V0ters will be asked to approve the plan to sell the town-owned campus for about $2 million so Trinity can proceed.

This looks like a very good and doable plan, which will fulfill residents’ oft-expressed desire to have the historic buildings restored and reused, and to preserve the open space to which the public will have access.

I hope you will go to the town meeting and support the plan.

Here is a link to a short summary of Trinity’s development proposal for the former Medfield State Hospital.

John Thompson stars in Moving on From Medfield, an award-winning documentary about mental health treatment through the years, directed by Julia Bergdoll. Here's the link.

Abandoned Online has a brief history of the hospital and mental health treatment, with magnificent photographs. Here's the link.

Edwin Vinald (E.V.) Mitchell (1850-1917) was the grandfather of my mother, Suzanne Mitchell Bryce, better known by everyone as “Sue.” No Mrs. anything, just “Sue.” In her youth, she was also known as “Sue the Swimmer” for her trophies; once she received a congratulatory note addressed simply to “Sue the Swimmer, Hyannis, Mass.

I recently returned to Medfield for a visit and met up with some of the Mitchell family. Kirk Knowlton is the grandson of Helena Mitchell (E. V.’s daughter). Also joining us were Jason and Ashley Mitchell. Their father was Robert Curtis Mitchell, my first cousin. They are E.V.’s great-great grandchildren.  David Temple was kind enough to open up the Medfield Historical Society for us and to pull some of the Mitchell memorabilia for us to enjoy.

In reading Richard DeSorgher’s books, I learned more about this side of my family than from anyone else. E.V. owned the E.V. Mitchell Company, which, in the early 1900’s, was the second largest hat factory in the country, the largest being in Foxborough. E.V. also owned a lumber business, a large grist mill, and one of the largest poultry farms in the country, all located right here in Medfield.

He sounds rich, huh? He was for a long time…but not when he was young.

E.V. Mitchell and his wife Blanche had three sons – Granville, Edwin, and Emlyn, and a daughter Helena, who was my grandmother.

Here are a few things you may not have known about E.V. and his family.

E.V. was very proud of the fact that he could walk to work; he just had to walk across North Street to his company (now the site of the Montrose School) – this, despite the fact that he had a car and a chauffeur.

E.V. never went to a barber shop. Instead, he had a barber’s chair installed in his house. Every morning his barber would come to his house and shave him, and every two weeks the barber would give him a haircut.

E.V. attended the Unitarian church, which was a few hundred feet from his house. Among his gifts to the church was a new, taller steeple – he wanted the tallest steeple in town to be on his church, not the Baptists’. He owned a pew at the church, and he bought another pew and had it installed on the mezzanine landing in his mansion.

To keep his memory alive, E.V. bought a large tract of land in the Dale Street side of the cemetery. He donated much of that land to the town but kept the largest lot (on the highest point) for his family, and at about 20 feet, his monument is the tallest one in the cemetery. E.V. and most of his family are buried there. Many of his servants, factory employees, and a church pastor are buried around the outer rim of the lot.

This is a good picture of something we don't know anything about. Barbara Berman sent this photo from East Kingston, NH March 7, 2022. She said she found it at a yard sale. No information on the back. The hats and the thick bat handles suggest it dates from the 1920s. The ball looks like a much-used baseball; a little too small to be a softball.

Can any Portal readers shed any light on the women's baseball team? They are standing in front of the "Official Score Board of the Medfield State Hospital Baseball Club." Email your answer here.

June has an abundance of days of observance, a plurality of which were promulgated by the United Nations. (Oddly enough, there appear to be no specific days designated to celebrate those most quintessential of June events – graduations and weddings.)  

Flag Day, June 14, was officially established in 1916 by President Woodrow Wilson, some 50 years after people began to display the flag in earnest as a show of patriotism in the Civil War. (The flag had been displayed relatively seldom in the early days of the Republic.) The flag code contains advisory protocols on when and how to display the flag and how to use it, store it, and respect it.

The familiar first flag, with 13 stripes and 13 stars in a circle, was designed in 1776 by Francis Hopkinson, a New Jersey delegate to the Continental Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. It is widely believed that Betsy Ross did make the first flag; an upholsterer by trade, she had been helping the Revolutionary War effort by repairing uniforms and sewing tents. That flag helped unify the troops that had heretofore been fighting under their state’s flag.

After Francis Scott Key watched the Battle of Fort McHenry in Baltimore in the War of 1812 he was moved to write a poem entitled Defence of Fort M’Henry. Key’s brother-in-law, Joseph Nicholson, immediately noticed that the poem fit the music of a popular British drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven. Key’s four-stanza work was published both as a poem and as a song, which quickly became popular and universally known as The Star-Spangled Banner. It became the American national anthem in 1931. 

Today the Francis Scott Key Bridge over Baltimore’s Patapsco River is sometimes referred to as “The Car-Strangled Spanner.”

June 14 is also National Bourbon Day.

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Father’s Day (this year in the United States on June 19) is celebrated in most countries around the world, but on different days and not always as a national holiday. In Catholic countries in Europe, it’s been celebrated on March 19 as St. Joseph’s Day for many centuries. In the United States it was first celebrated in 1910 at the initiative of Sonora Smart Dodd (1882-1978) of Seattle, who loved and admired her widower father and felt fathers should be honored as mothers are. Observances of Father’s Day ebbed and flowed, but President Lyndon Johnson (a father himself) in 1966 proclaimed the third Sunday in June as Father’s Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.

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Juneteenth (June 19) is the newest national holiday, signed into law June 17, 2021 by President Biden. It commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans in Texas, the last state in the Confederacy with institutional slavery. 

Although Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox April 9, 1865, the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi did not surrender until June 2. On June 19, 1865, union general Gordon Granger took 2,000 troops to Galveston, Texas and then to Houston to proclaim and enforce emancipation. During the four years of the Civil War, in order to escape the heaviest fighting, many plantation owners in the southeastern states had taken their slaves and moved to Texas and set up shop there. In 1865 there were an estimated 250,000 enslaved people in Texas.

Celebrations of Juneteenth began in Texas in 1866 and quickly spread through the south. The Great Migration helped boost Juneteenth celebrations nationwide, and by 1979 all 50 states had recognized the holiday in one way or another. Biden made it a federal holiday last year.

June 19 also happens to be National Martini Day, in addition to Father’s Day and Juneteenth.

June 1 is, among other things, World Milk Day, and June 30 is National Handshake Day. 

As I thought about the June issue of the Medfield Historical Society e-newsletter, dads immediately popped into my mind. Sure, it’s also the season for grads, weddings and the beginning of summer, but dads are so important—they mold their children into adults and each one does this in his own special way.

We know that all Medfield fathers are special, but I couldn’t recall a story of a particular Medfield father who would have significance for this publication. But then, out of nowhere, it came to me.

While researching the American artist George Inness, I came across a biography of his life written by his son, George Inness, Jr., entitled Life, Art, and Letters of George Inness. I had purchased the book, not yet read it, but picked it up and embarked upon my newest adventure. I could not put the book down until I had completed it several hours later.

There were many wonderful personal stories about George as seen through the eyes of his son. Here are just a few of these recollections.

George Inness was born May 1, 1825, in Newburgh, New York, and died August 3, 1894, at the Bridge of Allen in Scotland in the arms of his beloved wife, Elizabeth Hart. As his end came he was engaging in his favorite pastime, admiring and studying the beauty of nature, and observing an astonishing sunset.

A landscape artist, Innes is believed to be one of America’s leading impressionist painters. His work was influenced by the Hudson River School and the Barbizon School for technique, and by Swedish scientist and theologian Emanuel Swedenborg for expression. He developed his own tonal method and his paintings had a distinctive American style.

George Jr.’s first recollection of his father is of him transforming a white pine washtub to green. George Jr. had watched many painters paint many things, including washtubs, but had never seen anyone paint them in quite the way that his father did. George Sr. would load his brush with paint, apply a broad streak of paint, step back and evaluate and then envision his next stroke. He would repeat this process until the tub presented itself as a gloriously green piece of art. In George Inness Jr.’s own words, in reference to this event, “In my eyes he was a hero, a wizard, for there stood the tub.”