The top portion of today’s image is a photo postcard from about 1910, showing 16 Harley Street and its carriage house. The buildings are still standing. The bottom portion of today’s image is a painting of 16 Harley Street by Frank Henry Shapleigh from the 1870s.
Douglas Shand-Tucci, in his book, “Ashmont,” calls the house the Reed-Loring House. However, the Reed family never owned the house. George Derby Welles, through his agent, Edward Ingersoll Brown, had the house constructed in the early 1870s before selling lots for further development. In 1875, Welles sold the house at 16 Harley Street to Stephen L. Emery. In 1877, Welles sold Emery another 3,000 square feet of land contiguous to 16 Harley Street, and in 1882, Welles sold Emery another 3,000 square feet of land. In 1892, Emery acquired another 1,500 square feet of land from another owner. Emery then had the carriage house built.
Charles Henry Reed married Ellen Emery, Stephen’s daughter, in 1870. Charles operated a hide and leather business. The Reed family lived in Boston except for the year 1879, when they lived with Ellen’s parents on Harley Street. Charles Henry Reed died in 1882. Stephen Emery died in 1899 and left the property in a trust. By 1900, the grandchildren, Clara Elinor Reed and George S. Reed, came to live at 16 Harley Street. Clara married Royden Loring in 1910. The property remained in a trust until 1952, when it was conveyed by the Trustee to George S. Reed and Clara Elinor Loring.
Charlotte Feldman, 7 years old, a student at the Atherton School in Dorchester.is pictured when she led an orchestra of 160 grade-school students, in a recital at the annual musical festival of the Boston Public Schools before an audience of 3,500 at Boston Symphony Hall on May 20, 1927.
William Richardson, Edmund P. Tileston, Asaph Churchill, Jonathan Ware, and Mark Hollingsworth joined to form the Dorchester and Milton Branch Railroad on April 16, 1846.
Today’s illustration is a one-hundred dollar bond at 6% per year with coupons worth $3 semi-annually. Two coupons out of 18 have been clipped.
The Dorchester and Milton Branch Railroad was a branch line off the Old Colony Railroad main line from Boston to Plymouth. The 3.3 mile road was completed on Dec. 1, 1847 from Neponset Village in Dorchester, through the town of Milton, to the village of Mattapan.
“Said company may locate, construct, and maintain a railroad, with one or more tracks, within the towns of Dorchester and Milton, in the county of Norfolk, commencing at the most convenient point, at or near the depot of the Old Colony Railroad, at Neponset Village, so called, in Dorchester, and thence running, on the most eligible route, through the southeasterly art of the town of Dorchester, to a point eastwardly of the road leading from Dorchester to Milton, over Milton Hill, then crossing Neponset river, and thence running through the northerly part of the town of Milton, to some convenient point in Dorchester or Milton, at or near the Upper Mills, so called.” (Private and Special Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, from January 1838 to May 1848). Volume 8. (Boston, 1848), 645.
In 1929, the Ashmont-Mattapan High Speed Line opened from Ashmont to Milton, using a portion of the former Dorchester and Milton Branch Railroad.
Eighteen large silos and a grain elevator were built in 1941 as storage, in anticipation of World War II and expected difficulties in securing cacao beans. The “Baker Chocolate” painted silos remained a landmark in the Lower Mills for four decades. The silos were never filled to capacity, and in 1987 they were demolished.
The following is from: “Sweet History: Dorchester and the Chocolate Factory.” Copyright The Bostonian Society, 2005.
“A large grain elevator and nine pairs of concrete silos, originally located behind the Forbes Mill, stored cocoa beans for many years. The silos were built in response to the outbreak of World War II, when there was a high demand to supply chocolate rations for soldiers. Baker’s stepped up its production because “there must be no shortage of chocolate, which is a chief essential of emergency rations for an army in the field.” The location of the silos near the Forbes Mill centralized roasting operations, simplified the manufacturing process, and saved on space and man power.”
Today we have a photo of Richard Clapp’s house, which was located on Columbia Road approximately where the Russell School is now across from the Blake House.
The following is from, “The Clapp Memorial. Record of the Clapp Family in America,” Ebenezer Clapp, compiler. (Boston: David Clapp & Son, 1876).
“Richard, son of Lemuel and Rebecca (Dexter) Clapp, and brother of the preceding (William), was born in Dorchester, July 24, 1780, and died Dec. 16, 1861, aged 81 years. He was a tanner by trade, and his yard was only a few rods south of his brother William’s [on Boston Street]. At one time in early life he was engaged pretty extensively in brick-making, the business being carried on upon lands of his own in South Boston. Bricks there made were used in 1812, in the construction of the house he afterwards occupied, now standing on Pond Street [now mostly merged into Columbia Road], near the Five Corners [Edward Everett Square]. A few feet east from this house is the site of the one in which Rev. Richard Mather lived, and in which his son President Increase Mather was born.” Increase Mather was the sixth president of Harvard College.
Dorchester Illustration 2726 Milton Station car barn
Today’s illustration is a postcard, dated 1908, of the Milton Station car barn for trolley cars. The footprint of the building first appears in the 1904 Bromley atlas on Dorchester Avenue between Adams Street and Richmond Street. The location is now the site of the Lower Mills Apartments, a brick building with seven stories it was built in 1972. The car barn last appeared in the 1918 Bromley atlas.
Dorchester Illustration 2725 S. S. Pierce homestead
Samuel Stillman Pierce (1807-1880), the son of Daniel and Lydia Davenport Pierce, was born in the farmhouse owned by his family in what is now the Cedar Grove section of Dorchester. Daniel Pierce was a cabinetmaker. The house appears to have been built in the 18th century, although there is no documentation to provide an exact date.
At an early age, Samuel Pierce worked for a firm of importers in Boston, then went into the grocery business for himself. In 1831, he started his own grocery store, specializing in products for the well-to-do in Boston. The firm of S. S. Pierce became widely known for catering to the cosmopolitan tastes of Boston residents and for introducing new foods to the market.
Pierce maintained a home on Union Park and the family homestead in Dorchester, both homes appearing in the Boston Directory. He married Ellen Maria Theresa Wallis in 1836, and they had eight children. The family lived in Boston during the winters and summered at the family house he owned in Dorchester. According to Anthony Sammarco in “Dorchester, Volume 2,” the house was enlarged after the Civil War to accommodate his family. It stood on a knoll overlooking both Adams Village and and the Neponset River. The estate comprised a house and stable, with ten acres and marshland.
Pierce died in 1880, and his son Wallis Lincoln Pierce continued the trademark name and standards established by his father. The family included Samuel S. Pierce, Jr., who died as a young man in California; Dr. M. Vassar Pierce, a noted physician in Milton; and Holden White Pierce, who took over management of the Back Bay store of the S.S. Pierce Company. They retained their connection to Dorchester through their sister, Henrietta Pierce, who still summered in the family home. By the time of World War I, the Pierce homestead was a rambling series of additions made over the years.
Henrietta M. Pierce died in 1920, and her heirs sold a portion of the property to the Archdiocese of Boston, and shortly thereafter St. Brendan’s Church was built on the new Gallivan Boulevard. The remaining portion of the Pierce Estate was laid out as Lennoxdale, Myrtlebank, Rockne and Crockett streets and St. Brendan’s Road in the late 1930s, allowing for the building of the many new houses.
Sources: “Good Old Dorchester” by Dana Orcutt’s (1893); “Professional and Industrial History of Suffolk County, Volume 2,” by William T. Davis (1894); Wikipedia.
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Dorchester Illustration 2724 James and Hepzibah Swan
Colonel James Swan (1754-1830) was a native of Scotland, who came to Boston in his boyhood. He participated in the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Swan fought at Bunker Hill, where he was wounded twice. He was Secretary of the Board of War for Massachusetts in 1777 and afterward adjutant-general of the state. During the time he held that office, he drew heavily on his private funds to aid the Continental Army, which was then in dire need of funds to arm and equip the soldiers who were arriving in Boston from all parts of New England.
After the Revolution, Swan privately assumed the entire debt that the United States owed to France at a slightly higher interest rate. Swan then resold these debts at a profit on domestic U.S. markets. The United States no longer owed money to foreign governments, although it continued to owe money to private investors both in the United States and in Europe. This allowed the young United States to place itself on a sound financial footing.
James Swan arrived in France in 1787 where he hoped to trade in American produce such as wheat, tobacco and naval supplies. The destruction of social order following the French Revolution placed a premium upon these goods, and Swan’s business prospered. In 1792, the French government declared all property of the crown, church and fleeing aristocrats to be public property. That property was subsequently sold in negotiated sales or at auction. Swan bought numerous lots. Many of these he sold, but the best he shipped back to America, including the Thierry bedchamber suite, where they were installed in the Dorchester (Boston) home where his wife and daughters lived. These pieces of furniture from the master bedroom of Marie-Antoine Thierry Ville d’Avray’s estate are on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, courtesy of the descendants of the Swans.
In 1808, Swan and a business partner had a falling out, and the partner alleged that Swan owed him a large amount of money. Swan refused to pay and was sentenced to debtors prison in France. Swan lived stylishly in prison until 1830 when he was freed by another revolution.
His wife, Hepzibah Swan (1757-1835), was wealthy in her own right and was accomplished in both society and business. Mrs. Swan bought out two of the original investors in the largest and most far reaching real estate venture in postwar Boston when she became the only female member of the four person Mount Vernon Proprietors. They acquired the John Singleton Copley pasture in 1794 and subdivided it into townhouse lots that became quite valuable when the Massachusetts State House opened in 1798.
In 1796, the Swans built a second home on Dudley Street in Dorchester across from where the Salvation Army, Ray and Joan Kroc Corps Community Center is located today. Hepzibah wanted a larger home for entertaining so she had this one built in Dorchester with the help of her friend, Charles Bullfinch the noted architect. In this very grand manor house she maintained a household of herself, General Henry Jackson and other friends including General Henry Knox.
During the siege of Boston in the 1770’s, Knox and Jackson had stayed with her family and kept them safe from the British occupiers. Mrs. Swan depended on General Jackson for the management of her household affairs. Jackson maintained a home in Boston to keep up an appearance of propriety but lived in Dorchester. When he died in 1809, Hepzibah had him entombed in her garden in a plot surrounded by lilacs. A lane of lilacs led from the house to the tomb that Mrs. Swan often visited and pointed out to guests. One of them was the Marquis de Fafayette in 1825, on his triumphal visit to Boston for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. He visited Mrs. Swan on his way to Quincy to see John Adams. When she died in 1825 joined Jackson in the tomb.
The illustrations: the portraits of the couple by Gilbert Stuart; the bed is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the photograph of the house was published in “Domestic Architecture of the American Colonies and of the Early Republic” by Fiske Kimball. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922).
Today’s top image is a photo by Leslie Jones of the “100 Steps,” leading from Hancock Street to Downer Avenue on Jones Hill.
The bottom image is a sketch drawn by Jack Frost, the Boston Herald’s columnist in his Fancy This. This series on April 29, 1936. The hundred steps, rising from Hancock Street up the side of Jones Hill, the longest wooden stairway in Boston.
The building halfway up the hill was the Jacqueminot Bungalow, a function hall from the 19-teens to the 1930s.
Note: I counted the steps in 2015. There are a total of 103.
Dorchester Illustration 2722 portrait of Isaac Withington
The burnt poker portrait of Dorchester resident Isaac Withington was created by the artist Robert Ball Hughes. Isaac Withington was born in Dorchester in 1802 and died here in 1877. Ball Hughes was first a sculptor whose subjects were usually famous men and/or literary and artistic scenes. In this case he created a portrait of a nearby neighbor, Withington lived on Harvard Street, only a few blocks away from Ball Hughes’ home at 3 School St., so perhaps they were friends.
Robert Ball Hughes was an artist, born in London in 1804, who immigrated to America in 1829. He and his wife, Eliza, went first to Washington, D.C. In 1842, they moved to Dorchester, where Ball Hughes was commissioned to produce a bronze statue of mathematician and astronomer Nathaniel Bowditch. This statue was the first large bronze to be cast in the United States.
They lived on Adams Street opposite the site that would later become the Cedar Grove Cemetery. Then in 1851 they moved to 3 School St. at the corner of Washington and School streets. The house is still there, though quite altered. They entertained a number of celebrities including Charles Dickens and Jane Stuart, the artist.
Pyrography is the art of burning sketches into wood using a hot poker. A late 19th-century publication, “Wide Awake,” a serial miscellany of topics from art and literature, described the technique in 1885: [Regarding] “the drawing on wood with a hot iron (otherwise known as “poker-pictures”). The lines are burnt upon the wood and produce the effect when varnished, of a painting in glazed oils . . . . . the color of the burnt line being a rich brown upon the soft creamy tone of the wood.”
William Dana Orcutt said in “Good Old Dorchester” (Cambridge 1893), 385-386.
“Mr. Hughes manifested his artistic nature in more ways than one. He excelled, among other things, in executing what are known as “poker sketches.” These are pictures made on whitewood, the only tools used being pieces of iron, which were heated to a white heat. Every touch of the hot iron leaves a mark which cannot be effaced, and the work is so trying to the nerves that only a short time each day can be devoted to it. The effects of color can only be appreciated when seen. It seems incredible that such artistic results could have been produced in this way.”
There are a few examples of Ball Hughes’ other burnt poker drawings at these links:
