NARRAGANSETT -- Kate Chase Sprague: Who was she? What did she do?
She didn't accomplish much in terms of a career. She didn't guide a business to success or pursue a career in medicine, education or law.
She is remembered, if at all, as the daughter and wife of famous men from more than a century ago. In South County, specifically Narragansett, she is remembered for her extravagance, for the magnificent showplace of a house that she had built at "Canonchet Farm," but which no longer exists.
Kate Chase Sprague: Who was she? What did she do?
Essentially, she brought a little of the glitter of the Newport lifestyle to Narragansett in the late 1800s, purely by happenstance, and left behind some Victorian drama for the rural area to feast upon.
Being the daughter of Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the Treasury during Abraham Lincoln's administration, she was prominent in Washington, D.C., social circles in the 1850s and 1860s.
A Providence Journal article desribed her as being "one of the most remarkable women ever known to Washington Society."
A Cincinnati Enquirer article from that time period described her as royalty. "No queen has ever reigned under the Stars and Stripes, but this remarkable woman came closer to being Queen than any American woman has."
Had People magazine been around in 1861 when she married the "millionaire Boy Governor" from Rhode Island, William Sprague, and went on to convert his seaside farm into a gabled and turreted showplace, she would have surely been on the cover.
Kate Chase Sprague, who was she and what did she do? Five years after she married Sprague, rumors of his drinking and her discontent were rampant. She flung herself into renovating the Narragansett mansion, placing art works from around the world on its walls. Canonchet was where she entertained numerous guests, among them a professor and a senator suspected by her husband to be her secret suitors.
In the book "Kate Chase for the Defense," author Alice Hunt Sokoloff wrote:
"It was a warm August morning in the summer of 1879. The rocking chairs on the wide hotel porches at Narragansett were moving a little more animatedly than usual. Eager tongues were clacking and eyes were bright with that kind of special avidity which indicates scandal is in the air . . . "
"Some people claimed to have seen Governor Sprague, gun in hand, dash madly into a restaurant at the Pier and search frantically there for a German professor who had been engaged as tutor for his children by Mrs. Sprague . . . "
Details are murky. Some reports point to the professor; others have said it was a senator from New York, Roscoe Conkling, linked romantically with Kate, that Sprague was to have stalked into a Pier restaurant where Conkling was dining on little neck clams.
Thousands of newspaper inches were devoted to that hot summer day with all sorts of conflicting reports. Later that month, Sprague is said to have threatened to push Kate out of an upper window of "Canonchet." The next day, she and her young daughters escaped by horse and carriage, reportedly to the Kingston train station where they boarded a train and left town. Life never improved for Kate. Her son is said to have committed suicide; she was reduced to selling farm vegetables to support herself and her daughters.
Who was Kate Chase Sprague and what did she do? She was a daughter, a wife, a mother, an extravagant woman who built a showplace which would burn to the ground not far into the new century.
What she left behind was a window to life in Narragansett in the late 1800s and a little drama to mingle with the ocean air on hot August nights when the glittering days of old Narragansett Pier are recalled.
Princess Red Wing
Preserver of Native American traditions
By CHRIS POON
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer
EXETER -- She was born Mary Congdon, but was known throughout South County and even abroad as Princess Red Wing, the Narragansett Indian who spoke to school children and dignitaries alike about the honor of being a Native American.
Her gift of storytelling and her jangling silver bracelets and beaded headband mesmerized her audience. Among the Narragansetts, she was a leader, a historian and the woman who bestowed Indian names on generations of Narragansett children.
Strangers would inevitably ask: How did you get your name? Her mother named her after the red wing blackbird "to fling her mission far with grace, for ears that harken for the uplift of my race," she'd reply.
Everett Weeden of Charlestown recalls a woman who wasn't technically a princess but rose to legendary status in the tribe and in the non-Indian world.
"She spoke in these poetic verses at times because she was part of that generation when everything was poetry and pageantry," said Weeden, who was given the Indian name Tall Oak by Red Wing when he was 16.
Since her death at age 92 in 1987, a few Narragansetts have been successful in carrying on the storytelling traditions, but "none could fill Red Wing's shoes," Weeden said. "She was an exceptionally gifted person and a natural born speaker . . . Her message was always to generate a more positive image of Indian people in this society."
Born in Lisbon, Conn., Red Wing was one of seven children of Walter and Hannah (Weeden) Glasko. The family moved to the village of Harrisville, where Walter managed a farm and raised the family.
Red Wing was taught that her family descended from the Ninigret line of the Narragansett tribe, as well as the Wampanoags. But Weeden, a second cousin to Red Wing, says his research traces their lineage to the Mashantucket Pequot line.
Regardless of her exact roots, she was regarded as an expert in Native American matters.
In 1934, Narragansett leaders sought Red Wing's help to draft the tribe's bylaws, which were mandated by the Indian Reorganization Act. She later designed the tribe's seal, which is still used on official stationery.
When she wasn't speaking at elementary schools and colleges, running day camps, writing for a tribal newspaper or giving tours at the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Exeter, she traveled to Europe or to New York to address the United Nations. Once, she dined with Eleanor Roosevelt.
In an interview published in The Basic Yankee by Steve Sherman, Red Wing recalled the stir she caused during her visit to the United Nations: "Can I take you to lunch? Can I have your picture for my paper? What does the Indian think of this, what does the Indian think of that?"
She always answered their questions, no matter how naive or insulting and always made sure they went away with a positive impression of her people, said Eleanor Dove, owner of the now defunct Dovecrest restaurant and trading post.
NOTE: The Tomaquag Indian Memeorial Museum is located at 390 Summit Road, Exeter. Museum hours are by appointment. For more information, or to make an appointment, call 539-7213.
Florence Parker Simister
Historian's beat: streets of the cities
By MARTHA SMITH
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer
NORTH KINGSTOWN -- Everything that Florence Parker Simister did in her professional life revolved around the telling of history.
Her program Streets of the City, on WEAN, was a love letter to Rhode Island, a forum in which she chronicled the history of 2,500 streets, houses, fields and ponds of the state. The daily broadcast - she wrote the scripts that were performed by Ed Pearson - was the longest running locally produced radio program in state history, airing from 1952 to 1972.
"We have 18 years of her scripts in our library," says Albert T. Klyberg, executive director of the Rhode Island Historical Society. "She wasn't the first person to do radio scripts, but I suspect her Streets of the City, coming as it did at about the time the Preservation Society was trying to do Benefit Street and other restorations helped to popularize the preservation movement. A lot of people told me they always looked forward to the vignettes. The radio program and the preservation movement went hand in hand."
Mrs. Simister, who lived on Pleasant Street in Wickford and died in 1981 at the age of 67, was a prodigious author, once telling an interviewer, "The more you do, the more you can do. I hope I never find myself just sitting around idle."
There was no chance of that.
Mrs. Simister contributed many articles to the Rhode Islander, Rhode Island Yearbook, Yankee magazine, New England Galaxy and Newport History. She published a dozen children's books, all with historical settings, compiled her radio scripts into two editions of Streets of the City and, in 1963, wrote a centennial history of Rhode Island Hospital Trust National Bank, commissioned by the bank.
She also won local playwright awards and had her work performed by the Blackfriars Guild of Providence College, among other groups.
Her crowning literary achievement was certainly The Fire's Center, an account of Rhode Island's role in the Revolutionary War.
"It was a popular book," recalls Klyberg. "She wove it all together. It was the first time it had all been made into a single fabric."
Klyberg remembers Mrs. Simister as a woman generous with her time and expertise.
"She was a great help to me when I came back in '68 from Michigan," he says. "I knew about as much about Rhode Island as I knew about the mid plains of Nebraska. When I came on the scene she was still doing her radio scripts and we'd see her at the library a good deal. Very often she'd be there when a question came in to our reference librarian. There were always conferences with Florence because she often knew more than we did.
"She was very generous with sharing insights - dates of houses, biographical information."
Florence Parker Simister was equally kind to strangers. She and her husband, Robert, operated Simister's Bookshop in Wickford, at Brown and Main Streets, a fixture on the village scene. It was a beacon of congeniality and warmth, the perfect place to discover something special to read or to simply engage in good conversation with the proprietors.
An interviewer once said of Mrs. Simister, "She reminds us that we live in a real place, with unique traditions and memories."
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