Dorchester Illustration 2636, Samuel F. Perkins and Man-carrying Kites

Posted on October 1, 2023 by earltaylor

Samuel F. Perkins and Man-carrying Kites

Dorchester Illustration 2636

Samuel F. Perkins lived at 14 Rockmere St. He is the inventor of the man-carrying kite and continued experimentation from 1910 through the first World War and into the 1920s.

Perkins demonstrated his kites and skills at aeronautical exhibitions across the country. At the 1910 Harvard-Boston Aero Meet in Squantum, “he demonstrated that a man can be sent 2,000 feet in the air, supported by from 6 to 5 large 18-foot passenger-carrying aeroplane war kites.”  (The Boston Globe, Dec, 14, 1912)

In 1912, he received an order for 25 kites from Lt. John Rodgers of the U.S.S. Nebraska, docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard. Rodgers was the foremost researcher in the use of man-carry kites for the U.S. Navy.

The following is from https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.921073124624429.1073742437.779950035403406&type=3


“The principle was simple. A lead kite, eighteen feet high, was flown into the sky to test the wind. If conditions were right, a series of six to seven stringer kites would follow until there was enough lift to raise a man. A ground crew operating a winch could reel the “pilot” in or out depending on the weather, or what he needed to see.

Perkins may have been misguided, but he was no crackpot. He attended Harvard and MIT, and the U.S. Army Signal Corps as well as the Navy expressed serious interest in his invention as a means of observing the enemy. Admiral Byrd even took a Perkins kite on one of his Antarctic expeditions.

The biggest issue was stability. Getting Perkins’ kite into the air was easy, but if wind conditions changed the kite(s) could veer out of control. Perkins learned this the hard way during a test flight when he fell 150 feet to the ground. Nevertheless, he not only survived, he remained undeterred. The U.S. wasn’t the only country to experiment with kite observation systems—Germany and France employed them on a regular basis during World War I. However, it soon became clear that using a kite for observation was nothing more than a heroic investment in white elephant technology, and once again kites became the play things of children.”

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Columbia Village, Dorchester Illustration 2635

Posted on September 24, 2023 by earltaylor

Columbia Village

Dorchester Illustration 2635

The Boston Globe reported on May 14, 1950, that the families residing on Columbia Point in the former World War II Italian prisoner-of-war barracks complained about the conditions “unfit for human Habitation.”   The families had been assured that the housing was temporary, but at that time, some of them had been in the barracks buildings for four years.  On May 15, 1951, The Boston Globe printed a report citing statements that a 1500- new low-rent-housing project should be completed by July, the largest federally-aided project in New England. In 1953, the project was expected to be ready for occupancy in the spring of 1954. 

Today’s illustration shows Columbia Village in March 1956.

After a few decades of neglect, the housing project was due for renovation in the 1980s at a projected cost of $500,000 per unit.  A new development was constructed in the 1980s as a waterfront luxury development, with 400 of its almost 1,300 apartments subsidized for low-income tenants.  The project acquired a new name, Harbor Point.  All the residents of Columbia Point who wished to live in Harbor Point were provided new apartments (The Boston Globe, August 2, 1991).

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Dorchester Illustration 2634, Lyceum Hall

Posted on September 17, 2023 by earltaylor

Lyceum Hall

Dorchester Illustration 2634

This photograph of the Lyceum Hall was published in the Dorchester Community News 1978.

Lyceum Hall on Meeting House Hill served as a public gathering place for many Dorchester activities. It was built in 1839 and dedicated in 1840 and located between First Church and East Street facing the Dorchester Town Common.

Horace Mann (advocate for American public education) spoke at the dedication of the building, which was intended to host events and public discussions that would provide an educational benefit to the residents of Dorchester. Some of the topics included, discussions of the abolition of slavery, recruitment for the Civil War, the annexation of Dorchester to Boston, and lectures by traveling speakers from all over the country on the lyceum speaker circuit.

The lyceum movement was an early form of organized adult education. Among the well-known speakers who participated were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Henry David Thoreau, Daniel Webster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Susan B. Anthony.

The first Roman Catholic Mass on Meeting House Hill took place in the building as did the first Episcopalian Mass in Dorchester.

The school department used the building in the twentieth century for special needs students and for shop classes such as mechanical arts, woodworking and other purposes. The building was demolished in 1955.

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Robert Barnet, Queen Isabella, Dorchester Illustration 2633

Posted on September 10, 2023 by earltaylor

Robert Barnet, Queen Isabella

Dorchester Illustration 2633

This scan of a photograph was published in The Extravaganza King by Anne Alison Barnet who tells the story of her ancestor, Robert Barnet.

The following is from the book jacket:

“This is the entertaining tale of Robert Barnet (1853-1933), a prosperous Boston sugar merchant, and the enormously popular musical theatricals he wrote and produced for the First Corps of Cadets, a volunteer militia of young upper-class Boston businessmen. He and his family lived at 27 Carruth St. for a number of years.

“Barnet had already made a name for himself in local amateur theater circles when the Corps hired the middle-aged father of five to stage fund-raisers to erect the armory, known today as the Park Plaza Castle. Barnet himself starred as Queen Isabella of Spain in 1492, his most famous work. Donning dresses and wigs for the female parts, the hefty, muscular leading ladies raised laugher rather than eyebrows from the audiences of prominent Bostonians who attended the shows.”

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Dorchester Illustration 2632, Louise Purington

Posted on September 3, 2023 by earltaylor

Louise Purington

Dorchester Illustration 2632

Louise Purington was a physician who lived on Allston Street from the 1880s until her death in 1916. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke Seminary in 1864 and from Hahnemann Medical College in 1874. Purington was the National Superintendent of the Department of Health and Heredity for the National Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

In 1885, Dr. Purington and Ella Gilbert Ives, established a private school for girls and operated it for nearly twenty-five years.

In 1903, at the World’s Convention of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Geneva, Switzerland, Purington was appointed world’s Superintendent of the Department of Health.

Her published works included many articles for leading periodicals and these two books:

The Literature of Missions, 1876

Medical Missions: Teaching and Healing, 1903

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Dorchester Illustration 2631, Susan Fessenden

Posted on August 27, 2023 by earltaylor

Susan Fessenden

Dorchester Illustration 2631

Susan (Snowden) Fessenden (1840-1932) lived in Dorchester from 1891 through 1900. During that time she was the president of the Massachusetts Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and attended the Cincinnati Female Seminary, graduating in 1857.

After graduating, she was a teacher at the seminary, until her marriage in 1864 to John Henry Fessenden. During that time, she became interested in church and temperance work and felt that she could contribute most effectively as a speaker, instead of a writer.

In 1871, Fessenden moved to Sioux City, Iowa. She spoke on such subjects as woman’s enfranchisement, help for the laboring classes, and prohibition of the liquor traffic. She started the Young Women’s Christian Association (Y.W.C.A.) of Sioux City. 

Fessenden moved to Boston in 1882, so her children could attend college. Her two daughters entered Boston University with the classes of 1886 and 1889, respectively, and later her son with the class of 1894.

Fessenden’s friends convinced her to work with the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Initially she held the post of National Superintendent of Franchise. In 1890, she was unanimously elected to the office of State President of the W.C.T.U. of Massachusetts and remained in that office for the next eight years.

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Mrs. Cochrane’s School, Dorchester Illustration 2360

Posted on August 20, 2023 by earltaylor

Mrs. Cochrane’s School

Dorchester Illustration 2630

Rev. John Codman, scion of a wealthy family, enlarged the old Thayer place at the top of Codman Hill.  The estate, which had acres of sloping fields and looked out over Lower Mills and the Blue Hills, was a popular stop-over for ministers on their way from the countryside to theological gatherings in Boston. The Codman mansion was the scene of heated debates during the Congregational church’s “Great Schism” during the early 1800’s, when the more liberal Unitarian wing of the church broke away from the more conservative Trinitarians. Following Codman’s death in 1847, the junction of Washington Street, Norfolk Street, Centre Street and Talbot Avenue, known as Baker’s Corners, was renamed Codman Square in honor of the beloved reverend.

The house remained in the Codman Family until the Civil War. After the Civil War it was leased to a boarding school for young ladies,  operated by Miss Hannah Perkins Dodge. In 1868, the Codman heirs sold the home property with the estate house and over six acres of land to Charlotte Cochrane, who operated a school for young women. The Codman heirs retained about thirty-nine acres of open land.  In 1870, Charlotte’s resident students included Edith Blackler, 18; Lucy Abbott, 18; Lucy Hagar, 18; Eliza Nichols, 19; Alice Waterman, 17; Ella Richardson, 16; and Hattie Jenkins, 12.  Giselle Dondist, a Fench teacher, also lived in the house along with three servants and Charlotte and her children, Arthur, 6; and Agness, 4.

The land from the former Codman estate was subdivided during the late 19th century and the early twentieth century.  The Codman Mansion was destroyed by fire in 1928.

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Dorchester Illustration 2629, John Fottler and John Fottler, Jr.

Posted on August 13, 2023 by earltaylor

John Fottler and John Fottler, Jr.

Dorchester Illustration 2629

John Fottler, Jr. (1841-1929) came from an agricultural family. 

The following is from A Healing Landscape: Environmental and Social history of the Site of Mass Audubon’s Boston Nature Centre. Second edition (Lincoln, MA 2016) page 54.

“Who were the Fottlers? In 1830, Jacob and Barbara Fottler emigrated from Germany to America with their teenage sons John and Jacob Jr. and four other children. Passing through Boston, they originally intended to settle in the Midwest, but tragedy struck: In a much-publicized incident, a steamer sank in the Ohio River at Cincinnati, with Jacob Sr. and two sisters among the dead. Returning back east, the remaining family settled in Dorchester, where John, the eldest son, soon became breadwinner for the family with a job in Quincy Market.

”In 1838, John married Mary Donald, an English immigrant, and the couple began their own family. Making a career in the growing and selling of plants for the needs of the expanding city, John worked in a number of places around Boston; he helped to deliver and plant some of the first shrubs and flowers used in the new landscaping on Boston Common, worked in a nursery in Cambridge, farmed on Savin Hill in Dorchester, and worked his way up to serving as landscaping and agricultural supervisor for various large estates in the area.

“Meanwhile, John’s younger brother Jacob Jr. had married a Hannah Williams of Roxbury and settled on a farm just north of the future BNC, on land now occupied by Franklin Park. Not long after, John and Mary settled with their family on another farm nearby. In the 1870 agricultural census, the Fottlers were the only farmers in the area who sold more garden produce, vegetables and flowers, than did their competitor on Walk Hill Street, Joseph Lambert; and, since John Fottler maintained strong ties to the marketing side of the business, they established a sort of family empire combining both production and distribution in one operation.”

John was called the Father of the Boston Park System. For many years, he lived in a house with the present Franklin Park and owned 21 acres of land there. He broached his plan for the city to purchase the land and induced a committee of the city government to take a look. Mayor Prince wrote to say that posterity would be grateful to him for his service in helping to establish Franklin Park.

John, Jr., grew up in Savin Hill and established a prominent seed company downtown in partnership with Schlegel, possibly another German immigrant. The firm of Schlegel & Fottler published an annual seed and plant catalog from the 1880s through the first decade of the 20th century. John, Jr., was a founder of another nationally known seed and plant company, the Fottler Riske Rawson Company. John, Jr, had the house at 389 Washington St. built for his home.

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Charles H. Belledeu, Dorchester Illustration 2628

Posted on August 6, 2023 by earltaylor

Charles H. Belledeu

Dorchester Illustration 2628

Charles H. Belledeu was a contractor who built several houses in the Ashmont section of Dorchester.

The following article about Belledue was published in the The Dorchester Beacon on May 5, 1900, is an example of local journalism from the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries that emphasized positive messages.

Charles H. Belledeu

“The subject of this sketch was born in West Deer Isle, Maine, October 7, 1860.  His father was Louis Belledeu, a sea captain, and was born in France. His mother was Lucy Sweetser, a native of Deer Isle. His father retired after following the sea many years and settled down on the farm which was the old homestead. C. H. and his father could not agree. He told his father one day after a reprimand for some boyish prank he was going to leave home and come to Boston, but his father laughed at the idea and said he would have to go and bring him home, as he would never be able to support himself. 

“One morning, he packed up his valise and bade that all good-by, and started for Boston with $3.50 in his pocket, arriving here without any friends or anyone to help him. He looked for work until his money was all gone, then thought what his father told him. He could not bear to think of going back unsuccessful and made up his mind to get a job. He at last got a chance to learn the carpenter’s trade in Mr. Lilford’s shop at the north end.  After three years and a half, he had learned his trade and then went to work for J. & C. A. Noyes, 5 Province Court, Boston.  He saved his money and went to school evenings and finally got to be foreman. 

“When his firm dissolved partnership, he bought out J. Noyes and started for himself. At the end of ten years, he went home on a vacation and told his father he could buy him out then. The old gentleman was pleased with his success. Mr. Belledeu has built several houses and a hotel in Dorchester, which he rents, also other houses in the suburbs of Boston. He has had some large contracts for buildings in Boston. He also makes a specialty of store fittings, which he sends all over the country.

“Mr. Belledeu is a 32d degree Mason, a member of the Mystic Shrine. His is a great lover of horses, which is his hobby. He is secretary of the Dorchester Gentlemen’s Driving Club and one of the racing committee of the Boston Driving Club.

“Mr. Belledeu married Miss Viola A. Powers, October 26, 1887, a daughter of the well-known physician and surgeon, Dr. T. F. Powers of Boston, and a niece of Senator Powers of Vermont.”

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Dorchester Illustration 2627, Baker Chocolate Company

Posted on July 30, 2023 by earltaylor

Dorchester Illustration 2627, Baker Chocolate Company

Baker Chocolate was a frequent advertiser of its products in national magazines before the era of radio and television. Many of its ads were aimed toward parents. The advertisement in the today’s illustration targets the mid to upper classes — or at least those who would like to think they are part of those classes.

James Baker started the Baker Chocolate Company at Dorchester Lower Mills in 1780. His grandson Walter Baker gave the company the name Walter Baker and Company in the mid-19 th century. The company was sold to the Forbes Syndicate in 1896, which carried on the business until it was sold to  Postum Cereal in 1927.   It is now part of the Kraft Heinz conglomerate.

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