The Pierce School the Municipal Triangle, Part 1

The map below shows the triangle formed by Harvard Street, Washington Street, and School Street in Brookline Village. It is the location of the Town Hall, the Public Library, the Health Department, and -- for 170 years -- a succession of buildings of the John Pierce School.

You might call it the Municipal Triangle.

The northern part of the triangle was, from 1974 to last year, the location of the fifth building to carry the name Pierce School. It was recently torn down and will be replaced by the sixth building in the long history of Pierce.

The oldest of those buildings, erected in 1855, still stands, along with a larger 1904 addition.

That combined 1855/1904 building--its interior completely changed--will continue to be a part of the school.

I've put together Part 1 of an online history of the municipal triangle. It tells the story of the school, three Town Halls, and other town buildings up to 1970 and the decision to build a new Pierce School, the recently demolished 1974 building.

Part 2, still to come, will cover the 1974 school and bring the story of the Pierce School and the municipal triangle up to the present.

You can watch the illustrated and narrated 30-minute presentation at https://bit.ly/pierceschoolpart1

Town Meeting: The Long & the Short of It

Town Meeting members who convened in the high school auditorium for four hours last night (with more nights to come) might be surprised -- and perhaps jealous -- to learn about some of the shortest Brookline Town Meetings on record.

In January 1899, 60 men -- only men could vote in those "open town meeting" days -- convened on a very cold Tuesday night to dispose of 22 warrant articles in just 28 minutes.  "The business was rushed through without any ceremony," reported the Boston Globe, "the voters evidently being affected by the frigid atmosphere." 

Boston Globe, January 11, 1899

Items taken up included money for the library, the schools, and the water system. The warrant article expected to be the most controversial -- placing the fire department under a fire commissioner appointed by the Board of Selectmen -- passed without any dissension.

Four years later, on June 10, 1903, 150 citizens met in balmier weather for 27 minutes, allocating just under $300,000 for a variety of purposes, about half of it put toward the town's acquisition of the recently decommissioned Boylston Street reservoir.

Boston Herald, June 11, 1903

That record lasted just 24 days. On August 4, 1903, 26 attendees at a special Town Meeting took just seven minutes to approve the ceding of a portion of Hyslop Road on Fisher Hill in conjunction with the erection of the Longyear mansion, which was being moved piece by piece from Marquette, Michigan, to Brookline.

All of these meetings took place before Brookline's adoption of the representative town meeting format in 1915. (See Brookline Votes for Representative Town Meeting for more on the change.) But if you think it's not possible to have a meeting even shorter than seven minutes with the kind of  expanded body we have today ...

... think again.

In August 1963, 100 opponents of a plan to take land for a new firehouse on Babcock Street convinced a local judge to order a special Town Meeting to reconsider the action approved at the regular Town Meeting in March. 

Town Meeting Members assembled on August 19th and, after an hour and a half of legal wrangling, moderator Benjamin Trustman banged the gavel and announced "With reluctance, I call the Town Meeting to order."

But his request, reported the Brookline Chronicle Citizen, "was met only with a bewildering silence; no one moved the question or took the opportunity for which the 100 petitioners had broken tradition and fought in the courts."

"Hence," continued the paper, "it was but a matter of seconds for one of the town meeting members to move the meeting be dissolved and have his motion seconded and adopted."

Thus, after just two minutes, ended the shortest Brookline Town Meeting on record. 

Headlines in the Boston Herald (top left) and Boston Globe (top right), both on August 20, 1962, and the Brookline Chronicle Citizen (bottom) on August 22, 1963.

Let's see 21st century Brookline Town Meeting beat that!

Brookline Police Department, circa 1878

The hirsute and very serious looking men pictured here are the officers of the Brookline Police Department in or around 1878. Only three of the men are positively identified: Chief Alonzo Bowman is third from the left in the front row sitting between Sergeant Harris Head and Deputy Chief Patrick H. Cusick.

We have a good idea who the other men, all patrolmen, are too (though we can’t match the names to the faces), thanks to a detailed report produced by Chief Bowman that year (and other years that he led the department). Additional research through local newspapers and other sources fills in more details about some of these men.

Chief Alonzo Bowman

Alonzo Bowman was born in Vermont in 1832 and came to Massachusetts at the age of 17. After several years working at a Boston grocery store, he entered the express business in Brookline. (Express companies delivered packages via horse-drawn vehicles and later by rail.) Bowman served in the Union Army during the Civil War, first in New Orleans and later in Virginia. He worked in the weighing department of the Custom House in Boston after the war until joining the Brookline police department in 1871.

Bowman became chief of the department in 1876 and served in that capacity until his death in October 1899. (The photo of Bowman at left appeared on the front page of the Brookline Chronicle that month.)

Little is known about the other two officers who have been identified in the group photo. Harris Head, who was also born in Vermont, came to Brookline in the early 1870s. He apparently had only a brief career as a policeman and later ran a provisions store near the corner of Harvard and School Streets for many years. He died in 1906. Nothing more is known about Patrick H. Cusick.

Later pictures, in photographs and sketches, of three of the 1878 patrolmen are shown below as they appeared in the Brookline Chronicle. Can you match the images of them as older men to their younger selves in the earlier photo?

Charles B. McCausland was born in Vermont and came to Brookline at an early age, living with two uncles in town. He enlisted in the Union Army at the age of 21 in 1861 and was badly wounded at the battle of Fredricksburg. After the war he worked as a mason in Brookline before joining the police force in 1875. He was a member of the mounted patrol who, according to the Chronicle, "was, while in his prime, undoubtedly the finest equestrian in the police force of Boston or its immediate vicinity." McCausland was promoted to sergeant in 1879 and lieutenant in 1892. He died of head injuries suffered in a bicycle accident in 1895.

Albert S. Paige was born in Wellfleet in 1846 and educated at the Phillips School in Boston and in the Brookline public schools. He worked as a clerk in a provisions store and in the wholesale business before joining the police force as a patrolman in 1876. Paige rose to the rank of captain in the detective bureau and was interim chief after the death of Alonzo Bowman. He retired in 1909 and died in 1910 at the age of 64.

George Franklin Dearborn was born into a Brookline farming family in 1840. He joined the police force in 1870 and served at various times as a mounted officer and a truant and probation officer. He rose to the rank of lieutenant and retired in 1905. He died in 1921.

Other patrolman in the group photo include:

• Mears Orcutt, a member of the police force from 1872 to 1885 after which he served for more than 20 years as janitor of the public library. He was born in Jamaica Plain in 1825 and came to Brookline in his 20s. He drove a stage between Brookline and Boston and later was in the express business before serving in the artillery during the Civil War. After the war, he worked on horse cars in Brookline before joining the police. He died in 1912 at the age of 87.
• William W. O'Connell, a member of the force from 1874 to 1890. He was born in Ireland in 1844 and came to the U.S. at the age of one and to Brookline two years later. He was educated in local schools and worked as a mechanic before the Civil War. After serving in the artillery during the war, he joined the U.S. Cavalry as a scout and soldier in engagements against Native Americans out west until returning to Brookline and joining the police department. He worked as a carpenter for the town after leaving the force, and died in 1926 at the age of 82.
• Thomas J. Murray, a policeman from 1873 to 1887 when he was badly injured while chasing down a wagon driver who had run down a child in Brookline Village and had to leave the force. Murray was a Brookline native who was born in 1846 and was educated in the public schools. After leaving police work, he ran a hardware store and roofing business in the Village. He died in 1901 at the age of 55.

A full list of the department in 1878, as shown in Chief Bowman's report of that year, is shown below.

 

What's That on the Town Seal?

I was asked, at an event at Town Hall last night, what the squarish or diamond-shaped object at the lower right of the town seal might be.

I could identify all of the other objects on the seal, mostly agricultural implements reflecting the town's origins and its still largely agrarian nature in 1848, the year the seal was designed and adopted. 

But what was that object containing what looked like 12 square holes?

A clue to the answer was found in a 1951 brochure, "Town and City Seals of Massachusetts," prepared for the 60th anniversary of the State Street Trust Company.  Here, in part, is what the authors had to say about the Brookline seal:

The agricultural items in the seal, bee-hive, wheat-sheaf, scythe, rake, spade, plough, and harrow, are emblematic of the character of the town from its early settlement....

To 21st century eyes, all of the named items can be easily recognized on the Brookline seal  — with the exception of the harrow.  Could the square object with holes be a harrow?

A dictionary definition did not seem promising:

Definition of HARROW
:  a cultivating implement set with spikes, spring teeth, or disks and used primarily for pulverizing and smoothing the soil 

A Google image search brought up many pictures like these which did not seem anything like the object on the seal.

But there was also this image, from a word origin blog post about the word "harrowing" that also contained the following description of early harrows: "an industrial-strength agricultural tool, usually consisting of a heavy frame set with iron teeth or tines."

So, could the object on the seal be the heavy frame of a mid-19th century (or earlier) harrow?

Confirmation came from an unlikely source: Vincent Van Gogh.  Far down among the results of the Google image search was this 1883 sketch and study by Van Gogh called "Man Pulling a Harrow."

Except for being 5x4 instead of 4x3 it looks exactly like the object on the town seal.  And with that a not so harrowing search for an answer came to an end.

For more on the origins of the Brookline town seal, see my earlier post "Brookline's Town Seal: Adopted April 3, 1848."

Brookline's Town Seal: Adopted April 3, 1848

165 years ago today, Brookline Town Meeting voted to accept the now ubiquitous Town Seal, picturing "a group of agricultural and farming implements, a view of the City of Boston in the distance, with a train of cars running between the two places" and bearing the inscription "Muddy River, a part of Boston. Founded 1630. Brookline incorporated 1705."

The design, according to a report from then Town Clerk Artemas Newall, was "intended to be emblematical of the character of the Town from its early settlement, when designated and known as Boston Cornfield & Boston Plantation, to the present time,— the inscription to perpetuate, in a degree, its early historical associations."

The symbolism, according to a report from the town Preservation Office, "asserts that Brookline was not just suburban but prosperously agrarian—a suitable home, perhaps, for the country gentleman."

The seal, engraved on steel, was executed for the town by Francis N. Mitchell of Boston at a cost of $56 which included 100 embossed impressions and a press to be used for copying.

See also this later blog post about one of the object pictured on the seal.

Presidents in Brookline

(This post is a Presidents Day update of an earlier post on presidents in Brookline.  When I began researching this topic several years ago, I knew of seven chief executives who had been in the town at one time or another. Based on additional research, that number grew in subsequent updates to 13, then 15, and then 19. It is now at 23, and there may still be others.)

John F. Kennedy, of course, was born in Brookline. But did you know that as many as 23 United States presidents—from George Washington to Barack Obama—have been in Brookline before, during, or after their presidencies?

Theodore Roosevelt was married in Brookline (at the First Parish Church). John Adams made many visits to the town, where his mother, Susanna Boylston Adams, was born and raised.

Other presidents visited prominent residents or toured Brookline sites while on trips to Boston.  A few, including Abraham Lincoln, simply passed through the town in carriages or on the railroad while traveling to or from Boston or other New England communities.

Here is the list, with details of each president's visit.

GEORGE WASHINGTON
George 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

JAMES MONROE
James Monroe came to Boston as president in 1817 and rode out to Brookline and the country seat of Commodore William Bainbridge, former captain of the U.S.S. Constitution, where the president, according to a contemporary account, “breakfasted with that officer, his family, and some distinguished citizens, who composed the company.”³ Leaving Bainbridge's home, Monroe visited the celebrated Brookline gardens of Thomas Handasyd Perkins on his way to Watertown and Waltham.

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.⁴

ANDREW JACKSON
Andrew Jackson came to Boston in June 1833 as part of a tour through the northeastern states.  He was honored at Harvard, and visited Bunker Hill, Lynn, Salem, and Concord, New Hampshire, among other places. Jackson became ill and had to cancel plans to visit Portsmouth, New Hampshire and Portland, Maine.

On his way back to Washington from Concord, the farthest point of his journey, Jackson and his party passed through Brookline to reach Roxbury where they spent their final night in Massachusetts.

Not everyone was happy to see the president in Boston.  He had defeated John Quincy Adams for the presidency in 1828, and many of Jackson's policies were strongly opposed in the region.  Some could only hold their noses as they watched the reception the president received. As one Massachusetts paper put it: "Let us not cease to remember that there is a broad line of distinction between the honors due to the office, and the respect due to the man."⁵

MARTIN VAN BUREN
As Andrew Jackson's vice president, Martin Van Buren accompanied Jackson on his Boston visit and passed through Brookline with the president on their way to Roxbury and then to Washington.

JAMES K. POLK
After visiting Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, New Haven, Hartford, and Springfield, President James K. Polk on June 29, 1847 boarded a special train prepared in the latter city to take him to Boston.

Arriving in Brookline amid heavy rain "at the designated point a few rods west of the branch road leading from the mill-dam road," Polk boarded a barouche (a type of horse-drawn carriage) for the ride from Brookline into Boston. Polk's visit also took him to New Hampshire and Maine, where he celebrated the Fourth of July, before returning to Washington.

JAMES BUCHANAN
James Buchanan, as Polk's Secretary of War, accompanied him on his 1847 tour through the northeastern states, passing through Brookline with the president on the way to Boston in late June.  He was elected president nine years later.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Of all the presidents who visited or traveled through Brookline, Abraham Lincoln likely saw less of the town than any. Like Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, and Buchanan before him and Andrew Johnson after, Lincoln only passed through the town in transit between other cities and towns in New England.

In Lincoln's case, he was probably only in Brookline for a few minutes, cutting through the northernmost part of the town on a train en route from Boston to points west. (The tracks of the Boston & Worcester Railroad followed the same route through Boston, Brookline, and Brighton that the Mass Pike follows today.  Most of the Brookline section of the route was later transferred to Boston when Brighton, an independent town until 1874, was annexed to the city.)

Lincoln passed through Brookline this way twice: as an Illinois congressman in September 1848 while campaigning for Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate for president; and in March 1860, after visiting his son Robert at school in Exeter, New Hampshire.

Lincoln's 1848 campaign visit included speeches in Worcester, Boston, New Bedford, Lowell, Dorchester, Chelsea, Dedham, Cambridge, and Taunton.  On September 23, he boarded a train for home by way of Worcester, Springfield, and Albany, passing through Brookline near the beginning of the route.

In March 1860, Lincoln came to New England to visit his oldest son Robert, then a student at Phillips Exeter Academy.  He made speeches in Rhode Island and New Hampshire, and then followed the same train route west, through Brookline, Worcester, and Springfield to Hartford followed by more speeches in that city and others in Connecticut.  Two months later he won the Republican nomination for president at the party convention in Chicago.

ANDREW JOHNSON
Andrew Johnson came to Massachusetts in June 1867 for the dedication of a new Masonic Temple in Boston.  Arriving via Springfield and Worcester on the railroad, the president and his party disembarked in Brookline to a cheering crowd.

At the Longwood or Cottage farm [reported the New York Herald] there was a crowd of from twenty to thirty-five thousand citizens and military organizations numbering two or three thousand guns, all of whom indulged in the most cheerful and heartfelt demonstrations of welcome. A national salute announced the coming of the train, and as it approached the rural station the cheers which the concourse of people sent up completely deadened the screaming whistle and dinging of the bell of the locomotive.⁶

Johnson traveled "through the finest portion of Longwood, and past the elegant and picturesque residences that make Longwood and Brookline so famous” before making his way to Boston via the Town of Roxbury.

ULYSSES S. GRANT
Ulysses S. Grant visited Brookline at least twice, once during his presidency and once after leaving office.

As president, Grant came to Boston in late June 1872, two weeks after accepting the Republican nomination for a second term, to attend the World's Peace Jubilee and International Music Festival.  He met with Robert C. Winthrop and other trustees of the Peabody Educational Fund at the Revere House in Boston and attended a dinner at Winthrop's summer home on Warren Street in Brookline.  (Grant and Winthrop were among the original trustees of the Fund, established by George Peabody in 1867 to support Southern education.)

In October 1880, Grant was in Boston again for several days.  On the 15th, accompanied by John W. Candler of Brookline, Republican candidate for Congress, the then ex-president took a carriage ride through the suburbs, stopping for lunch at Candler's home on High Street Hill.

There may have been other visits as well. In an 1896 history of the town, Charles Knowles Bolton, writing about Brookline resident and railroad president Ginery Twichell during the Civil War, noted a visit on an unspecified date.

Years afterward [wrote Bolton], Mr. Twichell 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. Twichell's son.⁷

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.

CHESTER A. ARTHUR
Chester A. Arthur, who succeeded the assassinated James Garfield as president in 1881, came to Boston in October 1882.  A large reception was held at Faneuil Hall on October 11th, and in the afternoon the presidential party climbed into barouches for an excursion to Brookline.

Riding out Beacon Street as far as the Chestnut Hill Reservoir, Arthur and his entourage were entertained at the Brookline estate of Charles Sprague Sargent before returning to Boston for the evening.

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."⁸

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.

A later visit to Brookline came in 1912, when the then ex-president stayed at the Brandegee Estate in South Brookline.  An Associated Press story reported how Roosevelt sped from the Back Bay Station to Brookline, pursued by the paparazzi of his day.

A flotilla of taxicabs, filled with reporters and camera men, tagged the speeding motorcar through the outlying section to the home of Edward M. Brandegee, in Brookline. The colonel reached the Brandegee home before even the first members of the camera squad could take a snapshot.⁹

Roosevelt stayed at the Brandegee home for four days before returning to New York.

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.¹⁰

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.

CALVIN COOLIDGE
In 1908, while representing Northampton in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Calvin Coolidge visited his stepmother Carrie Coolidge at the Corey Hill Hospital in Brookline where she was being treated for an unidentified illness. Coolidge wrote from the hospital to his father in Vermont about his stepmother's condition.

It seems likely Coolidge visited or passed through Brookline at other times, perhaps during his terms as lieutenant governor and governor of the Commonwealth, but I have not found any record of subsequent visits.

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.¹¹

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.

JIMMY CARTER
Jimmy Carter came to Brookline while running for the Democratic nomination for president in 1975.  Details of Carter's visit still need to be added.

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.¹²

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.
 ² A history of Brookline, Massachusetts, from the first settlement of Muddy river until the present time: 1630-1906 
³ A Narrative Tour of Observation: Made During the Summer of 1817.
⁴ Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, comprising portions of his diary from 1795 to 1848, Volume 7
⁵ "The President's visit to Boston." New-Bedford Mercury, June 21, 1833, p. 2.
⁶ "The Presidential tour." New York Herald, June 23, 1867, p. 3.
⁷ Brookline: the history of a favored town
⁸ The life of Theodore Roosevelt
⁹ "Roosevelt is welcomed by Boston crowd: Colonel bows to admirers and speeds to Brookline home." Pittsburgh Gazette Times (Associated Press), February 25, 1912, p. 6.
¹⁰ "President has fun with old Yale Men." New York Times, September 8, 1909, p. 10.
¹¹ "Miss Betsey Cushing married as throng surrounds church." Boston Globe, June 5, 1930, p. 12
¹² "Clinton finds favor playing to 2 audiences." Boston Globe, January 21, 1992, p. 12


 Presidential images from whitehouse.gov

Separating the Trash a Century Ago

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.

Got Milk? Shhhh!

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.)

November 1915: Brookline Votes for Representative Town Meeting

On this date in 1915 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.”