Muddy River Musings

1865: A Good Sidewalk Was Hard to Find

2012-01-29T07:38:00.000-08:00

From the Report of a Committee on the Repair of Roads in Brookline, 1865:

The condition of that portion of the road devoted exclusively to pedestrians, is, in such a town as Brookline, as important as that of the carriage-way. Most of the persons in this town conduct their daily business in Boston, and reach the city by other means than their own conveyances. These persons, therefore, are for the most part compelled to walk, in Brookline, to and from the railroad, horse-car, or omnibus; and the town is therefore bound to furnish them, at all seasons of the year, an easy and cleanly path to travel on. That they do not have this, during the whole of the winter and early spring, and during continued wet weather at other seasons, is a well-known fact.

. . . . With attention to the repair of the existing sidewalks, and the construction of additions to them, the town might, in a few years, have permanently good sidewalks on every principal street. And it would no longer be the case that ladies, young children, and invalids, would be prevented by the state of the path, from taking necessary walking exercise. And persons liking Brookline scenery and Brookline society, would have more inducement to settle in the town, from the increased facilities for enjoying these great advantages.

Plank sidewalks, like this one shown on Beacon Street east of Englewood Avenue in the 1880s, were laid in Brookline as early as the 1850s.
(Brookline Historical Society lantern slide)

An Early View of Christmas in Brookline

2011-12-25T07:30:00.000-08:00

Mary W. Poor, who was born in Brookline in 1820, was the daughter of the Rev. John Pierce, minister of the First Parish Church. Her "Recollections of Brookline," read before the Historical Society in 1903, included this passage about Christmas at the time of her childhood.

As Brookline has changed outwardly, so have its manners and customs. In those old days there was no attention paid to Christmas beyond saying, "I wish you a merry Christmas!" to the members of the family when we first met them in the morning. We never dreamed of its being made merrier than any other day. The schools went on as usual and no one expected a Christmas gift. We had New Year's presents instead. I never heard of Santa Claus till I was sixteen and then he was mentioned by a lady from New York. We knew that Catholic and Episcopal churches were dressed with evergreens at Christmas, and sometimes went to Boston to see them on that day.

For more on the celebration of Christmas in early Massachusetts—it was outlawed from 1659 to 1681 and was not recognized as an official holiday until 1856—see this "Mass Moment" from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

Remembering Brookline's Civil War Dead

2011-06-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

NOTE: This is an expanded version, with illustrations, of an article that first appeared in the Brookline TAB and its Wicked Local Web site.

Brookline’s 1884 memorial to its Civil War dead was restored, reinstalled, and rededicated in the lobby of Town Hall on Memorial Day. If you haven’t gone to see it, you should.

Photo courtesy of Jesse Mermell

Unlike the town’s more visible statue of an anonymous bugler on his horse, these seven tablets of pink Tennessee marble pay tribute to individual men, their names chiseled into stone along with their units and the dates and places of their deaths.

There are 72 in all, soldiers and sailors who died at such places as Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, and the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

A century and a half ago, news of these storied places arrived in Brookline not just as part of the broad saga of the war but also as terrible news for families living in streets (and maybe a few houses) that are familiar to us today. That gives more meaning to the names of these places and takes us back to Brookline at the time of the Civil War.

Inspired by the rededication, I’ve been digging deeper, piecing together fragments that tell who these men were and what happened to them. A few—officers and members of prominent families—were easy; their stories were documented at the time and have been preserved in books, letters, and other sources.

Wilder Dwight, 1862^{2
(Click for larger view)}

Wilder Dwight, for example, was a Harvard-educated lawyer and a lieutenant colonel in the infantry. Mortally wounded at Antietam but in too much pain to be moved, he lay on the ground as battle raged around him and added these words to a letter, stained with his blood, that he had begun writing that morning:

DEAREST MOTHER,--I am wounded so as to be helpless. Good by, if so it must be. I think I die in victory. God defend our country. I trust in God, and love you all to the last. Our troops have left the part of the field where I lay.¹

On the opposite page he added “All is well with those that have faith.” Dwight was carried to the rear that evening and died the following day at age 29. He was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery, along with his brother, Howard, who was killed in Louisiana eight months later.

Charles L. Chandler³

Charles L. Chandler, a civil engineer, was a lieutenant colonel of Massachusetts troops. Wounded in Virginia in May 1864, he fell into Confederate hands. Two weeks later, his mother Eliza received a letter from a fellow officer that told how, under a flag of truce, a Confederate colonel came to him with news of Chandler’s death.

He lived for some hours [the officer wrote], and was kindly cared for by Colonel Harris, who has his watch, money, diary, and photograph of young lady. . . Colonel Harris said, Lieutenant-Colonel Chandler died happy, and desired him to give his love, etc., to all his family and friends.³

Chandler’s belongings were returned to his family after the war, but his body was never recovered. He was 24 years old when he died.

This painting, "Even To Hell Itself" by Donna J. Neary, shows Lt. Col. Charles L. Chandler, center, in the action at the North Anna River in Virginia where he was mortally wounded. It was made for the North Anna Battlefield Park. Used by permission of the artist.
Credit: Donna J. Neary, Heritage Studio

Unlike Dwight and Chandler, most of the men whose names are on the memorial were working men—carpenters, blacksmiths, laborers, shoemakers, and clerks—including several Irish immigrants and sons of immigrants.

Thomas Dillon's signature⁴

Thomas Dillon came to Brookline from Armagh, Ireland. A teamster like his father, he enlisted in Wilder Dwight’s regiment in 1862 at age 31 and, like Dwight, was killed at Antietam. Dillon’s company commander remembered:

One of the men of my company killed at Sharpsburgh, the other day, lived in Brookline, and had been out here only about six weeks; his name was Thomas Dillon, and he was a good, faithful fellow...A letter came for him two days after his death, which I think, under the circumstances, was one of the most affecting things I ever read... I do not know of anything that has brought the horrors of the war more plainly before me than this letter. I have written to the father of Dillon, telling him of his son's death.⁵

Daniel Webster Atkinson, a 25-year old journeyman carpenter, fell during the siege of Petersburg in October 1864. Atkinson was a tall man with blue eyes, light hair, and fair skin, according to an August 1862 list of enrollees in the 10th Battery of Massachusetts Light Artillery. (At six-feet one-and-a-quarter inches, Atkinson was the tallest of the 26 men listed and one of only two over six feet.)

John Billings, a comrade who wrote a history of the regiment, called Atkinson

.... a brave soldier, a professed Christian and true man...As the troops halted from time to time, he was several times seen, apart from the column, reading the Scriptures, or on his knees in prayer.⁶

Atkinson, wrote Billings, escaped serious injury in July 1864 when he fell asleep and walked off a pontoon bridge while crossing the Appomattox River "providentially alighting in one of the boats" supporting the bridge.

His luck ran out three months later at Hatcher's Run, Virginia, where he was shot and killed and "thus sealed with his blood the cause he had upheld from the beginning with peculiar earnestness." Atkinson, noted Billings, had told fellow soldiers he did not expect to survive the war and, on the morning of the day he died "had given directions to some of his more intimate comrades in regard to the disposal of his effects in case he should fall."

Site of the action in which Daniel Atkinson was killed, as it looked in 1896. From Billings' History of the Tenth Massachusetts Battery of Light Artillery in the War of the Rebellion, p. 366.

Five months after the battle, Billings and his fellow artillerymen passed by the place where Atkinson had fallen and found a grave on the spot.

Satisfied that it was his, there being no others near, we hastily inscribed his name, battery, and date of death on a rough board, with satisfaction at being thus able to mark his remains for future removal, before passing on with the column.

John W. Clark was one of the older Brookline men to die in the war. A mason, he was 39 when he enlisted in September 1861. After the battle of Antietam Clark’s unit was recuperating with others in Bakersville, Maryland, when President Lincoln came to review the troops and receive their cheers. It’s unlikely that Clark saw him. Diarrhea caused by water from a stream that ran through the camp had put many of the troops on sick call, and Clark was probably among them. He died of disease two days after Lincoln’s visit.

The only son of the pastor of Brookline’s Baptist Church, Samuel Lamson was a 23-year-old paymaster’s clerk on board the paddlewheel steamboat Ruth as it came down the Mississippi River in August 1863 carrying soldiers, civilians, and two and a half million dollars in cash — the payroll for General Grant’s army besieging Vicksburg. Near Cairo, Illinois, the steamer caught fire and sank. (Sabotage was suspected.) Twenty-six people died. Two eyewitnesses recalled seeing Lamson, who couldn’t swim, jumping reluctantly into the water clutching a window shutter. His body was recovered two weeks later.

The burning of the steamer Ruth as shown in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

These are just six of the Brookline men who died in the Civil War. (Stories of some of the others will be forthcoming.) I wish I could learn more about how they lived, not just how they died. But the restored memorial keeps their names alive, and telling their stories reminds us how deeply Brookline was affected by the war and what the town lost 150 years ago.

NOTES
^{¹Life and Letters of Wilder Dwight, Lieut.-Col, Second Mass. Inf. Vols. (1868)}
²Sketch of Wilder Dwight drawn by Private Francis D'Avignon, a French-born artist serving with the First Massachusetts Infantry. Image source: Heritage Auctions
³Lt.-Col. Charles Lyon Chandler (1864)
^{⁴On April 22, 1861 -- 10 days after the attack on Fort Sumter and three days after a mob of Confederate sympathizers attacked a Massachusetts regiment as it passed through Baltimore -- more than 200 Brookline men enrolled "for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of military drill and discipline" offered by the town. Dillon was one of the first to sign up. A little over a year later he enlisted in the Second Massachusetts Infantry Regiment.}
⁵Letter from Charles Fessenden Morse, September 26, 1862, in Letters Written During the Civil War, 1861-1865 (1898)
⁶The History of the Tenth Massachusetts Battery of Light Artillery in the War of the Rebellion. Formerly of the Third Corps, and afterwards of Hancock's Second Corps, Army of the Potomac. 1862-1865 (1881) [Photo is from 1909 edition]

Brookline Bikes: Sights to See on Beacon Street

2011-05-11T08:45:00.000-07:00

The annual Brookline Bikes bicycle parade takes place this Sunday, May 15th. It's a great event and an opportunity to ride the entire length of the historic Beacon Street boulevard in Brookline unimpeded by automobiles.

The Brookline Historical Society will have a table set up in Amory Park, the starting and ending point for the parade, with information about the development of Beacon Street. Stop by before or after the ride and check it out.

Shown below are some of the architectural and historical sights you'll see as you ride down Beacon Street. (Photos of Beacon Street landmarks in the past can be viewed on the Brookline Historical Society Web site.)

Pelham Hall (Outbound, at Pleasant Street) Pelham Hall was built as a residential hotel in 1926 as part of a burst of new construction in and around Coolidge Corner.

S.S. Pierce Building (Outbound, at Harvard Street). The S.S. Pierce building, the symbol of Coolidge Corner if not of Brookline itself, was built from 1898-99 on the site of the original Coolidge Brothers store.

The second story of the Pierce Building, now offices, was originally Whitney Hall. Named for Beacon Street developer Henry Whitney, it was used for concerts, lectures, dances, meetings, and other events. The original tower was taller. Damaged in a 1944 hurricane, it was remodeled afterward to its current design. The S.S. Pierce Company continued to occupy the lower floor until the 1960s and the building is still generally called the S.S. Pierce Building, even by residents who didn’t arrive in Brookline until much later.

MBTA Shelters (Both sides at Harvard Street) The tile-roofed shelters for the T, at Coolidge Corner, are the original structures built by Henry Whitney’s West End Railway in 1901. Remodeled a few years ago, they are the only original shelters that remain.

The Stoneholm (Outbound, between Short Street and Lancaster Terrace). The Stoneholm is a magnificent French Renaissance chateau style apartment building that opened in 1909 with such amenities as marble fireplaces, parquet floors, and crystal chandeliers. It was designed by Arthur Bowditch, who lived on Pill Hill.

Chinese Christian Church (Inbound, between Strathmore and Dean Roads). This neo-Gothic church was designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge in 1910. Built for the Leyden Congregational Church, it was bought by the Chinese Christian Church of New England in 1975.

All Saints Church. (Inbound, at Dean Road). All Saints Church, designed by the architectural firm of Cram, Wentworth, and Goodhue, replaced a temporary wooden church on the site with the completion of the nave in 1899.

The Beaconsfield Terraces (including Richter Terrace, Inbound at Dean Road and Frances Terrace, Inbound at Tappan Street). The Beaconsfield Terraces were one of the more unusual developments to follow the widening of Beacon Street. Built by Eugene Knapp, a wool merchant, in the early 1890s, the terraces were an early condominium arrangement in which people owned their units but shared ownership of 6-acre park, stables, a playhouse (known as the casino), tennis courts, and a playground. A bell system connected the houses to the stables so that people could call for their horse and carriage. A central heating plant heated all of the buildings. Today, only the residence buildings remain.

Athans Building (Inbound at Washington Street). This commercial block was built in 1898 with stores, offices, and a hall for dances and concerts.

Richmond Court. (Inbound, east of St. Paul Street). Richmond Court was one of the first—possibly the first—courtyard apartment buildings in the country. Built in 1898, it is set back and separated from the noise and bustle of Beacon Street by an iron fence, brick and stone posts, a fountain, and private gardens. Richmond Court was designed by Ralph Adams Cram who went on to design All Saints Church, further out on Beacon Street, as well as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, and many buildings at West Point and Princeton University.

Temple Ohabei Shalom (Inbound at Kent Street). Temple Ohabei Shalom was the first Jewish congregation in Boston, formed in 1842 by immigrant German Jews. The congregation moved to Brookline and this domed temple in 1927.

Invention & Innovation: A Walking Tour of New Ideas Born in Brookline

2011-05-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

Did you know that King C. Gillette got the inspiration for the safety razor while shaving in his Brookline home one morning?

Or that the birth control pill was developed by Dr. John Rock at the Free Hospital for Women overlooking the Muddy River?

Or that one of the world’s first electric cars was built at the Holtzer-Cabot Electric Company on Station Street?

Join me this Sunday, May 15th, at 2 pm to learn about these and other advancements made by 19th and 20th century inventors and innovators living or working in Brookline

The tour begins at the Brookline Village MBTA Station and will cover approximately 2 miles in 1-1/2 hours. Free and open to the public.

A Tree Falls in Brookline: The Aspinwall Elm, 1863

2011-05-01T20:59:00.000-07:00

In honor of Arbor Day, April 29th (officially proclaimed in Brookline by the Board of Selectmen last Friday), Muddy River Moments presents the story of the Aspinwall Elm, the most celebrated tree to grow—and fall—in Brookline.

Three generations of the Aspinwall family pose before the family home and the remains of the celebrated Aspinwall Elm after it came down in a gale in September 1863. (Brookline Historical Society photo)

When 19th century Bostonians talked about great elm trees, there were three that usually came to mind: the Great Elm on Boston Common; the Washington Elm on Cambridge Common; and the Aspinwall Elm, towering over the Aspinwall family home in Brookline Village.

The Aspinwall Elm was, by most accounts, the largest of these. The circumference of its massive trunk (as reported in The North American Review in 1844) had been measured in 1837 at 26 feet 5 inches at ground level and 16 feet 8 inches five feet up. Its branches (according to the 1846 edition of Dr. George B. Emerson's report on the trees and shrubs of Massachusetts) at one time extended 104 feet from southeast to northwest, and 95 from northeast to southwest.

The tree stood on what is now Aspinwall Avenue alongside the home built by Peter Aspinwall in 1660. (The site was opposite that of St. Paul's Episcopal Church, which was built nearly two centuries later, in 1851.) Tradition had it that Peter Aspinwall planted the tree in 1656, though other stories date it somewhat later than that and attribute its planting to Peter's son Samuel or to Samuel Clark, who lived with the Aspinwalls as a boy.

This photo of the Aspinwall House and the Aspinwall Elm was published in The Aspinwall Genealogy published by Algernon Aikin Aspinwall in 1901

Mary W. Poor, daughter of the Rev. John Pierce, recalled the tree in her 1903 recollection of Brookline in the 1820s.

Every one spoke of it as " Beautiful Brookl1ne." This was partly due to the rolling and well wooded surface and to the splendid elms of uncommon size and picturesque shape that fairly embowered the village and a great part of the town. The queen of these noble trees was the "Aspinwall elm," which stood at the southwest corner of the old "Aspinwall house" very near the site of the Episcopal church.

Half the tree fell in 1844. Eleven years later, J.C. Warren, president of the Boston Society of Natural History, examined the Aspinwall Elm while writing a book about the Great Elm on Boston Common.

I have examined this tree [wrote Warren], and find that its annual foliage has been almost wholly devoured by the canker-worm, in common with many other trees in the low land of Brookline. It appears at this time like a frightful skeleton ; and there is a question whether it will ever recover from the shock it has received. In its death, we shall have to deplore the loss of one of the finest natural ornaments of this part of the country.

Warren was right to be concerned. Eight years later, on September 18, 1863, the rest of the tree came down in a gale, crashing on top of the 200-year old house and punching a hole in the roof. Three generations of the family posed in front of the house with the toppled tree. (Click here for a larger view of the image above.)

The loss of the Aspinwall Elm was big news, and not just locally. Word of its demise was mentioned in newspapers as far away as Wisconsin.

The stump of the giant elm remained for some time after. In 1873, in his speech dedicating Brookline's new Town Hall, Robert C. Winthrop paid tribute to the Aspinwall Elm:

Of the venerable elm, which overshadowed [the Aspinwall House] certainly for more than a hundred and fifty years, if indeed it was not coeval with Columbus, nothing remains but the antique roots, and a few feet of massive but mutilated trunk. They are almost the last relics of the old Muddy River Hamlet, and I wish they could be enclosed and inscribed as a monument of the remote past. What an inspiring stump that would be for an open-air speech on some historical anniversary ! If nothing else can be done, I trust that enough of it may be secured as a desk for this very platform. If it were here at this moment, my manuscript would have a most congenial resting place, — more precious than the most skillful carving or veneering of Oak, or Maple, or Satin-Wood.

The Aspinwall House, in poor shape at the time of Winthrop's speech, was itself torn down in 1891. The land was acquired by the town in 1914 for a park. Expanded in 1972, it is now the Billy Ward Playground.

The Billy Ward Playground on the site of the Aspinwall House and the Aspinwall Elm.

Brookline, Allston-Brighton and the Renewal of Boston

2011-03-10T04:43:00.000-08:00

Help celebrate the 110th birthday of the Brookline Historical Society with guest speaker Ted Clarke, author of Brookline, Allston-Brighton and the Renewal of Boston. Sunday, March 13th, at 2 pm at Hunneman Hall, Brookline Public Library

Beacon Street at Coolidge Corner as laid out by Henry Whitney and Frederick Law Olmsted
(Image from the collection of the Brookline Historical Society)

In October of 1873, voters in the neighboring towns of Brookline and Brighton cast ballots on whether or not to accept annexation into the City of Boston. Brighton voted Yes, while Brookline voted No, and the decision had long-term repercussions for both towns and for Boston itself.

Join Ted Clarke, author of the new book Brookline, Allston-Brighton and the Renewal of Boston for a look at the different paths taken by these two communities following the annexation vote. Clarke, a local historian and former Summit Avenue resident, will talk about the development of Brookline and Brighton after 1873, with a focus on the local work of Henry Whitney and Frederick Law Olmsted.

The program is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

This is the Annual Meeting of the Brookline Historical Society. The presentation will be preceded by a brief business meeting.

The Brookline Public Library is at 361 Washington Street.

Presidents in Brookline: Keeping Count

2011-02-20T19:01:00.000-08:00

A question for Presidents Day: How many U.S. presidents have set foot in Brookline?

A definitive answer remains elusive, but here are the 13 chief executives for whom I've found evidence of some presence in Brookline before, during, or after their presidency.

GEORGE WASHINGTON
Washington was in command of the Continental forces besieging Boston from July 1775 until the British evacuation on March 17, 1776. The main route between Washington's headquarters in Cambridge and key fortifications on Dorchester Heights and elsewhere passed through Brookline.

Various secondary sources report the general traversing this route at various times, and it seems likely that he did on several occasions. There are also unconfirmed stories of his having inspected the Brookline Fort at Sewall's Point during the siege.

Washington certainly passed through Brookline during a visit to Boston in October 1789, six months after his inauguration as president. William Sumner, who was a boy of 9 at the time, described the visit 71 years later in the New England Genealogical Register. After inspecting the militia on Cambridge Common, reported Sumner, the president ("on a noble white charger") and a large procession set out for Boston.

Leaving Cambridge, the procession crossed Charles river over the old Cambridge bridge into Brookline. Thence passing by the Punchbowl tavern through Roxbury, they met at the dividing line between Boston and that town the officers and leading citizens of Boston, who came out to tender Washington the hospitalities of the metropolis.

JOHN ADAMS
John Adams' mother Susanna Boylston Adams, the daughter of Peter Boylston, was born and raised in Brookline. Adams made numerous visits to Brookline in the course of his long life.

The Rev. John Pierce was ordained as minister of Brookline's First Parish in March 1797, the same month Adams was inaugurated as president. Many years later, in 1849, Pierce shared this account of one of Adams' visits:

President Adams often mentioned with a lively interest this place of his mother's nativity. While President of the United States, he called on the Hon. Jonathan Mason, where General Theodore Lyman's house now stands, and remarked, as a striking illustration of the changes in the manners and customs of the country, that the last time he had travelled over the road before, he carried his mother, horse-back, on a pillion behind him.¹

Perhaps the last visit of Adams to Brookline was described by John William Denehy in his 1906 history of the town:

In 1821, President Adams, then 86 years of age, having expressed a desire to again visit the house in which his mother was born, a grand dinner party, given in his honor by Mr. David Hyslop at which Governor Brooks, General Sumner, and other distinguished guests were present, was held at the old Boylston House, which had been purchased from the heirs of Dr. Za[b]diel Boylston, by Mr. Hyslop's father.²

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Evidence of John Quincy Adams in Brookline, birthplace of his grandmother Susanna, is sparse, but Paul C. Nagel in his biography of Adams (John Quincy Adams: A Public Life, A Private Life, Harvard University Press, 1999) mentions Brookline as one of several towns where the former president made lyceum speeches in 1842.

Adams was certainly aware of his Brookline heritage. In his memoirs, he mentions speaking with the Rev. John Pierce of the First Parish Church at a dinner in Washington in September 1826, less than two months after his father's death:

Mr. Pierce spoke to me of the remains of my father's maternal family at Brookline—Boylstons and Whites—and of the ancient family estate in that town, which has gone into other hands.³

ULYSSES S. GRANT
Like J.Q. Adams, Ulysses S. Grant's presence in Brookline is only alluded to (at least in in the evidence I've seen so far). In an 1896 history of the town, Charles Knowles Bolton, writing about Brookline resident and railroad president Ginery Twitchell during the Civil War, noted that

Years afterward, Mr. Twitchell entertained in Brookline the great military leader of the war, General U.S. Grant. The general walked into the fields east of Kent street to see some wild animals kept by Mr. Twitchell's son.⁴

Another Ulysses S. Grant—the president's grandson Ulysses S. Grant III—lived on Brington Road in Brookline for a short time in the early 1900s while on military duty in Boston. Grant and his wife Edith, the daughter of Teddy Roosevelt's Secretary of State Elihu Root, moved to Brookline after a Washington wedding attended by President Roosevelt and many U.S. and foreign dignitaries.

BENJAMIN HARRISON
Benjamin Harrison, elected in 1888 between the two terms of Grover Cleveland, took an excursion to Brookline by carriage in August 1889 during a visit to Boston, part of a week long New England sojourn.

Late in the afternoon of August 7th, the President and a large party, riding in carriages and accompanied by mounted officers, set out on a ride through Brighton and Brookline. They climbed to the top of Corey Hill and proceeded from there to a reception at the home of Congressman John Candler on High Street Hill before returning to Boston.

See my earlier post Presidents in Brookline: Benjamin Harrison for more on Harrison's Brookline visit.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT
While a student at Harvard, beginning in 1876, Theodore Roosevelt had an active social life. "The young collegian," wrote William Draper Lewis in a 1919 biography, "became a familiar figure in Cambridge and Boston—especially in Brookline—driving about in a sort of sporting phaeton, then the height of the New York style in equipages."⁵

But it was in Chestnut Hill in Newton in 1878 that Roosevelt was introduced to his future wife, Alice Hathaway Lee. She was the cousin and next-door neighbor of Roosevelt's Harvard classmate Richard Saltonstall. At 17, she was two years younger than Roosevelt.

After what was described as a tumultuous courtship, they were married on October 27, 1880—Roosevelt's 22nd birthday—in the First Parish Church in Brookline. Alice Roosevelt died a little over three years later, on February 14, 1884 from Bright's Disease and complications from childbirth. Roosevelt was devastated and was said to rarely speak about Alice thereafter.

WILLIAM HOWARD TAFT
William Howard Taft, who succeeded Theodore Roosevelt as president, spent the summers from 1909 to 1912 in his "summer capital" along the shore in Beverly, Massachusetts. In September of the first year of his presidency, Taft came to Brookline for a field day held in his honor by the Yale Club of Boston.

The president (Yale, Class of 1878) played a round of golf at The Country Club, followed by a luncheon in his honor at the nearby home of Herman L. Whipple. As the New York Times described it:

The President motored from the club grounds to Mr. Whipple's home, where the latter had invited a company of nearly 300 Yale men to meet President Taft at luncheon. Following the luncheon came a reception under one of the towering elms on the Whipple lawn. After the entire company had passed by in a single column and had shaken hands with the President, some one stopped and asked for an autograph on his menu card. The idea was no sooner suggested than a hundred or more of the college men were swarming about the President in quest of similar souvenirs.⁶

Taft later watched the first inning of a baseball game between former Yale players before leaving for the return trip to Beverly. (Asked to umpire the game, Taft declined, saying, according to the paper "I value my life too much for such a job as that.")

Four years later, Taft was at The Country Club again, in the gallery for the first day of play at the 1913 U.S. Open, the year Brookline's Francis Ouimet won his historic victory over British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray. In October 1915, the then ex-president Taft spoke in favor of the proposed League of Nations before 1,300 people in the Harvard Congregational Church on Harvard Street.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
Franklin Roosevelt, like his cousin and presidential predecessor Theodore, took part in a wedding in a Brookline church. In FDR's case, it was not his own wedding but that of his oldest son James.

James Roosevelt and Betsey Cushing were married at St. Paul's Episcopal Church on June 4, 1930. Franklin Roosevelt was governor of New York at the time. The bride's father was renowned neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing of Brookline.

More than 500 guests—"leaders of the medical, political, diplomatic and social worlds," according to the New York Times—were in attendance. Spectators, noted the Boston Globe, thronged the neighborhood around the church.

Several thousand intensely curious persons followed the incidents of yesterday's marriage and the reception following, with avid interest [reported the Globe]. The crowd of onlookers around the church grounds, in the triangle at Aspinwall av and St Paul st, was so great that it took a large force of policemen and motorcycle men to keep the surrounding streets free of congestion so that the machines conveying members of the bridal party and the guests might reach the church door conveniently.

The church lawns were overrun with people on the Aspinwall av and St Paul sides. Verandas and steps of neighboring houses were used as points of vantage from which to watch the arrival of guests and later that of the bridal attendants and the bride herself.⁷

The ceremony was followed by a reception on the grounds of the Cushing home on Walnut Street where about a dozen large tents were erected on all sides of the mansion, including one with a dancing floor over the tennis courts.

James and Betsey Roosevelt were divorced in 1940.

JOHN F. KENNEDY
John F. Kennedy, of course, is the only U.S. President born in Brookline. Kennedy was born May 29, 1917 in the family home on Beals Street, now a National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service and open to the public.

Kennedy lived in the Beals Street home for six years before moving with his family to a larger home on Naples Road nearby. Kennedy attended both the Edward Devotion School and the Dexter School in Brookline before the family moved to New York in 1927. He was baptized and served as an altar boy at St. Aidan's Church on Pleasant Street.

GEORGE H.W. BUSH & GEORGE W. BUSH
George H.W. Bush was a former president and George W. Bush was seeking the Republican presidential nomination when they attended the Ryder Cup golf tournament together at The Country Club in Brookline in 1999.

The younger Bush's attendance at the match between U.S. and European golfers was not without controversy. Bush, then governor of Texas and leading in Republican polls, skipped the California Republican Convention to attend the tournament. That drew criticism from some of his rivals for the party's nod, but did nothing to derail Bush's drive toward the eventual nomination and the White House.

BILL CLINTON
Bill Clinton made two appearances at campaign events in Brookline during his successful 1992 quest for the Democratic nomination for president. Clinton met with members of the Brookline Democratic Committee in January. In April, he was back for a fund raiser at the home of Robert Farmer, his national campaign treasurer.

Clinton's January visit with the Brookline Democrats was paired with an appearance before the South Shore Chamber of Commerce in Dedham, a pairing the Boston Globe saw as indicative of his ability to reach out to different segments of the party.

Presidential hopeful Bill Clinton straddled the yin and yang of Massachusetts Democratic politics last week, [said the Globe] pitching his middle-class pragmatism in separate events to Dukakis Democrats in Brookline and Silber Democrats in Dedham, and leaving both crowds smiling.⁸

BARACK OBAMA
It was suggested when I first wrote this piece that Barack Obama may well have been in Brookline while a student at Harvard Law School, perhaps to eat in one of Brookline's restaurants, shop at its stores, or catch a movie at the Coolidge Corner Theatre. Evidence of such an early visit may yet turn up. But Obama definitely came to Brookline on May 18, 2011, making one of his two fundraising stops that day at the home of Jack & Eileen Connors in South Brookline.

NOTES
¹ "An address at the opening of the Town Hall, in Brookline: on Tuesday, 14 October, 1845." (A pillion is "a pad or cushion put on behind a man's saddle chiefly for a woman to ride on." - Merriam Webster Online.
²A history of Brookline, Massachusetts, from the first settlement of Muddy river until the present time: 1630-1906
³Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848, Volume 7
⁴Brookline: the history of a favored town
⁵The life of Theodore Roosevelt
⁶"President has fun with old Yale Men." New York Times, September 8, 1909, p. 10.
⁷"Miss Betsey Cushing married as throng surrounds church." Boston Globe, June 5, 1930, p. 12
⁸ "Clinton finds favor playing to 2 audiences." Boston Globe, January 21, 1992, p. 12

Presidential images from whitehouse.gov

"Brookline Biscuits" for Thanksgiving

2010-11-23T14:11:00.000-08:00

Care to add a little local flavor to your Thanksgiving meal this year? Try adding Brookline Biscuits to your holiday table as recommended by the Boston Cooking-School a century ago.

Brookline Biscuits as shown in the Boston Cooking-School Magazine in 1907

The November 1907 issue of the Boston Cooking-School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics provided Thanskgiving menus for five different settings. "Brookline Biscuit" was included in two of the five: the "City Home" and "Country Home" Thanksgiving meals.

1907 Thanksgiving Menus (Click for larger view)

Most of the recipes for the menus were provided by the magazine's long-time editor Janet McKenzie Hill. But the recipe for Brookline Biscuit was attributed to "C.J." This was most likely Charlotte J. Clark (née Wills), a teacher at the Boston Cooking-School and the former assistant to Fannie Farmer when Farmer was the school's principal. (Farmer had left to open her own school in 1902.)

It's not clear what, if any, connection Clark—or the biscuits—had to Brookline. The recipe (uncredited to Clark) was used again in Janet McKenzie Hill's 1916 Nyal Cook Book ("Practical recipes that have been tested in actual use") published by the Detroit-based Nyal drugstore chain.

Here's the recipe for Brookline Biscuit, as it appeared in 1907 and again nine years later. Give it a try, and let me know how it works out.

Have a pint of sifted flour in a bowl; into this rub two level tablespoonfuls of butter. Scald one cup of milk and when lukewarm add one-fourth a cake of compressed yeast, dissolved in one-fourth a cup of lukewarm water. Stir this into the flour and set to rise overnight.

In the morning work in sufficient flour to make a dough and knead it until it is elastic and does not stick to the fingers. Let rise until very light, then take from the bowl to the bread board, without working, and roll out into a rectangular sheet longer than it is wide, and half an inch thick. Spread softened butter upon this and fold the dough evenly, to have three layers.

With a sharp knife, dipped in flour, cut the dough into strips three-fourths an inch wide. Take hold of a strip at the ends, pull gently to lengthen it, then twist the ends in opposite directions and form the shape of the figure eight, joining the two ends underneath.

Place the biscuits in buttered pans so that they will not touch, and when light bake in a rather hot oven to a delicate brown. The recipe makes two dozen biscuit.

Links

From "Feeding America" The Historic American Cookbook Project" at Michigan State University

Brookline and the Invention of the Safety Razor

2010-11-15T17:41:00.000-08:00

King C. Gillette as he appeared in
John William Denehy's bicentennial
history of Brookline (1906)

On this date (November 15th) in 1904, King C. Gillette of Brookline was awarded a patent for a disposable safety razor. He had applied for the patent three years earlier, and first came up with the idea six years before that while shaving in his Brookline home.

Here's how Gillette recalled it in a February 1918 article in the company magazine The Gillette Blade:

I was living in Brookline at No. 2 Marion Terrace at the time [1895], and as I said before I was consumed with the thought of inventing something that people would use and throw away and buy again. On one particular morning when I started to shave I found my razor dull, and it was not only dull but it was beyond the point of successful stropping and it needed honing, for which it must be taken to a barber or to a cutler. As I stood there with the razor in my hand, my eyes resting on it as lightly as a bird settling down on its nest--the Gillette razor was born.

Years of experimentation failed to solve the technical difficulties involved in producing the kind of razor Gillette had in mind. MIT-trained engineer William Nickerson came to the rescue, joining Gillette in 1901 and perfecting the manufacturing process. (In the December 1918 issue of The Gillette Blade Nickerson described seeing an early version of Gillette's razor for the first time in the home of Henry Sachs on University Road in Brookline.)


Drawing for Patent 775,134 awarded to King C. Gillette in 1904

Sales took off in 1904, the year the patent was awarded, with 90,000 razors and 12,400,000 blades sold through the end of the year (according to the Dictionary of American Biography). With the continued success of the Gillette Safety Razor Company, Gillette and his family moved in 1907 to a large home at 1566 Beacon Street, near Lancaster Terrace. They lived there for only six years before moving to California in 1913. King C. Gillette died in Los Angeles in 1932.

This house at 1566 Beacon Street was the home of the King C. Gillette family from 1907 to 1913. It was torn down in 1944.

Further Reading

King Gillette Patents Safety Razor (Mass Moments)
The Gillette Blade, 1918
Razor Patent, 1904

Separating the Trash a Century Ago

2010-10-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

In honor of the first week of single-stream recycling in Brookline, Muddy River Moments offers a look back at how residents of the town a hundred years ago had to separate their trash for pick up.

The following is from the town's health regulations of 1918:

Article III. Waste Material—Garbage

Section 1. All waste material set out for removal by the town shall be kept in separate receptacles.
Sec. 2. One or more of such receptacles shall be used exclusively for garbage or swill and shall be water-tight, have tight fitting covers, and be kept clean and free from deposits of garbage. (An underground garbage receptacle is urgently recommended.)
Sec. 3. A second receptacle or receptacles, preferably made of iron, shall be used exclusively for ashes, tin cans, bottles, and other noncombustible waste.
Sec. 4. A third separate set of receptacles shall be used exclusively for dry combustible waste, such as paper, old shoes, house-sweepings, and other such waste material as it is customary for the town to remove.
Sec. 5. No person shall overhaul the contents of receptacles of waste material set upon the sidewalks to be removed by the town.
Sec. 6. No person shall throw upon the sidewalk, or into any public street or catch-basin, any paper, tin cans, house-sweepings, lawn-rakings, old shoes, orange peel, banana skin, dead animal, or other waste material.

Brookline Origins of Skating Magazine

2010-08-15T05:38:00.000-07:00

Kat Hasenauer Cornetta has an interesting article on BrooklinePatch about Theresa Weld Blanchard, who started Skating magazine, the official publication of the United States Figure Skating Association, in her Brookline home in 1923 and continued to be involved with it until her death in 1978. ("National Skating Magazine Started in Brookline Home 87 Years Ago")

Presidents in Brookline: Benjamin Harrison

2010-08-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

John F. Kennedy was born in Brookline. Theodore Roosevelt was married here. John Adams visited Brookline relatives in the town where his mother was born and raised.

How many U.S. presidents in all were in Brookline at some point in their lives? I've identified ~~seven~~ ~~nine~~, so far, though there may be more. This is the first in an occasional series documenting the presence of these chief executives in town, before, during, or after their presidencies. (See this later post for more on presidents in Brookline.)


Benjamin Harrison (Library of Congress)

The subject today is the 1889 visit of the 23rd president, Benjamin Harrison.

Harrison, a Republican, was elected in 1888 between the two terms of Grover Cleveland. On August 7, 1889, Harrison arrived in Boston via train from New York as part of a weeklong New England sojourn.

In Boston, Harrison was greeted by admiring throngs, met with invited guests at the Hotel Vendome on Commonwealth Avenue, and attended a reception at Faneuil Hall.

Late in the afternoon, the President and a large party, riding in carriages and accompanied by mounted officers, set out on a ride through Brighton and Brookline. A large crowd, including local officials, gathered on Corey Hill awaiting the president.

At one point, a group of carriages was spotted moving east on Beacon Street, and much of the crowd descended the hill to greet Harrison, only to be disappointed. It was, instead, a group of visiting furniture men returning to Boston from a ride to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir.

Eventually, the presidential party, having made its way out Commonwealth and Brighton Avenues and Allston Street, reached the top of the hill from the Brighton side.

Congressman John W. Candler of Brookline joined Harrison in his carriage and the ride continued, down the hill to Beacon Street, and then via Park Street, Washington Street, Gardner Road, Tappan Street, Sumner Road, Walnut and Warren Streets to the Ignatius Sargent estate.

From the Sargent estate, the president and his party continued via Chestnut, Walnut, and Irving Streets to the home of Congressman Candler on High Street Hill.

"A bountiful spread here awaited the company," reported the Boston Globe, "during which the mounted escort had an opportunity to fodder up."

Congressman John W. Candler hosted a reception for the president and his party at his home at 99 High Street

Returning to their carriages, Harrison and his party made their way back to the Hotel Vendome by way of High Street, through Brookline Village and up Harvard Street to Commonwealth Avenue. The next day, the president ended his whirlwind Boston visit, departing for Maine and the home of James G. Blaine, Harrison's Secretary of State and the 1884 Republican presidential nominee.

Sources

"Here-----Going. Awfully Glad You Came; Goodby. Harrison, Guest of City and State, Saluted by Cannon Upon Arrival. Receptions to Public and Officials. Driven Among Suburban Beauties. " Boston Globe, August 8, 1889, p. 1.
"The Chief Magistrate. President Harrison Visits Brookline and is Entertained by Congressman Candler." Brookline Chronicle, August 10, 1889, p. 252.

99 High Street Today

* 99 High Street photos courtesy of the Town of Brookline Preservation Office

Respect for the Law?

2010-08-05T18:38:00.000-07:00

TAB reporter John Hilliard and his colleagues had fun this week putting some of the odder town bylaws to the test. ("Exploring the banana peel bylaw (and more forbidden fun) in Brookline," August 5th).

Hilliard and crew batted a ball near Town Hall, played cards at the curbside, even dropped a banana peel on the sidewalk (not to mention dressing up in a banana costume and lying down in the street). And they got away with it, despite the fact that all of these--well maybe not the banana costume--are forbidden under town law.

But Hilliard and crew are hardly the first to be bemused by some of the no-nos on the books in Brookline. Back in 1921, the celebrated Brookline-born poet Amy Lowell joined fellow townspeople to protest a range of bylaws they said couldn't and shouldn't be enforced.

Boston Globe, December 22, 1921

Among the targets of Lowell and other protesters were laws or proposed laws against the following:

playing ball in the streets;
the drawing of sleds on public footpaths or sidewalks;
unrestricted use of velocipedes (bicycles) and roller skates;
the playing of musical instruments by anyone other than the member of a regularly organized band without a permit from the chief of police;
parking an automobile in any one place for more than 20 minutes;
horses traveling at more than eight miles per hour (at a time when automobiles were limited to 10 miles per hour);
the use of ungrammatical language by a driver in addressing a horse.

"Are we going to allow this overregulation when it isn't necessary," said Lowell [as reported by the Boston Globe]. "Are we going to make all our children criminals when they are not criminals. Are we going to be entirely officialized?"

In the end some of the bylaws were modified, other were dropped, and others were let go with promises of lax enforcement, not so different, it seems, from today.

Got Milk? Shhhh!

2010-05-27T18:18:00.000-07:00

Town Meeting last night gave Brookline police new powers to control "loud and unruly gatherings," with a measure aimed mostly at parties involving alcohol-fueled college students in rental housing in North Brookline. The new bylaw passed 183-3, capping the efforts of a group of North Brookline residents and their supporters calling themselves "Sleepless in Brookline."

A little over a hundred years ago, bottled beverages were at the center of another effort to curtail noise in Brookline. But the liquid culprit on that occasion was not alcohol, but. . .

. . . Milk.

A group of citizens -- "the early-morning-sleep-loving fraternity" the Boston Daily Globe called them -- stated their objections to "the rattling of milk wagons over the cobblestones, the shouting from one to another of the milkmen, and the banging of back doors and the unnecessary clanging of milk bottles" (among other nuisances).

On August 1, 1904, the Board of Health sent letters to every milk dealer who made deliveries in town, asking each

to carefully inspect and, if necessary, alter his wagons with reference to preventing rattling and other loud noise, and also to instruct the drivers to drive slowly when near dwelling houses, to avoid cobblestone gutters, to handle the cans and bottles quietly, to refrain from shouting, and in all other ways to do their work without unnecessary noise.

Selectman also heard concerns about the noisy gears of streetcars, the horns of automobiles, and the barking of dogs. (Dog owners were told to keep their dogs from barking in the early morning which [said the Globe] "will leave the rooster the sole time-honored right to express his sentiments at such a time."

The newspaper found all the commotion about noise fairly amusing. The story ("Noise crusade begun by prominent men of Brookline. Milkmen requested not to disturb sleepers") ran on the front page of the August 5th edition with a lightly mocking cartoon ("Brookline, The Silent Suburb") at the top. (Click on the page below for a larger view.)

Baseball Hall of Famer and Pioneering Sports Promoter George Wright

2010-04-03T05:30:00.001-07:00

(In honor of the Opening Day of the 2010 baseball season, Muddy River Moments looks at George Wright, the only member of the Baseball Hall of Fame buried in Brookline.)

Baseball Hall of Famer George Wright, who is buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline (although he never lived in Brookline), was perhaps the game's first real star. He was the shortstop and leading hitter on the undefeated Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, the first all-professional baseball team.

He moved to Boston in 1871 with the Red Stockings and his older brother Harry—captain and manager of the team—and won five league championships with Boston.

Wright was also an ambassador for the game. He was part of two teams that helped bring the game to the West in the 1860s. He joined trips to England in 1874 and around the world in 1888 to demonstrate the sport. Wright even umpired an exhibition game at the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden.

But his accomplishments in the national pastime, which earned him selection to the Hall of Fame soon after his death in 1937, don't tell the whole story of George Wright's impact on American sports.

Wright had a long post-baseball career as one of the nation's top cricket players at the Longwood Cricket Club in Brookline. As head of the Wright & Ditson sporting goods company in Boston, he helped popularize both tennis and ice hockey in the United States.

Perhaps most significantly, Wright played a key role in introducing golf to the U.S. and was sometimes called "the father of American golf."

Born Into a Sporting Family

George Wright was born in New York City in 1847. His father Sam, a professional cricket player, had emigrated from England in 1836 with his wife Annie and their young son Harry. The family moved to Hoboken, New Jersey in 1857, and the Wright brothers played cricket and the new game of "base ball" on the Elysian Fields of that city.

Starting at age 15, Wright played with baseball teams from New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. In 1867, he was on the Washington Nationals team that made the first tour of an eastern club to the cities of the "West": Columbus, Louisville, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis. Among the teams they beat (by a score of 53-10) was brother Harry's Cincinnati Red Stockings. (Harry had gone to Cincinnati in 1865 to manage a cricket club, but was soon leading one of the city's top baseball teams as well.)

Determined to match the powerful eastern teams, Harry Wright and Red Stockings owner Aaron Champion brought together the first all-professional—or at least first openly all-professional—team for the 1869 season. George Wright, signed to play shortstop, was the highest paid player with an annual salary of $1,400. Wright, reported the St. Louis Republican, was

the beau-ideal of base-ball players. His fielding exhibits science at every point, his picking, throwing and strategy could not be excelled, and he is plucky in facing balls of every description.

The Red Stockings went through the 1869 season undefeated. They were invited to the White House to meet with President Grant. In September they traveled to California for games on the West Coast. (The Transcontinental Railroad had only been completed a few months before. The players reportedly slept with pistols under their pillows out of fear of Indian attacks on the train.)

After another successful season in 1870, the Cincinnati club broke up. Harry Wright started a new team in Boston, bringing along brother George and several other players (as well as the Red Stockings name.) The team dominated the National Association, sometimes considered the first professional baseball league, winning the championship in all five years of its existence (1871-1875), before joining the new National League in 1876.

George Wright left the Boston team to lead the rival Providence club in 1878. He ended his National League career in 1882.

Beyond Baseball: Man of Many Sports

Not long after coming to Boston, Wright went into the sporting goods business as a sidelight to his athletic career. Joining forces with fellow merchant Henry Ditson, he built a successful business that lasted long after the end of his playing career. (Wright & Ditson was eventually absorbed into the sporting goods empire of Wright's former Boston teammate A.G. Spalding.)

Wright & Ditson carried equipment for all kinds of sporting and recreational activities popular with Americans. But it also brought Wright into contact with new kinds of athletic endeavors, most notably the game of golf, largely unknown in America at the time.

Wright's first exposure to golf came when he ordered a set of clubs and balls from an English catalog. They arrived without rules or instructions, and Wright, with no knowledge of the game, left them on display in his store on Washington Street in Boston. There they caught the eye of a visiting Scotsman who explained the game and later sent Wright a copy of the rules.

In December 1890, Wright and a group of friends set out for Franklin Park to try the game. Stopped by a policeman, they obtained a permit from the parks commission and returned, laying out a nine-hole course using tomato cans for the holes. They played two rounds, reportedly the first rounds of golf ever played in New England.

A few years later, Franklin Park became the site of the second municipal golf course in the U.S., still in use today. Another municipal course, designed by Donald Ross in Hyde Park in the 1930s, was named the George Wright Golf Course in honor of Wright's pioneering promotion of the sport.)

Wright & Ditson became a leading seller of golf clubs. Brookline's Francis Ouimet got his first club from Wright & Ditson. (His older brother Wilfred traded used golf balls for the club.) In 1911, Ouimet got a job as a clerk at Wright's store, and Wright was generous in his support of the young golfer's burgeoning amateur career.

By the time Francis came to work for him [wrote Mark Frost in The Greatest Game Ever Played], George Wright knew all about the young man's potential in the game and took a personal interest in the ex-Country Club caddie. As a former professional athlete, he understood only too well the pressures a gifted young player faced as he neared adulthood, searching for the limits of how far his talent could take him.

Wright, who had given his young clerk time off from the store, was in the gallery in Brookline in 1913 when Ouimet won his historic upset victory over Britons Harry Vardon and Ted Ray at the U.S Open at the Country Club. He continued to promote (and play) golf into his 80s.

Wright's interest in athletics extended into other sports as well.

In 1894, Wright helped organize a set of ice hockey and ice polo matches in Canada between Canadian athletes and a team of U.S. collegians from Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Cornell. (Ice polo, popular in the U.S., was similar to hockey but played with rounded mallets and a rubber ball.)

After watching a few contests [wrote David Fleitz in More Ghosts in the Gallery], George recognized that hockey was the superior game, so he set his company to work promoting the Canadian sport and manufacturing its equipment. By the dawn of the 20th century, hockey had supplanted ice polo in popularity, with George Wright providing a major impetus to its growth in the United States.

In 1898, Wright brought a group of top Eastern tennis players to California to help promote the sport on the West Coast. The players included Dwight Davis, for whom the Davis Cup is named, as well as Holcombe Ward and Brookline's Malcolm Whitman. (Ward and Whitman would be Davis' teammates on the first Davis Cup squad in 1900.) Also on the trip was Wright's son Beals who was then the national interscholastic champion and would, like the other three, later be elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. (Wright's son Irving was also a tennis player and served as president of the Longwood Cricket Club.)

Baseball Ambassador

While exploring, promoting, and playing other sports, Wright remained closely involved with baseball. As noted above, he was part of two early trips to the West in the 1860s to help promote the game. In 1874, the Wright brothers joined Albert Spalding, their Boston Red Stockings teammates, and the Philadephia Athletics on a trip to England to demonstrate the American game. (Old cricketers George and Harry Wright also helped the Americans surprise local cricket teams by beating them at their own game.)

Wright joined Spalding again in 1888-89 for a celebrated round-the-world barnstorming trip that brought baseball to Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, France, England, and Ireland. (Wright helped build a canvas batting cage on board ship so the players could practice without losing balls overboard.)

In 1912, the Swedish hosts of the Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm asked the American Olympic Committee to arrange an exhibition baseball game against a Swedish team. The Americans secured uniforms and equipment for two teams. Players were recruited from the American track and field athletes. George Wright, then 65, was brought along as umpire and coach.

The playing of the exhibition games had to wait until the American athletes were finished competing in their events. Jim Thorpe, fresh off his gold medal wins in the pentathalon and decathalon, played in the second of the two games.

Wright, in addition to umpiring the first game, helped coach the Swedish players in the finer points of baseball.

Wright was a member of the Mills Commission which in 1908 famously and erroneously attributed the invention of baseball to Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York in 1839. As Dan Okrent and Steve Wulf wrote in their book Baseball Anecdotes, Wright should have known better. On the other hand, it is likely that Wright's presence on the Mills Commission was largely symbolic. According to Okrent and Wulf, he never attended any of the meetings.

He did continue attending games, including a return to Cincinnati during the 1919 World Series. He became the oldest living ex-major leaguer in 1935.
George Wright died at his home Dorchester on August 21, 1937 at the age of 90. He was buried in Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline. Four months after his death, Wright was selected to the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the pioneers of the game.

The Big Dig of 1848

2010-03-21T06:42:00.000-07:00

The Big Dig of 1848:

The Brookline Reservoir & the Cochituate Aqueduct

Annual Meeting of the Brookline Historical Society
Sunday, March 28, 2010, at 2 pm
Hunneman Hall, Brookline Public Library, 361 Washington Street
The Cochituate Aqueduct, built between 1846 and 1848,
brought clean water 15 miles from Lake Cochituate
to the Brookline Reservoir for distribution to the City of Boston.

Join architectural historian Dennis DeWitt
for the story of the reservoir and its historic gatehouse
and their role in one of the largest public works projects of its time.

Refreshments will be served

The program will be preceded by a brief business meeting.

For more information, call 617-566-5747
http://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org

From Snow Sculptures to the Paris Salon and Beyond

2009-12-28T09:37:00.000-08:00

Henry Hudson Kitson and Theo Alice Ruggles at work in their studio in 1893. This sketch, which first appeared in The Illustrated American, was reproduced in a June 25, 1893 Boston Globe article—"Tale of Art and Love"—that described their partnership and forthcoming marriage. (Click on image for a larger view.)

In 1885, 14-year old Theo Alice Ruggles made a snow sculpture in the yard of her family's Brookline home on Harvey Street (now 30 Upland Road). This was no ordinary snowman. It showed a recumbent horse in the act of rising from the ground, and it attracted notice in the neighborhood and beyond. People from Boston were said to make the trip out to Brookline just to see it.

Encouraged by admiring visitors, Ruggles' parents tried unsuccessfully to enroll her in art school before finding a young sculptor, Henry Hudson Kitson, willing to take her on as a student. It marked the beginning of a journey that would lead in just a few years to the Paris Salon, to partnership and marriage with Kitson, and to recognition as one of the most accomplished woman sculptors of her day.

Perhaps most remarkably for a woman in that era, Theo Ruggles Kitson became one of the leading sculptors of war memorials in the United States, with statues, busts, and reliefs on display from coast to coast commemorating the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I.

Theo Alice Ruggles was born January 27, 1871. She was the daughter of Cyrus W. and Anna H. Ruggles. Her father, a successful businessman, was also Brookline's postmaster and the station master in town for the Boston & Albany Railroad. As a young girl, Theo enjoyed sculpting images out of clay at the family's summer home and letting them bake in the sun.

In the wake of the attention the snow sculpture brought to Ruggles and her work that winter of 1885 her parents sought a place for her in the school of the Museum of Fine Arts. The school turned her down as too young, as did other art schools and several private tutors.

Henry Hudson Kitson, who became her teacher and later her husband, was a native of England who had come to the United States as a teenager. He was 20 years old when he began working with Ruggles. When a commission took Kitson to Paris in 1887, his young student—accompanied by her mother—followed so that she could continue her studies.

In Paris, Ruggles learned from and worked with Kitson and also studied with French artists, including Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret and Gustave Courtois. In 1888, she had one of her sculptures accepted for the Paris Salon and the following year, while still a teenager, she became the first American woman sculptor to receive an award at the Salon.

Kitson and Ruggles were married in 1893, after their return to the United States. She had four works exhibited that year at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. In 1895, she became the first woman (and youngest member) in the new National Sculpture Society.

A Harper's magazine profile published that year said of her:

Though one of the youngest women who are known through their work in the art world, Mrs. Kitson has had the most successful career of any woman who has undertaken the profession of sculpture.

Theo Ruggles Kitson (as she became known) completed her first military sculpture—a statue of Revolutionary War naval hero Esek Hopkins in Providence, Rhode Island—in 1897.

Her 1902 Civil War monument ("The Volunteer") in Newburyport, Massachusetts became the model for the Massachusetts memorial at the Vicksburg National Military Park in Mississippi (shown at left). The first monument erected at Vicksburg, it was also the first of more than 60 statues, busts, and reliefs created by Kitson for the Vicksburg park between 1903 and 1920 .

The Boston Globe saw "The Volunteer" as a new kind of statue:

....a departure from the conventional soldier, which stands on a variety of pedestals in cemeteries and parks at 'present arms' or some other parade ground attitude. The figure is as much a departure from such figures as is the real American volunteer soldier from all previous soldiers in any land.

This spirit of volunteerism, continued the Globe,

is manifest in every line of the figure and it is really remarkable that a woman should be the first to note and portray in sculpture this strong characteristic of the American volunteer soldier, when it is the very thing that every foreign military critic first notices and always has noticed and commented upon. The trouble has been that the traditional solider of sculpture has been too hard to pull away from and Mrs. Kitson was the first who had the courage to give exact expression to the very qualities for which the volunteer soldier has always stood.

Author Polly Welts Kaufman, in her book National Parks and the Woman's Voice: A History (University of New Mexico Press, 2006), saw a different motivation in her description of the dedication of the Vicksburg statue :

Theo Kitson saw her Civil War sculptures as providing an opportunity for reconciliation and healing, not for the commemoration of heroism. Kitson herself was chosen to unveil the statue, but she insisted that a Confederate woman assist her in the unveiling. Alice Cole, the daughter of a Confederate soldier, joined her.

Kitson was also responsible for the first Civil War monument to feature a woman serving the troops. A memorial to nurse Mary Bickerdyke showing "Mother Bickerdyke" serving water to a wounded Union soldier, it stands in Galesburg, Illinois.

Theo Ruggles Kitson's statue of Civil War nurse Mary Bickerdyke stands in front of the courthouse in Galeburg, Illinois.

In 1904, Kitson received a commission from the University of Minnesota for a statue memorializing graduates of the university who were killed in the Spanish-American War. Dedicated in 1906, it became known as "The Hiker." The Gorham Company of Rhode Island made dozens of casts of this statue, including some after Kitson's death. Examples of "The Hiker" can be found today in several New England cities and towns and in other parts of the country, including Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Virginia, Maryland, Louisiana, Tennessee, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Arizona, and California.

This version of Theo Ruggles Kitson's most well-known statue "The Hiker"—one of dozens around the country—stands in Wakefield, Massachusetts.

Other examples of Kitson's work in Boston include memorials to Thaddeus Kosciuszko in the Public Garden and (with her husband) to Patrick Collins, second Irish-American mayor of Boston, in the Back Bay.

Theo and Henry Kitson separated in 1909, though they never divorced. She continued to work, out of studios in Framingham and elsewhere. She also contributed, along with other notable women, to columns in the Boston Globe about such issues as women's education. Theo Ruggles Kitson died in Boston in 1932.

A Local Sculptor for a Local Hero
Albert Edward Scott, a Brookline newsboy and graduate of the Devotion School, was the youngest American soldier to be killed in World War I. Scott, known as "Scotty," lied about his age to join the army at 15 and was killed in France in 1918 at the age of 16.

Scotty's fellow newsboys raised $2,000 for a plaque in his honor. Brookline native Theo Alice Ruggles, well known by then for her war memorials, was chosen to create the Scotty memorial to be placed in the wall of Town Hall.

The plaque was dedicated on October 29,1921. William Jennings Bryan, former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee, was the main speaker. The 300-strong Keith Boys Band was brought up from New York on a Navy destroyer to perform. The Boston School Committee gave newsboys the afternoon off to attend the ceremony, and the Boston Elevated agreed to transport all newsboys to the ceremony and back home for free with their newsboy badges.

Kitson's plaque, based on a painting by Gale Hoskins, depicts the death of Scott in the woods west of Paris. It was removed from the old Town Hall when the building was replaced in the 1960s and now sits on the back side of a later memorial to Brookline soldiers who gave their lives in war.

Additional Photo Credits
"The Volunteer"

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenlund/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
Bickerdyke Memorial
http://civilwarwomen.blogspot.com/2008/08/mary-ann-ball-bickerdyke.html
"The Hiker"

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dr_television/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

In the Line of Fire: November 15th at 2 pm

2009-11-08T08:38:00.000-08:00

In the Line of Fire:

Brookline Police Who Gave Their Lives
in Service to the Town

Fall Meeting of the Brookline Historical Society

Sunday, November 15, 2009, at 2 pm
at Brookline Town Hall, 333 Washington Street
(Refreshments will be served)

In the long history of the Brookline Police Department, two officers -- Joseph McMurray in 1904 and Joseph O'Brien in 1930 -- were shot and killed in the line of duty while responding to crimes.

Brookline Detective Kenneth McHugh, a 31-year veteran of the police force and unofficial department historian, has conducted extensive research into the cases of these two officers. Det. McHugh will tell their tales in an illustrated presentation as part of the Fall Meeting of the Brookline Historical Society.

Following the meeting, Det. McHugh will lead a tour of the Public Safety Building, headquarters of the Brookline Police and Fire Departments.

PLUS….

The Fall Meeting will also include a demonstration of the Historical Society Web site, first place winner in this year's New England Museum Association's Publication Awards Competition. http://brooklinehistoricalsociety.org

November 1915: Brookline Votes for Representative Town Meeting

2009-11-02T03:07:00.000-08:00

94 years ago today Brookline Town Meeting as we now know it was voted into existence.

On November 2, 1915 Brookline's voters overwhelmingly approved a change from traditional town meeting to a limited or representative town meeting in which "town meeting members" are elected by voters to represent them in the town's legislative body.

Brookline thus became the first town in Massachusetts to adopt this variation on the traditional New England open town meeting. (In an open town meeting any registered voter in attendance can participate in decisions.)

Today, 39 of Massachusetts' 298 towns operate under the representative town meeting system. The others retain the traditional open meeting format. (There are also 53 municipalities in the Commonwealth with a city form of government.)

Representative town meeting was proposed as early as 1897 by Brookline's Alfred D. Chandler (1847-1923) as a means of dealing with the growth of the town's population. By 1915, Chandler later wrote, only about 20% of the electorate could fit in the 800-seat Town Hall where town meetings were held.

The town meetings were therefore controlled by the first to arrive, or the strongest, and often by the least responsible, creating a situation that sapped the 'vital feature of the town system of government' which has so long been recognized and is practicable in small towns, but is unavoidably lost in large towns.

Chandler's proposal was taken under consideration in Brookline in 1900 but not adopted. Instead, Newport, Rhode Island in 1906 took up the idea and became the first municipality in New England to install a representative town meeting form of government. (Chandler served as a consultant to Newport.)

Members of Newport's 195-member Legislative Council came to Brookline in 1914 to describe their experience as Brookline debated whether to follow their lead. In January 1915 a petition was presented to the state legislature, and later that year the legislature passed "An Act to Provide for Precinct Voting, Limited Town Meetings, Meeting Members, a Referendum, and an Annual Moderator in the Town of Brookline."

The final step—approval by the town's electorate—took place in November by a vote of 3,191 to 1,180. The final town meeting under the old format took place on December 15, 1915, two days after a plan dividing the town into nine precincts for the new system was formally adopted.

On March 7, 1916 voters elected 27 town meeting members from each of the nine precincts. Stormy weather and a lack of competitive races for town-wide offices kept turnout to 40% of registered voters, reported the Boston Globe .

In addition to the 243 precinct representatives, the new legislative body would include: any state senators and representatives living in town; members of the Board of Selectmen; the town moderator, town clerk, and town treasurer; and the chairs of the Board of Assessors, the School Committee, the Library Trustees, the Walnut Hills Cemetery Board, the Water Board, the Parks Commission, the Planning Board, the Tree Planting Committee, the Gymnasium and Baths Committee, and the Registrars of Voters.

The first town meeting under the new format took place on March 21, 1916 in Town Hall. A railing across the width of the meeting hall restricted the front part of the room to town meeting members. (Brookline police checked their credentials before letting them through.)

The nearly 400 seats reserved for spectators were packed. (Any registered voter could speak, though only town meeting members could vote.) "The efficient manner in which Brookline's first meeting, under the new limited town meeting act was conducted in Town Hall last evening, influenced a great many of the citizens in the belief that the experiment will be successful," reported the Boston Globe.

Also among the spectators were representatives from other towns who were considering the new format for their own communities.

Representative town meeting continues to be the form of government used by Brookline today. There are now 16 precincts with 15 town meeting members each. Town meeting today also includes members of the Board of Selectmen, the town clerk and moderator, and any state senators or representatives who live in town.

LINKS

Remarks of Alfred Chandler on Representative Town Government (Massachusetts Law Quarterly, Volume 4, 1918)
Newport System of City Government (Cyclopedia of American Government, 1914)
Town Meeting (Town of Brookline Web Site)
Forms of Government: Towns (Massachusetts Municipal Association)
Citizen's Guide to Town Meetings (Massachusetts Secretary of State)

* The portrait of Alfred D. Chandler is from A History of Brookline, Massachusetts, from the First Settlement of Muddy River Until the Present Time: 1630-1906 published in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the town. Chandler's grandson, Albert D. Chandler Jr. (1918-2007) was a professor of business history who Fortune magazine called “America’s preeminent business historian.”

Dial Phones in Brookline: A New England First

2009-10-03T05:50:00.001-07:00

Before smart phones, before cell phones, before keypads and answering machines and area codes, before much of what think of when we think of telephones today, Brookline played a part in the introduction of a major innovation in telephone technology.

At midnight on the night of July 14, 1923, some 1,800 customers of the Aspinwall exchange office on Marion Street become the first in New England to be able to make calls themselves without having to speak first to an operator.

The customers had been supplied with new dial telephones (like the one at left). Phone company representatives visited people's homes to show them how to use the new devices, and instructions were distributed in flyers and through the newspapers.

The method is very simple [according to instructions published in the local paper]. You remove the receiver from the hook and listen for a steady humming sound known as the dial-tone, which is the equivalent of the operator's "Number, please?" After hearing this dial-tone, which comes on the line almost as soon as you place the receiver to your ear, you place your finger in the hole through which the first letter of the central office designation appears and turn the dial around to the finger stop. Then remove the finger and let the dial return to rest.

The newsreel below shows how the dialing method was explained to customers in another city several years later.

Direct dialing was made possible by new automated switching technology installed in the Marion Street exchange office. Prior to the change, callers would tell an operator the number they wanted to call, and the operator, plugging jacks into switchboards, would manually make the connection for them.

Automated switching equipment was available as early as 1896, but the dominant Bell System resisted the change. Bell's first dial phones were installed in Norfolk, Virginia in 1919, four years before Brookline. The new equipment spread slowly to other parts of the country. The last manual phones in the U.S. were not converted to dial until 1978.

The Movies Come to Brookline (Part 2)

2009-08-26T14:32:00.000-07:00

The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline's first (and only remaining) movie theater, is celebrating its 75th anniversary with a special event on Thursday, August 27th. Local author Susan Quinn and former Coolidge owner/programmer Justin Freed will tell the tale of this local and regional treasure in an evening of stories, vintage photos, and film clips.

This second of two blog posts tells the tale of the pre-Coolidge years and of the determined resistance -- equally as determined as more recent efforts to save the theater -- that kept Brookline theaterless much longer than nearby communities.

(Part 1 covered the years up to the town-wide movie referendum of 1923. Part 2 picks up with the story of that event.)

The People Vote

Public opinion played an important part in Brookline's continuing rejection of applications to build a motion picture theater in town. Vocal opponents, including clergymen, educators, and ordinary citizens, made themselves heard from the start.

Several times during the 1910s, as documented in Part 1, the Board of Selectmen polled those in attendance at hearings to gauge popular views. In every case sentiment ran against allowing a theater, and the Selectmen followed suit.

In the spring of 1923, with two new proposals before the Board, the Selectmen decided to put the question to a non-binding town-wide vote.

The Selectmen, very properly, [wrote the Brookline Chronicle] have the right to ask 'do the few persons who attend hearings on motion-pictures represent the views of the town as a whole?'

The ballot was set for April 24th. (There was already a special election scheduled to elect a replacement for the recently deceased town treasurer. In the end, the treasurer race received far less attention than the movie vote.)

The opposition mobilized quickly. An anti-movie meeting at the library drew 200 people. The Parent-Teacher Organization passed a resolution urging a No vote. A full-page ad -- "NO Moving-Pictures for BROOKLINE! -- was taken out in the Chronicle.

Proponents seemed far less organized.

The referendum received extensive coverage in the press, not just in the Chronicle but in the Boston papers as well. Space was provided for people on both sides of the question to express their views.

Opponents focused primarily on the movies' detrimental effect on children and the threat a movie theater posed to the residential character of the town. Proponents saw a boon to the town's business and convenience for residents who otherwise had to travel to other towns to enjoy a picture show.

"A number of moving pictures in Brookline Village--indeed a single moving-picture theater as an entering wedge for others which would inevitably follow--would begin the metropolitization of our community," wrote Harvey Cushing in the Chronicle, "and would in time completely alter its character and its desirability as a place of residence now so much sought after...."

"I am convinced," Walter D. Allen, Secretary of the Brookline Board of Trade told the Globe, "that a first-class picture house at Coolidge Corner, properly regulated, would stimulate trade. Business men would receive the matinee trade that now goes to Allston. Why should we consider children alone? Are not grown ups, elderly people unable to travel afar, to be considered?"

[See Having Their Say, below, for more examples of what opponents and proponents were saying before the referendum.]

In the end, it wasn't close. Brookline voters on April 24th overwhelmingly rejected the notion of a movie theater in town, 5,634 to 1,659. The two existing theater proposals were withdrawn. A third that was in the works was never submitted. There would be no attempts to bring the movies to town for another six years.

The Tide Turns

In July 1929, John F. Fleming presented a proposal for a moving picture theater at the intersection of Washington Street and Brookline Avenue. "During the past five years," Fleming told the Board of Selectmen, "there has come about quite a change in the sentiment of our Brookline people in regard to the wisdom of granting licenses for moving picture theaters in Brookline."

But the Board, the 1923 vote very much in mind, refused to consider any such proposal without another referendum. The following spring, a movement spearheaded by the Coolidge Corner Merchants Association began organizing to bring the movie question back to the ballot.

A vote was set for November 4, 1930. This time, proponents were prepared. Local merchants led the effort, sending circulars to customers and handing them out to residents. Signs urging a Yes vote appeared in store windows. Opponents, said the Chronicle, were made up of older residents who had been in opposition in 1923.

The population had changed and, as one letter writer pointed out, so had the movies. Talking pictures had come on the scene. Big studios had taken control of the industry. Perhaps most important was the implementation in March 1930 of a production code, commonly known as the Hays Code, that introduced the kind of censorship and control of content that Brookline movie supporters had urged and opponents had derided as impossible to achieve.

On November 4th, 80% of registered voters went to the polls and showed that times had, indeed, changed. Nearly 20 years after a theater was first proposed for Brookline, the Yes votes carried the day 8,219 to 6,884.

Opening the Gates

Within a week of the referendum, six groups had presented proposals for a total of eight theaters in town. The Board of Selectmen deferred discussion until January by which time the number of proposals had grown to 14.

One was for a new building on the site of the Beacon Universalist Church on Harvard Street, the eventual site of today's Coolidge Corner Theatre. But the Church proposal did not make the first cut. Instead, the first license for a movie theater in Brookline was granted to George W. Wightman and the Paramount-Publix Company for a building at the corner of Beacon and Charles Street.

Later that year, a second license was granted for a theater in Brookline Village, at the intersection of Washington and Pearl Streets.

The Wightman project ran into trouble, further delaying the long-awaited opening of a theater in town. In November 1931, the license was revoked, but the Selectmen left the door open for Wightman to pull a new deal together.

In February 1932, a new plan for the Beacon Universalist site was put forth, calling for a remodeling of the church into a theater instead of construction of a new building. It would be an independent theater called the Brookline Neighborhood Theatre -- Wightman had called his theater the Coolidge Corner Theatre -- and the church would receive half of the profits as rent.

But the Selectmen still seemed to hold out hope that the Wightman plan would come together. Discussions dragged on until June 1933 when Wightman announced he could not secure financing and the license was provisionally guaranteed to the Harvard Amusement Company for a theater on the site of the Beacon Universalist Church.

M.J. Shapiro and Son, a specialist in theater construction, was named general contractor in July and finally, after more than two decades of waiting, Brookline had its own movie house in December of 1933.

Having Their Say

Voices, pro and con, from the debate leading up to the 1923 moving picture referendum

"Motion pictures are pure dope for children. They require no thought; you simply look and look." - Mary McSkimmon, Principal, Pierce School

"Pictures give children a distorted view of life and this is not fair to them." - Gilbert Pierce, President of the Central Council of the Brookline Parent Teacher Association

"Is it not possible for a 'model town' like Brookline to find a representative group of citizens of sufficient character and intelligence to supervise the management of such a theater? With such a committee in charge and with parents and teachers alive to their responsibilities, let us have a community picture house in Brookline." - Pro Bono Publico

"But if the theater or movie 'fan' feels that he must have his favorite amusement, are there not theaters and movies galore in Boston, Roxbury, Brighton, and Allston? Why not go when they are already established and let Brookline be free from some of the objectionable features in the business." - George B. Foster

"The Jews are opposed to eating pork, well, let them go without. You are opposed to motion pictures, well, stay away. But if the Jews, being a majority in your locality, undertook to prohibit the sale of pork there, what would you say? This is tyranny. I am a free American, and I kick." - Frederic Cunningham

"It may be said that children go already. They will go three times as often when the movie is just a step down the street." - Ann C. Hoague

"It seems to me parents should be able to rule their children about the number of times in a week a child should attend." - Long A Tax-Payer

"What youth needs and thrives on in its hours of recreation are light, air, sunshine, activity. Brookline abounds in these opportunities in its playgrounds and gymnasium. The movie means darkness, except for one illuminated spot, trying on the eyes." - E.B.S.

"Why in all this talk against movies isn't a mother's view considered? In reading the list over, I guess almost everyone is perfectly able to go at any time out of town for their amusement, while you take a mother who is too tired to go nights, but might want to go with her own children in her home town. You know there are lots of respectable people who can only afford 'movies' for their amusement but have to stay at home, as carfares amount to so much." - A Mother

"Most teachers of children realize that one of the chief enemies of education at the present time is the moving picture theater because of the strain upon the nervous system of the children and the weakening of their mental powers. How dull must lessons seem after the abnormal thrills of the movies!" - Mary A. White

The Movies Come to Brookline -- At Last!

2009-08-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

The Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline's first (and only remaining) movie theater, is celebrating its 75th anniversary with a special event on Thursday, August 27th. Local author Susan Quinn and former Coolidge owner/programmer Justin Freed will tell the tale of this local and regional treasure in an evening of stories, vintage photos, and film clips.

As Quinn notes in her new anniversary booklet Only at the Coolidge: The Story of a Remarkable Movie Theater, the opening of the Coolidge in December 1933 came only after many years of opposition to the very idea of a movie theater in town.

I won't tell the theater's story here. (I recommend Only at the Coolidge and, of course, the Thursday night event.)

Instead, I'll tell the tale (in two parts) of those pre-Coolidge years and of the determined resistance -- equally as determined as more recent efforts to save the theater -- that kept Brookline theaterless much longer than nearby communities.

Boston and the Early Days of the Movie Business

Until 1910 or so, the movie business in Boston -- and in the U.S. in general -- targeted a largely immigrant and working class audience. Theaters were clustered downtown and in poorer neighborhoods. But as theater owners sought the more affluent, middle-class family trade that began to change.

In the years before World War One, "new theaters opened in virtually every major residential neighborhood surrounding the city," wrote film scholar Russell Merritt in a case study of the early movie business in Boston.¹

By the end of 1913, moving picture theaters had been approved in Dorchester, Roxbury, Back Bay, Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Belmont, and Watertown.

But not in Brookline.

As early as 1911, the Board of Selectmen rejected applications to build theaters in town. In October of that year, two Catholic and two Protestant pastors convinced the selectmen to turn down proposals for two theaters in Village Square. (The Boston Globe noted that this was the third time the board had gone on record as opposed to a movie theater.)

Rev. Michael T. McManus of St. Mary's of the Assumption expressed concern about the unwholesome influence a motion picture theater would have on the many young St. Mary's parishioners who lived a short distance from the proposed locations.

This argument about children would continue be at the forefront of opposition in the years to come.

Standing Firm in Opposition

In January 1913, a group led by Max Talbot proposed to build a theater on Washington Street between Brookline Avenue and Pearl Street (where 10 Brookline Place is now). The petitioners promised to show only high quality pictures and offered to have the selectmen, or a committee they would appoint, approve all pictures before they were shown.

The Talbot group's application was rejected. Again, local clergy played a part in rallying opinion against the theater, even urging their parishioners from their pulpits the Sunday before the meeting to stand against the granting of a license.

An Exception is Made

Although there were no movie theaters in Brookline until 1933, there were public showings of motion pictures.

On January 2, 1914 -- almost 20 years to the day before the opening of the Coolidge Corner Theatre -- the Brookline Friendly Society held a town-approved show in its headquarters in the Union Building at the corner of Walnut and High Streets.

The Friendly Society, predecessor of today's Brookline Community Foundation, was a charitable organization that included boys' and girls' club among the many services it provided.

The show was a big event. There were about 300 in attendance, mostly children who regularly took part in activities at the Union Building. Massachusetts Governor-Elect David Walsh attended and was introduced by the chairman of the Board of Selectmen.

The movies, reported the Boston Globe, included "From the Mine to the Mint" (about the making of U.S. coins) and three reels about the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The Brookline Chronicle noted that "the most popular among the pictures shown depicted the adventures of wild animals escaping from a circus train."

As was typical of motion picture shows in that era, the films were interspersed with other entertainment. "Between the reels [said the Globe], J. Wesley White sang sea songs, Miss McNeil of Brookline gave a fancy dancing exhibition and P.A. Rogers played xylophone solos."

The Friendly Society continued to have regular movie shows in its 400-seat hall on Friday and Saturday afternoons and evenings for some time after. Admission, according to one account, was 5-cents for children and adults and 3-cents for members of the Society's boys' and girls' clubs.

Movies were also shown in other halls and outdoors on the Cypress Street playground for July 4th celebrations and other special occasions in the 1910s and 1920s. But opposition to a commercial theater remained firm.

In the spring of 1915, a group led by former selectman and state senator John A. Curtin proposed building a theater in Coolidge Corner at a cost of $150,000-200,000. The Chronicle editorialized against it a few weeks before a public hearing on the petition:

"Such amusement places may not deserve all of the charges that have been brought against them, there may be good as well as bad ones [said the editorial]...

"It does not necessarily follow from the fact that a community is densely populated, and within the zone of an overflowing city population, that it must surrender its individuality as residential community and succumb to the amorphous, promiscuous conditions of city life...

"A moving picture theatre at Coolidge Corner may in itself be unobjectionable, but it will break a precedent and result in other moving picture theatres on Beacon Street and elsewhere, and the future of these streets will be doomed."

The following week, a letter from "A Citizen," noting the availability of motion pictures theaters in other communities, argued otherwise:

"I am an occasional patron of this form of entertainment and would like the privilege of being able to attend one in my own town with my own townspeople...[W]hat force can there be to the suggestion that what is desirable for our people outside of Brookline is not good for them inside the confines or their own town?"

A hearing was held before the Board of Selectmen in April. A representative of the Harvard Congregational Church spoke in favor, as long as there was strict censorship of what was shown.

Rev. John Sheehan of St. Mary's spoke against. "As soon as a picture house comes to Coolidge Corner one will come to Village Square," said Sheehan. "Once a picture show gets in one can say all he likes about censorship, but there will be no adequate censorship."

The selectmen polled those at the hearing to gauge public opinion. 60 voted No; 48 voted Yes. The Board rejected the application.

Other proposals continued to come forward, and be turned down. One came from Nathan H. Gordon, an early partner of Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer fame. (Gordon and Mayer both lived in Brookline at one time in the 1910s.)

Gordon's 1916 proposal called for a $350,000 theater with 2,000 seats at the corner of Harvard Street and Webster Place. It won overwhelming support from the Brookline Board of Trade whose members voted 137-40 in favor of the plan. It was rejected by the Board of Selectmen.

In the spring of 1919, it appeared the tide might be turning. Three new proposals were put forward, all within a few blocks of each other in Coolidge Corner. (One was for conversion of the Beacon Universalist Church, the building that eventually became the Coolidge Corner Theatre.)

The Brookline Chronicle sensed a change in the air:

In refusing to grant motion picture licenses here the Selectmen have been guided by public opinion. Since the last refusal, opinion appears to have swung the other way. The opinion of the town as a whole now seems to be strongly in favor of a picture house, provided, of course, it be a first-class enterprise, properly supervised.

The paper misjudged (or maybe opponents were just better organized). Hundreds of residents showed up at the May 6th hearing and when the Board polled those in attendance the vote was 203-85 against approving a theater. All three proposals were rejected.

That more or less put a halt to efforts to bring a motion picture theater to Brookline until 1923. Then things heated up again, and the issue was put before the whole town for a vote.

I'll continue with the story of 1923 movie referendum and its aftermath in Part 2 tomorrow.

¹ "Nickelodeon theaters, 1905-1914: building an audience for the movies" in The American Film Industry, revised edition, edited by Tino Balio. University of Wisconsin Press, 1985, p83-102

A Real Life "Make Way for Ducklings"

2009-08-18T02:01:00.000-07:00

A mother mallard trying to lead her brood of ducklings across a busy street is aided by a policeman who stops traffic to let them pass.

It's a famous scene, of course, from Robert McCloskey's classic children's book Make Way for Ducklings. But it also describes an actual event that took place on Beacon Street in Brookline in 1919 -- more than two decades before McCloskey's award-winning book appeared in print.

The tale was told in the August 16, 1919 edition of the Brookline Chronicle. ("Mallard Moves Large Family: Shows Rare Intelligence in Crossing Thoroughfare.")

A pair of mallards, reported the Chronicle, had been observed each summer for four years flying from the Muddy River to Hall's Pond to make their nest. When the ducklings had hatched and were ready to fly, the whole clan would make its way back to the Muddy River to live.

This particular year the ducklings -- ten of them -- hatched later than usual, on June 24th. Something happened to one of them during the night of the 26th, however, and the next morning the mother duck -- "evidently realizing that the place was unsafe, and doubtless with the happy memory of the Fenway and of the river with its sheltered islands" -- set out on foot with her not-yet-flying family.

At eight o'clock that morning [reported the Chronicle] she set out on the long journey, followed by the nine little ones, then only three days old and so tiny as to be hardly distinguishable in the long grass. Up the bank they went, and down the nearby alley, and a few moments later the astonished gaze of the traffic officer stationed at the corner of Beacon and Carlton Streets beheld them preparing to cross the wide main thoroughfare. Much amused and greatly interested, he stopped all traffic on the busy street until the duck, quacking continuously, had conducted her brood safely to the other side.

A second policeman on the scene escorted the mallards up Carlton Street and down Colchester Street to the Fenway.

But here the greatest difficulty of the journey was encountered, for the railroad tracks had to be crossed in order to reach the river. To go over the bridge [the Carlton Street Footbridge] was impossible for such little creatures, nor could they step over the high rails of the double track. Mother Duck became anxious. She led the little ones down to the bank; she urged them vociferously; she (so the eye-witness describes it) went close to the rail and 'rolled' herself over it, calling the ducklings to follow. And at last they did. Imitating her maneuver with all their tiny strength, they 'rolled' or pushed themselves over the same way.

Joyfully they scrambled up the opposite bank, across the path and the strip of grass, and in another moment they were splashing in the river, where they swam and paddled about, seeming entirely at home and nothing daunted by their extraordinary adventure.

We are inclined to think of a duck as one of our most stupid creatures [continued the story], but can a bird be thought dull who could plan and execute such a move as this? People may say it was merely the instinct of preservation. But still one wonders how that mother duck, who had always until now flown the distance between pond and park, high above the housetops, knew so surely what streets would take her there and make the shortest possible journey for those tiny ducklings. And besides, why did she choose the only crossing within half a mile where there was a traffic officer!

Could this story have been the inspiration for Robert McCloskey's classic tale? It seems unlikely. McCloskey was five years old in 1919, and didn't come to Boston (to study at the Vesper George Art School) until 1935. But he did have this to say about the origins of the story:

I had first noticed the ducks when walking through the Boston Public Garden every morning on my way to art school. When I returned to Boston four years later I noticed the traffic problem of the ducks and heard a few stories about them. Then the book just sort of developed from there."

It's possible the Brookline tale is one of the stories he heard. Or it may be that, in a time of more ducks and less traffic, incidents like this were not uncommon.

One final note: 90 years later, Brookline people are still coming to the rescue of ducklings in need. See this story, first brought to my attention via the Brookline TAB blog.

* Credit for Hall's Pond photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/msandman/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Wheelmen Take the Corey Hill Challenge

2009-07-25T05:16:00.001-07:00

Boston was the Hub of bicycling in the United States in the 1880s. The Boston Bicycling Club, the first in the country, was founded in 1878. Five years later, Outing, a Journal of Recreation labeled the city "the bicycling paradise of America." Wheelmen, as they were sometimes called, came from all over to ride "the beautiful roads that have rendered Boston the metropolis of bicycling."

One of the high points in metropolitan Boston-- literally and figuratively -- for local and visiting riders alike was Corey Hill in Brookline. Wheelmen strove to become the first to make it to the top of the hill and, after that barrier was broken in 1883, to set a new record time or simply challenge themselves to conquer the steep incline.

Bicycle manufacturers and sellers even promoted in advertisements the fact that their bicycles had made it to the top of Corey Hill.

"The hill is one of the steepest and longest in the vicinity of Boston," wrote the Boston Daily Globe on July 29, 1883, shortly after the first successful ascent "and hundreds of wheelmen have unsuccessfully tried to ride up."

The length of Corey Hill is 2300 feet [continued the Globe article], height 199 feet; average grade, one foot in 11.41. On the last 158 feet the average grade is one feet in 7.85 feet, and for the next 170 feet lower down the rise is one foot in every 7.87 feet

W.W. Stall, a Boston bicycle and tricycle dealer, was the first to make it to the top, in July 1883. He rode a Victor Tricycle like the one shown in the ad at left.

Later that month, H.D. Corey (fittingly enough) became the first to make the climb on a bicycle, a Rudge Light Roadster similar to the 1887 model pictured at left below. Corey was a noted Boston wheelman. (The following year he would become one of the first to ride a bicycle down Mt. Washington, the highest peak in New England.)

Annual Corey Hill climbs, organized by the Boston Bicycle Club, were held for the next several years. The 1886 event, part of the League of American Wheelman gathering in Boston, attracted particularly large crowds. (See the Harper's Weekly illustration at the top of this story and one from the Boston Globe below.)

Organized climbs were not the only way to attempt the hill, of course. The 1886 Cyclists' Road Book of Boston and Vicinity included Corey Hill as part of Route Five, starting at Trinity Church in the Back Bay. "The view from the top of the hill well repays for the labor of ascending it, on foot if necessary," said the guide, noting that the final, steepest 158 feet "is what generally bowls over the cyclist."

She Was His "Yankee Doodle Gal"

2009-07-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

Agnes Nolan was one of 18 children of a Brookline letter carrier and his wife. Her father had his moment in the spotlight in 1905 when no less a figure than President Theodore Roosevelt intervened after John Nolan lost his post office job (and source of support for his large family).

But the real celebrities in the Brookline family were Agnes and three of her eight sisters, all of whom appeared on stage.

Agnes and her sisters Lola, Alice, and Grace were all members of the company of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” George M. Cohan—arguably the most popular entertainer of the period. Agnes' stage career was brief, but she made big news locally and nationally in 1907 when she and Cohan were married.

The marriage—his second and her first—was planned, fittingly enough, for the Fourth of July though it actually occurred on June 29th.

The Nolans of Brookline

John J. Nolan began working for the postal service in Brookline in 1875. He was reportedly the first to deliver mail directly to individual homes in town. (Prior to 1864 postage only paid for post office-to-post office delivery; home delivery began in the big cities and spread slowly to other communities after the Civil War.)

Nolan was also the one to lay out the routes Brookline letter carriers used when free home delivery finally reached town.

In 1899, however, Nolan was dismissed from the postal service for drunkenness. As his son-in-law, Boston American columnist George Holland later described it:

The appropriate figure of speech would be to say that he had crooked his elbow.

Perhaps we could blame it on the monotony of trudging up to the same front doors.

A swinging door was different. Off his route, John Nolan found swinging doors and they opened on a warming atmosphere where, for a time, one could relinquish the responsibilities that came with the largest family in New England.

Whether or not it was the largest in New England, Nolan's family was certainly large. He and his wife Mary had 18 children (17 according to some accounts). Three died very young, but all of the others—with 29 years separating the oldest and youngest—lived with their parents in a succession of Brookline homes.

They were at 116 Brooks Street in 1900 and 38 Gorham Avenue in 1903. Later Brookline addresses for the parents included 149 Winthrop Road and 19 Green Street.

Nolan went to work in the coal business after his dismissal from the postal service, but his plight eventually came to the attention of U.S. Congressman Samuel Powers in whose district the Nolans lived. Powers brought the case to the attention of President Roosevelt in the White House, noting that:

It is claimed that the Department at the time of his discharge promised to reinstate him if his subsequent conduct should justify such action. The accompanying letters and certificates conclusively show that Nolan has been absolutely free from habits of intoxication ever since his discharge.

The congressman also enclosed a photo of the family, which he had advised Nolan to have taken, to show the president that Nolan "is not an adherent to any doctrine of race suicide."

(Roosevelt was said to be obsessed with the concept of "race suicide" a concern that English-speaking whites, through declining birth rates, were not keeping up with immigrants and other minorities. See Chapter VII, "Race Suicide," in Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race by Thomas G. Dyer, LSU Press, 1992).

In March 1905, Roosevelt issued an order reinstating Nolan to the postal service. According to Holland, the president telephoned the postmaster personally and Nolan was back on the job the next day.

The Nolan Daughters on Stage

By 1905, Lola, Agnes, and Alice Nolan, who began their performing careers under the stage name of the Merrill Sisters, were part of George M. Cohan's theater company.

Cohan has been called the father of the American musical comedy and "the man who owned Broadway." After beginning his career in vaudeville with his parents and sister, performing as The Four Cohans, he turned to the theater in 1901.

A writer, director, and performer, he produced more than 80 Broadway shows and wrote more than 1,500 songs over four decades.

Lola joined Cohan's company first. Agnes and Alice auditioned for the 1904 New York production of "Little Johnny Jones," Cohan's first Broadway hit. (It was the show that introduced such standards as "Yankee Doodle Boy" and "Give My Regards to Broadway.")

Cohan was reportedly smitten with Agnes' vitality—and the audacity she showed in asking for $25 a week for chorus work, more than the going rate. She and Alice were added to the company. (A fourth sister, Grace, later worked for Cohan as well.)

In February 1907, Cohan divorced his wife, the actress Ethel Levey. In April, it was announced that he and Agnes Nolan would be married on July 4th, Cohan's purported birthday. (Birth records show that he was born on July 3rd, but the "Yankee Doodle Boy" always claimed he was "born on the Fourth of July.")

In the end, the marriage took place a few days ahead of schedule, in Freehold, New Jersey, before a justice of the peace. As the New York Times reported on June 30, 1907:

An automobile accident last Monday detained the couple, who were taking a short trip, for several hours in Freehold, and during that time they decided to get married. They returned to Freehold yesterday and were married by the justice.

Agnes's sister Alice and Cohan's long-time partner, producer Sam Harris, were the only witnesses. Alice Nolan and Sam Harris would marry later that year, and the two couples would build adjacent homes in Great Neck on Long Island.

Agnes Cohan, conforming to the wishes of her husband and her parents, retired from the stage after her marriage. She and Cohan had a son and two daughters.

In 1942, Warner Brothers released Yankee Doodle Dandy, a musical biography of Cohan that won a Best Actor Oscar for James Cagney. Agnes Cohan was not a character in the movie. Cohan had stipulated that the film make no mention of his first wife Ethel Levey, and the filmmakers instead created a composite of the two wives to serve as Cohan's love interest in the picture.

The film was shown to the Cohans in a private screening. George was ill with cancer; he died in November of that year at age 64.

Agnes Cohan outlived her husband by nearly 30 years. She died September 10, 1972 at the age of 89. She had been living in Queens in obscurity and in poor health for 10 years. Neighbors told the New York Times she was devoted to television and had few visitors other than family. Most of the neighbors did not know who she was.

Times reporter Laurie Johnston described Agnes Cohan's funeral. About 60 people attended the service at Our Lady of Martyrs Catholic church in Queens in contrast, noted Johnston, to the thousands who filled the streets around St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan for George Cohan's funeral.

"I wanted to see if there were any celebrities," whispered a woman in purple wool as she slid into a pew and dropped to her knees beside a friend [wrote Johnston]. She was to be disappointed.

A few years before Agnes Cohan's death, the musical biography George M. opened on Broadway. (Joel Grey, like Cagney before him, won a Best Actor award—a Tony—for his portrayal of Cohan.) Agnes Nolan Cohan, as well as Ethel Levey, were restored as characters in the play.

In a 1970 television version of the play, Agnes was played by Blythe Danner, better know to today's audiences, perhaps, as the mother of Gwynneth Paltrow.

Agnes Nolan's mother Mary died in 1921 and her father John in 1929. Several other members of the Nolan family, in addition to the four sisters, had careers or ties to the entertainment industry.

Alice Nolan Harris last appeared on stage in a Cohan revue in 1910. She died in 1930 at the age of 42.
Loretta (Lola) Nolan, who continued to use the stage name Lola Merrill, married the actor Frank Otto and appeared in an act with him for many years, often in Cohan and Harris productions. The last surviving of the many Nolan children, she died in 1974.
Grace Nolan Landy had a brief acting career. She died in 1938 at the age of 47.
John F. Nolan, the oldest son, worked in the Boston post office for 28 years before leaving in 1913 to manage the Cohan and Harris Theater in New York. He died in 1923.
Raymond Nolan (1893-1967) moved to California and was a still photographer for 20th Century Fox Studios for many years.
William Nolan (1892-1953) was an editor at the Douglas Fairbanks Studio and worked on several Fairbanks films including The Thief of Baghdad.
Dorothy Nolan Holland (1895-1971), the youngest child, married George Holland who was a playwright and longtime "Boston After Dark" columnist for the Boston American. They continued to live in Brookline.
Another brother, Matthew Nolan (1879-1955), also remained in Brookline. He was not in the entertainment business; he was a Brookline firefighter for 45 years before retiring as Acting Deputy Chief in 1947.

Historical Society Website Wins Award

2009-06-26T14:25:00.000-07:00

The website of the Brookline Historical Society has been named a first place winner in the New England Museum Association's 2009 Publication Awards Competition.

The site, designed and maintained by Historical Society volunteer Larry Barbaras, was the top choice of the judges among websites from museums with annual budgets under $250,000.

"The access to great content made this site a standout," said the judges in announcing the award. "The site succeeds because the quantity and quality of the content makes the site feel like a useful destination and encourages engagement. The judges appreciated the straightforward interface that encouraged browsing.

The New England Museum Association's annual Publication Awards Program recognizes excellence in design, production, and effective communication in all aspects of museum publishing. Entries are judged by a panel experienced in publication, design, marketing and communications. Awards are given to those entries which most effectively present their message to the intended audience.

The Brookline Historical Society is a non-profit community organization dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of Brookline's diverse history. The Society's website (http://www.brooklinehistoricalsociety.org) includes hundreds of historic photographs, maps, articles, program highlights, and information about Brookline's past.

Brookline in the Flu Pandemic of 1918-19 (Part 2 of 2)

2009-06-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

From the front page of the Brookline Townsman, October 5, 1918

When the influenza pandemic struck Brookline in the fall of 1918 it affected all aspects of life in town as officials and residents alike struggled to control its spread, to provide care for the ranks of the sick, and to maintain daily life with so many unable to fulfill their usual roles.

Last week, Part 1 of this two-part report looked at Camp Brooks, the open air hospital on Corey Hill where merchant seamen from Commonwealth Pier in Boston were treated. This second part looks at the impact of the pandemic on the town of Brookline in general.

Influenza in the Town of Brookline

Camp Brooks, the tent hospital established by the Massachusetts State Guard to treat some of the worst cases among the merchant seamen, did not serve Brookline townspeople. The camp was isolated from the town. Guardsmen patrolled all approaches, and no visitors were allowed.

Influenza nonetheless spread among the population of Brookline, as it did in communities throughout the state. The first local person to die from the disease, police officer George T. Driscoll, succumbed on September 10th, the day after the camp opened. He had been sick for two weeks, though his illness had not been reported as influenza at first.

The initial outbreak was met with caution but with confidence that it could be kept under control. "To one who is forewarned and prepared, there is no real cause for alarm," said the Brookline Chronicle on September 14th

For the individual, his or her course of action is simple [advised the paper]. Until it is evident that the epidemic has been checked or has run its course, it would be well to avoid crowds, to keep outdoors as much as possible, sleep with windows open, eat sanely and in general lay in just as large a stock of health as possible.

A week later, as it became clear how easily the disease could spread from person to person, debate over how to respond intensified and the paper's tone, while still optimistic, changed.

Whether the schools are kept open or are closed, whether or not the doors of moving picture houses and other places of assembly are shut, there will still be open other avenues of infection. We are in a state of siege and might as well accept it.

On September 24, as the number of deaths continued to rise, the schools were ordered closed, as were the town swimming pool and gymnasium. Shortly after, public gatherings of many kinds -- at churches, meeting halls, billiard parlors, bowling alleys and other places -- were banned. Public funerals could only be held with a permit from the town. A flier outlining how to avoid the disease was circulated to local households.

Health care facilities and medical personnel in town were soon overwhelmed. An emergency call for more doctors and nurses -- "to attend the many patients now suffering for want of the simplest care" -- was issued. There was concern, too, that with whole families afflicted people could not take care of their own. "When hundreds of families are affected at the same time, and this not in a single town but on all towns, we suddenly outgrow our social clothes, and then we suffer from exposure," reported the Chronicle.

The Brookline Friendly Society, a social service agency and the forerunner of today's Brookline Community Foundation, sprung into action. Volunteers cooked broth in a kitchen set up in the Society's headquarters at the corner of Walnut and High Streets. Other volunteers collected "custards, jellies, fresh eggs, and other dainties" made by people in their own homes. These, along with broth and milk, were distributed to needy families every afternoon. Forty-nine automobiles were made available to the Society by local residents to help with the distribution.

Only the sick people themselves can tell what a help this was [reported the Friendly Society in its 1918-19 Report], but the expressions of appreciation were many. Extra food was sent to families where the breadwinner was ill, and extra clothing, particularly underwear, was bought when it was necessary.

In early October, town officials began to quarantine homes where cases of influenza had been found. On October 12th, the Brookline Townsman reported that:

Agent Ward [of the Health Department] assisted by other municipal officials has quarantined several hundred homes in Brookline, placing a red card on the front and rear of every house containing persons suffering from the disease. In addition a white card has been placed on the door of each sickroom which prevents all but doctors and attendants entering. In order to enforce the quarantine authorities have power to station policemen outside the house or seize the buildings but so far such action has not been necessary here.

The number of people who were sick had an affect on all kinds of activities. (There were more than 2,600 cases reported between September 1918 and the end of the year, out of a population of 37,000, although the actual number was probably considerably higher). The police and fire departments, reported the Townsman, were crippled, and dozens of Town Hall and post office employees, as well as those of private businesses, were unable to report to work. The Chronicle urged residents to be patient:

If telephone service is poorer, if the street cars run less often, if only one clerk is behind the counter when there should be two or three, if any of the ordinary daily services that we look for as a matter of course are less well performed than usual, remember the numbers on the sick list and have patience with those remaining who are doing double duty.

Advertisements in the Brookline papers showed how local businesses tried to cope with the crisis, to reassure customers, and, perhaps, in some cases, to take advantage of the situation.

Advertisements, The Brookline Chronicle, September & October 1918

By mid-October the worst of the epidemic seemed to have passed in Brookline. The ban on public gatherings was lifted on the 19th. The schools re-opened on the 23rd. (They were closed an extra week in January, part of an extended Christmas break, as a precaution.)

There continued to be cases, and a few deaths, in November and December and in 1919, though it was uncertain whether later cases were part of the same deadly strain of the flu. Overall, it appears that between 125 and 150 people -- and maybe more -- died. (Precise numbers are hard to come by; some Brookline residents were hospitalized and died in other towns and were not counted in the Brookline numbers, while some who died in Brookline were not residents of the town.)

"That Brookline has suffered no worse may be due in part to the promptness with which the program of prevention was adopted," wrote the Chronicle on October 12th. "Most of these steps were taken here before they were taken in other communities, and they have proved their value."

Then, too, [continued the paper] Brookline has had the very great advantage that its 'congested' districts, its quarters of houses in which families are crowded beyond the minimum requirements of health, are comparatively slight. Although the epidemic, like the agents of Herod, spared no class or quarter, it is essentially a crowd disease, and where the congestion was the greatest its incidence was most heavy.

Such an epidemic as this tests our social institutions, shakes our confidence in their sufficiency. It tries out our organizations for the protection of public health, raises questions as to whether the work of doctor and nurse might not be as much of a public concern as that of soldier and firemen and whether they ought not to be frankly in public rather than in quasi-private service. And it also raises, or should raise, a question or two about public living conditions and housing.

A Flu by Any Other Name....

The deadly flu virus of 1918-19 was widely but inaccurately known as "the Spanish Influenza" and is still frequently referred to by that name today.

According to the book “Hunting the 1918 Flu” by Kirsty Duncan, the misnomer was the result of more reports of the flu coming out of Spain than other countries because Spain was neutral in the World War and did not have the press censorship that other European countries had. But the flu did not originate in Spain nor was it more prevalent there than elsewhere.

(There was also a widespread but untrue belief at the time that the virus had been spread by agents of Germany in the waning days of the First World War.)

Accounts from the period also frequently used the now archaic term "the grippe" or, less frequently, "the grip" in their reporting on the influenza pandemic.

Brookline in the Flu Pandemic of 1918-19 (Part 1 of 2)

2009-06-15T13:13:00.000-07:00

The great flu pandemic of 1918-19 killed tens of millions of people worldwide, including an estimated 45,000 in Massachusetts and 675,000 in the United States. It's impact was felt everywhere, including in Brookline.

More than 125 residents of the town died. Schools were closed for four weeks right after the beginning of the school year. Homes of the afflicted were quarantined. Public gatherings at churches, meeting halls, soda fountains, billiard parlors, bowling alleys, and funerals were banned.

At the same time, quick reaction by local authorities was credited with limiting the impact more than in other communities. And at an open air hospital on Corey Hill, new methods of care were developed, methods that medical personnel then took to facilities elsewhere in the state and around the country.

This first of a two-part look at Brookline in the 1918-19 pandemic tells the story of Camp Brooks, the open air hospital on Summit Avenue. Erected literally overnight in September 1918, the camp became a focal point in Massachusetts' battle against the deadly disease.

Part 2 will look at the impact of the flu pandemic on the town of Brookline as a whole.

Camp Brooks and the Influenza Outbreak of 1918

Boston was one of the epicenters of the pandemic. After first appearing elsewhere in the spring of 1918, influenza erupted late that summer in more virulent form among merchant marine trainees in Boston Harbor. (There were major outbreaks around the same time in the port cities of Freetown, Sierra Leone and Brest, France.)

Noted surgeon William A. Brooks had opened the Brooks Hospital at the corner of Summit Avenue and Lancaster Terrace in 1915. At the time of the flu outbreak Brooks was both Surgeon-General of the Massachusetts State Guard and medical director of the recruiting service of the Shipping Board. He was called in to deal with the sick seamen.

I knew that the hospitals in Boston at that time were pretty well congested [he later wrote], and did not see how we could possibly place as many sick persons as we had.

Under Brooks' direction, the Brookline company of the Massachusetts Guard was called out on the afternoon of September 9, 1918 to erect a tent camp on the east side of Corey Hill between the Brooks Hospital and Corey Hill Park. Town Engineer Henry Varney and other town officials also pitched in. By just after midnight, the camp had been laid out, tents had been set up, sewage connections had been made, lights and water had been turned on, and the first patients had been admitted.

Researchers Richard A. Hobday and John W. Cason, writing about Camp Brooks in the May 2009 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, described conditions at the hospital:

The treatment at Camp Brooks Hospital took place outdoors, with “a maximum of sunshine and of fresh air day and night.” The medical officer in charge, Major Thomas F. Harrington, had studied the history of his patients and found that the worst cases of pneumonia came from the parts of ships that were most badly ventilated. In good weather, patients were taken out of their tents and put in the open. They were kept warm in their beds at night with hot-water bottles and extra blankets and were fed every few hours throughout the course of the fever. Anyone in contact with them had to wear an improvised facemask, which comprised five layers of gauze on a wire frame covering the nose and mouth. The frame was made out of an ordinary gravy strainer, shaped to fit the face of the wearer and to prevent the gauze filter from touching the nostrils or mouth. Nurses and orderlies were instructed to keep their hands away from the outside of the masks as much as possible. A superintendent made sure the masks were replaced every two hours, were properly sterilized, and contained fresh gauze.

Other measures to prevent infection included the wearing of gloves and gowns, including a head covering. Doctors, nurses, and orderlies had to wash their hands in disinfectant after contact with patients and before eating. The use of common drinking cups, towels, and other items was strictly forbidden. Patients’ dishes and utensils were kept separate and put in boiling water after each use. Pneumonia and meningitis patients used paper plates, drinking cups, and napkins; paper bags with gauze were pinned to pillowcases for sputum. Extensive use was made of mouthwash and gargle, and twice daily, the proprietary silver-based antimicrobial ointment Argyrol was applied to nasal mucous membranes to prevent ear infection.

Thirty-five of the 351 patients treated at the hospital died, a much lower rate, according to Brooks, than in indoor hospitals despite the fact that the open air hospital took in some of the worst cases. Only eight of the more than 150 doctors, nurses, aids, orderlies, and other workers at the camp developed influenza, and five of those were thought to have been exposed to it outside the camp.

The combination of fresh air, sunlight, and a "high standard of personal and environmental hygiene" employed by the Camp Brooks staff may have played a large part in their success compared to other hospitals, report Hobday and Cason. And, indeed, those same standards and plan of organization were adopted successfully elsewhere. "[A]s members of 'The Brooks Teaching Units,' these doctors, nurses, and aids have established military hospitals in eight other cities in our Commonwealth," reported the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in December 1918. "The strict adherence of the members of these hospital personnel to these military orders contributed in very large part to the success of the undertaking."

The Camp Brooks tent hospital remained in place for a little more than a month, until the worst of the epidemic had passed in Boston. A year later, with support from throughout the state, Brooks established the Brooks Cubicle Hospital on Corey Hill to provide a more permanent facility to apply the same principles of treatment that had been used at Camp Brooks.

Further Information

The Influenza Pandemic 1918 (The Discovery Channel)

The Great Pandemic: The United States in 1918-19 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services)
Influenza 1918 (The American Experience, PBS)
The Open-Air Treatment of Pandemic Influenza (Richard A. Hobday and John W. Cason, American Journal Public Health, May 2009)
The Origin of Camp Brooks and the Open-Air Treatment of Influenza (William A. Brooks, Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, December 1918)
The Open Air Treatment of Influenza (William A. Brooks, American Journal of Public Health, October 1918)

Dr. Lydia Clements and the Klondike Gold Rush

2009-06-06T19:39:00.000-07:00

The Klondike gold rush of the 1890s must have attracted its share of odd characters, but there probably weren't many like Dr. Lydia R. Clements of Brookline.

Dr. Clements, a graduate of the Boston University School of Medicine and the wife of a prominent dentist in town, set out with a party of men and women in the spring of 1898 determined to make her fortune in the gold fields of the Klondike.

"She thinks the practice of medicine should be profitable in that section," reported the Boston Globe at the outset of her expedition (May 8, 1898), "but if it turns out there is not much demand for medical aid, then she will turn to whatever else will net her gold."

"She may, with other women," continued the Globe, "purchase a claim and hire men, or even attempt themselves, to work the claim."

All of the women and some of the men in her party left the expedition before reaching their goal, but Clements persevered and become one of the first white women -- possibly the first from the East -- to cross the Chilkoot Pass into the Klondike region.

She practiced medicine in the city of Dawson and staked out a number of claims, but returned to Brookline six months later having lost $10,000 yet determined to return.

When she did return, in 1900, the driving force was her association with the occult philosophy of Prof. Charles H. Mackay and his West Gate School of Philosophy in Boston. "He has succeeded in influencing this woman in his theory," reported the Globe at the outset of her second journey to the far north (July 1, 1900), "so that she is willing to risk her life and much of her husband's fortune to exploit the theory."

I have been criticized in some quarters of Boston for what was termed my mad adventure of 1898 [Clements said in the Globe]. The same people, and many of them are influential in scientific and literary circles, will receive me with open arms when I return for the second time from the land of the midnight sun.

Guided by what she called Mackay's "power of mind over mind," Clements established herself in the Nome district of Alaska inside the Arctic Circle where she was certain she would make her fortune.

I do not wish you to think that it is the greed for riches that is sending me north [said Clements]. I have a clearly defined and I think laudable object in taking what some of my friends term a reckless venture in search of gold. It is my intention should I, as I expect, be eminently successful in my present undertaking, with my wealth to found a school of philosophy to disseminate the views of Prof. Mackay. It may take a year, it may take two years, but I am thoroughly convinced I will return to Boston a very wealthy woman.

There is no indication that Clements did make her fortune or found a school, but she did remain in Nome and elsewhere in Alaska for more than a decade, hiring men and mining tin and gold. She retained a Brookline residence at 11 Davis Avenue and travelled back and forth across the continent many times before returning to Brookline for good.

Lydia Clements died in Brookline in February 1927.

Further Reading

Fourth of July in the Klondike (Lydia Clements' account of her 1898 adventure in the Klondike, The National Magazine, April-September, 1899)
Klondike Gold Rush (Wikipedia)

Brookline's Puzzling History

2009-06-01T14:58:00.000-07:00

This Wednesday night at the Brookline Public Library, jigsaw puzzle historian Anne D. Williams will explore the story of jigsaws, including how residents of Brookline and the Boston area helped shape puzzle crazes from 1907 to 1910 and again during the Great Depression.

Williams is professor emerita of economics at Bates College. Will Shortz (NPR puzzle master and crossword editor of the New York Times) calls her “the world's foremost expert on jigsaw puzzles."

The program, part of the annual meeting of the Friends of the Brookline Library, begins at 7 pm at the main library at 361 Washington Street. More information.

Brookline Rides: 1910 & 2009

2009-05-31T11:31:00.000-07:00

With hundreds of bicyclists filling Beacon Street for the second annual Brookline Rides event today, it seems appropriate to run this iconic image of another kind of Brookline ride nearly a hundred years ago and contrast it with one from the bicycle parade.

The sleigh photo, from the Brookline Historical Society's collection of lantern slides, shows horse-drawn sleighs going east on Beacon Street, just past Carlton Street, in 1910. (Photo by Thomas E. Marr). The 2009 bike photo is by the Historical Society's Jean Stringham.

Visit the online photos and documents page of the Brookline Historical Society website for more photos and information about the lantern slide collection.

Mary McSkimmon, Brookline Educator

2009-05-31T06:28:00.000-07:00

Seeing news of the National Spelling Bee this week reminded me of the story of Mary McSkimmon, long ago principal of the Pierce School in Brookline who, as president of the National Education Association, presided over the second annual Bee in 1926.

McSkimmon was a forceful and innovative educator who achieved local and national prominence. (I first researched and wrote about her in 2005 for the sesquicentennial of the Pierce School, where both of my daughters were students.)

Among her many accomplishments were the following:

She was an early promoter of both student government and parental involvement in the schools. Among her innovations were regular mothers' meetings at Pierce at a time when there were no PTOs.
She was a co-author in 1914 of a "peace curriculum" for American schools aimed at promoting international understanding and appreciation for other cultures.
As NEA president in 1925, she created a committee on "Problems in Negro Education & Life" which provided for the first time an official way for the predominantly white NEA to work with the predominantly black American Teachers Association.
She fought relentlessly for an expanded view of and public support for education. As the Brookline Chronicle wrote upon her death in 1946, “She campaigned militantly for increase in music, physical training, school doctors and nurses in days when they were considered educational ‘frills,' and she often lectured on the subject, telling civic groups that unselfish taxation must be the rule for education.”

Born in Bangor, Maine in 1862, Mary McSkimmon was principal of Pierce from 1893 to 1932 and a member of the Brookline School Committee from 1933 to 1939. She was the founder of the Brookline Teachers’ Club, the first woman president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and president of the National Education Association (NEA) from 1925 to 1926.

Memorial Day and Brookline's Civil War Dead

2009-05-24T11:14:00.000-07:00

The statue of the soldier near the main library is more visible and better known, but I've always been moved more by Brookline's other Civil War memorial. Sitting on the small plaza opposite the entrance to Town Hall, this two-sided memorial consists of eight glass encased panels, one with a flag and the others with words chiseled into stone.

Visually, it's far less dramatic than the statue but unlike the anonymous bugler on his horse this memorial bears the names of 72 Brookline men who died at such places as Antietam, Gettysburg, Chancellorsville, Fredricksburg, the Wilderness, and the notorious Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia.

These are storied places for anyone who's read about the Civil War. But they carry a different weight here on the memorial.

A century and a half ago, news of these places arrived in Brookline not just as part of the broad story of the war but as terrible news for families living in streets (and maybe, in a few cases, houses) that are familiar to us today. That's always made the names of these places -- and Brookline at the time of the Civil War -- much more real to me.

William Dawes' Descendants in Brookline

2009-05-23T07:52:00.000-07:00

I was surprised to learn, while reading up on Brookline in the Civil War, that the first Brookline man to enlist in the Union Army was a grandson of William Dawes, the rider whose passage through Brookline on the day of Lexington and Concord is marked at the Devotion House each Patriot's Day.

William Dwight Goddard, who enlisted on April 23, 1861, was the son of Mehitable May Dawes Goddard, youngest daughter of William Dawes. Born in 1796, she married Samuel Goddard of Brookline in 1818.

William D. Goddard died in 1866. Mehitable Goddard died in 1882. Both are buried, along with Samuel and other family members, in the Old Burying Ground on Walnut Street.

"Honey" Fitz on Brookline

2009-05-20T05:40:00.001-07:00

Boston Mayor John F. Fitzgerald had this to say in a November 1913 State House speech welcoming the City and Town Planning Conference to Boston:

"[I]f you meet a citizen of any of these towns [Somerville, Everett, Malden, Medford, Arlington] abroad you will always find that they claim to come from Boston; the same is even true of our aristocratic sister Brookline, for, charming as Brookline is, it is unknown in Berlin, except perhaps as a suburb of the great city which so nearly surrounds it."[1]

Just a few months later, Fitzgerald's daughter Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and her husband Joseph would buy a house in Brookline where their son, the future president John F. Kennedy, would be born in 1917.

[1] from Letters and Speeches of the Honorable John F. Fitzgerald, Mayor of Boston, 1906-07, 1910-13, p. 161

Deaf Inventor Aids the Deaf

2009-05-17T14:12:00.001-07:00

I recently came across a short article about a deaf inventor who lived and worked in Brookline at the beginning of the 20th century. I thought I'd do some quick research and a brief write-up.

Little did I know how complex and interesting the story of William E. Shaw would turn out to be.

Shaw, who had been deaf since the age of 5, designed and built a series of special electric devices -- telephones, doorbells, alarm clocks, burglar alarms, and more -- all for use by those who could not hear.

His work won praise from Alexander Graham Bell and an invitation from Thomas Edison to work at Edison's laboratories in New Jersey. Shaw and his wife and son were also at the center of a controversial custody battle that revolved in part around the rights and abilities of deaf parents to raise hearing children.

William Edward Shaw was born in St. John, New Brunswick, Canada in 1869, the son of a sea captain and his wife. Shaw lost his hearing after a bout of spinal meningitis when he was 5, and his father took the boy to sea with him in the hope that a change in climate would help his recovery.

After the father died in 1877, the family moved to Portland, Maine. Shaw was educated there and later at the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. After graduating in 1893, he worked at a carriage factory and then at Anchor Electric in Boston and the Holtzer Cabot Electric Company in Brookline, moving to Brookline before the turn of the century.

It was in his home laboratory at 12A Linden Street that Shaw worked on many of his inventions, including:

the "talkless telephone," which enabled deaf people to send messages over a telephone line by typing on an ordinary typewriter which caused light bulbs with letters and numbers on them to be lit up at the other end of the line.
a doorbell that activated not a chime, but flashing lights (different colors for the front and back doors), an electric fan pointed at the bed, and other kinds of soundless alerts.
an alarm clock that agitated the sleeper's pillow to wake them up.
a baby monitor that alerted parents to the movements of a restless baby by flashing lights or shaking the parent's pillow.

William Shaw, 1924
Image from Popular Science, November 1924

Alexander Graham Bell, whose research on hearing and speech -- both his mother and wife were deaf -- led to his invention of the telephone, met and corresponded with Shaw. In a 1904 note, Bell wrote to Shaw:

"I have always been greatly interested in your inventions for the Deaf, and trust that the future may bring you continued success in the pursuit of your worthy inventions." (See an image of the note.)

There is no indication that Shaw's inventions were produced commercially or widely adopted. (His only patent appears to have been for an arcade shooting game in which the target would light up when hit while everything around it went dark.) But the inventor and his efforts garnered widespread attention with numerous articles in Boston-area newspapers as well as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications around the country.

William Shaw in his lab, 1924
Image from the Boston Globe, November 15, 1924

He was also an advocate of both electrical knowledge and the deaf community, giving demonstrations that raised money for programs and organizations for the deaf and promoting the inclusion of electrical work in the curriculum of schools for the deaf.

The custody case involving Shaw began in 1907. Shaw's first wife Lucy, who was also deaf, had died in 1902 soon after giving birth to their son, William Jr. The child, who was not deaf, went to live with his maternal grandparents in Boston. Shaw remarried -- his second wife was also deaf -- and in 1907 took back his son over the objections of the grandparents. Brought before a judge in probate court, the case drew wide attention with more than one hundred members of the deaf community present in the courtroom.

Several witnesses, including an Episcopal bishop who worked with the deaf community, testified that deaf parents could not raise a hearing child without having a negative impact on the child's development. Shaw was also attacked personally. Witnesses -- including his own mother and several of his siblings -- testified that he had a violent temper. But other witnesses, including his landlady, co-workers, and another sibling, testified on his behalf disputing the attacks on his character and praising his affectionate and loving demeanor with his son.

Both sides asked Alexander Graham Bell to support their case, but Bell -- saying he did not know Shaw well enough personally -- declined to get involved.

Shaw himself took the witness stand, speaking -- as had other witnessses -- through a sign language interpreter. The judge ruled in Shaw's favor, and the boy stayed with the inventor and his wife.

Six years later, William Jr. , then 10 years old, stayed with his grandparents again when Shaw's second wife became ill, and Shaw had to go to court to get the boy back again. After this second courtroom victory, he wrote:

"It is partly for the sake of the deaf in general that I have fought so hard. Law is law and it is the duty of the deaf to defend their own rights and fight for them if necessary."

Shaw's son, who was known as Willie, helped his father in his electrical exhibitions. He later became a seaman like his grandfather.

William Shaw and his son at a demonstration at a New Jersey School, 1914
Image from The Silent Worker, April 1914
(Courtesy of Gallaudet University Archives)

After leaving Brookline, William Shaw lived in Dorchester and then in Lynn, where he worked for General Electric. He later accepted Thomas Edison's invitation to come work for the great inventor and stayed at the Edison labs in New Jersey for five years.

Shaw returned to Massachusetts in the 1920s and continued his work. He was profiled by the Boston Globe at his Cambridge home and lab in 1924. He returned to Brookline in 1934 and lived at 9 School Street for the rest of his life. He died July 1, 1949 at New England Deaconess Hospital.

For more on William E. Shaw, see the following:

A Deaf-Mute Electrician (The Silent Worker, May 1903)
Deaf and Dumb Electrician (St. John Daily Sun. August 22, 1904)
Mr. Shaw's Victory (The Silent Worker, May 1907)
"Talkless Phone" Invented by Deaf Mute (Popular Science, November 1924)

About Muddy River Musings

2009-05-17T14:10:00.000-07:00

About the Author
Ken Liss has been president of the Brookline Historical Society since June 2009. A librarian at Boston College, he has lived in Brookline since 1996.

As a researcher and amateur historian interested in the history of Brookline, MA -- originally called Muddy River -- I've had the opportunity to share some of what I've found through formal programs and presentations. But many of the most interesting things I find are just bits and pieces of Brookline's past, uncovered while digging through sources or, serendipitously, when not even looking.

They may not fit right away into a formal presentation or a broader theme, but these little tidbits help tell the big story of the town, what it is and what it has been.

I started this blog to share, informally, some of what I find as I wander through what I call the thickets of historical research. It will be an idiosyncratic assortment: people, places, and events, big and small, that I've found interesting, amusing, poignant, or peculiar, or that otherwise caught my eye.

I hope others will enjoy coming along on these rambles through the past while adding to their own knowledge of Brookline and its history.

- Ken Liss