Dorchester Historical Society

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1708

Nathan Carruth, 1808-1888.

The following is taken from American Series of Popular Biographies. Massachusetts Edition.  Boston, 1891.

NATHAN CARRUTH, first president of the Old Colony Railroad, was born in North Brookfield, Mass., December 25, 1808, and died at his home in Dorchester, May 19, 1888.  Nathan Carruth was educated in his native town, and resided there until seventeen years old.  Coming to Boston in 1825, in the succeeding year he was employed as a clerk by a concern engaged in the West India goods trade, and he then served an apprenticeship in the drug store of Messrs. Fletcher and Carruth.  After the dissolution of that firm in 1831, he entered into partnership with his brother Francis, under the firm name of F.S. & N. Carruth.   They were associated in business for eight years, at the expiration of which time Nathan Carruth formed a copartnership with his younger brother Charles, under the firm name of N. & C. Carruth.  The latter concern had a most successful career in the drug business in Boston, covering a period of many years.

The revolutionizing of traffic made possible by the advent of steam as a motive power found a most enthusiastic supporter in Mr. Carruth, who devoted much time, energy, and capital to the introduction of railway lines in Massachusetts and other New England States.  He not only labored to promote their establishment, but after their completion he took an active interest in their welfare; and besides being the first president and general manager of the Old Colony Railroad, he was for a number of years treasurer of the Northern Railroad of New Hampshire.  He was the president of the Dorchester Gaslight Company and a director of the Mattapan Bank.  Politically, he was a Republican.  In 1847 he moved to Dorchester, laying out at great expense a most attractive estate in what is now known as Ashmont.  He resided there for the rest of his life.

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1707

Fred Allen, 1894-1956 

From: Fred Allen’s Letters edited by Joe McCarthy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965

A Boston Irishman, born in 1894 and christened John Florence Sullivan, Allen was the son of a bookbinder who earned $19.23 a week.  His mother died when he was three years old and he was raised by his Aunt Lizzie (“a wonderful name”) in the Allston and Dorchester sections of the city, working as a youngster in the Boston Public Library and as an errand boy for a piano company.  Allen was still in his teens when he broke into vaudeville as a comic juggler who cracked jokes as he juggled, first using the stage name Fred St. James and later Freddy James.  His routine soon began to feature more jokes than juggling, including such sure-fire howlers as, “Condensed milk is wonderful but how can they get a cow to sit down on those little cans?”  and “She was so old when they lit the candles on her birthday cake six people were overcome by the heat.”

Freddy James became Fred Allen when he was breaking into big-time vaudeville as a comedy monologuist; with a new name and new jokes he could ask for a higher salary than the $75 a week that Freddy James had been getting in small-time theaters.  In 1919, Fred Allen made a smashingly successful debut at B.F. Keith’s Palace on Broadway, the highest pinnacle of vaudeville.  Any performer who had played the Palace in those days could be assured of being booked by the manager of any important theater in the country, sight unseen.  By 1922, after touring as a headliner on the Keith circuit, Allen was playing in Shubert vaudeville on the same bills with such big stars as Lew Fields and Nora Bayes and earning the then astronomical salary of $400 a week.  Writing his own highly original comedy lines—which were often borrowed by Al Jolson and other greats—he was already identified in show business as a performer with a classy following.  Three times in one season he was brought back for return engagements at the Shubert Theater in New Haven by demands from admiring Yale undergraduates.

Fred took a job, which he thought would be only temporary, as the writer and star of a weekly radio comedy program, sponsored by Linit Starch.  He remained in radio for the next seventeen years and never appeared on the stage again.

Although he was one of the big show business celebrities of his time—a top radio star in that golden age of radio was as important as a top movie star—Allen never behaved like a celebrity and never thought of himself as anybody particularly special.  When television replaced radio as the dominating entertainment medium, Allen made a few tentative tries at it but he never felt at ease in television and the network executives at NBC wanted no part of the comedy show that he wanted to do, a sort of Allen’s Alley with the visual format of Thornton Wilder’s play, Our Town. 

In the last few years of his life, Allen appeared Sunday nights on television as a panelist on What’s My Line? An easy chore approved by his physicians because it required no rehearsing or script preparation.  He spent the rest of the week writing two autobiographical books, Treadmill to Oblivion, an account of his years in radio, and Much Ado About Me, memoirs of vaudeville and musical comedy days.  Allen had always wanted to be a full-time writer; one reason why he devoted so much time to turning out so many letters was the satisfaction that he found at his typewriter.  He often said that he enjoyed the preparation of his radio scripts more than the performance of his shows.  When he left radio, he seriously considered writing skits and monologues for other comedians like his good friend, Goodman Ace.  In his earlier years, he had written comedy material for a fellow Irish Bostonian, Jack Donahue, the famous Ziegfeld comedian-dancer of the 1920s.  Allen was greatly encouraged when Treadmill to Oblivion won praise from critics and became a best seller in 1954.  He plunged into Much Ado About Me with relish, working daily in an office without a telephone a few blocks from his Manhattan apartment.

On the night of Saint Patrick’s Day, 1956, when Much Ado About Me was not quite finished, Allen was stricken with a fatal heart attack while walking his dog on West 57^th Street. 

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1706

Elida Rumsey Fowle

[from a clipping from some unknown, undated publication, from the 2^nd half of the 19^th century]

Of all the women who devoted themselves to the soldiers in our late war [Civil War], perhaps none had a more varied experience than Elida B. Rumsey—a girl so young that Miss Dix would not receive her as a nurse.  Undaunted by seeming difficulties, she persisted in “doing the next thing,” and so fulfilled her great desire to do something for the soldiers, for wherever she saw a soldier in need her ready sympathies were enlisted, little caring if the heart bets stirred a coat of blue or gray.

She was engaged to Mr. John A. Fowle, of Jamaica Plain, Mass., who was employed in the Navy Dept, Washington, but who devoted all his spare time to philanthropic enterprises, and their work was supplementary from the first.  In Nov. ’61, she began to visit the hospitals and sing to the soldiers, and the knowledge of how little the boys had to look forward to from day to day, while under such depressing influences, first inspired the thought of supplying them with pictures and books.  One of the fist things established was a Sunday evening prayer meeting in Columbia College Hospital, in an upper room in Auntie Pomroy’s ward.  That room was crowded night after night, and over flow meetings were held in a grove nearby.  The interest steadily increased, and the enthusiasm of the soldiers could not be repressed, when Miss Rumsey’s sweet voice stirred their souls, and rekindled the noble self-sacrificing spirit that had brought them to such a place.  The soldiers planned what they wanted her to sing from week to week, and she three into the songs all her great desire to bring the boys to their better selves and help them to feel they were not forgotten and alone. 

Miss Rumsey was the means of founding a Soldier’s Free Library, the first one hundred dollars was given by Mrs. Walter Baker, a greater part of the remainder was earned by Miss Rumsey and Mr. Fowle, giving concerts.

Mr. Fowle and Miss Rumsey, on March 1^st, 1863, were married in the Hall of Representatives, about 4000 being present, the marriage ceremony was performed according to the rights of the Episcopal Church, by the Rev. Mr. Quint, pastor of the church which Mr. Fowle attended in Jamaica Plain, and Chaplain of the 2^nd Mass. REg.

Mr. and Mrs. Fowle now reside in Dorchester, Mass.

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1705

George Lathe Burt (on left) and John H. Burt (on right)

Mr. Burt began business as contractor and builder, in 1850, in company with his brother, John H., and one year later they associated with them another brother, Sumner A., who remained with them until his decease in 1886.  The name of the firm seems to have been J. H. Burt & Co.   Burt Street, laid out in 1897 and running from Washington Street to Ashmont was named for them.

George Burt was a member of the Boston common council, 1870, ’71, ’72 and ’73; member of House of Representatives, 1880, ’81 and ’82; member of state Senate, 1884 and ’85, and trustee of Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association, 1888 and ’89. 

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The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1704

Earlier this month we saw the Colonial Filling Station on Washington Street. Today we have the Colonial Filling Station at King Square at the point between Adams Street and Neponset Avenue.  You may have to zoom in with your picture viewer.

The Beacon Oil Co. owned and operated the Colonial Filling Stations, and the construction of this station was completed in June of 1923.  The photograph by Paul J. Weber appeared in The Architectural Forum, July, 1926.   Anthony Sammarco has noted that the finial on the building and on top of the pole represent orbits.

The following is from the article accompanying the illustration: Among the many filling stations scattered throughout New England in which Colonial details have been used to make the buildings more consistent architecturally with their environment or more suggestive of the names of the companies owning them, we find this bizarre little building at Dorchester, Mass.

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1703

The following is from “Dot Woman Wrote for National Magazines, Published Many Books”  By Anthony Sammarco, published: Dorchester Community News, 12 October 1990

Josephine Preston Peabody was one of the most talented poets to have lived in Dorchester.  She was born in 1874 in New York, the daughter of Susan J. Morrill and Charles Kilham Peabody.

When she was a child, her father died.  The family then moved to the home of her maternal grandparents, Charles and Susan Jackson Morrill on King Street, Dorchester.

Peabody entered the Harris School on Mill Street (now Victory Road), the school attended earlier by Alice Stone Blackwell (b. 1857), daughter of the famous women’s rights advocate Lucy Stone.  In 1887, while a student at the Harris School, Peabody began to write lyrical poetry, a form she continued with through her admission to Girls Latin School in Boston.

Getting Published

Her poetry was so well-received that it was published in both Atlantic Monthly and Scribners.  She became a voracious writer, penning a novel, a comedy, and 22 poems that appeared in magazines.  Her appetite for writing was insatiable, and recognition was forthcoming.

In 1892, she left Girls Latin School due to ill health, writing numerous short stories and poems, many of which were published.  However, it was in 1894, when she entered Radcliffe College as a special student, that her writing took on new meaning and acquired a luster of prose.  Her writings seemed to flow forth in a steady and even-paced rhythm.

After two years at Radcliffe, she left in 1896.  She continued to write and published poems such as “Old Greek Folk Stories,” “The Wayfarers,” “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” and “Marlowe” by 1901, in addition to dramas, novels, and short stories.

Making Changes

In 1899 she left the Morrill home in Dorchester to live on Linnean Street in Cambridge.  Undoubtedly this area, known as Avon Hill and laid out as a “Street Car Suburb” for the newly-affluent, gave new impetus for her writings.  In fact, she had written, “when my father died, we left New York and came to Dorchester … in Darkest Suburbs”.  Undoubtedly, Cambridge, with its proximity to both Harvard and Radcliffe, offered a more supportive and understanding environment than Dorchester, a newly-annexed town to the city of Boston.

Her travels to Europe began after her move, and she spent many months traveling through England, Scotland, Holland, Holland, and Belgium.  In 1901 she began a lecture position at Wellesley College, which lasted two years.  It was in 1906, however, that her life changed when she married Lionel Marks, professor of mechanical engineering at Harvard University.

The support of a husband allowed Josephine Peabody the luxury of the written word.  She entered and won, over 300 other participants, the Stratford Competition in England.  Her play The Piper was thought so talented and enjoyable that she received much attention at its premier in England.  It was after her marriage that her writings, primarily published by Houghton-Mifflin, continued on: “The Singing Man” in 1911, “The Wolf of Gubbio” in 1913, “Harvest Moon” in 1916, and “Portrait of Mrs. W” in 1922.

The couple also had two children.

Peabody’s writings, so extensive for one so young, came to an end all too quickly when she died in 1922.  Her reading public, probably unaware of her youth, was enthralled by her work; Peabody was able to crate the impression of realism, using the printed word.  She once wrote: “I am wildly happy while I am doing it, though it doesn’t for a moment dull the longing after color, and shan’t neither!”

No, the writing shan’t dull, nor even lose its color, for as long as “The Book of the Little Past” exists, we can retreat into the world illuminated by Josephine Preston Peabdoy.

Anthony Sammarco is a local writer and lecturer on the history of Dorchester whose articles appear regularly in the Community News. 

In addition to poems and other material published in periodicals, Peabody’s separately published titles include:

Old Greek Folk-Stories Told Anew, 1897

The Wayfarers, 1898

Fortune and Men’s Eyes, 1900

Marlowe, 1901

Singing Leaves, 1903

The Book of the Little Past, 1908

Piper: a Play in Four Acts, 1909

The Singing Man, 1911

The Wolf of Gubbio, 1913

Harvest Moon, 1916

Chameleon: a Comedy in Three Acts, 1917

Wings, a Drama in One Act, 1917

Portrait of Mrs. W, 1922

Diary and Letters, 1925

Collected Plays, 1927

Collected Poems, 1927

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If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1702

Article from newspaper (Boston Globe?) December 25, 1925

Dorchester Man Plays Santa

500 Children Will Receive Toys and Feast from Joseph A. Flynn

Out of his love for the children in his neighborhood Joseph A. Flynn, the well-known druggist at 940 Dorchester Avenue, Dorchester, will play Santa Claus to about 500 little ones on Christmas Eve.

The large Christmas tree is already in its place of honor in the middle of the large store with tinsel and bright Christmas ornaments covering the boughs.  Over it, under it, and all around it are magnificent toys.

There are big baby dolls and dressed-up dolls and sets of toy dishes for the girls, while the boys are going to find delight in the fire engines and mechanical toys waiting for them.

There will be candy and ice cream on Christmas Eve, when all the children in the neighborhood will come to the big party held in the store.  Christmas carols, coming over the radio, will lend the real Christmas atmosphere to the occasion, while Santa Claus, impersonated by Joseph L. Corcoran, the well-known raconteur, will make his appearance at just the right time.

Others who are assisting Mr. Flynn in his enterprise are Tony Di Angelo, Edward M. Sullivan of the school committee and Daniel Chisholm.  Little Paul Flynn, the three-year-old son of Mr. Flynn will be the young head of the affair.

The whole drug store has already taken on the festive holiday colors of red and green and white, and the children of the neighborhood are flocking there, eagerly awaiting the Christmas Eve party.

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1701

 Henry A. Clapp

[Material excerpted directly from introduction to Letters to the Home Circle: The North Carolina Service of Pvt. Henry A. Clapp, Company F, Forty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, 1862-1863. Edited by John R. Barden. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1998.  Barden gives his sources in footnotes in that publication.  Letters to the Home Circle includes the text of 44 letters written by Henry Austin Clapp to members of his family back in Dorchester.]

Henry Austin Clapp was born July 17, 1841, the eldest child of John Pierce Clapp, of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Mary Ann Bragg Clapp.  

Henry passed his entrance examination to Harvard College in the summer of 1856, following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Noah, who was graduated in the class of 1735.  

Clapp appears to have been one of the college’s quiet students, progressing in his studies along a predictable and creditable path.  He produced an exhibition part (or essay) titled “A Latin Dialogue from the Comedy ‘All’s Not Gold That Glitters'” (with fellow student Edmund Wetmore) in 1858, another (“Caricature in Literature”) in 1859, and a commencement presentation (“Grotius as a Man”) in 1860.  Following his graduation, he was elected usher in the Boston Latin School and taught there until January of the following year.  In May 1861 he began to read law in the office of David H. Mason of Boston and entered Harvard’s Dane Law School in the fall.  He won the Bowdoin Prize in 1862 for a treatise titled “The Services of Modern Missionaries to Science and Knowledge.”  During his second term in the law school, Clapp also served as a proctor in the college, living in the college buildings and attempting to maintain some order among the undergraduates.

On August 12, 1862, halfway through his law studies, Henry Clapp sent a letter to the officers of the Harvard Corporation, informing them that he resigned his place as proctor, having enlisted with the nine-months men in the New England Guards Regiment.

By the beginning of October, rumors of departure spread through the ranks of the Forty-fourth, although whether the intended destination was the Potomac or New Orleans or North Carolina was anybody’s guess.  Northern morale had been boosted the previous month by the bruising defeat inflicted on Lee’s army at Antietam in Maryland.  Was the Forty-Fourth to join McClellan’s army to wipe out the rebels in Virginia once and for all? On October 17 a soldier got a glimpse of a staff officer’s box marked “New Berne,” and orders on October 20 confirmed the fact. The Forty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia was bound for North Carolina.

Henry Clapp’s letters are not just a personal record.  They give a striking depiction of life in an occupied Southern town.  Since he was writing to members of his family, no doubt Clapp left out a great deal of the ugliness, filth, meanness, and vulgarity that accompanied day-to-day life in any army.  Nevertheless, what is left is still true and tells a great deal (and often tells it very well) about an important era in the histories of both North Carolina and Massachusetts.

Unlike a number of his comrades, Clapp did not reenlist or take a commission after his muster out at Readville on June 18, 1863.  He returned to law school at Cambridge and resumed his proctorship for a year.  After working for a while in a Boston law firm, he was admitted to the bar on July 1, 1865.  He practiced law until 1875, when he was appointed assistant clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, Massachusetts; his appointment was renewed regularly until 1887, when he became clerk, a post he held for the remainder of his life. 

Soon after his return from North Carolina, Clapp began to contribute articles, chiefly book reviews, to the Boston Daily Advertiser.  By 1868 the paper employed him as dramatic and musical critic, and he wrote articles for a number of other magazines and newspapers as well.  His astute observations on Boston’s theatrical performances gained him a reputation as one of the three or four most influential American dramatic critics of the late nineteenth century.  In 1885, building on the enthusiasm instilled by William Rolfe at Dorchester High School thirty years earlier, Clapp began a series of lectures on Shakespeare’s plays.  He was invited to repeat his talks many times in the years that followed.  A collection of his writings was published as Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic in 1902, the same year that he became chief dramatic critic for the Boston Herald.

Henry A. Clapp died of pneumonia on February 19, 1904, at the age of sixty- two and was buried in the old North Dorchester Cemetery.  Oddly enough, this son of Dorchester survived his native town by more than three decades.  By the 1860s the city of Boston, which had annexed the town of Roxbury, needed all or part of Dorchester in order to complete a drainage plan for the city.  The voters of Dorchester gave their approval to annexation on June 22, 1869.  The town, which had been the first in New England to establish the town meeting, held its last such conclave on December 28, 1869.  The annexation took effect on January 4. 1870.

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1700

Today I am hoping that someone has more information about the subject of the illustration.  Please let me know if you know anything about this.

Siphon bottle.  Nozzle has words: Suffolk Bott. Co.  Bottle has stenciled wording: Boston Club Bottling Co., 860 Morton Street, Dorchester, Mass.

If you are heading west along Morton Street toward Blue Hill Avenue, you will see the old police station in disrepair on the right, then the railroad tracks, then a small group of buildings where 860 is located.

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Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1699

Organized in 1888, the Central Congregational Church at the corner of Waldeck and Tonawanda Streets was designed by Albert West, a Dorchester resident, in a local Gothic style derivative of All Saints’.  In March, 2003, the sign on the church was New Testament Pentecostal Church of God in Christ.

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