Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1932
Today we have a photo of the house that belonged to Henry Lillie Pierce house on Washington Street, now occupied by the Vargas & Vargas Insurance Agency.
From Wikipedia: Henry Lillie Pierce (1825–1896) was the son of Colonel Jesse Pierce (1788–1856) and Elizabeth Vose Lillie Pierce (1786–1871) of Stoughton, Massachusetts. His father had been an educator at Milton Academy and later served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. As a gentleman farmer, he maintained a large farm in Stoughton (formerly a part of Dorchester) until he moved, in 1849, to Washington Street in the Lower Mills of Dorchester with his wife and two sons. Edward Lillie Pierce was then attending Brown University, while Henry Lillie Pierce was at Milton Academy and was to later attend the Bridgewater Normal School. In 1849, Henry L. Pierce was hired to work as a clerk at the Baker Chocolate Company. Walter Baker, the owner of the chocolate company and stepbrother of Pierce’s mother, hired him at a salary of three dollars per week. However, as their political views invariably clashed and caused tremendous animosity (Pierce was a vociferous and deeply opinionated Free-Soiler), Pierce left after only a year of politically tinged employment to take up newspaper work in the Midwest. At the request of Sydney Williams, brother-in-law of Baker and managing director of the chocolate mill, Pierce returned to Boston after a year and was appointed manager of the Walter Baker Counting House at 32 South Market Street in Boston (now a part of the Quincy Market retail area). Pierce was obviously a hard worker, for after the deaths of both Walter Baker (in 1852) and Sydney Williams (in 1854), he was permitted to lease the chocolate business from the trustees of the Baker Estate.
The trustees of the Baker Estate, fully aware that Pierce had only been with the company for five years, leased the business to him for a two-year probationary period, “subject to a life interest payable annually to Mrs. Baker,” widow of the owner and step-aunt to Pierce, until her death in 1891. He began manufacturing under the name and style of Walter Baker & Company. He was obviously successful, for in 1856 the trustees extended the lease a further eight years, during which time Pierce began an expansion that would eventually absorb his competitive chocolate manufacturers in the Lower Mills. The trustees continued the ten-year lease until 1884, when “all terms under the Walter Baker will having been satisfied, the entire property is conveyed by the Trustees to Henry L. Pierce.” In 1860, Pierce bought the Preston Chocolate Mill from Henry D. Chapin, to whom it had been sold the previous year, and in 1881, Josiah Webb sold his chocolate mill to Pierce. In 1864, the trustees of the Baker Estate renewed the lease for a second decade. This decade was decisive for Pierce, as he began to enter his chocolate in competitive exhibitions both in this country and abroad. In 1867, Baker’s Chocolate and Cocoa won an award in the Paris Exhibition for the quality of the product. In 1873, the company won the highest awards at the Vienna Exhibition, and in 1876, at the Philadelphia Centennial, Walter Baker chocolate and cocoa won the highest awards. With mill managers and mill employees, Pierce was able to expand the chocolate business and build new mills. In 1894, these were equipped with chocolate-making machines, most of which were imported from Germany, that saved power and were easy to attend.
Pierce followed in his father’s footsteps and was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1860 to 1862, and again in 1866; he also served in the Forty-third and Forty-fourth Congresses from 1873 to 1877. His interest in not only his employees but also the voters of Dorchester made him a very popular choice. After Dorchester was annexed to the city of Boston on January 4, 1870, Pierce was nominated and elected mayor of Boston in 1872 and 1877. It was during his terms as mayor that Pierce’s business began an extensive marketing and public relations campaign to make Walter Baker & Company a household name or, better, the household choice for chocolate and cocoa. In 1883, the company formally adopted the trademark La Belle Chocolatiere as its logo. Used earlier in the company’s history, this famous design was copied from the pastel portrait of Das Schokoladenmadchen by Jean-Etienne Liotard, an 18th-century Swiss painter. The chocolate girl was to become as famous as the company she promoted. It was not until 1884 that the trustees of the Baker Estate allowed Pierce to purchase the company outright. Once done, it was incorporated as Walter Baker & Company, Ltd.
Pierce was honored by the City of Boston when the school committee voted in 1892 to name the new grammar school just south of Codman Square in his honor. The school was designed by Boston city architect Harrison H. Atwood (1863–1954) and was an enormous hammered granite building at the corner of Washington Street and Welles Avenue (now the site of the Codman Square Branch of the Boston Public Library). It was considered one of the most advanced schools in the Boston public school system, and after the Great Depression, its focus became that of a “Baking School,” which offered trade classes.
During Pierce’s ownership of Baker Chocolate Company, from 1854 to 1896, he was to increase business greatly, so much so that he created an urban mill village with modern chocolate mills along the Neponset River.
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