Wicked Yankee is a blog dedicated to all the obscure bits of New England history and folklore that don't often get recorded in history books or taught in history classes.
I am always fascinated by the native cultures of North America. I am obviously particularly curious about the natives groups of New England. Their cultures and histories are so unique, but so much seems to have been lost to time and assimilation. What is even more interesting for me is that these native cultures of the north east have played such a large role in the development of Yankee culture.
Despite the many things we do know about the native groups of North America, there remains a lot of confusion and controversy regarding their genetic origins. For many years, the conventional wisdom has been that all native cultures in North America and South America are descended from Asiatic nomads who came from Siberia into modern Alaska by using the Bering Land Bridge during the last Ice Age. Historians, archeologists, linguists, and anthropologists have always questioned this theory, but so far little evidence has been gathered to support alternate origins.
One of the most widely expressed alternatives to the Asian migration theory, at least as far as east coast native groups are concerned, is that many are descended from ancient European populations that made the roughly 1,500 mile journey from France and Iberia to the east coast of our continent. These stone-age Europeans, called the Solutreans, could have traveled along the edges of the frozen glaciers, catching and eating animals like seals and sea birds.
This theory is based on the discovery of stone tools and technology created by the Solutrean culture in areas like Solutré in eastern France. Very similar technology has been found throughout North American native sites. Yet, one of the biggest draw backs to this theory had been the large chronological gap between Solutrean finds in Europe and similar stone tools discovered in the US.
Native American ston tools similar to Solutrean discoveries
However, according to Archeology Daily News, several dozen European style stone tools have been discovered at six sites along the east coast of the US. These tools date between 19,000 and 26,000 years ago. While previous US finds had dated to roughly 15,000 years ago, therefore well after Solutrean technology, these new discoveries are contemporary with European finds. What is even more interesting is that one of these stone tools, discovered in Virginia in 1971, was created using European flint.
If the Solutrean Hypothesis is correct, this would mean European cultures inhabited North America several thousand years before Siberian nomads even crossed the Bering Land Bridge.
Professor Dennis Stanford, of the Smithsonian Institution, and Professor Bruce Bradley, of the University of Exeter, the archeologists primarily responsible for analyzing the newly discovered stone tools in the US, are re-presenting the Solutrean theory in their book Across Atlantic Ice.
However, Stanford and Bradley are not theorizing that all native groups in North America are primarily European in origin. Rather, they suggest that Native Americans of the Solutrean origin would have eventually been assimilated by the greater population of the native groups with Asian origins. This would account for the fact that there are very few European genetic markers in modern or ancient Native American groups.
When I teach this subject in my history class, students sometimes ask about the origin of Native Americans. Generally, our text books only give information regarding the Asiatic origin theory. However, I try to let my students know that this is only one of several probable theories. Like many things in history and especially pre-history, we just do not know for certain. Discoveries like those made by Stanford and Bradley prove that every day.
If you are ever driving along route 6A in Barnstable, Massachusetts, you may notice there are several odd rocks and stones bearing plaques. If you are like me, you might wonder what these plaques say, why they were put there, and who put them there in the first place. Investigating all of these memorialized stones would take a lifetime. However, one stands out because of its odd shape and the effortCape Codders took to make sure this spot and stone were remembered in future generations.
Very simply, Sacrament Rock is the site at which the Christian sacrament of communion took place for the first time in the town of Barnstable, potentially in all of Cape Cod. However, the story behind how these early Yankee Christians arrived in the heart of the New England frontier to observe their religious practices is anything but simple.
As with many Yankee stories, the tale behind Sacrament Rock begins in England. In Seventeenth Century England, the only legal religion was the Church of England. The King was considered the head of the church. Any other religion was considered outlawed and would only have been practiced in secret.
Of course, it was this same regulation that caused the Plymouth colonists of 1620 to seek religious freedom in the New World. Back in England other churches that were considered Separatist and Puritan continued to be persecuted by the English government.
It was one of these Separatist congregations that would eventually create the tradition of Sacrament Rock. According to Dan R. McConnell, author of The Howes, Lothrops, and Linnells of Kent and London, England, and Scituate and Barnstable, Massachusetts, in 1625 a Cambridge educated clergyman named John Lothrop moved to London from Kent to minister to the former congregation of Henry Jacob, who had fled England to the New World.
Henry Jacob’s ministry is considered the first IndependentChurch in London, and like all other religions outside of the Church of England, was illegal. Therefore, the members of the congregation had to meet in secret, generally in the houses of known members.
According to McConnell, the Jacob/Lothrop congregation practiced in secret for nearly a decade. However, in 1632 Lothrop and 41 of the congregation members were arrested and brought before the Court of the High Commission. Their supposed crime was perhaps somewhat unusual from our perspective. McConnell states:
“Because of their covenant relationship, Separatists believed that every congregation could be a church unto itself, and could elect it’s own Ministers, by vote of it’s elders, based upon the model of the early Christian church [pre-Constantine]. To do so meant they had no need of the Church of England, and did not accept the authority of the Bishops. This was unacceptable to the Crown.”
During the trial, the Archbishop of Canterbury even went so far as to state of the Lothrop congregation, “You are unlearned men, who seek to make up a religion of your own Heads! You are desperately heretical.”
When I teach about religious heresy, I often have to remind my students that religion meant so much more to our ancestors than it means to many people today. If a powerful clergyman made the above accusation to a citizen of the 21st century, he might be laughed at. However, the members of Lothrop’s congregation were facing accusers who had legitimate political power as well as an enormous amount of perceived spiritual power. To them, their lives and souls were at stake.
In addition, Lothrop and his friends faced these accusations without the right to legal counsel and with very few protections against abuses of power. The punishments given to heretics by the Court of High Commission could be very severe and frightening.
McConnell describes how ministers who had been convicted of publishing material criticizing bishops of the church could have their ears cut off or their faces branded. Some people would be sentenced to life in prison, where they would quickly die.
If the congregation wished to avoid these punishments, they were required to sign an oath of allegiance to the Church of England. In doing so they swore to abandon any practice considered contrary to the Church. This would of course result in a loss of their unique religious practices.
According to McConnell in Reverend John Lothrop and the Founding Congregation of Barnstable, every member of Lothrop’s congregations refused to sign the oath. In retaliation, they were imprisoned. Some members of the congregation died before the majority was released a year later. However, John Lothrop was left in prison for two more years because he was deemed too dangerous.
Although McConnell states that he was eventually released to care for his dying wife, some sources indicate that his wife had already passed away by the time Lothrop left prison. These sources indicate that his six children were reduced to homelessness and begging.
Lothrop was released with the understanding that he would leave England for the New World. Because he did not immediately set sail, the court ordered that he be arrested again. However, before this could happen, he, his children, and some members of his original congregation left for Plymouth Colony in New England. In 1634 they originally settled in Scituate, Ma, which still claims to have the oldest Congregational Church in the US.
According to Amos Otis in Genealogical Notes of Barnstable Families, Scituate did not seem to suite Lothrop’s congregation well. Ultimately the congregation was split. In 1639 Reverend Lathrop and others were granted the right to settle in Mattakeese, the area that would eventually be incorporated into the town of Barnstable.
Otis makes it clear that at the time of Lothrop’s arrival in Barnstable there was no meetinghouse; in fact very few families actually lived in Barnstable prior to the arrival of Lothrop and his crew. They did seem to have a religious leader, named Joseph Hull, but Otis states that the congregation was not legally organized. Of the first religious meetings, Otis says:
“No meeting house had been built, and tradition points to a large rock near the dwelling house of Mr. Edward Soudder as the place where he and his followers held their first meetings for public worship.”
Otis goes on to say that while no record really mentions this rock as being religiously significant. Although, to him, the tradition seemed reliable. He also states that in his time a large part of the rock had been split off in order to build the foundation for a new jail. He states that, like Plymouth Rock, this rock in Barnstable should be preserved for posterity.
Furthermore, other sources like The Names of Cape Cod, indicate that Reverend Joseph Hull, who eventually fell into disfavor with colonial government, had been the first to use Sacrament Rock as a site for religious worship sometime before the arrival of the Lothrop congregation. However, like Plymouth Rock, there are no actual records to support either claim, simply tradition.
The Barnstable Congregational Church seems to have taken the advice of Otis. According to the inscription on Sacrament Rock, and The Names of Cape Cod, the church hired a geologist to recreate Sacrament Rock, which seemed to have been broken into many more pieces after Otis wrote about it in 1808. The pieces were assembled into the current Sacrament Rock, including the plaque, in 1916.
The plaque on Sacrament Rock
Reverend Lothrop built his home about a half mile from the site of their first celebration. The house served as his home and as their first meetinghouse until a larger one was built in 1646 near to LothropHillCemetery. His home is now part of the Sturgis Library, and contains many Lothrop artifacts, the most important being the bible he carried when he fled from England.
John Lothrop died not much later, in the year 1653. He and many of the members of his congregation were buried in unmarked graves in or near LothropHillCemetery. A plaque was created to memorialize the congregation members and their leader.
Plaque dedicated to the Lothrop congregation
Lothrop Hill Cemetery
Although Lothrop didn’t necessarily go on to fame and fortune in the New England colonies, many of his descendants have become well known. According to the NEGHS, this list of people includes George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Billy the Kid, Franklin Roosevelt, and Benedict Arnold. An odd crew to say the least.
Looking into the history behind Sacrament Rock reminded me just how much of our history and culture we ignore on a daily basis. I have driven past this monument hundreds of times and have never given it more notice than I would your average fire hydrant. Like all of us, I am very busy, and never considered that this odd shaped rock on the side of the road had anything to do with New England history or the struggle some New Englanders endured to secure the religious freedom Americans enjoy today.
So, next time you drive by that odd stone with a plaque on it, why not stop for a minute? Actually read it. You might find a spider web of surprising connections to your town, street names, and other familiar landmarks in your town. Sometimes these threads touch or brush our own lives in interesting ways, and we begin to see how the lives and choices of the Yankees of yore echo through history in modern New England and the world.
I am currently working on a post about Sacrament Rock in Barnstable, but this video arrived in my email thanks to a student of mine. It was pretty scary, but not that surprising. Sometimes it seems like teaching is a real uphill battle. I wonder if the result would be the same if a random group of adults were asked the same questions. If that were the be the case, our country is in a whole lot of trouble.
Additionally, I wonder why questions regarding the American Revolution were defined as “trivia.” To me, this type of information does not seem trivial at all. It is at the heart and core of why we are a sovereign country. Anyway, take a look.
I often tell my history students when they begin to struggle, “Sometimes history is hard.” Often information is difficult to find or has been lost to time, and very often things remain unsolved. I experienced this first hand in my attempt to locate the grave of Robert Marshall in West Barnstable. What I found was some fantastic history about his life and the odd circumstances surrounding his death. However, the man known as Robert the Scotsman remains a true Cape Cod mystery. Unfortunately it’s a mystery I have so far failed to solve.
According to Elizabeth Reynard, in The Narrow Land, Robert Marshall was the Scottish manservant, protector, and sometimes apothecary for Dr. Mathew Fuller, the first full time physician in BarnstableCounty. Reynard does not give a whole lot of historical information about Robert’s background; in fact very little background information on Robert seems to exist. She simply describes him as very large (also hairy) and extremely loyal to his master. He also seemed to have been marked as somewhat of an outsider in 17th century Barnstable. According to Reynard he was:
“A man who mocked the Lord by wearing a folded petticoat, and shattered the mind by music drawn from an instrument resembling a giant snail bloated by rigor mortis.”
What made Robert’s position even more tenuous, other than his bagpipes and highland garb, was the relationship his master had with Thomas Hinckley, the Governor of Plymouth Colony.
Unlike Robert, Mathew Fuller’s life is fairly well documented. Dr. Fuller is credited with being the first full time physician in BarnstableCounty, which now contains all towns on Cape Cod. According to the Mayflower Society’s Five Generations Project, Mathew Fuller was born in England sometime between 1602 and 1605. His parents and brother were members of the original passengers aboard the Mayflower in 1620. His father even signed the Mayflower Compact.
Mathew did not accompany his family on the Mayflower. It is guessed that he remained in England to complete his education. He arrived in Plymouth Colony around 1640. Although his parents did not survive their first winter in New England, his brother remained in Plymouth in the care of an uncle.
Matthew Fuller seemed to very quickly make a name for himself in Plymouth Colony, in both positive and negative ways. He was appointed sergeant in the military company under the command of Myles Standish. Although, he moved to Barnstable in 1650, he continued to serve Plymouth and Massachusetts by becoming the Surgeon General of the colonial troops.He even served as Captain of the Plymouth troops during the King Philip’s War. His medical training is said to have saved the lives of hundreds of colonial soldiers, as he had taken to the practice of baking linens before wrapping wounds. The disinfected linens prevented wounds from festering in a time when the understanding of bacterial infection was pretty limited.
Dr. Fuller owned land in many towns in the developing New England area, but eventually he settled in the area of West Barnstable called Scorton Neck. This area now runs between the towns of Sandwich and Barnstable along Route 6A, very close to SandyNeckBeach.
Although Dr. Fuller seems to have led a praiseworthy life, he was also well known for being an outspoken Quaker. Often, his willingness to say what was on his mind got him reprimanded by Governor Hinckley. In one specific event, he was even fined fifty shillings for speaking out against a mandatory tax created to support colonial clergy. Obviously, separation of church and state was not an important concept in the Plymouth Colony.
However, he and Robert really stepped wrong with Hinckley when the Governor got sick from eating snails. According to Reynard, the Governor asked for assistance from Dr. Fuller, who arrived with his faithful servant, Robert. Fuller examined Governor Hinckley and asked Robert to mix something that would help Hinckley vomit out the poisonous snails. The concoction served its purpose, Hinckley and the snails parted ways. However, the Governor was rather displeased with both Fuller and Robert. He believed that the two had conspired to poison him.
Hinckley was carried off to bed, insisting that he was dying from Robert’s supposed poison, and that Fuller had allowed it to happen and had done nothing to save him. This one, somewhat silly event, seems to have led to lasting enmity between the three men.
However, the real Yankee mystery begins after the death of Dr. Fuller in 1678. At the time of the illness which would eventually claim his life, Dr. Fuller’s estate was inventoried so he could prepare his last will and testament. In Plymouth Colony Wills and Inventories Vol. III, his estate is recorded to have contained a box of precious stones, pearls, and diamonds. These items would have been very rare and valuable in seventeenth century New England.
According to Mathew’s last will and testament, he did not necessarily leave these particular items to anyone in his family. However, many resources state that after Fuller’s death, his box of precious stones was found to be missing.
Governor Hinckley summoned Robert Marshall to court and accused him of the theft. Hinckley pointed out that Robert alone had sole access to Dr. Fuller’s belongings. Robert, who had not slept since the death of his master, could not explain what had happened to the missing jewels. Although Hinckley had no proof with which to convict Robert, the accusation and suspicion stuck.
As the story goes, Robert became inconsolable after the death of Fuller and the accusation of Hinckley. Apparently, his grief caused him to stop eating. He began to visibly waste away the winter after his master’s death. Very quickly Robert seemed to lose both his health and his mind. People reported seeing him searching feverishly for his master’s lost jewels, sometimes in strange, remote, places. Eventually, Robert simply died alone in the middle of a cold New England night.
His body was found lying in the snow on Scorton Hill, near his master’s land. As Robert was quite heavy and the snow was very deep, it was almost impossible to carry his remains to the cemetery for burial. It was decided that he would be buried near where he had died, on the northeastern slope of Scorton Hill.
Some sources even give very specific directions to his grave. For instance, according to a letter written by Mary Wing, which was reprinted Cape Cod Library of Local History Genealogy:
“The grave may be found by ascending Scorton Hill on the east side about two-thirds of its height, when you come to a stone wall that runs northeasterly in the direction of Francis Jones’ barn. Southeasterly from that wall 67 feet and northeast by north 133 feet from the wall by the county road is poor Robert’s grave.”
These directions read like a treasure map. Unfortunately, this land has changed a lot since 1863, when Mary’s letter was originally written. By ascending Scorton Hill on its east side, I would be walking through many back yards and private property. Thus, I was unfortunately unable to locate Robert’s grave.
However, I believe his grave is most likely still there, probably sitting unnoticed in someone’s backyard. In fact, all sources indicate that the spot of Robert’s burial was well known for nearly two hundred years after his death. Sometime in the late 19th century, a Barnstable sea captain by the name of Oliver Chase even marked Robert’s grave with two stones. He placed one at the head and one at the foot of the burial mound. He even brought Mary Wing, the author of the “treasure map” letter to the exact spot.
Not only was the spot of Robert’s grave known and marked, it was even avoided by CapeCodders for hundreds of years. According to The Narrow Land, it is said that Robert’s spirit refuses to rest. Instead, he continues to search for his master’s lost jewels. In fact, the story says if you are in the area of Scorton Hill on a moonlit night, you may hear Roberts bagpipes and the sound of his mournful sobs.
As far as I know, Dr. Fuller’s precious stones were never found. I don’t know if Robert stole them, but I do wonder. When Fuller died, he mentioned his Scottish servant in his will. When leaving his property and his wealth to his family, he bequeathed to faithful Robert “a peece of Cloth Intended to make mee a suite.” Not only does this seem like a little motive, but the unlikable Governor Hinckley was correct in stating that Robert had sole access to his master’s body and full knowledge of the whereabouts of his master’s jewels. I don’t want to accuse poor Robert all over again, but it does make me curious.
I was rather frustrated at being unable to find the grave of poor Robert the Scot. In order to find it, I believe it would take access to 19th century property records and permission to tramp around private property. Sadly, I don’t have either. Or, since Robert seems to be a noisy spirit, maybe I should just follow the sound of bagpipes and sobbing to the right spot. I would absolutely love to find this spot in the future if at all possible. Until that time, I have learned my own lesson well, sometimes history is hard.
I have to thank my sister for sending this story my way earlier this week. According to Masslive.com, a UMass professor was recently nationally recognized for his history wiki.
For those who do not know, a wiki is a website on which a user (often multiple users) can collaborate to add and modify content using a web browser (like Wikipedia). Apparently, “wiki” is a native Hawaiian word meaning quick.
Robert W. Maloy, who is a senior lecturer at the UMass School of Education created a wiki absolutely full of information for history teachers. In fact, it is simply called resourcesforhistoryteachers. If you teach and love history like I do (bad history dork here), you should definitely check this wiki out.
Not only has Maloy compiled resources for all grades of history, including AP, but he has posted resources for electives like Government and Economics. Furthermore, he has correlated his resources with the Ma state frameworks (Awesome!!!)
Professor Maloy is the administrator of resourcesforhistoryteachers, but other history teachers and even students have contributed content to his wiki. This seems like a great idea. Creating an online resource like a wiki is a great educational experience for students. Not only do they do the original research, which is generally how history should be taught and learned, but they get to see how their creation changes and evolves as others contribute to it.
It’s no wonder that Professor Maloy’s wiki was recognized as a runner up by the 2011 Edublogs Awards, in the category of Best Educational Wiki.
As a history teacher and history geek, I have to give a lot of credit to Mr. Maloy. This site is really impressive and could be useful for so many educators and students. I certainly plan to check it often while preparing for upcoming classes and posts.
If you’ve ever seen a Maine Coon you probably ran through the list of comments and questions that many coon cat owners get all the time. Is that a wild cat? Is that thing tame? Is he a hybrid of something? Where do they come from? Wow, that thing is huge, how much does it weigh? Of course, the list goes on.
These are all actually pretty decent questions, and as the answers have not been wholly adequate when posed in the past, they keep getting asked. Although the Maine Coon was only recognized as a pedigreed cat in 1973, its history actually extends so far back into our colonial era that it has now become a certified New England mystery. I only call it a mystery because there are so few verifiable pieces of evidence to explain the earliest origins of the coon type cat in New England. These long haired, bigger than average, wild looking, domestic cats seemed to have simply emerged from the primordial forests of New England just like Yankee culture.
It is precisely this mysterious quality, mixed with New England story telling and exaggeration, which has allowed the creation of so many legendary versions of the Maine Coon origin story. What we lack in historical evidence is certainly made up for in historical folktale.
In comparison to other cats, the Maine Coon is a bit larger. According to the breed standard publish by the Cat Fancier’s Association; the Maine Coon should be a medium to large cat. This generally seems to translate into a 15 to 25 pound (25 lbs being unusual) male cat, females would be proportionately smaller. This makes the Maine Coon slightly larger than the average house cat. In addition to their shaggy fur, tufted ear tips, long fluffy tail, and solid rectangular body shape, the Maine Coon can look quite large and wild. Undoubtedly, it is this wild appearance which helps to generate the majority of the Maine Coon origin stories.
In fact two of the most repeated stories about Maine Coons claim that they are the product of hybridization between either raccoons or the New England bobcat. Although a brown tabby Maine Coon superficially resembles a raccoon, it is impossible for a raccoon and any species of cat to hybridize, as they are not genetically closely related.
However, this fact did not stop New Englanders from believing that their coon cats might actually have raccoon origins. In an 1893 publication of the journal Science, a New Englander writes in with what must have been a common question. In his letter he wrote:
“I saw in a private house in Chicago recently, two cats which the owners called ‘coon cats.’ They had been obtained around the edge of the forest around Moosehead Lake, and it was claimed that they were hybrids, or descendents of hybrids of the common domestic cat and raccoons.”
The writer went on to explain that the cats were bigger than normal, had bushy coon-like tails, and they even ran around like raccoons. He even mentioned that one liked to climb on high things to stretch out for a rest. He seemed pretty convinced that what he had seen was a raccoon hybrid.
However, in a later issue of Science two readers also write in response to the original coon-cat letter. Both agree that a hybrid between a raccoon and domestic cat would be impossible. They state that these cats are common all throughout New England and most people believed that they were the result of long haired Angoras from Canada breeding with local domestic shorthair cats. This idea is at least more reasonable.
The idea that the Maine Coon is a bobcat hybrid is also implausible. Though many have recently claimed otherwise, according to a 2007 article published on the site Messybeast.com, there have so far been no proven hybrids between either the North American lynx or bobcat and a domestic cat. Not only would bobcats generally view the domestic cat as a meal option, but attempts at forcing the two to mate have so far produced no offspring.
To see a bobcat in comparison to a domestic cat, check out the following video. This would be cool, but scary.
So, if the Maine Coon is not a hybrid, where in the world did this wild looking cat come from? According to the Maine Coon breed profile belonging to the Cat Fancier’s Association, the Maine Coon is the native long haired cat of the United States. This is somewhat misleading, as North America is not the native homeland of Felis Catus, the domestic cat. Nor is it the homeland of the ancestor of the domestic cat, Felis sylvestris lybica, the African Wildcat.
African wildcat- which still resembles a modern tabby
According to a 2007 study published in Science, all domestic cats can trace their ancestry back to at lest five African Wildcats who may have been domesticated in the Near East roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. From there, cats spread everywhere agriculture did. Like today, cats were used to keep rodents and other pests away from food stores. Since cats don’t generally eat grains or vegetables they could be used to control the pest species that did.
In addition, though Native American tribes had various types of domestic dogs, they did not keep domestic cats so far as we know. Therefore, the first domestic cats to arrive in the New World would have arrived with Europeans. However, when that might have taken place is precisely the mystery at the heart of another one of the most enduring Maine Coon stories.
It seems as though most early colonists did not write much about their cats. Historians know that settlers kept cats aboard ships heading to the New World to control mice and rats, but there just aren’t a lot of sources describing them. Some have posed that cats may have been introduced to North America by Norse explorers who may have come from Greenland and Newfoundland to New England around AD 1000.
Believers in this tale cite the fact that the Norwegian Forest Cat, which is another so-called naturally occurring breed from Scandinavia, looks remarkably like a Maine Coon. However, the Norse explorers did not leave any record of the cats they may or may not have brought with them on their trips to Iceland, Greenland, or Newfoundland.
Norwegian Forest Cat - They do look like Maine Coons
Yet, in Ring of Seasons: Iceland - Its Culture and History, author Terry G. Lacy states that a DNA connection has been found between cats from Iceland and the cat populations in other places that have or may have experienced Norse visitation. She lists New York and Boston as being two of these areas. However, she also states that there have been no archeological findings to support this connection so far. Therefore, the theory is interesting, but so far unproven. If remains of cats are found in areas of Norse settlement in North America or more DNA research is done to find connections between Maine Coons and Norwegian Forest Cats, I’d be happy to look into this idea further.
The earliest colonial record describing the domestic cat, at least in the New England area, seems to be William Wood’s New England’s Prospect, originally published in 1634. In his book, Wood describes how colonists struggled against the ravenous population of New England squirrels, something anyone with a birdfeeder knows something about. Wood States that colonial farmers were forced to carry their cats into the cornfields to fend off the rodents.
Although he doesn’t mention anything about what their cats might have looked like, from this source we know that the domestic cat had arrived in New England sometime before 1634. In fact they probably arrived in New England with the Plymouth settlers in 1620, but the early Puritans did not make reference to them. In addition to Wood’s source, archeologists have also found that Jamestown settlers ate their cats during the Starving Time between 1609 and 1610.
Between the 1600’s and 1800’s there are many sources describing the presence of cats in the developing New England colonies. Of course many of these sources are connected to Yankee superstition and the fear of witchcraft. Some Puritans believed that witches could take the form of cats to harass and injure their victims. However, there are no references to coon cats or Maine cats as a particular type until at least the nineteenth century.
In fact, according to an 1883 article in The Boston Journal, a coon-type cat by the name of Angora Dick was shown by a Mr. Robinson of BangorMaine. The author describes the cat as being a savage looking animal of fourteen pounds. In 1895, at the first national cat show held in Madison Square Gardens, a coon-type cat from Maine won first prize for best long haired cat. It’s apparent that in these early cat shows, cats were not classified by breed, but by type. A New York Herald article covering the 1895 cat show lists among the prizes, first place awards for best short haired tiger cat, largest and heaviest cat, best pair of kittens, and best short haired cat.
Cosey- winner of the 1895 cat show
So, sometime between 1630 and 1880, coon-type cats began showing up in New England. By 1883 they seem to have become very well known. In Frances Simpson’s 1903, The Book of the Cat, a chapter is dedicated to the mystery of the Maine cat. The chapter is authored by F.R. Pierce, a resident of Maine.
In her chapter, Pierce offers some insights into the history behind the origins of the Maine Coon. However, even she seemed a little unsure. According to Pierce:
“As to how and when they came, I would say, like Topsy, they just ‘growed,’ for their advent reaches far back beyond the memory of the oldest inhabitants.”
Hence, it seems that even the residents of Maine didn’t quite know how their coon cats came to be. However, Pierce offers what must be the most believable and probable origin story of them all. According to Pierce, Maine was one of the largest ship building states in the mid eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She states that captains and their crews imported many different types of animals freely, from seemingly everywhere in Europe, Africa, and South America. Among these imports were many different types of cats from all over the world. These cats would earn their keep in a similar fashion to the original domesticated cats of the Near East, by killing the rodents aboard ships.
Many of these cats were brought back to Maine, where they were basically left to live freely. From this large genetic stock of felines, Mother Nature selected only the most fit to survive and breed. New England’s harsh environment more or less naturally selected a larger than average, long haired cat.
Early Coon-type cat
Pierce states that these cats were once more prevalent within Maine coastal towns, but were soon gifted to relatives further inland. The cats continued to spread and dominate the feline populations of these areas until the coon-type cat became quite common throughout New England.
There are, of course, several other legends attributed to the development of the Maine Coon. One of the more probable states that an early English sea captain by the name of Coon often kept cats aboard his ship. These cats would often mingle with the local short haired cats when the ship was at port. Eventually, so the story goes, these cats came to be called Coon’s cats.
Another of the more improbable stories connects the development of the Maine Coon to the execution of Marie Antoinette. This story states that the former Queen of France, when faced with execution, loaded her most prized possessions aboard a ship captained by a man named Samuel Clough. Sadly, Marie Antoinette was killed before being able to escape. Captain Clough then brought his ship to Wiscasset, Maine, as per the original plan. Aboard this ship were six of Marie Antoinette’s Turkish Angora cats, which mingled with the local short haired Yankee cats, thus creating the Maine Coon.
If this were true, which I doubt, I don’t think six more long haired cats adding their genetics into a population, which already included possibly hundreds of other long haired cats smuggled into Maine by other ships, would make much more of a difference.
Although Maine Coons enjoyed success in the early American cat shows, its popularity began to decline in the later twentieth century. By 1950, it was believed that the Maine Coon had actually become extinct. However, with the creation of the first breed standard by the Central Maine Cat Club, the coon cat began making a come back.
Despite having to apply three times for recognition to the Cat Fancier’s Association, an organization created in 1906 as a registry for pedigreed cats, the Maine Coon was finally accepted in 1975. In addition, in 1985, the state of Maine declared the Maine Coon would become its official State Cat.
The Maine Coon continues to be a popular pedigreed cat. In 2010, it was the second most popular breed of cat behind the Persian. In addition, in 2010 a Maine Coon named Stewie earned the world record for being the longest ever domestic cat, at 48.5 inches from the tip of his nose to the tip of his tail. The article states that the average cat is only about 18 inches long, which makes Stewie pretty impressive.
Longest cat in the world
Researching the origins of the Maine Coon proved to be pretty fascinating. I must admit I have only seen a Maine Coon a few times in my life, each time I thought they were large, handsome, and impressive cats. Although most of my friends and family have cats (we’re animal people), few people I know actually have a pedigreed cat of any sort. My fiancé and I have three cats (Cosmo, Coors, and Jaime), all of who have no pedigreed background of any note. However, like most Yankees, they seem to share this mixed un-specified, yet wild, background with the original coon type cats of New England, the ancestors of the pedigreed Maine Coons of today.
