderful variety of parks and conservation land in Easton, I seldom feel the need to go elsewhere for a recreational walk, but on Thursday I had the job of chaperoning our Envirothon team to the state competition which was held at the 900 acre Great Brook Farm State Park. I'm definitely going to take Maggie for a ride to this wonderful place that combines the extensive trails of Borderland with a working dairy farm.

The parking lot overlooks a small farm pond with a visitors center, picnic benches and a view of the dairy operation on a nearby hill. As I walked to the Envirothon registration tent, I saw something I had never seen before-swallows taking a bath. Half a dozen birds would skim across the farm pond at full speed and dip into the water using their momentum to pull them back into the air shaking the water off their wings. Just another trick that these superb flyers can pull off.

While the students competed, I got to walk around the property on just a few of their numerous trails. A large pond with many streams was a center piece of the trails I chose, but their are also hills and trails that run the edge of farmer Mark Duffy's fields. Bird life was all around me and once again I wished I had taken the time to learn the different calls and songs of the birds. Enough were visible, however, to make for an interesting study. I was also able to pick out a deer in the forest as she watched the line of student performance tents that were obviously in her favorite field.

Back at the headquarters I visited a traveling exhibition from the Silvio Conte National Wildlife Refuge that covers the whole Connecticut River Watershed. It featured a walk through trailer with four common environments as they would be seen at night and a series of interactive exhibits. My favorite was the eagle grip station. An eagle can grip with up to 400 pounds per square inch pressure, and the challenge is to see how your grip matches up-I hit 90 psi and the students were in the 70s and 80s. The rangers say that not even the most muscled human who has tried this machine has come close to the eagles grip. By the way, bald eagles have been seen fishing in Lake Winnecunnet in Norton for several years now. These have been immatures, but an early season report this year noted an eagle with at least a partially white head. Even tiny Knapp's pond on Union Street had a reported eagle sighting within the last two years. Expect to see eagles in Easton at Borderland and perhaps Wheaton Farm as the population continues to recover.

The best part of the day was the dairy operation. Mark and Tamma Duffy have leased land at Great Brook since 1987 to run a 120 cow dairy operation along with a model farm with sheep, goats, ducks and chickens. There is also a wonderful ice cream stand. The Duffy's have been successful enough that both their son and daughter have remained in the family business. Recently, the Duffy's have created a robotic dairy operation that they are currently testing with 60 Holsteins. We were lucky enough to get one of the first tours of this new facility. Now I'm pretty old fashioned when it comes to dairy farms-you know cows grazing on pastures, and lovely milkmaids hand milking the cows three times a day. OK, the lovely milkmaids were long gone by the time I was hanging out on the Gomes Farm on Bay Road in the 1960s. They had a milking machine like everyone else, but Mr. Gomes still had to attach the darned thing to his cows three times a day.

Mr. Duffy told us there are many ways to run a dairy and that for someone with a lot of fields the pasture system still works. He has turned to robotics to maximize his profits in an increasingly competitive market. It apparently happened in stages. He has been an advocate for scientific feeding for a while, for instance. Gone are the bales of hay we are still familiar with in Easton. He uses a blend of corn (from the stalk to the silk) and cut grass about the length my lawn will be when I finally cut it next week. His cows are divided into age groups and raised together. Young heifers and pregnant ones live at the model farm while calves are segregated individually. I was not happy to hear this at first-visions of veal calves stuck in a stall where they can't stand up danced in my head-, but each calf has its own pen and superlarge dog crate to live in, and each is feed its own mothers milk. Calves present the farmer with two problems-first if they stay with their mothers they tend to over or under eat and get sick. Second, if the calves are bottle feed, but raised together they tend to suckle each other and damage their udders. This year's calves seemed very happy being separate, but close to each other. They were all created by artificial insemination using semen that has been sorted out to produce a high percentage of heifers (in case anyone is looking for a very unusual new job). That's as artificial as things get on this farm-super close attention to feed replaces the hormone stimulation that some large dairy producers use.

On the way to the robotic barn we learned that cow tipping is a rural legend.  Cows sleep about 45 minutes a day in five to ten minute cow naps. They never sleep standing up, and they never lock their legs while standing like a sleeping horse so they are essentially untippable.

The robotic barn was amazing. Sixty cows live there with minimum human intervention. They never go out to pasture. Mr. Duffy explained that for much of the year in New England, the weather is not ideal for grazing. Cows like the temperature cool because they sweat like a dog through their tongue. Most of their time in a summer field is spent trying to stay cool. Mr. Duffy asserts that the typical cow wants to be pampered and live a life of absolute predictability. Each girl has a necklace with two electronic devices on it that identify her to the computers in the barn. The barn has no walls like the typical barn and giant fans circulate the air. Each cow is free to wander around the barn and even go to the beauty stall for  a massage and cleaning at the automated cleaning station, but most spend their time laying on specially designed European cow mattresses. Each mattress section is arranged so that the rear end of the cow hangs over into an alley where the manure is dropped and then swept away by an automated cleaning bar. An inflatable wall for the barn is raised in the winter not to warm the cows, but to keep the manure from freezing to the alley. When the cow decides it wants to be milked it wanders down to the robotic milking machine, one of the first in New England, that cost about $200,000. This machine comes from Sweden and Mr. Duffy noted that he and his farmhands had planned to name it with some beautiful Swedish milkmaid's name like Ilsa or Inga, but he was called away to plow snow while the machine was being installed and his wife and daughter named it Lars. Lars has a laser camera that inspects each cows under carriage when she walks into the milking booth and checks it against previous pictures. it then uses a hose to wash and rinse the udders before the laser camera returns to help attach the milking machine to the euphemistically called "quarter." Meanwhile the cow is rewarded by getting really expensive grain-the more milk she has the more grain she has a chance to eat. The machine records the amount of milk and runs certain tests on the milk before sending it to the refrigerated holding tank. Cows can self milk at any time of the day or night. It turns out the average cow milks itself 2.4 times a day instead of the traditional three. All this infrastructure was made possible by state and federal grants to improve small family farms. Lars and his mechanical cousins are revolutionizing the dairy business in Europe and allowing small farmers to fight off agribusiness. It was a surprise to me, but those cows were the most contented looking lot I had ever seen, and, as anyone who has ever lived on a farm knows, despite the robot, farm work never ends so the dairy crew has simply been reassigned to other farm projects. Amazing! Definitely worth a visit.

A New Day

Welcome back! With Google's technical difficulties over, let's get back to normal. I've added two new links to an intertwined pair of blogs by Douglas Watts. He's a fine writer on the environment with a focus on Easton and the Hockomock swamp. The archives of these blogs will keep you going for a while.

Back to the butterflies that I saw a week ago at Sheep Pasture. Getting ready for Farm and Fun Day last Saturday morning, I was walking by the Andromeda on the Rhododendron trail when I saw a Spring Azure, one of the earliest butterflies to appear in Easton annually. The swarm of perhaps two dozen tiny insects made a pretty blue contrast to the white of the flowering Andromeda.

This little butterfly has a wing span of .75 to 1.25 inches. An even smaller butterfly is the Eastern Tailed Blue which has also been found at Sheep Pasture although a little later than the Spring Azure. Actually there are two seasons for the Azure late March to June and a second flight from July to September. Here's the Tailed Blue:

The big mystery was a Comma or a Question Mark. Not the punctuation marks, but four species of butterflies in the Brushfoot Family. There are three Commas and one Question Mark, and I've been trying to discover which one of these relatively uncommon species is here in Easton. It should be a Question Mark which migrates throughout the whole state and can vary from uncommon to common from year to year with one or two the number found in one spot. Of the  three Commas the Eastern Comma is the most likely suspect, but it is less common here than the Question Mark.

The top is the Question Mark and the bottom is the Eastern Comma. I'm not in mid-season butterfly hunting form, but I could swear the specimen I saw lacked the tail of the Question Mark.

A butterflys eyes are very good at seeing color and motion, but they have rather poor depth perception. Sometimes you can slowly extend your arm with a camera directly at a butterfly and catch a good shot.

Last Saturday I had no camera and was too excited to move slowly.

You must be wondering why these two insects are named for punctuation marks. It has to do with the distinctive mark on the underside of their wings. Imagine my frustration when my mystery butterfly landed right behind a cameraman interviewing me for ECAT and folded its wings. Didn't know that shouting "Don't move!" is likely to have exactly the opposite effect. As the cameraman turned around, the butterfly flew into the bushes. I haven't seen it since. Here's what I was looking for on the wing:

That's the Question Mark above.

And there's the Eastern Comma. Once again while I missed the little swoosh, the basic shape seemed to be the Comma. I'll just have to keep looking!

The photos and information for this blog comes from two sources: the Massachusetts Audubon Society's Butterfly Atlas, and the Massachusetts Butterfly Society's website.

Tomorrow: Adventures at the Envirothon in Carlisle.

Technical Diffiiculties!!

Hello!
    After more than 60 straight days of successful blogging, technical difficulties at Google prevented the uploading of yesterdays blog on early season butterflies. I thought I might have wiped out the entire system, but what happened was that Google took their blog site off line for maintenance and then crashed it when it reopened. Stay tuned for an improved version of the original posting tomorrow!
Ed

The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

"The greatest good for the greatest number" is a quick summary of the philosophy of utilitarianism. First proposed by Jeremy Bentham and refined by John Stuart Mill, utilitarianism became the ethical philosophy that forms the basis of most government decision making in modern democracies, and what could possibly be wrong with this concept? Sadly, utilitarianism is not without its paradoxes. Let's give you, dear reader, one superpower: the ability to predict greatness. Using your superpower you discover a boy who will discover the cure for cancer, a girl who will invent an endless supply of energy to replace oil, and the farmer who will discover a way to end world hunger. They will improve the lives of billions, a few of whom will than discover things that will benefit even more. The problem is each has a very rare genetic make-up and one needs a heart transplant, another a lung transplant, and the third needs a kidney and a liver. The only other person in the world who is a tissue match is an ordinary young man with no great prospects beyond holding down the typical meaningless job. Although J. S. Mill would recoil at the thought, classical utilitarians could argue that the government had every right to take the life of the ordinary person to save the lives of the extraordinary ones. Too extreme an example? How about the man who loses his life long home so the state can build a bridge that saves 100,000 commuters one minute a day on the way to work? Or the Army Corp of Engineers who flood 131,000 acres and destroy a hundred homes in order to save several large cities from flooding? And, of course, there is always THE train.

Immanuel Kant suggested a moral system based on rules. The main rule was "act as if your every action created a universal law." Mr. K. was well aware of the typical human behavior of expecting others not to be selfish while exempting ourselves from that obligation. Taken at its base his philosophy suggests the golden rule "do onto others, as you would have them do onto you." Kant goes on to suggest as a corollary that no human has the right to "use" another to achieve their ends since no rational person would propose a universal law where they get screwed.

John Stuart Mill was well aware of these paradoxes and tried to incorporate Kant and Bentham into his revised utilitarianism. Create a rule of thumb, he suggested, and then apply the utilitarian calculation of the greatest good. In the case of the transplants the rule might be "no one should benefit from the involuntary death of another." OK, what about the death penalty that, one could argue, benefits society while the murderer certainly doesn't want to die? OK, refined rule "no one should benefit from the involuntary death of an innocent person." With that rule the folks needing the transplant would be left to rely on just how much the ordinary guy wanted a statue to his memory on every village green.

For me, the difference between the train and destroying 100 homes to save cities is just such a simple rule-don't destroy the quality of life of one person to benefit another unless the benefit is absolutely clear. Now the Army Corps levee system actually raised the Mississippi above the surrounding land making this disaster inevitable, but the result of opening the levees was as absolutely predictable as anything can be. Rule in place, apply the utilitarian calculation, destroy a hundred houses, save thousands. With the train no benefit is as absolutely clear as opening the levees, there's no direct A to B connection. All we get are A MAY cause B. Rule applied, no need for the utilitarian calculation, don't build the train.

Thank's for letting me be back in my Philosophy Class again

Under a Rock

I'm going to be spending the morning with some elementary school students at Sheep Pasture as a substitute teacher. The group will be cycled through three stations, and I had my choice of birds (complicated), turtles (too hands on), and isopods. So not knowing anything about isopods that became my choice. Isopods, it turns out, are woodlice, pill bugs or sowbugs. Isopods are crustaceans that live on land. They have more legs than spiders, ten or eleven pairs. They lose water to the environment quickly since their shell is not as impervious as insects exoskeletons so they have to hide out in dark, wet places. They have lungs on their back legs and carry their eggs in a pouch called a marsupium. They grow like a lobster by shedding their shell, but unlike a lobster they moult in two stages-back half first followed a couple of days later by the front. That's it for the ordinary woodlouse, but not for the members of the  family Armadillidiidae. These are the real pillbugs and I hope you caught the armadillo in the name because,like the mammal, they  can curl up in a ball to protect themselves. According to wikipedia, kids down south keep pillbugs as pets. They live for about three years in a wet, limited light environment, have that funny roll up in a ball thing, eat debris, and don't spin a squeaky exercise wheel in the middle of the night. Wikipedia adds that folks with pet tarantulas also keep pill bugs since they find tarantula poop and "leftovers" delicious. My job, apparently, is to fake a southern accent and convince kids to put the isopods in little bug boxes for observation.

Of course, what they didn't tell me is that under the same logs as the isopods are centipedes and millipedes. Millipedes eat the same kind of plant debris as the isopods, but their defense mechanism is to secrete a corrosive slime that can irritate the skin-some also shoot out hydrogen cyanide gas! Don't touch the millipedes, kids. The carnivorous Centipedes are worse with a poisonous bite that can be painful and cause the same kind of life-threatening reaction as peanut butter. The turtles and their salmonella were beginning to look better until I remembered how many logs I've turned over in my life without being bitten by a centipede. Note to self: check with nurse about epipens.

David Ambrose Middleton-The Real Story

Nothing like research to turn things around. Yesterday, if you remember I was trying to straighten out the service record of a Civil War sailor, David A. Middleton, who served on the USS Ino, Sea Bird, Hibiscus, Roebuck, and San Jacinto. We had three dates to work with to sort the ships out-July 7, 1861 when Middleton enlisted in the Navy, October 23, 1864 when he re-enlisted and September 23, 1865 when he was discharged, according to Chaffin, "from the San Jacinto." Yesterday we focused, brilliantly I thought, on looking at the Roebuck and San Jacinto. After the San Jacinto sank on New Year's Day 1865 I had Middleton sitting on the dock for nine months before being discharged.

Chaffin didn't tell us the whole story! This is a little strange since the Unity Church Parsonage where he lived could almost see the first house on Elm Street's Battle Row where Middleton lived between 1874 and 1881. Reverend Chaffin may have heard the sailor's stories but he apparently didn't listen carefully. While Middleton may have been discharged "from" the San Jacinto, he was actually sailing on another vessel at the time, a fact we'll examine in a moment.

The history of the ships themselves help us sort things out. We know Middleton left the army on July 7, 1861. Of his five ships only the San Jacinto was in the navy in 1861, and we know he wasn't on board until near the end of his service so what happened? Up in Boston the admirals were scrambling to find ships to maintain a blockade of the Confederacy. At the end of August they bought a large clipper ship called the Ino and converted it to military use. The USS Ino displaced 895 tons, had a crew of 144 and eight 32 pounder cannons. For us, the key date is its commissioning on September 23, 1861 exactly four years before Middleton's service ended. From July to September, he was either sitting home in Easton waiting to get a ship or working on converting the Ino. The Navy at this time was did not devote two months to training an ordinary seaman so I believe he was activated when the Ino was commissioned. The Ino spent the war looking for Confederate blockade runners and raiders and not finding many, but Middleton sailed thousands of miles in both the North and South Atlantic.

Beginning in November, 1863 the Ino was assigned to the East Gulf Blockading Squadron based in Florida and there she stayed until August 1, 1865. Leaving us with the problem of getting David Middleton back to Portsmouth to switch to the Roebuck and San Jacinto! My first (and second and third) thought was that Middleton never left the Gulf Coast after the Ino arrived there. The San Jacinto was at Key West often during 1863 and could easily have picked up crew from the Ino when she arrived in November. Remembering that the San Jacinto had captured a Confederate blockade runner called the Roebuck in January, 1864 perhaps Middleton became part of the prize crew. Unfortunately, none of this matches the dates set by Chaffin and prize ships were auctioned quickly so it's unlikely although not impossible that the prize ship was Middleton's Roebuck! Ugh!  Thus the transfer from the Ino to the Roebuck or San Jacinto is the currently unsolvable problem.

The good news is that in order to serve on the USS Hibiscus Middleton had to be in the Gulf after the sinking of the San Jacinto since the Hibiscus, a brand new 406 ton propeller steamship only reached Key West in February 1865. After the sinking of the San Jacinto, Middleton could have been transferred to the tiny 45 ton Sea Bird, a captured blockade runner that the Union used to run into shallow harbors and river mouths. When the Hibiscus arrived in Key West, the Sea Bird became a tender assigned to the bigger ship giving Middleton an easy transfer to finish his service.

So, if you have been following this convoluted puzzle what do we have? Chaffin was clearly wrong by implying, if not actually saying, that the San Jacinto was Middleton's last ship. The Hibiscus/Sea Bird tandem had to be what Middleton sailed on in 1865, and since the Hibiscus was decommissioned at New York on August 19, 1865 while the tiny Sea Bird was sold at auction at Key West in June, it was the Hibiscus that brought Middleton home. We also know that Middleton spent the most time on the USS Ino, but when he transferred to the San Jacinto and the Roebuck (and which Roebuck) remains a mystery. At any rate, dear reader, for sticking with me this far here's a picture of the Hibiscus:

 

David Ambrose Middleton, Part 1

As I noted yesterday I'm trying to put together a piece on Easton's participation in the Civil War Navy, but there are several difficulties. First many of the men who served for Easton do not seem to be Easton residents. When I finally found David Middleton who had gone through school here and was working at the shovel works, the records list his ships, but give all most no information about when he was on them! With soldiers in the Civil War army things are easier.  The regimental histories are well known. If a soldier was in the 7th Massachusetts Infantry like Middleton's brother James you can follow his unit from battle to battle. If the soldier is "lucky" enough to be wounded in a battle you know he was there and not a "horse holder," "coffee cooler" (an officer's aide), or other person on detached service. Even in those cases the daily records available at the Massachusetts archives or a regimental history might provide details.

Chaffin tells us that Middleton served on the "gunboats" Ino, Sea Bird, Hibiscus, Roebuck, and San Jacinto. It turns out Middleton was on a wild variety of ships charged with maintaining the blockade of southern ports none of which really qualify as a gunboat. Middleton's service record shows he actually enlisted in the army on May 25, 1861 and but, according to Chaffin, "took leave July 7, and enlisted in the navy." One of his service records say he actually deserted on July 7, 1861. His brother James, already a father with two small kids, was then in the army in a three year enlistment, and young David was supporting his aging mother so a family decision may have been made to get one of the men into a safer service. At any rate the only other dates we have of Middleton's naval service is October 23, 1864 when he re-enlists (under an alias!) on the Roebuck and September 23, 1865 when he gets his discharge from the San Jacinto.

Putting aside the alias issue-perhaps it was related to collecting a bounty, what can we make of this record? Well, the history of the ships he served on is available and unlike regimental transfers, one would think that two ships have to be in the same place at the same time to exchange sailors so let's start with the Roebuck and San Jacinto. The Roebuck was a two masted clipper ship that displaced 455 tons and had a crew of 69 and four 32 pound cannons. It had a good record of prize captures as a blockader, but late in July, 1864, due to weakened rigging, she was assigned as a storeship in Tampa, Florida. Yellow fever broke out among the crew, and on September 12 it was ordered north to Portsmouth, New Hampshire to recuperate, reaching their on September 28. Surprisingly she was decommissioned (mothballed) on October 17th less than a week before Middleton allegedly joined her crew! Where was his next ship at this time?

The San Jacinto was one of the Navy's first ships to be fitted with a propeller instead of paddle wheels. Launched in 1850 as an experiment to test new propulsion concepts it had been plagued with balky engines and unreliable machinery for years, but managed a distinguished career including precipitating the Trent Affair, a diplomatic crisis with England. It displaced 1,567 tons and had a crew of 278, two 8" guns and four 32 pounders. On January 7, 1864 apparently operating off Florida,  the San Jacinto captured a Confederate schooner called the Roebuck after a two hour chase. In late July 1864 yellow fever struck the ship at Key West and like the USS Roebuck (not the prize ship) it was ordered north to New York where it docked in the quarantine area on August 13, but on the next day it was ordered to coal up and chase a Confederate cruiser. It chased as far north as Halifax, Nova Scotia on the 19th without finding the rebel ship. After that (hooray!!), she put into Portsmouth, New Hampshire for repairs. The San Jacinto was being repaired at Portsmouth when the Roebuck appeared at the end of September. Clearly, Middleton's connection to the Roebuck was a short and dry one. He left Portsmouth with the San Jacinto and reached Key West on December 3 where the ship resumed its duties as the squadron flagship until near the end of the month when she was relieved of duty and sailed for the Bahamas. On New Year's Day, 1865 the San Jacinto struck a reef and sank near Great Abaco Island. The crew managed to save her guns, some equipment, and provisions, but they couldn't salvage the ship. Middleton returned to the United States, but with the war winding down, he was not recalled to service being discharged "from" the San Jacinto nine months after it sank. Well, puzzle solved about Middleton's last year of his four years of service, but not a very heroic story compared to his brother's service in some of the great battles of the war. Can we make anything out of his service earlier in the war? Stay tuned.

Pot Pourri

A short posting today because it is Farm and Fun at the NRT from 10-2 today with lots of animals and activities for kids.

Also at NRT I'm back in charge of egg sales. The price at the refrigerator in the office will remain $3 for a while, but will definitely be higher at the Farmer's Market when it opens on May 21 due to increased feed costs. We will no longer be recycling egg cartons because all cartons will now indicate the date the eggs were collected. Eggs refrigerated at the temperatures we use are "good" for several months, but we want to sell "great" eggs so we will discard unsold eggs after 10 days. Production is up and bad whether has kept people from visiting Sheep Pasture so there are always eggs for sale for now.

Yes, I am aware that when Fanny Holt Ames was reading about the Maharani mentioned in yesterday's post she was reading about someone who had many features in common with her own circumstances-a young woman who married a wealthy man much older than herself.

Gardening suggestion: if you plant a whole bunch of seeds from the cabbage family you'd better put a label on them. Right now I can't tell the difference between broccoli rabe, chard, or radishes! Thank God my beet "greens" are actually red.

After listening to South Coast Rail's Kristina Egan on Tuesday, I'm concerned that al Qaeda's rail terror plot may simply be to pay for lobbyists to push the Stoughton alternative. Think about it, it'll waste $2 billion of much needed government funds, devastate communities, and damage the environment. What more could a terrorist ask for? "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Working on a piece for a new Historical Society booklet. Did you know we had several men listed for Easton who served in the Union Navy? The problem is that many of them are not really Eastoners (or is that Eastonites) since anyone could accept a bounty to fill out a town's service quota. More on this tomorrow.