The Pawtuxet General | Episode 6

Greetings and welcome in! You've made it, just in time, to the Pawtuxet General, your connection to all things Pawtuxet-ish. I am your host, Jess! I'm going to have a chat about food drink, Pawtuxet secrets and ghost-stories! But, first, I would like to thank Liz Ruggieri, our newest Patreon subscriber. We love our Patreon subscribers. You fabulous people make it possible for us to do what we do, so, thank you. Also, keep your ears out for special holiday content, just for you. Plus, pictures of the places discussed here! a gift from all of us at the PG! Now, if the spirit moves you, you can join our fundraiser on PayPal at the link on this episode. We are growing every day, all because of you!

This week, our recipe is Yankee Baked Beans, a beloved family recipe so delicious. Our special cocktail is a Manhattan made perfectly with a cherry on top. For this week's edition of the House on the Corner series, we have a combo plate and story, the Joseph Kerwin Farm and an installment reading of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," by H.P. Lovecraft. So grab a drink and cozy up.

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Yankee Baked Beans. My grandparents lived during the Great Depression. My father told me, recently, that his mom did not know how to cook when she got married, and, at that time, there were social services in place to help young Housewives. So, she took lessons from trainers that went house to house; baked beans were one of those recipes. She would soak them overnight and send them in a special ceramic bean-pot, to cook, all day, in the local baker's oven. She made these every Saturday and served them with hot dogs, brownbread, coleslaw, and coconut-custard pie; all fresh from the bakery and delivered with her beans, to the door. So, my dad continued this tradition for my siblings and I. Baked bean pots, were decorations, as well as useful, in all shapes and sizes. All Yankees have their own recipe, but I think this is the best. In fact, one year, on the fourth of July, we were invited to a potluck party at a local marina. There were four batches of franks and beans, already there, when dad put his on the table. Within half-an-hour, Dad's was licked clean, while the others still sat, full. Make these for your people and get ready for the cheers. Enjoy! For this recipe, you will need 1 Lb. of dry, great northern beans. 2 whole onions, peeled. 2 tablespoons of oil. You could use your favorite oil. Dad used safflower. I use grapeseed... 2 teaspoons of dry mustard, 1 tablespoon of salt. Pepper, to taste; a quarter-cup of molasses, a quarter-cup of ketchup, and a dash of cinnamon and cloves. The night before, rinse the beans in a colander and pick through them to remove any stones; unless you like stones, then leave them in ...and call your dentist. Then, put the beans in a bowl and cover with water, by about two inches, over the top of the beans. Let them sit that way, at room temp, overnight. The bean pot, itself, is a stoneware-lidded crock, sometimes with handles, white on the bottom, and brown on the top. These are iconic and give the best results, but, you can't fuss with them in the oven or they'll dry out. That said, my, smart as a whip, grandmother changed this method to an electric crock pot. Brilliant, easy to clean, can be left on all day, and you can check and make sure that you aren't dry, so, you choose. Preheat the oven to 225 degrees. Yes, that's right. 225 low and slow is the way with these. And if you try and rush it, they will burn and that is nasty. Put oil in the bottom of the crock. Strain the beans, rinse quickly, discard the water. Put the beans in a saucepan and cover with water. Then, simmer them on the stove until they "smile," as Grammy would say, which is until the skins crack, a bit. Strain off the water when they're done. Combine all ingredients and put into the bean pot with the onions on top. Put the lid on and into the oven. It should bake for six to eight hours. There are some variations on this recipe, if you want; You could add a chunk of salt pork, which is my way, or bacon, or a little brown sugar. You can also use this method, but then make them savory, with chili powder, cumin, and a poblano pepper, which is my brother's way. enjoy them your way! This week's cocktail is a classic Manhattan;

2 ounces rye whiskey, three-quarters of an ounce, sweet vermouth. 2 dashes, Angostura Bitters, 1 orange slice and 1 maraschino cherry. Combine the whiskey, vermouth and bitters in a pint glass, fill the glass with ice, and stir for twelve to 15 seconds. Strain, into a chilled martini glass. Garnish with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry. I found the most amazing cherries there from Tellen Farms. They're called bourbon bada-bing cherries. They're pitted and with stems from your main taste. Amazing. You can also make a mocktail with orange juice and the cherries on ice. Enjoy! I want to tell you about my friend, Mike, and his electromagnetic pinball museum and restoration arcade. It's an all inclusive place to relax and share anything related to modern pinball and pinball and arcade games. A group of pinball and arcade fans with an addiction to games of all kinds and Lego, too!$10 gets you free play on pinball and arcade games all day. You can find them at 881 Main Street, Pawtucket, Rhode Island or online at WWW.ElectromagneticPinballMuseum.com. As a special treat, I thought I might do a locally based reading of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward," by H.P.

While I was doing my research for this read, I found out that, not only is the Josef Curwen farm in Pawtuxet Village, but, also, it is in the woods that house, the Pawtuxet River Walk, which we talked about in episode four. I have several sources for this information; obviously, the story itself. But, I use Lovecraft's Providence and adjacent parts by Henry EP Beckworth, as well. I found the farm on satellite imaging pnakoticatlas.com It's spelled P N A K O T I C A T L A S. Dot com. The location seems to be in a very overgrown section on a hill at the north side of the wood, surrounded by wooded marsh. I'm going to get some pictures and put them up for our Patreon subscribers. Lovecraft himself visited there in 1936. I don't have to tell anyone who has visited those woods, often, that strange things happen there. We've all felt it. The hairs standing up on your neck, while you turn around, trying to find the eyes you feel on you. Not evil, per say, but weird. The case of Charles Dexter ward is long. Today, I will be reading the first chapter. I hope you enjoy it and the Pawtuxet-ish atmosphere.

Part one. A result in a prolog chapter one, from a private hospital for the insane, near Providence, Rhode Island, there, recently, disappeared an exceedingly singular person. He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward and was placed under restraint, most reluctantly, by the grieving father, who had watched his adoration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania, involving both the possibility of murderous tendencies, and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind. Doctors confess, themselves, quite baffled by this case, since it presented oddities of a general psychological as well as physiological character in the first place. The patients seemed oddly older than his 26 years will warrant. Mental disturbance, as is true, will age one, rapidly. But, the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast, which only the very aged normally acquire. In the second place, his organic processes showed a certain queerness of proportion, which nothing in medical experience can parallel. Respiration and heart-action had a baffling lack of symmetry. The voice was lost, so that no sounds, above a whisper, were possible. Digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimized, and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation, at all, to anything heretofore recorded either normal or pathological. The skin had a morbid chill and dryness, and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit. Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared, whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar, more black-ish spot; of which, no trace ever existed, before. In general, all physicians agree that in ward, the process of metabolism had become retarded to a degree, beyond precedent. Psychologically, Charles Ward was unique; his madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in the latest and most exhausted of treaties and conjoin to a mental farce which would have made him a genius or a leader, had it not been twisted into a strange and grotesque form. Dr. Willett, who was Ward's family physician, affirms that the patient's gross mental capacity, as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity, had, actually, increased, since the seizure. Ward, it is true, was always a scholar; an antiquarian. But, even his most brilliant early work did not show the prodigious grasp of insight displayed during the last examinations by The Alienist. It was, indeed, a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital. So powerful and lucid, did the youth's mind seem, and only on the evidence of others and the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information, as distinguished from his intelligence, was he, finally, placed in confinement to the very moment of his banishment. He was an omnivorous reader and a great conversationalist, as his poor voice permitted, and shrewd observers, failing to foresee his escape, freely predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody. Only Dr. Willett, who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth of body and mind ever since, seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom. He had had a terrible experience and, then, made a terrible discovery, which he dared not reveal, even to his skeptical colleagues. Willett, indeed, presents a minor mystery, all his own, in his connection with the case. He was the last to see the patient, before his flight, and emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief, which several recalled when Ward's escape became known, three hours later. That escape, itself, is one of the unsolved wonders of Dr. Waite's Hospital. A window, open above a sheer drop of 60 feet, could hardly explain it. Yet, after that, talk with Willett, the youth was, undeniably, gone. Willet, himself, had no public explanations to offer. Though, he seemed strangely easier in mind, than before the escape. He had found Ward in his room. But, shortly after his departure, the attendants knocked in vain, and, when they opened the door, the patient was not there, and all they found was an open window with a chill April breeze, blowing in a cloud of fine, bluish-gray dust, that almost choked them. True, the dogs howled [dogs howling] sometime before, but that was while Willett was still present. And, they had caught, nothing and had caught no disturbance, later on. Ward's father was told, at once, over the telephone, but he seemed more saddened than surprised. And, by the time Dr. Waite called in person, Dr. Willett had been talking with him and both disavowed any knowledge or complacency in the escape. Only from certain closely confidential friends of Willett and the senior Ward, have any clues been gained. And, even these are too wildly fantastic for general credence. The one fact, which remains, is that up to the present time, no trace of the missing madman has been unearthed. Charles Ward was an antiquarian, from infancy, no doubt, gaining his taste from the venerable town around him and from the relics of the past, which filled every corner of his parents' old mansion, on Prospect Street, on the crest of the hill. With the years, his devotion to the ancient things increased, so that history, genealogy, and the study of colonial architecture, furniture, and craftsmanship, at length, crowded everything else from his sphere of interests. These tastes are important to remember and considering his madness. For although they do not form its absolute nucleus, they play a prominent part in its superficial form. The gaps of information which the Alienist notice were all related to modern matters and were invariably offset by a correspondingly excessive, though outwardly concealed knowledge of bygone matters, as brought out by adroit questioning, so that one would have fancied the patient, literally, transferred to a former age, through some obscure sort of self-hypnosis. The odd thing was that Ward seemed no longer interested in the antiquities, he knew so well. He had, it appears, lost his regard for them, through sheer familiarity, and all his final efforts were obviously bent toward mastering those common facts of the modern world, which had been so totally and unmistakably expunged from his brain. That this wholesale deletion had occurred, he did his best to hide, but, it was clear to all who watched him, that his whole program of reading and conversation was determined by a frantic wish to imbibe such knowledge of his life and of the ordinary, practical, and cultural background of the 20th century, as ought to have been his virtue of birth in 1932 and his education in the schools of our own time. Alienists are now wondering how, in the view of his vitally impaired range of data, the escaped patient manages to cope with the complicated world of today, the dominant opinion, being that he is lying low in some humble and unexacting position, until the stock of information can be brought up to the normal. The beginnings of Ward's madness is a matter of dispute among Alienists. Dr. Lyman, the eminent Boston authority, places it in 1919 or 1920, during the boy's last year at Moses Brown School, when he suddenly turned from the study of the past to the study of the occult and refused to qualify for college, on the grounds that he had individual researches of much greater importance to make. This is certainly borne out by Ward's altered habits at the time, especially by his continual search through town records and among old burying grounds for certain grave dug in 1771, the grave of an ancestor named Joseph Curwen Some of those papers, he professed to have found behind the paneling of a very old house, on Olney Court, on Scampers Hill, which Curwen is known to have built and occupied. It is, broadly speaking, undeniable, that the winter of 1919-20, saw a great change in ward, whereby he abruptly stopped his general antiquarian pursuits and embarked on a desperate delving into the occult subjects, both, at home, and abroad; buried only by his strangely persistent search for his forebears grave. From this opinion, however, Dr. Willette substantially dissents, basing his verdict on the close and continuous knowledge of the patient and uncertain, frightful investigations and discovery which he made toward the last. Those investigations, in their scurries, have left their mark upon him, so that his voice trembles, when he tells them, and his hand trembles, when he tries to write of them. Willett admits that the change of 1919-20 would ordinarily appear to mark the beginning of a progressive decadence, which culminated in the horrible and uncanny alienation of 1928, but, believes from personal observation, that a finer distinction must be made granting, freely, that the boy was always ill-balanced, temperamentally, and prone to be unduly susceptible and enthusiastic in his responses to phenomena around him. He refuses to concede that the early altercation marked the actual passage from sanity to madness, crediting, instead, Ward's own statement that he had discovered or rediscovered something, whose effect on the human thought was likely to be marvelous and profound. The true madness, he is certain, came with the later change, after the Curwen portrait and the ancient papers had been unearthed, after a trip to strange foreign places had been made, and some terrible invocations charted, under strange and secret circumstances. After certain answers to those invocations had been, plainly, indicated and a frantic letter, penned under agonizing and unexplainable conditions, after the wave of vampirism [hissing] and the ominous Pawtuxet gossip, and, after the patient's memory commenced to exude contemporary images. Whilst his physical aspect underwent the subtle modification, so many, subsequently, noticed. It was only about this time, willett points out with much acuteness, that the nightmare qualities became indubitably linked with Ward, and the doctor feels shudderingly sure that enough solid evidence exists to sustain the youths' claim, regarding his crucial discovery, in the first place. Two workmen of high intelligence saw Joseph Curwen's ancient papers found. Secondly, the boy, once, showed Dr. Willett those papers and a page of Curwen's diary, and, each of the documents had every appearance of genuineness. The hole, where Ward claimed to have found them, was long a visible reality, and Willett had very convincing final glimpse of them in surroundings, which can, scarcely, be believed, and can never, perhaps, be proved. Then, there were the mysteries and coincidences of the Orne and Hutchinson letters and the problem of the Curwen penmanship. And, what of the detectives brought to light, about Dr. Allan. These things, and the terrible message in medieval minuscule, is found in Willett's pocket, when he gained consciousness, after his shocking experience, and, most conclusive of all; there are two hideous results which the doctor obtained from a certain pair of formulae, during his final investigations, results which, virtually, prove the authenticity of the papers, in their monstrous implications, at the same time that those papers were born, forever, from human knowledge. I want to thank you all for joining us here at the PG, this week. If you would like to reach out with a question of Pawtuxet fact or a local ghost-story, we LOVE ghost-stories. Our email is Jess@pawtuxetgeneral.com. Once again, if the holiday spirit moves you and you'd like to give us a, one-time gift, to encourage us, here at the Pawtuxet General, just go to the link on this episode to join our fundraiser. So, thanks again. And, please, come back and meet me here, at the Pawtuxet General. A something for posterity production. Prerecorded in Pawtuxet!