The book about the Dorchester Day celebration of 1907 included a photo captioned: Last Indian Camp on Savin Hill, on the site of the old fort. The photo was described as made by James H. Stark in 1884.
When the English settlers arrived in 1630, New England Native Americans did use the conical form as one of their house types, and the outer covering was made of bark. In the photo, however, the covering appears to be canvas, which was not a traditional material.
The following is from Charles C. Willoughby. “Houses and Gardens of the New England Indians.” American Anthropologist, Jan. – Mar., 1906, New Series, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Jan. – Mar., 1906), pp. 115-132.
“One of the types of Native American dwellings was the conical house. The framework was made of straight poles with their lower ends set into the ground enclosing the circular floor space, their upper ends being brought together and fastened. This frame resembled that of the skin tipi of the Plains tribes, and was covered with bark mats or pieces of bark which were sometimes held in by a second series of poles placed over them.”
To learn more about Native American history, consider attending the Native America Blessing Ceremony on July 31st.
Today’s illustration reminds us that contractors often used to work out of their homes. John S. Davidson is standing behind the fence at 8 Charles Street. The boy is probably John’s son Leonard.
On June 28, 1913, The Dorchester Beacon newspaper ran the following puff piece about John Davidson.
“John S. Davidson
An Expert Painter and Decorator – Does Much Work in Dorchester and Vicinity.—No. 8 Charles Street.
“Few painters and decorators of Dorchester are better prepared to undertake large contracts in their line than is John S. Davidson. He has been in the business here for a period of eight years but has really been established since 1894. He was formerly located at 459 Geneva Avenue. He is thoroughly skilled in both exterior and interior painting and enjoys a splendid reputation for his fine decorative work. His shop is located in the rear of this residence at 8 Charles Street. The entire property covers an area of over 5,000 square feet. The shop is of commodious size and two stories high. It has a loft with a storing capacity for 1,000 pairs of blinds. Mr. Davidson employs from ten to twenty-five men, according to the number of contracts in hand. All work is done under his own personal supervision. He can be reached on the telephone by calling Dorchester 247. A specialty is made of residential work.
Mr. Davidson is well known in Masonic circles, and is a member of the Eastern Star Lodge, and of the A. O. U. W. (Ancient Order of United Workmen).”
Note: The Ancient Order of United Workmen was the first of the fraternal beneft societies that offered insurance for their members.
Today’s illustration includes Neil McNeil (left) and Sylvester Parshley (right). The McNeil Bros. business was one of the largest contracting firms in Boston in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Neil went south during the U.S. Civil War on camp construction work for the Union army. On his return, he engaged in the building business with his brother Hector. Parshley joined with Hector and Neil as a junior partner. In 1871, the McNeil firm acquired land for a saw mill at approximately 96 Freeport Street, Dorchester. Hector McNeil died in 1886. Neil lived on Stanley Street, and Sylvester Parshley lived on Cushing Avenue.
The map detail comes from the 1884 atlas of Dorchester. It shows the location of the McNeil production facility on Dorchester Bay opposite the end of Shamrock Street (now Kimball Street). The red shading indicates that the building was made mostly of brick. The construction of the Southeast Expressway included making new land, so that the property no long has water frontage.
The firm is mentioned in A Half Century of Boston Building as the builder of notable homes and commercial buildings.
One of the largest contracting and building firms in the city is that of the McNeil Brothers, who have constructed a very large number of the most elegant and costly buildings in this city, as well as many in other parts of New England and New York. The business was established in 1868, and the office of the firm is in the Master Builders’ Association building at 166 Devonshire Street. The following are among the most important buildings erected by this firm: The elegant residences of William D. Sloan, John S. Barnes, Charles Lamier, and George H. Morgan at Lenox, Mass.; residences of Cornelius Vanderbilt, F. W. Vanderbilt, Mrs. H. Mortimer Brooks, J. M. Fiske, H. H. Cook, William Gamewell, G. M. Hutton and A. B. Emmons, at Newport, R. I.; the residences of Charles Francis Adams, H. C. Jackson, Mrs. H. Keyes, C. T. White, J. A. Beebe, Charles Head, H. H. Fay, Miss E. E. Sears, R. H. White and many others, in this city; residences of J. S. Barnes, James A. Garland and Charles Lamier, at New York. Among the mercantile and public buildings are the Hemenway, Chickering, Potter, Hunnewell, and R. H. White buildings, the Parker House, Boston Post Office and Sub-Treasury, Boston Real Estate Trust building, in this city, and a very large list of notable buildings in other cities. This firm is widely known as one of the most reliable and trustworthy, and has a very high reputation for the promptness with which all contracts are carried forward. Their business has very largely increased in the past few years and they are now engaged on several large contracts.
Today’s vintage illustration is from Picturesque Boston Highlands, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester. (1895). The color photograph is from 2003.
In 1883, Arthur Horace Littlefield and Warren Herbert. Littlefield went into business together as grocers in the building at 2286 Dorchester Avenue, also known as 1213-1215 Adams Street, Dorchester, Lower Mills. They were born to Horace and Eliza Littlefield , Arthur in 1857 and Warren in 1859. The family lived at 68 River Street, approximately where the Sunoco station is now at the corner of River Street and Central Avenue.
Arthur had been a tin smith, and Warren had started as a clerk in a in the grocery store of Joseph E. Hall. Hall took an interest in Warrren and sold him the business in 1883. Arthur and Warren went into business and operated as the Littlefield Brothers in the first floor of the building pictured in today’s illustration.
Arthur married and had two daughters and a son. They moved to 1120 Washington Street, Dorchester, where they were tenants. Warren also married and had two daughters and a son in the same order as his brother. Warren and his family moved to Eliot Street in Milton.
The business seems to have provided a living for the brothers, although Warren must have left the business and come back, because The Dorchester Beacon reported in 1901 that the Littlefield Brothers were making “extensive improvements in their grocery store. Warren H. Littlefield has again become a member of the firm.”
Arthur died in July 1904 at the age of 47. Warren bought out Arthur’s interest in the business. He moved his family into 1120 Washington Street, where Arthur’s wife and children were living. But it turns out that Warren had been speculating in the stock market. Warren disappeared in September 28, 1905, and at that time, it was thought that his debts totaled about $40,000. Warren had been a member of the school committee of Milton and was treasurer of the Frist Methodist Church in Dorchester. An examination showed that the church’s accounts had not been misappropriated.
In October, Warren’s creditors attached the profits of the grocery and forced Warren into bankruptcy. In October, it was thought that his debts amounted to between $50,000 and $75,000. There is no documentation to suggest that Warren ever returned to Dorchester. His wife and children also disappeared from public records at that time. Arthur’s widow Lottie and her children continued as tenants in the house at 1120 Washington Street.
In 1861, the Harris School on Adams Street at the corner of Victory Road (formerly Mill Street) was erected and named in honor of the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris who was the pastor of the First Parish for many years. The property was sold to the Boston Housing Authority (in the 1970s?) for the construction of apartment buildings. At times the school was called the School on the Lower Road. The building was designed by architect Luther Briggs, Jr.
Source: Orcutt, William Dana. Good Old Dorchester: A Narrative History of the Town, 1630-1893. Cambridge: The University Press, 1908 [c1891].
Luther Briggs, Jr., born at Pembroke, Massachusetts, in 1822, worked in the Boston office of the well-known architect and engineer, Captain Alexander Parris, whose wife was Luther’s aunt. Young Briggs left the Parris office about 1842 and went to work as a draftsman for Gridley J. F. Bryant, who would later establish his reputation among Boston’s commercial architects. Briggs lived in Dorchester and his suburban architecture was very influenced by the picturesque styles and ornamental landscape designs featured in the books of Andrew Jackson Downing. He designed a variety of structures, including modest dwellings, business blocks, monuments, and public buildings.
Sources: Cummings, Abbott Lowell and Roger Reed. Drawing Toward Home exhibition catalogue entries; Guide to the Library and Archives, 25.
The Lower Mills Civic Association announced the re-lighting of the Walter Baker sign.
You are invited to celebrate the historic lighting of the Walter Baker Factory Sign in Lower Mills Dorchester on Friday June 10th from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at the Walter Baker Artists’ Lofts, 1231 Adams Street, Lower Mills, Dorchester
After 55 years of darkness, we are announcing that the historic Walter Baker sign atop Walter Baker Chocolate Factory Administration building in Dorchester Lower Mills will now be lit each evening. Once again, it will serve as a visual reference point for the neighborhood, and a reminder of the industrial past of Lower Mills and its thriving present, thanks to a Community Preservation Grant from the City of Boston the tireless work of a community-based partnership, the generous support of donors, local businesses, and neighbors.
The Lighting Celebration
The lighting ceremony will be held on Friday June 10th from 6:30 to 8:30 pm. It will be celebration of the vitality of the Lower Mills community, with food from local restaurants, locally made crafts and Baker chocolate factory memorabilia.
A formal thank you to sponsors and all those who made this possible with a special memoriam for Terry Dolan, without whom this would not have happened, will begin at 8pm. Right at sunset at 8:21pm the lights will be turned on. There will be access to the lobby of the Artist’s Loft Building and a Tour starting at 7pm.
For more information about the event for the media and information about participating in the event contact: Mike Skillin – President, Lower Mills Civic Association, 857.207.9001, Skill143@verizon.net
The Administration Building, which was constructed in 1918-1919, housed the executive offices, exhibition rooms, a small chocolate museum and a large-scale reproduction painting of the Baker trademark, La Belle Chocolatiere, by Jean-Etienne Liotard. The angle of the Administration Building, its location with the mills, as well as as its large “Walter Baker” neon sign, created a strong impression and focal point within the Baker’s complex. – Sweet History: Dorchester and the Chocolate Factory, (Boston, The Bostonian Society, 2005)
“John J. Gallagher United States Navy 28 August 1916 – 24 January 1944 John J. Gallagher was born on August 28, 1916 in Boston. As a resident of Dorchester, John entered the United States Navy soon after Pearl Harbor in 1942. John served as Third Class Water Tender (WT3) aboard the USS Plunkett, a destroyer. Gallagher was killed in the line of duty while fighting off an attack from the Luftwaffe on January 24, 1944. For the heroism displayed in his service to our country, John was awarded the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. WT3 Gallagher is buried in Nettuno, a United States Military Cemetery in Anzio, Italy.”
Gallagher lived at 58 Oakton Avenue.
On May 12, 2022, Thomas F. Mulvoy, Jr., reviewed the recent book Unsinkable by James Sullivan. The following is excerpted from that article.
“Along with John “Johnny” Gallagher, of an Oakton Avenue, Dorchester, a family that saw four of its men serve during the war, the author uses the reporter’s tools to high effect – official papers, letters between home and sea, witness accounts from the heat of battle, phone calls, and, in three cases, nonagenarian memories stretching back 70 years to when the men reminiscing were young and everything was ahead of them.
From late 1942 on, the narrative moves along to a rhythm set to the tune of constant calls to battle stations as the ship took on assignment after assignment, crisscrossing waters rife with German ships and the armored sharks of the U-Boat service. The author occasionally administers a taste of the tedium that can beset a warship between assignments and during back-and-forth trips to ports of call 1,500 miles and more apart, but he never allows his readers to lose the sense that everyone on the ship is always on high alert for the deadly patches ever in the offing.
The long keystone chapter on the battle at Anzio is a masterly chronicle of chaos, courage under fire, pathos, and unremitting death at sea. In the late afternoon of Jan. 24, 1944, the Luftwaffe launched a dozen or more bombers against the Plunkett. As the continual strafing for 25 minutes against the defensive fire of the ship’s crew, one bomb, a 550-pounder, cratered through the main deck and into the guts of the ship, setting off a horrendous fire that left bodies and body parts strewn about the vessel and survivors trying to help the wounded while taking stock of the catastrophe.
The early tally over the next days out of the 285 men listed as serving on the Plunkett that month was 24 identified as dead, among them Johnny Gallagher of Oakton Avenue, Dorchester, his back fatally bloodied by shrapnel. There were 29 sailors called missing, meaning presumed dead.”
Dorchester Illustration 2567 Why is Hyde Park not part of Dorchester?
The 1850 map of Dorchester clearly shows the section of Hyde Park north of the Neponset River as part of Dorcchester. In 1846, Henry Grew began buying land in the area and built a house there.
Henry Grew (1808-1892)wasborn in Boston on 30 May 1808, the son of John Grew and Anne Greene Grew. He was a student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., leaving school at age 16 to work in the store of dry-goods importer James Read. He began his own wholesale dry-goods business in Boston in 1830 under the name Chace and Grew, and although he retired from active business in 1845, remained a partner in the dry-goods businesses Grew and Perkins and Perkins, Doe, and Company. In 1847, he purchased several acres of land and built a house he named “Woodlands” in Hyde Park (then Dorchester). The estate grew to several hundred acres and contained an active farm, part of which was later incorporated into Stony Brook Reservation. Source: Massachusetts Historical Society
Henry Grew said on March 9, 1872, “Having purchased a few acres of land in the summer’ of 1846, I commenced building a house, and moved to this place, then a part of Dorchester, on the first day of May, 1847. At that time most of this territory was occupied by farmers. There were on River Street (the old highway between Dorchester and Dedham), within a range of a mile or a mile and a half, about ten houses, most of them small and occupied by farmers, with two exceptions, one a blacksmith and one a wheelwright, with a population not exceeding fifty persons.” Memorial Sketch of Hyde Park, Mass. (Boston, 1888), 12.
The town of Hyde Park was created on April 22, 1868, from sections of land in Dorchester, Dedham and Milton. The Dorchester land was the western portion of Dorchester shown in the detail from the 1850 map of Dorchester. Hyde Park was annexed to the City of Boston in 1912. The street that meanders across the illustration horizontally is River Street.
Camp Meigs and the U.S. Army Hospital site appear to have been part of Dorchester during the Civil War, prior to the creation of Hyde Park. During the Civil War, Readville supported three Massachusetts training camps and a large U.S. Army General Hospital. Best known as Camp Meigs, nearly 30,000 men in 55 military units prepared here for battle, including three of the Union’s earliest black regiments. The 54th Regiment, composed of men of African descent, led by Col. Robert Gould Shaw trained there.
Dorchester Illustration 2566 Thacher House and Fulton Iron Foundry
The Thacher family estate is at the left of today’s illustration. It was known as “Hillside,” and was located on the north side of Jones Hill. The building at the right is the Fulton Iron Foundry.
George C. Thacher was a founder and owner of the Fulton Iron Foundry, which was located in South Boston, at the intersection of Dorchester Avenue and Foundry Street, with offices on Long Wharf, in Boston. The location provided easy access to the then navigable Fort Point Channel, as well as connections to railroad lines, with spurs connecting directly to foundry buildings. Thacher’s foundry was not the only one in South Boston in the mid-19th century. By 1850, Cyrus Alger’s South Boston Iron Works, a corner of which can be seen at the lower right on this map, was the largest foundry in the country. There is no doubt, however, that Thacher’s Fulton Iron Foundry was profitable. Founded in 1835, it began in a period where railroad lines were being laid out rapidly and, although there was competition from cheaper English iron, iron rails and locomotives would have been a major source of business. In addition, of course, iron was in demand for everything from nails to stoves. By the mid19th century, iron foundries dominated the “lower end” of South Boston. The lithograph, from the collection at the Boston Public Library, shows the Fulton Iron Foundry in the period 1842-1856. The legend says: “The Fulton Iron Foundry. Geo. C. Thacher, Thomas Thacher and Thomas. T.Thacher, Jr., Proprietors.” [This paragraph was taken mostly from a house history report written by Marti Glynn in the Dorchester Historical Society’s house history project. You can see finished reports on the Society’s website. www.dorchesterhistoricalsociety.org.]
The foundry sat on about seventy-five thousand feet of land with a foundry building of sixteen thousand feet on one level equipped with large cranes and containing four melting furnaces, five ovens for drying, large molds for dry-sand and loam-work. Store-houses for sand, coal and a large stock of patter, an engine-house , buildings for dressing castings, making patterns and flasks, and blacksmith work, stable, and other structures are grouped near the foundry. Among the specialties manufactured are machine castings, such as large steam cylinders, propellers and channel plates for marine engines; gearing, pulleys, kettles for the refinery of oil, sugar and resin; appliances for chemical works, columns for buildings and generally heavy castings. Source: J. D. Van Slyck. New England Manufacturers and Manufactories. Volume 2 (Boston, 1879), 752-753.
