Dorchester Historical Society

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1722

In the first half of the 20th century, the Cosgrove Milk Company operated from a location on Christopher Street in the commercial area to the east of Adams Street in the Field’s Corner/Harrison Square neighborhood.

Today’s image shows a Cosgrove’s milk truck from Dennis W. Cosgrove whose aunts Dot Cosgrove Fitzgerald and Marie Cosgrove Steele appear in the photo.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1721

Albert L. Forbush

Scan of photo of Albert L. Forbush provided by Gary Burns, grandson of Albert.  Albert was in the milk business and owned milk trains in Boston that transported milk between Boston and Worcester.  The Forbush family had a dairy called Elm Farm from the late 19^th century into the 20^th on Columbia Road approximately opposite the Lila G. Frederick Pilot Middle School.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1720

Today’s illustration is a portrait of Robert Treat Paine (1835-1910), grandson of the signer of the Declaration of Independence.  Although Paine did not live in Dorchester, he did participate in housing construction projects aimed at providing lower-cost homes to workingmen.

Richard Heath has written an article about Paine’s work in Dorchester that may be found at http://www.dorchesteratheneum.org/pdf/HeathRobertTreatPaine.pdf

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1719

Samuel Downer was born in Dorchester in 1807 and lived on Jones Hill as an adult.

Source: Herbert Asbury.  The Golden Flood: An Informal History of America’s First Oil Field. New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.

Hundreds of laymen and scientists searched for that great desideratum of the nineteenth century—a safe, efficient, and reasonably priced illuminant.  An artificial light that would dispel the gloom of darkness and permit Americans to work and play at night had become a necessity in every phase of the national life; it was needed in the trains that had begun to run at night, in the steamboats which crowded the rivers, in the horse-cars and stagecoaches, in the factories and the store, and above all in the home.

There were bountiful stocks of whale oil, but whale oil was unsatisfactory unless refined, and when refined, it was very expensive.  High prices and scarcity of supply also prevented the widespread use of lard oil, produced principally by the meatpacking plants at Cincinnati.

There were many chemical “burning fluids” n the market, but most of them were expensive, and all were unsafe.  The cheapest was camphene, composed of ether, alcohol,  and rectified oil of turpentine.  It was also the most dangerous.  The great majority of Americans lighted their homes and places of business with the humble tallow candle.

Many of the nineteenth-century experimenters who attempted to solve the world’s lighting and lubricating problems made exhaustive inquiries into the possibilities of coal tar and asphalt as sources of oil, procuring enormous supplies of the latter from the great asphalt lake on the island of Trinidad.  The most successful producer of oil from these substances was the Downer Company, founded in the late 1830’s by Samuel L. Downer, son of a Boston merchant.  For a decade and half Downer was engaged exclusively in the manufacture of candles, and of lard, whale, and sperm oil for lubricating purposes.  About 1852 he acquired the rights to “Coup Oil,” a lubricator distilled by the chemist Luther Atwood from coal tar, which was extensively used by railroads and cotton mills for several years.  On his return from England late in 1856, Atwood showed Downer some of the water-white illuminating oil which he had produced from James Young’s brown naphtha, but Downer refused to hear anything about it.  “Illuminating oil doesn’t amount to anything,” he said. “You can never replace or displace the lard or whale-oil lamp; they are the articles for illuminating purposes.

However, Downer soon changed his mind.  Less than a year later he was manufacturing an illumination oil from Trinidad asphalt, using a process devised by Luther Atwood and his brother William.  But supplies of the raw material were uncertain, and in 1857 Downer erected a $150,000 plant at Boston, and a smaller on at Portland, Maine, and began manufacturing huge quantities of illuminating oil from a bituminous coal called albertite, found principally in Albert County, New Brunswick.  At first the Downer Company had considerable difficulty in disposing of the new illuminant, and on September 1, 1858, two hundred thousand gallons had accumulated in the company’s storage tanks; as the superintendent of the plant, Joshua Merrill, once put it: “Mr. Downer became somewhat apprehensive that he had overstepped the bounds of prudence.”  But a sudden demand for the oil was created by the appearance of improved lamps in the market, and particularly by the introduction of the famous Vienna burner from Austria.  Downer’s surplus stocks began to move late in October 1858, and by the first of the following year his tanks were empty and he was selling as much oil as he could produce.

The Downer Company was not the first to manufacture coal oil in this country, but it was the first to engage in the business on a large scale.  The great success of its operatons resulted immediately in the erection of many new refineries, and by the middle of 1860 fifty-three were in operation.

A few employed methods of refining devised by Abraham Gesner, a Canadian chemist and geologist.  He transferred the patent rights to the North American Kerosene Gaslight Company, which operated an oil and gas works on Newtown Creek, Long Island.  Gesner had originally called his oil “keroselain,” from two Greek words meaning oil and wax, but when he obtained his patents he registered as a trademark the word “kerosene.”  For several years only the North American Company and the Downer Company, to which Gesner had granted the right because of Luther Atwood’s association with Downer, were permitted to call their oil “kerosene.”  In time, however, the word became the generic term for illuminating oils manufactured from both coal and petroleum.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1718

The following is excerpted from a press release composed by Ashley McColgan, FHM Communications Intern from Curry College for the Forbes House Museum

 DORCHESTER BANNER WILL BE ON VIEW FOR LINCOLN DAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2012.

Forbes House Museum will hold its annual Lincoln Day celebration on Sunday, 12 February 2012, from 1-4pm at 215 Adams Street, Milton. Festivities for this event have been expanded in celebration of Milton’s 350th anniversary with support from the Milton Public Schools.

The Dorchester Banner, used by the Wide Awakes party in a march for presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln in 1860, will be on display. The banner was given to Mary Bowditch Forbes by John H. Means, son of Sergeant John H. Means of Company E First Regiment Infantry of Massachusetts. In a letter dated October 8, 1928, Means states, “So that after all this Banner comes to you from good hands. In considering what I should do with it, I felt that to place it in your hands, as patriotic a woman as you are it would be best. I am pleased that you are willing to accept it.”

Lincoln day will offer an afternoon full of activities to commemorate the Civil War, including drills and rifle firings with re-enactors, demonstrations, and interactive Civil War exhibits.
Hot chocolate will be served in the tradition begun by Mary Bowditch Forbes in 1924. Suggested donation for Lincoln Day is $5 per family.  The Lincoln Day celebration includes a concert of Civil War music with Dixon’s Gold at 4:30pm at the Pierce Middle School Auditorium, Central Avenue, Milton. Dixon’s Gold will perform with mandolin, mandocello, string bass, penny whistle, clarinet, banjo, trumpet and guitar along
with vocals. The audience will be encouraged to sing along.

Tickets are $10 per person for adults; $8 per person for members; $25 for a family of four; $20 for a member family. For more information on programs and events at Forbes House Museum, including Lincoln Day, please visit their website:

Home – Forbes House Museum

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1717

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church at 73 Columbia Road began as a mission of St. Mary’s, which is located on Jones Hill.  St. Mark’s replaced a building called Rose Cottage acquired from Edwin S. Davis.  The mission used the Cottage for a time before building the St. Mark’s building that we know today.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1716

The Gushee Dairy question is still getting responses.  Dan Jenkins has lots of info about the family and believes they had a dairy operation on Hillside Street in Milton as well as on Fuller Street, Dorchester.  He provided today’s illustration–a photo of a Gushee Milk Bottle that sold on eBay.  It is a cream separating baby face type.  A separating spoon device closed the small opening in the neck so the cream on top could be poured off.  I have added a close-up of a baby-top from a Cosgrove milk bottle from another Dorchester dairy.

Charlie O’Hara says: In regards to the Gushee Farm Dairy February 1 & 3 Illustrations # 1712 & 1714, one of the Gushee family homes still stands and is a small Victorian house at 104 Fuller Street. It is the 3^rd house just west of the foot path that leads from Fuller Street into the Woodrow Wilson School yard.  The first two houses are 3 families [at nos. 98 and 102] and then the 3^rd one is the Gushee’s.

 Just east of the foot path stand two small 1950–1960 Cape houses # 90 & 94 where the barn and bottling plant were located.  As a boy attending the Woodrow Wilson School in the early 1940’s I, along with other students, would stop at the barn, which was always open and we would feed the horses our lunch apples.  It was a small operation with only two or three milk delivery wagons of the kind with small truck wheels and rubber tires similar to those used by the Hood and Whiting milk companies.  Part of the pasture land remained until WW II when the newer single family houses were built on it South of Fuller Street and West of the dead end Mercier Avenue and Hurlcroft Avenue and extending to the Boston Home property.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1715

Jacob Fottler.

From: One of a Thousand. A Series of Biographical Sketches of One Thousand Representative Men Resident in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, A.D. 1888-89. Compiled under the editorial supervision of John C. Rand.  Boston: First National Publishing Company, 1890.

Fottler, Jacob, son of John and Mary (Donald) Fottler, was born in Dorchester, Norfolk County, August 19, 1839. 

He obtained his school training in the common schools of Belmont and Brighton, and at the Eliot High School, Jamaica Plain. He worked at home on his father’s farm—a tract of land now included within the boundaries of Franklin Park—also for a time at Hingham; at the age of nineteen he left home for California, and for some time was employed on a ranch in that state; coming back to Boston, he secured a situation in Faneuil Hall market.  In 1872 he was admitted as a partner in the firm of Sands, Furber & Co., which business relation still continues.

Mr. Fottler was married in Sanbornton, N.H., March 12, 1865, to Lucy Ann, daughter of Captain Edward and Phebe (Morrison) Evans.  Of this union are two children: Frances Bell and Milton Evans Fottler. 

Mr. Fottler was a member of the Boston Common Council in 1885, ’86 and ’87, and served on the following committees: public parks, public institutions, markets, elections, and sale of reservoir lot.  He was a member of the House of Representatives, 1888 and ’89, and served on the committee on the state-house.  He is a member of the Boston Chamber of Commerce—elected to serve on the board of directors for a term of three years; a member of the Boston Fruit and Produce Exchange, and also of the Bay State Agricultural Society.

He is member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts—receiving a lieutenant’s commission June 6, 1887.  Mr. Fottler visited England in July, 1887, as one of the delegation of the “Ancients,” who were invited by the Honourable Artillery Company of London to be present and assist in the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebration of that company.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1714

Today’s illustration shows Almond S. Gushee. The day before yesterday we saw a milk bottle from the C W Gushee dairy on Fuller Street.  Responses for the request for more information have come in:

From Dan Jenkins:

It appears the dairy was owned by Almond Shaw Gushee  and when he died his son Chester Ward Gushee took over per WWI draft reg.   Almond was married to Ida Smith, and she is mother of his children. He 2nd married a Therese Peters in 1900, who was of German origins.  Almond  was born in Appleton, Maine, to an old N. E. family that arrived from France in the 1600s.  Name properly was Gatchet.  So the bottle was from Chester’s era.  WWII draft reveals Chester at 104 Fuller St., owner of a milk business, so maybe cows and barns still there.

1942 .  Chester was married to Ruth Hotchkiss/Stone, and they had 3 children: Ruth 1921 who has descendants ,  Robert 1925, and Almond Chester Gushee b 1923.  Almond Chester enlisted in the Army 11-4-1942 and died in Maryland in 2004 and is buried at Mullen Hill Cem. in Lakeville, MA.  There are living members of this family and I will forward  today’s  illus. to one of them that has done research.  Maybe she can add info.

I forgot to mention that Chester’s brother William had a grocery store, likely nearby.  So probably sold Gushee milk.

From Bob Rugo:

Almond Shaw Gushee was born in Appleton, Maine in 1857. He was living on Fuller Street in 1886 when his son William Shaw Gushee was born and in1888 when his son Chester W. Gushee was born. He was described as a milkman and as a milk dealer on his sons’ birth records.

In 1897 Almond’s wife died at 92 Fuller Street and in 1900 he remarried, living at the same address.

Almond was active in establishing, in 1899, the Dorchester Gentlemen’s Driving Club  which held races at the Franklin Field Speedway. His daughter Edith made news when she was the first woman to race there in 1911 when she was 20 years old.

 The C. W. Gushee name on the milk bottle is presumably the son, Chester W. Gushee (1888-1963). When Chester’s wife died in 1949, they were living at 104 Fuller Street and when Chester died in 1963, he was living at 37 Bailey Street.

In 1940 the Chester W. Gushee Co. was a low bidder on a contract to provide subsidized milk to the poor. Other successful bidders included H.P. Hood and the Whiting Milk Company. At that time the Gushee Company was shown as based in Watertown. One possibility is that Chester’s younger brother, by 15 years, Charles had taken over the company by then. Charles had bought property in Belmont in 1937.

Also from Bob Rugo — From someone’s family tree online:

“Chester Ward Gushee 30 Sept 1888 Boston, MA married Ruth Hotchkiss/Stone

 1930 Federal census Boston, Suffolk, MA 8 April

Gushee, Chester head age 41 born MA propietor dairy business”

Report of the Harvard Class of 1909 (listed right after George Gund)

WILLIAM SHAW GUSHEE

Address 113 Fuller St., Dorchester Center, Mass.

Residence Ditto.

Occupation Milk Dealer, 113 Fuller St., Dorchester Center, Mass.

Married Beatrice Emily Hall, Dorchester, Mass., Oct. 16, 1913.

Children Beatrice Eleanor, Sept. 22, 1918.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org

Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1713

Captain John Codman  

Source:  Other Merchants and Sea Captains of Old Boston, State Street Trust Company, Boston, Mass., 1919.

Captain John Codman was born in Dorchester in 1814, being the oldest son of the Rev. John Codman.

Captain Codman always showed a great fondness for the sea, and as soon as he saw an opportunity he shipped on one of the famous clippers. During the Crimean War he commanded the ship “William Penn,” which was used as an army transport to carry troops from Constantinople to the Crimea, and during the Civil War he was in command of the steamer “Quaker City, which was engaged in carrying stores to Port Royal.

Captain Codman was very fond of riding, and once, when about seventy-five years of age, he rode from New York to Boston in the middle of winter. He had a horse which he called “Grover Cleveland” in order to show his admiration for the President, and he always caused great interest when on the hotel registers he signed his name and underneath it “Grover Cleveland.” He also wrote a number of books and newspaper articles and made many speeches on travel shipping, and tariff.  He used to say that “his little Latin and his less Greek had been very useful to him.” “It was like being vaccinated,” he said. “You may not feel it, but it is there all the same and does you a heap of good.” Captain Codman owned a ranch in Idaho and a house at Cohasset, the latter being so near the water that people used to remark that his villa on some boisterous night would undoubtedly go to sea without taking out clearance papers. He gave up the sea for the last thirty years of his life, but still owned a number of ships which were most successful, one of them, the “Morea,” in one year’s time making for him one hundred thousand dollars in tea. He was a graduate of Amherst College. He died at the age of eighty-six.

______
The Dorchester Illustration of the Day (DIOTD) is sent weekdays. If you receive this e-mail by mistake, please reply to be taken off the e-mail list. If you know others who would like to receive the daily e-mail, please encourage them to join the group by going to http://groups.google.com/group/dorchester-historical-society. You may contact Earl Taylor at ERMMWWT@aol.com

If you value receiving the DIOTD, please express your appreciation by making a donation to the Dorchester Historical Society, either by regular mail at 195 Boston Street, Dorchester, MA 02125, or through the website at www.DorchesterHistoricalSociety.org