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King Philip’s War Just to the west of Chelmsford was the town of Groton which was incorporated in 1655 and included all of today’s Groton and Ayer and parts of Pepperell, Shirley, Dunstable, Littleton, and Tyngsborough. Chelmsford and Groton were still the northwest frontier of English settlement in New England…
Read More »Opening Day, Eagle River, Alaska By Mike McCormick Stepping into the bracing air, I yank on my gloves and stride across snow filled ruts that gleam like fresh baselines in the narrow strip of dirt driveway. Hundreds of red capped birds chatter like anxious fans as I duck into my…
Read More »The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog. Newsflash! Joe Biden is a candidate for reelection. It’s hard not to be a little dispirited by the prospects of a replay of the 2020 election. As many as two thirds of both major parties are distinctly unenthusiastic…
Read More »Back on April 16, 2016, in the aftermath of the Lowell City Council vote to revoke the invitation extended to General Hun Manet of the Cambodian Army (and the son of Prime Minister Hun Sen), I wrote the following post that gave a brief overview of Cambodian history. With…
Read More »Chelmsford and Shaweshin While the boundaries set by the General Court for the new towns of Wamesit and Chelmsford were clear to those living then and there, the exact whereabouts of those lines faded over time. Indeed, Rev. Wilkes Allen in his History of Chelmsford (1820) wrote, the boundary between…
Read More »The entry below is being cross-post from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog. Three months ago, for the first time in 13 years, I took temporary leave of my blog to deal with the fall-out (unfortunate term in this context) of having tripped and broken what turned out to be seven…
Read More »The Arrival of the Europeans The Virginia Company established a settlement in Jamestown in 1607. That same year, a related company created another settlement at the mouth of the Kennebuck River in today’s Maine. Called Sachadehoc, this place was abandoned a year later after a fruitless and deadly winter. According…
Read More »The Massachusetts legislature by Special Laws Chapter 112 of 1825, considered and enacted “An Act to Incorporate the Town of Lowell” to be effective March 1, 1826. In recognition of Lowell’s approaching bicentennial, today I begin a series of blog posts called Lowell200. Over the coming months, I hope to…
Read More »This essay appears in the 2023 issue of The Lowell Review, just released this month, which includes a 55-page feature on Climate and Nature as well as writing about baseball, The Beatles, Jack Kerouac, and everything else in the world. The Climate/Nature section has essays, articles, and poems about Rollie’s…
Read More »Review of Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life, by Elizabeth D. Leonard Review by Richard Howe Scrolling through a list of books about Lowell’s Civil War General Benjamin Butler discloses a number of unflattering titles including The South Called Him Beast, When the Devil Came Down to Dixie, Army…
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