The darkened angel in this photograph is now gleaming white as she reaches toward the Neponset River near the Southeast corner of Cedar Grove Cemetery {CGC}. Moss, mold and lichen grow on older headstones causing deterioration and rendering inscriptions illegible, but a biological cleaner, water and a soft brush remove this growth while, with time, rain and sunshine whiten the stones. The left headstone in the photograph had been completely cleaned while the center monument was in process and the headstone on the right was still covered with growth. Most stones in this lot have now been cleaned.
“My Husband” is carved in the top triangle of the monument, and the following written below: “Walter R. Meins/died April 13, 1876/Aged 57 years. Jane Cooper/His beloved wife/1828-1902. Alice Cooper/ Devoted sister/1830-1904.” Also buried in the Meins lot are Attorney George E. Curry and Clara Neal Curry who resided at 51 Port Norfolk Street and Hannah Emery Neal, Charles E. Neal and James Neal of 49 Port Norfolk Street. James Neal was a manager at the Putnam Nail Factory on Ericsson Street in Port Norfolk.
Overlooking the Neponset River, CGC is a garden cemetery with winding paths, towering trees, hills, rock outcroppings, a reflection pool, waterfalls, greenhouses and picturesque chapel and office buildings. It is the only cemetery in the United States with a trolley running through it, according to Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Celebrated Dorchester architect Luther Briggs designed CGC in the late nineteenth century; he also designed the layout of one of the first planned suburb communities known as Port Norfolk and was the architect for many impressive homes in Port Norfolk and on Carruth’s Hill, Pope’s Hill and Ashmont Hill.
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Dorchester Illustration 2591 Arch for Jay’s Treaty
Today’s illustration is a drawing of the arch erected at Lower Mills in 1798.
The late Rev. Daniel Dunn was pastor of Saint Margaret’s Church and a past president of the Dorchester Historical Society. He wrote an article in 1973, published in the Dorchester Reporter on June 4, 2015, in which he mentioned the arch erected at Lower Mills in 1798.
“Proceeding to the official starting point, the cars will cross the Neponset River at the spot where the Federal Triumphal Arch was erected in 1798, to commemorate the ratification of Jay’s Treaty. In letters of gold, the arch proclaimed the sentiments of the citizens, ‘We unite in defense of our country and its laws – 1798.’ On August 9 of that year, President John Adams, who was en route from Washington to his home in Quincy was escorted through the arch by the Boston Cavalry. The wind storm in 1815 destroyed the arch.
The 1859 History of the Town of Dorchester mentions the arch, and that is likely one of the sources used by Rev. Dunn. Another was likely the 1896 publication, Major John Lillie. 1755-1801. The Lillie Family of Boston. 1663-1896. By Edward Lillie Pierce.
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Dorchester Illustration 2590 Alice Stone Blackwell, 1857-1950
The Dorchester Historical Society will host a Zoom program on Sunday, November 6, at 2 pm, about the 50,000 women who registered to vote after the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution in 1920. The City Archives is working on a databsase of the women, and the project is named the Mary Eliza Project in honor or Mary Eliza Mahoney, the pioneering African American nurse and civil rights activist, who was one of the many women who register to vote in 1920.
Alice Stone Blackwell was the only child of Lucy Stone and Henry Brown Blackwell. After her mother’s death in 1893, Alice carried on her mother’s work for women suffrage as editor the Woman’s Journal.
Alice was educated at the Newburyport, Mass., school of Jane Andrews, at the Harris Grammar School in Dorchester, and later at the Chauncy School in Boston.
Alice described life in Dorchester from her perspective as a teenager in her journal published under the title Growing Up in Boston’s Gilded Age: The Journal of Alice Stone Blackwell, 1872-1874. Alice would catch the train at the Old Colony station at Neponset or at Harrison Square to ride into Boston to exchange books at the Boston Athenaeum or at the Boston Public Library. She would visit her mother at the office of the Woman’s Journal at 3 Tremont Place. On Sundays she would go to church at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, then on Bowdoin Street, or at the Saint Mary’s Chapel, later the All Saints’ mission at Lower Mills. On school days, Alice would walk toward Harrison Square to attend the Harris School at the corner of Adams Street and Victory Road, formerly Mill Street. Her diary includes descriptions of her walks in the Dorchester countryside –it was still an area of large open spaces, and it was an era when people walked long distances or rode in a carriage pulled by horses.
After Alice’s graduation from Boston University where she excelled and was president of her class, she went to work in the offices of the Woman’s Journal, the paper edited by her mother. Over the next thirty-five years, Miss Blackwell bore the main burdens of editing the country’s leading woman’s rights newspaper–gathering copy, reading proof, preparing book reviews, and writing long columns of crisp, hard-headed arguments for female equality. Beginning in 1887 she also edited the Woman’s Column, a collection of suffrage items sent out free to newspapers round the country. She effected a truce between the American Woman Suffrage Association and Susan B. Anthony’s rival National Woman Suffrage Association. In 1890 the two organizations merged, and Miss Blackwell became recording secretary of the new national American Woman Suffrage Association.
Alice found other evils to expose and underdogs to champion. For years she operated an informal employment service for needy Armenians, and she joined William Dudley Foulke and George Kennan in activating the Friends of Russian Freedom. She translated the poetry of oppressed peoples into English to widen American awareness. Her affiliations widened to include the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Anti-Vivisection Society, the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Peace Society. Postwar reaction turned her into a socialist radical. One Boston newspaper refused to print her militant letters because of the controversy they provoked. In 1930 she published Lucy Stone, a biography of her mother.
Today we have a scan of a print made from an 1844 Daguerrotype in the Prints and Photographs Division of Library of Congress showing Lucy Stone as a young woman.
Born in West Brookfield in 1818, Lucy Stone came from an old New England family. Her father, Francis, was a well-to-do farmer and tanner who believed that men were divinely ordained to rule over women. Her mother, Hannah, accepted this view, but Lucy became resentful. Though her brothers were sent to college, her father was shocked when she asked to go, and he gave her no financial support. She determined to educate herself, and at age sixteen, she began to teach district school at a dollar per week.
During this time her hostility toward the existing status of women increased, especially when she learned that women had no vote in the affairs of the Congregational Church in West Brookfield of which she was a member. Finally in 1843 she had earned the money to enter Oberlin College. At college she was looked upon as a dangerous radical, for she was an ardent abolitionist, was uncompromising on the question of women’s rights and became Unitarian in religion. In 1847 she graduated from Oberlin, the first Massachusetts woman to earn a college degree. She refused an invitation to write a commencement address because she would not have been permitted to read it herself, owing to the prevailing belief that it was improper for women to participate in public exercises with men. The injustice was corrected thirty-six years later when Lucy Stone was an honored speaker at Oberlin’s semicentennial jubilee.
In 1850 she led in calling the first national woman’s rights convention at Worcester, Mass. Lucy, who was only barely recovered from typhoid fever, made a speech that converted Susan B. Anthony to the cause. She married Henry Browne Blackwell, a Cincinnati hardware merchant and abolitionist in 1855 but kept her own name, calling herself Mrs. Stone. Her action added the phrase “Lucy Stoner” to the language to denote a married woman retaining her maiden name. The birth of Alice Stone Blackwell in 1857 led Lucy to give up some of her traveling and lecturing, but she continued to organize many campaigns for woman’s suffrage.
The Dorchester home of Lucy Stone and her family was located on Boutwell Street on Pope’s Hill. The seventeen-room house was named Pope’s Hill after the land on which it stood. She lived there from 1870 until her death in 1893.
Perhaps Lucy Stone’s greatest contribution was in founding and largely financing the weekly newspaper of the American Woman Suffrage Association, the Woman’s Journal. During a run of forty-seven years, under the editorship of Lucy, her husband Henry and later Alice Stone Blackwell, the Woman’s Journal more than any other journal was the voice of the woman’s movement. After 1887 Lucy’s voice failed, and she spoke only to small gatherings. Her last lectures were delivered at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
Mrs. Emily A. Fifield was born in Weymouth on Feb. 12,1840. Her father, Thomas B. Porter, was a lumber dealer in the town and had wharfs on the Monatiquot River which passes out into the sea below Quincy.
Emily Porter was was sent into Boston to attend a school kept by William B. Fowle. Coming out of school before her eighteenth birthday, she was betrothed to her life-long boyfriend William Cranch Bond Fifield, who was ten years older, and they were married on May 31 1858. The couple found a house in Dorchester and lived there for 50 years. They had three children Mary; George (died in infancy) and Charles, who died in Dorchester in 1877.
William was a member of the staff of the New City Hospital and was connected to that institution for 18 years. In those days William drove into the hospital over the Avenue by horse carriage. The doctor and the hospital kept a horse always ready to send out to Dorchester when there was an emergency.
Emily was a member of the Boston School Committee from 1884 -1900. (The Massachusetts Constitution allowed only males to vote, but the phrasing of the qualifications for holding elective office did not include that restriction. Women were elected to the school committee in some Massachusetts towns as early as the late 1860s.) The success of the Mechanic Arts School was largely due to her services while she was chairman of the committee. Another achievement was her work in the educational exhibit sent from Boston to the Chicago World’s Fair, the World’s Columbian Exhibition. The exhibit gave Boston the reputation as a leader in educational matters, a reputation that was communicated throughout the civilized world.
She was interested in religious and philanthropic enterprises especially in Dorchester where she lived during the greater part of her more active life.
She was devoted to the Unitarian cause and to her Dorchester church. She dearly loved the national organizations whose meetings she attended faithfully and with eager interest. Mrs. Fifield’s guiding influence was first felt when she became secretary. She helped to form plans that made the society strong and permanent, and she carefully tended to the organization’s growth, always working to include every part of the country. She worked to make her work national in its scope. She felt equally interested in all parts of the country: Pacific Coast, Southern circuit, or Green Harbor. Always a welcome speaker, she used clear and forceful language to communicate a fuller understanding of the aims and methods of the organization.
Emily combined an unusual degree a large vision, the facility of seeing things in their true relations that enabled her to develop plans with rare wisdom and the habit of painstaking attention to minute details. Her reports were models of clarity. Always young in spirit, possessed of open mind, and demonstrating large sympathies while being guided by the highest ideals, she gave her best in generous loving service.
One of Emily’s activities was her work with The Benevolent Society of the First Parish Church. The Society, which was organized in 1861, stated its general purpose in its name. Its definite work is twofold: first, to give deserving women employment in the form of sewing and second to give the garments made by these women and by members of the society to charitable institutions, industrial schools and in response to private appeals.
Sixteen women received sewing assignments through the fall and winter months and nine women through the spring and summer. Each earned $1.50 per month through payment from the Society. The women thus employed were personally known to and visited by the members of the Committee. No one who is not cognizant of the work of the Society can have the slightest idea how valuable to these women was the opportunity of earning money by work which could be done in their own homes and at times when other work was unavailable.
The Society kept both the Dorchester Ward in the New England Hospital and the Nathaniel Hall room at the Mariners’ Home supplied with bed linens, blankets, towels, etc., as required.
Elisha B. Worrell was a wholesale fruit merchant in Boston and lived on Trull Street in Dorchester until 1897, when he moved to 98 Melville Avenue. In 1910, he and his wife, Helen, moved to 16 Stockton Street, Dorchester.
Worrell’s entries in the Boston Directory state that he was working as a lecturer, but the entry in the 1900 U.S. Census provides his occupation as wholesale fruit. On January 28, 1901, a prospectus appeared in The Boston Globe for shares in a new company, the Sherman-Worrell Fruit Company. It read, in part, “A totally new product and with no competitor in the market. Years of experimenting ended. Ripe fruit concentrated into permanent form within two hours after taking from tree. Without expense of tin or glass, the product—solid blocks of pure fruit, made without preservatives, acids or adulterants of any kind—can be packed in pasteboard cartons and in boxes and shipped through the world. Ready to use by simply adding boiling water.” The company seems to have been a success.
Worrell’s lecturing career seems to have involved the topic of household management. In 1897, he published The Housekeepers’ Educator and Guide. He was also active in the activities of Second Church in Dorchester. In 1912, he participated as a chairman in an eight-day campaign, titled “Men and Religion Campaign,” which involved hundreds of churches in the Boston area.
The Coffin Valve Company was located at the end of Tolman Street next to the railroad lines. The company became a supplier of large valves to the Metropolitan Water Works in Boston and to municipalities across the country. The map is from the 1910 Bromley Atlas. The illustration of the factory at Neponset is from the Coffin Valve Company letterhead.
Zebulon Erastus Coffin’s name appeared in the 1853 Boston Directory, giving his occupation as pattern maker in Boston. Directories from later years indicate that he was a machinist and pattern maker and that he lived in Newton Centre. The year 1853 was the first time he was identified as a pattern maker. In 1852, his entry in the Directory had indicated that he was a housewright.
Coffin was either making machinery or reselling it, including lathes, planers, slotters and drilling machines. He later became general agent of the Boston Machine Manufacturing Co., before starting his own manufacturing business for large valves and fire hydrants. During his time with the Boston Machine Manufacturing Co., he was issued his first patent for a fire hydrant. By 1881, Coffin established the Coffin Valve Co., makers of fire hydrants and other valves for municipal water systems. In 1885, he received a patent for the Coffin fire hydrant.
In 1891, Coffin and his family came to Dorchester to live at 19 Frost Avenue. In 1892, the factory at Neponset was mentioned for the first time in the Boston Directory. The company achieved a national reputation as mentioned in an article in the periodical Fire Engineering, June 12, 1907, “This company has attained a national reputation as makers and designers of the largest sluice and gate-valves built and used in America.”
The 1918 Bromley Atlas indicates that the factory was still located in Neponset that year, but the works was destroyed by fire in January 1928 in a $400,000 four-alarm fire.
Dorchester Illustration 2585 Early Manufacturing in Dorchester: Tanning
contributed by Carole Mooney
In the Southeast corner of the Clap compound, at 195 Boston Street, rests a reminder of when a young country encouraged manufacturing to bolster its economy to become less dependent on foreign nations for essential supplies. The giant stone biscuit with fluted edge and a hole carved through its center was once tipped on its side and rolled over bark, crushing it for use in tanning hides. A flier located nearby describes the leather-making process with illustrations. Recently a collection of notes by Daniel Dunn, donated by the family of the late Joe Langis, past president of the Dorchester Historical Society, provides information on the political importance of leather manufacturing.
In 1767 Dorchester voted to “encourage manufacturers of the country and less the use of foreign superfluities.”
On March 31, 1788, an act passed by the Massachusetts House and Senate prevented the exportation of green or unmanufactured calf skins out of this Commonwealth by land or water. The legislators wrote, “Whereas the exporting of greener unmanufactured calf skins, will occasion a scarcity thereof, and be attended with disagreeable consequences…”
Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of Treasury, in a 1791 report, said tanners were active in numerous parts of the country and the government had been asked to prohibit the import of leather and export of bark. “Not only the wealth; but the independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation, with a view to those great objects, ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply,” he said.
Leather was manufactured for a variety of items, according to Daniel Dunn’s notes. Shoes were made with cow hide with calfskins for uppers. Sheepskin was considered cheap leather, lambskin was used for gloves, horsehide for harnesses and pigskin for the seat of saddles. Donkey and mule hides, a rough or shagreen leather, was used to create a good grip for scabbards. Oil and lampblack were rubbed in to color the leather.
The Neponset River estuary served as an important water highway to Lower Mills until 1837, when the bridge on Granite Avenue was constructed. The bridge hindered the passage of larger vessels, and the Neponset section of Dorchester benefited from an increase in commercial activity.
From ancient times, Native Americans used the estuary for fishing, hunting and trading. The English settlers in 1630 soon allowed the construction of a grist mill at Lower Mills to grind the grain they needed for flour. Commercial activity increased, and many kinds of mills flourished due to the easy accessibility for vessels that were used to bring raw materials to Lower Mills for manufacturing and to take the finished goods to wider markets.
Carole Mooney provided the photograph of Gulliver’s Creek for today’s illustration. Although the creek was in Milton (Milton broke off from Dorchester in the seventeenth century), the creek is notable in the history of the estuary. The red marker in the map shows the location of Gulliver’s Creek on inland side of the Granite Avenue Bridge.
The first incorporated commercial railway in the United States used horse-drawn wagons to haul blocks of granite along rails from the Quincy quarries onto barges in Gulliver’s Creek in the early 1800’s. The barges floated from the creek to the Neponset River and along the Atlantic coast to Charlestown to build what was then the nation’s tallest obelisk, the Bunker Hill Monument. The Granite Railway Corporation operated from 1826 to 1870 when it was acquired by the Old Colony Railroad. The barges carrying the granite were able to pass the bridge more easily than larger vessels.
Impressively, large sections of granite, many with drill marks along the edges, line Gulliver’s Creek which opens to the southerly bank of the Neponset River.. The creek is navigable by kayak during high tides and can be located by paddling along the Neponset’s south bank from the Granite Avenue Bridge.
Before 1633, Richard Collicott built a small wharf on Gulliver’s Creek to carry furs to Thompson’s Island and Boston. Shipbuilding began in 1640 at Gulliver’s Creek Wharf where small ships called shallops were built.. In 1899, 43 parcels of land totaling 232 acres were acquired by the Metropolitan District Commission for the Neponset River Marsh Reservation to preserve the Neponset marshes between Lower Mills and Granite Avenue.
sources:
James E. Lee. “America’s Very First Railroad: It Created a Monument,” Trains Magazine, Vol. 25, Issue #6, April, 1975, pages 28-32
Dorchester Illustration 2583 Nathaniel Tucker and Mary Fenno Tucker
The following text is from the Dorchester Historical Society’s house history project.
Born in Canton (later Stoughton) in 1805, Nathaniel Tucker was the eldest of James and Betsey (Withington) Tucker’s eight children. Little is known of his early life, as few records exist to document the years prior to his appearance in Dorchester records in 1850. The one record we do have is of his marriage to Mary Fenno in 1829. Nathaniel and Mary Tucker had two daughters: Mary Eliza, who married Timothy Munroe Rhodes and Frances Louisa, who married Allen Darrow Smith.
Nathaniel was a leather merchant, with offices on Pearl Street in Boston. He dealt in boots and shoes on a wholesale basis, and the company was known as Nathaniel Tucker & Co. By the 1870s, Nathaniel had retired. The company had been taken over Munroe Rhodes, and advertised under the name of Rhodes, Paige & Co., Successors to Nathaniel Tucker & Co.
Tucker’s business appears to have been very profitable. He traveled to Europe on business in 1868 and in December of 1872, he applied for a passport, planning to travel to Europe with his wife and daughter. According to his passport application, he intended to be away for a period of two years. In preparation for this trip, T. Munroe Rhodes, then deeply involved in real estate, advertised the house at 19 Sumner Street to let, providing rare detail about the house and other buildings on the estate. The house is listed as having “all the modern improvements.” At that time, “modern improvements” might include central heating with a coal-fired furnace and hot air through natural convection and gas lights. Through this advertisement, we know that the property contained a stable, with a bowling alley and billiard room connected. The large garden, “with fruit and vegetables in abundance” is a reminder that Dorchester still embodied its agrarian origins. Many wealthy Dorchester residents cultivated new varieties of fruits and vegetables as an avocation, some of which can be still be found today.
The photo of Mary Tucker must have been taken in the 1860s, when her husband’s career would have been at its peak. Mary would have been in her late fifties. Her dress, with the hoop skirt popular in that era, appears to be silk. The sleeves are banded with velvet, and there is lace at the collar and wrists. A lace handkerchief is tucked in at her waist and her hair, with its stylish mid-part, is covered with a lace cap, as would be fitting for a married woman of her age. She is photographed against a formal backdrop, likely staged by the photographer. This portrait, together with the fact that there are multiple portraits of Mary, indicates the important financial and social position of the Tucker family.
When the family returned from Europe, they moved from 19 Sumner Street to Train Street, near Neponset Avenue, likely to live with their daughter, Mary Eliza, and her husband, T. Munroe Rhodes. Tragically, on November 6, 1875, while she was riding in her carriage with her grandchild, for some reason her horse became unmanageable. Perhaps it was frightened; whatever the reason, Mary was thrown from the carriage and killed instantly. The Boston Post reported on the accidenton November 8th. Nathaniel Tucker continued to live on Train Street until his death in 1886. Notice of his death appeared in The Boston Globe on June 25, 1886.