Boston in the 19th Century

1815+ Flowering of New England

Manufacturing aristocracy moved in from New Hampshire/south Salem etc.

“The horrible madness has been perpetrated. We stand gaping at each other, hardly realizing that it can be true – then bursting into execration of the men who have sacrificed us.”
1812 Nathaniel Appleton

War of 1812 started transition from shipping to manufacturing, especially Salem, Marblehead, Newburyport

Marriage between the wharf and the waterfall
Intermarriage:
Lowells and Jackson
Lawrence and Appletons
Amory and Lawrence

Bibl Diaries of Nathan and William Appleton
1812: Nathan Appleton and Francis Lowell “talk of mills” in Edinburgh
1814 Lowell on return bought a defunct power mill in Waltham
+ Patrick Jackson, sea-captain, invested, first complete cotton factory in America
William Appleton’s disdain for a Sicilian prince

1814 First completely mechanized cotton fabric production, from raw cotton to cloth, at first U.S. textile company in Waltham, Mass

Textile factories
“Mill Girls”

1812 BS R8 “Squatter Sovereignty in Boston” Letter to T June 24, 1890 “There were up to 1804-1805, many lands at West Boston on the hill and its slopes left vacant by the Tory or royalist families, who were called refugees, on South Russell, Botolph, Garden, Center and Grove streets, on the western slope of the hill, also where Pinckney and West Cedar Streets are now as well as the present site of Louisburg Square and adjacent territory; on these, when a boy I was wont with playmates to build ovens and roast apples and potatoes, and occasionally to fry in a skillet slices of salt pork; and here while employed in these culinary employments, we boys were once confronted by Major Ben Russell and Mr. Charles Bullfinch two of Boston’s selectmen who kindly greeted us, but declined an invitation to our anticipated feast.

It was during the war of 1812 with Great Britain that this occurred, and at that day we had in Boston a set of sharp lawyers and surveyors, apt in title hunting, for whom all unclaimed land was “grist to their mill” to whom the fencing in of such lands was an inexpensive measure and lands so obtained came cheap; and squatter sovereignty was an easy acquisition of title; of questioned, the removal of a fence released all claim, and so they squatted and so acquired, and so sold, giving quit claim deeds, which lapse of years of non-questioned holding have strengthened.”

Brahmins: Houses by Bullfinch, their monopoly of Beacon Street, their ancestral portraits and Chinese porcelain, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of the mind, Yankee shrewdness and New England exclusiveness.
Survived shock of Jeffersonian, Unitarianism and Industrialization”

Unitarianism: by early 1800s nearly all Congregational pulpits taken over by Unitarians.
“convinced that the godless were in the ascendancy, a number withdrew to the seclusion of their mansions to read the lessons, cultivate their roses and reflect on the folly of mankind.”

1813 BS R1 113 MA Society for the Suppression of Intemperance formed

BS W6 ref to 1810-1813… “His wife, an old lady probably seventy or eighty years, was the gayest of the gay. She dressed in the fashionable style of the day, in a white beaver bonnet with an ostrich plume of flowing dimensions. As she, on every fine morning, entered her open chariot for her morning ride, she was the observed of all observers.
“Where the Merchant’s Exchange now stands was an open space where we boys enjoyed ourselves playing base ball and engaging in other sports. (?) Where the Quincy Market stands was a portion of our fishing grounds. The populous and compact portion of South Boston was one of our places of re creation and for picking berries and the location of the public gardens the place of our bathing. Many a pleasant jaunt we had over the Neck as far as the old burying ground to the confines of Roxbury.

BS W7 “The space now occupied by the public gardens was a marsh. And a dirty, nasty place it was…I have seen a row of country produce teams that were on their way home from Boston that extended from Dover Street clear way up to where John D. Williams’ store on the Neck was; and Daniel Weld kept a store on the Neck, where all these farmers went to get their Half a Mug of Flip and a fried sausage….In 1815, I paid $22.50 a thousand for cigars; The other day (1880) I had some sent to me and the cost was $200 a thousand.

1812-1814 Beacon Hill demolished and into pond.
1812 Swimming pool on Common – Bathing forbidden on Sabbath

“two intellects and half a heart”
Ticknor and Everett and other young Brahmins on a voyage of discovery – an evangelical/cultural journey
1815 Handel and Hayden Society The Messiah

1815 BS G 11 Boston in c…Then Boston Neck was a narrow isthmus between two bays and a large part of what is now the South End below Dover Street was either under water or composed of salt marshes, The old Potters Field occupied the present site of the Church of the Immaculate Conception, and the land was so low that when a grave was dug the water came right into it, and the coffin had to be lowered into the water. One of the first things I remember (c1899) was having seen seven pirates hung on Boston Neck, a great crowd having collected to see the sight. They were captured off the MA coast somewhere I think.”

1816 Daniel Webster to Boston – Senate in 1827 – Secretary of State in 1841 +
“recognized spokesman of Big Business”
1830 DW – “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable”

1816 The Year without a summer…In New England that year went by the name of “eighteen hundred and starve to death” January was mild, so much as to render fires almost needless in parlors. Feb was not cold. April began warm but grew colder…and ended in snow and ice with a temperature more like winter than spring. May buds and flowers were frozen, ice formed half an inch thick, corn was killed, and the fields were again and again planted until deemed too late. June was the coldest ever known in this latitude. Frost, ice and snow were common. Almost every green thing was killed. July was accompanied by frost and ice. On the 5th ice was formed to the thickness of common window glass…August was more cheerless… Ice was half an inch thick. September furnished about two weeks of the mildest weather of the season. Soon after the middle it became very cold and frosty, and ice formed a quarter of an inch thick. BS A44

1816 BS E58 : 1881 – “Sixty five years ago, when I was a young man, there was not a bread cart in Boston. All bread was carried about the town in covered wheelbarrows, and all bakers were obliged to make biscuits and loaves of given weights; and I have often seen some of the selectmen of town stop a wheelbarrow and weigh the bread, and if it was found deficient in weight, seize it on the spot and send it to the Almshouse.

Funerals were never attended in carriages, except when persons could not walk. The body was always carried on the shoulders of four men, whose heads were covered by the pall. Male and female formed the procession on foot to the grave. There was no such thing as a hearse, except for the burial of poor persons, who had no procession, and this vehicle was a long black box on four wheels. The coffin was always black, and in opulent families it was covered with black cloth. Mahogany coffins were not thought of until some years later, and then only by the wealthy, and these were soon imitated by poor persons, by staining pine coffins to mahogany color.

At this date, and for some years afterwards, it was customary for the upper classes to notify the public of the death of a person, by what the English term “ringing out” which was done by striking the Stone Chapel bell a certain number of strokes for a man, woman or child, then giving a loud ringing of the bell, and finishing the ceremony by striking the number of years of the deceased. I believe Dr. Warren put a stop to this ceremony by assuring the town authorities that it was often productive of great evil among sick and nervous people, and rendered unavailing his best exertions to relieve the sick, and in the course of time the custom of tolling all bells for funerals was discontinued. This absurd custom is still kept up in our country towns.

The residents of Boston at this time kept cows and pigs as a matter of course. The cows on the Common. Faneuil Marker at this time was the only market but provisions were sold all over town, Much of the poultry, game, butter, milk, eggs cream was brought from the country by women on horseback, in two large panniers thrown across the animal and the women perched on top. There were several noted stands for these women – one in particular at Miss Peggy Moore’s tavern on the corner of what is now Washington street and Boylston street, belonging to the Wells family and now covered by the Boylston marketplace. I have seen, early in the morning, fifteen or twenty horses tied to hooks at the back of Miss Peggy Moore’s Woodshed fronting on Boylston street, while their owners were at breakfast in the house. Quails, partridges and pigeons could be bought at that time for about twenty-five cents a pound and I myself have purchased a goose for the same sum.” F

1817 BS V187 Evening Transcript Feb 26, 1879 Old Boston 1806-1819 Gen Oliver’s Reminiscences The old jail… “I also saw in the same cell of the jail four pirates on the eve before their execution in 1817, Williams, Rogg, Peterson and one other who were hanged on Boston Neck, in an open field not far from St. James Hotel. Rogg, a very stout man and a Swede, broke the rope by his weight and fell heavily to the ground, but was soon replaced on the scaffold. On both of these occasions great crowds were in attendance. Pictured sheets, with the men standing on the platforms, having ropes round their necks and their coffins beneath and with various doggerel verses, sometimes with “last words and dying confessions, printed by William Coverley, corner of Milk Street and Theater Alley, at only one cent apiece” were hawked among the crowd.”

BS V141 from Transcript c 1886 : “The winter apparel of boys even fifty years ago would be an interesting subject. India rubber boots and shoes were then not invented; great coats were among rare things; boys’ coats were generally made over from dad’s dress coat; pants were cut down and traveled through successive boys, and finally cut up into pieces to patch other clothes. Boy tailors were unheard of. Seamstresses passed from house to house and fixed over the boys clothes, cut down etc. If a boy had a grandmother he could count on a pair of woolen mitts, otherwise he went without. To purchase such things was little thought of. In the houses, no furnaces, few stoves, bedrooms as cold and colder than barns nowadays. Warming pans for beds at night in constant use, as the bedclothes were like two cakes of ice. Washing was done by first breaking through the ice found in the pitchers over night. All cooking done by wood fires, and better than in our day. All can be said of the boy of half a century ago is that the fittest lived. No wonder that consumption claimed its thousands and tens of thousands, both young and old….The boys saved their pennies for a whole year in order to buy a pair of skates. Christmas presents were unknown. New Year, perhaps, brought round a something, and then most generally a something useful rather than playful”

Boston had its town crier… Wilson, who paraded old Cornhill after a child lost, to announce an auction sale or a pocket-book lost. I remember his jovial face and jokes, as he sounded his bell which brought out all the boys on Cornhill…” Letter 1868

1818 Boston Handel and Haydn Society (est. 1815) gives first Messiah
performance; Boston establishes public elementary schools;
Benjamin Silliman, the first professor of chemistry and natural
history at Yale, founds American Journal of Science and Arts;
Hitchcock Chair Company founded in Riverton, Conn.; Connecticut Toleration Parry ratifies new constitution separating church and state disestablishing the Congregational church and
extending the franchise

1819 Maine votes to separate from Massachusetts and adopts state constitution; William Ellery Charming, "Unitarian Christianity"
1819 The squirrel on the Common is very sacred. On Mar 11, 1819 Wilbur Johnson was sent to prison for life for stealing squirrels on the Common.

1820 Lunenburg Bibles printed by horse powered press in Massachusetts

1820s-1830s American Colonization Society to purchase slaves and resettle in Africa

1820 Marlboro Hotel erected, and in the rear a commodious stable from which the stages departed on their routes through the country, Our oldest citizens will recall with pleasure the blast of the horn, the crack of the whip, and the attendant crowds always present on such occasions. But the headquarters of the stage lines was near the corner or Milk and Washington streets, about where the Transcript building now stands. Here were situated the Washington Coffee House and a large stable. This was the turning point of the Roxbury stages (hourlies) running from Norfolk House over the neck and thence down town… fare was 12 and a half cents. Near the Marlboro was situated carriage and other repair shops, and the tavern became famous for obtaining the latest religious news and gossip. The stable was on ground where the Lowell Institute now stands, reached from Washington Street through the archway, now occupied by Levering the bookseller, and the stages connecting the immediate suburban towns made this their headquarters.

From 1820 to 1836 the Marlboro was in full prosperity… In the latter year, the Marlboro Corporation, some 16 individuals, purchase the property, strange to say, with the purpose of building a church on the site of the stable, and to convert the hotel into a temperance house. Some 10 years later, Marlboro Chapel was remodeled and the Church of the Pilgrims took possession. Rev Matthew Hale Smith presided with great success.

Chapel has a place in history for here the anti-slavery element held many of their first meetings, and the cause of the poor blacks was advocated…
In 1837 on Independence Day the Marlboro opened its second career of prosperity… printed regulations of the house:
“Family worship to be attended every morning and evening, no intoxicating liquor to be used or sold about the house, smoking of cigars not allowed on any part of the premises, no money to be received on the Sabbath, now will company be received on that day, except in cases of necessity, cold and warm baths are provided here for the boarders, and a vegetable diet for those who prefer it; the best efforts are promised by the landlord to furnish the table with the products of free labor.”

1821 First U.S. high school opens in Boston; Amherst College founded; Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York

182I BS Vault -- Overseers of the Poor – Vote Book 1821:

Re almshouse:
“1st That liquor no liquor stronger than beer be allowed to any person in the almshouse without a certificate from a physician
2nd That any person, a subject of the House, bringing or causing spirit to be brought into the Alms-House shall be immediately confined in Bridewell, and kept at work and fed on bread and water for a term not exceeding one week nor less than twenty four hours.
3rd Any person that shall go out without leave of an overseer, unless sent y the master or mistress on errands, or shall stay longer than the time allowed, shall be prohibited from going out for a space not exceeding three months.
4th Any person found drunk, or using profane language, being indecent in behavior, stealing or embezzling any clothes of other articles, shall be confined in Bridewell and fed on bread and water for a time not exceeding one month, at the discretion of the overseer of the week.
5th That no person shall be allowed to straggle into any other entry than that in which his room is, unless on business permitted by the master.
6th That all fires shall be raked up and candles put out before 8 p.m. in the winter and at nine o’clock in the summer, except in cases of sickness
7th That all persons shall attend prayers and public services regularly, and at the hall to eat their meals in an orderly manner, unless they be excused by the overseer of the week for good and sufficient reasons.
8th No persons shall be allowed to visit the subjects without a written permit from an overseer,

Duties of the master…
The master may receive money in payment of oakum, paper stuff and other articles, also accounts against other towns, and deposit it in the MA Bank…
The wife or housekeeper of the master shall generally superintend the Females of the House, prepare and distribute the clothing to all the subjects thereof, together with all the small stores allowed to the sick and convalescents, and visit the woman’s rooms, not less than thrice a week, and see that they are kept perfect clean.
The master’s family shall not consist of more than himself, his wife and children, except two servants who may be selected from the House, with the consent of the board, and no other subjects shall be employed in the master’s family.
The salary of the Master shall be for the current year, one thousand dollars, and his house rent and fuel sufficient for two fires.

Extracts of rules relating to the work and employment of people in he Work House, made and approved by the town 25 Sept 1739:
1st That the Bell shall be rung every morning , and such persons as are able, shall repair to the several places appointed for them to do their work in, and shall be kept diligently at work, from such hours in the morning to such hours in the evening, as the Overseers shall from time to time direct, except so much time as shall be allowed for meals and religious worship.
2nd That the common work of the House be picking oakum, unless for such tradesmen whose business may be well accommodated in the House, and it shall be judged more profitable to employ them in their trades such as tailors, shoemakers, mop makers, nailors etc, and that such pf the women as are capable, be employed in carding and spinning wool, flax, yarn for mops, and cotton yarn for candle wick, knitting, sewing etc…

“By the statute passed 1735 and ratified and confirmed January 1789, the inhabitants are authorized to choose twelve Overseers, one for each ward…The third section provides “that the Overseers of the Poor of the town of Boston, for the time being, shall have the inspection, ordering and government of the said house…”
“Voted that the indenture binding Mary Williams to Joseph Harrington (?) of Roxbury the 19th Aug 1813 be cancelled – the girl having been returned to this house.” (1822 meeting …= 8 years…)

“Voted that Patrick Picket pay two dollars weekly towards his wife’s board in the Insane Hospital.” May 7, 1823…

“…the Almshouse at South Boston was ready to receive whatever persons, of the most respectable class of the poor, now in the Almshouse in Leverett Street at Boston could be removed…”

1823 …city council created the House of Industry…did not change powers and duties of the Overseers of the Poor

“The Overseers of the poor are not obliged by law to send any person to the Alms House who has not a legal settlement in the city , and more than half of the number usually sent there in a year, have no such legal settlement…”

Oct 1823…”That John Levy have the colored boy George Williams, as an apprentice, provided he can [procure a recommendation from some person connected with the governance of Harvard College, in addition to the certificate of the Selectmen of the town of Cambridge, which shall be satisfactory to the Overseer of the Week, and a clause inserted in the Indenture that said boy shall not be removed out of the State.”

March 3, 1824 “That the committee for clothing be authorized to purchase some chief handkerchiefs for the men to wear on their necks.”

Apr 7, 1824 “That Major Minot Thayer of Braintree have the liberty of permitting James Davidson, an apprentice bound to him by this board, to go to sea.”
“That the Master of said house receive of Samuel Codman, Esq., seventy five dollars 57/100, being a moiety of the proceeds of the sale of gunpowder, seized by the Firewards from sundry persons, for violation of laws relating to the storage of gunpowder etc.

“Voted that the Chairman and Col Badger be a committee to confer with Major Sam Thayer, relative to a settlement with Mrs. Sofer respecting Catharine McCann, a girl bound to her, and taken away by the direction of the Board, on account of ill usage.”

August 24, 1824 “That Thankful Cole have a grant of seven dollars and that her pension continue hereafter as heretofore.”

“Voted that the indentures binding Martin Canovan to Hon Joseph Strong of South Hadley be cancelled, the boy having absconded.”

September 1824: “voted that Mr. Foster be authorized to negotiate with Mr. Doroty respecting the board in this house of Mary Platt his mother, as he expressed a willingness to pay something for her board, with a view to keep her in the house.”
October 1824:”…Mr. Doroty and agree with him for her board…one dollar a week.”

“Voted that Samuel Alden, George Folsom and Charles Jarves be prohibited any intercourse whatever in the Almshouse as assistants to the principal physician or otherwise, in consequence of violating the rules and regulations of the Alms-House in secreting a dead body, with the intention of purloining the same.
Voted that Doctor Fisher be prohibited serving in the Alms-House in consequence of a similar violation, some time since, and that the master serve them with a copy of the above.”

1823 Lowell, Mass., "the manufacturing city," begins operation; Catherine Beecher opens Hartford Seminary; Lyman Beecher, The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints
1824 Pawtucket, R.I., women textile workers strike first recorded strike involving female employees; first public high school for girls opens in Worcester, Mass.; first black students admitted at Dartmouth College

1824 BS E 157 Pemberton Hill was most attractive as the estate of Gardiner Greene, who, between 1801 and 1824 purchased it from three owners. In the early years of the present century this was the most imposing domain in Boston. The gardens were renowned. The grounds were terraced and planted with vines, fruits and ornamental trees, and flowering shrubs and plants. Black Hamburg and white Chusselas grapes, apricots, nectarines, peaches, pears, grew here to perfection in the open air. Rare ornamental trees from foreign lands adorned this splendid garden among them the Japanese gingko tree which is now on the Beacon Street mall of the Common, near the path leading from Joy to Winter street. Mr. Greene had one of the first greenhouses at the Hub. His second wife was a sister of Lord Lyndhurst, the celebrated Lord Chancellor of England who was a son of Copley, our famous portrait painter.

When Greene died in 1832, his estate came into the market and was bought by Peter Jackson who bought several neighboring estates and had the whole graded and laid out. Thus Pemberton Hill which was soon after turned into Pemberton Square was cut down and the earth was used to fill the Millpond.

December 1, 1824 :
“Voted that the subjects be supplied with a Thanksgiving dinner as usual.”
“Voted that the bill from East Sudbury for board of Lavina Cobb’s illegitimate child be committed to John Knapp, Esq. To inquire into the correctness of it and report.”

“Voted that Collins Damons bill for board and clothes furnished Lavina Cobbs’ child , George F Cobb, from Oct 13, 1823 to 10 October 1824, amounting to twenty nine dollars 36 cents be allowed and entered on the next draft on the City Treasurer for payment; and that the question of accountability of the Commonwealth to support Geo Cobb referred to John Knapp Esq.

Jan 1825: “That John Knapp be requested to write to the town of East Sudbury, denying the inhabitancy of Levina Cobb and her child as being in this city, and referring them for future payment to the Commonwealth.”

Feb 25, 1825…”Voted that a committee of three be appointed to confer with Dr. Ware and request of him an explanation (if any he can give) relative to the body of Hannah Smith having been taken away from the Almshouse in an improper manner.”

Apr 6 1825 “that John Lewis, a barber in this city, have Enoch Green, a colored boy, bound to him to learn that art or mystery of the barber and hairdresser until he comes of age.”

April 1825…the Almshouse inmates moved to South Boston House of Industry…

July 6 1825…That the Chairman request the Treasurer of the City to notify all the pensioners or their agents when they come for the money allowed them at the last meeting that they must call upon the Overseers of their wards and inform them respectively of their circumstances and necessities before the 20th of September next, and that otherwise their pensions will not be renewed.”

Letter to council…re accommodation of Boston-domiciled paupers from other town… although the number of such cases has been small, much smaller than common for the time elapsed since we were deprived of the almshouse…

“relief of those within the city…some individuals have applied to the director of the House of Industry and have been denied, alleging the want of accommodations for such persons, particularly the partially insane, though harmless..

What may be our difficulties when winter approaches, we must at present time leave to be anticipated by such, as we have a just apprehension of the solemn responsibility that will rest on those, who are bound by law to make the suitable provision for the helpless and distressed.”

July 25 1825…Voted that the indentures binding Mary Williams, a colored girl, to Joseph Harrington of Roxbury be cancelled.”

1822 x City of Boston
First mayor = John Phillips, a member of an old mercantile family
Josiah Quincy “The Great mayor”

BSN: Stage Coach War: Competition was keen at that time (1820) among rival stage lines on the route between Boston and Providence, and finally one company announced that it would
carry passengers free and give them a good dinner at the end of the journey. The other company was not to be outdone and offered a similar inducement plus a bottle of wine. Mr. Shaffer, dancing teacher of Boston – rode back and forth for a week, traveling, wining and dining without cost. At the end of a week both companies agreed to the charge of $3.00)
“About 1822, journey from Boston to Providence took four hours and 50 minutes. The fare was $3”

1825 The Kean Riot Actor Edmund Kean…1821, May, came to Boston to play Richard III…He acted two nights for the benefit of public charities, but on the third night, when no such inducements were offered, 20 people turned up. Kean refused to appear, bade manager Duff goodbye and left. Went back to England. Early in January 1825, a storm burst on him…sued for damages if 800 pounds for loving his neighbors wife better than his own. Returned to New York, where” his treatment of the Boston audience in 1821 was denounced as vilely contemptuous. He came to Boston and took up headquarters in the Exchange Coffee House…Letter to the Columbian Centinel “…Acting from the impulse of irritation, I certainly was disrespectful to the Boston people; calm deliberation convinces me I was wrong. The first step toward the throne of mercy is confession; the hopes we are taught, forgiveness. Man must not expect more than those attributes we offer to our God.”

He appeared at the Federal Street stage, in citizens dress, previous to performance as Richard III. “The tumult instantly became violent and unmanageable, and missiles, brass balls, potatoes, bottles containing asafetida, apples, and Negro gingerbread, were thrown onto the stage. Mr. Keane now retired and after five minutes, Mr. Kilner, the manager, came forward to state that Mr. Kean wished to apologize, but not at the risk of his life. A silence ensued. When Mr. Kean reappeared on the stage, missiles were thrown were redoubled violence and increased malevolence. Mr. Kean retired to the green-room and cried like a child….Shortly after the stage was invaded by a body of men, who demanded that Mr. Kean be delivered to them and avowed their determination to kill him if he fell into their hands.
In applying ladders to the windows and forcing other entrances, thousands had by this time succeeded in storming the house, and rushing into the interior of the theater, they commenced their work of destruction. Loud yells were now made for Kean and while the objectivity of their hostility was in a house contiguous to the theater belong to Clarke, one of the performers…

At two o’clock in the morning, Mr. Kean returned to his hotel. The following morning he entered a vehicle from the private door of the hotel and was driven six miles out of town where a stage had been ordered to convey him to New York. He was so changed I hardly knew him. :So appears, I said to myself, the mighty actor who can saw the passions of enlightened numbers, and of whom Lord Byron has said that the third act of his Othello was the noblest effort of human genius”

1825 BS A 46 “In 1825, there were in New England about 15,000 Catholics, about half of whom were in Boston, three priests and eight churches, only one of which was worthy of the name. – In 1877, there are in Boston 30 churches and chapels, 89 priests, 14 of whom are Jesuits. Since 1840 the Catholic churches in Boston increased five fold and those of other congregations two fold. In 1877, according to the editor of the pilot the Catholics numbered half the population of Boston, but speaker’s estimate was that they were not more than 35 % (Rev Daniel Dorchester).

1826 Horse-drawn railway – Quincy quarry to Neponset docks – boat to Charlestown for Bunker Hill monument construction
First rail line in the U.S. stretches 3 miles from the Neponset River to the granite quarries in Quincy, Mass.
1827 Massachusetts is the first state to use taxes for public education

1827. July 4, Cornerstone of Tremont Theatre, on spot now covered by the Tremont Temple. First performance took place on September 24. Wives as They Were and Maids as They Are. In 1842, the Tremont ceased to be a theatre. Having been sold to the Baptist Society on Wednesday, March 31, 1852. Falling walls crushed and injured a number of persons. Dickens and others delivered addresses in the temple; while Jenny Lind and Catherine Hays poured forth their golden notes to enraptured audiences.
In the building adjoining the Temple were the quarters of the Independent Cadets, the oldest military organization next to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, in Boston.

1828, July 4, the cornerstone of the Tremont House laid, and it was opened to the public October 16, 1829. It was thought to be, and was at the time, a model of luxury and elegance. – Charles Dickens, on his first visit to America, came to the Tremont House. “The hotel, (a very excellent one) is called the Tremont House. It has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember, or the reader would believe.”
View of the Granary Burial Ground from the Tremont’s windows.
The hotel displaced three ante-revolutionary houses: one, fronting Beacon Street was the residence of John Parker; the corner of Tremont was an open lot, with handsome horse-chestnut trees, belonging to an old-fashioned house with the end to the street, the mansion of the Hubbard family. Next was a house built by Thomas Perkins, whose wife was a Mascarene. It fronted on the street and had a garden. (D)

1828 BS F100 1828 July 4 x Cornerstone of Tremont House laid…October 1829 completed Opening at grand dinner Oct 16

1828 Nathaniel William Taylor, Concio and Clerum

1829 Boston Directory contained 11,719 names, including 200 colored people whose names were inserted after those of the white people at the end of the volume,

1829 William Apes's A Son of the Forest, first published autobiography
written by an Indian, appears; first modern hotel, Tremont
House, opens in Boston

1830 Thaddeus Fairbanks (Saint Johnsbury, Vt.) invents platform scale for which he is knighted by the emperor of Austria and which kicks off the city's economic growth
1831 Wesleyan College founded at Middletown, Conn.; New England Anti Slavery Society established; Mt. Auburn Cemetery established in Cambridge, Mass.

1832 BS F38 Cholera 1832, July first appearance…mild.
“Give for an adult 50 drops of laudanum in a glass of hit brandy and water, equal parts of each, and repeat it every 15 minutes until four doses have been taken, so as to give the whole 200 drops. If thrown up, repeat the laudanum in a teaspoon of brandy.
Apply bags of hot sand to every part of the body and limbs of the patient. Large woolen cloths wrung out of very hot water may be applied in the same way, provided they are kept from cooling.
Make a poultice and paste of common mustard mixed in the same way as for ordinary use. Apply this hot over the whole surface of the bowels.
Given an injection made with a gill of starch m arrowroot or gruel, with one teaspoon of laudanum in it.
“Finally, we recommend a good conscience and a fearless performance of duty as the best of all preservatives against the disorder. It is well shown to physicians that the most timid are most frequently the subjects of epidemic disease. This is peculiarly the case with cholera because it affects the nervous system. We therefore strongly urge upon our fellow citizens a perfect confidence in the wisdom and goodness of God, and a full assurance that those who perform his will by the devotion of their labors to the sick and suffering, are taking the surest means to escape the attack of this disease.

1833 Another Jackson visit – 2,000 mill girls marched two abreast in his honor. Two mile long parade. They wore white dresses and blue sashes and carried parasols.
Dickens positive comments on Boston mill girls.

“A Proper Bostonian did not run for public office: he offered himself for the post.”
“A model of excellence” = Brahmin ambition for Boston
The flowering of New England: Boston writers flood of works epitomizing the optimistic and popular spirit of the day.”

1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson American Declaration of intellectual independence by calling on American scholars to stop imitating the “courtly muses of Europe”
Thoreau, poet, writer and incurable non-conformist – 1849 Night in jail for refusing to pay taxes for American War x Civil Disobedience
Literary Movement + transcendentalism

“Captain of the Watch” armed with a rattle and a long hook. Paid 50 cents a night

Rich people would always move out of town in the summer or seek refuge in purer atmosphere

HENRY ADAMS
1836 Henry Adams – farmer – Boston – Braintree/Quincy
“Of all the Adamses, Sam alone had the common touch”
Boston Adamses: “integrity combined with intelligence”
“unhappy Adamses”
John, graduated Harvard and moved to Boston – defending Boston officers x Massacre
Long time adversary = Jefferson (both died on July 4, 1826)
Abigail Adams: “a long courtship…created a “natural aristocrat out of her farmer-lover”
Johnson Quincy Adams – Monroe Doctrine – elected president by the House of Reps – unpopularity – Boston Puritanism to the White House –Louisa Adams x English “a miserable wife”- “A billiard table in the White House for grim pleasure”
3 a.m. woke – five books of the bible – five mile hike…one hour nude swim in the Potomac. At 14 in Paris in love with an actress – seven year nightly dreams of her – lesson of never forming an acquaintance with actress…made sons walk to Boston if they wanted to see theater x 10 miles…never used carriage for recreation…walked
One characteristic of Adams men is complete lack of identity with the masses
Lacked the common touch
John Quincy = bankrupt
Charles Francis Adams m Abigail Brooks, daughter of millionaire Peter Chardon Brooks – kept England from entering the civil war
1789 Abigail Adams: “I cannot find a cook in the whole city but what will get drunk”
Abigail: “If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned woman.”
BIBL The emancipation of Massachusetts – Charles Francis Adams

BIBL The Sea Trader His Friends and His enemies by David Hannay, Boston Little Brown
BIBL: King’s Cutters and Smugglers: 1700 to 1855 by Kebble-Chatterton, Lippincott
BIBL: T Wharf by Z. William Hauk
The Wharf Rat, a magazine of limited circulation published since 1928.
Lawrence Joseph O’Toole 1908-1951 “Mr. T Wharf”
BS 40 BIBL: Sketches of History Life and Manners in the US By a Traveler, New
Haven, 1826 Marryat.

Old Boston Town, early in this century by An 1801er (Hale James) 1880 BS

“Not on Fort Hill, but at the junction of High Street, and the head of Pearl street there was built in the first decade of the century, the largest private residence probably then in Boston. It had a dome almost rivaling that on the State House. It was always called Harris’ folly. Why it was thusly spoken of, cannot say; but suppose his bank account did not hold out as long as he expected when the building as commenced. Remember him distinctly, as a fine, portly, aristocratic looking gentleman, who was then, or before, a ship chandler on Purchase Street.

Some of the fine old mansions in town were then in Pearl Street. They were back from the street some seventy or eighty feet, with old chestnut trees and gardens in front, and occupied by some of Boston’s best townsmen. …Col Thomas H. Perkins built a fine modern residence in Pearl Street, in which his family resided several years. At the corner of Federal and Milk Streets was the old mansion of Robert Treat Paine, with fine outlying grounds. And nearly opposite, corner Milk and Congress Streets, was an old residence, which was occupied by Julien, a French cook, and was then the only place in town where a party of bon-vivants could obtain a first class dinner.
In 1805, there was but a single commercial establishment in Milk Street, from the old South to the water. This one was in a small wooden building called a “ten-footer.” This shanty was nearly opposite to Oliver Street, and was the only building on a triangular piece of ground called Liberty Square. The remainder of the lot was generally occupied by dilapidated trucks and wagons, old boxes, barrels and rubbish generally.

The above mercantile concern was kept by a venerable lady called Aunty Spaulding, whose stock in trade consisted of needles, pins, tape, marbles, tops, molasses candy, green apples and other like necessities for small children.

On the opposite side of Batterymarch street, at the corner where Odiorne’s nail store was built, there was a one story wooden building standing on piles, and the water coming under it at high tides; over the big double door of this building was the sign “Cataract Engine.” Immediately next to the old engine house were ways for building or repairing small vessels…I do recollect that about 1805 there was a vessel on the ways, her bowsprit ticking out nearly across Batterymarch Street, and almost reaching my mother’s bedroom windows. From there, running toward the bend of that street, at Hamilton Street, were lots of spars afloat, caulker’s stages etc., and standing over the water at the head of what is now the west side of India Street, was my father’s sail loft which was afterwards burned. The end of Batterymarch Street was called Tilden’s Wharf.

Some two years afterwards when all this dock property had been filled up, and Broad and India streets had been built (1806 and 1807), the footway from Long Wharf to India Street was a wooden bridge about four feet wide, with a wooden railing. It was here that the New York packets made their headquarters.

Before Quincy Market was built, the only market house in town was Faneuil Hall. Almost any morning might be seen Col Thos Perkins, Harrison Gray Otis, William Gray, Ben Bussey, Peter Brooks, Israel Thorndike and other wealthy towns folk trudging home for their eight o’clock breakfast, with their market baskets containing their one o’clock dinner.

The dealers in the market house occupied the whole of the first floor of Faneuil Hall, and they used the cellars for the storage of salted meats, fish, and other barreled stuff. The large room on the floor above was never used except for political meetings and big dinners. The upper floor contained all the armories which were then required for the military companies of the town.

About where the western entrance of Quincy Market now is there used to be lying in dock (say 1810) two old hulks, which were roofed over, and from which vessels the inhabitants obtained their chief supply of oysters. The oyster boats used to sail up the harbor to these hulks, and deposit their cargoes, from whence they were distributed to the smaller dealers. You got on board over a narrow footbridge, and several small tables were standing ready, with a tin pepper and salt box thereon, and wayfarers would be accommodated with a dozen raw on the shell, and a two tined steel fork to pick them up with. But Father Holbrook would never allow his customers to “spile his ‘isters” with lemon juice, or any such trash. Nothing but salt and pepper onto this boat,” he used to say.

In the immediate neighborhood of these oyster boats, there was a narrow crooked lane leading to Ann Street. It was hardly wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other, and had no sidewalks nor any name that can now be recollected. In a corner of this lane was an old tavern called the Roebuck, not a very respectable place of resort seventy years ago. About that time a murder was committed in this tavern by some Danish or Swedish sailors.

What is now North Street, was, in 1805 called Fore Street, afterwards changed to Ann Street, as far down as North Square, thence to its terminus it was Fish Street. It’s original name of Fore Street was probably adopted because it was the marginal street, the water from the harbor coming up at high tides to within one hundred feet of Fore Street, as the writer can testify, having been in swimming at least hundreds of times within forty yards of 45 Ann Street.

Many sailor boarding houses were situated on North Square and Fish Street; hence Ann Street was largely filled with slop-shops, as sailor’s clothing stores were called, with cheap hat stores and small wares for seamen’s use. The center of the hardware trade was in Dock Square and adjoining Union Street.

In the latter part of the past century there was a shipyard near Battery Wharf. It was called Hartt’s Yard. At this yard the old frigate Constitution was built.

Seventy years ago it was a frequent practice of schoolboys to spend their Saturday afternoons on an island in the harbor. We provided ourselves with a pot, frying pan, and other things requisite for chowder and a fry, and taking a boat at Winnismit Ferry, would pull to the island, land our traps, then go and catch some fish, and return to the island and prepare the festival. Driftwood along shore furnished fuel, and after our sumptuous repast, we would have a good swim (there not being a house or resident on the island (expect a man who tended a flock of sheep), and then we would pull our boat for home. If you look at that island now, you will see East Boston.

Boys in those days were an important element of the Volunteer Fire Department. It was by law decreed that every housekeeper should have in a convenient and conspicuous place, two leathern fire-buckets with his name painted thereon. The most conv. And consp. place would be the front entry; hence on entering the front door of a residence, rich or poor, the first things that struck the eye were the fire buckets. Each bucket contained a long canvas bag, suitable for removing clothing, books and small valuables, and also a bed key, for unscrewing bedsteads.

It was the duty of the householder, on hearing the ringing of the fire bells to carry his buckets to the place of the fire. Two lines would then be formed from each engine to the nearest pumps. Then men and boys would pass the full buckets to the engine and the young ones like me, pass up the empty buckets to the pump.
After a fire was extinguished the buckets would be ranged alongside the nearest fences, and their owners would take them home, and polish them off to be ready for the next alarm.

My first love was the Old Cataract, and I stuck to her till I was nine, when my father moved “down to the North End.” Then my affections were transferred to the little Extinguisher….She was housed on the drawbridge over Mill Creek in Ann Street. But she would throw water. It went up like a skyrocket. In her service, I was promoted to the full-bucket line when I was 12.

Three quarters of a century ago, there were only four public schools in Boston for teaching English and writing, and the Latin School. The North End School was in Middle Street near Richmond Street, and was under command of Master Johnny Tileston; the South End School, corner of West and Common Streets, under Masters Payson and Webb; that in School Street which stood where the City Hall now is, was disciplined (yes, indeed it was) by Masters Jones, Snelling and Haskell; and the school at the corner of Sudbury Street and Chardon’s Lane was managed by Masters Holt and Mulliken. Each of these teachers had an assistant, who was called the “usher.” The writer was only personally acquainted with two ushers. One was always called Little Billy, a younger brother of Master Snelling, and “Tooter Hart” who was usher of Master Mulliken. The only duty these ushers ever performed for me was to announce my name very loudly to the master, whenever they thought his special attentions were required for my benefit ( which was not seldom.) Usher Hart got his nickname from the boys because he used to “toot” on a clarinet with the band when there was a military parade.

There wasn’t much soldiering in those days; there was a pretty general turn out of uniformed companies on Nigger ‘Lection and Fourth of July, and the Ancient and Honorable was out its once in a year on Artillery Election Day. The various uniformed companies each celebrated its anniversary. The Governor was escorted to Cambridge on Commencement Day by a company of cavalry before the Lancers was organized. The company was also reinforced by a numerous body of truck men with their long white frocks…

There was also another great parade about seventy years ago, composed of a large number of the substantial townsfolk, who used to assemble on the Common once or oftener in a year, to assist at certain Indian rites called the Feast of Squantum. I was assured that Squantum was no place for little boys. The cavalcade was mounted on the best horses the town could produce, riders with long suwarrow or white-top boots, made a gallant show when they crossed South Boston bridge, Was never out of bed when they got back. The reflection of later years lead me to believe it was quite possible for those gay cavaliers to celebrate the Indian festival, a la Mammoth Cod Association of a later day. We know about that honored institution!

70 years since a portion of the hill between Cambridge and Beacon Streets was called “Nigger Hill,” and there lived, generally in squalor, nearly all the colored people of the town; such as chimney sweeps, scavengers, waiters etc. There were many very low white women who lived on the “Hill” and the nigger dance houses were they resort of the worst kind of people. There was a similar place at the North End, visited by sailors and peopled by the lowest grade of women. It would not have been considered proper, seventy years ago, to put the name of Tin-pot Alley in print, or speak it to ears polite.

Coffee Exchange House was the first public building every erected in Boston, expressly for a public house. All the taverns which will be noticed hereafter by me, were originally private dwelling houses.
The Old Province House was the only exception. That was the governor’s residence in colonial times, and was kept by Mr. Benjamin Crombie as a tavern, or rather as a large public boarding house about seventy years since. In my boyish days, the whole terraced front garden was open to Marlborough Street, with fine old trees around it. Later the block of brick stores was built on Marlborough street, and the entrance to Province House, which stood at least one hundred feet from the street, was through an archway, four or five feet wide, running under the stores.

The steps of the Exchange Coffee House were much used by Jimmy Wilson, the town crier, to announced the auction sales of Whitwell and Bond; Thomas K. Jones etc. …who did chiefly congregate in Kilby Street, near State. Jimmy was a great humorist, and though he made his living by crying, he was always in a good mood. He generally closed the formal announcement by some quizzical remark to a bystander, for he knew everybody, and was on familiar terms with all sorts and conditions of men.
Jimmy Wilson was often at his post about nine o’clock in the evening, ringing his bell loudly for several minutes to collect a large crowd and then announcing a lost child, or a lost pocketbook. His account of the agony of bereaved parents would be heart-rending, when he would suddenly explode with a joke which would start the crowd off, roaring.

It was the custom of travelers to leave their names on a call book at the stage office, and the coaches would often be an hour going from street to street picking up passengers, returning to stage office in time to start punctually on the hour. On the arrival of the stages in town, half the passengers would stop at the stage house; others who desired it would be carried to any part of the town. Boston was then not so sizeable as now, the number of inhabitants in 1810 being about 15,000.

There were very few gentlemen in Boston who, seventy years ago, would think it was possible for them to wear other than an English hat. There were three or four prominent hatters who made it a specialty to import hats ordered by their regular customers. One was Colonel Daniel Messenger, whose store was in Newberry Street, corner of Sheafes’ Lane; and another was William Barry, who had a store in the Old State House. There was also a hatter who hat not quite so stylish customers; his name was Sturgis; kept at the corner of Ann and Centre Streets. He was father of Captain Josiah Sturgis, for many years in command of revenue cutters; and whose expensive epaulettes and muchness of gold lace must yet be remembered by many. His sister Lucretia was married to Joshua Bates of Baring Brothers, London, and their daughter became the wife of the Dutch minister to England, Mynheer Van Der Weyer.

Somewhere about sixty years ago, the good ship Canton Packet owned by Thos H. Perkins, left Central Wharf, Boston, bound to China. Her commander was gentleman of the old school, a first-class navigator, thoroughbred merchant and true Christian. His demeanour was so quiet that he might have been mistaken for a country parson. The first and third mates were regular sailors, every inch of them, not too arbitrary or severe, but seemingly having this idea constantly in their minds “ we must get all the work possible out of the boys; study navigation, pish?”

The second mate was much the youngest of all the officers; quiet and gentle in giving orders, and a great favorite with the men. A few days after leaving port, when everything had been made snug, the second mate informed the crew that it was the captain’s wish that the men should not waste all their time, during their “watch below,” in cards and other useless amusements. They might read, sing, play or mend clothes, but he didn’t wish them to utterly waste their time in nonsense.

The crew was composed entirely of Americans; several Boston boys, the rest from adjacent towns and Cape Cod. All had been fairly educated with two exceptions, an old salt named Jerry, and George, a mulatto. The captain proposed that a portion of every watch below should be devoted to study; that tween decks forward should be the study room, and that he would teach navigation, mathematics, lunar etc.

The suggestion was gratefully received by the crew; the captain gave his daily instructions (except Sundays) in which he was constantly aided by the second mate, when his duties did not require him to be on deck.

The ship went to Whampoa, Manila, to a port in Northern Europe, and returned to Boston after an absence of fifteen or eighteen months. At the end of the voyage, there was not one of the crew (with the exceptions mentioned) who could not, in case of emergency, have navigated that ship to any required port.

After the ship had been secured to the wharf (by the crew, not stevedores) and the crew were preparing to visit their families and friends, all hands were called aft, and were told that “as you boys loaded the chip you can, if you choose, discharge her, receiving stevedore’s wages.” A very short consultation on the fo’csle settled the matter in the affirmative. The boys went to their homes, or friends at night; took an early breakfast and in due time the ship was discharged. The next day a variation of the formula was made.
“boys the owner is going to have the ship hauled up for the present; her sails are to be unbent, rigging unrove, spars to be sent down, in fact we want the ship stripped, and as you have already rigged her on the voyage, you can do the job if you like and get rigger’s wages.”

The job was taken; the ship hauled to a wharf at the Northend, and when the crew was paid off as seaman, stevedores and riggers, they were complimented very highly by the venerable owner.

Every one of that crew (exceptions noted) went out on his next voyage as an officer of a vessel. One of them took command of a brig.
The good captain, the first and third mates, and all the crew besides those to be mentioned have all finished their last voyages. The good assistant schoolmaster, having advanced in his profession to shipmaster and owner, has for many years been identified with the commercial interests, not only of Boston, but of the world. He is wealthy, a nautical inventor, scholar, merchant and gentlemen. To sum him up in three words, he is Robert Bennett Forbes.

The Old Mill was at the head of Mill Pond, about one hundred feet west of Hanover Street, just opposite Center Street. It was a large, wooden, yellow-painted grist mill; and was in operation as late as 1808. After the water had been used in the mill, it ran off through Mill Creek to the harbor. The creek was twenty-five or thirty feet wide, and was arched over for Hanover Street to cross it; thence it was open to Ann Street, where there was drawbridge, which was never opened, as vessels never came above Ann Street. They probably went from the harbor to the mill through this creek, during the latter part of the Past century, which was rinsed out by the tide every twenty four hours; and yet was not a savory place.

The New South Church was in 1806 and old fashioned yellow painted building on Summer Street near High Street. John Thornton Kirkland was the pastor. When several years later my parents occupied a pew in the Old south, Dr. Eckley was so severe in his demeanor that he was enough to frighten any but a very brave person….I remember that about seventy years ago, Deacons Salisbury and Phillips, and Messrs. Charles Sprague, Armstrong, Callender and others, succeeded in having the old wooden painted pulpit removed, and an elegant circular mahogany one erected, very much to the disgust of Dr, Eckley. The doctor had an impediment in his speech, or rather, a hesitating way of speaking, and the first Sunday he was in the new pulpit he remarked in the long prayer that “he hoped the Lord would soften the hearts of the congregation, and not keep them as HARD as the ma-hog-a-ny which they had introduced into His house.” His was frightful and his wig nearly came off in his wrath.

Doctors Eckley, Eliot and Baldwin all wore stiff, curled, powdered wigs; Doctors Stillman and Murray had wigs of natural hair, the former dark brown, the latter almost red.

One thing I am sure of, that seventy two years ago there was not a single Irish servant girl in Boston; no not one. All the “help” was native born American; help, indeed, of the best quality; wages, one dollar a week.

The regular congregation of the Roman Catholic church consisted chiefly of French, Spanish and Italian families; not more than one hundred attendants in all, besides stranger visitors, who were attracted by the music or the peculiar services. Between 1805 and 1810 I must have attended that church fifty times in company with an old female servant, who was a Romanist, although born in Connecticut. Have dwelt on this point somewhat because I want to impress on your mind that, strange as it ay appear to you now, Boston was really an American town in the early part of this century. And not Democratic neither.

During the war of 1812, there was an old vessel fitted up as a prison ship; she was moored in the mill pond, alongside a new street which had been made, leading from Hanover Street to Charlestown Bridge. The vessel lay within ten feet of the wharf, and a dozen prisoners might have been seen any day, on their way to Faneuil Hall to get their provisions for the day. These fellows fared a good deal better than our poor boys did at Dartmoor prison.

I remember seeing Commodore Hull march up State street with Capt. Dacres having his arm, after the capture of the Guerriere by the Constitution. And in company with many others saw, from one of the islands in the harbor, the fight between the Chesapeake and the Shannon. Two days before we saw poor Lawrence in State Street.

Taverns and stage offices…the southern mail coaches had their headquarters at 45 Ann Street…The stable accommodations at all these places were very extensive, sufficiently so to accommodate several hundred horses and vehicles; for many persons would travel to town in their own chaises, or carriages; and leaving these vehicles at the stable, would take up their own quarters with friends in to

ABOLITION

THE VARRENS, Big Dick, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips

“1820s…In those days the colored population abstained from manifesting any interest in political meetings on account of the existing prejudice against their race. My impression is that they were excluded from voting during my earlier days; but at all events a statutory property qualification for many years debarred the larger portion of the colored population from exercising that privilege or right, most of them being poor and occupying menial positions in society. The prejudices carried so far that some of the churches, if not most of them, contained a sort of pigeon-box gallery for their accommodation in so0me remote corner of the choir gallery, At the communion table they – either from modesty of necessity – sat on outside benches separate from the pews, and were served last with the sacramental emblems. At the public schools, if perchance a pale mulatto was surreptitiously smuggled in through the introduction of some roguish white boy (as I remember one to have been), the mulatto – on discovery of his race – was summarily turned out and the white boy violently punished for his temerity in introducing him. However honestly opposed one might have been to the movement of the early Abolitionists, justice requires that we should rejoice at the progress which was engendered from those movements, and that we should not hold our mead of respect and admiration from those intrepid men – both Bostonians – who were the pioneers in the successful effort to elevate the colored race n this country. I mean William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips.” Boston Journal – William Brewer: BS E 48 9/10 1881

1700 25000 black slaves 1/10
1790 800,000 black slaves 1/5

First Boston black community 17th century on Copp’s Hill x “New Guinea”
1739 Peter Faneuil ordered a slave from West Indies paying for him with a shipment of fish
(no official slave market)

1761 Susanna Wheatley bought Sally, eight years old = Phyllis, d. 1784
Married John Peters, “a respectable colored man of Boston”
Honored by royalty in England

1820 West End on north side of Beacon Hill = : “Nigger Hill”
MA law prohibited marriage between blacks and whites
“Negro Pews”
Frederick Douglas refused entry to restaurant
Segregated schools – Smith School = Abigail Smith, admirer of black schoolmaster Prince
Sanders

BS E 28 The hill north of Beacon Street, known then as "Nigger Hill" was occupied principally by Negroes, living mostly in small shanties built by themselves. So strong was the prejudice against the race then even here in Boston that they were not permitted to reside in any other part of the city. In this quarter was congregated all the vicious and depraved of the community, and to pass through the area after dark was not at all desirable, as it would be attended with more danger than anyone would think possible at the present day. (1886). Fights and rows were of nightly occurrence, and assaults and murders not infrequent. Boston’s police at the time consisted of a few venerable constables, who judging from their efficiency must have obtained an insight into the duties by studying the instructions of the renowned Dogberry.

This unique community on the hill was controlled by and kept in submission by one man, Big Dick, the King of Nigger Hill, as he was called, a gigantic Negro. His influence was backed by a pair of fists almost as large as tea kettles. He was six and half feet tall, powerfully but symmetrically built, and possessing wonderful strength. The writer saw him for the first time on 4 July 1826.His costume consisted of a white shirt of the finest linen, with a large turned down collar, a black silk handkerchief knotted loosely around his neck, which together with the upper part of his chest was bare, full white pants, a red velvet Turkish jacket and a straw hat placed jauntily upon one side of his head. He had the reputation of being an exceedingly quiet and good-natured fellow but when aroused by any insubordination or trouble in his dominion, he became a terror to all, with whom he came into contact.

Another character in the zenith of his popularity at that time was Old Reed, a constable of the city and noted thief-taker. His success in the discovery of stolen property and arresting thieves was truly marvelous…The secret, so it was said, was his having in his employ parties who were in his power, whose liberty, and in some cases it was intimated, their permission to ply their trade depended on the value of the information they gave him. …The writer remembers a tall, thin man, straight as an arrow, with a large bandanna handkerchief wound round his neck and in his hand a substantial hickory walking stick. Nothing escaped his sharp gray eyes, and no face or person with whom he had once come into contact was forgotten.

1831 William Lloyd Garrison anti-slavery movement
1831, Jan 1 – Liberator started at small hole-in-the-wall office in Washington Street
1831 August – Nat Turner
Garrison dismissed colonization as “white-manism” Accused upstanding Brahmin families of complicity with slavery.
Pulpit was “sworn ally of slavery”
Sit-ins in separate Negro pews
Cotton producing south and textile manufacturing north = “Lords of the Loom” and “Lord of the Lash”

1831 “America” by Samuel Francis Smith – first sung in 1832 at Park Street Churc1832 Public school system established by Horace Mann = Genoa grade/age system

1832 Perkins Institute, first U.S. school for the blind, opens in South
Boston; Samuel Gridley Howe (Julia Ward) School for the Blind – Perkins School, after gift from Thomas Perkins Samuel
Francis Smith composes hymn America at Andover Seminary
1833 Hartford and New Haven Railroad incorporated
Prudence Crandall of Canterbury, Conn., arrested for establishing a school
for black girls
Congregational Church disestablished in Massachusetts last New England state to do so
Fist steam railroad in New England connects Boston and Lowell
1833 Lydia Maria Child's Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans
Called Africans, calling for immediate emancipation, prompts the
Boston Athenaeum to revoke her library privileges

1833 MA Temperance Society founded
Desire for Reform
“impotent poor” “able poor”
The House of Industry
Separate the respectable and honest from the idle and vicious poor
Only major reform movement until Civil Rights era of 1960s

Margaret Fuller and feminists
Lucy Stone Leagues

1834 Ice shipped/ Louisburg Property Owners association formed
1834 Richard Dana sailed from Boston

1834 Trial of pirates who captured the American brig Mexican held in Boston…after half an hour, the jury brought in a verdict of guilty against the captain, mate and five of the crew, at same time recommending mercy for Bernardo de Soto on ground of his saving the officers, passengers and crew of the American ship, Minerva. Trial took place in the new Masonic Temple at Temple Place

1834 Ursuline convent burned

1834 Abner Kneeland, a Free Enquirer who doubted divine origin of
the scriptures and adopted pantheistic views, convicted on blasphemy charge in Boston; George Bancroft, History of the United States (1834 76)

1835 June 11, execution of the Spaniards in the yard of the Leverett street jail…notwithstanding efforts to prevent suicide Manuel Boyga succeeded in slashing his throat with a piece of tin and he was much weakened by loss of blood, in consequence of which he was carried to the scaffold in an armchair and while there was seated upon it…Captain Gibert afterwards kissed the face if Boyga, who was nearly insensible, and listened with composure to the reading of the warrant which was interpreted to them. Soon after which the Catholic clergymen repeated their last protestations of innocence and at half past ten the awful sentence of the law was passed on them

1835 Omnibuses run on fixed routes in Boston; shoe factory established in Farmington, N.H.; first train runs between Boston and
Providence; William Ellery Charming, Slavery

1835, Oct 21 Mob attack on Boston Female Anti Slavery Society x Washington Street
1835 William Garrison mauled by Boston mob – “A mob of gentlemen tied the rope around Garrison’s neck” Dragged Garrison to Boston Common
1835-36 Continuing violence
Wendell Phillips prodded into action by his brilliant young wife, Ann Terry Greene.

1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature; first meeting of the Transcendental Club

1837 Phillips x Faneuil Hall speech on assassination of Elijah Lovejoy
Edmund Quincy and Henry Bowditch
Merchant John Murray Forbes

BS E36 The City Tavern stood next to the east side of Brattle Street Church, and extended nearly Brattle Street nearly to Elm Street. The stables in the rear extended through to Brattle Square, covering a large space.

The City Tavern was one of the busiest places in the city, being the headquarters for numerous stage lines which centered here and on Elm Street. At all hours of the day and night the roar and rattle of stages, the tramp of horses, and the vociferous shouts and exclamations of drivers made it almost a pandemonium. These stage taverns might be said to be similar to the business exchanges of today, being the headquarters for news from all directions, and consequently were frequented by all classes and conditions of people.
Few citizens of the present day (1889) are aware of the stage business in those days. Over 100 lines of stages ran from Boston to various points in New England, and the City Tavern was the about the head center of this stirring business, the largest stage house in Boston being the Patterson House, of 11 Elm Street, directly in the rear.

Among its notable landlords were Simeon Boyden, afterwards connected with Dwight Boyden in the management of the Tremont House… Lucius Doolittle, tavern keeper when…

At this hotel, Sept 10, 1839 occurred one of the liveliest fire ever known in the city… At about half past ten a fire broke out…It was thought that the fire would destroy all down to Dock Square…Brattle Street Church was much injured, the houses opposite were also much injured…The City Tavern presented a curious appearance…from every window in the house came pillows, quilts, beds, trunks, hats, boots etc. in quick succession hurled by Mr. Doolittle’s friends who had got into his house in order to do something. By this means, Mr. Doolittle’s loss was greatly augmented!

Under the flooring of the stable was kept a large number of hogs, which could not be rescued and perished in the flames. A most heart-rending feature of the fire also was the appalling screams of the imprisoned and burning horses, which resembled the agonized wail of human voices. To this might be added the terrific squeals of the unfortunate porkers. For a long time the air was laden with the odors of roast pork,

The immediate neighborhood of the City Tavern was not very attractive, yet a few features worth noting. An original character was John B. Pero, a mulatto, who kept a barber’s shop just at the commencement of Dock Square. He was a charming specimen of the tonsorial artist, and his shop was the resort of the gossips and newsmongers of the neighborhood. His oracular opinions on men and things were similar to those of Daniel Pratt for great originality and profundity of thought. Many substantial old West enders on coming downtown to get their morning shave made it a point to drop in on Pero and talk over the news and gossip of the day. Opposite the tavern was the second-hand clothing establishment of Jonas Clarke, John Coburn and Cyrus Foster, well-known and respected colored citizens. The last-named person was the afterwards famous Deacon Cyrus Foster. The old man had an amiable weakness for public display, and for many years marched with the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company at their display, carrying the fatigue caps of its members. For many years, his annual benefit took place, on which occasion he delivered an original address, and was the recipient of many testimonials from his admiring auditors.

Sometimes they came in the shape of wreaths composed of turnips, onions and other vegetables, and with an occasional paper bag of flour, which sometimes striking the old man on his woolly head, would distribute its contents, making him for the nonce a white man in spite of himself. These old worthies have long since passed away.

After the general introduction of railroads, the stage travel rapidly decreased, and the City Tavern by degrees lost its prestige. For many years it was maintained as a resort for railroad employees and a small class of traders…It was removed to make way for the Washington street extension.

PIX four stories…two balconies on the second and third stories…

PARK AND BEACON

BSN: “Corner of Park and Beacon, in the old Ticknor House is now the jewelry store of Trefry and Partridge. In the window is a framed hand engrossed and illuminated scroll which is here quoted:

1632 Originally Park Street was a cowpath
1662 Boston’s first almshouse was erected on this site
1682 The almshouse was burned and another erected in 1686. For many years this was the most pretentious, if not the only worthwhile building on this thoroughfare.
1708 Park Street at that time was named Centry St. and accepted by the town.
The almshouse was used for housing the British soldiers wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and until their deportation from Boston in 1776.
1795. The town voted to sell the property at Public Auction
1800 Park Street was shown on the map as extending from the Granary at the foot of the common to the almshouse on Beacon Street. At that time the thoroughfare was unattractive with its row of dirty buildings.
1801 The corner lot was purchased by Thomas Amory, a Boston merchant, who built the present house in 1804. The wine and coal cellar built at that time and extending under Park Street still exist.
1803. The highway was laid out by Bullfinch who designed the State House
1806. The building was occupied by Mrs. Catherine Carter who conducted it as a fashionable boarding house. The property was then purchased by Dr. John Jeffries, the Loyalist, a famous Revolutionary figure, who had gone to Halifax with the British troops. He returned to Boston in 1790. It was he who identified the body of Dr. Joseph Warren and cared for the wounded at the Battle of bunker Hill. He remained in this building and later moved to lower Park Street where he completed fifty six years of professional life.
1808. Gov Gore owned the premises and used the house as the governor's mansion.
1813 Park Street is mentioned as leading from Tremont St Mall to the State House.
1816 Property owned by Andrew Ritchie who delivered the annual Fourth of July Oration for the city. The next occupant was Harrison Gray Otis, leader of the Federalist party and Boston’s Cicero
1824: General Lafayette made the house his headquarters. A grand reception was held here in his honor on August.
1825. Lafayette arrived in June for the dedication of the Bunker Hill Monument. On this occasion Lafayette rode from Park and Beacon Streets in the coach now at the Wayside Inn Sudbury
1830 Prof George Ticknor purchased the property. He was possessor of a magnificent library and numbered among his friends the leading men of the time.
Before the end of the century the building was taken over for industrial purposes.

THE TENEMENT

THE LYNCH FAMILY, The Rookery, Broad Street Riot

BIBL: Irish Catholic Encyclopedia entry re Boston diocese history.

“Many have called it the “Athens of America.” “There is a growing temptation to call it the County Cork of America.”

“Irish were the uprooted peasantry from the poorest poorhouse in Europe”
“Irish workers were always two weeks away from starvation”
“The scum of creation, beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failure in the struggle for existence” – Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge
“The latter day immigrants were inferior people, whose prolific issue threatened the very foundations of Anglo-American civilization”

muckers blacklegs green-horners clodhoppers nicks – male
biddies kitchen canaries and Bridgets == female
potato “bumper”
poteen “Irish whiskey”

Ireland – British imposed illiteracy under the Penal Laws forbidding right to attend and keep school
Schools held in secrecy in fields and hedgerows. “Hedge schoolteachers”
“A most profitable crop of tenants”
(NB Goody Glover was hanged on Boston Common for saying rosary in Gaelic while kneeling before a statue of Virgin Mary” – ?)

BIBL Coming of the Irish – Leonard Patrick O’Connor Wibberley
“Adopted citizens who came to level the hills, fill up the lowlands, drain the marshes, erect docks, and map the island with its pleasant walks and spacious streets” -- William Sumner:
“Looking for freedom – from hunger”
“To the land of the ever young”
“There is a great many inconveniences here, but not empty stomachs”
Noddles I – East Boston
Irish rookeries
“A scarecrow patriot”
“Ward heeler”
“Shoulder hitter”
“Tammany Hall”
Know-Nothings – Anti-Irish Movement
?A church was blown up in Dorchester?
In Civil War…Irish became “Yankees”

BIBL: Boston Irish Thomas O’Connor

Early Irish immigrants did well to stay clear of the Boston area, whose inhabitants were predominantly Anglo-Saxon, who generally regarded the Irish as members of a barbaric, inferior, and unmanageable race, and who saw themselves as representatives of a superior English culture

St Patrick’s vermin - “They’re hanging men and women for the wearing of the green”

“In 19th century…one city in the entire world where an Irish Catholic under any circumstances should never, ever set foot = Boston.”
Lomasney: “Don’t write when you can talk; don’t talk when you can nod your head.”

1600 Mountjoy – scorched earth offensive that blackened the fields of Ireland
1605 Guy Fawkes
mid 1600s James 1 transported Scots
1652 Oliver Cromwell shipped 270 Scottish prisoners to Boston
1685 150 French Huguenots arrived
1690 William at the Boyne. Defeated Irish rebels and James to France
1691 Protestant ascendancy was complete
The Wild Geese – Soldiers of fortune
1691 Penal Laws

Pre 1790 300,000 to 400,00 from all parts of Ireland to USA “as indentured servants”
After 1600s number of non-Catholic Irish from northern Ireland exceeded that of Irish from the south – descendants of Scots settlers who were planted there by James 1
But discriminated against despite Protestantism
1716-1776 Ulster Irish immigration = 200 t0 250,000
First stayed clear of Boston, but gradually accepted after 1691 charter

1719 Boston authorities complained that “great numbers of persons have lately been transported from Ireland…concerned that too many would bring a town change
“Unclean, unwholesome and disgusting” (including Ulster Presbyterians)
Given five days to register
1719 Presbyterians from Northern Island settled in Londonderry N Hampshire
1719-1776 Ulster Protestant Irish to North America x 200,000 to 250,000
1729 Police watch called out to quell a mob of angry people who tried to prevent Irish from landing – A MEMBER OF THE LYNCH FAMILY?
1724 Irish Charitable Society

1807 James Sullivan, Irish Protestant was elected governor/grandson of Philip O’Sullivan of Limerick, a Catholic rebel who fled to France in 1691 along with other so-called Wild Geese after the victory of William of Orange. Son came to America in 1723, York, Maine and lost touch with his Catholic roots and became a Protestant/John rose to rank of brigadier-general and served under George Washington during the evacuation of Boston…was authorized to use “St Patrick” as official password of day when he le colonial troops into town…

1737 Panic rumor Catholic priest in Boston
1746 Three man committee appointed to search and enquire into the activities of Catholics – Nov 5 First Pope’s Night
1750 “200 Irish immigrants of substance”

1763 Canada – Catholic rites allowed
1765 Mayhem in Harvard after anti-Catholic lecture
1775 Washington forbade troops from holding Pope’s night
1778 French alliance – priests, sailors etc.
1779 MA Bill of Rights guaranteed freedom of conscience and worship to all
1788 Nov 2, first official Mass in Boston

Irish Catholics = small percentage 1/5 to ¼ Irish to 1776 – Most were poor/indentured
1783..Catholics numbering fewer than 100 began to practice religion openly, mostly French and Irish.
1792/96 Two French priests

John Thayer, b Boston of staunch Congregational parents converted to Catholicism in France returned to Boston in 1790 to be first English language priest
Secret Catholics came out
1790 Boston x 500 Irish Catholics
1792 Rev Matignon from France, fled revolution with his pupil Cheverus x “charm and distinction”

1803 Church of the Holy Cross was dedicated
1803 BS B81 “Cathedral of the Holy Cross established in 1803 by Jean Lefebvre de Cheverus first Catholic bishop of Boston, missionary to the Penobscot Indians, friend of President John Adams, advisor to our State legislature, one of America’s noblest priests,. He stood by the bedside of Catholic and Protestant alike.” This plaque placed by a group of Protestant businessmen in 1950….tablet in Franklin street…Spent more than a year enduring the privations and hardships of the Maine woods where he ministered to the Penobscott and Passamaquoddy Indians. Bishop Cheverus was made first bishop of Boston in 1808m and 15 years later was recalled to his homeland by the King of France.

Upper class Federalists and Jeffersonians, vied for support of small but growing number of Irish voters. But church leaders Matignon and Bishop Cheverus supported the Federalists – Political ideals of common people at variance with those of church hierarchy
Henry Cabot Lodge: “Ah the Irish…The minute one of them accomplishes anything, there’s always another one behind him with a rock, waiting to bring him down.”
Otis: “Wild Irishmen and others”
“Hordes of wild Irishmen and other disorderly people”
Alien and Sedition Acts
Backfired – Victory of Jefferson

1812 War: “Irish exiles kindled the fires that inflamed Americans against the British people” – (British minister to Washington)

1814 Irish on Dorchester heights to repel invaders – peace in 1815

1815 was one of those moments in history that mark they end of one clearly identifiable period and the beginning of another
1815 + 15 years that followed = the matrix of the modern world

England Acts of Enclosure/Corn Laws/
Late teens, early 1820s – Irish immigration to Boston, craftsmen, tradesmen etc.
1820 2000 Irish
1825 5000
1830 7000 - 8000 Irish Catholics in Boston

Mayor Josiah Quincy’s projects

Irish for Andrew Jackson “a self-proclaimed Irishman.”
Irish added their voice to clamor for change at the expense of the privileged class
Generation of Irish in the new Democratic Party

1825, July –Aug “Irish riots” – Ann and Broad Streets
“A Catholic conspiracy” – Rev. Lyman Beecher

1834 Ursuline convent burned

1837 BSN “On June 11… Broad Street riot -- a fire company (Londoners) collided with a funeral procession (Irish) Met head on. Neither would give way. Wheeled corpse up an alley. 1500 persons engaged in riot. “Pebble stones” Houses barricaded – blood spilled. Took 800 lancers and infantrymen to restore order.” Led to a reorganization of the fire dept.

1837 Little, Brown & Company founded; Mt. Holyoke College
founded; Emerson delivers his "American Scholar" Phi Beta
Kappa speech at Harvard; Horace Mann begins Massachusetts
Board of Education, reforms schools as Secretary of Education; in
1839 establishes the first state normal school to train teachers, in
Lexington, Mass.

1838 Sarah Grimko's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes appear in the
New England Spectator, English monopoly on screw manufacture
broken with the founding of the Eagle Screw Company in Rhode
Island; Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Divinity School Address"
1839 John Humphrey Noyes founds Putney free love and communist
community in Vermont; Boston Academy of Music performs
city's first instrumental concerts; Andrews Norton, A Discourse on
the Latest Form of Infidelity, attacking Emerson; Washington
Allston's exhibition at Harding Gallery, Boston first retrospective exhibition in the United States devoted to an American artist

1839 Great Hurricane

1840 Orestes Brownson, "The Laboring Classes"; first number of The
Dial, edited by Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson; Adams & Company establish express parcel service between New York and Boston; first nut and bolt factory opens in Marion, CT

1840 forty one constables constituted the entire police force of Boston. “Old Reed” and “Derastus Clapp” were the boss rogue catchers, and they were perfect terrors to evil-doers. The city was then considered quite safe with such a large band efficient corps of protectors. Clapp’s office in Franklin Street was a favorite resort of reporters in those days. There were but few of those useful gentlemen about and they were not outdriven with hard work. Tom Tileston, Tom Gill etc….were familiar faces at Clapp’s snug quarters just in the rear of Prentiss’s music store, The old man used to smoke and play checkers between the courts, and reporters were always welcome to join. Over his desk was framed a note which he had received from Rupert Choate, in his usual handwriting, which only one man in Boston could read and that was the late Amos Merrill, then a clerk in Choate’s office. Mr. Clapp was obliged to turn to him for a translation of the document, “Old Disastrous” as he was nicknamed by the rogues who fell into his clutches was keen as a briar, and a splendid judge of human nature. Oct 27, 1838, bank in Smithfield RI robbed…Clapp told be on the lookout for a man wearing a splendid black wig as a disguise…saw a well dressed spectator in the Municipal Court tw0 weeks later. “Thou art the man!” Confessed.

BS VF Oral History: Seaver 1840 –1851: “The night watchmen wore long coats which protected them from the weather, but which hardly helped accelerate their movements when in pursuit of a criminal. In one hand they carried a perforated tin lantern with a candle burning inside, and in the other a long stick with a hook on one end. It was quite easy at times to thrust this hook into the culprit’s collar and bring him up with a round turn. Naturally it was much harder to catch a man wearing no coat. The watchmen used to stand on the corners of the streets and call the hour, saying for instance, “Nine o’clock, and all is well!” After that hour they did not meet many, for nine o’clock was the conventional bedtime.
Another picturesque person who walked the streets in the evening was the oysterman. Across his shoulders he wore a yoke from each end of which was suspended a pail of oysters and as he went along he would cry, “Oy! Buy oy!” I can remember enjoying many hot oyster stews on cold winter nights,”

1841/42 Lord Morpeth’s visit to Boston: “He met the Appleton family on board and appears to have been specially impressed with Miss Fanny A…to whom frequent reference is made in the pages of his diary…On 21 October he hove to in sight of Boston…he was struck by “the city’s busy look of prosperous commerce”….he repaired to the Tremont House where he stayed all through his visit…State house…presence of the “spitting box” whose odiousness he can only approximately express by picturing Cicero provided with one of these modern utensils…A banquet in his honor at the Tremont where he met Longfellow, Choate etc…He relates a call made to Dr Channing, whose wife and daughter uttered not a syllable, though the doctor himself talked freely and affably, appearing full of faith and hope for the future, and firmly believing that democracy would at length yield such results as could be wrought by no other means of government. …Of Seward, he wrote that he wads the only public man in America who evinced the least respect for Abolition NB

1842 BSN: Dickens said “Boston is what I would like the whole United States to be. It has the best suburbs, the best society, best hotels and best appreciation of any city in the United States.”

1842 First free public art museum in the U.S., Wadsworth Athenaeum, opens in Hartford, Conn.; Massachusetts child labor law dates 10 hour day for those under 12; in speech before the Massachusetts legislature, Dorothea Dix calls for separation of the criminal and the insane

1841-47 BIBL: Brook Farm 1841 – 47 see “Archaeology of Brook Farm BS F74 W59 P36)….Emerson called the farm “a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of reason in patty pan”
Nathaniel Hawthorne : The Blythedale Romance
George Ripley, Unitarian minister from Boston, editor of Dial and co-founder of the Transcendental Club in 1840 boarded at the farm owned by Charles and Maria Ellis in 1840 – the Ellis’ interest in Transcendentalism…
Main building complex = The Hive = see Beehive…
The Eyrie = cultural center on highest elevation of land in the area, an outcrop of Roxbury puddingstone.
The Cottage was another building built in early 1840s by a Roxbury woman who departed Brook Farm with its shift to Fourierism.
A Danish gardener
A Swiss engineer.
Fourier described the ideal community, the Phalanx, consisting of 1600 members, living in a self-sufficient community called a Phalanstery, covering about three square miles..
In March 1846, fire destroyed the Phalanstery, while most members were at a dance in the Hive…
Ironically, Brook Farm made a rapid transition from Utopian community to almshouse when it was purchased for that purpose by the town of Roxbury in 1849
In 1855 clergyman James Freeman Clarke purchased farm, though little known about it until it was loaned to the US government for Massachusetts Second Infantry Regiment training ground, Came Andrew. Robert Gould Shaw received his military training at Camp Andrew. Camp closed in July 1861, although John Sears reported that the camp continued to serve as a convalescent camp, where numerous soldiers were buried…
1871: Association of the Evangelical Lutheran Church for works of Mercy” – orphans, aged and cemetery.
In 1944 the orphanage was closed down and the property loaned to the Commonwealth for use by state-approved foster parents to care for neglected children…
Brook Farm Home was opened in 1949 as a treatment center for disturbed children. Closed its doors for good in 1974…MDC acquired property in 1988.”s

bibl Hawthorne’s Journals
BS A 91 Brook Farm, “Formerly the Communists’ Home”…headline 1876
Brook Farm lies near the boundaries of Newton and Dedham, in the extreme southwestern portion of West Roxbury…Sole remaining cottage is Gothic in style, with four gables containing four rooms in each story, simple in style…outside the house the landscape is pleasing through not very picturesque, although several large rocks a road or two from the house show there ragged sides in bold relief.
Hawthorne, April 13 1841: Here I am in Polar Paradise. Provide yourself with a good stock of furs, and if you can, the skin of a polar bear. You will find it a very suitable summer dress for this region. I have not yet taken my first lesson in agriculture, except that I went to see our cows foddered. We have eight of our own and the number is now increased by a transcendental heifer belonging to Mrs. Margaret Fuller. He also complains that the cows were troublesome owing to the inexperience of their milkers.
The scheme was unsuccessful from the beginning although some of the finest minds in America present …Hawthorne, Dana, Curtis, Owen, Ripley, Shaw, Higginson, Codman, Emerson, Fuller, Mrs. Horace Mann (then Miss Peabody) and many others dwelt here and labored for the common good. Dissensions arose and one dark Saturday evening several of the cottages were destroyed by fire….They separated and went back into the busy world, wiser than when they came, realizing that the port’s dream of rural happiness in such a home could not be fulfilled in the stern soil of New England.

Dial 1840 -1844
Brooke Farm – “The Sentimental Class”
Thoreau: “Again and again, I congratulate myself on my so-called poverty. I could not overcome the advantage”
The curtained corner at the Old Corner Book Store Washington and School Street

1843 BS 66
Church attendance in Boston on a pleasant Sabbath in January
Orthodox – Park Street Old South etc …6100
Episcopal 2200
Catholic 10,700
Unitarian 6,200

1843 Massachusetts passes law forbidding state authority to capture fugitive slaves; Methodist Episcopal church splits over slavery, with abolitionists forming Wesleyan Methodist Church; insane asylum opens in Dorchester, Mass.; Goodyear Metallic Rubber Shoe
Company, later Uniroyal, begins in Naugatuck, Conn.; Elias Howe invents first practical sewing machine in Hartford; Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico

1843, June 17 Bunker Hill monument dedicated, Daniel Webster delivered the oration. Cornerstone was laid by Lafayette on June 17, 1825. Cost $150,000.
BSN Celebration of completion of the Bunker Hill monument June 17, 1843 was the grandest civic and military display ever made in the US. As high as $20 was paid for seats in windows on Washington Street to view the parade. Oration by Daniel Webster. Pres of US and his cabinet were present. Toll taken at Charlestown and Warren bridges amounted to $1,500.

1844 BSN: Originating in Dedham in and immediately adopted in Boston was a ruse to avoid the stringent liquor laws: Wherever holiday was being held, there was sure to be a booth bearing a placard “The Striped Pig on Exhibition.” In this booth liquor would be served. For years The Striped Pig was used as a synonym for a glass of liquor.

BS F 3 Jan and Feb 1844, most severe frosts affecting harbor, when a solid field of ice extended down the harbor for a distance of 9 miles…cold snap started 25th January when temperature was 2 degrees below…on the 27th it was 8 degree below.
“The ice extended in one unbroken mass from the wharves southeasterly through what is called the west or Back way, as far as the narrows. Toward Broad sound, for about one and a half miles in the direction of Fort Independence, the ice is fixed. For some distance beyond the water is open, but still farther beyond, as far as the Lower Middle, abreast of Spectacle Island, the ice is fixed. Beyond this there is much drifting ice, which moves back and forth with the tide. The weather continues severely cold, with a cutting north west wind.
On Jan 30 afternoon meeting of merchant…the steamer Britannia then frozen in her dock advertised to sail on the Thursday
Operations commenced on the ice by Mr. Hunt, a pilot who under took the labor, a force of 500 men being put on the work…On Wednesday am a dispatch was sent to Fresh Pond for ice ploughs, and all the necessary equipment for cutting ice.
The distance to be opened was about 10 miles and was covered by an unbroken surface of ice from six to 12 inches thick. The harbor literally covered as far as the eye could see by men, horses and apparatus, as well as thousands of men and boys on skates, horses and sleighs, boats on runners and tents for the protection of the men at work. So solidly frozen that ox teams crossed over from Point Shirley to Deer Island.
The ice men commenced ops at both ends … at the ferry and the outer ends of the ice...and worked toward each other and at 12 o clock on Friday the two gangs of men were within half a mile of each other, The channel however was not completed until till Saturday the third of Feb and at 11 o’clock the Britannia steamed down the cut and passed the outer Graves at 12 o’clock.

BS U56 “1844 harbor freeze eyewitness: “We stepped from terra firma at the end of Long Wharf, sliding down a rope which has often served to conduct us to the deck of the Coquette and the Flirt when bound on an aquatic excursion, and landed in the ice field ten feet below high water mark. An ambitious competitor seeking to monopolize the business of toll ferries and bridges, eloquent in his recommendation of a ladder passage for a “small consideration,”
We trudged on over the slushy surface to the Narrows. A motley crowd of men, boys and a few fair adventurers, from all grades of society, horses and sleighs were wending their way to the ice cutting operation.
We encountered several suspicious looking booths, some consisting of a hand sled loaded with demijohns, jugs, bottles and glasses displayed in tempting circles on a temporary bar. A strip of cotton cloth stretched on poles set in the ice screened the vendor of poison from the cold wind, while he paced back and forth, advertising in guttural tones the stock the “critter”
Arriving at a point about a quarter of a mile from Fort Independence, we observed the process of cutting a channel through the ice. A horse attached to an ice plough cut grooves in the surface, in which men followed with long saws, cutting it into blocks from twenty five to seventy five feet square. The blocks were then broken out and the ebbing tides floated them away. Several adventurous spirits, bent on enjoying their expedition to the utmost, took passage down stream on the moving cakes, escaping to the solid field when the danger of a wider range of water stared them in the face,
Several express lines were kept running between the city and the scene, their drivers reaching a rich harvest. Most of those who went down the harbor took occasion to visit the Castle. The actions of the waves had formed an artificial terrace of s\the frozen ice, which served as steps to the top of the embankment. Following the popular current, we passed on to the entrance of the Fort, when we found ourselves in medeas res consisting of half-uniformed soldiers, dogs and munitions of war. From the top of the battlement, the frozen field presented a novel scene, dotted over with squads of men, whose Lilliputian dimensions gave them the appearance of so many flocks of black birds flitting over the ice. Quitting the stronghold of Uncle Sam, we sought the nearest point of main land, and struck across the ice to South Boston Point, reaching which we availed of omnibus conveyance to the city.”

1844 BSH149 Great Whig mass meeting on Boston Common in September

1844 Jews finally permitted to be buried in Massachusetts
(1852 Boston’s first Congregation -- Ohabei Shalom – meets in the present Charles Playhouse South End. Boston has less than 50 Jewish families. 1880s Eastern European Jews begin arriving in Boston en masse. First they settle in the North and South Ends and, at the turn of the century, the West End.
1906 Adath Jeshurun, the first Orthodox Synagogue in Boston to be built by Jews on its own land in their own community. Opened September 14, 1906 in Roxbury’s Blue Hill Avenue. Today the building thrives as the 1st Haitian Baptist Church.
1845 Charles Sumner – Faneuil Hall – “Evils of War” –“the young man has cut his own throat”

1846, September 30 Ether “rectified sulphuric ether” x William Morton/Thomas Green x dentistry
1846, October 16 Ether x patient – operation by Dr. John Warren

1846 Boston 850 licensed liquor dealers
1849 1,200!

Father Mathew vs. The saloon

1846 BS B89 Cornerstone of the Howard Theater off Scollay Square laid. For the next thirty years the carriages rolled down Beacon Hill and silk hats were lined up in the cloakroom as Boston blue bloods turned out to see the best actors of the day. Junius Brutus Booth played Hamlet there many times and his three sons, JB Jr. Edwin and John Wilkes also appeared.
Meanwhile on the first floor the Otis S. Neal brewery continued to bottle ale and beer at a lively pace day and night.
By 1870, the day of the legitimate drama at the Howard was over. Melodrama and variety began to fill the bill…AS the theater’s tone dropped, profits rose. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a popular booking as was Cody’s own mammoth combination of 25 first class artists riding their horses on stage in Twenty Days….
Around the turn of the century, Dr. G.E. Lothrop, one of Boston’s greatest showmen took over the Howard Athenaeum, by then known as the Old Howard. Under his management the theater entered its burlesque era….
After its invention in 1928, the striptease became the main attraction…Since then strippers have given top billing at the Howard keeping the seats occupied for afternoon, evening and Friday midnight performances.
It would be difficult to find a man in Boston who has not been to the Old Howard at least once. Practically every college student in the area has cut classes at some time or other to make the early show on Monday “before the censor cuts it.” Harvard students are traditionally regarded as among the Howard’s loyal patrons…..SEE article Old Howard/George Manning

1845 Severe potato famines in Ireland accelerate Irish emigration; Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century; Rufus Porter's
Scientific American founded; Horace Mann, Lectures on Education
1846 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from an Old Manse; the ballet
Giselle makes its American debut at Boston's Howard Athenaeum;
William Morton demonstrates use of ether during surgery at
Massachusetts General Hospital; Boston Stock Exchange founded

1847 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline; Samuel Colt receives
federal order for guns and sets up factory city in Hartford, Conn.;
Horace Bushnell, Views of Christian Nurture

“Native Americans” alarmed by the first wave of Irish-Catholic immigration were thunderstruck with what took place in 1840s and 1850s – “Black Forties”
Irish living in squalor, herded together in the congested streets of the North End or in dilapidated houses on the once fashionable Fort Hill district, they cling to the wharves and try to survive.
1847 In a single year, Boston which was already absorbing immigrants at rate of 4000 to 5000 a year received 37,000 newcomers, most of whom were listed as Irish laborers
1847, April 10 1,000 landed in a single day
Famine Irish: pallid, weak, disease riddled, half-starved.
“a massive lump in the community, undigested, indigestible” Hamlin
By 1850 = 35,000 Irish in Boston – by 1855 = 50,000, a third increase

1847 “When the terrible ship fever raged among the Irish immigrants – a quarantine station set up on Deer Island… like earlier Indians, hundreds of stricken Irish.

1847 BSN: “A posse of ladies ..about 40 in all, in the village of Utica, MI, secretly assembled and destroyed a bowling alley with axes, hatchets and hammers, which was 80 feet long, it was the cause of much domestic trouble to them. What are the ladies thinking about in regard to the multiplication of these nuisances in Boston.” Boston Almanac, July 15, 1847

“Two stillborn infants found buried in a rubbish dump”

1848 First chewing gum manufacturer established at Bangor, Me.; New
England Female Medical School opens in Boston; James Russell
Lowell, The Biglow Papers (first series) and A Fable for Critics
1849 Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government; Francis
Parkman, The Oregon Trail, Charles Summer argues unsuccessfully
for school desegregation before Massachusetts Supreme Judicial
Court in the Roberts case schools remain segregated for another 6 years

1849 Quarantine station permanent
1849 “Fort Hill x underground habitations” cholera
1849 Benjamin Roberts suit on behalf of five year old Sarah Roberts denied admission to school on basis of color – lost case. -- Racial segregation of school ruled legal 1854, Apr 18 General Court passed law against exclusivism

BS F47 1850, Sept 27 Auction sale for tickets etc. Jenny Lind Concert…$625 a ticket! Her hotel suite decorated at a cost of $13,000!!

BSN: From 1850 to 1855 the number of naturalized voters in Boston increased almost 300 percent, while the number of native voters increased 14 %. In 1855 the number of MA parentage was less than the number of Irish parentage. The persecuted minority had become “the poor downtrodden majority.” -- 1850 Boston population was 136,831 of whom 30,000 were immigrants

Boston had retained its Anglo-Saxon Protestant character long after NY and Phil had become metropolitan centers “alien culture and detested religion” “aged, blind, paralytic and lunatic”
“Catholic menace”
American Party x highly secret x Know-Nothing-party because its members pledged never to say a word “I Know Nothing”
Northern precursor of KKK
Temperance Liberty Protestantism versus Rome, Rum and Robbery

21-year residency law
King James Bible compulsory
Abolished all Irish militia
“Nunnery Committee” – 1855
“Visitations”

1856 Rise of American Party
Know-Nothings to make stand against rising Irish tide
Temperance, Liberty and Protestantism
“Nunnery Committee”
Brahmin response pre-civil war = American Protective League APL “Upper Mississippi”
1893 “A massacre of heretics”
East Boston July 4 march prohibited. Killed a catholic x Willis
Immigration Reduction League
“The lowering of a great race” HC Lodge

But slavery issue was topic of the day, not the Irish menace. Millard Fillmore won one state = MD
For a time Civil War neutralized tensions between Yankee and the Celt…problem of controlling the immigrant became secondary to saving the Union
1861 Jan 12 – The Pilot “stand by the Union, fight for the Union; die for the Union” – Made it clear they were willing to fight to save the Union but not to free the slaves.
Irish 9th – the green banner was always in the forefront of the fightin

THE NORTHWESTMAN

David McKay, Clipper ship, Cape Horn, San Francisco

The pride of the city in the 1840s was the waterfront with its spacious docks and wharves, the veritable forest of masts and the wealth of snowy canvas. For these were the days of the clipper ships. No other city in the US could rival the beauty of the picture presented by Boston Harbor when full-rigged ships entered laden with fruits and spices from the Mediterranean lands, or left with cargoes outward bound. From the present Dover Street bridge on the south to Charlestown Bridge on the north was a line of wharves: Russia, Liverpool, and Fort Hill; Arch wharf for the West Indies trade; the two Foster wharves for the European trade; Rowe’s wharf to which the fruit importers came; India Wharf center of the East Indies business which was controlled by the Parkmans, Lymans, and Wigglesworths, as the cotton market was mostly dominated by the Fays, Cunningham’s and Storers. Usually the merchants had their counting houses and warehouses on the wharves into which their ships came. On Sunday mornings picnic parties gathered at the interesting waterfront to see the many craft in full rig. In addition to the clipper ships there were steamboats arriving and departing occasionally. Samuel Cunard established his fleet in 1840, the first ship the Britannia setting sail for Boston from Liverpool for Boston on July 4, 1840. Boston was the exclusive American port of destination until 1848. BSN

“Not one Boston Northwestman failed to round the Cape safely”
BIBL Some Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston

BSN “In the days of the clipper ships when the fortunes of nearly all Bostonians were involved in the China trade, there were ten or a dozen flagstaffs on top of the old State House. On these staffs the flags of the different merchants were displayed when their returning ships were sighted outside the harbor.”

(1810) Daniel Mackay, b Nova Scotia
Boston vessels so well built completed four to every three by British or Dutch
Medford x Mystic shipbuilding
Thatcher Magoun
Kent – F Street S. Boston
McKay – East Boston Yard

BSN: Capt William Phelps, b 1802, who took his clipper around the Horn to California used to say that the stage coach ride from Lexington to Boston was the most dangerous part of the voyage.
The clipper ship “Herald of the Morning” in a voyage to California struck a sperm whale head on and lost seven foot of her bow, necessitating throwing overboard part of her cargo to prevent sinking. “The whale also suffered.”

BSN Occasionally clipper captains took their wives along, and in China and India merchants vied with one another in offering them costly gifts and lavish entertainment. One of these seafaring women, Mrs. Patten, 19-year-old wife of a Boston skipper proved herself a heroine off Cape Horn during the cold and stormy winter of 1856. With the first mate under suspension for dereliction of duty, her husband stricken with brain fever, and the second officer unable to navigate, she commanded the 1,600 ton clipper during the remaining 52 day passage to San Francisco, at the same time nursing her husband back to health.

1840 Charles Sumner “Governor Corwin regarded the war against Mexico as a thing got up to extend the area of slavery. He was right and he knew he was. It was the last act in the drama of the Texas spoliation. Texas belonged to and was part of Mexico. Sam Huston and other leading spirits who wished to extend and strengthen the slave power in America went to Texas, got into a quarrel with the Mexican government, had a war, whipped Santa Anna at San Jacinto, won the land and established the republic of Texas. Soon afterward under the administration of President Polk, it was admitted into the Union as a slave state, with a proviso that out of the territory three other states, with or without slavery, could hereafter be made and become parts of our Union.
This was all fought and talked over in the presidential campaign of 1844…
Out of the annexation of Texas grew the Mexican war, The theory of Continental domination or “manifest destiny” was then the popular delusion.

1844 BSN It was during the same year 1844 that Enoch Train started a line of Liverpool packets and these continued for 15 years, until the general use of steamships brought their career to an end.

BIBL: Two Bostonian Missions to the Frontier Indians 1810-1860 William McLaughlin Brown
“As Francis Wayland put it as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Boston in 1824 “one object of foreign missions is to render every heathen village into “as happy and gladsome a place as the loveliest village that smiles on the New England landscape.” Missions to the native Americans were to produce the same effect: When Missionaries went from the missionary rooms to the heathen, the salvation they took with them was inseparably bound up with that definite New England culture of which they were a product
Clifton J. Phillips “…”the foreign mission movement made Boston a representative name for the New World in Smyrna, Canton, Honolulu or Bombay.”

BS U60 “descr. 1840s…Tremont Street houses fronting on the Mall, their windows overlooked the hilly country beyond Charles River as well as that nearer and orderly throng that on Sunday afternoons after second church (sadly departed custom) promenaded in two opposing columns over the brick pavement outside the rail of the Common. These endless processions were composed almost entirely of our native population, from the wealthiest mercantile or profoundest professional or literary, through all stages of social arrangement. The Lawrence brothers – the affable Abbot bowing to most everybody he met – the grave Appletons, absorbed in pious or business thought, the Carys, Eliots, Quincy’s Bradlees, Curtises, Judge Bigelow, always in conversation on higher things, Bancroft the historian, as well as young fellows with their marmalet madams, or others in mere gander companionship, staid man and wife, and girls firmly braced arm-in-arm scorning male protection – all of these treading close upon each others heels as an old fashioned funeral, but at a brisker pace, round and round they went, over the Tremont, park, Beacon, Charles and Boylston paves, a circuit of a mile and a third, meeting each other twice in every round….This
mutual observation by meeting in opposite procession lent life and interest to hours of walking, and its was only when the setting sun or keen demands of appetite reminded them of supper that the throng vanished like a phantom

“These once exclusive parlors and chambers, as well as all the rest of the elegant houses between Winter and Boylston streets, fronting on Tremont Street mall, have been surrender to trade of every description – fancy goods, millinery, groceries, auction marts, organs and pianos, baccantic labyrinths that mock at the screen law, horrid dentistry, taxidermy, carriages and saddlery, furniture, carpets, beer cellars, pictures, Eichberg Conservatory of Music, and five times as many more artistic or vulgar pursuits. The change ahs been as silent and imperceptible as it is now most thoroughly accomplished in the fall of the last of the Tremont Mall homes

The mecca of present day shoppers, the section of Boston including Tremont, Boylston, Summer, Winter, Franklin and Tremont Pl. constituted in 1840, the most popular residential portion of the city…The illumination of these streets, both residential and business, calls to mind quaint pictures, for at evening lamp lighters walked abut the streets, each one carrying a ladder and having a pail of whale sperm oil on each side of a yoke worn over his shoulders. There were omnibuses and carriage to transport people from Bowdoin Square and other central points to the outlying towns, and Boston had no fewer than eight railroad stations.
The population of Boston in 1840 was 125,000 and by 1850 it had increased to 160,000.

BS H 9 Pagoda Building Washington/State considered a skyscraper at the time. Double cornice which suggested an oriental pagoda…seen as first attempt to beautify the outside of a building in Boston. Quincy granite…seven stories... six upper stories for residential purposes and the street floor for a haberdasher’s store, first Chaffin

1846 The whole Back Bay was a salt marsh. Early on an autumn morning, he used to shoulder his shotgun, step from his backyard into his boat and go out for a day’s fowling. (House was on one of little lanes leading off Pleasant Street, not far from Tremont.)
The duck guns in those days were tremendous things, six feet long muzzleloaders, with either flint locks or percussion caps. Frequently during the shooting season he would bring home a dozen brace of curlew, sand peep, plover, wild geese, yellowlegs, coot or black duck from spots now occupied by the public library, Symphony Hall and Beacon Street residences. Flocks of 200 or more wild geese grouped in the letter A were then a familiar sight over this section, and hunters used to lie in wait for them under the walls along the shore.
In those days the tidewater used to come up to Arlington and even as far as Charles Street. The Public Garden was shoreline until 1837. Boylston Street projected out into the water about as far as the present entrance to the subway and in it was located one of the two city hay scales. Tidewater then came up to Church Street, covered upper Tremont nearly down to Pleasant, and Shawmut Ave was beach gravel up to Dover St. Upper Tremont Street was then known as Dyke road, and the almost “centenarian” remembers well how water used to come right up to Dyke road all along the way to Roxbury.

BIBL A Journal of A Voyage to California Edward Everett 1840s. “A stop at Valparaiso was a pleasant change. The passengers hired donkeys and galloped through the streets, attended bull and cock fights, and found relief from the ship’s far in tropical fruits and drinks”

BIBL The Clipper Ship Era Arthur H. Clark
The Building of the Ship Longfellow
The Tale of Our Merchant Ships Charles Cartwright
The Argonauts of ’49 Octavius T. Howe

1848 Visit to Boston of the Chinese junk Keying bizarre in decoration with elaborate saloons, cabins and a joss house containing the 18-handed idol “Chin-Tee, the teakwood junk registered 800 tons, was shaped like a Spanish galleon, and displayed wooden anchors and thatched mat sails.

1849+ BS A89 The Calcutta Trade, art Feb 1876…for many years Salem controlled this branch of commerce. Elias Haskel Derby, once rated the largest ship owner in world. But Boston soon obtained superior position, and the last vessel that ever went from Salem was the George belonging to Mr. Joseph Peabody. For many years it was carried on from Boston by BA Gould, Samuel Austin and others in ships such as the Arno, Beta, Hoogly, and Dover, vessels generally of less than 300 tons burthern. These ships carried supercargoes and clerks, and their homeward cargoes were purchased at Calcutta with species carried in the ships. After a while the old line of merchants passed and with them their old fashioned ships, and the snug, safe and conservative way of doing business. In 1840 the whole American trade consisted of 21 ships cargoes bringing home seventeen thousand tons of goods and only worth here one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
In 1849 the California trade commenced, and from that time to 1857 a new class of ships began to be built. Extreme clippers from 1000 to 1400 tons burden were the popular class of vessels, and the favorite route of these famous ships was from San Francisco to Calcutta, where they obtained freights for Boston, not New York. Letters of credit could be obtained at that time on the best London bankers by almost any “good looking young man” on State street for any amount, The business had been profitable in the past and many of the old conservative merchants had grown rich in this trade, and Boston had become the great market for all the various drugs, dyestuffs, gums and products of the vast Indian empire. With the facilities afforded by liberal credits and the then newly established bonded warehouses in Boston, the Calcutta trade was greatly extended and every year from 1850 witnessed the entering of some aspiring new aspirant for wealth …
In 1857 this trade had reached its greatest importance…Ships arrived from Calcutta at Boston, 96, with 147,000 tons goods…Ships from Calcutta a t New York, 22, with 37,000 tons goods.
Total imports 189,000 tons worth $14,200,000
Including 1,121,000 packets of linseed, 6.000,000 pieces of gunnies and great quantities of Ginger, hides, jute, indigo, lac dye, hemp, rice, saltpeter, castor oil, sheep skins, goat hides

1851 Herman Melville, Moby Dick; Maine is first state to prohibit sale
of alcoholic beverages

1851 Flying Cloud
1852 American Navigation Club challenged English to race
Sovereign of the Seas = 19 knots

1853 Great Republic Queen of all clippers, christened with water – burned in New York
1853 Boston harbor police started as rowboat manned by two men – they spent most of their time fishing

Panic of 1857

1857 Calcutta Trade… In that famous and eventful year many fortunes were shipwrecked…One Monday morning of that year could be seen seven magnificent ships of over one thousand tons each, lying off in the harbor, just arrived from the East Indies…Cargoes largely linseed and gunny bags and cloth…and New York was compelled to come to Boston for linseed supplies. But that year 1857 the Calcutta trade received a blow from which it never recovered…Nearly all the young merchants that entered into the trade with such energy, but without experience or capital, met with sad misfortunes. The business was entirely overdone, goods accumulated in vast quantities, and many firms were ruined. About this time NY began to ask, Why do we go to Boston to buy our linseed? Cannot we import it ourselves?

1860’s end of the glory period -- At the end of the clipper ship era, Boston was a metropolis of wealth and refinement, the richest city for her size in the world.

1868 Cunard to New York…But returned in 1870