Dorchester Illustration no. 2381 Elizabeth Stanton Chadbourne
Elizabeth Stanton Chadbourne was born September 6, 1855, to William and Elizabeth Chadbourne. William came to Lynn, Massachusetts, from Lyman, Maine, at the age of eighteen to take a job in the shoe industry. He and his brother Benjamin later operated a grocery business in Boston. He married in 1845, and he and his wife Elizabeth had 5 children. He later began serving as a police officer at Boston’s Station 5. When Dorchester was annexed to Boston, he was made captain of the district, and he oversaw the construction of station 11, where he remained until his retirement in 1878. He was the first captain of police to be pensioned, after twenty-five years of service. He came out of retirement for a couple of years in the early 1880s to operate a stable at the corner of Savin Hill Avenue and Sagamore Street.
The family lived on Payson Avenue, then bought a home at 71 Grampian Way in 1877. William died in August, 1895, having spent the last four winters of his life in Parksley, Virginia, a town improved by his daughter Elizabeth.
Elizabeth was listed individually in the Boston Directories in the 1870s and 1880s as a public reader and a teacher of elocution. It was rare at the time for women to have their own listings in the directories.
The Cleveland Leader, Feb. 19, 1893, explained how Elizabeth was responsible for the improvement of Parksley, Virginia, which is located on the peninsula extending south from Maryland toward the entrance to Chesapeake Bay:
Elizabeth S. Chadbourne, a Boston elocutionist gave some dialect readings in Delaware and first visited and recognized the possibilities of the fertile peninsula, which had been practically closed to the world until about five years ago. A single farmhouse with a station composed the town. Now there is a flourishing town with broad streets, pretty houses, and great prospects, owned by a stock company of which Miss Chadbourne is secretary, treasurer and largest shareholder. She is also the inside worker who interests people to invest. She understands all kinds of leases, deeds, etc., and can make out an agreement on the spot which all the quibbles of the lawyers cannot circumvent.
The American Biography: A New Cyclopedia Biography (1918) reported that she started the Parksley Land and Improvement Company to build the town, the first in that area to be developed along modern lines. At the time of publication of the Encyclopedia, the town had eighteen general stores, two banks and a population of more than two thousand inhabitants. By then Elizabeth was retired from the management of the company and was a member of the Dorchester Woman’s Club and treasurer of the Red Cross at Savin Hill.
Elizabeth died in 1930 and was interred at the Chadbourne Cemetery in Lyman, Maine.
Check out the Dorchester Historical Society’s online catalog at
http://dorchester.pastperfectonline.com/
The archive of these historical posts can be viewed on the blog at
www.dorchesterhistoricalsocietyblog.org