Guild Merchant of Preston

(Logo of Preston Guild 2012)

Hoghton Tower is about 7 miles from the center of the City of Preston. While Preston has only been a "city" in the British legal sense for the last decade, the market town goes back to the Anglo-Saxon period. It was the site of two famous Battles of Preston, one in the English Civil War (1648), and one in the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion (There's a good article in Wikipedia, here.).

In 1179, King Henry II granted the town a royal charter which gave a monopoly on trade in the town to a guild of its merchants. As the right was valuable, it was important to keep a record of who qualified as a member of the guild, and so in time it became the practice for the court of the guild to meet at long intervals (eventually set at twenty years) to revise the membership list, and this meeting of the court then became the beginning of a week of celebration of the Guild Merchant. (More about this history here.)

Sir Bernard de Hoghton writes to point out that 2012 will be the year for one of these twenty-year celebrations. The Guild Court is required to meet on the first Monday after the Feast of the Decollation [i.e., Beheading] of St. John the Baptist. That feast falls on August 29, so the Court meeting this year will be on  Monday, September 3rd, though the surrounding festival will actually begin on Friday, August 31st.

There is, of course, a web-site! I've cited the history page already, but here's the home page.

Speaking of the (American) Civil War

Allan N. Houghton, of Marshfield, Mass., founder and long-time publisher of the H.A.A. Journal, is also a Civil War re-enactor (his persona is that of a 1st Lieutenant of Engineers).  He writes that his work for the last year has involved various aspects of restoration of Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, with a particular focus on the fort's role in the Civil War. In working on the fort's magazine and an adjacent gunroom last spring, he made two replica howitzers: then, this past August, in his re-enactor persona, he led two gun crews in the actual 1860's gun drill with the replicas. He writes that he also re-enacted the presentation of the colors to the 12th Massachusetts Regiment of Infantry--his great-great-grandfather, James Gordon Smith, had served in Company G of that regiment.

Replacing our Facebook group

Our Facebook group for Friends of Hoghton Tower was one of the casualties of FB's rejiggering of groups and pages last year. To take its place, I have created a Facebook page for the H.A.A. at www.facebook.com/HoghtonAmerica , and have added there my own pictures of the Tower that had been posted with the group. (I didn't think it right to repost others' photos, but please feel free to put up images of your own.)

Why a blog?

My thanks to several members, and friends, of the H.A.A. who have already looked in on this blog, within its first few hours, and passed along their comments. I take particular note of those who have remarked that the thing does little to explain its own existence!

For years, the H.A.A. was held together in large measure by a newsletter circulated through the very considerable and largely single-handed efforts of Allan Houghton. When Allan was unable to continue with the project, we simply went without for a while. More recently, though, Sir Bernard (knowing that I began professional life as an English teacher, and have done some writing since) asked if I might be able to take up the mantle. I suggested that a digital, rather than print, format might be possible, and the blog you see is an experiment in that direction.

Regardless of format, though, the key to any exercise like this is information from all of you out there. I have a few anecdotes of my own to tell, and Judy Houghton Henderson has suggested that it might be good to reprint some of Allan's old articles: but, generally speaking, the only news I have to pass on will be the news I hear from you. Please feel free to e-mail me: numenor001 [at] gmail.com .

Grandfather and the Houghtons at Shiloh

[The following appeared, in slightly different form, in the Culver Citizen as one installment of my irregular column "It's Still the Lake Water." (That title reflects the fact that when I was a boy and first writing for the Citizen, it had a column written by Mr. Bob Kyle, a retired newspaperman--he had covered the Scopes monkey trial, among other things--called "It Must be the Lake Water.")]

The South Bend Tribune had an article one day this past summer about the Mishawaka Public Library and its new Civil War tribute, a painting of "Houghton's Charge" by Darren Smith (more here).

Darren Smith, "Houghton's Charge," collection of Peter Dekever on long term loan to the Mishawaka (Ind.) Public Library.

The hero depicted in the painting turns out to be no direct relation of mine, but reading about his career reminded me, in a roundabout sort of way, of one of my most interesting interviews from thirty years ago, a conversation with Mr. W. O. Osborn, Culver's legendary attorney and banker. I've repeated it so often that the Citizen's editor calls it "the story about the mule." 

The Mishawaka painting commemorates Captain James Houghton, of Mishawaka (and of the Massachusetts Houghtons), and his men of Company I of the 9th Indiana Volunteer Regiment; years ago, the Mishawaka Chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic (the Civil War equivalent, for Union soldiers, of the American Legion) was also named for Captain Houghton. In April of 1862, the 9th Indiana was part of Colonel William Hazen's 19th Brigade, in Brigadier General William Nelson's 4th Division of the Army of the Ohio—50,000 men under the overall command of Major General Don Carlos Buell.

The 35,000-man Army of the Tennessee, under newly-reinstated Major General Ulysses S. Grant, had marched south along the Tennessee River, almost completely divided the state of Tennessee, and was on the brink of seizing a vital rail hub just across the border at Corinth, Mississippi. The Confederacy, realizing the danger, marshalled forces from as far away as New Orleans to stop Grant before he could get to Corinth; Buell, meanwhile, was marching southwest from Nashville to reinforce Grant. Grant decided the area on the west side of the Tennessee River between Pittsburgh Landing and Shiloh Church would be a good one in which to make camp and drill his largely inexperienced troops into shape. Twenty-some miles south, Confederate General A. S. Johnson had other ideas, and his Army of the Mississippi attacked Grant's almost completely unprepared forces on the morning of Sunday, April 6, 1862.

By late afternoon, the Union forces had been driven back, with great losses on both sides, including General Johnson and Union Major General W. H. L. Wallace (not be confused with Hoosier Major General Lew Wallace, future author of Ben Hur, who was also commanding a Union division in the battle). At about 5:30, Johnson's deputy, P. G. T. Beauregard, erroneously informed that Buell had turned aside, broke off the attack, thinking that Grant could be finished off on Monday. At almost the same moment, the first units of Buell's Army arrived at Pittsburgh Landing, ferried across the river by steamboat.

Monday morning saw the Union counterattack. General Nelson's division was on the left of the Union line, with the river on its own left and Confederate Maj. Gen. William Hardee's Third Corps in front of it. Hazen's 19th Brigade was on the right side of Nelson's division. About 10 am, they bore the brunt of a major Confederate attack and began to fall back; reinforced by the 22nd Brigade, they turned the tables, forcing back the Confederates. They overran a Confederate artillery battery, but came under friendly fire, and retreated. Confederates then advanced against the remaining Union brigade (Col. Ammen's, the 10th), and nearly captured the neighboring division's artillery. When the 6th Ohio drove the rebels away from the artillery position, Col. Hazen seized the moment and ordered a charge, led (I take it) by Captain Houghton, the only officer of the 9th to be killed in that day's battle.

I mentioned that there were two General Wallaces on the Union side. It turns out the Union had two Houghtons as well: in addition to Capt. James Houghton of Mishawaka, there was First Lieutenant James E. Houghton of Plymouth (29th Indiana, 5th Brigade, 2nd Division, my first cousin four times removed, and brother-in-law of Bayless Dixon, the first proprietor of Union Town, which eventually became Culver). Lt. Houghton's company commander, Capt. Daniel Casey, was shot in the hand as their unit moved into position on Monday morning, and Lt. Houghton assumed command of the unit for the duration of the war. He is buried next to his father in the southwest corner of Oak Hill Cemetery in Plymouth. 

Now, as to my morning with Mr. Osborn—I went to see the great man at his office in the State Exchange Bank. At 89, he was still sharp as a couple of tacks, and had a story for every occasion. For our conversation, he reminisced about one of his early cases as an attorney, defending the will of my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Houghton. Thomas had been married three successive times, and the children of his first marriage disagreed with the way he had distributed his property (mostly, originally, their mother's property, as they pointed out) amongst the various half-siblings. Their grounds for having the will overturned, Mr. Osborn said, were that Thomas had been mentally incompetent since the Civil War (a period of fifty some years, during which he had, among other things, served as Union Township Trustee). As evidence for this claim, they pointed out that Thomas had not served in the Civil War. He had been excused, they said, for medical reasons: specifically, he had been kicked in the head by a mule (or fallen off a horse, or something) and was mentally incompetent thereafter.

"Now Thomas," Mr. Osborn said, "kept meticulous records, and I knew if he had some sort of a medical excuse, he would have saved it all this time. So I searched that house high and low, and it turned out they were right. I found a medical deferment, and it actually was because he had been kicked in the head by a mule. But it wasn't because he was of unsound mind. That mule had kicked out his teeth. And with false teeth, he couldn't rip open a cartridge to load a muzzleloading rifle."

Lunch with Sir Bernard and Lady de Hoghton

One of my colleagues, our school's head varsity soccer coach, organizes a soccer-playing tour of the United Kingdom for the boys every couple of years or so, generally over our Thanksgiving break. This was one of the 'on' years, and I went along as a second chaperone. We flew into Edinburgh, visited the city's landmarks, toured St Andrews (both the university and the Old Course), and played Stewart's Melville College, all before taking the train along the route of the old Flying Scotsman south to London, where the boys played Eton (on Thanksgiving Day) and Charterhouse.

Generally, of course, I stuck close to my colleague and the team, but on the Saturday morning of our trip they were all scheduled to take a bicycle tour of the site of the coming Olympic games (we were staying in a brand-spanking-new Holiday Inn Express within spitting distance of the Olympic site in the east end of London--so far east, in fact, that the Prime Meridian ran between us and the nearest Underground stop, so that we became quite blase about moving from one hemisphere to the other).

I guessed (correctly, as it turned out) that this cycling tour would be a bit more exercise than I was ready for, and so I arranged, instead, to travel to the other side of London and meet up with the H.A.A.'s patron, Sir Richard Bernard Cuthbert de Hoghton, 14th Baronet Hoghton, of Hoghton Tower, and Walton le Dale, County Lancaster. We had met some years ago, at Hoghton Tower itself, and might have done so again, but as it happened Sir Bernard and Lady de Hoghton came south to London at just the same time the team did. Getting to their pied-à-terre turned out to be more of a project than I had expected. It ought to have been a fairly simple matter--a cross-city ride, but with only one transfer. The line I meant to transfer to was out of commission, though, and while there was a substitute bus service in place, I couldn't make sense of the guard's directions (though they were certainly meant to be helpful), and ended up catching a cab. (Needless to say, this was a bit pricier than the bus, but I was beginning to doubt that I would make it to my lunch appointment before supper time.) True to his craft, the cabbie brought me straight to the de Hoghton doorstep, and on schedule, to boot.

Lady de Hoghton (the former Rosanna Burratti, and a physician, though I think she has retired from her practice) greeted me warmly at the door, explaining that Sir Bernard was on the top floor of the town house and would be down in moment, as indeed he was. We sat and chatted for a while in the beautifully appointed living room, which, like the dining room next to it, gave pride of place to large format prints by their son Thomas de Hoghton, a professional photographer (you can see some of his work here).  The original plan had been to go out to eat (how many chances does one get to buy lunch for the head of the family?), but eventually Lady de Hoghton excused herself to go out to the kitchen and throw something together.

Sir Bernard took me on a quick tour of the three floors of the home, which he bought as a young man first starting off in London. The architecture was interesting, but we were soon deep in conversation about the former print newsletter of the Association, loyally sent out for years by Allan Houghton, of Massachusetts, and of a whole range of related topics, including recent improvements at the Tower and the possibility of opening one or two rooms there for paying guests, perhaps particularly members of the H.A.A.  (It turns out that this set of rooms, in the Irishman's Tower, is now available: see details here .) Someplace in there, we also discussed the American-Civil-War-era baronet, Sir Charles, who invested somewhat heavily in the Confederate cause.

Lady de Hoghton called us to lunch, which turned out to be pasta Alfredo, a green salad, pork loin with sage leaves, a very nice bottle of wine, and miniature mince pies, of which I ate more than my diet would actually have allowed for. We had a great conversation about Italy (which I have yet to visit), and I got to meet Thomas, who stopped by home on his way, I think, to the studio.  By the time we had eaten the last of the pies (and, I think, finished the bottle), it was time for me to be on my way to join the team to see a professional football game (Crystal Palace hosting Milwall). After snapping a picture of my host and hostess (above), I was off to find a cab to go right the way back across London to the football stadium, Selhurst Park.

It was a good game, and the afternoon was topped off by a reception for local alumni of our school at the historic Gray's Inn, at which the boys were honored guests: but the highlight of my day was definitely lunch with our English cousins.

Judy Houghton Henderson Named First President of HAA

Sir Bernard de Hoghton, Bt., Patron of the Hoghton American Association, has appointed Judy Houghton Henderson, of Washington and Hawaii, to serve as the first president of the Association. Judy will continue to be the Pacific Coast Coordinator for the Association, as well.

Under Judy's guidance, the Pacific Coast group has met frequently, taking particular advantage of a British-themed pub in (or at least near) the appropriately named town of Houghton, Washington, as the following photo from August, 2009, indicates: