Although Franklin Park is technically on the edge of Dorchester and not part of Dorchester’s historical territory, the park feels as if it is home.
Franklin Park Zoo comprises 72 acres within Franklin Park. When Frederick Law Olmsted designed the park, he included the idea for a future zoological garden, intended to be a naturalistic area for native animals. However, when the zoo was opened in 1912, it included many exotic animals in addition to ative species. The zoo has evolved over the years and is now accredited by the American Association of Zoological Parks and Aquariums.
Dorchester Illustration 2597 Fields Corner Municipal Building
From the National Register nomination::
Visible from the Fields Corner intersection, looking northwestward along Adams Street is the architecturally significant, High Victorian Gothic Municipal Building at 1 Arcadia Street and 193 Adams Street. This 3.5 story H-shaped building is constructed of red brick with granite trimmings, its roof line characterized by a series of steeply pitched gables. Built as Police Station #1 ca. 1875, this building is one of the most important landmark buildings in the area.
Additionally, the building is an example of the work of Boston’s first City Architect, George A. Clough, and is significant for its role in community development. Although the building permits and records no longer exist for the Municipal Building, it is generally thought that Clough (l843-ca. 1916) – who began designing schools for the City in 1872 and became the first City Architect in 1873 – is the building’s architect. Clough learned drafting from his father, who was a Maine shipbuilder, and studied under George Snell of the Boston firm of Snell & Gregerson. He opened his own firm in 1869.
Clough’s most prominent buildings are the Suffolk County Courthouse in Pemberton Square 1888-89) and Boston Latin and English High School (l877). He worked in a number of eclectic styles and is credited with introducing “the German system, which provides for constructing the building around open courts, thus affording ample light and ventilation to all parts of it…” Although not built around an open court as were the Courthouse and High School, the Municipal Building does provide generous 1ight and ventilation through its H-p1an and paired fenestration. Symmetry and balance — of plan, scale, and massing — also characterize most of Clough’s work. George Clough is credited with designing over 25 schools for the City of Boston, several local churches, and numerous other municipal buildings and public charitable institutions in the Boston area.
Besides being significant for its architectural merit and association with the first City Architect, the Municipal Building is important for its strong community identity and for its contribution to the civic and cultural history of Dorchester. The building was originally constructed as a replacement for the old District 11 Police Station that was located on Hancock Street. The eastern wing of the Municipal Building, facing Adams Street, housed the new police station, with jail cells (still remaining) in the basement. The rear (western) wing was designed as the Dorchester branch of the Boston Public Library, the first such branch system in the United States. The building also served for a time as a district court.
This information about Colonel Charles Barnard Fox comes from http://foresthillstrust.blogspot.com/2010/11/colonel-charles-barnard-fox.html
With the sensationalism garnered in the movie “Glory,” we reveled in the drama and impact of the Civil War however it also served to remind us of why that war was fought. The 54th Regiment, led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, was the first African American regiment formed in Massachusetts, yet few of us realize that the all black 55th Regiment was led by a Dorchester, Massachusetts resident. Charles Barnard Fox (1833-1895) was the son of the Reverend Thomas B. Fox, editor of the “Boston Transcript.” He had been born in Newburyport while his father had been minister of the Unitarian church in that town, but the family moved to Dorchester in 1845. Educated in the local schools, Fox studied, then entered the field of civil engineering. His brother, the noted architect John A. Fox, was also a civil engineer and considered the “Father of Stick Style” architecture in this country.
Fox had enlisted in the Civil War at Lyceum Hall on Dorchester’s Meeting House Hill, which was the local recruiting office. He received his commission as Second Lieutenant in the Thirteenth Massachusetts Infantry; one year later he was made First Lieutenant. In 1863, he was transferred to the Second Massachusetts Cavalry, with the same rank. That same year he was made Major of the 55th Regiment, an African American regiment, being promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel on November 3, 1863. The 55th Regiment had been trained at Camp Meigs, and was composed of African American men who had everything at stake in the war. Fox, with his fellow officers, were well trained, and were to be commended for their service. In Fox’s obituary, it was quoted as saying that “It was abundantly shown in his long and meritorious service in the army during the civil war, and especially in his readiness to enter a branch of the service that was not regarded with favor even by many who in theory favored perfect equality between races, and which was not calculated to attract the young soldier powerfully, in comparison with the more popular and agreeable positions in white regiments. But Colonel Fox believed in the equality of the black men with the white, and whatever he believed he lived up to, and the relations which existed between him and the colored soldiers in his command were ever the most intimate and mutually regardful nature.”
Fox was reared in the Unitarian faith, and upon the family’s removal in 1845 to Dorchester, they became connected with the First Parish Church on Meeting House Hill. The minister was the Reverend Nathaniel Hall, a fierce anti-slavery opponent who expounded upon the evils of both slavery and the subjugation of blacks in the South. His sermons, many of which were published for a more general readership, were vociferous and pointed in his belief that slavery was immoral, and could only be abolished through the war. Thomas B. Fox was undoubtedly influenced by Hall, and by his own father’s opinion, which was quite often read in the daily editions of the “Boston Transcript.”
Charles Barnard Fox served in the Army of the Potomac until after the Battle of Fredericksburg, in the Siege of Charleston and in the Campaign in Florida, the Battle of Honey Hill being particularly gruesome. His record of bravery and courage was made known when he was made brevet Colonel of the 55th Regiment; he resigned his commission on June 25, 1865 at the end of the Civil War and decided to remain in the South. For three years after the war, Fox managed a cotton plantation on Sea Island off the coast of South Carolina, it was not until 1868 that he returned to Boston, becoming an inspector at the Boston Customs House. In partnership with his brother and his friends, he assisted in the establishment of Holbrook & Fox, a real estate and land auction house in Boston. It was his friend Silas Pinckney Holbrook and his brother John Andrews Fox who created the partnership. The firm of Holbrook & Fox was one of the leading firms of its kind in New England and was well respected for the development of the real estate market in the late 19th century. Fox married and built a home, designed by his architect brother, on Fuller Street in Dorchester. His connection with the development of the old farms and estates of Dorchester continued until his untimely death in 1895.
The contributions of Colonel Charles Barnard Fox in regards to the Civil War were important enough to have his convictions and personal beliefs supersede his comfort. He served his all black 55th Regiment well, and earned their respect with the title of colonel by brevet, and honor that few officers received for their service in the Civil War.
Colonel Thomas Barnard Fox is buried in the Fox Family Lot at Forest Hills Cemetery.
Dorchester Illustration 2595 Archibald T. Davison, Jr.
Archibald Thompson Davison (11 October 1883 – 6 February 1961) was an American musicologist, conductor, composer and music educator.
Davison lived with his parents and siblings at 394 Washington Street, Dorchester. His father was a doctor as was one of his brothers.
Dr. Archibald T. Davison (a Dorchester native) left his position as Organist & Choirmaster at All Saints, Ashmont, to take the post of University Organist and Choirmaster at Harvard. He coached the Harvard Glee Club in the 19 teens and became its first conductor. The Club under his direction, from 1920 to 1933, came to be regarded as the best amateur chorus in the United States.
Davison completed his studies in music at Harvard University, where he was awarded a PhD in 1908. He is best remembered for his work as co-editor of the two volumes of The Historical Anthology of Music, along with Willi Appel.
He taught at Harvard for forty-one years
His compositions were completed early in life, and none of them are part of the standard repertoire.
His musicology writings include:
The Harmonic Contributions of Claude Debussy, 1908
Choral Conducting, 1940
The Technique of Choral Composition, 1945
The Historical Anthology of Music Volume I: Oriental, Medieval and Renaissance Music, 1949
The Historical Anthology of Music Volume II: Baroque, Rococo and Pre-Classical Music, 1950
For a much longer description of Davison’s life, check out his obituary in the Harvard Crimson.
Dorchester Illustration 2594 McCreight Home Sanatarium
In 1887, Mary B. McCreight immigrated to the United States from Ireland. By 1902, she was renting 58 Bowdoin Avenue and running a hospital. In 1908, she purchased the property. Two years later, she expanded to the property next door at 56 Bowdoin Avenue and operated the two houses as a hospital.
She had capacity for taking in tuberlosis patients, but from Census records, it appears that in later years, the facility catered mostly to the elderly. In 1910, she had a staff of five besides herself. She had a lodger and eleven patients. Some of her patients stayed for years. At its peak, her business had 40 beds.
Mary died in 1948.
The houses were taken down in the mid-20th century and replaced by the multi-unit building seen in the lower half of the illustration.
Dorchester Illustration 2593 Treasures Along the Neponset River Trail
Treasures Along the Neponset River Trail contributed by Carole Mooney
Birds and animals including eagles, hawks, heron, ducks, geese, crows, turkeys, deer and rabbits attract the attention of visitors to the Neponset River Trail as well as sunsets over the waving marsh grass and colorful murals under bridges. Reminders of the area’s rich heritage serve as a backdrop for many scenes. In the photograph, ducks and a heron relax on a strip of granite in the river which reflects the Baker Chocolate Company buildings.
The falling waters of the Neponset River provided energy for the country’s first water-powered grist mill and paper mills in the Lower Mills area. Buildings constructed by the Walter Baker Company from 1868 and 1947 border both sides of the river. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, the brick buildings reflect styles from the Second Empire, Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival and Utilitarian Modern.
In 1846, the 3 1/4 mile Dorchester and Milton Branch Railroad was built between Port Norfolk and present day Mattapan Square. In 1899, the recently established Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) acquired 232 acres for the Neponset River Marshes Reservation. In 1990 the rails were removed from the Dorchester and Milton Branch Railway and two years later the MDC acquired the right-of-way to link the former drive-in and dump site parkland in Dorchester Bay with the Neponset marshes. In 2003, 2.4 miles of the Lower Neponset River Trail opened.
Along the trail, outcroppings of conglomerate contain pebbles of older rock that became rounded as they tumbled along the river bed. Because the small andesite pebbles in the compressed silt resembled an old fashioned fruit filled pudding, they were nicknamed Roxbury Puddingstone which became the Massachusetts State Rock in 1983. Found only in the Boston basin, Roxbury Puddingstone has been along the trail for millions of years. Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes described the children of giants who didn’t like their pudding creating the rocks:
“They flung it over the Roxbury Hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;”
At the eastern end of the trail, lines of pilings which once supported the wharf and dock for the A.T. Stearns Lumber Company rise out of the river. Stearns operated here from 1847 well into the 1900’s with two counting rooms, a lumber building, a planing mill, a dry-house, a molding room, a block of five tenements, two stables and a large shed. The Senator Joseph Finnegan Park now occupies this space. Moldings, columns, windows, doors and other architectural features manufactured here are still part of the fabric of older Dorchester homes.
The trail is easily accessible by public transportation from the red line’s Ashmont station. The Mattapan High Speed Trolley’s stops along the Neponset Trail include Butler, Milton and Central Avenue.
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.
