Thomas Paine
Our nation’s semiquincentennial year has kicked off with the 250th anniversary this week of the publication of “Common Sense” by Thomas Paine (1737-1809). He’s the English philosopher and revolutionary who came to America in late 1774 and published his famous work barely a year later. His best-selling manifesto for freedom was so persuasive and fiery the Second Continental Congress borrowed large chunks of its logic when fashioning the Declaration of Independence just a few months later on July 4, 1776.
I’ll leave it to the historians and the scholars to ponder the continuing significance of Paine and his literary output. Admittedly, there’s no Las Vegas hook for this, but I am sometimes known to ponder matters far and wide. So I’m going to take another look at New Rochelle, N.Y., a leafy New York City suburb where I have relatives and have frequently visited long before becoming New To Las Vegas. They live just a block from one of the strangest and most bogus shrines to political action in America that I know of–strange and bogus mainly because nothing political ever happened there.
Thomas Paine Cottage Museum, New Rochelle, N.Y.
I am referring to what is now called the Thomas Paine Cottage Museum. The rather nondescript structure is perhaps the last tangible vestige of Paine. Why am I so down on this tribute to a man listed among the country’s Founding Fathers? Here are some reasons.
–Paine didn’t write “Common Sense” at his cottage-now-museum, which he did once own. He authored the work in Philadelphia, 100 miles to the south. Nor did he write at the cottage his other most-famous works, which included “The Age of Reason,” “Rights of Man” and “Agrarian Justice.”
–Because he also was fomenting the later revolution in France–where he almost lost his own head–Paine lived in the cottage for only four years, a residency that didn’t even start until more than a quarter-century after he wrote “Common Sense.” So the cottage was basically a retirement pad. And a part-time one at best. In his later years Paine also maintained a home in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which is where he died in 1809.
–The current location of the cottage has little historical accuracy. At the time Paine lived in it, the house, rebuilt after a fire, was located a quarter-mile away up a hill. It was rolled down Paine Avenue to its present location in 1908–99 years after Paine’s death–so real-estate developers could start developing the area including much of Paine’s old spread with stately homes that still exist.
–The “museum” contents of the cottage include precious few historical items with any real connection to Paine, including two chairs he sat in and a Franklin stove given to him by its inventor, Benjamin Franklin, who was also his patron. The holdings are largely period nick-knacks.
–A marker installed in 1952 accurately notes the spot along North Avenue where Paine was buried a few yards from where the cottage now stands. But what the marker’s inscription doesn’t say is that 10 years after Paine’s death, a crazy London journalist in 1819 secretly dug up his bones and shipped them back to England, where they were eventually lost to history. Nearly two centuries later, in 2009, the heist made a Time Magazine list of “Top 10 Famous Stolen Body Parts,” along with Geronimo’s skull and Napoleon’s, uh, junk.
–When I visited more than a decade ago, the two-story cottage itself was a little ratty, no doubt due to strained financial resources of its owner, the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Society (Huguenots were French Protestants who left France in the face of religious persecution; they founded New Rochelle in 1688.) The facility then was only open limited hours a few days a week. According to its website, it’s now only open for visitors on prior request.
