Boston in 1848
From an original drawing by Edwin Whitefield
Boston: Byways and Folkways… a Brief History Part I
From the Great Migration of 1635 to the political upheavals of the late 1960’s this course follows the
development of Boston through the lens of its geography, changing population, and neighborhoods.
Boston Beginnings
“Where is Boston?” The answer to this question is not as simple as one might expect. “It's where it's always been,” you reply. But that is not the case. Depending upon which geologic period you are considering, what we call the Boston Basin has traveled a considerable distance. Originally part of what geologists call Avalonia, a microcontinent that developed during the Paleozoic Era some 538 million years ago, the Boston basin has migrated from the southern hemisphere, collided with several other early continental plates and eventually joined the North American Plate comprising the coastal areas from the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland [hence its name] southward to, and including. Rhode Island. Interestingly, part of Avalonia drifted to the northeast, forming part of modern Ireland, all of England, and parts of coastal Europe from northern France to Denmark. In one sense, the East Anglian founders of Boston, who settled the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630, had not really traveled very far at all.
The present-day topology and contours that we associate with Boston Proper would be entirely unfamiliar to the original Puritan settlers of the Great Migration of 1630. Called Shawmut in the Algonquin language, the peninsula consisted of less than 500 acres connected by a narrow isthmus to what is now Dorchester Heights. With very high tides, the peninsula became an island. Boston Proper today is approximately 60% landfill. The overlay map below shows the original contours of Boston in dark green with landfill in light green, tan, and rose. An excellent interactive atlas of Boston over time can be found at
Geography as Destiny
While geography is not
determinative in the absolute sense, it does impose constraints on population, land use, and economic development. While fresh spring water and a deep harbor attracted the first settlers, the lack of an easily accessible hinterland limited Boston's potential as a major shipping center. While New Amsterdam's Hudson River and Connecticut Colony's Connecticut River provided navigable waterways deep into the interior, Boston's meandering 80 mile long Charles River travels only as far as Hopkinton, while the Mystic River's 7 mile course ends in Medford. For this reason Boston's early economy would be dominated by maritime coastal industries and mercantile trade with Britain, East Africa and the West Indies. Both required skilled craftsmen, merchants and the capital to finance them. Through out the three phases of its development, mercantile, industrial, technological, Boston has relied on its human capital as the chief source of its economic vitality.
Mystic and Charles River Watersheads
Topology of Boston
When viewed from what is now Charlestown, the Shawmut skyline was dominated by three hills: Trimount, consisting of Mt. Vernon, Beacon Hill, and Pemberton Hill, with Copps Hill to the northeast and Fort Hill to the southeast. There are no extant sources describing what the original settlers saw when they arrived on Boston's shore other than that of a young girl, Anne Pollard, who described Shawmut as " very uneven, abounding in small hollows and swamps, covered with blueberries and other bushes." In the late 17th century print below, the three hills of Trimount are quite prominent, including the beacon from which Beacon Hill derived its name; to the left can be seen Copps Hill.
The "uneven" topology "abounding in small hollows and swamps" that Anne observed from the shore of Charlestown was largely the product of the Laurentide ice sheet's retreat some 12,000 years ago. The retreat of the glacier resulted in the creation of moraines, drumlins, and kettles across the New England landscape. Beacon Hill is an excellent example of an end moraine formed as the ice sheet paused in its retreat leaving a deposit of gravel, boulders and sand behind. The islands of Boston Harbor are almost entirely drumlins, rounded, teardrop shaped hills created by the scouring action of the retreating glaciers. Boston Harbor's "swarm" of drumlins is quite unique being only one of three partially submerged "swarms" in the world. Jamaica Pond is an example of a kettle pond created by the melting of a large mass of ice that calved from its retreating glacier and created a depression that filled with water over time.
Stepping back in time, the underlying geology of the Boston Basin developed approximately 600 million years ago during the late Neoproterozoic and Precambrian periods. A considerable part of the underlying bedrock consists of Cambridge Argillite, a formation of shale-like layered sedimentary rock. An older formation, known as Roxbury Conglomerate, also underlies parts of the basin. It is more popularly known as Roxbury Puddingstone, an apt name for a matrix of stones, cobbles, and boulders of varies sizes cemented together by finer materials. As you traverse the various neighborhoods of Boston you come to realize how popular Puddingstone became as a favorite building material, especially in the construction of its public buildings and churches.
One of the most beautiful views of Boston occurs when driving into the city on Route 2 in Arlington Heights. From this 300 foot elevation the entire basin is spread out before you. Similar views can be obtained from Needham Heights, Wellesley Hills, Prospect Hill in Waltham or Chestnut Hill in Newton. These sites form the escarpment that surrounds Boston and hence the word "basin." Volcanic in origin, consisting of various granites and gneisses, they were formed during late Precambrian times when Avalonia was somewhere near the Equator.
Old South Church
courtesy of Ajay Suresh
Roxbury Puddingstone
Courtesy of James Hobin
Topographical map of the Boston Basin
Courtesey of the
Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres
View of Boston from Pine Hill, Middlesex Fells
Notice the granite outcropping in the foreground
The Great migration
The 1620 arrival of the Pilgrims at Plymouth will always have pride of place in the American origins narrative, but our story begins 10 years later and 40 miles to the north-west with The Great Migration of 1630-1640. The arrival of seventeen ships and the flagship Arabella under the leadership of John Winthrop initiated the beginning of a mass exodus of over 80,000 English emigres to the shores of Massachusetts. While this migration emanated from all parts of England, a substantial number were drawn from the parishes of East Anglia, often leaving as a group, often with their pastor.
One has to wonder what motivated that first group of some 800 or so souls who boarded the five ships which sailed on April 8, 1630 from Yarmouth, Isle of Wight, England. At the completion of the two month voyage, 200 had died and 100 more would return to England shortly after landing. With the exceptions of the small colonies at Plymouth Plantation and Salem, this group of mostly middle class, well educated tradesmen, craftsmen, and shop keepers faced a largely uncharted wilderness with only the limited means they had brought with them. Why indeed?
It is difficult to fathom the complex motives and desires of each individual who took part in the Great Migration, but there was an overriding religious context that provides an answer for many. This can be found in understanding what Harvard professor Perry Miller, in his book of the same name, called An Errand into the Wilderness. The accent mark here should be placed on the word errand rather than wilderness. These sons and daughters of the Protestant Reformation were inspired by their belief that they were chosen by God to be an example of what a Christian Commonwealth could and should be. The wilderness, remote and free of the old world's influences, would become, what Governor John Winthrop, in his sermon delivered in Southhampton just before their departure, called "a city upon a hill."
The Lord will be our God, and delight to dwell among us, as his oune people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our wayes. Soe that wee shall see much more of his wisdome, power, goodness and truthe, than formerly wee have been acquainted with. Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when hee shall make us a prayse and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “the Lord make it like that of New England.” For wee must consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill. The eies of all people are upon us. Soe that if wee shall deale falsely with our God in this worke wee have undertaken, and soe cause him to withdrawe his present help from us, wee shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. Wee shall open the mouthes of enemies to speake evill of the ways of God, and all professors for God’s sake. Wee shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause theire prayers to be turned into curses upon us till wee be consumed out of the good land whither wee are a goeing.
The larger political and social context of this decision to emigrate in 1630 certainly included increasing dissatisfaction with the restoration of more traditional religious rites and clerical authority under King Charles I. However, The Great Migration was not so much a flight from religious persecution as it was a bold embrace of an opportunity to create a Christian Commonwealth in an unsullied environment.
In 1670, Samuel Danforth, pastor of the church in Roxbury, delivered a sermon marking the election of members to the General Court of Massachusetts. In A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness, he reminded his listeners that they had endured "this waste and howling Wilderness" for one reason only: to give testimony freely to their faith in the Gospel.
“You have solemnly professed before God, Angels and Men, that the Cause of your leaving your Country, Kindred and Fathers houses, and transporting your selves with your Wives, Little Ones and Substance over the vast Ocean into this waste and howling Wilderness, was your Liberty to walk in the Faith of the Gospel with all good Conscience according to the Order of the Gospel, and your enjoyment of the pure Worship of God according to his Institution, without humane Mixtures and Impositions.”
This is a heavy burden to shoulder. The daily exigencies of survival in this wilderness , combined with the increase in population and corresponding diverging viewpoints, would test and reshape the nature of this great experiment.
The Beginning
Most cities get their start by happenstance, often evolving from some fortuitous geographic feature. Such was the case of Saxon Oxnaford, oxen's ford, now Oxford. It was at this point that a ford across the River Thames allowed the passage of cattle being driven from the Midlands towards London some 50 miles away. Soon a small village developed into a town important enough to be mentioned in AD 912 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
Boston, however, is the result of a decision made some 3000 miles away on August 26, 1629 at Cambridge University where John Winthrop and eleven other members of the Massachusetts Bay Company entered into a covenant to each hereby freely and sincerely promise and bind himself ... to embark for the said plantation by the first of March next, ... to inhabit and continue in New England. A meeting of the entire General Court of the Company on the August 28 and 29 confirmed this decision voting that the government and patent should be settled in New England. At a further meeting of the General Court on October 2o John Winthrop was elected Governor for the following year. The members of previous English joint stock companies formed to exploit the riches of the new world remained in England together with their royal charters while sending out others to extract the wealth of the wilderness, as was the case of the Virginia Company. But here we have something quite unique, this Company, together with its charter, would embark as a group to establish their new plantation. Their royal charter, unlike other joint stock companies, did not specify where the governing board would meet yearly. The General Court would meet thousands of miles away from the supervision of the Crown, and thus Massachusetts Bay became a self-governing commonwealth. The seeds of a future revolution were planted early.
John Winthrop, 1588-1649
Arrival
In 1626 several members of a disbanded colony at Cape Ann had established themselves at the entrance of the Naumkeag River. In 1628 the New England Company was formed to enlarge the community, renaming it Salem, and elected John Endecott as governor. It was in Salem Harbor that the Arabella dropped anchor on June 12, 1630. Previous to their arrival, Winthrop had engaged Thomas Graves, an engineer from Kent, to establish the beginnings of a settlement on the Mishawum peninsula, renamed Charlestown, in honor of King Charles I. On July 12 Winthrop's fleet arrived and set about the work of establishing a town. Overtime, the health of the settlers deteriorated. The only source of water on the peninsula was a brackish spring that was under water at high tide.
The community at Charlestown had a nearby neighbor, William Blaxton. Blaxton was the only remaining member of the ill fated Gorges Expedition of 1625, but rather than return to England, he established himself on the Shawmut peninsula along with his library of several hundred books, building a small house, establishing an orchard and tending his garden. By all accounts he was quite happy in his solitude. But that was about to change. Hearing of the devastating conditions at Charlestown, Blaxton wrote a letter to Isaac Johnson, a former classmate at Cambridge University, now a member of the Charlestown community, inviting them to Shawmut where there was an abundant supply of sweet water from a natural spring. The offer was accepted, and on September 7, 1630 the Charlestown community relocated. Apparently the overcrowding which ensued, and the religiosity of the Puritans [Blaxton was Anglican] compelled William to search out a less crowded location for his library to the south. In 1635 he became the first settler on the Pawtucket River in what is now Rhode Island. The acerage he sold to the newcomers comprises today's Boston Commmon.
On 1924 the City of Boston erected this plaque in Blaxton's Honor
It is located on Beacon Street near the Common.
The aforementioned Isaac Johnson died on 30 September 1630, but before his passing he bequeathed the name of his home town in Lincolnshire to the new community, henceforth it would be Boston. The backstory of this name has a rich and deep history. In the early seventh century a Saxon, monk renown for his piety established a monastery on River Alde in Suffolk. The fisher folk of the area, because of his concern for their well being, held him in great esteem and hence, they referred to him as the "boat helper" which in the Anglo Saxon of that time was Bot-holph. Over time Saint Botolph's Town was contracted into Boston.
Of course, the land that Blaxton vacated, as well as all of Eastern Massachusetts, already had an indigenous population. The Massachusett band, part of the Algonquin language group, had been established in this region for some time. The earliest evidence of indigenous habitation of the coastal areas of New England date back some 12,000 years. Small bands lived in established villages growing corn, beans, pumpkins and squash. Hunting, fishing and shellfishing complimented their diet. By the time our story begins the native population of this region had been decimated by what epidemiologists call a virgin soil epidemic. In the great epidemic of 1616-1619 it is estimated that fifty to seventy-five percent of a native population of approximately 60,000 had succumbed to diseases they were exposed to by contact with early European explorers and fishermen. The effect was devastating on many levels. One estimate places the number of warriors left in the Massachusetts band at
60. When William Bradford established Plymouth, it was built on the site of the recently abandoned Wampanoag community of Patuxet. Corn stubble was still visible as well the graves of the dead.
It is perverse, to say the least, that this event made the settlement of Boston and its satellite communities a far easier project. The mind set of the settlers only added to this effect. The issue of appropriating native land was explored in a letter by John Winthrop before the Great Migration in which he asked, “By what warrant have we to take that land, which is and hath been of long tyme possessed of others the sons of Adam?” His answer is below.
This savage people ruleth over many lands without title or property; for they inclose no ground, neither have they cattell to maintayne it, but remove their dwellings as they have occasion, or as they can prevail against their neighbours. And why may not christians have liberty to go and dwell amongst them in their waste lands and woods (leaving them such places as they have manured for their come) as lawfully as Abraham did among the Sodomites? For God hath given to the sons of men a twofould right to the earth; there is a naturall right and a civil right. The first right was naturall when men held the earth in common, every man sowing and feeding where he pleased: Then, as men and catell increased, they appropriated some parcells of ground by enclosing and peculiar manurance, and this in tyme got them a civil right ... 2dly, There is more than enough for them and us ...4thly, We shall come in with good leave of the natives.
The rest, of course, is history.
It was never the intention of the first settlers to stay put in Boston. By the end of the first year, there was a population of 2000, by 1640 it had increased to 40,000. During the first year alone, Cambridge, Watertown, Roxbury, and Dorchester had been founded, by 1641 there were a total of 16 communities within Mass Bay Colony. The increase in the number of communities was often the result of a process called hiving. New arrivals often found themselves at a great distance from the center of town civic life. The proximaty of a meeting house for Sunday worship was a determinative factor in the minds of many who decided to eventually move on and establish a new village with its own meeting house. In 1635 the town of Watertown begat Dedham, which in turn begat Medfield in 1649, as well as my hometown, Needham, in 1711.
Like the birth of Aphrodite, some towns came into existence out of nowhere. Individuals and groups, some local, some new arrivals, would coalesce and petition the Great and General Court for permission to establish a new town. Such was the case of Salisbury, Massachusetts. In September of 1638, Simon Bradstreet and eleven others petitioned the Governor and General Court for the establishment of a plantation on the banks of the Merrimack River. At first called Colchester, in 1640 it was incorporated as Salisbury.
Isaac Buswell settled in the newly established town in 1638 where he received land in the first division. He was a weaver and was a townsman of Salisbury in 1650. He had left Southampton, England, on the Ship Confidence, on 24 April 1638. Born in Husbands Bosworth, Leicestershire, in 1592, he died in Salisbury at the age of 91 in 1683. He was my eighth great-grandfather.
Probate Record of Isaac Buswell, 1683
Settling In
It is an oft mentioned artifact of Boston lore that its meandering streets follow the the cow paths of the early town. The origin of this bit of folklore is unknown, but our first written reference was from Ralph Waldo Emerson who quipped that “we say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.”¹ The reality is less fanciful and more prosaic. Boston was a 17th century city. It came long before the more formal grid patterns that informed the layout of Washington D.C. or Chicago. Boston grew higgledy-piggledy. An early settler was assigned his site, built his home, facing this way or that, to suit his taste. The roads would come after and conform to the already established dwellings. There were, however, a few straight main thoroughfares such as King Street , now State Street, where property was aligned in a more orderly manner. The other factor affecting the layout of the city was the fact that it was on an irregular shaped penninsula, with many small coves and inlets as well as several large hills that roads had to conform to. In a later time, when the city filled in the Mill Pond, the South Cove, and Back Bay, a grid layout became the order of the day.
The earliest residents lost no time in transforming the terrain of Shawmut Peninsula. A cove to the north-east of Beacon Hill was almost enclosed by a small island positioned across its entrance. With a burgeoning population to be fed, the need for a mill was paramount. A company was formed in 1643 to dam the cove and build two corn mills within three years. A creek was also extended to connect the pond to the South Cove of the town. Tidal action provided the power to the mills which eventually also included a rum mill and a chocolate mill. The Mill Pond was active until 1804 when the Boston Mill Corporation bought the pond and began the task of filling it in with earth from Beacon Hill and Copps Hill. It took 21 years to finish and added 50 acres to the town. Charles Bulfinch was engaged to design the layout of the streets. As you step out onto Causeway Street leaving TD Garden, you are walking on the causeway that enclosed the Mill Pond, and if you perhaps walk down Canal Street to look for a bite to eat, you are reminded that a canal once connected the Mill Pond the South Cove.
1648 Boston
Showing the Mill Pond
Given the religious motivation of settlers it is no surprise that the first pubic building to be constructed was a meeting house in 1630. First Church Boston was erected near today's State Street, and was very rudimentary consisting of plastered stone walls and thatch roof. A burial ground was established in that same year and is located next to King's Chapel. Originally called The Old Burrial Ground its name was changed upon the construction of King's Chapel in the 1750's. Of note, the burial ground is not affiliated with a church, but has always been municipally owned. As you would expect, many of the founding fathers of the colony are to be found there including Govenor John Winthrop, John Cotton, grandfather of Cotton Mather, and William Emerson, father of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Literacy is central for a religious community based upon scriptural revelation, and the first school was founded in 1635, five short years after settlement. Boston Latin School was based upon the Free Grammar School of Boston, England, and instructed boys in Latin and Greek in preparation for a college education. To fulfill that need a college was established in 1636 in Newe Town . Originally called New College, it was renamed Harvard after Reverend John Harvard bequeathed his library and half of his estate to the college. While not formally affiliated with any particular religious establishment, its intended purpose was to advance Learning and perpetuate it to Posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate Ministery to the Churches, when our present Ministers shall lie in the Dust. Using Cambridge University as its model, instruction was in Latin and the curriculum included Greek, Hebrew, Logic, Rhetoric and Mathematics. By the mid 18th century the curriculum became more secular adding subjects such as Astronomy, Algebra and Physics.
Harvard's first buildings purchased on land from Goodman Peyntree
located on the edge of Cow-Yard-Row.
Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, coastal maritime and mercantile trade dominated the economy of the town. While each dwelling had its small garden, Boston depended upon its surrounding communities for staples such as grain which could be grown more efficiently on larger plots of land. Wharfs, markets, rope-walks, shipyards, smithies, and all the allied trades dominated the activity of the town from the start. A survey of the occupations of the first settlers tells the story.
The two years of public controversy came to a head in early November 1637 when Anne was brought to trial before the General Court meeting in Newtown. She was charged with countenancing the public controversy that had disturbed the peace of the Commonwealth. After two days of trial, Anne, in her final statement predicted that God's curse would fall upon the colony for its behavior. Found guilty, Governor Winthrop read the verdict: Mrs. Hutchinson, the sentence of the court you hear is that you are banished from out of our jurisdiction as being a woman not fit for our society, and are to be imprisoned till the court shall send you away. Massachusetts Bay was not yet through with Hutchinson. Her church trial followed in March of 1638 where she was excommunicated from the Church and delivered up to Sathan. By April, Hutchinson and her family were safely in Providence Plantation. From there they would found the town of Portsmouth on Narragansett Bay. Hutchinson's Boston property eventually passed on to one Thomas Cresse who built his home on the site in 1718. It became the Old Corner Book Store, one of the oldest buildings in the city. In 1945, the Great and General Court of Massachusetts rescinded Anne's banishment. Sometimes it takes a while.
One of those attending Hutchinson's weekly meetings was Mary Dyer. Her arrival in Boston in 1635 with her husband William signaled the next chapter in Boston's history of religious intolerance. Hutchinson's religious viewpoints appealed to Mary who became a close friend and regular attendee at the infamous meetings. With the banishment of Hutchinson, the Dyers left Boston. On the recommendation of Roger Williams they set up a small colony on Aquidneck Island, now Newport, Rhode Island. Our story might end here if it were not for Mary's return to England in 1650 and her encounter with George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends, more popularly known as Quakers. Fox's emphasis on the equality of both men and women before God, as well as the emphasis on the individual's inner voice as a source of spirituality, appealed to Mary.
In 1657 Mary returned to Boston in the middle of what can only be called a state-sponsored persecution of Quakers who had recently arrived in the city. In October of 1657, the General Court enacted a series of laws to deal with the heretical influx. For males, the first offense of being found within the colony was the loss of one ear, upon the second offense, was the loss of the other ear. A third offense would be punished by the piercing of the tongue with a hot iron. Whippings were the punishment for women. These draconian laws were not enough to stem the tide and a second law, passed in October of 1658, mandated banishment with the penalty of death if one returned. Mary, hearing of the harsh punishments several of her friends had suffered, returned to Boston that summer. What followed is possibly one of the most cruel acts perpetrated by a sitting Governor of the Commonwealth.
Upon her arrest and conviction, Mary and two other Quakers were paraded to the elm tree on Boston Common for execution on October 27, 1659. The first two, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, were hung while Mary watched. Dyer ascended the ladder and had the noose placed over her head. At the last moment, Governor Endecott ordered her to be brought down and escorted out of the colony. Mary would return to Boston in the summer of 1660, but there would be no reprieve this time. She was immediately arrested and executed on June 1, 1660. The execution of Dyer foreshadowed the end of the Puritan theocracy in Boston. The newly restored King Charles II, hearing of the events in Boston, issued a royal mandate ordering that all execution of Quakers cease.
Mary Dyer's statue in front of the Massachusetts State House
The thirty short years following the death of Mary Dyer witnessed the transition of Boston’s government of the elect to one that was secular and less intolerant. The roots of this transformation are found both in the Commonwealth’s fraught colonial relations with England and the evolving temperament of the populace.
During the first half of the seventeenth century, Boston had been largely left to its own devices, England being consumed by the Civil War and the Puritan Commonwealth that followed. With the restoration of the Stuarts in 1660 there was a dramatic change in the attention the mother country paid to the affairs of its colonies. Massachusetts, in particular, was a source of concern. The period of benign neglect had reinforced Mass Bay’s sense of independence. Non-compliance with the various Navigation Acts from 1651 to 1696 was of particular concern, as was their insistence on minting currency. The Pine Tree Shilling was particularly infuriating in that it lacked the image of Charles II. Also of concern was the limitation of the franchise to those who were members of the Puritan faith.
After much back and forth of royal delegations to the colony and colonial representatives to the Board of Trade, events came to a head in 1686 with the revocation of the Massachusetts Charter by James II. The Charter of 1691, which replaced it, explicitly extended the franchise to non-Puritans. The larger context of this change reflects an underlying change in the sentiments and sensibilities of the populace at large. We often overlook the fact that the establishment of Mass Bay occurred at the very end of the Middle Ages with all that implies for how they saw their relationship to God and civil society. It would never occur to a person of the seventeenth century that church and state should be separate, God being the author of all governance. It is hard to draw a line between when the Middle Ages ended and when modernity began. We can see the beginning with the publication of Francis Bacon’s Ovum Organum
in 1620 and certainly by 1687 with the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica
, we have entered the Age of the Enlightenment. Historian Perry Miller succinctly describes the transformation:
For the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire religion could be separated from politics, doctrinal orthodoxy divorced from loyalty to the state, and the citizens of a nation be permitted to worship in diverse churches and to believe different creeds without endangering the public peace. Various factors contributed to effecting this revolution; the triumph of scientific method and of rationalism made impossible the older belief that government was of divine origin; the rise of capitalism, of the middle class, and eventually of democracy, necessitated new conceptions of the role of the state.⁵
Boston was a literate society. In 1722 Boston could boast five printing shops, more than all the other colonies combined. The rationalism of the Enlightenment gradually infused the mindset of colonial thinking. The notebooks of Obadiah Ayer, who graduated from Harvard in 1710, show that he was attending courses in logic, geometry, metaphysics, and geography. In 1753, sophomore John Adams was leafing through Gravesand’s Mathematical Elements of Natural Philosophy [1720] where he read that he should
Lay aside all feigned hypotheses. The properties of Body cannot be known a priori...
He only, who in Physics reasons from Phenomena, and pursues this Method inviolably to the best of his Powers, endeavors to follow the footsteps of Sir Isaac Newton....⁶
In Boston, the once unquestioned convictions of Puritanism gave way to a more humanistic conception of life and its meaning. The 1741 Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God of Jonathan Edwards would give way to the …God [who] is infinitely good, kind, benevolent… of William Ellery Channing in his 1819 speech that launched Unitarianism. It is but a short journey from Channing to the Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1838 Harvard Divinity School Address, in which he rejected the idea of a personal God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
William Ellery Channing
Boston: Rebellion or Revolution
Peter Oliver
1713-1791
It is a truism that whosoever wins a war writes its history, and that history then becomes the sanctioned national narrative. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. The historiography of America’s Civil War comes to mind. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century southern historians, sympathetic to the Confederacy, spoke of The Lost Cause, or The War Between the States rather than use terms such as The Civil War or War of the Rebellion. To them, the South was defending a superior culture and way of life from the depredations of Northern politicians hell-bent on dominating the nation’s government at their expense. The endurance of this narrative still resonates for us today in disagreements over flying the Confederate flag or dismantling Confederate monuments.
You can look far and wide to find a history of the American Revolution from the Loyalist side. Not that it does not exist, but rather, that it is not promoted or particularly acknowledged by We The Winners. Contemporary American History textbooks work hard to avoid the charge of political correctness, attempting to examine all sides of any one particular issue, but concerning Loyalists during the Revolution, their narratives’ when mentioned at all, are portrayed as distorted or partisan. Well, after all, they lost the war. Historian Douglass Adair summarized this state of affairs in his introduction to Peter Oliver’s Origins and Progress of the American Rebellion, a Tory Point of View:
…must abate of that self sufficiency which he had imbibed in the simple State of Nature, of doing what was right in his own Eyes; & submit his private Opinion to the publick Judgement of the many, confiding in their united Sense, as of more Authority than the Sentiments of any Individual. Nay, he must also consent to the Opinion of the Majority of the Society, be it never so small a Majority.⁴
Then again, while Oliver seems to accept the basic Lockean concept of the necessity of a social contract freely entered into, he consistently denies the ability of individuals to conform their behavior for the good of the whole society. In this, he reflects a more Hobbesian view on the nature of man, one in which our worst instincts inform our actions creating a brutish world in need of authoritarian control. Oliver consistently uses the word mob when describing the behavior of Bostonians in general: He [Hancock] had always a Mob at Command. Insofar as Bostonians were capable of self-government he found that As for the People in general, they were like the Mobility of all Countries, perfect Machines, wound up by any Hand who might first take the Winch… Again, reflecting the need for absolute authority, Oliver often takes to task the reluctance of the British government in reigning in Boston’s rebellious nature: Timidity, in Suppression of Rebellion, will ever retard the Subdual of it.
As Oliver marches through the catalog of British-American confrontations, beginning with the Stamp Act and ending with Lexington and Concord, he attributes the motivation of the conspirators to their basest instincts, usually vengeance or self-aggrandizement. He dates the actual beginning of the entire concatenation of Incidents to the year 1761, to a single event, the preferment by Governor Bernard of Thomas Hutchinson, then the Lieutenant Governor, for the position of Chief Justice of Massachusetts Bay, over James Otis Sr., a member of the Massachusetts Assembly. According to Oliver, Otis’s son, James, Jr. then vowed that if his Father was not appointed a Justice of the superior Court; he would set the Province in a Flame if he died in the Attempt.
Bostonians Paying the Excise Man
Attributed to London Engraver Philip Dawe, 1774.
The engraving depicts the tarring and feathering John Malcolm,
Commisioner of Customs, four weeks after the Boston Tea Party.
Yankee Boston
The "Sacred Cod" has been watching over the House of Representatives since its installation in 1784
The Industrial Revolution Comes to Boston
In one of those unintended consequences of history, it was Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807 that changed the course of Boston’s history. The Napoleonic Wars had placed the neutral United States in an untenable position as harassment by both English and French warships prevented free trade in European waters. With the second largest merchant fleet in the world, Jefferson had to take a stand . The Embargo Act was an effort to put pressure on both nations by banning any exports from American ports, and restricting imports from England. The Act failed to achieve its ends and severely punished the merchant class, especially in Boston.
Francis Cabot Lowell was the scion of a wealthy Boston Brahmin family, he had attended Phillips Academy, graduated from Harvard, and established himself as a prominent Boston merchant engaged in the China Trade. Lowell was particularly affected by the Embargo Act. The owner of eight merchant ships, he, together with Uriah Cotting and Harrison Grey Otis had developed India Wharf, its adjacent warehouses, as well as a retail district in the area of Broad Street. Lowell had always had an interest in textiles, and saught an opportunity to redirect his family's wealth away from shipping and into manufacturing. A family tour of England in 1810 allowed him to visit the textile mills of Lancashire and Scotland. England jealously guarded the secrets of it textile technology prohibiting any note-taking or drawings in its factories. Lowell spent two years in the English Mills studying and committing to memory the complexities of the power looms and spinning jennys he observed. Upon return, in a two-year period, he was able to recreate and improve upon what he had seen and was ready to establish the first integrated textile mill in the United States.
Boston Manufacturing Company, Waltham, Massachusetts
Forming the Boston Manufacturing Corporation, he built his mill in Waltham on the banks of the Charles River in 1814. The way he employed the technology he had recreated was unique. His mill was an integrated factory. Every step of the process, cleaning, carding, spinning, and weaving were under one roof. This innovation would forever change the nature of manufacturing. More importantly were the changes he instituted in financing the company and managing it. At that point businesses were individually owned or partnerships which limited their financial resources and increased their liability. Boston Manufacturing was organized as a joint stock company, selling $1000 shares of stock to the Boston elite, who, as share holders had no liability for the actions of the corporation. In 1821 the dividend was 27.5%. Lowell also instituted a new system of management, creating a Board of Directors to oversee corporate policy and systemized the management of the mill from acquisition of raw materials to marketing of the finished product.
In 1822 the Boston Associates decided to expand production to a site with more water power. They chose land at the Pawtucket Falls on the Merrimack River and named this new, planned city, Lowell, in honor of their founder who died in 1817 of pneumonia at the age of 42. Lowell's factory system proliferated across Massachusetts. Approximately 45 mills were built during this period, from Holyoke to North Andover. Textile mills needed a source of cheap raw materials, principally cotton. In another ironic twist, another Massachusetts inventor, Eli Whitney, received his patent on the cotton gin in 1794. This revolutionized the plantation economy in the South, making cotton King, and wedding Boston's economy to that of the slave holding South. As mentioned earlier, while the mills were in Lowell, the profits flowed to Boston, where Brahmins such as Nathan Appleton, Patrick Tracy Jackson, Abbott Lawrence, and Amos Lawrence were busy creating the Hub of the Universe, which in no small part rested on the fruits of slave labor.
LANDMAKING IN BOSTON
"This is a city that has been created by man..."
Frederick Salvucci
Birds Eye View of Boston, 1850
Bachmann, John
Courtesy BPL, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center Collection
The historical developments mentioned here are not the only ones that shaped landmaking in Boston. But wharfing out, the China trade, introduction forailroads, Irish immigration, mid-nineteenth-century harbor improvements, pollution from waste-water disposal, public parks, late-nineteenth-century port development, and twentieth-century transportation innovations were the most important reasons for the filling done in Boston and are themes that recur throughout this study.
Nancy Seasholes, Gaining Ground: a History of Landmaking in Boston
Frederick Salvucci, former secretary of Transportation for Massachusetts, was speaking literally, not metaphorically in this interview with PBS when he characterized Boston as “... a city that has been created by man.” Frederick was the leading proponent for the most expensive highway project in the history of the United States, the Big Dig. In its own way, the project was the culmination of two centuries of transforming the topology of Boston, and in this case it restored a human landscape destroyed by an earlier project, the Central Artery. And this is the main takeaway, two centuries of landmaking had proceeded, as one would expect, without much forethought. Each represented an answer to a specific contemporaneous need, whether it was increasing the available wharfage, filling an odorous mudflat providing more land for housing, or the creation of parkland. Boston grew like topsy.
It is not possible in the small space we have here to cover all of the instances of landmaking in Boston, given that, we will look at the process of warfing out, the filling of the Back Bay, and the creation of the Fens. For a more detailed study of landmaking in Boston, I highly recommend. Nancy Seasholes’ Gaining Ground: a History of Landmaking in Boston.
Warfing Out
It was not until quite recently that I understood the difference between a pier and a wharf, the former being a structure built on wooding pilings extending out from the shore, the latter, a solid structure, an enclosure made of stone, and then filled with various materials such as gravel. The majority of the landmaking in 17th and early 18th century Boston was the result of building wharves to meet the demands of Boston’s growing coastal and international trade. Over time, there was a tendency to fill the areas between wharves with more fill, creating new land. This process is known as wharfing out.
I hope you had the opportunity to enjoy lunch or dinner at Durgan Park before its demise 2019. If so, then you were dining in a location that represents the first major public construction project undertaken in Boston. It is also true, that if you were magically transported to that same location in 1825, you would be under water. Facing south, to your immediate left would be the Town Dock where the city’s main sewage outlet was located. Over your right shoulder, you would see Faneuil Hall, just a few short steps away. Ahead of you, to the south, you you would see John Codman’s wharf.
In 1822, having reached the point where a town meeting form of government was no longer feasible, there being more than 7,000 voters on the rolls, Boston incorporated as a city, with a mayor, a council and aldermen. In 1823 Josiah Quincy was elected as the city’s second mayor, and unlike his predecessor, he was an activist, and he had a project in mind. The central market district around Faneuil Hall was constricted and overcrowded to the point that vendors often had no space to display and sell their wares. Additionally, the odor emanating from the area of the Town Dock was, to say the least, uninviting.
Quincy’s proposed that the City build a seawall from the exit of Mill Creek to the North side of Long Wharf with the areas between the existing wharfs being filled. The seawall became Commercial Street. The City would erect three market buildings upon the site, to the east of Faneuil Hall. The overlay map below shows the proposal. The shaded in areas indicate the location of what we now call North Market, Quincy Market, and South Market.
Stephen P. Fuller: Plan of Proposed Faneuil Hall Project
Courtesy of Library of Congress
For its time, this was a project on the scale of the Big Dig. Controversial from the start, it would require vast financial resources, the taking of land by eminent domain, and, more importantly, it would be a public project. This was when development in Boston was by private individuals or small companies. State approval was achieved, legal obstacles settled, and money was obtained by selling future store locations in the markets yet to be built. In July 1824, work began, and the central market opened for business on August 26, 1826. This was perhaps the first instance of what we now call central government planning in Boston. A problematic area needing revitalization was transformed into a viable market area with public spaces and architecturally significant buildings in the Greek revival style designed by Alexander Parris. It is a fitting bookend to the waterfront park, just to its East, created on the land reclaimed by the Big Dig.
John Andrews, East View of Faneuil Hall Market Place
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library
“Back Bay...is nothing less than a great cesspool”
Report to the City Commission on the Drainage of Back Bay, 1850
Boston 1858, View of the Mill Dam from the Dome of the State House
Courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, Boston Public Library
The filling of the Back Bay is a complicated story. It occurred in fits and starts over a period of 50 years. The City, the Commonwealth, corporations, and individuals all played a role in a series of projects, each representing the needs of the moment rather than an overall vision of what could be. It was essentially the intersection of private entrepreneurs, who needed access to the Back Bay for capital investment, bargaining with private owners, the Commonwealth, and the City for rights to accomplish their plans. First, we will start with a map of the Back Bay as it existed in 1814, before significant changes took place, which has been overlayed with a current street map of the area.
Fuller's Map of Boston, 1814
Courtesy o f Mapjunction
Beginning clockwise at one o’clock, we see the bottom of the west side of Beacon Hill, where Charles Street abuts the shoreline. Continuing south, we are on the edge of the Boston Common and the Rope Walks, built on recently filled-in land in 1795. At three o’clock, we are standing at the edge of the Theater District, where you can proceed west onto Orange, now Washington, Street, and proceed westward down Boston Neck. As we continue walking, the yet-to-be-built Cathedral of the Holy Cross appears on our left, approximately where the “N” of Neck appears on the map. Continuing west to where “The Brook” enters the Bay, we turn north and admire the future Boston Symphony Hall site. Proceeding north on Gravelly Point, we are following the future Massachusetts Avenue until it intersects with the future Newbury Street. If you look to your left, you will see the future Harvard Club of Boston on the edge of the Charles River.
The first major project that would unintentionally lead to the filling of Back Bay was the brainchild of Uriah Cotting, in many ways the archetype of the entrepreneurial class that dominated the Boston financial world of the period. Born in Waltham, the son of an innkeeper, he moved to Boston as a young man earning his keep as an errand boy. When his name begins to appear in the historical record he is a partner in developing India Wharf in 1803 and Central Wharf in 1815. In 1816 he developed an area which would become Cornhill Street, the location of the Sears Crescent built in the same year.
Justin Winsor, historian and librarian at Harvard College wrote in his 1881 Memorial History of Boston that “Mr. Cotting was the projector and the guiding spirit in nearly every enterprise involving the development of the town for business during the first twenty years of this century.”
In 1818 Uriah launched his next project, the Boston and Roxbury Mill Corporation, with the object of building a dam across the tidal mud flats of Back Bay. A causeway-toll road would be constructed on top of the dam, and raceways through the dam would capture the tidal flow enabling the building, by his estimate, of eighty-one mills of various sorts, flour, grist, cotton, and lumber to name a few. It would appear that his earlier experience in 1814 helping Francis Cabot Lowell establish his successful mill in Waltham had been inspirational.
In 1818 construction began. Two stone seawalls, fifty feet apart, filled with mud and a gravel topping, were completed in July 1823. The toll road which connected the Worcester Turn Pike to Boston was opened to traffic, howeve, Uriah did not live to see the completion of his project, dying at the age of 47 in 1818.
1852 Plan of Back Bay and vicinity, by Henry F. Conant, Ezra Lincoln
Courtesy of the Digital Commonwealth
The 1852 Plan of the Back Bay by Conant and Lincoln [above] illustrates the complexity of Cotting’s project. The main causeway connecting Boston to Brookline has a short extension connecting it to Gravelly Point, thus creating two basins, one, a full basin, and the other a receiving basin. At high tide, the sluice gate from the Charles River would be opened filling the full basin to power mills and factories. The outflow from the receiving basin would be released back into the Charles during low tide.
For a variety of reasons, the mill dam project did not fulfill Cotting’s expectations. Only three manufacturing sites ever occupied the site, not the eighty-one he projected. Revenues never reached expectations, and the tidal action was insufficient to provide the power needed, but worse, the dams created a stagnant body of water. Most sewerage in Boston was emptied directly into the nearest body of water. Before the construction of the dam, the tidal action of the Charles River would scour the estuaries and wash effluent out to sea. To make matters worse, two railroads, the Boston & Worcester and the Boston & Providence built causeways across the bay to gain access to Boston thus even worsening the problem.
View of Boston & Worcester and Boston and Providence Railroads intersecting over Back Bay
J. W. Barber circa 1850
Public outrage at the stench, the plague of mosquitoes, and fears that miasma [this was the prevalent theory on how disease spread] would endanger public health, resulted in the creation of several commissions to remedy the situation. After much back and forth between the City, the State, and the Boston Water & Power Company, proprietors of the mill dam, a tripartite agreement was reached in 1856 to begin filling the bay.
The State Commission awarded the contract to the firm of N.C. Munson & George Gross who would receive title to 25 percent of each building lot created. The project was underway in 1858. Boston had exhausted its local supply of gravel, but the last ice age had created a series of eskers, long high mounds of gravel and sand, on the banks of the Charles River in Needham, Massachusetts. The area was bounded by Central Ave to the north, Hunting Road to the west, and Kendrick Rd to the south, the Charles River forming its eastern boundary. Conveniently the New York and Boston Railroad was nearby and ran to the Brookline border with Boston, where an extension was built across the bay to the site. Munson and Gross employed two steam shovels that filled tip cars running on tracks parallel to the eskers. Taking 10 minutes to fill, each train of 35 cars brought 2,500 yards of fill to Boston on a schedule of 25 trips a day. For six days a week, a train would arrive on site every 45 minutes. The monumental scale of this endeavor would not be surpassed until the “Big Dig” relocation of the Central Artery in the 1990s.
Photo Courtesy of Wicked Local
While Boston created its high-end neighborhood, Needham was left with an eyesore for decades. The excavation laid bare the underlying bedrock. With the resulting lack of vegetation, dust and dirt blew as far as Needham Center on a windy day. It wasn’t until the opening of Route 128 in the 1950s that the land became valuable to developers for industrial development.
Needham Gravel Pits prior to 1950
Photo courtesy of Needham History Center and Museum
There was another incentive for this project other than eliminating a health hazard. The resulting land could be developed as a haven for upper-middle-class Bostonians who wished to escape Boston’s growing Irish population. Historian Nancy Seasholes, in Breaking Ground, characterized the report of the commissioners in charge of the project as containing a
…thinly veiled reference to the hidden agenda of these projects—creating attractive residential areas so that upper-middle-class Yankees, who were valued as both voters and taxpayers, would remain in the city to counteract the Irish immigrants pouring into Boston at the time. p .178
Early plans for developing the Back Bay attest to the commissioners' hopes. It was decided that a central boulevard in the French style, 240 feet in width, with 20-foot setbacks, would be the centerpiece of the Back Bay. It would have a mall down the center, complete with a fountain. Four parallel avenues, each with a service alley between them, would intersect with a grid of streets beginning at the base of the public garden with Arlington Street.
Plan of Commonwealth lands, 5 Dec. 1856
Suffolk Co. Deed Registry, Book 743
To offset the project's cost, the state sold lots before the actual filling-in and rolled over the net profit to pay the price of the next stage of the landfill. By 1876, the State had finished its part of the project, and in 1882, announced a net profit of 400% on the sale of its lots. In addition to the State, two other entities with rights to parts of the Back Bay were also engaged in selling and filling the mud flats. The Boston & Roxbury Mill Co. finished their section in the mid-1870s, but the Boston Water & Power Co. would not finish until 1882.
Detail from 1871 plan of the
Back Bay
A Set of Plans Showing the Back Bay 1814-1881, by Fuller and Whitney
The sand and gravel fill used in the Back Bay project could not support heavy structures and required the use of wood posts, driven deep into the ground until they rested on the blue clay or the outwash sand deposits below. The figure below illustrates the manner of construction used to support the homes above. Wood pilings had been successfully used for centuries, but depended on the posts being kept submerged below groundwater level, otherwise, the tops of the pilings exposed to air would be attacked by fungus, rotting the wood. Eventually, the lack of support would result in structural failure. This has been a continuing issue in the Back Bay and has often resulted in costly repairs. In 1984 twenty row houses on Brimmer Street were discovered to have rotting pilings leading to the establishment of the Groundwater Trust in 1986 to monitor groundwater levels through a series of wells throughout the city.1
Courtesy of James Lambrechts, Wentworth Institute of Technology
From her home on Beacon Hill, Catherine Hammond Gibson had an excellent view of the progress being made in the filling in of the tidal flats. The widow of John Gardiner Gibson, Catherine was a member of the elite Brahmin class of Boston society. The family’s ancestry and wealth were deeply rooted in Boston’s shipping and financial community. This was a family who could live on Beacon Hill and spend the summer in Nahant. In 1859 Catherine decided to buy one of the first lots available on Beacon Street. For the sum of $3,696, she purchased what would become 137 Beacon Street and hired architect Edward Clarke Cabot to design her Italian Renaissance-style brick and brownstone home. Three generations and seven family members would live at number 137 until the death of Catherine’s grandson, Charles Jr. in 1954. In 1957 the home became a house museum. The Gibson House is the only surviving townhouse in the Back Bay that has preserved its original Victorian-era exterior and interior. If the picture below looks familiar to you, it is probably because you watched Jo March enter her boarding house in the 2018 production of Little Women.
The Gibson House
Frederick Law Olmsted and the Creation of the Fens
The Fens near the Museum of Fine Arts
As you leave the beautifully colonnaded north-facing entrance of the Museum of Fine Arts, you are greeted by one of the masterpieces of urban landscaping architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted’s Fens. As you cross Fenway to the Fens it is hard to imagine that in the 1870’s one engineer described the area as "the filthiest marsh and mud flats to be found anywhere in the State of Massachusetts.” While the filling-in of the Back Bay had proceeded apace during the 1870’s the area to the west from Gravelly’s Point to Sewell’s Point in Brookline had not been touched. The confluence of Muddy River and Stony Brook created a tidal marsh that, as the city grew, had become the terminal for much of the city’s sewerage.
Map showing the tidal flats between Gravelly and Sewells Points
1874 Boston Hopkin's Atlas
Because the land's topography was unsuitable for development, it was decided to turn the area into a park. In 1877, the City Council approved a plan to convert the tidal marsh into a reservoir with a park surrounding it. In appearance, it would be much like the Brookline Reservoir Park created in 1848 to supply water to the city of Boston. In the map below, you can see the shaded areas that would need to be filled in.
1877 Plan for Back Bay Park
Courtesy of Nancy Seasholes, Making Ground, p216
Not happy with the initial design competition results, the Park Department Commissioners turned to Frederick Law Olmsted, famed designer of New York's Central Park. Olmsted’s vision for the new park was quite different from the original plan, deciding instead to create what some have called an “ecological restoration” which would incorporate the tidal flats into a naturalized landscape while diverting Muddy River and Stony Brook through covered culverts into the Charles River. This would create in Olmsted’s words a scenery of a winding, brackish creek within wooded banks...numerous points and coves softened in their outlines by thickets with much delicate variety in tone and color...picturesque elements emphasized by a few necessary structures, strong but unobtrusive. To our great fortune, the Park Commission approved the plan, and work was begun in 1880. At Olmsted’s insistence, the park was renamed the Back Bay Fens in 1888.
Olmsted's Proposed Improvement of Back Bay 1879
The Athens of America
Aristides, Louisburg Square, 1850
Courtesy Another Believer, Wikimedia Commons
The Boston Athenæum
10½ Beacon Street
The Athenæum was not a library open to the public. It was public in the sense that if you had the ability to buy a share in this private institution, then you could join. In practice, its membership was the exclusive preserve of the elite of Boston society, its bankers, merchants, ministers, and academics formed the core of its membership. There was a common saying in Boston that “a Boston Brahmin is someone who has a share in the Athenaeum, a relative in the McLean Asylum and a plot in the Mount Auburn Cemetery ³
In his research on the Athenæum, historian Ronald Story found that from 1805 through 1860, 22 of Boston’s 23 millionaires held shares as well as 42 of Boston’s wealthiest 48 families. During the same period, 29 of the 34 Trustees of Harvard College also held shares as did 27 of the 42 presidents of Boston’s leading commercial banks.⁴
The Museum of Fine Arts
Despite its elitist origins, the Athenæum served as a seedbed and a springboard for the development of many of Boston’s most significant cultural institutions. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Brahmin institutions such as the Athenæum, the Dante Club, and the Somerset Club served to maintain the exclusivity of this elite class. A massive wave of Irish immigration began to alter this picture. While there was a thriving popular culture in Boston, the Brahmins became convinced of the necessity of creating cultural institutions that could educate the middle-class, providing them with access to high culture, while preserving the elitism of their private institutions. ⁵
The creation of the Museum of Fine Arts is one such example. The impetus for the future museum originated with the Board of Trustees of the Athenæum, concerned that their small space could no longer accommodate donations of objects d’art, with the support of Harvard and other institutions in the same straits, they asked and received a charter from the Commonwealth for the building of a museum in the newly filled in Back Bay. While privately owned, the Board of Trustees was made up of a wider range of Boston’s public figures. The original Board had 23 members out of which 22 were Athenæum members. However, the Board later included notable figures such as the Superintendent of the Boston School Committee, the Mayor, and the Secretary of the State Board of Education, ensuring that the museum's mission remained community-oriented.⁶
For its first six years, the Museum occupied the top floor of the Athenæum. In 1876 the museum moved into its new building in Copley Square. The Gothic Revival building was designed by John Hubbard Sturgis and Charles Brigham. In 1909 the Museum moved into its current location in the Fens. The original site is now occupied by the Fairmont Copley Plaza.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra
Boston is the one place in America where wealth and knowledge of how to use it are apt to coincide.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson’s quip could apply to many of Boston’s elites but in the case of Henry Lee Higginson, it is particularly apt. Higginson’s family was deeply rooted in the Brahman community. Son of George Higginson, a partner in the State Street brokerage firm of Lee, Higginson & Co., Henry attended Boston Latin School and spent a year at Harvard before ill health forced him to leave. A two-year sojourn in Europe followed where he studied music. Returning home he was commissioned a lieutenant in the 2nd Massachusetts Regiment, and later a Major in the 1st Massachusetts Calvary. In 1863, while recovering from wounds, he married Ida Olympe Frederick Agassiz, daughter of Louis Agassiz, professor of geology and biology at Harvard. Over the span of his career his firm’s investments in mining, railroads, and the telephone company would create the fortune necessary for him to indulge his private passion, the creation of a full-time professional orchestra on the European model.
Henry Lee Higginson, 1917
Courtesy Library of Congress
The existing musical scene in Boston consisted of individuals of varying talents who played in voluntary associations such as the Handel and Haydn Society, the Philharmonia, and the Harvard Musical Association. None of these associations had the attributes of a professional orchestra: a permanent conductor who had control over the repertoire and hiring of musicians, musicians who contracted to play exclusively for the orchestra, and a fixed rehearsal and performance schedule. All of this Higginson endeavored to accomplish in his establishment of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881. He hired George Henschel, a German-born British conductor and close friend of Johannes Brahms, to be the BSO’s first conductor. The first concert was on October 22, 1881, and featured pieces by Beethoven, Haydn, Schubert, and Weber.
The Boston Symphony Orchestra, Georg Henschel, Conductor, 1881
Howe: The BSO, An Historical Sketch, pp. 66-7.
All of this was funded by Higginson personally with a yearly grant of $20,000 until the orchestra should become financially independent. The following year, in 1882, Higginson went one step further, in requiring all musicians to be exclusively available to the BSO from October through April, except playing for the Handel and Haydn Society. The Handel and Haydn Society was closely allied with the Boston Athenæum, an organization whose support Higginson did not want to alienate. In addition to hiring a European conductor, this contractual move raised a commotion in the local musical community. It is a tribute to Higginson’s position in the Brahmin community that he accomplished both aims.
Boston Symphony Hall, circa 1904
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
In 1900, Higginson moved the BSO from the Boston Music Hall to its present site at the Massachusetts and Huntington Avenues intersection. Higginson maintained sole control of the BSO until 1918, when he authorized the creation of an independent Board of Trustees.
The Boston Public Library
The Brahmins conceived the great business of life tobe the erection of barriers against the intrusionof the unpleasant.⁷
Vernon Louis Parrington
Unlike the MFA and the BSO, the Boston Public Library was a creation of the Commonwealth and the City of Boston. The impetus for the creation of the first free library in the nation is both complex and illustrative of the underlying class divisions that were growing in the second quarter of 19th-century Boston. On one hand, there was a sincere concern on the part of the city’s political establishment for the education and improvement of the working class, especially important since the content of the popular mass press was considered to be inferior. On the other hand, there was a conscious desire and active commitment on the part of the Brahmin class to erect legal barriers to protect their exclusive private libraries from being appropriated as the nucleus of a public library. At the same time, many Brahmins individually supported the movement to create a public library for the use of those who were considered less fortunate.⁸
Chief among the early proponents of a public library was George Tiknor, former trustee of the Boston Athenæum and former professor of modern languages at Harvard. His and others’ efforts led to the formation of a committee that sent letters to fifteen of Boston’s major private libraries suggesting they combine all their resources into one free public library. The response was underwhelming. The Boston Athenæum’s reply cited “insuperable objections,” and the Massachusetts Historical Society and The American Academy of Arts and Sciences both deigned not to reply. Support for the project among the general public continued to grow and in 1847 Boston’s Common Council successfully petitioned the legislature to authorize “a library for the free use of every citizen.” In 1848 the city followed through and established the Boston Public Library with Josiah Quincy Jr., mayor of Boston, as president of the Board of Trustees, who would be succeeded by Edward Everett, president of Harvard, and George Ticknor.
The initial location of the Library was a former schoolhouse on Mason Street
which quickly proved inadequate to house the sixteen thousand volumes in its collection. In 1858, new quarters were erected at 55 Boylston St
which was home to seventy-five thousand volumes. By 1880 the library had outgrown its Boylston Street location. In 1880 the legislature permitted the building of a library on land in the newly filled-in Back Bay at the corner of Dartmouth and Boylston. Charles Follen McKim of the firm McKim, Meade, and White designed the new library in the Beaux Arts style using the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris as his source of inspiration. The location of the Library in Copley Square opposite Trinity Church with the Museum of Fine Arts to the right created a public cultural space in the new Back Bay.
Copley Square, 1909
Courtesy Boston Public Library
The North Slope
Acorn Street,Beacon Hill
© Sunny Chanruangvanich
Beacon Hill conjures up images of Federalist brownstones with ornamental ironwork, facing narrow cobbled streets, adorned with attractive vintage gas lighting. This description holds true for much of the South Slope of Beacon Hill, particularly Pinckney, Chestnut, and Mount Vernon Streets. This sloping area adjacent to the Common was originally pasture owned by John Singleton Copley. Copley, a loyalist, had returned to London in 1774. The Mount Vernon Proprietors, a syndicate formed by Harrison Gray Otis, and Charles Bullfinch, among others, purchased the 18.5 acres from Copley in 1795 for the sum of $18,450. Bullfinch had recently completed the construction of the new State House on property adjacent to the pasture increasing its valuation, a fact of which Copley was unaware. Once discovered, this would result in several years of litigation.
Otis, Mayor of Boston, Bullfinch, a member of the Boston Board of Selectmen, together with other leading Bostonian merchants were central to much of the development of Boston during this period. It was often the case that, as officeholders, these same individuals were involved in the approval of projects that would benefit them financially. In 1802, Bullfinch would finish the construction of Otis’s new Federalist-style home at 85 Mt. Vernon St, one of the first properties of many to follow.
To Bostonians of the early 1800’s, a reference to Beacon Hill elicited a very different image. The North Slope of Beacon Hill was a maze of narrow, twisting streets, courtyards, and back alleys lined with wooden frame housing, often in a state of disrepair. Being close to the waterfront, it attracted a mixed population of craftsmen, dock workers, seamen, and itinerant laborers. It was also home to a considerable number of taverns and houses of ill repute, earning it the name Mount Whoredom bestowed by the British troops occupying Boston in 1775. As late as April 1850 a police raid resulted in the arrest of 150 prostitutes.
Hales's Map of Boston, 1814
Courtesy of BPL Levanthal Map Center
The clipping above from John G. Hales's map of Boston 1814 delineates the North Slope and the South Slope of Beacon Hill. These two areas are separated roughly along the axis of Myrtle Street. The North Slope is well developed. The buildings are a darker shade of gray, which indicates they were wood-framed. When you enlarge the map by clicking, you will notice the maze-like layout of the streets, with many alleyways and courtyards. In contrast, the development of the South Slope had just begun with a scattering of homes, all of brick or stone construction, indicated by the lighter shade of gray.
The North Slope also became the heart of Boston’s African American community. Originally located in the North End around the Ann Street area, by the 1830s, Boston’s Black community had consolidated on the North Slope of Beacon Hill, establishing a thriving community centered on the First Independent Baptist Church founded in 1806, the New England Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1832, and the Abiel Smith School, founded in 1835. Most residents were employed as laborers or domestics, while some established themselves in commerce, notably as barbers and hairdressers.
Thus, there were two Beacon Hills, the South Slope, home to many of the wealthiest and most prominent Bostonians, and the North Slope, home to one of the largest free Black communities in the North. There was more than just a difference in wealth and social class separating these communities. The South Slope was home to the Lawrences, Lowells, and Appletons, Brahmin industrialists whose wealth and power were based on the exploitation of slave labor in the South. The North Slope was the center of the fugitive slave movement, home to fugitives who had, until recently, been picking the cotton that sustained the building of Federalist mansions on the South Slope.
One wonders, did Nathan Appleton, resident of 39 Beacon St, and co-founder of the Boston Manufacturing Company, happen to stroll down Charles Street to Cambridge Street and pass the window of Lewis Hayden’s tailoring shop at number 151? And if so, did he realize that Hayden was a fugitive slave and a central figure in the Underground Railroad? Did Hayden recognize the prominent Bostonian?
While all of this is conjectural, it does underscore the irony that Beacon Hill played a crucial role in the events leading up to the brink of the Civil War. Industrialists and financiers like Appleton and Lawrence, known politically as Cotton Whigs, were at the forefront of efforts to prevent a war and maintain the economic relationship between Northern industrialists and Southern planters. In contrast, Lewis Hayden gave shelter to a quarter of the fugitive slaves who passed through Boston during this period. Some of his actions taken to prevent the return of captured fugitives led to riots that further inflamed the debate over the Fugitive Slave Act. Additionally, two other residents of the North Slope, Senator Charles Sumner from Massachusetts and William Lloyd Garrison, who published The Liberator from nearby Cornhill Street, were instrumental in raising the North's moral consciousness to a point where conflict became almost inevitable. It is remarkable that such a small place played such a significant role in shaping the destiny of the United States.
Dramatis Personae
39 Beacon Street, home of
Nathan Appleton, [October 6, 1779-July 14, 1861], founding partner of the Boston Manufacturing Company, founder of the City of Lowell, State Representative [1816-1827], United States Representative [1831, 1842], and member of the Boston Associates, a network of Boston industrialists tied together through business interests and intermarriage.
In 1839 Nathan Appleton married Harriet Coffin Sumner, 25 years younger than himself, and a cousin of the abolitionist and reformer Charles Sumner. Like many American families, the Appletons were divided over the issue of slavery. Nathan Appleton believed it would gradually be abandoned as outmoded and inefficient. He could not understand the appeal of abolitionism for the younger members of his own Whig party, as well as for his daughter Fanny and her husband, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. After Sumner’s 1848 speech denouncing the “unhallowed union” between “the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom,” people like Nathan Appleton were branded as “cotton” as opposed to “conscience” Whigs. Appleton considered this unfair, as his opposition to immediate emancipation was based on genuine outrage at what he considered the dangerous and fanatical opinions of the more militant abolitionists. The abolitionist movement, he wrote, “has produced nothing but evil. It has banded the South into a solid phalanx . . . [and thus] increased the severity of the slave laws. It has postponed the period of emancipation in the more northern slave states, which were fast ripening for that event.” In 1860 he still hoped war could be avoided by appeals to reason and self-interest. Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography
66 Phillips Street, home of Lewis Hayden, his wife Harriet, and his step-son Joseph. Lewis was born in Kentucky in 1811, a slave of Rev. Adam Rankin, a Presbyterian minister, who sold Lewis at the age of 11 to an itinerant peddler. Lewis was separated from his first wife, Esther, when both wife and son were sold by Henry Clay to a plantation in the deep South. In 1842, Lewis married Harriet Bell and adopted her son Joseph. In 1844 the Hayden family escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad. In 1845 they moved to Detroit, and then to Boston. The Hayden home on Phillips Street became the center of the fugitive slave movement in Boston, harboring hundreds of former slaves on their journey northward. As a member of the Boston Vigilance Society and the American Anti-Slavery Society, Lewis worked closely with William Lloyd Garrison and others to frustrate the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and was central to the efforts to free several captured fugitives from Federal custody, notably Shadrach Minkins, Anthony Burns, and Thomas Sims.
Perhaps more than any other American, Hayden experienced the full range of the anti-slavery struggle. He was a fugitive slave and he was a stationmaster on the Underground Railroad. He traveled from town to town speaking against slavery and he took up arms against slavery. He recruited soldiers for black regiments and he suffered the loss of a son who had enlisted in the Navy. He was a co-worker with Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and a host of lesser known campaigners.
Despite his accomplishments and his famous allies, Hayden is not well known. Perhaps this is so because he was not a writer like Garrison, or Stowe, or William Wells Brown. Nor was he an orator like Phillips, or Parker, or Frederick Douglass. As writers and orators these individuals fought for freedom with powerful words. Their publications and their speeches brought attention to themselves and left a record for future generations.
Hayden and many of his friends were committed to freedom through action. In the language of our times, they were "activists." We know relatively little about these activists because many of their deeds were illegal by the standards of their day. Hayden's assistance to fugitive slaves, his militant defense of William and Ellen Craft, his rescue of the escaped slave Shadrach, and his role in John Brown's conspiracy were illegal at the time, no matter how commendable they may seem to us today.
Hayden and his friends could not reveal the specifics of their activities during the dangerous period from 1840 to the Civil War. If we are missing the exact route of a trip through the Underground Railroad, or the details of John Brown's visits to Boston, it is very likely because the participants made a conscious effort to hide that information.
Near the end of the nineteenth century, a few of the anti-slavery activists recorded their experiences. A few others had children to record their deeds. Hayden had no surviving children and did not preserve a record of his actions.
For these reasons, Hayden has never received the credit he is due. His story is told only in footnotes of the biographies of the leading men and women of the anti-slavery movement. Using the thread of Hayden's remaining letters and the newspaper reports of his day, I have tried to sew those footnotes together in order to tell the remarkable story of a man committed to the fight for human rights.
Lewis Hayden and the War Against Slavery. Joel Strangis, Linnet Books 1999, pp. xiii-xiv.
20 Hancock Street, Home of Charles Sumner [1811-1874]. Sumner was born on Irving Street, on the North Slope of Beacon Hill. He was the son of Charles and Relief Sumner. Charles Sr. was Harvard-educated, established a law practice, served as Clerk of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and was later Sheriff of Suffolk County. An abolitionist, he felt strongly about the equality of all people regardless of race. In 1830 he purchased the house at 20 Hancock Street in which Charles Jr spent most of his adult life.
Charles Jr. graduated from Harvard in 1830, attended Harvard Law, and was admitted to the bar in 1834. After a three-year sojourn in Europe, he returned to Boston and entered political life becoming well known for his disapproval of the Mexican War and the extension of slavery westward after the annexation of Texas. His strong advocacy resulted in his becoming a leader of the Conscience Whigs in Massachusetts. In 1850 he was the lead attorney, together with Robert Morris, one of the first Black attorneys in the nation, in Roberts v. City of Boston, challenging the legality of segregation in the Boston Public School Schools. His chief argument, that segregation caused psychological damage, would be used a century later in overturning Brown vs. Board of Education. In 1851 he became US Senator for Massachusetts running as a Free Soil Party candidate. For the next nine years, he was a leading advocate for the abolition of slavery. His Crime Against Kansas speech in 1856 would lead to his caning on the floor of the Senate by Preston Brooks. He would serve in the Senate until his death in 1874.
He [Sumner] became a pariah in high society. Antislavery was welcome in Brahmin circles, but the worthies of Beacon Hill considered his fixation on the topic unseemly. Old friends avoided him on the street. Outsiders to Boston watched in disbelief as literal shudders passed through the room when his name was mentioned at fashionable soirees. He was, however, welcome at meetings of the city’s politically active free Black people, making regular appearances at a Black-owned barbershop known for hosting antislavery discussions, an abolitionist sequel to Abraham Van Buren’s tavern.
With his social standing in free fall, Sumner discovered his inner populist. In 1848 he railed against “an unhallowed union—conspiracy let it be called—between two remote sections: between the politicians of the Southwest and the politicians of the Northeast,—between the cotton-planters and flesh-mongers of Louisiana and Mississippi and the cotton-spinners and traffickers of New England,—between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” Drawing on a resonant piece of Jacksonian rhetoric, he announced, “The money power has joined hands with the slave power. Selfish, grasping, subtle, tyrannical, like its ally, it will not brook opposition.”When Southern oligarchs locked arms with Northern capitalists, Sumner concluded, the wealthy posed a greater threat to liberty than the mob.
Excerpted from Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracby Timothy Shenk. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, October 2022.
31 Cornhill Street [now Government Center], publication site of William Lloyd Garrison’s. [1805-1879] The Liberator. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Garrison was abandoned at an early age by his father and was largely self-supporting and self-educated. Apprenticeship to a printer led to his career as a publisher. In 1829 his abolitionist views were given a national voice when he joined with Benjamin Lundy in Baltimore, Maryland to publish The Genius of Universal Emancipation. Originally believing in gradual emancipation and colonization, his views evolved to the point that he demanded immediate uncompensated emancipation and social and political equality for Black Americans. Moving to Boston in 1831, he established The Liberator, which he published for thirty-five years. His outspoken views sparked anger among many Bostonians, especially the merchant class. On the evening of October 21, 1835, a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society at the offices of The Liberator was stormed by a mob described by one observer as “gentlemen of wealth and standing.” The mob led Garrison away threatening to tar and feather him. He was rescued by the mayor of Boston. Over time, as political events unfolded nationally, Garrison’s importance and influence locally and nationally increased. During this period he worked with activists such as Fredrick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Maria Chapman. After the Civil War, Garrison remained active in the cause of civil rights. At the Women’s Tea Party held at Faneuil Hall in December of 1873, Garrison declared "I am still for immediate, unconditional, everlasting emancipation from oppression of everyone on the face of the earth.”He died in 1879 and was interred in Boston’s Forest Hills Cemetery
There had been antislavery agitation long before America had ever heard of William Lloyd Garrison; but for the most part the approach had been rational, the technique gentlemanly, and the demands moderate and gradual. One of the most popular of all early emancipation programs was the plan for "colonization," which proposed to solve the slavery problem by purchasing Negroes and settling them in Africa. …Even when apathy gave way to curiosity, and Boston did begin to take notice of Garrison and his little coterie, the results were anything but encouraging. Looked upon generally as agitators and cranks, Abolitionists were not socially acceptable in any respectable circle. "They did not go to work like Christian gentlemen," observed the Congregationalist minister, Reverend Horace Bushnell; while William Ellery Channing, representing Unitarian principles, agreed that they only stirred up "bitter passions and fierce fanaticism." Financial opinion reflected in the powerful Niles Register, claimed that Garrison was "doing all possible injury to the cause of emancipation," and the Washington National Intelligencer accused him of "poisoning the waters of life to the whole community."Garrison seemed to thrive on opposition, however. Imperturbable, self-assured and fanatic, Garrison struck back, blow for blow, gradually gathering a small band of followers about him.
Thomas H. O’Connor, The Lords of the Loom: The Cotton Whigs and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner’s & Sons, 1968), pp. 43-44.
Most Bostonians of the 1830s were contemptuous of the activities of abolitionists and William Lloyd Garrison in pparticular. In 1835, the editor of the Hampshire Gazette described him “to be a hot−headed enthusiast, a notoriety hunter.” Other abolitionists were also held in ill repute resulting in riots in New York City and Philadelphia in 1834 and the stoning of John Greenleaf Whittier and British abolitionist George Thompson in Concord New Hampshire in 1835. Boston’s elites, including Mayor Theodore Lyman Jr. and Abbott Lawrence, wishing to reassure their Southern business partners that the activities of these fanatics were not representative of the people of Massachusetts, organized a meeting of over 1500 citizens at Faneuil Hall on August 21, 1835. Harrison Gray Otis delivered a full-throated denunciation of abolitionism as "war in disguise upon their [Southerners] lives, their property, their rights and institutions, an outrage upon their pride and honor, and the faith of contracts."
Exactly two months after the Faneuil Hall meeting, an invitation to George Thompson to speak to the members of Boston’s Female Anti-Slavery Society provoked a howl of protest among Boston’s elites. By the early afternoon of October 21, 1835, a mob had gathered at Garrison’s office at 46 Washington Street and proceeded to break into the assembly being held in the auditorium next door. Garrison was captured as he exited through a rear window and was severely beaten and dragged towards nearby Boston Common with a noose around his neck. The timely intervention of Boston’s mayor saved Garrison, who was spirited off to a local jail and charged with rioting. Reflecting upon the incident several weeks later, Garrison remarked "It was planned and executed, not by the rabble, or the workingmen, but by 'gentlemen of property and standing from all parts of the city’."
Courtesy of The National Museum of American History
The power and influence of Boston’s elites were not limited to the confines of Massachusetts but were also consolidated nationally by the election of Nathan Appleton to Congress in 1830. Appleton, together with Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, who owned shares in textile companies owned by Appleton and Lawrence, and Congressman John Quincy Adams, would see to it that conservative principles protecting commerce and business relationships, especially with the South, would be safeguarded in Washington and Boston. Historian Thomas O’Connor aptly describes the mood of Boston’s South Slope elites in the late 1830s.
With such a team of political experts leading the way, it is small wonder that the business interests of Massachusetts could feel certain that before long the political atmosphere would reflect that same stability and order which already characterized the economics and society of the State. Many, certainly, would agree with the words of Amos Lawrence to his son, as he rhapsodized: "Our local affairs are very delightful in this state and city. We have no violent political animosities; and the prosperity of the people is very great.⁴
This state of affairs would not remain delightful for long. A steady stream of events over the next twenty-five years would inflame public opinion, advancing the cause of abolitionism. In 1835, a Boston mob, led by Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson, stormed the Boston Courthouse on May 24, attempting to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns. When Burns was marched to Long Wharf to start his journey back into servitude, thousands of Bostonians lined the route in protest. Only eighteen years had passed since the attempt on Garrison’s life in 1835.
Francis McIntosh was a boat worker on the steamboat Flora and was described as a freeman and mulatto from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Shortly after arrival in St. Louis, Missouri, McIntosh was arrested and charged for obstruction of justice because he did not aid two officers when summoned. The police officers were attempting to arrest McIntosh’s fellow shipmates and wanted McIntosh to assist them in the arrest. When McIntosh refused, he was arrested on the spot and was told he would be imprisoned for five years. In retaliation, McIntosh stabbed both officers and fled the jailhouse. One of the officers, who practiced excessive, immoral, corrupt racial policing attempting to imprison McIntosh for five years, died. His death ignited blood lust in St. Louis among many white residents. McIntosh was pursued, caught, and imprisoned. Before he could be sentenced, an angry white mob broke into the jailhouse and overpowered the jailer to extract him. After McIntosh was paraded through the streets of St. Louis, the white mob chained him to a tree with firewood underneath his feet waiting to be lit. Thousands of residents came to witness the state-sanctioned murder. An alderman waved a pistol at the crowd and threatened to shoot any one who attempted to stop the murder. The white mob proceeded to slowly burn Francis McIntosh to death. Some newspaper accounts describe him to be alive, yelling for twenty minutes in the pit of fire before he eventually died. Source
Courtesy Library of Congress
Elijah Lovejoy, editor of the Alton Observer, accepted delivery of his new printing press on November 7, 1837, at 3:00 A.M. This was Lovejoy’s third printing press since arriving in Alton in 1836, and it would cost him his life.
…Lovejoy used his paper to preach against slavery and argue for its abolition. He almost immediately faced death threats from the city’s pro-slavery residents and opted to move his family out of slaveholding Missouri to the freer and supposedly safer streets of Alton, Illinois.
…Lovejoy assured the people of Alton that he’d operate the Alton Observer with less space dedicated to the subject of slavery, since he was now in a free state. However, in the Observer’s first issue Lovejoy insisted that the institution of slavery “is an awful evil and sin.” From there his paper became only more anti-slavery.
…On August 7, 1837, a mob gathered at the Observer’s office and destroyed Lovejoy’s printing press. Lovejoy was able to purchase a new press with the help of donations from sympathizers back East. Opponents seized this press almost immediately and dumped it into the Mississippi River.When the third press arrived on November 7, Lovejoy was ready to defend it. A pro-slavery mob formed at the warehouse where the press was being stored and one of the rioters climbed a ladder and tried to light the roof on fire. Lovejoy emerged from the warehouse and shot at the man. Gunfire rang-out from the mob as well, leaving Lovejoy dead, shot five times.
Source
The Attack on Lovejoy's Warehouse
Courtesy of Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum
American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses by Theodore Dwight Weld, his wife Angelina Grimké, and her sister Sarah Grimké published in 1839. A key figure in the abolitionist movement, Weld was a white New Englander. His wife, Angelina, and sister-in-law Sarah, were from a Southern slave-owning family; both women were active in the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements. Theodore purchased in bulk from a reading room at the New York Stock Exchange issues of newspapers being discarded, hundreds if not thousands of them. He took them home to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and there the two women analyzed them, in essence running a clipping service, arranging the clippings by topic: diet, clothing, housing, working conditions, and the like. As the book says in its introduction, the Southern newspapers give themselves, especially in advertisements for runaway slaves, evidence of mistreatment of the enslaved. The book invites those interested to call at the office of the publisher, the American Anti-Slavery Society, to verify its sources. The book also analyzes arguments defending slavery. It was very influential in the formative days of the abolitionist movement. Source
At the beginning of November 1850, two slave hunters arrived in Boston bearing a warrant for William and Ellen Craft, who had escaped from a plantation in Georgia two years earlier. …In the abolitionist community of Boston, their arrival was big news, promoted in the Liberator. To celebrate the Crafts' achievement, Black abolitionist William Wells Brown took them on a 60-stop speaking tour across Massachusetts. Back in Boston, they stayed with Lewis Hayden at his home at 66 Phillips Street on Beacon Hill and started to make a life. When the two slave hunters arrived in Boston looking for them, the Boston Vigilance Committee sprung to action, hiding the Crafts and harassing the hunters. When the slave hunters showed up at Hayden's home looking for the Crafts, they found the house barricaded and guarded by kegs of gunpowder. The slave hunters were told they would not survive the night in Boston.They quickly left the city. The Crafts' old slave master, however, would not give up. When word reached Boston that he had petitioned President Millard Fillmore to send US Marshals to Boston, the Crafts continued on to Halifax and then to London, where they lived for the next 19 years.
Daniel Dain, A History of Boston, Chapter Five, Kindle ebook edition.
ACT II ~ 1850-1860
The passing of the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850 was the final provocation that radicalized the growing anger of Bostonians and northerners alike. Added in an attempt to appease Southern resentment over the Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, at one stroke, required all federal officers to assist in the capture and return of fugitive slaves upon the presentation of an affidavit by the fugitive’s putative owner without trial. Furthermore, anyone caught aiding or abetting the escape of a slave could be punished with a $1000 fine and six months imprisonment.
The business elites of Boston were initially jubilant that the voices of compromise and reason, led by Henry Clay and Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, had won the day. The extremists, both North and South had been held at bay, and the feared economic catastrophe that succession and war would bring was prevented. Webster’s speech of March 7, 1850, in support of the Compromise prompted more than 800 of Boston’s business elites to send a public letter to the Senator in which they enthused "In a time of almost unprecedented excitement, when the minds of men have been bewildered by an apparent conflict of duties. . . you have pointed out to a whole people the path of duty, have convinced the understanding and touched the conscience of a nation."
The voices of Boston's abolitionist community rose in furious indignation. Horace Mann described Webster as a "fallen star! Lucifer descending from Heaven!” The Rev. Theodore Parker expressed his dismay, stating that "No living man has done so much to debauch the conscience of the nation." And James Russell Lowell denounced him as "the most meanly and foolishly treacherous man I ever heard of.” Charles Sumner, leader of the Conscience Whigs, condemned the Compromise as “a flagrant violation of the Constitution, and of the most cherished of human rights—shocking to Christian sentiments, insulting to humanity, and impudent in all its pretensions.”
The growing political tension in Massachusetts came to a head in the election of 1850. Conservative Cotton Whigs dominated state politics with its control of the Boston delegation in the Massachusetts legislature. However, in 1850, members of the Free Soil Party, Conscience Whigs, and anti-slavery Democrats buried their differences and united on a slate of candidates across the state winning control of the State House. They soon announced their intention to nominate and elect Charles Sumner to the now-vacant Senate seat of Daniel Webster.
For the Cotton Whigs it was Armageddon—the last desperate battle against the forces of lawlessness and greed, the last hope for peace and harmony. Anything less than victory at this crucial point, they feared, would mean the disappearance of those reasonable and objective men who were working to preserve the Union and prevent secession. Firmly convinced that a party system based on the slavery issue would lead to civil war, the Cotton Whigs saw that the subsequent withholding of cotton supplies, the disruption of credit, and the stock market collapse that would inevitably follow, would bring financial ruin to every textile mill in New England.⁵
Between January and late April, the Massachusetts General Court voted 26 times in an attempt to elect a Senator. On the final vote, Charles Sumner was elected by a single vote. In the days that followed, Cotton Whigs could be observed parading about Boston draped in black crepe. Political power in Massachusetts was now firmly in the hands of those who opposed slavery. Sumner was well aware of the maelstrom he was about to enter. Sumner was a close friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and his wife Fanny, ironically, the daughter of Cotton Whig Nathan Appleton. Upon Sumner’s election, Longfellow wrote "The papers are all ringing with Sumner, Sumner! the guns are thundering their triumph. Meanwhile the hero of the strife is sitting quietly here, more saddened than exalted.” To Longfellow’s wife, Sumner remarked” I have no joy in my responsibilities…Most unfeignedly do I wish that another was in my place.”⁶
Over the next several years a series of cascading events in Boston would escalate tensions locally and nationally.
On February 15, 1851, 33-year-old Shadrach Minkins, a fugitive slave from Virginia, was arrested by US Marshals while working as a waiter at Taft’s Cornhill Coffee House, becoming the first fugitive slave in Massachusetts to be arrested under the new Fugitive Slave Act. Minkins was brought immediately to the Boston Court House where attorneys Robert Morris and Richard Henry Dana argued for a writ of habeas corpus which was denied by Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw. At this point, a group of twenty Black Bostonians, led by Lewis Hayden of the Boston Vigilance Committee, forcibly removed Minkins from the courtroom. By evening he was hidden in an attic on Southac Street on the North Slope of Beacon Hill. Over the next several days Minkins would be moved from Boston to Cambridge, to Watertown, to Concord, and thence to Leominster arriving in Montreal on the 21st.
Letter from Shadrach Minkins thanking his friends in Boston.
In February of 1851, Thomas Sims, a fugitive slave from Georgia, stowed away on a brig sailing to Boston. Discovered as the ship entered Boston Harbor, Sims escaped and found refuge in the North End of Boston. In early April, Sims’s owner, James Potter, sent agents to Boston seeking Simm’s arrest. Given the circumstances surrounding the recent escape of Shadrach Minkins, Simms was held in the Court House which was wrapped in chains and heavily guarded. The Boston Vigilance Committee devised several plans to rescue Simms to no avail. At a hearing, Commissioner George Ticknor Curtis remanded Simms back to the custody of his owner. Taking no chances, Simms was marched down to Long Wharf on the morning of April 21st to board the brig Acorn accompanied by over 200 armed escorts while large crowds shouted “Shame, Shame.” On April 18 The Liberator reported that Simms “…sable cheeks were bathed in tears, and although he evinced the deepest grief and sorrow, he marched with a firm and manly step, like a martyr and a hero, to his fate.”
“Boston police and night watch conveying the
fugitive slave, Sims, to the vessel.”
Anonymous engraver from the firm of Worcester & Co.
On June 2, 1854, 140 US Marines and a brigade of state militia marched fugitive slave Anthony Burns from the Boston Court House, down State Street to Long Wharf. 50,000 Bostonians thronged the streets in protest where many windows were draped in black to mourn the passing of Burns's freedom. Several weeks earlier, on May 26th a mob had stormed the Court House where Burns was detained. In the melee that ensued US Marshall, James Batchelder, was killed. Federal Marshall Watson Freemen received approval from President Franklin Pierce to bring Federal troops into Boston. No other event did more to galvanize the Boston community in the cause of abolition than Burns's rendition. Angered by the use of federal power, many who had once been ardent in their opposition to abolitionism were converted to the cause. No less a Boston Brahim than Amos Adams Lawrence declared that he and others “…went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
Rendition of Anthony Burns.
Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society
In 1854, Senator Steven A. Douglas of Illinois, in an attempt to secure Chicago’s position as a possible hub for a transcontinental railroad, proposed an act in Congress that essentially repealed the Missouri Compromise, which banned slavery north of the 36° 30′ parallel. The Kansas Nebraska Act would create two new territories within each of which the newly created states would determine their status as free or slave by the doctrine of popular sovereignty. The passage of the Act in May created a firestorm across the nation. Partisans on both sides, Free Staters and Boarder Ruffians, stormed into Kansas to determine the status of Kansas by force of arms. Bleeding Kansas became the focus of the nation’s attention. That spring the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Company was formed with support from many leading Bostonians. By July they had financed a company of 24 Free Staters who set off for Kansas. In the fall of 1855 two separate elections had formed two separate governments in Kansas, each of which petitioned Congress for admission to the Union. On May 19th Senator Charles Sumner rose in the Senate chamber to deliver his famous The Crime Against Kansas speech, in which he compared the situation in Kansas to “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery.” Two days following, Sumner was attacked at his desk by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, who beat him unmercifully with a cane leaving him senseless on the floor. In testimony to how changed the political situation was in Boston, Amos Lawrence invited Sumner to rest at his home upon his return to Boston, the very same Amos Lawrence who had worked furiously to prevent Sumner’s election in 1850.
Coda
The five years following the canning of Sumner witnessed the birth of the Republican Party, the division of the Whig and Democratic parties along sectional lines, the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. The nation had been brought to the brink of war, not by any one single event, but by a series of cascading events, the synergy of which made war all but inevitable, awaiting that one final event to ignite the nation. That event occurred on November 6, 1860, with the election of Abraham Lincoln as president on a Republican ticket opposed to the expansion of slavery into any new states or territories. On April 12, 1861, Confederate forces opened fire on Fort Sumpter.
By December, the effects of secession were already felt in Boston with trade between North and South coming to a sudden halt. Mills were closing with disastrous effects on workers and the local economy. Conservatives such as Amos Lawrence and Nathan Appleton worked furiously, supporting various political compromises, hoping to avert war. Appleton lamented that the approaching catastrophe was due to “...an impracticable idea, a nonentity, connected with the institution of slavery.” In July of 1861, tragedy struck Nathan’s family with the accidental death of his beloved daughter Fanny when her clothing caught fire. Nathan died the day after Fanny’s funeral. They were interred side by side in Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Early in the war Lewis Hayden encouraged his close friend Governor John Andrew to consider the creation of an all-Black regiment to represent Massachusetts in the conflict. With the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, this became a reality with the creation of the Massachusetts 54th Infantry Regiment. Hayden was an active recruiter for the regiment throughout the war. His son was killed while in service with the Union Navy. In 1873, Hayden was elected to the Massachusetts General Assembly serving one term. He continued his activism accomplishing the closing of the Black segregated school on Beacon Hill, and was active in the cause of women’s suffrage. Four years following his death in April 1889, his wife Harriet upon her death bequeathed the entirety of their estate to Harvard Medical School, establishing the "Lewis and Harriet Hayden Fund Hayden Scholarship for Colored Students.” Harriet and Lewis were buried in Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett.
It was 1859, four years after his caning on the Senate floor, before Sumner was healthy enough to return to the Senate. Throughout the war, he was a staunch advocate for the immediate emancipation of all slaves and the enlistment of Blacks into the Union forces. After the war he was known as a Radical Reconstructionist, believing that the secessionist states should be treated as territories which must give equal voting rights to Blacks before their readmission to the Union. Sumner was co-author in 1870 of what became the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which forbade discrimination based on race in voting, transportation, and public accommodations, a law later overturned by the Supreme Court in 1883. It would not be until 1957 that another Civil Rights Bill would address these same issues. He died in Washington on March 11, 1874, aged 63, after a heart attack. He was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery. Acting as pallbearers that day were Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and John Greenleaf Whittier.
In December of 1863 Garrison’s beloved wife, Helen, suffered a stroke, leading him to move his family to a new home that could accommodate her needs. A suitable house was found in the Roxbury Highlands, then a country suburb of Boston. In 1865, with the abolition of slavery, Garrison announced that the purpose of the American Anti-Slavery Society had been achieved and resigned as President, however, his resolution to dissolve the Society did not pass, leading to a rift between Garrison and Wendell Phillips that did not heal until 1873. Garrison ended publication of The Liberator at the end of 1865. He continued as an activist in the cause of civil rights, especially the women’s suffrage movement, serving as President of the American Women’s Suffrage Association and associate editor of the Women’s Journal. In January of 1876, Helen’s death from pneumonia precipitated a grief so deep that friends feared for his health and life. A long decline in Garrison’s health ensued ending with his death on May 24, 1879, at his daughter Fanny Garrison Villard’s home in Dobb’s Ferry, New York. His burial was at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain. In Washington D.C. Frederick Douglass delivered a eulogy at Garrison’s memorial service saying, "It was the glory of this man that he could stand alone with the truth, and calmly await the result.” Years later, his grandson, Oswald Garrison Villard, Fanny’s son, became a founding member of the NAACP.
Growing The City-Annexation
May's Pond, Roxbury, Massachusetts 1858
By Samuel Lancaster Gerry, American, 1813–1891
Courtesy Boston Museum of Fine Arts
Arthur Williams Austin, born in the City of Charlestown in 1807, attended Harvard College, graduating in 1825, and entered law practice specializing in managing the trusts of large estates. He was active in the civic life of his native Charlestown, reorganizing its fire department, serving as postmaster (1829-183), serving as chair of the Board of Selectmen, and helping the city investigate the burning of the Ursuline Convent in 1836. He was also a prominent opponent of the unsuccessful attempt to annex Charleston to Boston. In 1839, having amassed sufficient income, he went into semi-retirement. In 1849, he moved to West Roxbury, then a part of Roxbury, where he “…sought recreation amid well-tilled fields, orchards planted by his own hands, waving harvests and pastures dotted over with flocks and herds. He accordingly selected one of the most wild, unsubdued, and romantic spots in the town of West Roxbury.” ⁴ As politically active in West Roxbury as he was in Charlestown, Austen led the movement to secede from Roxbury. In 1851, he was elected to West Roxbury’s first Board of Selectmen. In 1873, he led the opposition against the annexation of West Roxbury to Boston. In 1874, after West Roxbury became part of Boston, Austin moved to the Town of Milton, where he resided until his death in 1884.
The Austin Farm , West Roxbury, circa 1870
Located near the junction of present-day Morton and Canterbury Streets opposite Franklin Park
This could be accomplished without any drastic change to one’s lifestyle since the new railroads and horse-drawn trolleys made the city accessible for employment and cultural pursuits. Yet, towards the end of his life, Arthur found himself amidst a popular clamor in the suburbs for the amenities of urban life: water systems, street lighting, fire departments, police departments, and street maintenance, all of them expensive and all of them just over the border in Boston.
After 23 years as a separate town, West Roxbury voted to approve its annexation by Boston. Arthur found a new location more suitable to his tastes, a small town with a rural flavor just across the Neponset River in the Town of Milton. The move was not difficult, a short trip of two miles down Blue Hill Avenue. Without realizing it, Arthur was embarking on a rite of passage that succeeding generations of Bostonians would replicate. Over the next century, Irish, Jewish, and Black Bostonians would move along the axis of Blue Hill Avenue, from Lower Roxbury to Mattapan, establishing communities whose location changed as succeeding waves of new ethnic groups established themselves in Boston, but that is a story for another day.
The history of the annexation movement in Boston reflects the constraints geography imposed upon its development. Insufficient space for industry and housing combined with an increasing population led to infilling every available estuary, inlet, and cove. By 1870, Boston’s landmaking efforts had reached their natural limit. Yet its population continued to grow almost exponentially. In ten short years, Boston’s population rose to 100,000 in 1845 and 250,000 in 1855. Irish immigrants living in dire poverty represented more than half of this increase, resulting in overcrowding and tenement-like conditions in the North End and Fort Hill areas.
Fort Hill circa 1856
Courtesy Boston Public Library
While the available workforce increased dramatically, allowing a corresponding growth in industry, the demands made on the city’s infrastructure rapidly outpaced its ability to pay for them. Compounding this dilemma was the flight of Boston’s wealthiest citizens to the nearby suburbs, where they could enjoy the amenities of rural life without any obligation to pay taxes to support the city that sustained their wealth. Among the financial industry, this phenomenon was quite startling; by 1850, almost fifty percent of the banking community had moved to the suburbs. At this point, Boston began actively promoting annexation of its neighboring suburbs.⁵
2052 Centre St. Jamaica Plain, circa late 1800s
Courtesy Boston Public Library
The desire to escape the poor reflected the dark side of the suburban ideal. Life on the urban borderland offered not only access to natural surroundings free from the dirt, noise, and congestion of the city, but also freedom from any obligation to assist with urban problems, especially support of the poor. In the idealized pastoral suburb, most of the population was wealthy, the taxes low, and public responsibilities minimal. Although we often associate the flight of affluent urbanites with the second half of the twentieth century, the process actually began a century before. It was an inherent part of the suburban ideal and was born with the residential suburb.The irony was that the middle- and upper-class residents of such places spent their weekdays helping to create the urban conditions they were fleeing. They were the industrialists who built the factories, the real estate speculators who owned the slums, the bankers who financed new development, and sometimes the clerks who kept the whole system running. The residents of upper Roxbury included men like James W. Converse, who owned one of Boston’s largest boot and leather manufactories and was president of the Mechanics’ Bank of Boston, and Franklin Greene Jr., a Boston merchant and insurance executive. Their professions contributed to Boston’s growth, but their wealth enabled them to outrun the more undesirable consequences of their labors
Excerpt From Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles Chapter 3 "Inventing The Suburbs"
Roxbury
Corner of Dudley and Warren Streets (Dudley Square) in 1856
Courtesy Trustees of the Boston Public Library
Plan of the town of Dorchester, 1870,
Thomas W. Davis
Courtesy of Norman B. Leventhal Map Center
With Roxbury's annexation, momentum increased for further annexations. Dorchester was the first to petition the General Court following a referendum on June 22, 1869. Dorchester had lost much of its original territory with the succession of Milton, Stoughton, and Hyde Park, and like Roxbury, its increasing population and urbanization created a demand for the municipal services that Boston could better provide. In January of 1870, Dorchester joined Boston, adding an additional 4,532 acres, once again doubling Boston’s size.
Two years later, in 1873, a bill was introduced into the legislature proposing the annexation of West Roxbury, Brighton, Charlestown, and Brookline.
Map of Boston 1875 : from A. Williams & Cos
Courtesy Norman B. Leventhal Map Center
Suggested Readings
Binford, Henry C., The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815–1860, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Jackson, Kenneth T., Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1985.
Knights, Peter R., The Plain People of Boston, 1830–1860, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Rawson, Michael. Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Warner, Sam Bass, Jr., Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Footnotes
1. Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles: The Making of Boston, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010),
Chapter 3: “Inventing the Suburbs,” Apple iBook edition.
2. Arthur Williams Austin (1807-1884) Massachusetts. "A lawyer of Boston.” [Oscar Fay Adams, A Dictionary of American Authors 13 (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899)], pp-307-10. From:
https://lawlit.net/lp-2001/austin.html
3. Carl Grey Martin and Modhumita Roy, “Narrative Resistance: A Conversation with Historian Marcus Rediker Cultural Logic: Marxist Theory & Practice, 2015-2017 (Whole Number 22), pp. 54-70, p.56
4. Arthur Williams, op. cit. pp. 307-310.
5. Michael Rawson, Chapter 3, Inventing the Suburbs, Apple iBook edition.
6. “Address of the Hon. Samuel Walker, mayor,
to the City Council of Roxbury: delivered before the two branches in Convention, January 5, 1852,”(Roxbury: Thomas Pringe, city printer. 1852), p.16.
7 . “City of Roxbury, Report of the Commissioners Appointed by the City Councils of the Cities of Boston and Roxbury, Respectively, on the Union of the Two Cities Under One Municipal Government, Roxbury City Document No. 3 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1867), p. 11.”
8. Michael Rawson, Chapter 3 Inventing the Suburbs, Apple iBook edition.
A Streetcar Metropolis
Boston's First Electric Trolley, 1889
Courtesy Historic New England
Pictured above is the first electric trolley in Boston, about to start its run heading down Beacon Street towards its final destination at Chestnut Hill Reservoir on January 1, 1889. Prior to 1889, horse-drawn trolleys had provided service in the greater Boston area. By 1880, over 7000 horses and 1400 trolleys were servicing Boston and its suburbs. Electrification represented a quantum leap in speed and reliability, transforming Boston Proper from a centralized pedestrian city, in which one lived as well as worked, into a center of business and manufacturing surrounded by a metropolitan suburban area from which the working and middle classes would commute to work in Boston.
Urban Historian Sam Bass Warner Jr., who pioneered the study of these transformative effects in
Streetcar Suburbs
, describes the motivation behind this migration from the city to suburb.
For the middle class of the late nineteenth century the rural ideal was one positive element in a complex of conditions which shifted people's attitude from being favorable to being hostile to city life. The physical deterioration of old neighborhoods, the crowding of factory, shop, and tenement in the old central city, the unceasing flow of foreigners with ever new languages and habits-these negative pressures tended to drive the middle class from the city. The new technology of the street railway and the contemporary sanitary engineering enabled these families to move out from the old city boundaries into an expanded area of vacant and lightly settled land. In this new land the rural ideal, by its emphasis on the pleasures of private family life, on the security of a small community setting, and on the enjoyment of natural surroundings, encouraged the middle class to build a wholly new residential environment: the modern suburb.¹
Henry Whitney, president of the Metropolitan Steamship Company and president of the West End Land Company, was largely responsible for the creation of Boston's trolley car suburbs. Whitney bought vacant lots along Beacon Street, Brookline, which at that point was not much more than a rural lane connecting Boston to the western suburbs. An astute businessman, he correctly understood the relationship between property values and transportation. He convinced the Town of Brookline to permit the creation of a 160-foot-wide boulevard with a tree-lined median strip containing tracks for the trolleys of his newly formed railway company. When other railway companies objected to the project, Whitney formed a syndicate in 1886 and bought them out, forming the West End Street Railway Co. which controlled over 200 miles of track in Greater Boston. To execute his Beacon Streeet plan, Whitney hired landscape architect William Law Olmstead to design the boulevard, which remains largely intact today.
The surge in land values along this route led to the sale of lots and the construction of homes for wealthy and upper-middle-class individuals who wanted to enjoy the pleasures of a pastoral suburb within commuting distance of Boston's financial and banking districts.
Henry Whitney 1839-1923
Beacon St. in 1887, before Whitney's conversion of Beacon Street into a boulevard. This view, just above Coolidge Corner where Marion Street enters on the left just below Corey Hill, shows the pastoral nature of Brookline before the trolley opened it up to development. Photo Courtesy of the Public Library of Brookline
Beacon Street at Coolidge Corner looking east after construction began in April 1887. The Coolidge Brothers Store to the left is now the location of the S.S. Pierce Building built in 1898. The trolley line and the ensuing development attracted high-end businesses such as S. S. Pierce that catered to the wealthy residents flocking to the area. P
hoto courtesy of the Public Library of Brookline.
Beacon Street at Coolidge Corner looking West in 1897. Corey Hill is in the background. The Coolidge Brothers Store is still in place but was demolished to make way for the new S.S. Pierce Building the following year. In ten short years, a pastoral lane had been transformed into a major boulevard with a direct link to Boston, allowing the rapid development of Brookline. During this period Brookline's population grew by almost 250 percent, from 8,057 in 1880 to 19,995 in 1900. Photo courtesy of the Public Library of Brookline.
The later part of the nineteenth century was a golden age for Boston. Despite the economic setbacks of the Civil War Years, the Great Fire of 1872, and the Long Depression of 1873-79, the city’s population grew. From a population of 250,000 in 1870, the city reached a population of over 560,000 by 1900. A significant percentage of this increase resulted from a new wave of immigration in the 1880s from Eastern Europe, Canada, and Italy. While some dispersed rapidly into the outlying metropolitan area or beyond, most settled in the traditional immigrant neighborhoods of the North, South, and West Ends. Previous tenants of these areas, principally the Irish working class, aspiring to join the middle class, moved outward into the newly annexed towns of Roxbury, Dorchester, and West Roxbury. These areas have been termed zones of emergence. The electric trolley's effect on the population's movement out of the city is illustrated in the map below, adapted from Warner's Streetcar Suburbs.
Boston was a pedestrian city in 1850. Except for the very wealthy, who could afford to purchase and maintain a horse and carriage, walking was the principal means of transportation. By necessity the working and middle classes lived within a two-mile radius of downtown Boston. With the advent of the horsecar trolley in 1852, moving as far as three miles from the city center and commuting to work became practical. Development of trolley lines proceeded rapidly producing a flurry of land speculation along their routes. By 1890, horsecar routes had reached a distance of four miles from downtown Boston. Henry Whitney’s introduction of electrified trolleys in 1889 extended this limit to ten miles, opening a vast area of the pastoral suburbs to development. Railway companies extended lines far out into the suburbs in an attempt to stimulate land development and increase their revenues. In several instances, amusement and recreational facilities were erected at the end of the line to encourage city dwellers to spend leisure time in the country. The Commonwealth Street Railway Company built Norumbega Park in 1897 with a zoo, dining pavilions, and amusement rides.
Norumbega Trolley circa 1900
Courtesy Newton Free Libary
With a few exceptions, the development of new neighborhoods in Boston reflected the city's social hierarchy. The wealthiest five percent generally moved furthest from the city center, establishing large homes and estates in rural areas. The middle class, representing fifteen percent of the population, settled in areas three to six miles outside the city and built single and two-family homes. The lower middle class comprised twenty to thirty percent of the population and occupied the area just outside the walking city. The high demand for housing in this zone led to skyrocketing land values, resulting in the construction of multiple and single homes on very small lots to maintain affordability. Recent immigrants and the poor continued to live in the core pedestrian city or the former neighborhoods of the lower middle class. This often resulted in the subdivision of homes into apartments, which increased population density and degraded the quality of the properties over time. This pattern typically repeated itself as each new wave of people moved outward.²
Our story begins in 1711, when the newly established Second Parish of Roxbury built its first meeting house near Walter Street, near what is now the Arboretum. Over time, the meeting house deteriorated and needed severe repairs. In 1773, the congregation voted to move further west and rebuild at the junction of Centre and South Streets in a rural area of West Roxbury. Today, Holy Name Church occupies the approximate location of the Meeting House.
First Parish West Roxbury, Unitarian, Circa 1885
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library
John Bradford was called by the congregation and ordained minister on May 30, 1785. He served thirty-eight years until his retirement in 1823. In that same year, the Norfolk County Registry of Deeds shows that John Bradford purchased several tracts of land from Samuel Dexter for eight hundred dollars. Hale's 1833 Map of Boston shows this parcel adjacent to the Meeting House. Upon Bradford’s death in 1825, the land passed to his wife Mary and then to their son, Samuel Dexter Bradford, upon Mary’s death in 1828. That John choose to name his son Samuel Dexter Bradford implies a close relationship between the two families.
Hales Map of Boston, 1833, showing
the Meeting House and Bradford Estate
Samuel Dexter Bradford, a Harvard graduate and lawyer, was prominent in local and national affairs. In local politics he, together with Arthur Austin, were petitioners for the incorporation of West Roxbury as a separate town in 1851. Politically conservative , he was dismayed by Charles Sumner's election to represent Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. As a delegate to the Democratic Convention in Baltimore of 1852, he enthusiastically endorsed the selection of Franklin Pierce, a moderate centrist, to lead their ticket as well as the party’s platform which supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.
The 1850 US Census listed his occupation as “farmer.” In addition to himself, his wife Julia, and two sons, there are listed six other residents on his estate: one farmer, William Taylor of England, five laborers, two from Maine, one from England, and two from Ireland, all thirty years of age or younger. This is the portrait of a wealthy gentleman farmer who has the means to employ and support a large household while he is otherwise occupied. Upon his death in 1865 his estate was valued at $1,500,000. His wife inherited the estate's property as well as yearly interest from a $300,000 trust.
Samuel Dexter Bradford
1795- 1865
There are no extant photos of the Bradford estate, but maps indicate that its entrance was on South Street, quite close to the location of Bradford Circle today. Reverend Theodore Parker, transcendentalist, abolitionist, and pastor of Second Parish Roxbury, had his residence further south on Spring Street. Parker’s home represents the type of home built during the first half of the nineteenth century in West Roxbury. The rural nature of the area was described by Samuel D. Bradford in a nostalgic remembrance of his childhood at his father’s “mansion.”
The appearance of things, around the mansion of my kind and most excellent father, in Roxbury, was very different then from that presented now. The house was almost surrounded by woods. Very little of the land was cleared or cultivated. Rabbits and wild squirrels were very abundant, not to mention other animals of a less pleasing description, which made sad havoc in the poultry yard. The woods were filled with wild pigeons, partridges, woodcocks, and quails, holding out such inducements for boys addicted to hunting, (as all such sports were then called,) as cannot be readily conceived of at the present time, when the forests are gone, the ground shot over by so many people, and almost without game of any kind. Like other boys of my age, I passed most of my time in the woods, with my dog and my gun.⁵
Parker House near Spring & Centre Streets. Circa 1895
Courtesy Boston Public Library
In the twenty-five years after Samuel Bradford's death in 1865, the land left to his wife Julia passed through several stages of development. We know that in 1868, Julia consolidated her late husband’s estate with the purchase of land from her two sons, Samuel Jr. and John, each for the sum of $10,000. In the following year, 1869, Julia Bradford sold land from her estate to Arthur Austin of West Roxbury and Paschal Turney of New York City, the first for $35,000 and the second for $10,000. Whether this constituted the entirety of her estate is not known. Both men were executors of her husband’s estate, and in the case of Austin, we know that he was a prominent lawyer and land speculator in Norfolk County. All we know of Turney is that he was a prominent New York attorney and married Anne Whitney of West Roxbury in 1859, it is likely that he, as well as Austin, was also a close associate of Samuel Bradford both having been chosen as executors of his estate.
The map below shows the plan for her estate in the year 1874, which does not reflect the recent sales of 1869.
By 1890, Bromley's Atlas of Boston shows that parts of the Bradford Estate north and south of Centre Street had been subdivided. Each lot is numbered, and the block street pattern has been laid out. Lots that have been built on are indicated by a shaded footprint and the owner's name. At this stage of development, most of the lots are in the possession of the heirs of Julia Bradford. Several individuals have purchased adjacent groups of lots for development but have not sold them as yet. Principally among these are William Muscular, Robert Farquhar, and H. Hutchins. All of this reflects the pattern of development that we have described earlier, sales to single owners and speculators.
Bromley Atlas of West Roxbury - 1890
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library
In six years, Bromley's Atlas of 1896 shows considerable change. Whereas there were ten homes in 1890, there are now forty. A new developer, Albert W. Cooke, purchased all available lots north of Centre Street from the Bradford estate. It is interesting to note that there is one larger lot of land on the south side of Centre Street belonging to Ellen George, which was not part of the original Bradford estate and has remained intact throughout the development process, a remnant of the older, more rural West Roxbury surrounded by a growing development.
Bromley Atlas of West Roxbury - 1896
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library
The advertisement above appeared in Boston newspapers in April of 1896. Placed by the Bradford Land Company, it announced a public auction of lots in The Bradford Estate. The advertisement as a whole captures the flavor of the times, complete with a photograph of an auctioneer asking Shall I Strike A Lot Off To You. Notice that one of the advantages of this estate is its proximity to railroad stations and a trolley line. Buyers are also encouraged to consider this as an investment that will be “worth double very soon” in “the ideal home-spot of Boston.” This, and scores of advertisements like it, reflected the surge in development that occurred in the late eighteen hundreds in the outer perimeter between three and ten miles of Boston proper
.
Bromley's Atlas of West Roxbury - 1914
Courtesy of the Boston Public Library
The auction was successful. Nine years later, very few lots are available in The Bradford Estates. In the eight years since the auction, an additional 180 homes have been constructed. Most vacant lots were owned by individuals who have yet to build. Only on Knoll Street are there sections of adjacent lots still in the hands of developers. Ellen George remained in her large home. We can only guess her thoughts as she surveyed the neighborhood she lived in until her death in 1912 at ninety-four years of age. And that is the question which Sam Werner raises in Streetcar Suburbs:
Aside from class segregation there was nothing in the process of late nineteenth century suburban construction that built communities or neighborhoods: it built streets. The grid plan of the suburbs did not concern itself with public life. It was an economically efficient geometry which divided large parcels of land as they came on the market. The arrangement of the blocks of the grid depended largely upon what farm or estate came on the market at what time. The result was not integrated communities arranged about common centers, but a historical and accidental traffic pattern.⁶
He continues:
The inattention of late nineteenth century Bostonians to the fragmentation of their community life was not an accidental oversight, it was a matter of principle, the principle of individualistic capitalism. Above all else the streetcar suburbs stand as a monument to a society which wished to keep the rewards of capitalist competition open to all its citizens. Despite ignorance and prejudice, during this period of mass immigration, the suburbs remained open to all who could meet the price. ⁷
Slide Show: Homes were built in the Early 1900s on the former Bradford estate.
South Street, 1899 - Early Colonial Revival
Bradfield Street, 1910 - Craftsman Farmhouse Style
Montclair Street, 1910 - Four Square Style
Montclair Ave, 1920 - Victorian Style
Farquhar Street, 1920 - Three Decker
Farquhar Street, 1910 - Three Decker
Edgemont Street, 1910 - Victorian Style
Farquhar Street Today
Ellen George's Estate Today
Suggested Readings
Fishman, Robert. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
Harmon, Lawrence and Levine, Hillel. The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions. New York: The Free Press, 1993.
Jackson, Kenneth T. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford, 1985.
O’Connell, James C. The Hub's Metropolis: Greater Boston's Development from Railroad Suburbs to Smart Growth. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013
Warner, Sam Bass Jr. Streetcar Suburbs: Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900. 2nd ed., Harvard University Press, 1978.
Footnotes
1. Sam Bass Warner, Jr. Streetcar Suburbs: Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2nd. Ed. 1978), pp. 51-2.
2. Ibid. pp.,102-118.
3. Ibid, p. 117.
4. Ibid. p.92
5. Samuel Dexter Bradford, LL.D. Works of Samuel Dexter Bradford, LL.D, (Boston, Phillips, Sampson & Co. 1958), p. iv.
6. Warner, p. 239.
7. Warner, p. 241
The Last Stop
C'est fini!
Fama Clamosa (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Avalonia-480Ma.jpg), „Avalonia-480Ma“, added arrow and place name by David Moore,
