2019 March 10th Sunday 2 pm Boston in the American Revolution

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Dorchester Historical Society, 195 Boston Street – 2 pm, Sunday, March 10, 2019

For nearly a year between 1775 and 1776, Boston was a town under siege.  Heightened tension made life frightening  and unstable  for all trapped in the town, including Loyalists, British soldiers, and rebels.  Join the Dorchester Historical Society for our March program featuring Brooke Barbier, author of Boston in the American Revolution: A Town versus an Empire, as she discusses what led to the siege, what life was like during the siege and how Boston was ultimately liberated on March 17, known today as Evacuation Day.

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Dorchester Illustration 2393 Christopher Gibson School

2393 Christopher Gibson School Bowdoin Avenue from City Archives online

Dorchester Illustration no. 2393   Christopher Gibson School

Designed in 1893 and constructed by 1894, the Francis A. Brooks Grammar School was constructed opposite the end of Morse Street on the section of Bowdoin Avenue located northwest of the railroad tracks at Mount Bowdoin.  The design for the school by city architect Edward March Wheelwright was shown in the American Architect and Building News, December 30, 1893.   The completed school was shown in the magazine in the January 4, 1908, issue with the name Christopher Gibson School.

The name change occurred at least ten years earlier in honor of Christopher Gibson, one of Dorchester’s early benefactors.  The Gibson name had been applied earlier to a school built in the 1850s on School Street.  Gibson Street and Gibson Field were also named for Gibson, who was a 17th century soap boiler.

In 1872 the N. Y. and N. E. Railroad had laid down tracks that cut Bowdon Avenue into two segments.  This segment of the street was sometimes called Little Bowdoin Avenue or North Bowdoin Avenue, then between 1910 and 1918 it was renamed Ronald Street.

The lower photo by Ollie Noonan is from 1958 and shows the back side of the building as the children line up to enter the boys’ entrance.  Jonathan Kozol was a teacher at the school when he wrote Death At An Early Age as an indictment of the Boston Public Schools.

The building was demolished in 1975 after a fire. The city-owned site is now being called 16 Ronald Street, and in 2016 the city approved a design submitted by Hearth, Inc.,  to build a new four-story building including 52 one-bedroom affordable senior housing units and 2 studios.  I don’t know if the project has gone any further than the approval.

 

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Job Posting 2019-02-19

Dorchester Historical Society, 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA  02125

Job Description

Researcher/Writer Veterans Project Phase 1

This is a grant-funded, temporary position. A minimum of 10-15 hours of work per week is required. Payment will be based upon number of deliverables produced. Work must be completed by Nov. 15, 2019.

DUTIES:

Under the guidance of the Collections Committee of the Dorchester Historical Society, the Coordinator will be the main genealogical researcher and biographical writer for the Veterans Project.

  • Research and compile genealogical data for a predetermined list of Dorchester residents who have served in the armed forces
  • Use genealogical data (online resources, onsite resources)and documentary evidence, to write a high-quality, short biographical narrative of each Dorchester service member
  • Use proper citation methods to document the source of information used in producing biographies
  • Submit biography drafts to Collections Committee for review and online publication
  • Report periodically on progress of the project, including metric data

 

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

  • Minimum education required: Bachelor’s degree in history or related field. Graduate students currently pursuing degrees in public history are strongly preferred.
  • Keen interest and experience in performing historical/genealogical research
  • Strong research and writing skills
  • Strong organizational skills, including the ability to independently manage project timelines and tasks
  • Familiarity with genealogical research tools such as Family Search and Ancestry.com
  • Familiarity with newspaper research
  • Proficiency in MS Office, including Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel

 

Please send cover letter and resume to:  Earl Taylor, earltaylordorchhistsoc@gmail.com. Please also include a writing sample of no more than 2 pages on a topic in history or genealogy.

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Dorchester Illustration 2392 135 Savin Hill Avenue

2392 135 Savin Hill Ave corner of Hubbardston Road

Dorchester Illustration no. 2392   135 Savin Hill Avenue

Today’s illustration is a scan of a real photo post card circa 1910 showing the house at 135 Savin Hill Avenue, corner of Hubbardston Road, along with a picture from Google showing its more recent appearance.

The building permit , dated January 4, 1900, identifies the owner as Louise Donkin and one of the architects as her husband.  Louise acquired the land following the sub-division of the F.C. Welch estate.  Roads were put through, and in the 1904 & 1910 atlases,  Donkin Terrace was the name of what is now Hubbardston Road.  The first owner after construction was Mary A. Bertram of whom little is known, though her will on Ancestry mentions several pieces of property along Savin Hill Avenue and another on Dakota Street.

The house has retained its massing, but there are some little changes in the appearance. The vintage photograph shows how much shutters can dress up a house and shows the original design of the porch, where the elements exhibit a little more style than the porch in the more recent porch in the Google picture.  In the vintage photo there is a little railing in front of the attic dormer on the side of the house.

During the early 1950s, the Southeast Expressway was constructed on the west side of Savin Hill.

Although Savin Hill had been separated from the rest of Dorchester by the Old Colony Railroad tracks since 1844, the expressway served to make this isolation even more pronounced.  As part of the Expressway project, a street and houses on the west side of Hubbardston Road were taken out and a concrete retaining wall was constructed.  This opened up a view of Dorchester over the Expressway and the railroad tracks for the houses along the east side of Hubbardston Road.

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Dorchester Illustration 2391 Home of Hannah T. Bliss

2391 Residence of Mrs. Hannah T. Bliss and Sons 1908

Dorchester Illustration no. 2391  Home of Hannah T. Bliss

This real photo post card shows the home of Mrs. Hannah T. Bliss and Sons in 1908.  The house was located at 151 Adams Street, and the land on which it stood was later incorporated into Ronan Park.  The location is the southern corner of the park where it faces Adams Street.  Hannah acquired the property on June 17, 1893, from Pierce heirs and lived there until her death in 1910.

There is a small sign in the front yard next to the wooden stairs that says Dr. Bliss.

Cyrus Bliss, a farmer, and Hannah Bliss were born in Rehoboth, married there and had children Frederick and George.   The non-population census for agriculture in 1880 reported that Cyrus had 117 acres of land; value of the farm $2,000; value of equipment $250; value of live stock $390; and an estimated value of yearly production of $1,000.   Cyrus died April 4, 1883.

Hannah and her sons moved to Boston, and city directories have entries for Hannah at 184 Adams before acquiring the house in the photograph at 151 Adams Street.

The entry in the 1910 census includes Hannah at age 82; Frederick W Bliss, 57, a lawyer; George D. Bliss 54, a physician in general practice; and Mary Jenning, 23, a servant who immigrated in 1902 from Ireland.

Hannah died on November 9, 1910, of a cerebral hemorrhage, and her son George signed the death certificate.  Dorchester undertakers R. & E. F. Gleason arranged the funeral, and Hannah was buried in Rehoboth.

The 1918 atlas shows the house had been demolished by that year, and the parcel was incorporated into the park.  The park was named for Father Peter Ronan (1842–1917), first pastor of St. Peter’s Church in Dorchester.

 

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Feb. 17, 2019 Program: Screening of the film “Of Stars and Shamrocks”

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Sunday, February 17, 2019, 2 pm at the

William Clapp House

 “Of Stars and Shamrocks”

Join the Dorchester Historical Society for a special screening of the film “Of Stars and Shamrocks” on Sunday, February 17, at 2 p.m., with commentary by Charles R. Gallagher, S.J., associate professor of history at Boston College. Originally aired on WGBH in 1995, “Of Stars and Shamrocks” chronicles the intertwined histories of Boston’s Irish and Jewish immigrant communities from the mid-19th century on.

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Dorchester Illustration no. 2390 Welles Mansion

2390 Welles House

Dorchester Illustration no. 2390  Welles Mansion

Welles Mansion

The home of the Welles family was the original estate house for Ashmont Hill when the hill was all open land except for the house in the illustration.  George Derby Welles, who lived in Paris, inherited the estate from his grandfather in 1870 and asked Edward Ingersoll Browne to have a sub-division plan drawn up for the sale of lots.   The house was replaced by the Edward Pierce School in 1892, and the school was itself replaced by the Codman Square branch of the Boston Public Library in the last quarter of the 20th century.  Illustration is from The Homes of Our Forefathers by Edwin Whitefield. (Boston, 1880).

The estate house must have been built in the 18th century due to its Georgian style.  We know that General Henry Knox and his family lived there for a while just after the Revolutionary War in 1784.  Daniel Webster lived there in 1822.  Later in the 19th century the house fell from its high estate when ownership passed out of the Welles family.  “For a period a lager-beer garden flourished on its grounds, an unsightly board fence concealing the former attractions of the property, and serving as a disagreeable eye-sore to the people. Fortunately, however a third turn of affairs brought the stated into better use; for the house was demolished, the fence torn down, and the splendid building erected which will go down history bearing the name of one of Dorchester’s most honored citizens,–the Henry L. Pierce School.”  (from Good Old Dorchester by William Dana Orcutt).  The author’s attitude toward demolishing the old to bring in the new is still with us today. Now the School, too, has disappeared into history.  It was replaced by the current Codman Square branch of the Boston Public Library at the corner of Welles Avenue and Washington Street.

Ashmont Hill was developed into a railroad suburb in the late 19th century, now still exhibiting 40 acres of substantial, well-crafted, well-designed and well-preserved late-19th-century residences. George Derby Welles was born in Dorchester in 1843, and he outlived his siblings and his father, all dead by 1847.  George Derby Welles inherited the land in Dorchester, including land west of Washington Street.  By the time the land was offered for sale, George seems to have been living in Paris, where he died in 1923, although he had claimed Boston as his legal home. Subdivision plans published in 1871 indicated small lots, but apparently buyers in the 1870s and 1880s preferred to buy larger parcels by combining small lots into larger ones to build more substantial homes.  Street after street in the Ashmont Hill residential quarter west of Peabody Square is bordered by wood frame, mostly single-family residences noteworthy for their originality and/or exuberance of design, quality craftsmanship, surviving stables on still-ample lots, etc. Exceptional examples of the Italianate / Mansard, Stick, Shingle, Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles (as well as hybrids of these popular late-Victorian architectural modes) appear at every turn.  (architectural comments from Neighborhood description of Ashmont Hill from the Boston Landmarks Commission).

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Dorchester Illustration 2389 Bollard of Three Decker

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12705 Three Decker bollard at Edward Everett Square, 2012.

Dorchester Illustration no. 2389  Bollard of Three Decker

The sculptures on top of bollards at Edward Everett Square, located in the plaza with the bronze pear sculpture, represent themes connecting Dorchester’s past and present.

One of the pieces of artwork is a bronze three-decker representing all the multi-family houses throughout Dorchester.  Although three deckers are not unique to Dorchester, Dorchester’s developers did fall in love with the form, producing over 5,000 of them from the 1880s until the three-decker  was prohibited by the city in or about 1930 due to the fear of fire spreading quickly among closely-spaced wooden buildings.  Many residents of Dorchester and former residents recall growing up in an apartment filling a whole floor of one of these buildings.  The keys in the sculpture suggest home and personal space.  Encompassing from 900 to 1300 square feet of floor space, an apartment in a three-decker is as large as a ranch house in the suburbs.

The City of Boston’s website has this comment: “Three deckers first began to appear in Boston just before the turn of the 20th century. Based on the construction principles of three-decker ships, three deckers are designed to maximize living space on rectangular city lots and were built so that the apartments, stacked one atop another, extended back into the lot, with rooms opening up one on to the other.

The fronts of the houses featured stacked porches between columns, purposely created to encourage the owners of the properties to take advantage of the fresh air. Houses were constructed with windows designed to cross-ventilate the structure during long, humid city summers.  Many triple deckers also had back porches as well, giving the families who lived in them even more outside space.”

http://www.cityofboston.gov/3D/whatis/history.asp

The term triple decker is rumored to be an invention of the BRA, while older Dorchesterites always use the term three decker.  Three deckers may have begun as early as the 1870s and lasted throughout the 1920s.  The Boston Landmarks Commission published an excellent piece in 1977: Three-Deckers of Dorchester: An Architectural Historical Survey by Arthur J. Krim.  Krim says “The three-deckers are a large part of the identity of Dorchester and define its sense of place.” Krim says that Dorchester has the largest collection of three-deckers of any community anywhere. You may view the introduction to this document at

http://www.sidewalkmemories.org/archives/The%20Three-Deckers%20of%20Dorchester.pdf

The outlawing of three deckers may have been the result of negative feelings about the types of people who would be likely to live in them as much as a fear of fire.  Some believe that class issues were part of the reason the three-decker form was banned as a building type.

Krim suggested stylistic differences by geographic distribution; others have pointed out influences from other periods such as Queen Anne revival or Colonial revival.

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Dorchester Illustration 2388 House of William Cranch Bond

2388 House of astronomer William Cranch Bond

Dorchester Illustration no. 2388 House of William Cranch Bond

The photograph shows the house of astronomer William Cranch Bond, who, together with his son George Phillips Bond, are regarded as the first important contributors towards the early history of astronomy in America.

The first house owned by William Cranch Bond was in Dorchester on Cottage Street west of Edward Everett Square.  The only parlor was sacrificed to science and converted into an observatory.  A huge granite block, some tons in weight, rose in the center of the room, and the ceiling was intersected by a meridian opening.  There were stone blocks in the gardens and neighboring fields as well for the support of instruments, meridian marks,etc.  Life was not easy, and he spent his evenings as a watchmaker to meet the current household expenses.  In 1838 when he received an appointment from the United States Government to cooperate with the exploring expedition of Com. Charles Wilkes, although his equipment was amply sufficient, he added new buildings and a new suite of instruments.  In a short time a new observatory was erected in Dorchester and was fully equipped for investigation of magnetic and meteorological elements.

Much of the following is from Memorials of William Cranch Bond and George Phillips Bond. By Edward S. Holden. (San Francisco: C. A. Murdock, 1897)

William Cranch Bond was born in Portland, Maine, September 9, 1789.  The family’s lumber business failed, and they moved to Boston to open a clock store. It was necessary for the young Bond to do his part towards supporting the family.  He early evinced the ingenuity and fertility in mechanical contrivances for which he was subsequently distinguished.  At the age of ten (1799) he made a wooden clock, and became famous among his playfellows for his skill in the manufacture of traps, toys, etc.  He left the public school at an early age and became an admirable workman.  At the age of fifteen (1804) he constructed a satisfactory shop chronometer, and at about the same time a quadrant, which was also a very serviceable instrument.  His attention was turned to astronomy by the remarkable total solar eclipse of 1806, when the sun was hidden for no less than five minutes.  The comet of 1811 was discovered in Europe, but with no knowledge of that discovery, Bond discovered it independently.  He loved science for itself, and cultivated it with a private passion–he had been observing the great comet of 1811 for months before his observations came to the knowledge of Professor Farrar of Harvard and Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch of Boston.

Farrar and Bowditch, who were planning an observatory for Harvard, gave Bond the mission of making examinations of the building at Greenwich when they learned that he was planning a trip abroad in 1815.  In 1819 he married for his first wife his cousin Selina Cranch in Kingsbridge, Devonshire.  They had six children: William Cranch Bond Jr., Joseph Cranch, George Phillips, Richard Fifield, Elizabeth Lidstone, Selina Cranch.  After his wife’s death in 1831, William Cranch Bond married her elder sister Mary Roope Cranch, who left no children.

Then in 1839 he reluctantly moved to Cambridge to take the position of Director of the Harvard College Observatory, which however afforded no salary until the year 1846.  Until then life continued much the same with Bond having to earn his living with jobs outside astronomy.  His sons helped out in the Observatory as they had in the Dorchester home.  William Cranch Bond, Jr., died an untimely death in 1841, and his father was deprived of an able assistant.  George P. Bond helped his father and succeeded him as Director of the Observatory when Bond died in 1859.

 

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Dorchester Historical Society open houses

The Dorchester Historical Society’s historic houses are open on Sunday, January 20, 2019:

William Clapp House, 195 Boston Street

James Blake House, 735 Columbia Road

The Lemuel Clap House will not be open but will be open February 17th.

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