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| Photo credit: Brookline Historical Society |
This photo shows the old firehouse on Washington
Street, at the corner of High Street, in 1891. Flanked by two wooden
commercial buildings, the firehouse (replaced by the current building in 1908) is decked out for the Fourth of
July.
But on closer examination, something seems odd.
The
bunting looks twisted and sloppily hung. The flag is facing the wrong direction. It's also bunched up on the lower left — not exactly proper flag
decorum — and the white stripes look...well...not so white. And there's a
stuffed figure of a fireman on the top, in front of the tower. (Compare
it to
this photo of the same firehouse decorated a decade or so later.)
And yet, according to an account in the
Boston Post,
"The building occupied by the Hose 1 and Engine 1 companies was the
most tastefully decorated in the town, and was awarded the prize of $10
as such."
What's going on here?
An Old Tradition
The
answer may lie in an old New England tradition: the Antiques &
Horribles parade on the Fourth of July. The Antiques & Horribles
— sometimes shortened to the "Horribles Parade" — was an annual event in
Brookline and many other towns in the second half of the 19th century and
into the early 20th century. It's still celebrated in several towns
today.
Local residents would dress up as "antiques" —
figures from the past — or "horribles" — characters in strange and often
grotesque or macabre guise. The horribles,
according to Yankee Magazine,
"used elaborate costumes, masks, blackface, cross-dressing, and other
disguise to illustrate gender and class reversal. Their satire and broad
parody were often aimed at authority, women, and foreigners."
The
tradition probably began in the 1840s — the earliest known example is
in Lowell in 1851 — as a parody of the
Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts.
The
"Ancients & Honorables," as they are called, are "the oldest
chartered military organization in the Western hemisphere." Formed in
1638 "to train young gentleman officers for service in the various
militias of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts," the company has taken
part in Independence Day celebrations since the earliest days of the
nation.
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| Ancient & Honorable Artillery Company on parade in Boston, 1900 |
By the middle of the 19th century, the Ancients
and Honorables, by then a largely symbolic organization, were ripe for
parody. Here's how UCLA linguist William Matthews (in the journal
American Speech, October 1940) described the rise of the "Horribles" as a
reaction to the Ancients and Honorables:
As
it became a body of eminent citizens who had the taste for military
organization, of course practically every member was an officer of this
of that other regiment; and the members personally were not snappy young
cadets with reputations to make and physiques that needed no making,
but solid burghers who had gone beyond their youth in becoming eminent
by activities that did not involve keeping the body in fighting
condition.
The result was that on such occasions of state as
called for a parade of the... "Ancients and Honorables"...the variegated
display of diverse uniforms on unathletic figures looked comic to a
visitor who had not been brought up to reverence the Company's high
status.
So a time came when it was customary in country villages
to burlesque it by a Fourth-of-July parade of..."Antiques and
Horribles"...Nowadays, "Antique" is omitted from the title; but it is
still customary that part of the costumes try to look as antiquated as
possible while others try to look as frowzy as possible.
According to
Yankee Magazine, "the
disorderly and drunken training days that characterized the last years
of compulsory militia service" may also have had something to do with
the rise of the Antiques & Horribles.
Antiques & Horribles in Brookline and Beyond
Brookline's 1891 Independence Day celebration, like those of other
years, began at 7 am with an Antiques & Horribles parade. It
started at the corner of Washington and Cypress Streets, marched down
Washington through Brookline Village to the firehouse, and then west on
Boylston back to Cypress and Cypress Field.
The
Post reported that the parade "was not up to the standard of those of former years" though Brookline's own paper, the
Chronicle, said it was "exceptionally good."
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| Boston Post, July 6, 1891 |
Although no pictures of that year's parade
have come to light, it seems likely that the odd decoration of the
firehouse was done in the spirit of the Antiques & Horribles.
Perhaps it was changed to a more respectable display after the morning
parade. Or maybe the report of it being "tastefully decorated" was
tongue-in-cheek.
The Antiques & Horribles photo below
from Brookline in the late 1890s or early 1900s gives a sense of the
comedic turn these parades often took. It shows a float whimsically
promoting flying machine races on Corey Hill, the
"Brookline Liquid Air Railway", and other municipal "advancements" such
as car rides 50 years in the future from the "City of
Brookline" to "Boston Village."
Less whimsical to modern
eyes are
several characters in blackface, all too common in this era. Prizes
awarded in 1891, in fact (in addition to the firehouse), included
characters dressed as "Negro minstrels" and a "colored boy on a
donkey."
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Photo credit: Brookline Public Library
Click on the image for a larger, zoomable view at Digital Commonwealth |
A second photo, from Brookline's 1889 Fourth of July
celebration, shows several oddly-dressed characters (including a
honeymooning couple with a mustache peeking out from behind the "bride's"
veil) amid baseball players and soldiers in antique uniforms. (See the
full zoomable photo at Digital Commonwealth)
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| Photo credit: Brookline Public Library |
Two more examples, from other Massachusetts towns, give a better sense of the "horribles" costumes typical of these parades.
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Figures at an Antiques & Horribles parade, New Bedford, MA
Photo credit: New Bedford Free Public Library |
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"Horribles" on a float, Andover, MA
Photo credit: Andover Historical Society |
Horribles Parades Today
The
tradition of Fourth of July Antiques & Horribles parades spread
beyond New England. There were versions in New York City's Harlem, in
California, Texas, Arizona, Hawaii, and elsewhere. The Ancients and
Honorables themselves held a 7 am Antiques & Horribles parade on July 4, 1896 on board the steamship
Servia as they
marked Independence Day on their way to visit England.
The
parades had largely died out by the middle of the 20th century,
although some towns have continued or revived them. Contemporary
examples, usually minus the satire of earlier days, include parades in
Marblehead,
Gloucester,
Beverly Farms,
Winthrop,
Danvers, and
New Silver Beach (North Falmouth), all in Massachusetts, and
Glocester in Rhode Island.
The
term "parade of horribles" has also taken on a metaphorical sense in
the legal arena, reaching all the way to the United States Supreme
Court, as
recounted in a column by former
Boston Globe language columnist
Ben Zimmer.
NOTE: The commercial buildings on either side of the firehouse in the 1891 photo have their own stories to tell. More about those in a later blog post
