MassLIFT Regional Conservation Coordinator Sarah Brodeur, together with Opacum Land Trust Director Ed Hood and members of the Palmer Trails Committee, led about a dozen of us on a two mile hike through parts of the Shaw Historical District on this lovely summer morning.  We met at 10 am at the end of Rondeau Road, then started hiking along the White Trail, on the east side of Pattaquattic Hill.  We were each given a map of the area prepared by the Trails Committee, but it was almost unnecessary, as the trail we followed is very well blazed; navigation points are numbered and clearly marked, and points of historical interest are also indicated.

Settlers arrived in Palmer in the early 1700s, although it was not incorporated as a town until after 1750.  A man named John King is considered the town’s founding father; he built his first home on the banks of the Quaboag River in 1716, so yes, this year is the 300th anniversary of that event.  I was interested to hear that many of the first settlers in Palmer, probably of Scotch-Irish descent, were actually squatters; they did not have deeds to the lands they homesteaded, which is why the settlement’s first petition to the General Court in 1732 to become a town was denied.  Here are some observations about the area which I remember from the walk.

• Conservation land in Palmer is currently under a patchwork of ownership
• The Commonwealth owns around 650 acres
• Interesting finds today included fresh bear scat and a geocache location
• The top of Pattaquattic Hill is privately owned; remains of a rock quarry are still visible
• The William Brown family owned a pig farm at this location

• Further along the trail we came upon a second Brown homestead, with a hand-dug well

• Brothers Matthew and Robert Brown were recluses who lived at the end of the road
• It was known that they kept a good deal of money hidden in their home
• Eventually, due to the persistence of thieves, they transferred it to a local bank for safety
• When in 1900 the brothers passed on at ages 89 and 90, they left a large estate
• Captain Kidd’s Rock has a fascinating naming story due to a find near the rock

• In 1849, two boys chasing a rabbit discovered a letter purportedly written by Captain Kidd
• In 1700, it had been lost under the rock by a courier traveling from Boston to New York City
• Legend has it that Captain Kidd buried treasure on Conant Island in Boston Harbor
• That land has since been paved over by one of the Logan Airport runways
• The Shaw District Schoolhouse #2 was built in 1870
• For 20 years, 93 families sent their children to school there
• Trails on this conservation land are sometimes used for mountain bike races

Our destination this morning was Captain Kidd’s Rock and the old Tavern site; when we reached it shortly after noon, about the half group chose to continue the White Trail Loop back to where we started.  Sarah and Ed ferried the rest of us back to our cars.  We all enjoyed spending the morning walking in these woods and learning about Palmer’s past.

Living in Massachusetts, we can hardly escape colonial history, but sometimes this very ubiquity lulls us into believing we know more about it than we do.  After all, it happened not that long ago, and the colonists were a literate bunch who left reams of written testaments to their beliefs and actions.  But there is value in revisiting the history we thought we knew, and I was eager to hear Nathaniel Philbrick speak about his latest work, Valiant Ambition, subtitled George Washington, Benedict Arnold and the Fate of the American Revolution.

A friend from my reading group drove us to the American Antiquarian Society on Salisbury Street in Worcester after work this evening; we were glad we arrived a bit early, because the large meeting space on the ground floor quickly filled.  By 7 pm, when the lecture started, about a hundred people were in the audience.  We were first introduced to the Society; founded in 1812, it is a national research library and a learned society.  As the website states:

The AAS library today houses the largest and most accessible collection of books, pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers, periodicals, music, and graphic arts material printed through 1876 in what is now the United States, as well as manuscripts and a substantial collection of secondary texts, bibliographies, and digital resources and reference works related to all aspects of American history and culture before the twentieth century.

The Society is a private, non-profit corporation and welcomes your support.

Mr Philbrick began by telling us that he considers himself both a historian and a story-teller; when he first became an author, he realized that history would not be boring if he could use narrative to bring stories to life.  He said that the seed which flowered into his latest work was planted 25 years ago, when he read De Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, a first-person epistolary account of ordinary life in the colonies just prior to the American Revolution.  He also said that his mother was a fan of Benedict Arnold, a Revolutionary War hero she felt was unfairly maligned.  These two strands came together when he decided to revisit the story of our most infamous traitor and focus on the tangled relationship between George Washington and Benedict Arnold.

The outlines of the Arnold’s story are easily traced:  he grew up in Connecticut, became a successful businessman, then decided to support the Patriot cause shortly after the Stamp Act of 1765.  After joining the war effort as a captain in the Connecticut militia, he quickly distinguished himself in a military capacity, most notably at the capture of Fort Ticonderoga in 1775, the naval engagement with the British on Lake Champlain in 1776, and the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, in which engagement he was badly wounded. He eventually rose to the rank of Major General in the Continental Army, but early on in his military career, he quarreled with colleagues and did not feel he received the recognition he deserved.

A master politician, George Washington served as Commander-in-Chief and thus co-ordinated the actions of the disparate groups fighting for independence, but he implemented decisions made by the Second Continental Congress, a tradition of civilian oversight over the military which continues today.  This policy was not without pitfalls; for example, military promotions were often politically motivated.  Frustrated at being passed over for promotions, Arnold more than once offered to resign, but General Washington, who perceived his value as a military strategist, refused to allow this, and in fact, appointed him Military Commander of Philadelphia in 1778, after the British withdrew from the city.

In Philadelphia, Arnold, who had aristocratic pretensions and was eager to advance himself socially and financially, found himself in the middle of bitterly divided city factions: those with Loyalist sympathies on one side and on the other, hardened Patriots determined to root them out.  Arnold himself, by that time enamored of the glamorous Peggy Shippen, began to despair over the new country’s situation and think about switching sides.  The story moves toward a quick conclusion: by 1779, Arnold began providing the British with troop locations and strengths, as well as the locations of supply depots,  He eventually offered to surrender West Point to the British for £20,000; when he obtained command of West Point, he began to put the plan in motion.  Unfortunately, Arnold’s contact, British spy chief Major John André, was captured in September 1780, and Arnold’s treachery was confirmed.  However, Arnold escaped capture by American troops and was given a British command; he fought in the colonies for another year before he decamped with his family for England.

So in the end, was the case of Benedict Arnold a tragedy, the story of a good man gone bad due to circumstances beyond his control?  Mr Philbrick did not argue for this interpretation; instead, he simply described the outsized colonial personalities and how they interacted with each other during this period.  He believes that the greatest danger to the new republic was not traitors so much as the self-serving opportunism that was exhibited by so many in the large cast of characters.  He almost made it sound as if we need both villains and heroes, so that by contrasting Benedict Arnold and George Washington, we can formulate a creation myth, a dramatic story of how revolutionary ideals prevailed and we became a real nation.