Dorchester Illustration 2460 Warren Francis Ames

2460 Warren Francis Ames from Boston Globe March 13, 1946 2

Dorchester Illustration no. 2460       Warren Francis Ames

Early June and D-Day always brings remembrances of those who served in World War II.  Even though Warren Francis Ames did not participate in D-Day, he is remembered by a Hero’s Square at Edison and Pond Streets.

https://www.cityofboston.gov/veterans/herosquares/view.aspx?id=1336

Hero Squares

Warren F. Ames Square

Edison Green Street and Pond Street

 Warren Francis Ames United States Army Air Forces 20 October 1924 – 2 March 1946 Warren Francis Ames was born on October 20, 1924 in Boston MA. As a resident of Dorchester, Warren inducted into the United States Army Air Forces on April 26, 1943 and began active duty that same day. Warren served as a Second Lieutenant with the 449th Bomber Group, Heavy, and the 716th Bomber Squadron. On March 2, 1946, Warren was declared missing and presumed dead over Hungary. For the heroism displayed in his service to our country, Warren was awarded the Air Medal, Purple Heart, American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal. Warren was survived by his parents Margaret Donovan and Henry F. Ames and is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing in the Florence American Cemetery in Florence, Italy.

Boston Globe, March 13, 1946.

Dorchester Flyer “Presumably Dead”

Lt. Warren F. Ames, 20 of Dorchester, officially missing since the Liberator bomber of which he was navigator became disabled over Austria a year ago, has now been listed as “presumably dead,” according to a letter received from the War Department by his mother, Mrs. Margaret Donovan of 46 /Edison Green, Dorchester. A pro-burial mass will be held at St. Margaret’s Church, Columbia Road, at 9 a.m., Saturday.

Mrs. Donovan has corresponded with relatives of the nine other members of the Liberator crew and found that there was only one survivor, the bombardier.  Five crew members were executed b the Nazis.  Of the four missing and presumably dead, one other, John Knox of 3 Arbella Road, was a Dorchester neighbor of Lt. Ames.

Lt. Ames was a graduate of the High School of Commerce and was attending the Boston University College of Business Administration, when he enlisted in April, 1943.  He served with the 15th AAF and completed more than 2 missions.

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Dorchester Illustration 2459 Proposed Streets 1896

2459 detail from 1896 map of Boston and Vicinity

Dorchester Illustration no. 2459       1896 map

I have always been fascinated by maps.  In addition I like exploring how our roads and highways affect our lives – the choices made in the past, about where our roads should go, that force us to travel one way or another.

The detail from an 1896 map presented as today’s illustration shows some proposed streets that luckily did not come into being.  These roads would have cut through residential neighborhoods, requiring the demolition of many homes.

The proposed road in the center of the illustration runs along an angled line from the intersection of Welles Avenue and Dorchester Avenue to Minot Street where it ends in a big circle where many streets meet.  It cuts through Shepton and Edwin Streets, through Monsignor Lydon way (then Templeton Street), to cross Adams Street at Ashmont Street.  Then it continues through Newhall, Pierce and Oakton and Chickatawbut.

Another proposed street ending in the same circle on Minot Street connected to Freeport Street, where Ashmont Street ends at Neponset Avenue.  This route would have cut through Coffey Street and Chickatawbut.

Map: Boston and Surroundings. (Boston: Published by Geo. H. Walker & Co., 1896) available online at

https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:wd376710q#

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Dorchester Illustration 2458 A’Hearn Brothers

2458 Ahearn brothers World War I

Dorchester Illustration no. 2458       A’Hearn Brothers

Memorial Day seems an appropriate time to present another biography of World War I veterans.

A’Hearn Brothers , written by Camille Arbogast.

Illustration from Boston Globe, February 13, 1918.

Brothers Clarence, Joseph and Harold Blake A’Hearn, were born at 3 New Atlantic Street in South Boston. Clarence, who sometimes went by C. Joseph, was born on July 12, 1893. Harold was born on September 10, 1896.

Their father, John J. A’Hearn, a native Bostonian, was a roofing foreman active with the fraternal society, the New England Order of Protection. Gertrude (Crowfoot) A’Hearn, their mother, was born in England, and immigrated to the United States around 1870. John and Gertrude married in 1886, at Saint Vincent de Paul’s Church in South Boston. They had eight other children: Gertrude born in 1888; Ellen, known as Nellie, in 1890; Leonard in 1892; John in 1895; Frank in 1899; William in 1904; Marie in 1905; and Arline in 1907. By the time Clarence and Harold were born, their parents had lost a child: John died of pertussis, or whooping cough at four-months-old.

The A’Hearns owned a home on Atlantic Street in the section south of Thomas Park. This stretch was sometimes referred to as New Atlantic Street, as on Clarence and Harold’s birth record. By 1900, this part of the street had been renamed Covington Street, and the A’Hearn’s house number was 34. Growing up in the Dorchester Heights section of South Boston, Clarence and Harold attended the Thomas N. Hart school on H Street. In 1905, their five-year-old brother, Frank, died of cerebro-spinal meningitis.

By 1910, the A’Hearns had moved to Dorchester, purchasing 13 Bruce Street in the Ashmont section. The older children were employed: Gertrude as a Boston city school teacher, her life-long career; Ellen as a telephone operator; and Leonard a bookkeeper at a brokerage. In 1914, Clarence graduated from Mechanic Arts High School in the Back Bay. He went to work as a clerk for the Boston and Maine Railroad, based out of North Station. His 1917 draft card gave his parents’ address, 13 Bruce Street, as his residence; the 1917 Directory listed him residing in Hudson, Massachusetts. According to a newspaper article, he was “known in sporting and social circles as ‘Midge.’” Harold graduated from the High School of Commerce (later English High School) on the Avenue Louis Pasteur in the Fenway. After graduation, he was employed by Western Union as a statistical clerk.

Their older brother, Leonard, was the first to enter the service, joining the Coast Artillery Corps in 1914. Leonard served in Mexico as a National Guardsman, and fought in France as part of the 101st Infantry. While overseas, he was wounded five times.

In the summer of 1917, Clarence entered the Naval Aviation school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The eight-week program was the Navy’s first pilot training ground school. On November 30, 1917, Clarence was inducted into the Army as a Private First Class in the Air Service Signal Corps. On January 8, 1918, he was sent to the Air Service Aviation School at Princeton University for preflight training. Seven weeks later, he was transferred to an Aero Cadet Squadron at Camp John Dick Aviation Concentration Center at the Texas State Fairgrounds in Dallas to begin primary flight training. In April, he was transferred to the Flying Cadets Detachment at Kelly Field, in San Antonio, Texas. From there he was sent to Taliferro Field, near Fort Worth, Texas. He completed his training at Langley Field in Hampton, Virginia, which offered advanced observer instruction. On August 27, 1918, Clarence was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Aviation Corps. He was discharged on December 3, 1918.

By the time Harold registered for the second draft in June 1918, he was already working for the United States Quartermaster at Camp Upton, New York. He was inducted into the Army two months later on August 24, 1918, and assigned to 2nd Company, 1st Provisional Battalion, 156 Depot Brigade for training. A month later he was sent to Camp Jackson, in Columbia, South Carolina, where he served in the Headquarters Detachment. He was made a sergeant on November 13, 1918, and promoted to regiment sergeant major on December 9, 1918. On October 25, 1918, he was transferred to the Headquarters Company of the 61st Field Artillery where he remained until he was discharged on January 3, 1919.

The A’Hearns received some notice in local newspapers for having three sons in the military. A Boston Globe article, “Mr and Mrs John A’Hearn, Dorchester, Have Three Sons In War Service,” noted that John and Gertrude A’Hearn also did what they could to support the war effort. A member of the War Savings Fund Committee, Mr. A’Hearn spent “much of his time doing his ‘bit.’ … Mrs. A’Hearn is a hard worker in the Red Cross Society.” Another article stressed that the fourth A’Hearn brother was “only 11 years old.” There was also coverage of the day Clarence and Harold “unexpectedly” returned home from their service only half an hour apart.

After the war, Clarence and Harold lived at 13 Bruce Street. Also living there with their parents in the early 1920s were Gertrude, still a teacher; Leonard, a Boston University college student; as well as teenagers William, Marie, and Arline. Their sister Nellie left the household in 1916 when she married. Harold was hired by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, today’s IRS, in 1919. He worked for the Bureau for the rest of his career. Clarence returned to clerical work for the Boston and Maine Railroad.

Clarence also served in the New England Reserve Corps as an aviator, performing a two-week tour of duty each year. In September 1925, flying a biplane out of Boston on a very foggy and cloudy day, he got lost. In order to ascertain his location, he landed, and discovered he was in Cranston, Rhode Island. After fueling the plane, the engine malfunctioned, and he had trouble taking off. The wing of the plane hit a fence and the plane rolled over. No one was injured. Clarence had another close call in 1930, when, then a captain, he took off from Boston airport. Unbeknownst to him, the wings of his plane were coated with snow and sleet, causing the plane to struggle to gain altitude, and to eventually go down in the water not far from the end of the runway. Again, no one was injured, though Clarence and his observer did have to be rescued from the chilly water.

On June 28, 1924, Clarence married Alice Louise Collins at Saint James Church in Medford, Massachusetts. His brothers served in his wedding party: Harold as his best man and Leonard as an usher. Clarence and Alice eventually had four children: John, William, Francis, and Marie. William died in 1931 at under a year old.

Clarence graduated from Northeastern University in 1926 with a Bachelor of Commercial Science. In 1930, Alice and Clarence lived on Lake Boon Road on a property they owned in Stow, Massachusetts. By 1935, they had purchased 64 Martin Street in West Roxbury, where they lived for the next 20 years. Clarence was a payroll supervisor for the Boston Public Schools. In 1940, he earned $2,340 a year. Both he and his wife also had other income sources. In 1955, the Boston directory reported they lived at 13 Bruce Street. By 1958, they had returned to Stow.

In the 1920s, Harold was promoted, becoming a supervisor for the Bureau of Revenue. In the 1930s and 1940s, he worked out of offices in New York, Columbus, Ohio, and Washington, D.C. Though he was often stationed elsewhere in the United States, Harold maintained the Bruce Street home as his permanent residence. 1943, he was promoted to Assistant Deputy Commissioner, Accounts and Collections Division. His work sometimes took him on visits to far-flung regional offices, as in 1944 when he was sent to Hilo, Hawaii, “for a few days’ work in the Hilo office in connection with the customary check-up of the office of the U.S. Internal Revenue for the district of Hawaii.” In 1952, Harold was named District Director for Upper Manhattan, with a starting salary of $12,000. Harold was “responsible for combined collection and audit activities” of his district. At times his work required a brush with celebrity, as when he filed tax liens against underworld mobster Frank Costello and superstar Frank Sinatra. He retired at the end of 1956, after more than 37 years with the IRS.

At the end of his life Harold lived at 302 Chapman Street in Canton, Massachusetts. Harold died November 2, 1964. A Solemn High Mass of Requiem was celebrated for him at Saint John’s Church in Canton. Harold was buried in Boston’s New Calvary Cemetery, according to family sources. Clarence died in Stow on January 15, 1971. A Requiem Mass was held for him at Saint Isidore’s Church in Stow. According to family sources, he was buried in Stow.

List of sources available upon request.

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Dorchester Illustration 2457 John Danforth/Maria Cummins House

2457 John Danforth/Maria Cummins House

Dorchester Illustration no. 2457       John Danforth/Maria Cummins House

The Dorchester Historical Society has a collection of bricks collected by Edward Huebener at the end of the 19th century.  Huebener was a board member of the Society.  The bricks have portraits of Dorchester buildings, and the story is that each brick came from the building whose portrait is carries.

The Rev. John Danforth House, built in 1712,  was located on Bowdoin Street at the site now occupied by the St. Peter’s parochial school building.

John Danforth, 1660-1730

The Rev. John Danforth graduated from Harvard College in 1677 and was ordained as minister of the First Church in Dorchester in 1681.  He served 48 years, the longest tenure in the history of the Church, but Orcutt says “in all this time nothing of consequence occurred.”  In 1712 he gave up his right to live in the ministry house, and he built the house on Bowdoin Street, and lived there until his death in 1730.  Dr. Thaddeus Mason Harris, in his Chronological and Typographical Account of Dorchester, mentioned that Danforth was something of a poet.  During his ministry, in 1698, the Young Men’s Union was formed in Dorchester, a society for religious purposes which continued in existence until 1848, a period of one hundred and fifty years.

In 1732 the house was converted to use as the Turk’s Head Tavern.  Stage coaches from Boston and Roxbury stopped here.  The coaches would stop again at Robinson’s Tavern on Washington Street before continuing on along to the bridge at Lower Mills and on toward Plymouth.

In the 19th century the building was again a private home, and Judge Cummins, judge in the court of common pleas in Norfolk County, and his daughter Maria Cummins lived here.

Maria Cummins, 1827-1866

Born in Salem in 1827 to a family of some social standing and relative affluence, Maria Susanna Cummins moved, while still quite young, with her family to Dorchester, at that time still a rural suburb separate from Boston.  Maria’s father, David, had become a judge of the court of common pleas of Norfolk County.  Her mother was David’s third wife.  He already had four children prior to this marriage, and three more followed Maria, making eight children in the family.  Families of stepbrothers and sisters were common, so the characters of stepmother or father, orphan, etc., of the fiction of the day were not unrelated to the reality of the times.  The Cummins Colonial home may have been the model for the country seat in the suburb of D—— in The Lamplighter.  Maria attended Mrs. Charles Sedgwick’s Young Ladies’ School in Lenox, Massachusetts.  Mrs. Sedgwick’s husband, Charles, had a sister Catharine Maria Sedgwick, who was the nation’s foremost woman author and who lived with her brother and maintained an occasional literary salon.  Maria could not have failed to be influenced by her association with this author.

Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, first published in 1854, sold 40,000 copies in the first month and 100,000 by the end of a year.  It is the story, as described in the Dictionary of American Biography, of a child lost in infancy, rescued from a cruel woman by an old lamplighter, adopted by a blind woman, and later discovered by her well-to-do father.  It tells a woman’s story: a young girl, without financial resources or family support, must find her own way.  The plot focuses on the development and use of the main character’s own talents, and he book is intended in this manner to be useful and instructive.  Readers should examine their own circumstances and should develop self-control and self-discipline.  The characters in the book are mainly people from the country who have come to Boston from small towns and farms of New England, a trend reflective of society at the time.  Nina Baym says “Rural women … Could not merely replicate the behavior of the uplands they had left behind.  To be a woman in a new social setting was, in effect, to be a new kind of woman.”

The Lamplighter is the book to which Hawthorne specifically referred in his famous complaint that “America is now wholly given over to a d____d mob of scribbling women.  The Lamplighter was published when Maria was twenty-seven years old.  She became seriously ill ten years later and died in 1866 of abdominal disease.  She was able to write a total of only four books: The Lamplighter (1854), Mabel Vaughan (1857), El Fureidis (1860) and Haunted Hearts (1864).  None of the other three achieved great success.

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Dorchester Illustration 2456 Preston Chocolate Factory

2456 Preston Chocolate Factory

Dorchester Illustration no. 2456       Preston Chocolate Factory

One of the buildings of the Baker Chocolate complex was named the Preston building in honor of another Dorchester chocolate maker, a former competitor to Baker.  The Preston building is a three-story building on the Dorchester side of the river east of the bridge tucked behind the larger building that fronts on Adams Street, approximating the original location of the Edward Preston’s early mill.

As early as 1770 Edward Preston owned a chocolate mill on the Dorchester side of the Neponset River east of the bridge at Lower Mills.  By the 1850s John Preston had acquired land for a factory and a wharf at Commercial Point.  Today’s photograph shows the factory building.  The detail from the 1874 atlas shows the John Preston Wharf at the very right, while John’s home is on Mill Street near the left edge of the map, shown as a house in a large rectangle in yellow. Plus he owned much of the property in the area.

The following is from the Boston Athenaeum’s website:

https://cdm.bostonathenaeum.org/digital/collection/p16057coll41/id/33/

In the 1860s, John A. Preston Jr. (1828-1919) patented a new method for extracting oils from the beans and enlisted the services of the pharmaceutical profession to claim medicinal virtues for his hot cocoa beverage. An 1870 advertisement advised the reader that “[m]edical men recommend cocoa to invalids and convalescents, as preferable to tea or coffee; for, while soothing to the nervous system, it is restorative, invigorating and sustaining.”

John Preston has an entry in the book The Rich Men of Massachusetts: Containing a Statement of the Reputed Wealth of about Fifteen Hundred Persons, with Brief Sketches of More than One Thousand Characters.  By A. Forbes and J.W. Greene.  (Boston: Published by W.V. Spencer, 1851).

John Preston

Worth: $50,000

Chocolate manufacturer; by which business he made his money, and which undoubtedly he will save.  Brother of Elisha, and seems to emulate many of his rare qualities, especially his benevolence.  A rich man cannot avoid at some time or other being useful.  He is inevitably a reservoir; and, if he has not a faucet through which charities are constantly flowing, still he is a cistern, out of which taxes, at least, can be pumped, to give succor to alms-houses.

As a comparison of Baker’s and Preston’s businesses, the 1850 US Non-Population Schedules of the Census show that

John Preston’s chocolate factory produced 8,777 lbs of chocolate plus 27,400 packets of cocoa, plus other articles with a total value of $18,000.

The Walter Baker company produced 357,000 lbs of chocolate that year with a value of $36,000.  Baker produced other cocoa products with a total value of $46,000.

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Dorchester Illustration 2455 Dorchester’s First High School

2455 First High School

Dorchester Illustration no. 2455       Dorchester’s First High School

Although Dorchester was the earliest town to establish a school open to all boys, paid for by the town budget, it was not until the middle of the 19th century that it established a high school.

The following is from William Dana Orcutt. Good old Dorchester. (Cambridge, 1893)

“In 1850 the subject of a high school was again agitated, –this time with more success. One hundred and eighty-three tax-payers of the town signed a petition asking the school committee ‘to recommend to the town the immediate establishment of a high school.’ This petition was discussed and reflected upon for two years, when action was finally taken. The sum of six thousand dollars was appropriated with which to erect a building, the location selected being on the School Pasture property, on the westerly side of South Boston and Dorchester turnpike, a little north of Centre Street. This spot was selected as being the most central position.

The school was organized in December, 1852, with a membership of fifty-nine pupils of both sexes, representing the Everett, Mather, Adams, Gibson, Winthrop, Norfolk, and private schools.   The first principal was William J. Rolfe, the present Shakespearian authority, who held the position for four years.”

Note, although Orcutt places the school on the west side of Dorchester Avenue, the 1858 atlas of Norfolk County shows the building on the east side.  The school building occupied the lot that is today a small shopping plaza at the corner of Dorchester Avenue and Gibson Street.  The School Pasture property encompassed what is now Town Field and extended across Dorchester Avenue to the east.

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Dorchester Illustration 2454 Walter Humphrey

2454 Walter Humphreys

Dorchester Illustration no. 2454       Walter Humphreys

We are continuing to share the Society’s collections by email and through other online methods.

Today’s illustration is a portrait of Walter Humphreys.

Walter Humphreys, son of Henry Humphreys and Sarah Clapp Humphreys, was born July 4, 1842.  He  enlisted in Company A of the 13th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment four days after his twentieth birthday in 1862.

He wrote a letter home dated May 2, 1864, when he was near Mitchell’s Station , Virginia:

I must say that I am ready for the coming contest and hope that victory although it may come with the sacrifice of life and the flow of much precious blood may be the result of our arms—with haste—

Yours in love,

Walter

He died one month later on June 2, 1864, at Cold Harbor.

One of the members of his company, Warren Freeman of West Cambridge, wrote about Walter:

“One day last week Walter Humphrey of our company, whom you know, while digging in the trenches was struck in the bowels by a bullet and died the next day. I was going to relieve him and was just on the point of taking his spade when he was struck. He looked at me as he said, “Well this is what we must all expect.” We are throwing up a line of rifle pits at this time. Since my last we have lost in the regiment twelve men killed and wounded.”

This is an excerpt from a letter by Warren home to his family, published by his father in a book, Letters from Two Brothers Serving in the War for the Union to Their Family at Home in West Cambridge, Mass. Cambridge, 1871.

Walter Humphreys’ name appears on the Soldiers Monument on Meeting House Hill.

His brother was Richard Clapp Humphreys who was later president of the Dorchester Historical Society from 1903 until his death in 1912.  Richard began work at the grocery store of J. H. Upham & Co., in 1852, and nine years later became a partner in the business, where he remained for twenty years.  He then associated himself with Messrs. Holbrook & Fox, real estate dealer, where he remained eight years, after which he retired and became engaged as a trustee of estates, receiving about 50 appointments from the courts as executor, administrator, trustee or guardian.

Sources:

Arthur Wellington Brayley. Schools and Schoolboys of Old Boston. (Boston, 1894)

Ebenezer Clapp, comp..  The Clapp Memorial.  (Boston, 1876)

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Dorchester Illustration 2453 Capen Bowl

2453 Capen Bowl

Dorchest

We are continuing to share the Society’s collections by email and through other online methods.

Today’s illustration features a bowl brought to America by the Capen family who migrated in the 1630s.  Barnard [or Bernard] Capen, a shoemaker, and his wife Joan Purchase Capen arrived in Dorchester in 1633 on an unnamed ship with sons Bernard and John, and daughter Honor.  Earlier their two daughters had come to Dorchester: Susanna with her husband William Rockwell and Dorothy with her husband Nicholas Upsall who came in 1630 on the ship “Mary and John”.   The Capen family brought with them this hammered brass bowl, probably made in Spain in the late 16th century.

Possibly of Spanish origin, the Capen Bowl is about 20 inches in diameter and 5 inches deep.  The size of the bowl required it to be made of several sheets of metal riveted together.  It was probably used for every purpose a bowl could be used for, from washing dishes to washing a baby.   The bowl was exhibited in 1982 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in the exhibit New England Begins.

Built by 1637, the Barnard Capen House was located at corner of what is now Washington and Dunlap Streets. The house is considered to be the second oldest house in New England and was built in the style of the West Country with heavy framing. “The farthest end of the house, consisting of four or five rooms, was built first; and some hundred years later the end nearest the street was added. The house was built on one side with especial reference to protection from the Indians; and the present owner [John Hewins] has found several arrows,during his residence there, which had been sent with hostile intention by the wily savages against the home-fortress of his ancestors.” — William Dana Orcutt. Good Old Dorchester. (Cambridge, 1893) 357.   In 1833 a Capen relative, John Hewins, bought the house and built additions and a shed.

The house that Barnard and Joan built in the 1630s remained in the Capen family for nearly 270 years. In 1909 it was taken apart and moved and reassembled at 427 Hillside Street in Milton near Houghton s Pond where it remained until the early 20th. century.  The Boston Sunday Herald, Feb. 7, 1909, carried an article entitled “Barnard Capen’s Old Home in Peril” that stated that the contractor who was about to demolish the house to make way for a development of three-deckers would gladly spare the old house if some society or public-spirited citizen desired its preservation.

Harvard Professor, Kenneth Grant Tremayne Webster, bought the house for $50. “Through a relative, Webster engaged an MIT student to make drawings, number, codify and catalogue every board, brick and timber in the old house. He next hired a building wrecker to take the house apart and haul its components to a plot he owned at 427 Hillside Street, Milton. A carpenter then put the house back together.”–Milton Times

When a new owner wanted to replace the house with a larger and more up-to-date design, the Capen House was again taken apart and put in storage for possible sale to a new owner.

Barnard and Joan’s gravestone in the Dorchester North Burying Ground is said to have the oldest date of any known gravestone in New England. The stone was moved to the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Barnard lived from approximately 1562 to 1638 and Joan from 1578 to 1653. In December, 2015, David Allen Lambert blogged about the stone’s fragments for the New England Historic Genealocial Society, stating that it is likely, the stone was carved in the 1670s and replaced a wooden grave marker.

https://vitabrevis.americanancestors.org/2015/12/a-grave-concern/

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Dorchester Illustration 2452 Decorative Needlework

2452 Needlework by Jane Withington 1807

Dorchester Illustration no. 2452        Needlework from centuries past

 We are continuing to share the Society’s collections by email and through other online methods.

Today’s illustration features a piece of decorative needlework stitched on silk.  Jane Withington was a student at Mrs. Saunder’s Miss Beaches [sic] Academy on Meeting House Hill in 1807.

The Jane Withington who is likely to have made this piece was the daughter of Edward Withington and Eunice Tucker, one of ten children.  She was born in Roxbury, May 3, 1790.  Jane would have been 17 years old when the needlework was done.  Then five years later she married Jacob Howe in Dorchester on Aug. 20, 1812.  Jacob’s brother Samuel married Jane’s sister Eunice.  Source: Henry Withington of Dorchester, Mass., and Some of his Descendants.  By Frederic Scherer Withington. NEHGR (1921) p. 142-270, specifically p. 205.  This is the only Jane Withington who would have been the right age in 1807 to be a student in Mrs. Saunders’ & Miss Beach’s Academy.

The Dorchester Historical Society collections include examples of needlework and samplers from three centuries of Dorchester history. Many of these pieces were worked by young women as part of their education to show their proficiency with needle and thread.

Much of the following is from American Samplers by Ethel Stanwood Bolton and Eva Johnston Coe.    (Boston: Massachusetts Society of the colonial Dames of America, 1921)

The curriculum at Miss Glover’s School and at the Saunders and Beach Academy included decorative needlework as one of the courses of study. One of the popular types of needlework created by young women was the sampler.  Samplers began as a way of recording examples of stitches; therefore, a sampler was an exemplar of the various stitches that a young woman had mastered and wanted to remember.  In the twentieth century, we have come to call any needlework signed and dated by the maker by the name of sampler.  Perhaps the secret charm of samplers was that they were distinctly the expression of the mind of the girl or her mother or her teacher, and so they are pretty nearly as varied as the mind of man.  In the second half of the eighteenth century, samplers became more original pieces of work incorporating images of leaves and flowers, houses, dogs and birds, and other scenes from nature.

Most of the known surviving needlework pieces were created by schoolgirls.  By the mid-eighteenth century there were many schools serving to round out the education of young women.  Some were finishing schools designed to teach the arts of conversation and comportment.  Others called themselves academies and offered instruction in languages, reading, geography, and mathematics.  Both finishing schools and academies offered needlework instruction as vehicles for religious instruction and for furthering education in mathematics and the basics of the English language.

Much of the emphasis in the curriculum was placed on needlework as evidence of a young woman’s domestic accomplishments.  As Americans grew more sophisticated, so too did their style of needlework.  Working the alphabet into needlework design began in the seventeenth century.  Pictorial embroideries on silk were an eighteenth-century art requiring special technique demanding infinite patience.

The origins of decorative needlework are lost in ancient times long before recorded history began.  Certainly many images come to mind: native American costume, clothing from the ancient Orient, textiles from early Greece and Rome.  The art of embroidery began in the Middle East in ancient times. Some early examples of un-dyed woven linen embroidered with blue and red silk threads that are now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, came from the Mamluk period in Egypt.

Needlework in western culture came to prominence in the Medieval period.  The tenth through the fourteenth centuries are now known as the golden age of embroidered textile art.  Garments with elaborate embroideries taking years to complete were deemed of more value than gold.  The needle-workers’ art was painstaking to the extreme and, indeed, the very threads they used had to be spun and dyed by hand even before the decorative art of embroidery could begin.  The earliest reference to needlework samplers comes from a 1502 list of expenses of Elizabeth of York in England.  This entry concerned 8 pence given for an ell of linen cloth “for a sampler for the Queen.”  There are numerous references to needlework in English poems and plays that show the popularity of the form.

The first settlers in New England in the seventeenth-century included young women who brought samplers with them to the New World.  There are occasional references to the textile arts in early documents, but only very few examples remain.  Bed rugs and hearth rugs are some of the extant examples of this early work.  The growing sophistication of the colonists over two hundred years in New England resulted in greater demand for decorative arts in the home.

For other resources sharing Dorchester history, see www.dorchesteratheneum.org and www.dorchesteratheneum2.org

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Dorchester Illustration 2451 Mellin’s Infant’s Food

2451 Mellins Food

Dorchester Illustration 2451  Mellin’s Food

Thomas Goodale of the Doliber-Goodale Co. chose local children for his advertisement.  The top illustration is an 1894 advertisement for Mellin’s Food with an illustration of Marian Louise Bowker, Neponset, Mass.  The advertisement on the bottom right includes a photograph of James Robert Clair, 64 Richfield Street, Dorchester.  The bottle is at the Dorchester Historical Society.  The society owns another advertising card with a testimonial: “My little one only two months old, was a mere skeleton.  We put him on Mellin’s Food, and it is wonderful to see what a change it has wrought.”  April 19, 1888.

Thomas T. Goodale lived at 10 Carruth Street in Dorchester from the time it was built in 1888 until about 1920.  He and Thomas Doliber worked for Theodore Mecalf of Boston.  The company was the marketer of Mellin’s Infant Food. About 1880 Doliber and Goodale took over the business, which they ran out of 40-43 Central Wharf on the Boston waterfront.

The following is from Goods for Sale: Products and Advertising in the Massachusetts Industrial Age by Chaim M. Rosenberg (2007), 123.

With the beginning of the scientific age, the search for a good alternative to mother’s milk gathered speed.  The German scientist Justus von Liebig is credited with being the first, in 1867, to offer for sale an “ideal” infant food.  His formula was a blend of  cow’s milk, wheat flour, and malt flour, mixed with bicarbonate of potash.  Gustav Mellin in England modified Liebig’s formula.  Prepared infant food was a boon to working mothers who left their nursing children in the hands of grand-parents during the day.  Mellin’s Food for the Infant became popular in the United States.  It was marketed by Theodore Metcalf of Boston at the cost of sixty-five cents a container.  Around 1880 the agency for Mellins’ baby food was taken over by Thomas Doliber and Thomas T. Goodale, two of Metcalf’s employees.  Doliber-Goodale & Co., was located at 40-43 Central Wharf on Boston’s waterfront.  Its motto was “ora et labora” (pray and labor).  The company advertised Mellin’s Food as “the only perfect substitute for Mother’s milk.” Made from dried malt extract, Mellin’s Food claimed to give the baby “strength and vitality” while preventing colic and constipation. Later, the market for Mellin’s Food was expanded to include the elderly, invalids, and dyspeptics.

The following is from http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodbaby.html

By the 1890s the most popular by far of the powders to be added to milk was Mellins Food, developed in England and manufactured in Boston, whose advertisements claimed that it was “the genuine Liebigs Food,” The best known of the dried-milk products was another European import, Nestles Milk Food, which was manufactured and distributed under license by a New York City firm. Advertisements for various proprietary infant foods because well-nigh ubiquitous by the 1890s….Nestles (“Best for Babies”) said it was better for babies than milk, for “impure milk in hot weather is one of the chief causes of sickness among babies.”…A favorite promotional technique was to offer free samples by mail to the readers of middle-class magazines. Perhaps the most effective with middle-class mothers…were the free handbooks on infant care feeding distributed by the companies. Mellin’s with its own press, was especially active in this field. The handbooks explained the chemistry of milk and feeding in clear but relatively sophisticated language, adding an aura of science to the food they were promoting.

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