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.