Sibyl’s Leaves

Posted on July 29, 2018 by theamericanplutarch

One of my favorite authors is Michel de Montaigne, author of Essays. In Montaigne’s final essay, “Of Experience,” he traces his experience with the disease of kidney stones. He wrote about his anxiety and fears, his expectation of death, which became monsters, chimeras, in his mind. The fear was often overwhelming. Then he would turn to his notes and essays written previously, in which he discussed the symptoms of the disease, the fear, and how he dealt with it. Often he would feel better after consulting these “Sibyl’s Leaves” (the words of the prophetess).

I like Montaigne have often experienced crushing fear. And I sometimes turn to my own “Sibyl’s Leaves.” Indeed, I once wrote a poem about them, which follows:

Sibyl’s Leaves

Sibyls’ leaves,
tattered, scattered,
upon the shelves
of old ideas;
Dusty, musty,
mine alone,
chronicle of anguish.

Ancient prophecy,
History, personal mystery,
Events, long ago
through them I know,
What will be–
What’s in me.

Prophetess speaks,
Hidden oracle
veiled in words–
and thought—but not
the truth,
so silently out of reach.

Monsters approach,
The darkness
of my mind,
there to find
my error–
Cause of terror.

Utter fear,
The parchment’s near
for me to consult,
The answer’s there
(if not, somewhere),
Amid the riddles
​Of Sibyl’s leaves.

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The Shawl

Posted on May 28, 2018 by theamericanplutarch

The Shawl, by Cynthia Ozick, is a small book combining a brief short story and a short novella that are connected together by the central characters, an event in the past, and a shawl.

This book has many themes combined together into the two stories. The essence of the two stories is that a young mother, Rosa, her niece Stella, and Rosa’s infant daughter Magda are Poles at the beginning of World War II who have been captured by the invading Nazis and brought to a concentration camp. The author provides no details in terms of dates, places, and events. The three females are starving, and Magda is close to death. Rosa hides her by embracing her under a shawl. Magda sucks on the shawl and stays quiet. Stella, jealous of Magda, takes the shawl from her, which causes Magda to run out into the ground of the concentration camp, where she is killed.

The brief story is of good v. evil, of moral choice, of the contrast of nature and humans, of the rudiments of life and death, of the contrast of body and mind.

Put in a situation of evil, of impending death, a person might choose self-preservation or altruism toward another. Stella chose self-preservation. Rosa chose altruism until the moment when Magda died, then she chose self-preservation.

We read about life and death hovering on the edge of time: one totters on the edge, then eventually goes over the edge. Stella, Rosa, and Magda are on the edge; Magda goes over.

Their bodies were disintegrating but their minds were alive: Magda was wide-eyed; Rosa heard the voices in the fence. “She felt light, not like someone walking but like someone in a faint, in trance, arrested in a fit, someone who is already a floating angel, alert and seeing everything, but in the air.” Like the realm of being, between soul and body.

The second, longer part of the book takes place thirty years later in America, specifically Miami. Rosa has lived in New York but abruptly destroyed her business and fled to Miami, where she lived in squalor and despair. She is haunted by the events of the past, and the loss of Magda.

It is a lost past and an empty present: a golden memory competing with a dismal present; as one ages a futile attempt to recapture youth, the body, the beauty, the potential of youth.

The story evokes images of the Madonna and Child: Magda the blessed babe, Rosa the Madonna; the child was sacrificed, died, but lives again, resurrected in Rosa’s crazed mind as a great university philosopher.

Rosa cannot escape from the evil that happened to Magda, and the greater evil that affected Poles in 1939 of their catastrophic destruction at the hands of the Nazis and Soviets. Rosa was from the Polish upper class of Warsaw. Her family were Poles before they were Jews. When they lost their Polishness they became like everyone else, like other Jews.

Overall, this book is about time. It is about one moment in time, when, where, why is never described, but it burns itself into Rosa’s memory (“a blazing flying current, a terrible beak of light bleeding out a kind of cuneiform on the underside of her brain”), and she spends the rest of her life recalling it. This moment of time haunts her, from it she conjures up ghosts, memories that seem as real as the present, indeed are more significant than the present, for the past is more real to her, especially the one grand moment, not of her daughter’s death, but her daughter’s birth. In that moment it was like the Madonna and Christ child. It was an incarnation of a person, an idea, that became life. Magda’s death has seared her life, and her birth, upon Rosa’s brain as the most important event, the most significant event, that she knows of.

When this birth happened, life was good, she was betrothed, her Polish family living lives of harmony, sophistication, culture—all of which were subsequently rubbed out, or stolen, by the criminal invaders of Poland.

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When is a Historian Judge and Jury?

Posted on March 22, 2018 by theamericanplutarch

Over a century ago, the world became intrigued by the theories of Sigmund Freud and his interpretation of humans as irrational, rather than rational, creatures. People wondered about the significance and consequences of irrationality in courts of law, legislatures, schools, and houses of worship: if the judge, legislator, teacher, and priest are irrational, then how can we trust their decisions, laws, teachings, message?

Freud’s theory must have had a subtle impact on me at some point in the past, when it comes to thinking about and writing history. Most historians, in college classes, textbooks, monographs, etc., determine whether the person or people written about were morally culpable or not. What is the point, they argue, for being able to see what has happened in the past if we cannot pass judgment on historical persons so that we can learn from their wickedness, immorality, and overall mistakes? This was the exact point that the great historian Livy made when he argued that history is didactic, a teaching tool of morality. But what if the historian writing in the present has no greater wisdom, is no more rational, than the person living a century or more in the past? I constantly consider this when I write. I can hardly be a qualified judge and jury to pass judgment on someone like Captain John Smith, or Christopher Columbus, or George Washington, or Abraham Lincoln. Rather, my view of writing history is to try to recover from the past the exact feelings and mentality that the historical person was feeling and thinking. I try to resurrect the past, to empathize with past people, to look at them not from the benefit of my or my society’s values, rather to look at them from the perspective of their own time. I am not a judge and jury of the past. Rather, I want to give listeners and readers as much as possible an unbiased portrait of a past time so that the reader can make their own silent judgment.

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Is Science Inherently an Act of Piety?

Posted on March 2, 2018 by theamericanplutarch

During the past century science has become so focused on the material and the secular as to deny what was one of the essential characteristics of Western scientists going back three millennia: piety. Ancient Greek scientists perceived religion and science to be part of the same pursuit into the nature of being. Medieval scientists followed the Aristotelian path to discovering what they conceived to be the nature of God. Renaissance and Enlightenment scientists could hardly doubt that the Creation that they studied via mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and geology is Elder Scripture, the word of God older than, and just as authoritative as, the Old and New Testaments. The nineteenth-century geologist Edward Hitchcock’s belief that religion and geology are commensurate, the turn of the century psychologist William James’s belief that religion played a vital role in human psychology, and the early twentieth-century physicist Albert Einstein’s desire to know through science the mind of God, reveal that some nineteenth and twentieth century scientists relied on piety to approach the scientific study of human and natural phenomena.
Science is a pious enterprise and endeavor: the search to know the secrets of the universe and to reach the limits of human understanding occurs within the context of nature, an overwhelming entity that dwarfs us, generating a pious response, demanding reverence and humility, generating as well a sense of continuity and purposeful change, that answers exist to questions, that there is order rather than chaos, that reason and knowledge exist. Piety involves a sense of awe of the universe and a realization that being plays a role, whatever that might be, in its creation and constancy. Pious scientists have had an awareness of the profundity of existence, of life, and the role of something, an act moving upon potential, making and sustaining life.
Scientific and religious thought are complementary not contradictory. Scientists prior to the modern age were convinced that their research into nature shed light on the divine. The most valid response to God the Creator was a pious attempt to understand His Creation. Thinkers showed piety through natural theology; a belief in the continuity of and order in the universe; belief in natural laws; and a belief that human reason can (and will) discover natural laws.
Cultural and social influences during the past four centuries have led to a questioning of the divine role in the creation of the universe, resulting in a reconsideration of God the Creator, the divine role in the creation of the universe that is revealed through divine works, resulting in more of a general anonymous sense of a great mystery in the universe that could or could not be divine.
There was a definite change from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries in the perception of God the Creator. Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the paradigm in scientific thought helps to explain this change. The seventeenth century was a time of a providential God in control of all aspects of natural and human history. The eighteenth century moved toward a deistic God the Creator who put in motion a Creation that required very little divine intervention. Skepticism brought about by the critical discoveries of the nineteenth century resulted in the sense of the divine as a vague supernatural force that has some sort of a role in the vastness and complexity of the universe. Thinkers into the twentieth century were increasingly agnostic and atheistic in doubting any kind of supernatural agency at work in the universe.
Piety changes during this time from a clear sense of a personal God, a Christian God, to a more generic sense of a Creator God to a more amorphous mysterious presence; but during the whole there is an awareness and awe of the universe and (perhaps) its maker that is pious if not religious, piety being a sense of wonderment and humility when faced with a natural phenomenon that sometimes seems to defy explanation.
I wonder, is the driving motivation for those who pursue the physical, life, social, behavioral, and mathematical sciences, piety?……

For more on the history of science, see my Science in the Ancient World: From Antiquity to the Middles Ages, republished in a paperback by Bloomsbury Jan 22, 2026: find it at https://www.amazon.com/Science-Ancient-World-Antiquity-through/dp/B0FSW74DKZ/ref=books_amazonstores_desktop_mfs_aufs_ap_sc_dsk_0?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_w=6oCC7&content-id=amzn1.sym.299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_p=299f645c-0a78-440a-94a2-fb482e7cb326&pf_rd_r=142-5197957-8175817&pd_rd_wg=Erb81&pd_rd_r=7cdd0d6a-0a38-49cf-a2ba-a1a0959be396

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The Liberal Arts: The Continuing Foundation for Learning in Our Society by means of the Trivium and Quadrivium

Posted on February 4, 2018 by theamericanplutarch

The Liberal Arts are based in the historical trivium and quadrivium. The Trivium is Latin, literally “a place where three roads meet”. Quadrivium is Latin for where four roads meet.

The Liberal Arts of today derive from the meeting of three to four historical roads: the ideas of human expression and knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and Romans; the Medieval striving to preserve the humanistic ideas of the ancient world; the rebirth of ancient learning that occurs during the Renaissance and Enlightenment; and the rebirth of mathematics and science during the Scientific Revolution of the Renaissance and Enlightenment.

The liberal arts involve the study of those subjects that open the mind and help bring about a free people.  Liberal is Latin for “suitable for a free person.” Arts is “skill as a result of learning or practice.”

Hence Liberal Arts means the study of subjects to gain an expertise so to acquire the habits and personality of a person who lives a free life, that is, lives in such a way to be free from outside influences, to know precisely what one’s personal beliefs, derived from personal experience, are.

The Ancient Greeks provided the foundation for the Trivium and Quadrivium, as they were defined later in the Middle Ages, because of their focus on philosophy, literature, rhetoric, history, art and architecture, mathematics, the life and physical sciences. The Roman Empire encompassed the learning of the ancient Greeks, and brought such learning forward into the centuries after the birth of Christ. But the Roman Empire went through a political and cultural decline—the liberal arts of the ancient Greeks declined as well. In the resulting period subsequently called the Dark or Middle Ages (Medieval Europe), there were some isolated centers of learning that continued to preserve ancient Graeco-Roman (typically called Classical) learning. These centers of learning were usually connected to Roman Catholic monasteries. It was during this time that the terms Trivium, for logic, grammar, and rhetoric, and Quadrivium, for arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, were coined. European society, culture, and economy went through a resurgence beginning in the 12th century, which led to the European Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Scientific Revolution.

 

The Trivium: the arts of thought and communication

  1. Logic: logic refers to philosophy, to human thought, the fact that humans are thinkers, able to conceptualize ideas, to try to achieve a sense of what exists, or “is,” that is being, which is not subject to time. Example: Humans like all animals feel. When a human feels a sense of warmth toward another being, a sense of attachment, of not wanting to be separated, they conceptualize this feeling as Love. Love is not material or physical; it is simply an idea based on conceptualized feelings.
  2. Grammar: grammar refers to symbols that humans have invented to symbolize the concepts and ideas that they have conceptualized. These symbols can be learned and shared, which form the basis of communication. So, for example, the concept of Love can be designated by four symbols, L, O, V, E, joined together.
  3. Rhetoric: rhetoric are all of the arts of communication that humans use to share their ideas and concepts by means of symbols. Humans can therefore share an idea or concept, such as Love, by means of symbols that are expressed through writing or speaking.

 

Quadrivium: the arts of temporal and spatial reasoning

  1. Arithmetic: because humans live in time and space, they keep track of movement in time and space by counting and measurement. The Counting function is arithmetic, and the Spatial function is geometry. Arithmetic is the way to make sense of the multitude of things (quantities) and movement in our environment over time.
  2. Geometry: Geometry is the way humans make sense of the multitude of things and movement in our environment that take up space. We observe various things at particular moments in time and can make sense of how they relate to us in terms of distance, volume, and dimension.
  3. Music: Music is using arithmetic, counting things and movement in time, as it applies to sounds and harmony. Special notes are created to keep track of these sounds moving through time. Music symbolizes human creativity in different cultures.
  4. Astronomy: Astronomy is measuring space and its vast dimensions over time. We observe various things over time and can make sense of how they relate to us in terms of distance, volume, and dimension. Astronomy symbolizes the hard sciences, examining movement (physics), material substances (chemistry, geology), and organic substances (biology).

The Liberal Arts continue to form the basis for thought, expression, and reasoning in our culture, from the past to the present and into the future.

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The Small Liberal Arts College in Crisis: Is there a Solution?

Posted on October 15, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

I teach at a small parochial liberal arts college in Oklahoma. Like other such colleges, parochial and secular, this college, Bacone College, is continually in crisis: financial crisis, enrollment crisis, staffing crisis, management crisis.

There are a host of reasons leading to said crises: the high costs of attending a small private college compared to a public university; the comparative dearth of resources of a small college; the heavy reliance upon enrollment and tuition to keep finances from going in the red; the sacrifice of academics to sports programs; the reliance upon fluctuating members of the board of trustees for leadership; the top-down style of management that small institutions tend toward.

The value of historical study is that it provides a sense of a long-term perspective of the past to the present, which often helps suggest guidance for the future.

Based on my research and writing for Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years, as well as my (going on) 18 years as a professor at Bacone College, I believe I have gained some perspective on Bacone’s past, present, and possible future, which provides, perhaps, lessons for other small liberal arts colleges. The 138 years of Bacone College suggests:

Bacone College was founded 138 years ago by missionaries from the American Baptist Home Mission Society to bring Christian education to the Indians of Indian Territory, Oklahoma Territory, and elsewhere. The American Baptists controlled the college until about 60 years ago when they decided to move on from its oversight and sizable financial commitment, to allow Bacone to be governed independently by a Board of Trustees answerable to no outside source of governing authority and commensurate financial assistance. There were predictable leadership, management, and financial consequences. From the beginning in 1880, Almon Bacone, and since then all of his successors, wanted Bacone to be independent of all tribal control, which independence guaranteed a flexibility in decision making but a lack of financial resources. Whatever endowment Bacone once had was spent many years ago. Hence the dependence on enrollment and tuition.

Athletics has, for many years now, especially since 1999, kept the college open, but the problem has been that athletics has come before academics, which is an unworkable situation for a college. It is almost like increasing debt: as the debt and interest rates rise the debtor can scarcely get out of debt without taking on more. As the college grows ever more dependent on athletics it can scarcely rid itself of this non-academic encumbrance and indeed must continue to recruit and take on more. If college resources go toward athletic programs and staff, then academics by comparison suffer.

The mission of the college has been unclear for years. There are many private Christian schools connected to a denomination, and many private American Indian schools connected to a tribe. But how many private colleges that are Christian without a clear denominational presence (in terms of students, faculty, administration, oversight, and financial support) or American Indian without a clear tribal presence (providing leadership and money) can survive in today’s world? Back in the 1950s, Bacone began to move away from its exclusive concern with American Indians. Why? The college was struggling to make a go of it then, as well as now. It makes sense to continue to broaden the college outward to all racial and ethnic groups. Besides, in the past thirty years there are a multitude of tribal colleges that take away the potential pool of applicants for Bacone.

For many years now, stretching back more than half a century, Bacone has had no realistic, workable strategic plan. Such a plan must be based on set, established academic programs that are consistent and comparable in order to attract a pool of students. Bacone has long been uncomfortably caught between professional and academic programs—almost like a split personality. Professional programs (business, health, education, criminal justice) lead to a clear career path and jobs after graduation. Academic programs (Liberal Arts) can lead to a career path and jobs but not as clearly; academic programs can prepare students for graduate school. Bacone has never had academic programs clearly intended to prepare students for graduate school, hence top notch students who want to pursue academics beyond the bachelors degree have little incentive to attend. A college that has a shotgun approach to majors will find it hard pressed to attract serious students—hence the reliance upon athletics. There are many professional schools all over eastern Oklahoma competing with Bacone’s business, health, criminal justice, and education programs, and they cost a lot less; but there are not as many small private liberal arts colleges preparing students for career as well as graduate work.

The key to college success resides in the faculty. Faculty have to feel invested, central to planning and decision making, because they are the ones who ultimately can attract students and bring students forward to degree completion to ensure continuous successful enrollment, year after year. Bacone has since 1880 had a top down administration in which faculty are very little, and rarely, directly involved. The faculty must be equal to the administration in terms of planning and decision-making because the faculty, in their day-to-day interaction with students—and not the administration—are ultimately in charge of academics. This is why successful schools have faculty tenure (or the like), because tenure guarantees to the faculty that they can be invested and central to the college without having to fear for their jobs. Bacone has never had tenure. And, successful schools have active and forthright faculty governance that is engaged equally to the administration; Bacone has never really had this either.

Bacone—and by comparison, I believe, many other small private liberal arts colleges—will never be able to emerge from the quagmire it has been in for many years, until . . .

  1. it can focus its attention on academics rather than athletics (athletics as a consequence of academics is, of course, acceptable), which means to make a decision to focus on degree plans that fill a necessary liberal arts niche and will bring students to study;
  2. it embrace a clear and consistent academic purpose in terms of successful liberal arts programs preparing students for graduate studies as well as careers;
  3. it can develop a clear, realistic mission—based on Bacone’s past, this would be an ecumenical Christian approach as well as a multicultural approach filling the needs of students with particular racial, ethnic, class, and personal needs;
  4. it can embrace faculty as equal partners in recruitment, planning, governance, and delivery of academic programs.

There is an important role for the small liberal arts college in America. Foresight and strategic planning based on an understanding of the past and the needs of the present must replace knee-jerk reactions to immediate crises and unconsidered responses to the exigencies of the moment—such is the key to survival and success.

For more on Bacone College, see Marking the Jesus Road: Bacone College through the Years: Lawson, Dr. Russell Matthew: 9780977244805: Amazon.com: Books

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The Return to McCarthyism

Posted on September 26, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

Almost seventy years ago, an obscure senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, used fear as a means to initiate widespread panic and intimidate the innocent.

Fear can do this to people. Fear makes the rational become irrational, the innocent become guilty, the mainstream become evil. McCarthy used the fear of communism to instigate mass panic throughout America. Seemingly rational people began to accuse others of being communist without any evidence whatsoever. The panic gained momentum. Anyone who disagreed with McCarthy was accused of being a communist. Anyone who spoke out against the fear-inspired panic became guilty for even questioning the relevance of the panic. The McCarthyists, emboldened by a narrative of lies that became a pseudo-truth, went after anyone who displeased them: the reasonable, the level-headed, those who reserved judgment, those who realized that such fear-inspired panic is a constant throughout human history.

A narrative of falsehood gains momentum simply because the most outrageous accusations are difficult to defend by even-handedness. If a person is accused of being a racist, the label inevitably sticks, and is difficult to shed. Any statement to the contrary, any attempt to defend oneself, is considered further proof of inherent racism.

This is why the presidents during the McCarthy years, Truman and Eisenhower, refused to confront McCarthy, because in so doing they would automatically be accused of being communist, and be unable to shed the accusation.

Fear-induced panic convinces all but the most courageous to hide their head in a hole until the panic subsides.

President Trump should have learned this important political lesson: never, never, courageously defend yourself against outrageous accusations, because the accusers will continue to make the accusation, and the accusation will be considered truth itself.

As a history professor and writer, it is disheartening to see so many intelligent people return to the mechanisms of McCarthyism. I thought maybe we had learned our lesson. Obviously not.

 

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Is the Message Still Relevant?

Posted on September 11, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

For 2000 years, since Jesus commanded his disciples to go spread the good news to all nations, Christian messengers, or missionaries, have traveled throughout the world spreading the message of hope and redemption. There are few people on the Earth who have not heard this message. Messengers have translated the Bible into a hundreds of languages—and more translations keep coming. Especially in the past 500 years, Europeans, in the wake of aggressive imperialism, increased their efforts to spread the message to North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Often missionary work has been an apology for conquest, slaughter, and enslavement. In the late 1800s, European competition for world power led to horrifying imperialistic actions in Africa. For example, beginning in the 1880s, King Leopold II of Belgium brutally expanded Belgic power into the Congo in the name of civilization and Christianity.

Indeed, for centuries Christian apologists have claimed that unless a people adopt European customs, values, dress, and language, they cannot be properly converted to Christianity, hence receive salvation.

At the same time, the European heritage has become increasingly materialistic, hedonistic, and narcissistic, such that the expanding noise of modern technology and communications seems to be drowning out the message of Christ.

Is the message still worth listening to?

Yes, if the message is in its purist form.

The purity of the message is found in the Gospel, first and foremost, in the teachings and actions of the Son of Man. Here we read firsthand, albeit through translation, the words of Jesus of Nazareth rather than the many commentators and expostulators who often distort the message for their own purposes.

And so, for people throughout the world who have routinely been dispossessed of property, human rights, liberty, and life, we hear words that bring peace to our anguished souls. For its true that in reading the Gospel,
You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free.

Read about the life of a person who made the message relevant to people living in the 18th century: Apostle of the East: The Life and Journeys of Daniel Little.

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All Things are Possible

Posted on August 27, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

Recent conflict and protests in America, about statues and monuments recalling troubling events in the past, seem to be dividing a country that clearly needs uniting. Those who focus on division rather than unity seem to think that all things are possible—that the sky is the limit for the future, and all they have to do is imagine it, protest for the sake of it, made a lot of noise about it, and it will come about.

Protesters are focusing on the American past, but ironically their view of the past is shortsighted, if not altogether ignorant. The past is not just a few isolated events from the collective memory about which people who otherwise know little about history can gather and make noise.

The philosophy of presentism—living for the moment without a deep appreciation of the past or an anticipation of the future based on the past—is how problems of division, conflict, manipulation of others, acquisition of power, and the creation of totalitarian states, occur. If all a person can do is consider how the present moment, one after another, might make him/her feel good because of a brief moment of feeling significant, powerful, and important, then such a person is ripe for the exploitation of demagogues, who typically promise that such feelings, such power, such a narcissistic trip, will continue—as long as you believe in the opposition to what is steady, orderly, traditional—the establishment.

Protest for the sake of protest is wrongheaded. It upsets order, creates chaos, but fulfills a momentary urge to feel significant.

Look, I have many of the same suspicions of the power elite that protesters have. But I am not marching through the streets carrying placards screaming at the top of my lungs. Why?

Because, for one thing, I have a historical perspective. Emergencies—what appears to be something that has to be done, NOW—are rarely emergencies—they just seem that way in the moment. I truly believe the philosophy recorded in Ecclesiastes, that there is “a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; . . . a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to be silent and a time to speak”—overall, “time and chance happens to them all.”

Yes, time and chance happens to us all. We need to know patience, to accept what has happened, what will happen.

All things are possible. But remember the caveat to this phrase, as found in the Gospel of Matthew? “All things are possible”—with God. The disciples were upset because Jesus had told them that it is more difficult for a rich man to go to heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. How, then, can anyone be saved? “With God, all things are possible,” Jesus said. The point is, that humans try to do so much, but our individual and collective weakness prevents us from doing what we want: we cannot, in short, make all things that can possibly occur actually occur. And to try to is to court disappointment because our time rarely conforms to God’s time.

Contentment, in short, is based on waiting. A person can act, a person can dream, a person can try their hardest. But in the sum of all things, according to the vast stretch of time of which you and I are just a very small part, the future is unknown, and what is about to happen is unknown: all we can do is wait–for humans can do very little, but with God, all things are possible.

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Historical Sites along the Maine Coast: Kittery to York

Posted on July 13, 2017 by theamericanplutarch

Kittery, Maine, situated on the northern shores of the Piscataqua River, was a home to seamen and fishermen. Most such men of the salt sea were not well known in their own time and forgotten today. An exception was Lieutenant Andrew Newcomb, son of Captain Andrew Newcomb, the son following the father in the life of the sea. Captain Newcomb lived in Boston during the 1660s to 1680s, sailing his shallop laden with cargo up and down the Atlantic coast. Where his son Andrew was born is unknown. He appears in the historical record in the 1660s at Hog Island, one of the northernmost of the Isles of Shoals; Hog Island was under the jurisdiction of Maine in the 1600s, and has been ever since. The Isles of Shoals was an important center of the New England fishery during the colonial period. Fishermen such as Andrew Newcomb would set sail for daily or longer voyages to the Gorges Banks or other such fishing grounds where haddock, cod, mackerel, and other fish were captured. Back at Hog Island, the fisherman would cut and salt the fish and let it dry in the sun before being stored in a barrel for export. Andrew was married to Sarah, whose maiden name is unknown, but who bore seven children, Simeon, Andrew, Simon, Thomas, Sarah, Mary, and Peter. Sometime in the late 1660s Andrew and Sarah bought land at Kittery, in the north parish, what is today Eliot Maine. Here the family resided while Andrew carried on his trade and stayed involved in Hog Island affairs. For example in 1671 he was a constable on Hog Island serving a warrant on a drunken sailor who resisted. Mary died within a few years of their move to Kittery; Andrew, in debt and looking for new opportunities, moved his family to Martha’s Vineyard, where he married again and had eight more children with Anna Bayes, and became a prominent citizen.

Kittery is also famous as being the home of Sir William Pepperrell, the hero of the assault on Louisburg in 1745. William Pepperrell, Sr., arrived in America from Wales by way of Newfoundland in the mid 1600s; he settled at the Isles of Shoals and took up fishing. His business was sufficiently profitable to allow him to relocate on shore at Kittery Point, a peninsula jutting into the Piscataqua east of Kittery town. William married Margery Bray, daughter of Kittery shipbuilder and merchant John Bray, establishing by his alliance with the Bray family a foundation for future mercantile success. William Pepperrell, Jr., was born to William Sr. and Margery on June 27, 1696. Already his father was a major landowner and merchant involved in naval stores, shipbuilding, and the trans-Atlantic trade. By the time William Jr. was 21 years old, he was made a partner in the firm, “The William Pepperrells,” and assumed supervision over Pepperrellboro, the town and immediate environs of the lower Saco River and the village of Saco, most of which the Pepperrells owned. William Jr. rose rapidly in political circles as well, becoming Colonel and commander of the Maine militia, and a Provincial Councilor to the General Court of Massachusetts, representing Maine. Indeed Maine had been under the political control of Massachusetts since the 1650s and would be designated the District of Maine until it became an independent state in 1820. Pepperrell was a leader, then, in the political affairs of Maine and Massachusetts. He was a close associate of Massachusetts governors, being made Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas by Governor Jonathan Belcher, and working with Governor William Shirley to plan the audacious assault on the French fortress of Louisburg on the island of Cape Breton.

During the second to the last of the Great Wars for Empire fought between the French and the English, the Cape Breton War (King William’s War, 1744-1749), William Pepperrell, Jr. led New Hampshire and Maine soldiers to accomplish what most observers of the time considered improbable if not impossible. The French fort of Louisburg guarded the approaches to the St. Lawrence River. The English controlled Newfoundland and, by the Treaty of Utrecht ending Queen Anne’s War (1703-1713), Nova Scotia. However Cape Breton Island lay in-between, and the fortress at Louisburg promised to harass English shipping and colonial possessions during conflicts between the two great empires. Massachusetts Governor William Shirley realized the strategic importance of Louisburg, and decided, with William Pepperrell, to eliminate the French threat. Pepperrell amassed a force of over four thousand men; they journeyed north to Port Royal, Nova Scotia, then crossed Gabarus Bay to the southern shores of Cape Breton. They quickly marched the short distance to the fortress, to the surprise of the French commander Duchambon. Through subterfuge, will, and courage, the English succeeded in capturing the fort. Pepperrell became immensely famous as a consequence, and was granted the title of Baronet by King George II.

Today’s Maine Route 103 takes the exploring motorist from Kittery to Kittery Point, where the Lady Pepperrell house stands as well as the Pepperrell family burial ground. Nearby is Fort McClary, maintained by the State of Maine. On this site, at the southern extreme of Kittery Point looking out over the mouth of the Piscataqua River flowing into the Atlantic, William Pepperrell, Sr., had established basic fortifications to protect his property. In 1721, the Acts and Resolves of Massachusetts Bay Colony records a vote of the General Court “to erect breastworks in the town of Kittery for defense of the river”; these defenses were built on the site of Pepperrell’s initial fortifications. For years the fortifications were known as Fort Pepperrell or Fort William. At the beginning of the American Revolution, the New Hampshire revolutionary government confiscated the land and fortifications from the loyalist Pepperrell family. Soon after the fortifications were abandoned, and remained so until 1808, when the United States purchased the land from the State of Massachusetts and erected new fortifications named after a hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill. A granite wall and earthwork hosted several cannon to be manned by soldiers who lived in nearby barracks. The remains of these 1808 fortifications still exist; the foundation for the barracks also remains. A magazine to hold powder and balls was built in 1808 as well; this structure can still be toured by the visitor to the Fort.

Fort McClary is an astonishingly beautiful place to visit. The brisk salt air flows in from the Atlantic. In the far distance one spies Whaleback Lighthouse. Nearer, across the mouth of the Piscataqua one sees Fort Constitution, which guarded the entrance to Portsmouth harbor from the New Hampshire side. In the background is the town of Newcastle. The old stone walls of Fort Constitution stand next to the lighthouse of the U. S. Coast Guard. Fort McClary likewise is surrounded by ancient granite walls, fortifications built during the early nineteenth century. Below the walls the surf pounds at the natural granite of the shore. Spring wildflowers bloom even in this hazardous environment. Extending from the wall in several locations around the fort’s perimeter are caponiers, which provided defensive postures for artillery to fire at the enemy. In lieu of cannon, marksmen aimed from the caponiers or from the massive blockhouse at the center of the fortifications. The hexagonal blockhouse is several stories high. Its foundation is built into native granite; the first floor walls, likewise, are of granite. The second floor is built of timber. The blockhouse has numerous portals for lookouts and defenders.

The exploring motorist leaving Fort McClary departs north on the road (Route 103) to York. The old town of York, centered about the Old Gaol, the Jefford’s Tavern, the Old School House, and the Old Burying Ground. The Old Gaol held prisoners awaiting trial or corporeal punishment.

The Old Gaol [jail] at York was built in 1656, and was the sole gaol of the District of Maine during most of the colonial period. The present structure dates back to 1719. It had quarters for the gaoler and his family as well as two cells in which supposed ne’er-do-wells were kept pending trial and punishment. Stocks still exist at the site, revealing the proclivity of corporeal punishment in colonial New England regardless of gender or age. The Old Gaol is part of a complex of old structures maintained by the Old York Historical Society, including Jefford’s Tavern, dating from 1750, and the Old Schoolhouse, dating from 1745. The latter structure is located off Route 1 in York Village, and is adjacent to a delightful colonial graveyard featuring the best in period macabre headstones. The headstones of the Old Burying Ground tell in brief through pictures and epitaphs the lives of York men, women, and children.

The site of York is in the shadow of nearby Mount Agamenticus, which for a small mountain (691 feet) has a full history. Indian legends make Agamenticus the site of the famous chief of the Penacook tribe Passaconaway’s final resting place. The first explorers along the coast used the small peak as a seamark for bearings. Today’s journeyer can either drive or hike of Agamenticus; there a fire tower allows for quite an astonishing view for so small a peak. Jeremy Belknap, who ascended the mountain in 1780, observed “a most enchanting prospect. The cultivated parts of the country, especially on the south and south-west, appears as a beautiful garden, intersected by the majestick river Piscataqua, its bays and branches. The immense ranges of mountains on the north and north-west afford a sublime spectacle; and on the sea-side the various indentings of the coast from Cape Ann to Cape Elizabeth are plainly in view in a clear day; and the wide Atlantick stretches to the east as far as the power of vision extends.”

To read about an 18th century minister along the Maine coast, see

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