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History of Kittredge Park
Nesmith St with Kittredge Park to right
As the weather warms and the outside turns vibrant green, my thoughts go to the many parks in the city of Lowell and their history. This is a republication of a story I wrote several years ago about Kittredge Park at the corner of Andover and Nesmith streets.
In 1831, brothers John and Thomas Nesmith purchased 150 acres in Tewksbury from Judge Edward Livermore for $25,000. The following year, the brothers hired Alexander Wadsworth, a landscape architect from Boston who was the cousin of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and also the designer of Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, to design a subdivision for a portion of their land.
1832 subdivision plan for John & Thomas Nesmith
Wadsworth’s plan, dated May 1832, and entitled “Plan of a part of an Estate in Belvidere Village belonging to Thomas and John Nesmith” Wadsworth created a subdivision plan of 120 building lots and half a dozen streets, with a green space called Washington Square in the middle. A notable feature of this plan is the number of trees that Wadsworth drew on it. There are hundreds of them, all lining the streets with a double row of trees around Washington Square.
Two years later, on March 29, 1834, the Massachusetts legislature annexed 384 acres of Tewksbury to Lowell. This slice of land, extending from the Concord River to today’s Fairmount Street, included the Nesmith development, making it Lowell’s first residential subdivision. When John and Thomas built substantial homes of their own on either side of Andover Street, this became the most desirable neighborhood in the city.
On April 10, 1860, after the area had been fully developed, John and Thomas conveyed Washington Square to the city for $2100 and “in consideration of our desire to ornament the city in which we reside.” The conveyance included an express condition that:
“Said premises shall forever be kept open and unbuilt upon, as an open square or common, and that the same shall be kept by said city suitably fenced so that said premises may ever remain for the improvement and ornament of said city, for the comfort and benefit of those residing near the same, and for the health and resort of the citizens generally.”
A young couple who lived nearby, Edward and Effie Kittredge, were not members of Lowell’s elite; they were just ordinary working people. He was a machinist who became an electrician when that was a novel occupation, she took care of their two young sons, Paul, who was born in 1890, and Guy, who was born in 1898. Tragically, Edward died at a young age, leaving Effie with two teenage sons. She worked as a dressmaker and Paul took a number of jobs, including a driver for a bottling company (according to the 1910 census), and then as a painter and a printer.
On September 30, 1914, Paul married Sarah Hemmersley at the Immaculate Conception Church. They were both 24 years old. Paul also became an officer in the Ninth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, a National Guard unit with a record stretching back to the Civil War. He was mobilized in 1916 and served on the Mexican Border. When the United States entered World War One in 1917, the Massachusetts National Guard was federalized and reorganized. The Ninth became the 101st Infantry Regiment of the 26th Yankee Division, an organization made up entirely of National Guard units from New England.
The 101st Infantry Regiment was the first National Guard unit to land in France and the first to enter combat. If fought almost continuously from the spring of 1918 until the end of the war. The 101st was part of the 1.2 million man American army that launched the Argonne Offensive in late September, 1918. Lasting 47 days, the Argonne Offensive caused 120,000 American casualties, including more than 26,000 killed in action, making it the deadliest battle in American history. Among those killed was Paul Kittredge, who had just been promoted to captain. He was killed by German artillery fire on October 23, 1918.
Paul Kittredge was buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France. In the 1920s, the city of Lowell renamed the park Captain Paul Kittredge Square. In the late 1980s, between serving in the U.S. Senate and running for President, Paul Tsongas, who lived just a few blocks away on Mansur Street, led a neighborhood effort to beautify and restore Kittredge Park to help perpetuate the wishes of Thomas and John Nesmith that this park would remain, in perpetuity, a place for the “health and resort” of the people of Lowell.
Morning Mondo and a Question
Morning Mondo and A Question
By Jim Provencher
What’s the plan, Poppy, now that
you’re getting up there, you going
to ash or ground?
My six-year-old grandson hits me
with these questions out of nowhere,
no holds barred morning mysteries,
no filter, no curb, no screen.
Ashes, I guess—why take up space?
I’m not famous—no one would visit
my grave, depositing devotional debris.
No, it’s ashes for sure.
But where will they go, in a little box
someone can keep somewhere?
No, just carry them up, when you’re
old enough, to the summit of Mount Feathertop,
Queen of the Victorian Alps.
It’s a long-haul slog along the Razorback,
an undulating ridge, navigating a series
of rocky knobs and grassy balds,
climbing some, skirting others,
big views back over to Mount Bogong.
A few hours of serious up-and-down
and there she is, a perfect 6,247-foot pinnacle!
Follow the sharp ridgeline, straddling the knife-edge
where east, west, slopes fall away, plunging
into eucalypt darkness and the Ovens River Valley.
Feathertop—the name says it all:
In winter nonstop Antarctic winds
send summit snow plumes streaming,
permanently flying a white flag of surrender.
In summer, though, high above
Ovens Valley heat, wild flowers carpet grassy slopes. Bees buzz about: Let me go there.
Last Outpost Layover
Last Outpost Layover
By Jim Provencher
Stalled at a kind of boundary line
awaiting orders
Another afternoon
of pink grapefruit, soda & gin
People die, places endure
In a space of dead treelines and dry creekbeds
Chipping away at dense blocks of gravity
Noguchi-gouged granite, brutally knocking
into the heart of the matter
On that nowhere road
that takes you the way
a river takes you
Delighting in roughness,
what can be done with it
Making a figure of something else
yet something in itself
Making do, forgetting decorums
ranging outside nooks and books
sorting and sounding out
Pressing forward, pushing back
old haunts and homegrounds
recede in the rear-view
Snug in the limitless—
new threats loom
foraging carved remains of abandoned dwellings
bothered by algorithms and lack of rhythms
among those who appear happily occupied
Lying fallow, a still night in open country, listening—
the common nightcall of the bush,
idle chuckling, the single nightjar churring
a few words before setting sail
Lost but nothing lost on me—
Out in the West Texas town of El Paso
I fell in love with a Mexican girl
We danced the fandango at Rosa’s Café
In Marion, Ohio
Warren Harding bought a paper
In Marion, Virginia
Sherwood Anderson ran two weeklies
One conservative, one liberal
The kind of thing they used to do—
Think of New York after the war
But which war?
I’m thinking what some may think
wrestling with time and the wind
burning down the wick
a fluttering, guttering flame
Resisting soft landings
Proceeding by indirection
Dead-reckoning the way home
Crossing the line
to wander greater voids
Endings, reading them differently
now that the writer’s gone
surveilling the smoking afterground
in the dank silence of dawn
In the Exclusion Zone
they sell lots of alcohol
At the crumbling outskirts remain
the few who could not survive
elsewhere, living on leftovers
among abandonment, gathering rocks
for what I don’t know
In the aftermath at the last outpost
daring to breathe where children learn to die
before they can tie their shoes
Retaining a forensic mindset in a redacted world—
Are you looking for something?
Are you waiting for someone you don’t know?
Operating in a fact-free universe
floating like smoke where the chimneys
burn night and day
Unwanted anywhere, by any country
Milked for cash daily by local cartels
In a long-ago life things happened fast
Nothing moving here now
What you see may be disturbing
No trigger warnings in a hair-trigger world
Wandering lost marbles, dropped by
giants who abandoned their play—
Was it all just a Banksy Job w/a money angle?
Clouds in the sky, thoughts in the mind—
Living in a house of ghosts
Coming and going
I must be on my way
Paused at the last checkpoint
Checking my bonafides
Flashing my frontier pass
The Kerouac Renaissance: From Lowell to the World
The Kerouac Renaissance: From Lowell to the World
By Steve Edington—Lowell Celebrates Kerouac
The Jack Kerouac Commemorative at Bridge and French Streets was formally dedicated in the summer of 1988 two years after the organization, Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, was created to carry forth the idea of honoring Kerouac in his hometown.
I doubt few would have foreseen then that the 1988 Dedication would be the first of 36 consecutive annual Festivals in Lowell to honor the life and literary/cultural legacy of Jack Kerouac. This October of 2025 will be the 37th annual Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival, thanks to the ongoing life and efforts of LCK. [A virtual on-line Festival was held in 2020 due to COVID, but it did happen.]
Early on the Festival dates were moved from the summer to October to reflect Kerouac’s well-known passage in On the Road that “Everybody goes home in October.” For all his many far-flung travels, Lowell always remained home for Jack Kerouac; and he went to his eternal home in October of 1969 when he passed away in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was then brought back to Lowell for a Funeral Mass at the St. Jean Baptiste Church where he had once served as an altar boy and then buried in Lowell’s Edson Cemetery.
I came on to the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Committee over 30 years ago in 1994 and have served a couple of terms as its President. I am presently LCK’s Treasurer. What has been especially fascinating to me is how the growth and evolution of LCK has taken place in tandem with the Kerouac Renaissance—on a national and global level—that was gaining traction at around the same time that the Commemorative was dedicated.
Even as those of us with LCK worked on producing our Festivals from year to year, things were taking off in the larger Kerouac world as his true literary worth was coming to be recognized. The novels and books of poetry that he’d published in his lifetime, with some of them going out of print, came back to life.
Thanks to the efforts of the late John Sampas, who became the Literary Executor of the Kerouac Estate in the early 1990s, a whole genre of post-humous Kerouac writing was published. They included two volumes of his Selected Letters that ran from 1940 until his death in 1969. There was a coffee-table volume of his Buddhist writings called “Some of the Dharma.” There was “Atop an Underwood,” “The Haunted Life,” and the original version of the On the Road scroll, to cite but a few examples. The latter came after the OTR scroll manuscript was purchased in May of 2001 by James Irsay, the owner of the NFL franchise Indianapolis Colts, for just under 2.5 million dollars.
At the turn of the century and millennium The Modern Library ranked On the Road at number 55 of the top 100 American novels of the 20th century; and Time Magazine rated it as one of the 100 best English language novels published between 1923 and 2005.
When John Sampas passed away in 2018, his nephew, Jim Sampas, became the Estate’s Literary Executor. Jim has continued in the practice of bringing previously unpublished Kerouac writings into print. In collaboration with Kerouac scholar Charles Shuttleworth, Charles and Jim have seen to the publication of Kerouac’s journal from his Desolation Peak experience in the summer of 1956, and to much of his previously unpublished journals on Buddhism. Jim and Sylvia Cunha—Director of Marketing and Development for the Kerouac Estate—have also brought out a collection of Kerouac’s sayings and maxims with the title “Truth and Beautiful Meaningful Lies.”
In the academic world Jack Kerouac has achieved the status and respect that he was denied in his lifetime and in the years immediately following his death. There are now courses in English Departments across the country on the life and writings of Kerouac and other Beat Generation writers. At the University of Pennsylvania Dr. Jean Christophe Cloutier has done some outstanding work and research on Kerouac’s use of the French-Canadian/Franco-American language in his writings—using much of Kerouac’s previously unpublished work. Here at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell there is a Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies in the UML English Department.
The UML Center for Lowell History has recently received, via Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, the archives of the late Roger Brunelle, one of the founders of LCK. Much of it deals with the origins of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac, the attention it has received from around the world, and much of the history of the organization itself.
On this note, we return to the theme of how Kerouac’s rising star in the larger literary, cultural, and academic worlds has parallelled the near-40-year history of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac. During these years our festivals have grown both in attendees and content. Over the first or second weekend in October people come from around the country and from various parts of the world to spend a weekend in the city where Kerouac’s road began.
The bus and walking tours we offer show the neighborhoods and parts of the City of Lowell that are described in Jack’s five Lowell-based novels from the 1920s and 30s. They include Kerouac’s birthplace on Lupine Road in Centralville, and his grave site at the Edson Cemetery. While we give due recognition to Kerouac’s road novels, our primary focus is on his Lowell roots and his French-Canadian ancestry, which come through quite clearly in Jack’s Lowell novels. Our musical events, open mics, and a poetry competition at Lowell High School all pay tribute to the ongoing Kerouac Spirit in his hometown.
In partnership with the Parker Lecture Series, we bring acclaimed Kerouac scholars to Lowell to offer their many and varied perspectives on Kerouac’s life and work. Among them have been Kerouac biographers Ann Charters and Dennis McNally, New York Times feature writer John Leland [“Why Kerouac Matters”], the aforementioned Dr. Cloutier and Charles Shuttleworth, filmmaker John Antonelli, as well as local poet and writer Paul Marion—a founder of LCK and keeper of much of the Kerouac lore of Lowell. We also work in tandem with the Kerouac Studies program at UML on a couple of pre-festival events on the campus as a way of connecting with Kerouac in academia.
Since the late 1990s one of the mainstays of our festivals has been the renowned composer and jazz artist David Amram, who brings his amazing musical talents, as well as his stories of his days with Kerouac in New York, to Lowell year after year. One of the highpoints of each festival is the Annual Amram Jam on Sunday afternoon. Those attending—always in a packed house—are invited to read a piece of their own work or a favorite Kerouac passage while David and his fellow musicians provide the musician accompaniment. This way, the readers can share their material while being accompanied by the same person who once provided the musical back-up for Kerouac when he read at some of New York’s jazz clubs in the late 1950s. David will be with us again this year in Lowell (2025) just a few weeks shy of his 95th birthday!
In 2022, and the months leading up to it, LCK worked in collaboration with several other cultural and civic organizations in Lowell to observe the Jack Kerouac Centennial. Kerouac was born in 1922. We kicked off the Centennial on Kerouac’s birthday on March 12, wrapped it up with the October Festival, and LCK produced several other Kerouac themed events in the months in between. Once again, people came from all over America and several other countries to be a part of this observance.
What I find most remarkable in looking back over the ongoing and highly productive life of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac is that we do all we do as an all-volunteer organization with no paid staff and no office. We are very ably served and led by our current President, Mike Flynn. Our LCK Committee meets year-round to plan the October festival and put on some more low-key events for Kerouac’s birthday. We get our financial support from arts and cultural grants, income from the festivals, an annual appeal to donors, as well as some State funding thanks to Senator Ed Kennedy.
To return to what was noted at the beginning of this essay, I feel that the growth and success of our festivals has taken place in tandem with the larger Kerouac Renaissance. The two go hand in hand: As the Kerouac star keeps rising in the larger world, more and more people come to Lowell to honor his life and legacy. They, in turn, take their Kerouac/Lowell experience back to where they live to keep the Kerouac Spirit alive and growing wherever they may be.
One more late-breaking piece to this story:
In recent weeks the former St. Jean Baptiste Church was purchased from Lowell’s TMI Property Management and Development company by the Grammy winning country music singing star Zach Bryan to be converted into a Kerouac Center (actual name yet to be determined). As indicated above, the St. Jean Baptiste Church was once the heart and soul of Lowell’s French-Canadian community; and was the place where, during Father Armand “Spike” Morrissette’s ministry, Jack served as altar boy, and where “Father Spike” conducted his Funeral Mass.
The drive to convert the former St. Jean Baptiste Church into a Kerouac Center got underway some 3-4 years ago. Zach Bryan’s purchase of the building is an amazing boost to now making the Center a reality.
From an article in The Boston Globe about this development: “’[Zach] Bryan’s commitment to Kerouac’s legacy should go a long way toward ensuring that younger generations will engage with the writer’s work,’ said Jim Sampas, the literary executor of the Kerouac Estate.”
We at LCK are delighted with this development and are ready to lend our support in whatever ways we can. As the conversion of the St. Jean Baptiste Church goes forward, we will keep on keeping on with our annual festivals.
With a Kerouac Center in Lowell, along with the ongoing Lowell Celebrates Kerouac festivals, and the Kerouac Studies program at UML, Lowell, Massachusetts is well poised to be the Center of the Kerouac World!
Somewhere, Jack must be smiling.
****
Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire. He is a 30 year member, and a past President, of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac.
He is the author of “The Beat Face of God—The Beat Generation Writers as Spirit Guides,” “Kerouac’s Nashua Connection,” “Bring Your Own God—The Spirituality of Woody Guthrie” and “God Is Not God’s Name—A Journey Beyond Words.”
Steve grew up in West Virginia and is a 1967 graduate of Marshall University. He and his wife reside in Nashua.