19th Century Tobogganing on Corey Hill

A winter storm in Brookline today brings sledders to local hills, carrying all manner of conveyance for children and adults alike: classic Flexible Flyers; modern plastic models in a variety of shapes and colors; even cardboard boxes and purloined cafeteria trays.

130 years ago, it also brought tobogganers to go whizzing down the most celebrated toboggan run in the Boston area: the steep chutes of the Corey Hill Toboggan Club.

Operating each winter, from December 1886 to February 1895, chutes ran from a clubhouse on Winchester Street across the then undeveloped lower slope of Corey Hill to a spot on Harvard Street approximately where the Chabad Center of Brookline (496 Harvard Street) is today.

The toboggan chutes of the Corey Hill Toboggan Club. Looking from Winchester Street toward Harvard Street, 1886. Photo courtesy of the Public Library of Brookline. (Click on image for larger, zoomable view.)

A Canadian Import Comes to Brookline 

Toboggans – and the word toboggan – originated with indigenous peoples of North America, who used them to transport items across snowy landscapes. Recreational tobogganing began in Canada, most notably on Mount Royal in Montreal where the Montreal Toboggan Club opened three slides in 1879.

Tobogganing soon spread across the U.S. border. The Corey Hill Toboggan Club was formed in November 1886, and quickly became known as the best facility in the northeast. 

Construction of a clubhouse and chutes began immediately after the formation of the club. The clubhouse stood approximately where 197-199 Winchester Street is today. By December 1886 there were three chutes in place, one of the three starting from a platform at the top of the clubhouse 12 feet above the level of Winchester Street. That made for a rapid 42-foot drop to the level of the meadow that ran to Harvard Street. 

In early December, the club successfully petitioned the Brookline Electric Light Company to have poles places along Harvard Street to provide power to light the chutes at night. By Christmas, the electric lights were in place.

When a 300-strong contingent of the Montreal snowshoe and toboggan club Le Trappeur  visited Massachusetts in February 1887, members of the three-month old Corey Hill Toboggan Club were their main escort in a large parade through the streets of Boston. 

The Le Trappeur club of Montreal marching down Beacon Street in Boston from the State House as shown in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, February 12, 1887

 
 

A lack of snow prevented the Canadians from trying the Brookline slides, but they did take back to Montreal an oil painting showing two club members, Massachusetts governor Oliver Ames and 20-year old Florence Peck of Boston, flying down the Corey Hill chute on a toboggan. Peck, whose father was on the executive committee of the club, presented the painting to Montreal mayor Honoré Beaugrand at a State House reception.  

A month later, several members of the Brookline club visited their one-time guests for the winter carnival in Montreal. 
 

The “Best and Most Expensive” Slide  

By the winter of 1887-88, there were at least five toboggan slides in the Boston area. They included a slightly older Brookline club at Wright’s Hill, near Boylston Street and Reservoir Lane, and facilities in Dorchester, Cambridge, and Malden. But, reported the Boston Globe in a lengthy article on tobogganing, “the Corey Hill slide is by far the best and most expensive one.”  

The chutes, reported the Globe, were not as long as some of the others in the area, “but the management finds that it is more pleasing to the members to have them short and steep instead of long and gradual.” In fact, wrote the Globe reporter, the Corey Hill chute was the steepest in the country. 

Tobogganing on Corey Hill, as seen in a later article in the Boston Globe (January 15, 1893)

 

The club grew to more than 300 members that second winter of its existence, including residents of Brookline, Back Bay, and other parts of Boston and neighboring communities. The clubhouse was enlarged to include a waiting room with a fireplace on the lower floor, a smoking room, bathrooms, a kitchen for preparing meals and refreshments, and a storage area for toboggans so that club members did not have to carry them to the site each time.  

The chutes themselves had water poured on top of the packed snow where it would freeze and provide a smooth sliding surface. A well was sunk and pipe was laid along the length of the chutes to keep them watered. Innovations in later years includes a tilting platform at the top and a motor-driven return chute to bring toboggans back up the hill for additional runs or storage.  

Articles in the Brookline and Boston newspapers described the thrill of taking a toboggan down the Corey Hill chutes. Here’s how the Boston Globe described it in December 1887:

“A push, a rush of cold air, and you fall through space more like a meteor than anything else. It is not a slide; it is a flying hop-step-and-jump to the foot of that 100-foot slope. Even then the speed seems to increase, but the novice feels that the toboggan is sliding over something solid, and that is a crumb of comfort. In quicker time than it takes to read, much less write it, the toboggan flies straight out over the dip or second fall and comes down with a flop, but without wavering in its wild career continues scurrying down the incline.”

Novices, said the Globe, find “their sensations of fright and delight so inextricably mixed that they can’t tell which is uppermost. And the beauty of the whole thing is the sensation does not wear away as your trips become more frequent.”  

An 1893 article in the Boston Post, written under the pseudonym “Amy Robsart,” described one woman’s experience going down the Corey Hill chute this way:  

“I took a long breath and shut my eyes. – ! – !
There were two consecutive bumps half way down that made me open them, and I saw flying bits of Biela’s comet and thousands of starry dazzlements in a flight through the air. That is probably the nearest I shall ever approximate to flying….
My bangs stood up straight, my hat flapped wildly on the firm pivot of my hat pin, there was a trail of hairpins in my wake.
‘Where am I at?’ I inquired a little ruefully when I had been picked out of the snow and had smoothed my ruffled plumage.
But it was fun!
Fun with the keen edge of fear that gives it the fascination that it is.” 

Clothing, Class, and Gender  

Toboggans, toboggan slides or chutes, and the thrill of participating were not the only elements of this popular recreational activity to cross the border from Canada.  Tobogganing fashion also followed the Canadian model. Members of the Corey Hill club, and other clubs, wore outfits modeled on those of Canadian clubs, with each club having its own colors.  

The c1880 photo at left shows men and women of a Montreal toboggan club in their club outfits. (Photo courtesy of the McCord Museum). Similar outfits can be seen in an 1886  advertisement in the Brookline Chronicle, top right, and an illustration of Corey Hill tobogganers in an 1888 story, bottom right. (Click image for a larger view)

 

More significant were class and gender elements of tobogganing that were common in Canada and were replicated in Brookline and other American communities. As Canadian scholar Gillian Poulter wrote in a 1999 dissertation (later turned into a book) on sport, spectacle, and identity in Montreal:  

“Forming clubs and building slides and club houses was a means by which club members differentiated and separated themselves from the poorer classes. By demarcating specific areas as club property, and by adopting blanket suit costumes, the professional and commercial middle-class tobogganers were in no danger of having to share their slides with ‘the great unwashed,’ who in any case probably had little time and energy to spare for such diversions.”

At Corey Hill, a club membership cost $3, later increased to $5. Club members had to wear their club badge – an example is shown below – to use the toboggan chutes. The club outfits – not required, but common – and the toboggans themselves added additional costs. The club drew members – including at least two Massachusetts governors -- from Brookline as well as the Back Bay and other areas.  

Photo courtesy of the Public Library of Brookline

It’s not known if there were specific ethnic restrictions in the club’s bylaws, but it is worth noting that although Brookline had a substantial, largely working class, Irish-American population by this time there are no Irish surnames shown in the many articles in the Brookline and Boston newspapers that listed officers and participants in the club’s activities  

(The Country Club in Brookline, which was started just four years before the Corey Hill Toboggan Club and had its own history of restrictive membership policies, also had its own toboggan slide during this period.) 

Men and Women Together on the Slopes  

The thrilling ride down a toboggan chute presented opportunities for a kind of closeness not usually considered proper for young couples. As the Toronto literary magazine The Week put it in an 1885 article:  

“When Florence or Charlotte has to be tightly encircled in the grasp of an admiring pilot, down the glittering descent, the pair feel the mutual dependence and responsibility, which often leads them to courtship in earnest.”  

In her dissertation, Gillian Poulter notes that Canadian newspapers sometimes described the sensation of tobogganing for women in what she described as “surprisingly eroticised terms”. The Brookline News, in an article on tobogganing published on Christmas Day, 1886, was more circumspect:. “There are some things about it [tobogganing],” wrote the News, “that never will and never can get into any newspaper.”   

The same article in the News did include a description of another part of tobogganing with particular appeal for young couples: the climb together back up the hill. The article quoted a pamphlet on tobogganing, together with an illustration of “The Uphill Road,”:

"Uphill we clambered, and as I felt the gloved hand of Dick’s younger sister upon my sustaining arm, I wished the climb might have been twice the distance; and right here I want to say that if ever a woman looks fresh and young and irresistibly lovely it is when at the top of a climb up a toboggan slide she stops with her cheeks flushed, her lips parted, and her eyes shining with the exertion [of the climb].”

In January 1888, the Brookline News shared what a couple of magazines had to say about what was on the minds of young couples on the Corey Hill slopes:

"Puck [a humor magazine) says if you have the right kind of girl, the walk up the toboggan slide is just as exciting as the ride down. And sometimes more so. It's a glorious sport both ways."
- Brookline News, January 14, 1888

“Ethel: Which toboggan slide to you like best, Corey’s Hill or Wright’s Hill?
Mabel: Oh ! Corey’s Hill, don’t you? It’s so much steeper that the men have to hold on to – er – the toboggans ever so much tighter.” 
- Brookline News, January 21, 1888 (Reprinted from the Harvard Lampoon)

Tobogganing Seasons Come and Gone  

Club members and their guests continued to climb Corey Hill to use the club’s chutes through the winter of 1894-95. Many more came out to watch.  As many as 500 people were reported on the slopes at times, with as many as 150 actually going down the chutes.  

A good tobogganing season depended, of course, on having enough snow. Activity rarely began before January, and there were years where very little tobogganing took place. (A January 28, 1888, Brookline Chronicle article noted there had been 30 nights of tobogganing so far that season and that they hoped to break the previous records of 55 nights.)  

Social events at the clubhouse were a big part of the Corey Hill Toboggan Club’s activities, whether there was actually tobogganing or not. There were musical performances by club members, “smokers” (probably male-only social gatherings) and “ladies’ nights.”   

There were carnivals on the slopes, modeled on those that were held in Montreal and elsewhere. (The 1893-94 season, for example, included an “Illumination Night,” with fireworks, fire balloons and bonfires, and a “Fancy Dress Carnival.”) In the last years of the club, these social events received more attention in the local press than the actual tobogganing.  

The winter of 1894-95 was the last to see tobogganing on the chutes of the Corey Hill Toboggan Club. In December 1895, the Brookline Chronicle reported that the club was planning several elaborate entertainments for the next three or four months. But on January 18, 1896, the Chronicle asked “What is the matter with the Corey Hill Toboggan Club this winter? Will the gentle art of harmless chuteing [sic] be allowed to become extinct?”  

That same week, the Boston Post, in a brief article titled “Tobogganing on Corey Hill,” reported:  

“The lovers of tobogganing in the city will probably not have a chance this winter to enjoy the sport at the Corey Hill Toboggan Club. The chute is all falling to pieces and ditches are dug through the field where the chute makes its course.  

A meeting of the directors of the Corey Hill Club was held last Christmas, but nothing definite was done in regard to fixing up the slide. "

The demise of the Corey Hill Toboggan Club was no doubt due to growing residential development in this part of Brookline in the wake of the laying out of the Beacon Street boulevard and the coming of the streetcar a decade earlier.   

By 1897, the club, it’s clubhouse, and its celebrated toboggan chutes were no more. (See the maps below for a detailed view of the change.)  

These segments from the 1893 (top) and 1900 (botom) Brookline atlases show the northwest side of Corey Hill. The approximate location of the toboggan chutes has been added as an orange line. The clubhouse of the Toboggan Club is at the high point on Winchester Street in the 1893 map. 

By 1900, Verndale, Kenwood, Henry (now Russell), and Columbia Streets have been added and there are houses on the lower part of the hill with plots laid out higher up, including on both sides of Winchester Street. The clubhouse is gone. (Click image for a larger view)