Books published by publisher Granville Historical Society

This book was inspired by town of Rye resident Lisa Moll’s University of New Hampshire research paper entitled “Rye’s Ode to Olympic Oil,” which demonstrated the crucial role Rye played in stopping Olympic Oil’s 1974 effort to build the largest oil refinery in the world on Great Bay in Durham, New Hampshire. Rye blocked the Olympic effort to secure a marine terminal on the New Hampshire Isles of Shoals to receive crude oil and the pipelines needed to transport oil for refining inland. Lisa’s paper, part of which was researched at the Rye, New Hampshire, Town Museum, also provides a full overview of the role of Durham, New Hampshire and other seacoast NH towns in the defeat of the refinery. The Rye Historical Society (RHS) is grateful to all the people who fought tirelessly to save the coastline of New Hampshire from exploitation. Particular thanks is given to the late Guy Chichester of Rye who fought the proposal tirelessly and donated his collection of material to the Town museum, and to Jessie Herlihy, founder of the Rye Historical Society in 1976, who held anti-refinery meetings in her home in 1973-74. Also key in the battle to save the NH Seacoast was Phyllis Bennett, publisher of the start-up community newspaper, Publick Occurrences, which broke the story that Olympic Oil was planning an oil refinery complex for the Seacoast of New Hampshire. Phyllis led a relentless effort to inform and connect the Seacoast community with facts, and bring the truth of the proposed oil refinery complex out of the shadows of the governor’s office and into the light for all to see. This was at a time when NH's largest newspaper, The Manchester Union Leader, and the then governor of New Hampshire, Meldrim Thomson, siding with Aristotle Onassis, were all championing and supporting the building of the oil refinery. On the fortieth anniversary of the oil refinery defeat in 2014, Dudley Dudley, who helped spearhead the defeat of the proposal in Durham and in the New Hampshire legislature, gave a talk in Rye. Peter Horne, one of the key Rye activists against the refinery, spoke about his role in the defeat. Peter’s reflections are included in this book, along with other Rye activists. We are forever grateful to the two elderly sisters, Bernice Remick and Frances Tucker, who refused repeated exhorbitant offers to sell their 42-acre farm to Olympic Oil. Their farm on Brackett Rd. in Rye was directly in the path of the proposed pipeline, and in their refusal to sell, the entire Oil Refinery deal came to a halt. Later, the sisters sold their land to Rye Conservation Commission for a mere $12,000. This essay is dedicated to all the people who had the passion and courage to protect and preserve the Seacoast community for future generations. They took on the mighty and the powerful in the “battle of the century.”

A Coffeyville Historical Society illustrated publication about the Dalton Gang's 1892 unsuccessful raid on Coffeyville's two banks, with a bibliography of 69 sources. Covered are a brief history of the area, the Dalton family, the brothers (Bob, Grat, and Emmett) both as lawmen and as outlaws, and a detailed account of the raid and its aftermath, including information about the citizens who rose to the defense of their town.

Social welfare, increasingly extensive during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was by the first third of the nineteenth under considerable, and growing, pressure, during a "crisis" period when levels of poverty soared. This book examines the poor and their families during these final decades of the old Poor Law. It takes as a case study the lived experience of poor families in two Bedfordshire communities, Campton and Shefford, and contrasts it with the perspectives of other participants in parish politics, from the magistracy to the vestry, and from overseers to village ratepayers. It explores the problem of rising unemployment, the provision of parish make-work schemes, charitable provision and the wider makeshift economy, together with the attitudes of the ratepayers. That gender and life-cycle were crucial features of poverty is demonstrated: the lone mother and her dependent children and the elderly dominated the relief rolls. Poor relief might have been relatively generous but it was not pervasive - child allowances, in particular, were restricted in duration and value - and it by no means approximated to the income of other labouring families. Poor families must either have had access to additional resources, or led meagre lives. Samantha Williams is a university lecturer in local and regional history at the Institute of Continuing Education, Cambridge, and a Bye-Fellow in History, Girton College, Cambridge.