Dorchester Illustration 2565 Spaulding House
The Spaulding family owned a large estate at the top of Pope’s Hill, extending down the west side of the hill to Adams Street. The mansion house owned by John P. Spaulding is pictured at the bottom of today’s illustration. The 18-acre estate was split up after John’s death in 1896. The estate house was sold to the Archdiocese of Boston for use of the Daly Industrial School, and the slope of the hill along with the flatland stretching to Adams Street was sub-divided for house lots.
In 1849, Mahlon Day Spaulding (1827-1888), joined 149 other men from New England to form a mutual stock company that bought a ship, and traveled around the Horn to California. With the money earned in California, Mahlon successfully invested in the wholesale grocery business and later in the sugar refinery business. After his death, his two sons, William S. Spaulding and John T. Spaulding, took over the sugar company and later sold it to the United Fruit Company. The Spauldings became socially prominent Bostonians and were some of the most important art collectors in the United States.
In 1858 John Spaulding was admitted as a partner in the firm of Israel Nash & Co., dealers in West India goods, at 87 Broad Street, Boston. In January, the firm name was change to Nash, Spaulding & Co. After the Civil War, the firm divided into two, Israel Nash & Co., teas, and Nash, Spaulding & Co., sugar refiners (with Henry and Mahlon D. Spaulding). In 1866, Nash, Spaulding & Co. confined their activities to the importation of teas, sugar and molasses. In 1867, the firm bought the Oxnard Sugar Refinery, and in 1871, the Revere Sugar Refinery was created. The firm built a six-story facility in East Cambridge. John P. Spaulding was one of the organizers of the Sugar Trust in 1887, which attempted to control all the sugar refining in the country. Of the twenty-three refineries in the Trust, four were in Boston.
Spaulding was a director of the Union Pacific Railroad Company. In 1878, he became a member of the Board of Aldermen in Boston, and in 1880, he became a member of the Executive Council. At the time of his death, he was a director of the Boston and Albany Railroad, the Atlas National Bank, the International Trust Company, and the American Surety Company of New York.
Known for his philanthropic work, he was a main benefactor of Helen Keller until his death in 1896, when she was 16.
Sources:
The online archive of California (a network of California libraries) has an entry for Spaulding family papers. The description of Mahlon Day Spaulding comes from that source.
Revere Sugar Refinery, nineteenth-century. This print is at the Boston Athenaeum.
The photograph of the estate house is from Historic New England.
Appleton’s Annual Cyclopaedia 1896, Third Series, vol. 1. (New York, 1897), 588.