Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (8 page)

Bob photocopies the pages in my copy of Blass’s memoir about Fort Meade, and we discuss the remote-viewing buildings one more time. “Just don’t take any pictures,” he advises.

I promise him I won’t.

After driving around the post for a few minutes, I locate the spot and pull off on a side road. As I’m surveying the empty fields, a pickup truck parks right behind me.

“You lost?” a helpful voice calls out.

I look over and see a guy in his early forties, sporting a crew cut. I’m almost certain he’s military, although he’s not wearing a uniform, just a light-brown polo shirt and jeans.

“Well …,” I begin, not sure who he is and how much I should say, “I’m trying to figure out where some buildings were.”

“What buildings?”

“They were numbered 2560 and 2561.”

“Can I see that?” he asks, pointing at the map sticking out of my front pocket.

“Uh, yeah.”

“I think they were demolished a while ago,” he says, tracing a small circle with his index finger over the same area Bob had indicated.

“It’s okay if they’re no longer there. I’m just curious where they used to be.… ”

Now he’s a bit wary. “Why’s that?”

I downplay it. “Oh, it’s just for this little project I’m working on.”

That sounds suspiciously evasive, so I elaborate. “It’s about a top-secret program the CIA was doing using psychics.”

Much better.

He looks at me like I’m a nutcase. “Sorry I can’t help you there. Do you know how to find your way back to the main exit?” he asks. “It can be confusing.”

“Not really.”

He turns toward the street and says, “Drive out here, make a left onto Llewellyn Avenue, take your first left onto Ernie Pyle Road, go right on Mapes Road, and then you’ll turn right to 175.”

“Left, left, right, right. Got it. And I’ll pass by the barracks, right?”

“I don’t believe so.”

I had forgotten to ask Bob where they were. “I need to find those, too. Bill Blass trained here during World War II.”

“The fashion guy?”

“That’s the one.”

He hands back the map and shakes his head. “Lotta funny stories about this place.”

“Any that come to mind?” I ask, smiling.

He thinks for a moment, gives me a long, hard look, and says, “Almost forgot. They’re doing construction on Llewellyn, so you might have to jog around that a bit.”

That would be a no.

It’s also a good indication, even I can intuit, that it’s time to move on.

IN THE FAMILY
of American states, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (the state’s official name) is the runt of the brood. Wyoming is the least populated, but Rhode Island is geographically
the smallest. And like many diminutive siblings, what the Ocean State lacks in physical brawn it compensates for in bravado and scrappy determination. Rhode Island was first to declare independence from Great Britain and boasts having fired the earliest shots of the Revolution; on June 9, 1772, almost three years before Massachusetts minutemen clashed with redcoats at Lexington and Concord, Sons of Liberty patriots from Warwick, Rhode Island, shot up and torched a British schooner, HMS
Gaspée
, that had been harassing colonial mailboats. Newspapers across the colonies cheered the brazen strike, which exacerbated tensions with England, and Warwick residents celebrate the
Gaspée
affair every June by burning the ship in effigy.

This rebellious streak dates back to the late 1630s, when Roger Williams, with other like-minded souls banished from Massachusetts because of their faith, established the colony as a haven from persecution. Among those exiled was Mary Dyer, an early heroine in the battle for religious freedom. (The correct spelling of her last name is somewhat elusive; Dyre, Dyer, and Dyar all appear on contemporaneous documents.) Today, a statue honoring Dyer stands in Boston, where she died. But there is no tribute or memorial to her of any kind in Newport, where she lived.

Described by her peers as “comely”—the Puritans’ uncomely word for “attractive”—Dyer was admitted to the Boston church in December 1635 at the age of twenty-four. She had emigrated from England a year before with her husband, William, but by the spring of 1638 she was cast out of Massachusetts. Her friendship with Anne Hutchinson, who was labeled a heretic for leading unauthorized Bible meetings, had already raised suspicions, and Governor John Winthrop became convinced that Dyer was wicked when he learned that she had prematurely given birth to a deformed, stillborn girl. To prove his case, Winthrop disinterred the tiny corpse that Dyer had secretly buried in grief and shame. “It was of ordinary bigness; it had a face, but no head,” Winthrop wrote in his journal. “The navel and all the belly, with the distinction of the sex, were where the back should be; and … between the shoulders, it had two mouths, and in each of them a piece of red
flesh sticking out; it had arms and legs as other children; but, instead of toes, it had on each foot three claws, like a young fowl.”

For her “monster birth,” Dyer was expelled. She and her husband joined Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and other exiles from Massachusetts to found Rhode Island, the first government in the New World to establish freedom of worship as a fundamental human right.

In 1652 the Dyers traveled to England, where Mary came under the spiritual wing of George Fox and his newly formed Society of Friends, or Quakers. Mary converted and returned to New England in 1657. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. Massachusetts’s new governor, John Endicott (also spelled Endecott), was more intolerant than Winthrop and supported increasingly vituperative punishments against the Quakers, from extravagant fines and whippings to slicing off their ears and slitting their tongues. In October 1658, Massachusetts passed a law condemning them to death if they even entered the state.

Nine months later, Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson did just that, intentionally challenging the law. They were promptly tossed into prison. When Mary Dyer visited them, she, too, was jailed. William Dyer went ballistic, excoriating the magistrates by letter for mistreating his wife. “You have done more in persecution in one year than the worst bishops [back in England] did in seven,” he raged. Although William Dyer no longer lived in Massachusetts, he still commanded respect and was able to secure Mary’s release. Stephenson and Robinson were freed as well.

But precisely as the Rhode Island authorities had forewarned in their September 1657 letter to the United Colonies, the draconian laws only served as a magnet to the Quakers. Stephenson and Robinson marched right back into Massachusetts and were arrested, and Mary Dyer left Newport for Boston to offer moral support. Once again, she was incarcerated. All three received death sentences.

On October 27, 1659, Dyer, Stephenson, and Robinson were led to the gallows. Stephenson went first. “Be it known unto all this day that we suffer not as evil-doers, but for conscience sake,” he said when the noose was draped over his head. After a final prayer was uttered by the
local minister, Stephenson went off the platform. The rope snapped straight; his body tensed, shuddered, and then went limp.

Robinson followed.

Dyer was saved for last so she could watch the other two die. Her legs and arms were bound, and the noose was placed around her neck. Suddenly a voice cried out, “Stop! For she is reprieved.” Unbeknownst to Dyer, Endicott had conceded to giving her one last chance, after first giving her a memorable scare. Dyer was untied, taken down from the gallows, and escorted out of Boston.

Far from being shaken by the experience, Dyer was furious that she’d been spared while her fellow Quakers had been killed. Seven months later, on May 31, 1660, Governor Endicott and Dyer were once more face-to-face.

“Are you the same Mary Dyer that was here before?” he asked, incredulous.

“I am the same Mary Dyer that was here at the last General Court,” she said.

Endicott had lost all patience. “Tomorrow,” he told her, “[you will] be hanged till you are dead.”

“This is no more than what you said before,” Dyer replied.

“But now it is to be executed.”

The next morning she again calmly approached the gallows on Boston Common. The noose was tightened. A minister placed a handkerchief over her face so that the assembled crowd would not witness her final, involuntary contortions. A signal was given, and she dropped. Her neck broke the instant the rope went taut, and Mary Dyer was dead.

Dyer was not the last Quaker to be martyred; one year later, a man named William Leddra was hanged. Influenced by a prominent Quaker in England named Edward Burrough, King Charles II ordered that the executions stop.

A U.S. Naval Hospital stands where Dyer’s farm used to be in Newport, just off Third Street. Outside the hospital’s entrance, a security officer asks me the nature of my visit. I describe my search for unmarked
sites and Mary Dyer’s connection to the place. He smiles and from out of nowhere asks: “Okay, history guy. Where’d the name Jeep come from?” (I’m thrown at first but then realize that my latest rental car is a Jeep, so the question isn’t totally irrelevant.)

His tone is playful, but for a moment I’m afraid that if I fail to answer correctly, he might actually turn me away, like the Sphinx blocking passage to Thebes. If memory serves, there are a couple of theories about the etymology of Jeep, but I’m so caught off-guard, I can’t recall a single one of them.

“C’mon,” he says, “it’s short for ‘general purpose,’ or GP, which became
Jeep
. Also, I need to see your ID.” I’m not sure that he’s entirely accurate, but as I hand him my driver’s license, I’m not about to argue.

He seems genuinely intrigued by Dyer’s story, but he’s confused by my intentions; if I know there are no plaques or signs about Dyer, “What’s the point of coming here?” he asks. Cars are starting to line up behind me.

“I just have to see it firsthand,” I say quickly.

“Happy hunting.”

Over the past three and a half centuries the land around the hospital has changed, and no structures or foundations from the seventeenth century have survived. Anything, everything, related to Mary Dyer is gone.

“That’s probably why there’s no marker about her—there’s nothing there,” a staff member at the Newport Historical Society suggested when I called them months ago to verify where Dyer’s property was. “Preservation funds are limited as it is, and priority is usually given to sites where there’s
something
to point to.”

A tangible link to the past certainly has its advantages. Ideally, we hope to see the original building or fort or house because these help us to summon the memory of those who worked or fought or lived there. An empty spot of land often isn’t as evocative as the genuine article.

But even if “nothing” remains, there is value still in visiting the general area, I think. The stories, not the physical sites, are what’s paramount, and they become more indelibly impressed in our minds when
we travel to where they occurred. The journey alone inspires thoughtful contemplation, and inevitably we chat with others about our endeavor along the way, as I did with the security guard and also with a woman on the train to Providence, who saw me reading Dyer’s biography and was curious about “the Quaker Martyr from Rhode Island.”

At the destination itself all of our senses are engaged. Dyer’s old homestead presses up against what is now Coasters Harbor. Strolling around this picturesque neighborhood, hearing the light lapping of the waves and taking in the briny air, I have a better idea of her life here in Newport and how far she was from her first home in Boston. For us it’s an easy ninety-minute drive to Massachusetts. In Dyer’s time the journey took days, and she often went by foot. I can’t imagine how punishing this must have been in both body and spirit, especially her final trip. With every step she knowingly moved closer to a horrific death—and yet kept walking. I doubt I ever would have focused on the depth of her courage had I not come here. Now I’ll never forget it.

My contact at the Newport Historical Society touched on one other matter that can’t be overstated when it comes to why historical sites often go unmarked: lack of funding. Obviously it costs money to get these signs and plaques made, to say nothing of the hefty expenses required to erect a statue or refurbish an old property, and preservation and historical societies across the country are operating on shoestring budgets as it is. They also rely extensively on dedicated volunteers, and, having called on many of them already, I can attest that they are a consistently helpful and knowledgeable bunch.

At the forefront of the movement to protect America’s past is the revered and privately funded National Trust for Historic Preservation, and each year the organization releases a list of the nation’s most “endangered sites.” It is a sobering catalog of extraordinary landmarks that have either been neglected or are at risk of being destroyed. The Trust recently included on its list the Human Resources Center in Yankton, South Dakota (formerly the South Dakota Hospital for the Insane), and the building is historically significant because its winged design and sun-drenched rooms were intended to create a soothing environment
for patients. I immediately contacted the center about coming out for a visit before it was demolished, and the administrator said that there was no rush; in this case, a recent cut in the state budget had ironically saved the old hospital—for the time being. “The truth is,” the administrator told me, “we don’t have the money to tear it down.”