Eric B. Schultz This post may be the strangest we’ve ever written. It may also be the shape of things to come. While the mission of the Old Colony History Museum is to collect, preserve and exhibit history, that doesn’t mean we’re not also about looking ahead. With that in…

Eric B. Schultz In part I of this series, we described some of the Old Colony’s most destructive fires, and in part II, some of the region’s heaviest snowstorms. Our third and final segment looks at the Old Colony’s long, calamitous history of surviving what’s blowin’ in the wind. On the…

Eric B. Schultz In part I of this post, we described some of the Old Colony’s most devastating fires, including the Granite Mill Blaze in Fall River (1874), the Grover Shoe Factory Disaster (1905) and the Strand Theatre Fire (1941) in Brockton, and the Myles Standish Forest Fire (1964). We…

Eric B. Schultz Some say the world will end in fire. Some say in ice. Some, like the residents of Taunton in 1886, may have thought their world would be swept away in a great flood. (See our blog post about “The Great Flood of 1886.”). Readers old enough to…

Eric B. Schultz In 1864, Timothy Crowell Baker (1838–1925) arrived in the newly-minted city of Taunton, seeking work as a tinsmith. It was a good time and place for his occupation, as the Taunton stove industry was flourishing. Residents of the Old Colony, along with Americans everywhere, were enthusiastically trading…

Eric B. Schultz “Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock and the Golden Rule!” –”Ya Got Trouble” from The Music Man There’s something about rocks. Search the web for “famous rocks” and you’ll discover everything from the Rosetta Stone to Ireland’s Blarney Stone. New England’s poet, Robert Frost, has written celebrated verses about “upper boulders”…

By Katie MacDonald and William F. Hanna In compiling material for our upcoming book, Tetiquet to the Sea: A History of the Taunton River, we have found a boatload of fascinating characters. Rivers seem to attract entertaining people with interesting stories, and one of our favorites is Thomas Coram. Born in Lyme-Regis, on the south coast of…

By Eric B. Schultz The Old Colony stretches from Rehoboth to Provincetown and from Scituate to Dartmouth. It is the historic home of New Bedford’s whaling fleet and Fall River’s textile factories, the Ames brothers’ shovels and Reed & Barton’s silver. Its soldiers and political leaders range from Myles Standish and Robert Treat Paine to Major General Darius Nash Couch and the brave WWII American GIs buried at the Normandy American Cemetery.

By Eric B. Schultz Act One: An Old Colony First December 1906. A 420-foot tubular steel antenna rises from Brandt Rock, a snowy, desolate spot along the Atlantic coast in Marshfield some 40 miles northeast of Taunton and 20 miles from where the Mayflower landed.