Categories: History

Massachusetts: Fun Facts and Trivia

Massachusetts has one thing most other states don’t. It’s a state heroine, and her name is Deborah Sampson (1760-1827). She was a schoolmarm and lecturer turned Revolutionary war heroine.

According to masshome.com, the state also claims an official vessel (the schooner Ernestina), an official poem (“Blue Hills of Massachusetts” by Katherine E. Mullen) and a state folk hero (Johnny Appleseed). The tabby cat is the official feline, while the Boston terrier is the state dog. Nor surprisingly, the official state rock is Plymouth Rock of Pilgrim fame.

Although Massachusetts has the nickname of the “Bay State” because of the early settlement on Cape Cod Bay, the name of the state actually derives from Algonquian Indian words that mean “great mountain. This is an apparent reference to the highest of the Blue Hills, located south of the town Milton.

Most of us learned about the state when we read in elementary school about the 1620 landing of the Pilgrims in Plymouth. The English-speaking colony they founded became a New World center of liberty and culture as well as a hub of commerce and industry.

The original inhabitants included several North American Indian tribes. The Nauset consisted of Algonquian Indians who had been living on what we know as Cape Cod. The other two largest tribes were the Massachuset and the Wampanoag.

Massachusetts will be forever linked to notorious witch hunts and trials in Salem in the late 1600s and to the Revolutionary War a century later. The first individual to be martyred in conjunction with the fight for independence from the British was Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave killed on the Boston Common in 1770. Boston is famous for the 1773 tea party that defied British taxation, and the opening shots of the war for independence were fired at Bunker Hill.

The Commonwealth became the sixth state in 1788. Boston has served as the state capital since 1780. The tiny state is home to some of the mightiest colleges and universities in the world, among them Harvard (the oldest college in America), Dartmouth, Holy Cross, Princeton, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke and Amherst.

According to 50states.com, 552 documents pertaining to the Salem witch trials of 1692 have been preserved at the Peabody Essex Museum. The Fig Newton got its name from the town of Newton, Massachusetts. Visitors to the state will want to take in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield and make a stop at Lowell, America’s first planned industrial city. The state is home to the two largest cities in New England: Boston and Worcester. The popular tourist islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard were formed by glaciers.

For those who are interested in Plymouth Rock, the visible portion is a lumpy fragment about the size of a coffee table. The date “1620” has been cut into its surface. After being broken apart and dragged by oxen around the town to inspire the desire to fight for independence, the rock bore the marks of gouging and scraping by souvenir hunters in the 1800s. It currently sits near the head of Plymouth Harbor.

The Bay State is associated with many other unusual facts. The first U.S. postal ZIP code is 01001 at Agawam. Clark University in Worcester was the site where the birth control pill was invented. Rockport sports a house constructed entirely of newspaper.

Volleyball traces its history to Holyoke in 1895, where William G. Morgan invented a new game he called “Mintonette”. After a demonstration at a nearly YMCA, the name “volleyball” stuck. The Pilgrim National Wax Museum in Plymouth is the only museum devoted entirely to the story of the Pilgrims. The first nuclear-powered surface vessel, the USS Long Beach, was launched at Quincy in 1961.

Many famous Americans have called Massachusetts home. Among them are the large Kennedy family, Charles Goodyear and Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams (both buried in Quincy). Others include Horatio Alger, Susan B. Anthony, F. Lee Bailey, Clara Barton and Leonard Bernstein. Writers E. E. Cummings, Emily Dickson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell and Henry David Thoreau hailed from the Bay State. So did entertainers Bette Davis, Leonard Nemoy, Cecil B. DeMille and Jo Dee Messina. While Benjamin Franklin is most often associated with Pennsylvania, he also was from Massachusetts.

In addition to stunningly beautiful autumn foliage, Massachusetts is famous for one more thing: Boston cream pie, which is the official state dessert.