Jamaica Pond - New (Old) Views.

The Boston Public Library has just posted these photos, with quite a few more, to their Flickr group. Let's see if you can figure out where they were shot from.

New Blog - And This Is Good Old Boston

Since new material for the Remember Jamaica Plain site is coming slow, I thought I'd extend the franchise and do a Boston-themed blog. Thus: And This Is Good Old Boston. Of course you recognize the words:

And this is good old Boston
The home of the bean and the cod
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots
And the Cabots talk only to God.

I'll be trying to show the familiar in unfamiliar places, and remember the once-famous and now forgotten. So far I've looked at M.I.T. in Boston, the original Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's Newspaper Row, the gradual growth of the State House, and the Roxbury-South End border. Next up is a look at the South Boston Marine Park. I'll try to add at least one post per week. I may add links to other sites and book reviews as well. Come over and check it out.

Hellenic College

Bacon estate, 1924.


I thought I had accounted for all the schools in Jamaica Plain, but I've just found that I missed one. Hellenic College is located mostly just over the Boston line in Brookline, but they do own a large plot of land along Prince street, overlooking Jamaica Pond. Here's an Associated Press article announcing the purchase of the former Bacon estate.



Plans for America's First Hellenic University Are Disclosed in Boston Today

August 5, 1939


Plans for America's first Hellenic University was, where disclosed today with the announcement that the Greek Orthodox Theological Seminary has purchased a 25-acre site in Jamaica Plain.

The property, known as the Gaspar Bacon estate, is adjacent to the present 35-acre layout of the seminary, just over the line in the town of Brookline.

The seminary will be the nucleus of the planned university in which those of Greek birth and antecedents are expected to contribute 100 million dollars.

The university, however, will be non-sectarian, although continuing a heritage of Greek culture.

Judge John C. Pappas, who purchased the property on behalf of the seminary, said chapters to foster the university will be established throughout the country.

"Spyras Skouras of New York and California, prominent businessman and industrialist, will lead the campaign for the 100 million dollars," said Pappas.

Pappas and his brother, Thomas, formerly in the diplomatic service, Angelo Cotsidas and Theodore Tonna are underwriting the first structure, a $250,000 building which will contain classrooms, library and gymnasium.


Here's an article on Gaspar Bacon.

Crowell Hatch

This 1859 map shows the location of the former Hatch house on Centre street, marked in red. The house sat between today's Soldier's Monument on the right and today's Arborway rotary, near the intersection on the left.



I've been sitting on this entry for far too long, in hopes that I would develop more information on the subject, Crowell Hatch. While I haven't found the information I've been looking for, I have discovered an interesting source I can direct readers towards - more on that later.

Crowell Hatch was born in Marshfield in 1740. He followed the route of many at the time, going to sea, becoming a Captain, and then retiring to shore to become a trader, buying ships, provisioning and stocking them, and sending crews out to trade in foreign lands. Hatch first shows up in Jamaica Plain in 1799, buying xx acres of land from Timothy Penny, then of the island of Jamaica. The estate ran between Centre and Pond streets (then the Road to Newton), following approximately the path of today's Orchard street. I've trace the history of this property back in time to Hatch and Penny in a previous article. This was at the same time when James Perkins, who was following a very similar career path, was buying his estate on the opposite side of Jamaica Pond. Hatch's estate also stood adjacent to that of John Hancock, though Hancock no longer inhabited that house.


Hatch has entered into a second earlier article, in which I discussed the Boit family. In 1789, Hatch, then 49 years old, married Hannah Boit, the 24 year old daughter of John Boit, and merchant, importer and leading citizen of Boston. Ten years later, he bought an estate in Jamaica Plain from Timothy Penny.


The Columbia, as drawn by the ship's artist, George Davidson.



Crowell Hatch has two claims to fame that come down through the years to us; both as an investor, rather than a ship's captain. The first is the voyage of the Columbia, the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe. Following the publication of Captain Cook's journal in 1784, a group of partners including Hatch (then a resident of Cambridge) bought the Columbia, originally built in the North river yards between Scituate and Marshfield. The ship was put under the command of Captain John Kendrick, with a smaller sloop joining the voyage under the command of Captain.Robert Grey. (Here, I'll add that the Columbia carried in its crew one John Boit, son of John Boit mentioned above).

The goal of the voyage was to collect sea otter skins from the Pacific Northwest and trade them in China. Western traders suffered a fatal weakness when dealing with China at the time. While China had many products desired by the West - primarily tea - the West had little to offer China other than silver. As the United States had no source of silver at the time, expensive three-way trading was required to satisfy the Chinese and gain access to Chinese markets. Sea otter fur was of very high quality, and the Russians had been recently using it in their own China trade.




The full story of the Columbia is beyond the reach of this blog. The first voyage of the Columbia began the American China trade, which would make many Boston and other American seagoing cities' fortunes. Hatch later bought out his partners and sent Captain Grey back to the Pacific Northwest, where he named the Columbia river, and bought millions of acres of land for Hatch. While this second voyage set up the American claim on the Pacific northwest (Oregon), Congress failed to see the benefit of Hatch's great land transaction, and failed to recognize it.


Boston Exchange Coffee House.


The second, and lesser claim to fame for Crowell Hatch is in another investment; in this case, the building of the Boston Exchange Coffee House in 1809. The name belies the significance of the building. The Boston Exchange Coffee House was a seven story hotel, stock exchange and merchant/trader's meeting place built by Andrew Dexter in 1809. At the time, it was the tallest building in the nation. Although Dexter had investors - one of whom was Crowell Hatch - much of the money needed to build the Exchange was generated by fraudulent bank manipulation, from Boston to Detroit. At a time when paper money was mistrusted, and the national government was still not the master of its currency, Dexter had banks print money far beyond their deposit's ability to cover. Much like our own time, these banks were massively over-leveraged. In time, with the Exchange built, the financial house of cards would fall, and Dexter would flee to Canada. Just eight years later, in 1818, the building would be destroyed in a fire.

When I first read of Hatch's connection to the Boston Exchange Coffee House, I was hoping to learn more about him through this story. Unfortunately, he seems to have been a minor, silent partner, and shows up nowhere in the story after his initial investment. Hatch lived in Jamaica Plain at the time of the Exchange construction and financial scandal, and died in 1814 - not the 1805 you may see repeated in old documents on the internet.



No doubt by now you're forgotten that at the top of this article, I hinted of more to come. Crowell Hatch does have another claim to fame (or rather infamy) - one that very few people would have been aware of until very recently. One of the first online references I found to Crowell Hatch - which now seems to have disappeared - described him as being "of black-birding memory," or some such phrase. When I looked up the term, it was as I expected: black-birding referred to catching slaves, or dealing in the purchase and sale of the same. This is what stopped me from writing the Crowell Hatch entry: I was hoping to find more evidence that Crowell Hatch had traded in slaves. It should be no surprise that it should be true - Boston was built on trade among the colonies and with other nations, and slaves were just another cargo to them until at least the Revolution and the outlawing of slavery in Massachusetts in the 1780s.

I never did find the evidence I sought, but recently I returned to the subject, and an online search came up with a new source of information on Captain Hatch. A group of amateur historians from the South Shore of Massachusetts has set about telling the story of the voyage of the Columbia expedition: Hit and Run History. In association with WGBH.com, you can watch their story in a series of videos. The episode featuring Crowell Hatch and slavery can be seen here. The Hit and Run History folks have taken local history to the next step, producing their own 'television' documentary, piece by piece.





For a good read about this largely-forgotten episode in Boston's history, read The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse by Jane Kamensky.

John Boit's journal of the second voyage of the Columbia.

Mass. Historical Society Columbia voyage page.

The Discovery of the Columbia River - a nice article published in a series Old South Leaflets. I can't find a date. The Old South Meeting House produced a series of educational articles on American history through the late 19th Century to go with their lecture series on the same topic.

Louis Agassiz - Honored in Jamaica Plain

In 1896, two new grammar schools were opened in Jamaica Plain: The Bowditch for girls and the Louis Agassiz for boys. The Agassiz was located at the corner of Burroughs and Brewer streets, behind a Centre street commercial block. So who was Louis Agassiz, and why was this school in particular named for him? I can't say for sure - no records were kept - but I will propose an answer with some confidence.



Louis Agassiz school, Brewer and Burroughs streets.


Louis Agassiz was born in 1807 French-speaking Switzerland, and was educated broadly in Natural History - what we would call botany and zoology, or simply biology. After studying new fish species early in his career, he shifted to the new fish fossils that were being found at the time. He soon became a world leader in both modern and paleo-ichthyology.

In spite of his fame in these fields, Agassiz is best known today for being the leading proponent of the then-new idea that there had, in the past, been Ice Ages, in which much of the Northern Hemisphere was covered in vast sheets of ice. This Agassiz deduced from his home country, where glaciers still covered mountainsides, and evidence of past, larger glaciers were spread through the countryside. For a culture with no clear idea how old the world was - outside the six thousand-odd years of Biblical history - this idea was beyond ground-breaking.

In 1846, Agassiz traveled to the United States to study the natural history of North America and to give a series of lectures at the Lowell Institute in Boston. Once here, he was offered a job at Harvard, and became founder of Museum of Comparative Zoology and taught a generation of scientists. Posterity has not been so kind to Agassiz in remembering him as one of the leading scientific anti-evolutionists of his day - Agassiz and Darwin looking at the same evidence and seeing very different causes. In the 1860s, Agassiz returned to his study of South American fishes, going on months-long voyages to see his subjects in their natural habitats. He passed away in 1873, one of the country's and the world's most famous scientists.

So now we know something of Louis Agassiz's fame. But why was this particular school in Jamaica Plain named in his honor in 1896? Perhaps the answer is simple as his fame, but there is more to the story. The first Agassiz connection is a slender thread, but an interesting one. During the mid-19th Century, a Village Hall was built on Thomas street near Centre street. The building had various uses over the years, serving as a schoolhouse and a Grand Army of the Republic meeting hall, but it was also used to house lecture series for the public at a time when educational talks on scientific and literary subjects had broad popularity. In her Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain, 1845-1875, Ellen Morse describes just such a visit by the great Louis Agassiz:

"Distinguished lecturers came then to the platform of the old hall, Mr. Homes and Professor Agassiz being among those whom some of the boys and girls of those days remember most vividly. Professor Agassiz' benevolent, kindly face and his broken English gave him great charm, even if we couldn't follow much of his scientific instruction. What a privilege it was to hear such men in those days when they traveled all over the country to deliver their fine lectures! How did they ever survive the long journeys in stagecoaches and the resting places in country hotels and cold bed-chambers?"

So the Man Himself spoke in Jamaica Plain within a stone's throw of the future site of the eponymous school. Interesting, but there is much more to the story.

In 1850, Agassiz married Elizabeth Cabot Cary, an educator who would be a co-founder and first president of Radcliffe College. Their daughter Pauline would marry Quincy Adams Shaw, who became one of the richest men in Massachusetts through his investment in the Calument and Hecla copper mine in Michigan. The Shaws settled on an estate overlooking Jamaica Pond on Perkins street. Pauline, already discussed in an entry here, used her wealth to aid many progressive causes, including the establishments of Boston's first Kindergartens.

So Pauline Agassiz Shaw, daughter of the great man, wife of one of the state's leading businessmen, and famed philanthropist in her own right, was a resident of the community at the time the school was built - and named. In fact, one of the first of her kindergartens was located in the very Village Hall where her father had lectured years earlier. Isn't it reasonable to speculate that the school could have been named in her father's honor as a respectful tip of the hat to Mrs Shaw as well? As I said, there can be no proof, but the story sits together well. It's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Sadly, the 'new' Agassiz school on Child street is now slated to be closed, and the name Louis Agassiz will no longer be honored in Boston. In this, Agassiz joins a long list of those lost to posterity in the Boston school systems massive down-sizing since the baby-boom years of the 1960s. The stories of all those whose names have been lost would fill a book, and the loss to Boston history is sad indeed.

*In a final note, I can't discuss Louis Agassiz without using the 'R'-word. I was reading a local internet comment section recently, where the name Agassiz had come up. One of the commenters asked if the readers knew that Agassiz was "one of history's most notorious racists." Granted that the internet is the land of hyperbole - and ignorance - but this kind of thing needs correcting. There will be no more Jamaica Plain content - the following is an effort to get this matter off my chest. Please feel free to ignore it.

Louis Agassiz's name and fame have long passed from public knowledge - 19th Century Natural Historians are not on the tips of contemporary American's tongues. Outside of those interested in paleontology, geology and ichthyology, the man was barely known in this country outside his adopted Cambridge and in Jamaica Plain - and even there, he was less a man than a label for a building. So where did the commenter I cited get his/her information?

Stephen Jay Gould was a paleontologist, head of the same Harvard museum as Agassiz had founded, and a prolific writer of popular science articles and books. It was Gould who found letters written by Agassiz and published quotes from then one hundred years after the man had died. The 'money quote' from Agassiz was a description of an encounter with an African-American waiter in a restaurant. Agassiz tells of a visceral response to his close encounter with this African man - he describes the man in as ugly terms as we could imagine.

So what do we do with such information? At the time Gould's book was released, there were calls to rename schools named after Agassiz. While Boston resisted, the City of Cambridge did so, renaming its Agassiz school in honor of an African-American, presumably to make amends. Should Boston have done the same thing? I think not.

The truth is, in the mid-19th Century, essentially all white people were racists. Abraham Lincoln was a racist, as was Charles Darwin. While white people disagreed over how to treat the races of the world, vanishingly few believed literally that all men were created equal in the biological sense. Indeed, unless we are willing to cut off history's honors at 1965, it's hard to imagine finding more than a handful of racism-free heroes out of all of Western civilization.

Right through the turn of the 20th Century, the Western scientific world held that Caucasians were biologically superior to all other races - a fact that Stephen Jay Gould himself made a minor career out of discussing. In fact, that same Western intellectual elite - and its contemporary butchers, bakers and candlestick makers - believed equally that women (of all races) shared a similar biological inferiority to blacks and other races. Again, Gould makes much of this fact in his columns and books.

Given these facts, I find it hard to pick out Louis Agassiz for opprobrium. Was he a racist? Yes - guilty as charged. He was, however, a man of his time. All of the scientists of his day shared his beliefs to some degree, and to judge him by our contemporary morality is to be guilty of anachronistic history. An examination of his personal beliefs and how they informed his work is a worthwhile endeavor, more for what it may tell us about ourselves than for any pleasure we may get from looking down our noses on him.

Louis Agassiz was one of the great men of his age - warts and all. All heroes have feet of clay, and we point an accusing finger at one at our own risk. Do we really want our own heroes examined so closely? Men like Agassiz and Thomas Jefferson were poisoned by the racist beliefs of their days. At their best, they were also great men, worthy of honor. A maturity that both recognizes their flaws and honors their virtues does honor to ourselves. And some day, our time will be judged as we judge the past. And like them, we have little idea what it is about us that will be found so revolting by our descendants. We can only rest assured that there will be demands that the names of our contemporary heroes be removed from places of public honor.

Note: Commenter Jim adds this.

"One correction, please, Pauline was born to Louis Agassiz's first wife, whose maiden name was Cecile Braun (1809 - 1848). "

Clark's Dry Goods

Here we have a trade card from Clark's Dry Goods, which was located in White's Block, Centre street opposite Burroughs street. Trade cards had been used for advertising throughout the 19th Century, but became broadly popular with the development of color lithography in the 1870s. By the early 20th Century, their time had passed, replaced by magazines.

Centre street, 1974 (White's Block in red).



White's Block, 1885. Cyrus White lived directly behind his store, on Brown place.


Eugene W. Clark and his shop show up in the 1873 West Roxbury Directory, and by 1885 the Boston Directory mentions a second location at Boylston railroad station, and a home at Maple place, opposite the then-new Police station. The 1905 Boston Directory lists the store and a new home location on St John street. The 1905 Directory also shows Eugene Clark listed as a clerk at the JP post office. A son, Eugene Jr., was employed as a draftsman in Boston, and lived with his father. By 1925, Eugene Sr. is gone, and Eugene Jr. is listed as a architect on Joy street, Boston, and living in Reading.



Just found: E.W. Clark's Dry Goods store, corner of Centre street and Seaverns's avenue.

Ye Olde Engine House

Centre and Thomas streets, 1874.




Centre and Thomas streets, 1868.



I'm back! It's been almost a year since my last Jamaica Plain history post - mostly for a lack of material. Having already picked the low fruit of JP history, and having climbed the tree and crawled out on the branches like a monkey, I'm afraid there just won't be many more entries here. I have, however, found a nugget that I don't think I've discussed before.

The top map shows the corner of Centre and Thomas streets in 1874. The drawing below the map is a property plan from November, 1868. The buildings shown on the 1874 map are shown in the drawing six years earlier. The entire property where the four buildings are located had been owned by John Williams, one of two Williams brothers who owned a harness shop at Centre and Green streets and bought and sold property all over Jamaica Plain.

The fire insurance map at the top of the page shows us building locations and property owners, but in the case of commercial properties, we rarely know exactly what the building was used for. I'm using this property plan to point out that the building marked in red in the plan, but unlabeled in the 1874 map, was at the time the Town of West Roxbury Engine House - the fire station. As far as I know, there is no mention in any records outside of property deeds and this plan of this site being used for a fire house. By 1884, the engine house had moved up Centre street near the corner of Myrtle street, where the building is now used as an ice cream store.



Here we have Engine 12, Roxbury Massachusetts, courtesy of the Boston Public Library Flickr group. I imagine an engine much like this one would have found a home on Centre street as well.


If you want to locate where the old engine house stood, the property was immediately adjacent to today's Blanchard's Liquors. The brick building currently housing Fowler Real Estate now sits on the old engine house property.


Property plan: Norfolk County Registry of Deeds, Vol. 374, page 112.

Eliot street tour

Eliot Hall.


The third and final set of Jamaica Plain Historical Society walking tours begins this Saturday at 11:00 AM with the Monument Square tour. This tour explores the former Eliot School lands, including a variety of architectural styles on Brewer street and the Unitarian church, Eliot hall, and the Eliot school on the appropriately named Eliot street. Please join me - your humble tour guide - at the Loring-Greenough house at eleven, weather permitting.

Green Street Tour

The Jamaica Club meeting house.


I'll be leading a tour of Green Street this Saturday, June 5, for the Jamaica Plain Historical Society. The tour starts at the corner of Centre and Green sts at 11:00 AM, weather permitting. As always, the tour is free, so come out and say hello.

Tour schedule

It's That Time - Tour Season!

This Saturday, May 8 begins the annual walking tour season of the Jamaica Plain Historical Society. The Monument Square tour begins at the Loring-Greenough House at 11:00, weather permitting. As always, all tours are the right price - free! - and go on weather permitting.


2010 tour schedule