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Boston 


Henry  Adams,  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury philosopher,  said  that  the  history 
of  America  is  not  the  history  of  the 
few,  but  the  history  of  the  many.  The 
people  of  Boston's  neighborhoods  have 
accepted  the  challenge  of  Adam's 
statement  to  produce  "people's  his- 
tories" of  their  own  communities. 
Hundreds  of  Bostonians  formed  com- 
mittees in  each  of  fifteen  neighborhoods 
of  the  city,  volunteering  their  time  over 
the  past  year  and  a  half  to  research 
in  libraries,  search  for  photographs, 
produce  questionnaires,  transcribe 
tapes,  assist  in  writing  and  editing,  and 
most  important,  act  as  interviewers 
and  subjects  of  "oral  history"  research. 
These  booklets  are  not  traditional 
textbook  histories,  and  we  have  not  at- 
tempted to  cull  a  statistical  sample. 
We  have  simply  talked  with  our 
neighbors,  people  who  remember, 
sometimes  with  fondness,  sometimes 
with  regret,  but  always  with  wisdom. 
For  each  of  us  has  his  or  her  own 
story  to  tell,  and  these  stories  are  vital 
to  the  development  of  our  neighbor- 
hoods and  our  city. 

©  1976,  The  Boston  200  Corporation 
Boston  200  is  the  city's  official  program 
to  observe  the  Bicentennial  of  the 
American  Revolution  from  April  igy^ 
through  December  1976. 

Kevin  H.  White,  Mayor 
Katharine  D.  Kane, 

President,  The  Boston  200  Corporation 
I  Beacon  Street 
Boston,  Massachusetts  02108 

617-338-1775 


DO  RCHES TER 


A 

.xTa.  CH  E  c  KE  RBO  A  R  D  of  small  towns  housing  one- 
third  of  all  Boston  residents  makes  Dorchester  a  diverse 
city  within  a  city,  a  "neighborhood  of  neighborhoods." 
One  visitor  described  his  first  impression  of  the  com- 
munity as  "rows  and  rows  of  triple-deckers,  thousands 
of  them  .  .  ."  But  shop  at  an  Uphams  Corner  "Grocer- 
ia,"  visit  a  Field's  Corner  pub  or  swim  at  Savin  Hill 
Beach  and  the  image  quickly  fades.  By  a  local  politi- 
cian's count,  there  are  "at  least  twenty"  distinct  sec- 
tions to  Dorchester,  each  with  its  own  identity  and 
each  part  of  a  complex  urban  environment. 

The  vibrant  city  landscape  has  not  completely  ob- 
literated the  skeleton  of  the  original  wilderness.  Dor- 
chester's seven  rocky  hills,  lush  gardens,  powerful  river 
and  sheltered  harbor  give  us  some  idea  of  what  the 
first  English  colonists  saw  when  they  stepped  onto 
Savin  Hill  Beach  on  a  June  day  in  1630,  a  few  weeks 
before  their  countrymen  settled  on  the  other  side  of  the 
harbor  in  Boston. 

Local  legend  has  it  that  Chickatawbut,  chief  of  the 
Neponsets,  greeted  the  new  arrivals  in  English,  offering 
them  fish  and  a  handshake  of  friendship.  Whether  or 
not  the  story  is  true,  the  natives  could  have  learned 
English  from  passing  fur-traders  or  from  Englishman 

FRONT  cover:  Farming  in  Mattapan,  late  igth  century 
INSIDE  cover:  Advertisement,  c.  1880 


David  Thompson,  a  trader  who  lived  and  fished  on  a 
small  island  just  off  the  mainland.  The  Indians  prob- 
ably spoke  a  few  words  of  French  as  well,  since  French 
trappers  had  hunted  in  the  area  as  far  back  as  the  late 
sixteenth  century. 

Chickatawbut's  tribe,  who  gave  their  name,  Mas- 
sachusetts, to  the  entire  province,  did  not  feel  the  Eng- 
lishman's need  for  ownership.  They  were  happy  to 
share  their  land,  and  amiably  allowed  the  newcomers 
to  build  homes  in  the  area.  They  even  signed  their 
marks  to  papers  which  would,  by  English  law,  eventu- 
ally deprive  them  of  their  ancestral  hunting  grounds 
and  cornfields. 

By  Chickatawbut's  death  in  1633,  the  first  group  of 
English  Puritans  had  begun  to  shape  their  settlement 
to  suit  them.  Dorchester  took  on  the  appearance  of  an 
enlarged  Devonshire  village,  as  land  was  parceled  out, 
cattle-fields  set  aside,  and  a  fort  and  a  meetinghouse 
built. 

The  earnest  Puritans  who  set  about  building  log 
houses  in  the  colonial  wilderness  had  waited  many 
years  to  come  to  North  America.  The  Nonconformists, 
as  the  Puritans  were  known  in  England,  had  been  hav- 
ing difficulties  since  the  English  government  outlawed 

I 


JLOTUUn^ 


Part  of  Smith's  Map  of  New  England  from  Mercator's  Atlas,  1625 


Puritanism  in  1593.  The  group  living  around  Dorches- 
ter, England  organized  themselves  into  a  church  fel- 
lowship led  by  the  Anglican  minister  John  White,  the 
"Patriarch  of  Dorchester."  Reverend  White  dreamed 
of  a  Puritan  commonwealth  in  America  where  Dorset 
fishermen  and  traders  could  set  up  a  spiritual  haven 
"that  they  might  worship  God  according  to  the  light  of 
their  own  conscience."  Although  the  idealistic  priest 
never  left  England,  or  the  Anglican  church,  he  realized 
his  hopes  as  he  watched  his  parishioners  set  sail  on  the 
"Mary  and  John"  for  their  adventure  in  the  New 
World. 

The  people  who  made  up  the  Dorchester  Company 
were  of  a  different  stamp  from  the  professional  explor- 
ers and  migrant  trappers  of  early  days.  Roger  Clap,  a 
member  of  the  company,  tells  us  in  his  Memoirs: 

"Many  of  the  people  were  trading  men,  and  at 
first  designed  Dorchester  for  a  place  of  trade,  and  ac- 
cordingly built  a  fort  upon  a  hill  called  Rock  Hill  ..." 

The  Nonconformists  sought  the  security  they  had 
so  sorely  longed  for  in  England,  so  the  first  thing  they 
did  was  to  build  a  fort.  By  1639  they  had  guns  set  up  at 
the  present  Savin  Hill,  and  ammunition  stored  at  their 
new  meetinghouse. 

The  early  Dorchesterites  built  their  community 
around  parcels  of  land  defined  by  the  seven  hills  of  the 
bay  area  and  the  valleys  around  them.  In  dividing  the 
wilderness  land,  they  set  the  characteristic  pattern  for 
Dorchester's  future.  The  area  grew  as  a  collection  of 
small  "villages"  each  with  characteristics  of  its  own, 
acting  as  a  unit  in  matters  of  common  social  and  eco- 
nomic interests. 

The  first  section  of  Dorchester  to  be  cultivated  by 
the  colonists  lay  along  the  path  between  the  palisaded 
fort  at  Rock  (or  Savin)  Hill  and  the  first  church,  not 
far  from  its  present  site  on  Meeting  House  Hill.  The 
English  cut  logs  from  nearby  woods  and  gathered 
thatch  from  local  salt  marshes  for  their  farmhouses.  Be- 
cause the  settlers  were  afraid  of  harassment  by  Indians, 
they  made  a  rule  that  all  homes  were  to  be  built  within 


a  half-mile  of  the  meetinghouse.  They  built  their 
homes  along  a  road  which  followed  the  line  of  today's 
Pleasant  Street  and  Savin  Hill  Avenue  on  a  piece  of 
level  land  known  as  Allen's  Plain.  The  peninsula  on 
the  south  side  of  the  bay  (now  South  Boston)  was  a 
convenient  place  for  keeping  cows,  and  smaller  ani- 
mals grazed  near  the  present  site  of  Columbia  Point 
and  the  University  of  Massachusetts,  on  the  "calf  pas- 
ture." 

The  late  Mr.  Richard  Bonney,  who  knew  probably 
more  about  early  Dorchester  than  anyone  else,  described  the  net- 
work of  seventeenth  century  roads  that  set  the  scene  for  later 
settlement: 

"One  early  road  covered  the  route  of  Pond  Street 
and  Crescent  Avenue  to  the  Cow  Pasture.  From  the 
"Five  Corners"  at  the  end  of  Pond  Street,  a  land  ran 
towards  the  Neck  (Boston  Street).  Jones'  Hill  was  cir- 
cled by  a  road  running  from  the  meetinghouse  along 
Cottage,  Humphrey,  and  Dudley  Streets  to  the  center 
of  Old  Roxbury  at  Eliot  Square. 

"When  Israel  Stoughton  set  up  his  grist  mill  at  the 
falls  of  the  Neponset  in  1633,  necessary  to  build  a 

road  across  the  Great  Lots.  This  left  Hancock  Street  at 
the  foot  of  Meeting  House  Hill,  and  followed  Winter 
and  Adams  Streets  to  the  Lower  Mills.  It  became  an 
important  route  from  Boston  to  the  Plymouth  colony 
and  was  known  as  the  Lower  Road.  In  1654  the  Colo- 
ny ordered  the  construction  of  a  better  road,  and  a  re- 
markably straight  highway,  over  a  right  of  way  four 
rods  wide,  was  laid  out  from  Roxbury  to  Braintree, 
crossing  the  Neponset  on  a  new  bridge  at  the  Lower 
Mills.  This  followed  the  present  Warren  and  Washing- 
ton Streets.  In  1661 ,  River  Street  from  the  Lower  Mills 
along  the  Neponset  to  Dedham  was  constructed.  But 
the  oldest  road  of  all  was  an  Indian  trail,  running  from 
the  upper  falls  of  the  Neponset  (Mattapan)  to  salt  wa- 
ter, partly  perpetuated  in  Norfolk  Street." 

As  the  community  set  up  this  network  of  roads,  new 


3 


settlers  came  in  droves  to  add  to  the  population  of  the 
successful  new  province.  Three  thousand  people  came 
in  1636  alone.  With  more  Englishmen  arriving  in  the 
Dorchester  Bay  area,  the  few  remaining  Indians 
moved  farther  south,  signing  over  almost  all  of  their 
native  lands.  The  white  settlers  in  1656  set  up  the  first 
"reservation"  in  the  colonies,  at  Ponkapoag,  and  the 
Neponsets  eked  out  an  existence  as  their  numbers 
dwindled.  The  Indians  continued  to  make  seasonal  vis- 
its to  the  falls  at  Lower  Mills  until  the  mid-i8oos,  when 
the  last  of  the  tribe  had  died  or  been  assimilated. 

The  nineteenth  century  orator  Edward  Everett  re- 
ported that  in  his  boyhood  the  "last  of  the  Ponka- 
poags,"  a  very  old  man,  still  appeared  each  summer  at 
Lower  Mills,  "to  fish  and  wail  upon  the  tribal  burial 
mound." 

With  Indian  lands  legally  appropriated,  Dorches- 
ter grew  into  a  prosperous  provincial  town  during  the 
seventeenth  and  eighteenth  centuries,  but  not  without 
a  few  crises  to  weather.  In  1675,  Wassasamon,  one  of 
the  few  Dorchester  Indians  who  had  survived  the  colo- 
nists' incursions,  was  killed  as  the  result  of  a  British  le- 
gal dispute.  This  was  one  of  the  events  which  directly 
instigated  "King  Phillip's  War,"  a  last  gasp  of  Indian 
outrage  against  the  colonial  takeover  of  their  lands. 
The  war  seriously  depleted  the  population  of  Dorches- 
ter, causing  some  townspeople  to  become  refugees  in 
nearby  Boston,  and  producing  famine.  In  a  move  curi- 
ously prescient  of  things  to  come,  friends  in  Dublin 
sent  the  colonists  shiploads  of  provisions — food,  clothes, 
and  money.  Dorchester  would  eventually  repay  their 
kindness,  during  the  horrors  of  the  nineteenth  century 
Irish  famine. 

By  the  time  of  the  American  Revolution,  Dorches- 
ter had  become  an  agglomeration  of  small  rural  com- 
munities connected  by  a  network  of  coach  roads  lead- 
ing from  one  mill  settlement  to  another.  While  multi- 
plying in  population,  it  shrank  geographically.  The 
original  Dorchester  had  stretched  from  the  Boston  bor- 
der almost  to  the  Rhode  Island  line.  As  more  and  more 


Englishmen  arrived  in  Massachusetts,  daughter  towns 
formed  themselves  out  of  the  "Southern  Grants"  of 
Dorchester.  Canton,  Foxboro,  Wrenthem,  Milton, 
Stoughton  and  Sharon  all  grew  into  independent  com- 
munities, as  fertile  lands  and  the  industrial  power  of 
the  Neponset  River  waterfalls  brought  prosperity  to 
the  entire  area. 

By  the  mid-eighteenth  century,  farmers  and  mill- 
owners  were  enjoying  the  good  life  their  ancestors  had 
set  out  to  find.  But  colonial  politics  threatened  their 
hard-won  prosperity.  The  burden  of  British  taxes  was 
bringing  colonists  to  the  breaking  point.  In  1 765,  the 
members  of  the  Dorchester  town  meeting  instructed 
their  representative: 

"to  use  the  utmost  of  his  endeavors,  with  the 
Great  and  General  Court,  to  obtain  the  repeal  of 
the  late  parliamentary  act  (always  earnestly  assert- 
ing our  rights  as  free-born  Englishmen),  and  his 
best  skill  in  preventing  the  use  of  stamped  paper  in 
this  government." 

As  Revolution  came  closer,  a  number  of  Dorchester 
men  became  involved  with  the  Sons  of  Liberty,  an  un- 
derground political  organization  active  in  next-door 
Boston.  The  Sons  often  met  in  Dorchester  to  plan  strat- 
egy and  to  regroup  forces  after  their  Boston  activities. 
In  one  such  gathering,  after  a  1 769  protest,  over  300  of 
the  Sons  dined  at  Robinson's  Tavern  in  Dorchester. 
They  washed  down  their  dinner  of  barbecued  pig  with 
45  toasts,  each  one  more  colorful  than  the  last,  ending 
with  a  call  for  "strong  halters,  firm  blocks  and  sharp 
axes  to  all  such  as  deserve  either."  Despite  such  intense 
toasting,  John  Adams  reports  in  his  diary  that,  amaz- 
ingly, "not  one  person  was  intoxicated  or  near  it." 

Dorchester's  hills  were  vital  to  the  colonial  defense 
of  Boston,  as  they  protected  the  harbor  and  provided  a 
look-out.  In  1 776,  General  George  Washington  devised 
a  plan  to  move  cannons  from  Fort  Ticonderoga  in  New 
York  to  the  highest  of  these  hills,  Dorchester  Heights, 


4 


Rural  Dorchester  from  Mount  Bowdoin,  c.  i8§o 


in  a  part  of  Dorchester  now  South  Boston.  The  fortifi- 
cation caught  the  British  ships  in  the  harbor  by  sur- 
prise, so  much  so  that  they  left  Boston.  The  event  was 
a  crucial  turning  point  in  the  Revolution,  and  an  occa- 
sion for  the  yearly  March  1 7  th  Evacuation  Day  cele- 
brations. 

Although  Dorchester  was  home  to  a  few  Loyalists, 
the  majority  of  town  meeting  members  seem  to  have 
been  Patriots.  Dorchester,  in  some  ways,  set  a  model 
for  the  new  American  government.  The  community 
experimented  with  democracy  by  establishing  a  town 
meeting  system,  with  votes  for  all  free  church  mem- 
bers, and  set  up  America's  first  tax-supported  "public" 
school,  open  to  all  boys  in  the  district.  The  Revolution 
did  not  really  change  the  lifestyle  of  Dorchester.  After 
the  war,  farmers  continued  their  planting,  and  mill 
owners  expanded  their  industries. 


Dorchester's  industrial  life  began  early,  as  her  en- 
terprising citizens  took  a  look  at  their  new  environ- 
ment, and  decided  to  use  the  power  of  the  Neponset 
River's  waterfalls  for  a  profit.  By  the  beginning  of  the 
"Industrial  Revolution,"  Dorchester  was  a  milltown 
and  an  important  manufacturing  center.  At  one  time, 
Dorchester  contained  the  country's  only  powder  mill, 
chocolate  mill,  cracker-maker,  pottery  works,  and 
playing  card  factory.  It  was  also  home  to  cotton,  wool- 
en, and  paper  mills,  as  well  as  the  first  copper  works  in 
America  (established  by  Paul  Revere),  and  several 
stone  quarries. 

By  the  1830s  Dorchester  had  put  itself  firmly  on  the 
industrial  map.  Mill  wheels  turned,  trading  ships  and 
whalers  plied  the  harbor  and  fishermen  brought  in  her- 
ring and  cod.  One  wealthy  citizen  even  tried  to  culti- 
vate oyster  beds  with  imported  Maryland  oysters.  Al- 


5 


Swan  House  designed  by 


though  that  business  failed,  neighborhood  youngsters 
managed  to  pick  up  a  few  oysters  every  summer  until 
the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Heyward's  Gazet- 
teer described  Dorchester  in  the  1830s  as 

"An  agricultural  and  manufactory  town  of  over 
3500  inhabitants,  large  farms  covering  broad  acres, 
and  factories  (Thomas  Crohane's  being  the  first  in 
that  part  of  the  country  to  manufacture  playing 
cards)  cotton,  chocolate  and  starch  mills." 

Until  the  mid-nineteenth  century,  Dorchester  was 
a  self-sufficient  Yankee  community,  commercing  with 
Boston,  yet  not  dependent  on  the  larger  town.  It  had 
relinquished  its  former  pasture-land  (now  South  Bos- 
ton) after  a  fervent  fight,  but  it  still  included  Hyde 
Park. 

The  coming  of  the  railroad  marked  the  beginning 
of  the  end  of  Dorchester's  independence.  In  1856,  the 


6 


Bulfinch  {painting  on  brick) 


Old  Colony  railroad  established  its  first  line  from  Bos- 
ton and  Dorchester  was  on  its  way  to  becoming  a  met- 
ropolitan suburb.  Railroad  tracks  were  rapidly  built 
over  Dorchester  marsh-land  and  the  area  became  eas- 
ily accessible  to  Bostonians. 

By  this  time,  thousands  of  immigrants,  a  large  por- 
tion of  them  Irish,  were  filling  up  Boston  and  citizens 
of  older  families  began  to  look  farther  from  the  city  for 
relief  from  overcrowding.  They  were  people  who  had 
bought  South  End  townhouses  or  Yankee  families  who 
had  made  their  money  on  immigrant  labor.  They  felt 
displaced  and  sought  escape. 

The  emerging  middle  class  who  were  building 
homes  in  Dorchester  wanted,  not  a  suburb  as  we  know 
it,  but  a  re-creation  of  their  city  home,  with  a  little 
more  green,  more  space  and  opportunity  for  elegance, 
to  share  with  people  "of  their  own  kind".  There  was  an 
economic  discrimination  to  nineteenth  century  Dor- 
chester. Unless  someone  was  already  living  there  be- 


fore  the  development  of  the  "garden  suburbs"  he  had 
to  be  a  "man  of  means"  in  order  to  buy  there.  This 
economic  segregation  guaranteed  virtual  isolation 
from  immigrant  society,  at  least  until  the  end  of  the 
century. 

But  Dorchester  was  not  to  remain  a  haven  from  ur- 
ban problems  for  long.  A  few  immigrants  and  sons  of 
immigrants  amassed  enough  money  to  move  out  of  the 
central  city.  They  saw  the  living  space  and  con- 
venient transportation  of  Dorchester  and  began  to  buy 
homes  in  the  new  suburb.  The  newer  ethnic  groups 
felt  their  prospects  for  power  lay  with  Boston,  where 
their  cousins  were  beginning  to  take  over  politically 
from  the  old  Yankee  establishment.  Real  estate  entre- 
preneurs also  thought  that  union  with  Boston  would 
raise  the  value  of  their  investments.  Although  old  Dor- 
chester families  shouted  loudly  against  the  move,  the 
town  of  Dorchester  voted  to  annex  itself  to  the  City  of 
Boston  in  i86g.  Father  Daniel  Dunn,  pastor  of 
St.  Margaret's  Parish,  wrote  about  Annexation  Day: 

"Springlike  weather,  with  green  lawns  and 
emerging  buds,  was  the  atmosphere  at  that  mid- 
night hour  when  the  first  Sunday  of  1870  met  the 
first  Monday.  At  that  stroke  of  midnight,  the  239- 
year-old  Town  of  Dorchester  became  the  new 
Ward  Sixteen  of  the  City  of  Boston. 

"A  majority  of  the  voters  of  both  the  City  of  Bos- 
ton and  the  Town  of  Dorchester  who  had  gone  to 
the  polls  on  the  previous  June  22nd  were  in  favor  of 
the  annexation.  The  vote  tally  in  Dorchester  was 
928  in  favor,  with  726  opposed. 

"This  annexation  terminated  most  of  the  duties  of 
Selectmen  James  H.  Upham,  William  Pope,  and 
William  Henry  Swan.  But  they  had  a  week  of 
grace.  Nathaniel  B.  Shurtleff,  mayor  of  Boston,  in 
his  address  to  the  City  Council,  spoke  of  the  union. 

"He  charged  the  council,  Tn  welcoming  this  new 
addition  to  our  city,  we  must  endeavor  to  see  that 


all  the  rights,  reasonable  demands,  and  just  privi- 
leges of  the  inhabitants  of  the  Sixteenth  Ward  are 
fairly  considered  and  attended  to.' 

"The  mayor  remarked  that  Dorchester  was  'dis- 
tinguished for  the  delightfulness  of  its  views.' 

"Bringing  particular  joy  to  the  approximately 
1 1 ,000  new  citizens  of  Boston,  were  the  words  of  his 
forceful  wish,  'let  the  Cochituate  water  flow  to  such 
places  where  it  is  required  and  absolutely  needed.' 
The  pure  water  of  Lake  Cochituate  had  been  piped 
to  the  homes  of  Boston  residents  since  1848.  Now 
the  homes  of  Dorchester  would  be  tied  in  with  the 
city  water  supply. 

"Pleasure  in  being  a  Ward  Sixteen  citizen  was 
shown  by  the  owner  of  the  J.  H.  Upham  Company, 
who  had  the  new  title  painted  on  his  grocery  de- 
livery wagons.  They  had  come  up  in  the  world!" 

After  annexation,  Dorchester  multiplied  in  popu- 
lation as  new  trolley  and  subway  lines  made  even  the 
more  distant  sections  an  easy  commute  from  the  city. 
Pastures,  farms  and  open  lands  filled  with  elegant 
mansions,  two-family  homes,  and  beginning  in  the 
1 880s,  "triple-deckers,"  Dorchester's  particular  con- 
tribution to  American  architecture.  The  latter,  with 
its  comfortable  living  space  and  economical  upkeep, 
suited  itself  to  the  new  lifestyle  of  Dorchester. 

The  second  generation  Americans,  who  were  mov- 
ing into  Dorchester's  two-family  and  three-family 
homes  at  the  beginning  of  the  century,  were  mostly 
Irish.  They  would  almost  entirely  displace  the  older 
Yankee  families,  and  would  themselves  be  followed  by 
a  succession  of  ethnic  groups — Polish,  Jewish,  Lithua- 
nians, Italians,  French-Canadians,  and  after  World 
War  II,  Afro- Americans,  Cubans,  Puerto  Ricans, 
Haitians  and  Cape  Verdeans.  Many  things  have  hap- 
pened in  all  of  the  many  communities  that  are  Dor- 
chester, in  the  last  80  years,  but  the  pattern  of  small, 
closely-knit  neighborhoods  established  300  years  ago 
continues  to  characterize  the  district. 


7 


View  of  Dorchester  with  Washington  Street  in  foreground,  c.  igoo 


Long-time  residents  of  a  few  of  Dorchester's  "vil- 
lages" talk  about  their  lives  and  their  environment, 
how  the  stage  was  set  for  community  life  in  Dorchester 
from  the  1890s  to  mid  twentieth  century. 

Edward  Everett  Square,  Jones  Hill 
&  Uphams  Corner 

Some  of  the  earliest  homes  in  Dorchester  were 
built  in  the  district  around  Edward  Everett  Square, 
originally  known  as  "Five  Corners."  This  same  area 
was  later  the  first  home  of  the  "three-decker,"  and  is 


now  a  dividing  line  between  the  meat-packing/indus- 
trial area  of  Dorchester  and  two-  and  three-family  res- 
idences. 

A  hundred  years  ago,  Jones  Hill  was  home  to  some 
of  the  most  elegant  of  Boston's  upper  class.  Today  it  is 
an  ethnically-mixed  area  where  Spanish  is  often  heard 
in  the  local  groceries  and  young  professionals  are  mov- 
ing into  the  lovely  old  homes.  Uphams  Corner's  loca- 
tion at  the  junction  of  five  streetcar  lines  made  it  Dor- 
chester's marketplace.  The  world's  first  supermarket, 
known  simply  as  "The  Store,"  was  founded  here. 

DouglasShandTuccizj-  a  young  professional  historian 


8 


whose  specialty  is  Victorian  Dorchester.  His  most  recent  book. 
The  Second  Settlement,  1 875-1 925,  is  a  history  of  Jones 
Hill.  A  member  of  one  of  the  few  Yankee  families  remaining  on 
the  hill,  he  was  educated  in  private  schools  and  graduated  from 
Harvard  University.  With  an  air  of  "'noblesse  oblige,"  he  re- 
grets the  exodus  of  the  "professional  class"  he  feels  Dorchester 
needs  for  leadership,  and  with  an  arch  glance  tells  of  his  part  in 
the  Dorchester  secessionist  movement  of  the  early  yos.  He  gives 
us  the  perspective  of  a  Yankee  historian  in  the  carefully-modu- 
lated resonance  of  an  elite  Victorian  gentleman: 

"The  Hill  was  named  after  Thomas  Jones,  who,  by 
way  of  letters  patented  in  1635,  was  given  most  of  the 
land  where  the  garden  and  the  Stoughton  estates  used 
to  be.  The  foundations  of  his  house  are  still  standing. 
The  hill  sort  of  slumbered  along  for  200  years  just  as  a 
pleasant  large  farming  community,  with  olive  groves 
and  cherry  orchards,  until  the  1870s.  When  Dorchester 
was  annexed  to  the  city,  owners  of  large  estates  saw  a 
magnificient  opportunity  to  make  a  vast  amount  of 
money  in  a  real  estate  speculation. 

"What  the  estate  owners  usually  did  was  to  enclose 
their  own  houses  in  very  small  lots  and  build  similar 
houses  along  the  streets  which  they  laid  out  in  their  es- 
tates. They  tried  to  control  the  income  level  and  social 
class  of  people  that  came  in.  The  result  is  that  the 
townhouses  on  the  hill  today  are  very  close  together 
and  lined  up  right  on  the  street. 

"There  were  enormous  class  differences  during  the 
building  fever.  Most  of  the  people  coming  to  Dorches- 
ter after  annexation  were  newly  rich.  And  they  were 
very  anxious,  if  they  were  to  build  a  fine  big  house  for 
themselves  with  an  elegant  front  porch  and  beautiful 
drawing  rooms  and  all  the  rest,  that  they  should  not 
have  next  door  to  them  some  sort  of  worker's  cottage. 
It  was  not  a  racial  question,  but  one  of  income  and 
socio-economic  class. 

"I  see  enormous  evidence  of  profound  Irish-Cath- 
olic, Protestant-Anglo-Saxon  cooperation,  with  very 
little  racial  animosity  in  the  whole  period.  What  con- 
ditioned their  attitudes  toward  each  other  was  the  kind 


of  neighbor  you  were.  For  instance,  the  most  flamboy- 
ant Irish  Catholic  in  Honey  Fitz's  entourage  located 
on  Cushing  Avenue  in  the  late  '80s  and  a  whole  flock 
of  Yankees  of  great  wealth  and  importance  built  on 
either  side  of  him.  In  1914,  a  man  named  O'Neill 
bought  the  largest  and  most  famous  house  on  Cushing 
Avenue.  No  e.xodus  of  Yankees  for  ten  or  fifteen  years 
thereafter.  But  O'Neill  had  a  big  shiny  motorcar;  he 
had  a  chauffeur;  he  had  servants;  he  was  a  very  proper 
kind  of  Victorian.  And  it  was  those  things  that  seemed 
to  matter  to  people  in  those  days.  They  were  insecure 
about  their  economic  class.  And  they  wanted  to  be  re- 
inforced by  everyone  around  them. 

"The  only  major  change  which  occurred  with  any 
trauma  was  the  introduction  of  three-deckers.  There 
was  much  prejudice  against  them  because  they  were 
considered  tenements.  After  World  War  I,  in  the  ser- 
vant-less age,  prosperous  Yankees  and  Irish  started 
moving  towards  West  Roxbury  and  Jamaica  Plain  be- 
cause Jones  Hill  was  getting  congested  with  three- 
deckers.  The  people  who  moved  in  were  mostly  middle 
class,  and  although  they  made  even  single  houses  into 
three  and  four  family  houses,  they  still  looked  nice. 
They  were  still  painted  and  the  lawns  still  done.  The 
result  is  that  the  neighborhood  survived,  down  to 
World  War  II  with  some  degree  of  prosperity. 

"But  on  Jones  Hill,  there  was  a  significant  migra- 
tion after  World  War  II.  Jamaica  Plain  and  West  Rox- 
bury seemed  to  exert  great  pull  on  professional  people. 
What  little  remnant  there  was  of  the  professional  class 
after  World  War  II  saw  the  enormous  push  of  blacks 
from  Roxbury,  and  without  telling  anybody  about  it, 
the  professionals  decided  to  move  someplace  in  the 
suburbs.  They  fled  away  surreptitiously  in  the  night, 
and  thus  placed  the  community  in  the  position  it's  in 
today,  where  you  don't  have  the  kind  of  leadership 
class  to  work  toward  an  integrated  neighborhood.  It 
was  because  of  the  racial  change  my  uncle  moved  after 
World  War  II.  I  remember  him  saying  to  my  grand- 
mother that  the  blacks  are  headed  this  way  and  some- 


9 


day  the  property  is  going  to  be  worth  nothing.  And 
that  kind  of  terrible  economic  logic  drove  many  people 
out  of  the  area. 

"Dorchester's  biggest  problem  today  is  the  general 
opinion  that  nobody  lives  here  unless  they  have  to. 
Hope  lies  in  concerning  the  city  again  with  its  neigh- 
borhoods, with  home  ownership." 

Along  with  Yankee  and  Irish  families  moving  into  the  mansions 
on  Gushing  Avenue,  the  growing  Dorchester  suburb  of  the 
i8gos  attracted  families  of  more  moderate  meatu.  John 
Gadigan  was  five  years  old  when  his  family  moved  from  the 
South  End  to  St.  Margaret's  parish.  He  has  lived  in  the  same 
neighborhood  for  82  years.  Cadigan  started  work  with  the  Bos- 
ton Herald  as  a  teenager,  and  retired  in  igys  as  the  oldest  em- 
ployee at  the  Herald-  Traveler.  He  is  a  strong,  muscular  man 
whose  face  reddens  with  indignation  as  he  describes  the  igig 
Boston  Police  Strike,  whose  chin  lifts  with  pride  as  he  talks  of 
the  accomplishments  of  his  sons,  and  whose  eyes  dance  roguishly 
as  he  relates  boyhood  pranks. 

"Both  my  parents  were  born  in  this  country.  They 
were  of  Irish  descent  and  grew  up  in  the  South  End 
section  of  Boston.  My  grandmother  and  grandfather  on 
on  my  mother's  side  lived  on  Genessee  Street,  present- 
ly the  site  of  the  Herald  American.  My  grandmother 
ran  a  boarding  house  there.  When  the  'greenhorns' 
would  come  from  Ireland,  somebody  over  there  would 
say,  'Go  and  see  Meg  Whooley.'  So  they'd  go  to  her. 
The  area  was  pretty  much  Irish.  But  in  the  i8gos  the 
character  of  the  place  was  changing.  The  Irish  were 
moving  out  and  the  Jews  were  moving  in.  Dorchester 
was  a  growing  suburb  then,  and  this  was  largely  an 
Irish  neighborhood.  There  was  no  reason  for  our  com- 
ing here  other  than  this  general  movement. 

"We  first  lived  on  Bellflower  Street.  In  fact,  I  lived 
where  the  1966  fire  started.  Whether  that's  considered 
Dorchester  or  South  Boston  has  always  been  a  moot 
point  to  me.  According  to  Dorchesterites,  Mt.  Vernon 
Street  was  generally  accepted  as  the  boundary  line  be- 
tween Dorchester  and  South  Boston.  But  Washburn 


Street  was  the  end  of  our  parish  line.  *  It  was  the 
boundary  line  and  to  me  was  a  legitimate  reason  for 
being  included  in  Dorchester.  Unhappily  for  us  kids 
who  went  to  school  here,  it  was  never  considered  South 
Boston  by  the  South  Boston  people.  Unhappily  I  say, 
because  the  Seventeenth  of  March  has  been  a  big  day 
for  South  Boston  always.  For  years  it  was  never  hon- 
ored by  the  school  department,  but  after  considerable 
digging,  they  decided  to  give  us  half  a  holiday.  In  the 
old  days  the  holiday  was  complete  in  South  Boston, 
but  only  in  the  Roger  Clap  School.  In  the  Russell 
School  we  only  got  half  a  holiday. 

"I  went  to  the  Roger  Clap  School.  I  was  in  the 
kindergarten  there  with  the  most  wonderful  teacher. 
Well,  they  kicked  us  out  of  there.  They  made  an  ele- 
mentary school  out  of  it  and  built  the  Russell  School 
for  what  they  term  junior  high  now.  I  wasn't  too  keen 
about  going  to  school.  I  got  promoted  but  I  was  never 
at  the  top  of  the  class,  I'll  tell  you  that.  I  really  didn't 
appreciate  the  value  of  an  education  until  I  graduated 
from  grammar  school. 

"I  had  an  uncle  who  was  working  at  the  Herald 
and  on  a  summer  vacation  he'd  get  a  job  riding  on  the 
wagons,  distributing  advertising.  I  started  there  to 
work  for  the  Herald.  Once  I  got  out  of  school,  about 
1904,  1905,  that  was  my  first  job.  I  was  16  years  old, 
and  had  completed  grammar  school.  My  extent  of  high 
school  was  night  school,  two  years  at  South  Boston 
High.  But  there  were  other  kids  in  the  neighborhood 
and  one  of  these,  Henry  Donovan,  is  still  a  friend  to- 
day. Donovan  stayed  in  school  and  graduated  from 
English  High  in  1906.  I'm  an  ex  officio  member  of  the 
Glass  of  1906.  I  was  with  Donovan  all  the  time  and  he 
brought  me  to  the  meetings.  Then  the  guys  decided 
that  if  I'd  come  to  all  those  meetings  over  twenty- five 
years,  well,  what  the  hell — we'll  make  him  a  member. 
So  I'm  a  member  of  the  Glass  of  1906. 

"The  Clap  School,  once  the  Clap  estate,  is  located 
on  Harvest  Street.  That  was  all  their  estate  from  Bos- 
ton Street  down  to  where  Howell  Street  is  now.  You 


10 


*The  boundary  between  St.  Margaret's  parish,  Dor- 
chester, and  St.  Augustine's,  South  Boston. 


Uphani's  Grocery  Store,  c.  iSj^ 


talk  about  enjoyment!  Well,  as  a  kid  down  there,  there 
was  Daddy  Clap's  orchard.  Everybody  knew  Daddy 
Clap's  orchard.  Pears  were  their  specialties — the  Clap 
pears  are  nationally  famous.  They  used  to  have  a  night 
watchman  there,  and  he  had  a  vicious  dog.  And  as  a 
kid,  of  course,  you  didn't  like  him  because  he  used  to 
interfere  with  us  once  in  a  while,  and  the  boys  got  hun- 
gry at  nighttime.  They  had  a  cat  wire  over  the  fence  at 
Boston  Street.  Three  strands  of  cat  wire.  It  was  pretty 
tough  to  get  over  that.  But  there  was  a  fellow  who  was 
in  the  furniture  moving  business  on  Dorset  Street, 
which  is  right  in  the  same  neighborhood.  It  was  rather 
an  easy  matter  to  borrow  one  of  those  thick  old  quilts 


they  used  wrapping  up  furniture.  We'd  go  and  snitch  a 
quilt,  and  get  over  the  barbed  wire  and  into  the  or- 
chard for  the  apples  and  the  pears. 

"The  pears  were  delicious.  One  guy  went  up  the 
tree  to  shake  it  and  drop  them  down.  Shake  the 
branches  or  force  it  down  so  the  other  guys  could  grab 
them.  It  was  a  three  or  four  man  job  and  then  you  had 
to  have  a  lookout  to  watch  out  for  this  guy,  the  watch- 
man, because  he  had  a  wild  dog.  And  he'd  just  loose 
that  dog — and,  boy,  that  dog — if  you  didn't  make  that 
fence,  and  get  up  over  there,  you  were  a  gone  goose. 
But  anyway,  those  were  delicious  pears.  Delicious 
things. 


1 1 


"I  can  well  remember  the  land  behind  Daddy 
Clap's  was  all  salt  water.  There  was  a  Russell  Boiler 
Works  there,  and  a  brass  foundry  and  a  place  where 
they  made  dummies  for  the  stores.  In  the  rear  of  these 
buildings  was  part  of  the  South  Bay,  where  we  used  to 
go  swimming  in  a  pool  about  25  feet  deep.  We  used  to 
go  swimming  in  our  birthday  clothes.  We  would  go 
there  when  the  tide  was  out. 

"As  kids  for  amusement  we  used  to  walk — only  my 
boys  don't  believe  it.  We'd  start  to  walk,  generally  on  a 
Saturday  or  Sunday,  preferably  on  a  Sunday,  most 
every  Sunday.  We'd  walk  out  Dorchester  Avenue  from 
Mt.  Vernon  right  to  the  Milton  line,  out  to  Pierce 
Square,  the  Walter  Baker  Company;  then  we'd  walk 
River  Street.  River  Street  brings  you  into  Mattapan 
Square  and  then  we'd  walk  down  Blue  Hill  Avenue  to 
Columbia  Road.  We  used  to  do  it  almost  every  week,  a 
ritual.  Particularly  in  the  fall,  it  was  wonderful.  You 
walk  through,  kicking  the  leaves;  that's  savage  amuse- 
ment. 

"Then  we  had  in  the  wintertime,  a  nice  toboggan 
slide  out  there  in  Franklin  Field.  I  had  a  toboggan  out 
there  for  four  or  five  years. 

"These  other  two  guys,  Donovan  and  Joe  Cum- 
mings,  we  always  went  places  together.  The  girls  didn't 
interest  us.  We  were  three  guys  and  we  went  wherever 
we  wanted.  Donovan — he  was  the  first  to  stray  away. 
He  met  some  girl  and  he  fell  for  her.  She  lived  in  Rox- 
bury.  I'd  sometimes  meet  him  after,  or  I'd  walk  with 
them.  So  he  married  this  girl.  He  went  to  Washington 
as  a  stenographer  and  I'll  never  forget  it.  It  was  like 
taking  my  right  arm.  I  used  to  eat  in  the  guy's  house 
more  than  in  my  house.  The  first  year  he  was  there  I 
went  down  to  see  him.  He  was  in  a  rooming  house 
there,  and  that's  where  I  met  my  wife.  I  fell  hook,  line 
and  sinker.  Then  I  realized — I  married  an  angel.  Fin- 
est woman  there  ever  was. 

"When  I  first  started  with  the  Herald,  I  worked  in 
an  apprenticeship  with  the  union.  I'm  a  union  man. 


Early  in  his  career,  the  vaudeville  star  Fred  Allen 
often  appeared  at  the  Strand  Theatre  in  Uphams  Corner 


12 


one  hundred  percent.  We  had  one  of  the  best — the  In- 
ternational Typographical  Union. 

"I  was  a  policeman  at  the  time  of  the  Boston  Police 
Strike.  I  was  working  at  the  Herald  and  I  just  got  the 
notion  to  take  the  examination.  My  father  worked  in 
the  courthouse  and  it  more  or  less  inclined  me  that 
way.  I  was  a  cop.  It  was  a  job  and  it  was  a  pretty  good 
job.  I  am  very  proud  of  the  fact  that  I  was  a  policeman. 
I  was  a  union  man  and  I  had  to  go  out.  I  had  only  been 
a  cop  for  about  six  months,  in  station  i6.  I  was  perfect- 
ly satisfied.  The  union  gave  full  power  to  an  executive 
committee  to  negotiate.  So  the  executive  committee 
really  called  the  strike,  and  the  strike  was  on. 

"It  happened  September  9,  191 9.  It  had  been 
building  up  and  the  police  were  making  certain  de- 
mands that  they  get  free  uniforms  and  get  paid  extra 
for  detail  work.  Coolidge  was  governor  at  the  time. 
The  National  Guard  was  called  out.  There  are  people 
who  thought  Coolidge  was  a  hero  up  on  Beacon  Hill. 
You  know,  waving  the  flag,  'Down  with  the  unions,' 
down  with  the  dictators,  Coolidge  forever,  and  all  of 
this  but  Mayor  Peters  was  right  in  wanting  the  state 
militia  to  be  put  in  there  and  there  were  other  police- 
men available.  They  had  400  men  who  didn't  belong 
to  the  union,  plus  a  couple  of  hundred  superior  officers 
in  uniform  plus  1 500  men  recruited  by  Deputy  Super- 
intendent Pierce  who  had  been  recruiting  men  for  six 
months  before  the  strike  date.  But  no — they  said,  keep 
them  off,  now  let  the  goons  do  a  little  job,  and  this  is 
what  makes  a  hell  of  a  hero  out  of  Coolidge.  Peters 
pleaded  with  Coolidge  on  that  very  day  to  put  militia 
on  the  street  that  night  but  Coolidge  said  no  and  the 
result  was  chaos. 

"We  were  requested  to  turn  in  our  badges,  so  that's 
what  we  had  to  do;  they  were  the  property  of  the  city. 
Seven,  eight  hundred  men  were  out  of  a  job — not  only 
that,  but  they  were  blackballed.  This  Chamber  of 
Commerce  clique  put  on  the  pressure  and  got  the  law 
passed  that  we  couldn't  be  allowed  civil  service,  or  to 


serve  on  any  jury.  No  striking  cops — myself  included — 
were  called  for  jury  after  that,  even  to  this  day. 

"I  went  back  to  the  Herald  and  they  put  me  on  as  a 
sub  and  I  continued  to  work,  and  eventually  got  me  a 
regular  job,  so  I  ended  up  the  oldest  man  in  the 
Herald. 

"We  were  going  to  talk  about  the  church.  I  remem- 
ber all  the  pastors  of  St.  Margaret's.  The  first  one  was 
Msgr.  William  A.  Ryan.  Frank  Clap  who  was  a  Protes- 
tant gentleman,  a  member  of  the  Odd  Fellows,  met 
Father  Ryan,  and  rented  him  a  house  to  live  in.  I  lived 
in  the  house  where  the  first  Mass  was  said,  27  Clap 
Place.  It's  now  Mayhew  Street.  I  came  into  the  parish 
a  year  or  so  later.  In  those  days,  Catholics  and  Protes- 
tants didn't  always  get  along  together  very  smoothly, 
but  Mr.  Clap  was  a  nice  gentleman  and  Father  Ryan 
was  a  fine  man.  Mr.  Clap  was  good  to  him;  he  didn't 
charge  him  anything  for  the  use  of  the  Atheneum 
Building  (an  Odd  Fellows  Hall)  for  Sunday  Mass,  un- 
til he  got  the  wooden  building  built  at  Harvest  and 
Boston  Street.  In  '99  they  laid  the  cornerstone  at  Dor- 
chester Avenue  and  Columbia  Road  and  built  the 
present  brick  church. 

"In  the  time  of  Edward  Murphy,  the  church  was 
all  done  over  and  rebuilt.  We  needed  a  lot  of  money  to 
rebuild  it.  Msgr.  Christopher  O'Neill  took  charge  of 
renovations  and  we  had  raffles  that  became  known  as 
'St.  Margaret's  Motor  Mart.' 

"We  became  famous  for  peddling  automobiles.  We 
had  a  little  coupe  and  at  Columbia  Road  and  Dorches- 
ter Avenue  we  did  a  whale  of  a  business  selling  chances 
to  passersby.  We  had  only  one  automobile  then,  and 
gradually  increased  it  to  seven.  When  we  came  to  get 
the  seven,  it  was  a  tough  time  because  of  the  shortages. 
But  the  Reverend  had  an  ace  in  the  hole.  He  used  to 
play  golf  with  Alvin  T.  Fuller,  Mr.  Cadillac  himself 
Fuller  said.  When  do  you  want  the  cars,  Father?  And 
he  said  such  a  date  in  July.  You'll  get  them.  Fuller 
promised.  We  rented  Braves  field  one  night  in  July. 


13 


Uphams 


The  cars  were  delivered  to  the  field  that  day  and  we 
held  the  show  that  night.  I  can  remember  that  night 
we  put  in  the  bank  $48,000  out  in  Brighton. 

"I've  always  lived  in  St.  Margaret's  parish.  We 
lived  on  Edison  Green,  and  then  moved  and  my  father 
bought  a  house  on  top  of  the  hill  on  Buttonwood 
Street.  When  I  got  married,  I  lived  down  on  Morely 
Street,  for  a  number  of  years,  then  moved  to  a  house  on 
Rosecliff  Street  and  that's  about  thirty-five  years  ago. 
After  that  I  moved  to  my  present  abode,  down  on  St. 
Margaret's  Road.  I  guess  the  only  reason  is — what's 
the  use  of  moving  if  you  like  what  you  have  and  you're 
here?" 


14 


•,  c.  igw 


Meeting  House  Hill,  Field's  Corner 
&  Savin  Hill 

"This  is  the  heart  of  Dorchester,''  attests  a  young  resident  of 
Field's  Corner — and  with  good  reason.  The  valley  that  includes 
Field's  Corner  and  the  hills  rising  from  it  formed  the  site  of  the 
early  Puritan  church,  fort  and  school.  Today  the  area  is  home 
to  members  of  all  the  city's  major  ethnic  groups  and  to  a  variety 
of  industries  and  businesses.  In  the  face  of  urban  change,  the 
strong  churches  of  the  area  have  helped  maintain  stability. 

The  Rev.  James  K.  Allen,  the  wiry  young  pastor  of 
the  First  Parish  Church,  is  like  all  clergy,  a  familiar  figure  in 
his  community.  He  is  involved  in  many  activities  concerning  the 
people  of  his  neighborhood.  Here  he  tells  the  history  of  his 
Church,  for  which  "Meeting  House  Hill"  is  named: 


"Dorchester  begins  with  the  First  Parish  Church. 
It  was  organized  by  a  group  of  dissenters  in  a  hospital 
in  Plymouth,  England.  Our  country  started  with  peo- 
ple like  them.  It  was  the  time  of  the  Cavalier  move- 
ment in  England  when  the  young  men  let  their  hair 
grow  long  and  started  to  use  profane  language  on  the 
streets,  and  when  public  morality  dropped  to  a  very 
low  level.  A  new  group  arose  against  this,  called  Puri- 
tans, giving  rise  to  a  new  ethic  and  a  new  way  of  look- 
ing at  life.  These  people  met  with  ministerial  leaders 
and  started  meetings.  It  was  the  preaching  of  the  Rev. 
John  White  that  gave  rise  to  what  we  call  the  Massa- 
chusetts Bay  Colony.  The  first  of  his  followers  in  Eng- 
land to  reach  these  shores  was  the  Salem  group.  Sec- 
ond was  the  Dorchester  group.  Since  Dorchester  is  now 
part  of  Boston,  this  is  the  oldest  parish  in  Boston,  .1630. 

"In  163 1,  they  built  their  first  Meeting  House, 
which  was  also  used  for  storage  of  valuables  and  pow- 
der. That  served  them  for  six  years.  It  was  a  beginning 
form  of  protest  coupled  with  vision;  they  came  here  to 
found  what  they  called  'God's  Plantation  in  the  Wil- 
derness.' Out  of  a  hostile  wilderness,  they  built  what 
we  have  today,  with  their  determination. 

"In  1639  a  school  was  opened — the  first  'free'  tax- 
supported  school  in  America.  It  was  for  boys  only. 
They  built  the  school  to  give  boys  the  ability  to  read 
the  scriptures,  because  the  scriptures  held  the  key  to 
eternal  life.  Now  you  can't  read  the  scriptures  in  the 
school  because  it  is  against  the  Constitution,  which  is 
plainly  ridiculous  from  the  standpoint  of  our  begin- 
ning- 

"This  is  the  sixth  building  of  the  First  Parish 
Church.  There  was  one  destroyed  by  fire  in  i8g6, 
which  had  replaced  others.  One  of  these  stood  on  the 
James  K.  Allen  Park  across  the  street  from  the  present 
structure;  that  one  was  destroyed  by  a  hurricane  they 
called  'The  Great  Wind.'  The  present  church  is  the 
most  ornate  colonial  church  in  America.  It's  a  Colonial 
style  called  Christopher  Wren.  It  was  built  in  1896  of 
Georgia  Pine  so  hard  you  can  hardly  drive  a  nail  into 


it.  The  pipe  organ  was  built  by  men  who  called  them- 
selves 'organ  scientists.'  They  came  to  work  riding  bi- 
cycles, wearing  spats  and  high  silk  hats,  and  carrying 
cases.  It's  one  of  the  finest  organs  in  America.  The  pul- 
pit came  from  the  Old  West  Church.  It's  high  because 
in  the  idea  of  the  Puritans  the  minister  spoke  for  God, 
and  they  lifted  him  up.  Eight  feet  up. 

"I  moved  to  Dorchester  in  1954  and  found  it  very 
different  from  the  Sage  Brush  Ranch  in  Idaho  where  I 
was  born.  My  first  recollection  was  of  the  homes  of  blue 
collar  workers.  The  people  of  this  area  cared  about 
their  homes.  It  still  is  the  thing  that  makes  a  good  com- 
munity— people  caring  for  their  homes  and  their  chil- 
dren. The  church  life  of  the  community  is  vital  and 
vigorous  with  St.  Peter's  and  First  Parish.  We  would 
have  diflSculty  if  anything  happened  to  either  church. 
Our  congregation  was  moving  to  the  suburbs  but  par- 
ishioners decided  to  strengthen  one  another  by  buying 
homes  in  Dorchester  or  moving  nearer  the  church.  The 
inspiration  for  the  life  of  the  people  in  this  community 
is  carried  on  by  the  church." 

Many  families  have  lived  for  generations  in  the  Meeting  House 
Hill  area.  John  Ward  moved  here  as  a  young  boy  almost 
seventy  years  ago.  When  he  joined  the  police  force  in  igig,  he 
was  assigned  to  Station  11  in  Fields  Corner  and  bought  one  of 
the  new  homes  being  built  on  his  beat.  Now  a  handsome  86, 
Ward  still  works  full  time  and  keeps  himself  in  good  shape.  He 
enjoys  long  walks,  chats  with  friends  and  singing  old  songs: 
"I  moved  to  Dorchester  in  1907  from  Quincy  and 
went  to  the  Mary  Hemenway  School  in  the  sixth 
grade.  I  graduated  in  1910.  I  lived  down  on  Freeport 
Street  which  is  down  opposite  the  Gas  House.  It  was 
then  known  as  Commercial  Point.  They  used  to  make 
gas  down  there.  There's  a  big  barn,  and  they  used  to 
have  about  40  mules  carting  all  the  coal.  They  would 
make  gas  out  of  coal.  After  getting  the  gas  out  of  the 
coal,  they  would  dump  the  residue  for  fill  next  to  the 
Gas  House. 

"The  house  I  lived  in  was  torn  down  and  they  ran  a 


15 


Meeting  House  Hill 
showing  First  Parish  Church 
and  Lyceum  Hall 


Dorchester^  Mass.  (Meet.n 


road  through  it — Morrissey  Boulevard.  In  those  days 
there  were  very  few  automobiles;  all  the  business  was 
done  in  horse-drawn  vehicles.  I  remember  the  farmers 
driving  herds  of  cattle  up  from  Quincy  and  the  farms 
south  of  Boston  to  the  Abattoir  in  Brighton  where  they 
used  to  slaughter  the  steers  for  meat.  I  moved  from 
Freeport  Street  down  to  Glover's  Corner.  Between 
Freeport  Street  and  Glover's  Corner  were  such  busi- 
nesses as  O'Connell's  Lumber  Yard;  then  there  was 
Doherty's  Coal  Yard.  It  was  run  by  Dan  Doherty,  and 
he  used  to  go  over  to  East  Boston  and  hire  the  green- 
horns off  the  boat  for  very  little  pay.  He  had  a  tene- 
ment house  next  to  his  coal  yard  and  they  used  to  call  it 
'Doherty's  Hotel.'  The  Irish  men  that  lived  there  made 
up  this  parody  to  the  tune  of  'The  Wearing  of  the 
Green': 


Oh,  I  always  did  live  happy, 

And  I  always  did  live  well 

In  a  boarding  house  on  Freeport  Street 

Named  Doherty's  Hotel 

With  a  wash  tub  on  the  table 
And  a  crowbar  on  the  wall 
And  a  windy  brogue  to  let  out  smoke 
In  Doherty's  Hotel. 

"Then  there  was  the  McGovern  Coal  Company 
down  on  Geneva  Avenue.  It's  interesting  to  know  how 
the  McGoverns  got  their  money  to  go  in  the  coal  busi- 
ness. Well,  when  old  Mr.  McGovern  and  his  brother 
came  over  from  the  old  country,  they  went  out  west  to 
get  their  fortune.  They  were  panning  gold  and  when 
they  had  enough,  they  started  home  on  horseback.  On 


i6 


John  Ward  as  a  rookie  policeman,  January  igso 


the  way  home  they  got  chased  by  Indians  and  they  had 
sacks  of  gold  across  their  saddles.  Mr.  McGovern's 
brother  got  shot  by  an  arrow,  an  Indian  arrow.  Well, 
he  couldn't  do  anything  to  save  him  crossing  the  river, 
so  he  reached  over  and  he  got  his  brother's  gold,  and 
put  it  on  his  saddle,  and  he  came  home  here  and 
started  in  the  coal  business. 


"I  remember  other  businesses  in  the  area.  The 
quarry  up  at  the  corner  of  Geneva  Avenue  and  Olney 
Street  was  owned  by  a  contractor  who  used  to  quarry 
stone  to  make  foundations  for  new  houses.  It  was  pud- 
ding-stone he  quarried. 

"Then  there  was  a  man  who  lived  on  Linden 
Street.  He  used  to  peddle  vegetables  and  he  had  cows. 
I  remember  him  driving  cows  up  on  Mount  Ida.  That 
was  before  it  was  known  as  Ronan  Park.  He  and  I  used 
to  drive  the  cows  up  to  Mount  Ida  to  graze.  They 
would  be  up  there  grazing  all  day.  I  remember  looking 
down  the  West  Side  of  Mount  Ida  and  there  were  no 
three  deckers  down  there.  It  was  all  farms. 

"Former  Mayor  Hibbard  lived  up  on  top  of  Mount 
Ida  in  a  very  beautiful  residence.  Many  Yankee  people 
lived  here.  They  had  Irish  immigrants  as  maids.  There 
was  a  little  room  in  the  top  of  each  house  for  the  maid. 
They  used  to  put  the  maid  in  the  attic  to  sleep.  These 
Irish  living-in  girls  and  the  Irish  working  men  helped 
build  St.  Peter's  Church  with  their  nickels,  dimes,  half 
dollars  and  dollars.  Father  Ronan  used  to  go  round  to 
the  back  door  of  all  the  houses  and  talk  to  the  living-in 
girls  and  they're  the  ones  that  really  started  St.  Peter's 
Church. 

"When  I  was  a  young  man  after  I  went  to  work,  we 
used  to  go  to  all  the  Saturday  night  dances  down 
Bloomfield  Hall,  on  Geneva  Avenue.  They  used  to 
have  sunlight  dances  on  holiday  afternoons  like 
Thanksgiving  afternoon  and  Christmas  and  New 
Year's  and  Washington's  birthday. 

"When  I  was  on  the  police  force  I  used  to  patrol 
this  road  (Puritan  Avenue),  and  I  always  liked  this 
house  because  it  had  a  lot  of  fruit  trees.  And  it  had  an 
extra  house  lot  and  there  was  a  lot  of  room  for  my 
children  to  play.  I  bought  this  house  in  1924.  I  had 
fifteen  fruit  trees  here,  but  they're  all  gone  now. 

"As  a  patrolman,  I  was  down  at  Station  1 1  for  25 
years.  Every  Christmas  we  used  to  run  parties  for  the 
poor  children  and  get  them  down  to  the  station  and 


Street  near  Field's  Corner,  c.  i8go 


fill  up  their  bellies  with  goodies  and  give  them  warm 
clothes.  That  was  during  the  Depression." 

The  children  w/io  ^'filled  their  bellies'"  at  Station  ii's  Christ- 
mas parties  were  victims  of  hard  times,  economic  depression. 
But  the  biggest  ejfect  felt  by  the  policemen  themselves  was  a 
fifteen  percent  cut  in  wages.  Civil  service  provided  protection 


from  financial  disaster.  The  patrolman's  daughter,  Ruth 
Ward  Brown,  begins  her  reminiscences  where  her  father 
leaves  off: 

"I  was  not  touched  by  the  Depression  at  all,  be- 
cause my  father  was  in  the  Police  Department.  I  never 
even  heard  the  word  mentioned  until  I  got  married. 
My  mother  was  a  thrifty,  frugal  woman  who  knew  how 


i8 


to  make  ends  meet.  She  gave  us  hand-me-downs  and 
could  make  over  our  clothes. 

"I  had  a  very  happy  childhood.  When  I  was  grow- 
ing up  on  Puritan  Avenue,  it  was  a  country  setting  to 
me.  We  had  paved  streets,  but  cobblestone  gutters.  Up 
at  the  end  of  the  street  there  was  a  farm  with  a  green- 
house. Everybody  used  to  go  there  to  get  geraniums 
and  flowers  for  Mother's  Day.  In  the  house  next  door 
to  me  there  was  another  greenhouse.  People  were  more 
interested  in  horticulture.  There  was  a  fish  pond  across 
the  street.  That's  filled  in  with  land  now,  where  two 
newer  houses  have  been  built.  We  had  about  the  same 
number  of  houses  on  the  street.  Mostly  single  houses 
and  two  two-family  houses.  At  the  foot  of  the  street, 
there's  one  three-decker. 

"There  were  several  big  old  trees  on  the  street.  Our 
whole  property  was  lined  with  various  kinds  of  trees.  In 
fact,  I  think  we  were  the  only  family  in  the  neighbor- 
hood that  had  a  tulip  tree.  It  blew  on  top  of  the 
house  during  the  hurricane  of  1938.  That  was  the  first 
hurricane  I  ever  heard  of,  except  I  heard  my  grand- 
mother speak  of  'The  Big  Wind'  back  at  the  turn  of 
the  century.  I  remember  that  my  mother  and  father 
were  in  California  at  the  time,  on  a  convention  with 
the  American  Legion  and  my  grandmother  was  mind- 
ing us.  The  little  house  on  our  extra  lot  blew  down;  our 
fences  blew  down;  that  huge  tulip  tree,  higher  than  the 
house,  blew  on  top  of  the  house.  All  the  sidewalks  were 
uprooted  and  turned  over  by  these  huge  trees  lying 
criss-cross  across  the  street,  or  falling  on  houses. 

"Cats  were  flying  through  the  air;  shingles  were 
blowing  off  houses;  bricks  were  flying  off  chimneys;  my 
cousin  was  up  to  visit  us  that  day,  and  on  the  way 
home,  trees  were  falling  in  front  of  her  and  behind  her. 
When  she  went  by  St.  Peter's  Church,  the  huge  cross 
on  top  of  the  Church  blew  off  and  splintered  on  the 
sidewalk.  People  were  going  up  trying  to  get  little 
pieces  of  the  cross  for  souvenirs. 

"Over  in  the  extra  lot,  my  sister  and  brother,  who 
were  older  than  me,  used  to  build  miniature  golf 


courses.  They  got  old  tomato  soup  cans  and  sunk  them 
into  the  ground,  and  made  little  traps  and  a  whole  lit- 
tle landscape. 

"In  those  days,  they  didn't  have  Little  League  or 
organized  groups.  The  boys  would  go  up  into  Olney 
Woods,  where  they'd  have  their  own  baseball  and  foot- 
ball teams.  In  the  era  of  the  big  bands,  the  boys  in  this 
neighborhood,  instead  of  going  in  too  much  for  sports, 
went  in  for  music.  My  brother  can  play  every  instru- 
ment and  specializes  in  clarinet  and  saxaphone.  When 
he  was  going  up  to  the  Christopher  Gibson  and  Pat- 
rick T.  Campbell  schools,  he  used  to  sign  his  papers  as 
'Benny  Goodman'  because  that  was  his  idol.  His 
friend,  who  was  a  drummer,  used  to  sign  'Gene 
Krupa.'  Of  course  that  would  get  the  teachers  crazy! 
But  he  won  several  scholarships  through  the  public 
school  system.  He's  an  orchestra  leader  now. 

"When  I  got  married  in  1948,  I  just  moved  across 
the  street." 

Mrs.  Brown's  husband,  Don  Brown,  joins  the  conversa- 
tion. Mr.  Brown  is  a  tall,  professional  photographer  with 
sharply-defined  features  and  a  resonant  voice — he  laughs  as  he 
tells  of  his  Mayflower  ancestry  and  describes  the  neighborhood 
as  it  was  when  he  first  came  to  it: 

"How  we  got  this  house  is  an  interesting  story.  We 
had  invited  the  lady  that  owned  the  house  to  our  wed- 
ding. She  died  before  the  wedding,  but  before  she  died, 
she  spoke  to  her  cousin,  the  lawyer,  and  asked  that 
Ruth  get  first  chance  at  buying  the  house.  So  we 
bought  the  house  and  most  of  the  furnishings  in  a  pack- 
age deal. 

"In  1948  this  was  a  stable  neighborhood,  predom- 
inantly Irish  Catholic.  Now  a  lot  of  people  are  moving 
to  the  suburbs.  I've  seen  these  houses  sold  two,  three, 
and  some  four  times  in  the  number  of  years  I've  been 
here.  Some  have  been  improved,  others  have  gone 
down.  We've  gone  through  block-busting.  These  have 
been  dramatic  changes.  I  have  the  feeling  it's  leveling 
off,  though. 


19 


NOTICE. 


The  Citizens  of  Dor- 
chester are  hereby  respectfully  informed 
that  hy  calling  at  the 

HARRISON  SQUARB, 

they  can  find  a  general  assortment  of 
Crroceries,  consisting  in  part  of 

BESTFllLY  FlOE  CIDIC£  TMS.  mi,  OH.  &C. 

DAIRY    BUTTER   AND    FRUIT    OF    ALL  KINDS, 

and  a  complete  assortment  of  FAJVCY  GROCERI 

Also,  Crockery,  Glass,  Stone  aod  Earthen 

all  of  which  will  be  offered  at  low  prices  for  cash 
motto  being  large  sates  and  small  profit^.   The  Si 

-^icri^r  .tenders  his  acl^nowiedgments  to  his  custom, 
rorHrelT  libjer^  patr^ne^  in  times  past,  uulTFespectiu 
splicits  a  continuance,  of  the  same,  assoring  them  that 
pains  shall  be  spared  on  his  part  to  give  them. the  fre§h- 

'  fest  goods  the iliarket  affords,  as  be,  is  daily  replenfsh'inf 
his^tocji*  Ovods^eli^ered  to  any  part  of  the  towik,  fk<ee 
•f  fixpeiise. 

.  '     N.  B.   Fishing  and  Pic-^ic  Parties,  suoplied  aa  ostud^ 

ISAAC  FIELD.  . . 

flarr«w  Square,  Dorchester,  April  l,t,  1852.  J 


sh,^H| 

t  n¥j 


"People  who  have  moved  in  are  of  different  ethnic 
groups.  We  have  a  colored  population  and  some  Span- 
ish-speaking, both  Puerto  Rican  and  Cuban.  We  have 
an  Indian  family.  This  is  probably  one  of  the  most 
well-integrated  neighborhoods  one  can  find.  There's 
bound  to  be  a  few  little  problems,  but  I  think  this  street 
has  done  very  well.  If  a  real  emergency  arises,  the  new 
people  are  the  first  to  help.  In  fact,  about  a  year  ago  we 
had  a  fire  in  our  house  in  the  middle  of  the  night,  and 
the  first  ones  to  help  us  were  our  new  neighbors — a 
black  family  and  a  white  family  who  moved  here  re- 
cently, whom  I  didn't  even  know.  They  couldn't  help 
us  enough." 

At  the  same  time  as  the  young  officer  Ward  was  entering  the 
police  force  and  getting  settled  on  Meeting  House  Hill,  an- 
other young  family  was  moving  into  Savin  Hill,  with  a  ij- 
year-old  son.  Savin  Hill's  harbor  and  waterfront  made  it  a  va- 
cation area  for  city  people  in  the  nineteenth  century.  A  famous 
hotel.  Cutler's,  was  built  in  the  iSjos,  and  wealthy  Bostonians 
would  come  for  the  summer,  often  on  the  advice  of  their  doctors. 
As  railroads  arrived,  some  of  these  families  built  year-round 
homes  here,  gradually  transforming  the  old  ^Fox  Point'  into  an 
elegant  suburb.  But  a  touch  of  the  wilderness  atmosphere  lived 
on  into  the  twentieth  century.  John  Madden,  now  an  ac- 
tive community  leader,  remembers  the  adventure  of  growing  up 
on  the  edge  of  Dorchester  Bay: 

"I  was  born  in  Roxbury  in  1908.  My  parents  lived 
in  Roxbury  until  1925,  when  we  moved  to  Dorchester. 
My  parents  bought  a  house  on  Sidney  Street.  In  1930 
they  sold  and  moved  out  to  the  Neponset  area.  I  got 
married  in  1933  and  came  back.  I've  lived  here  ever 
since. 

"The  general  characteristics  of  this  neighborhood 
have  never  changed.  We  did  have  a  fellow  that  lived  on 
Crescent  Avenue  who  had  about  twenty  cows  that  he 
used  to  range.  He  had  a  pasture  down  in  back  of  his 
home  which  would  end  up  on  the  back  of  Sidney 
Street.  He  used  to  bring  the  cows  up  through  Sidney 
Street  to  the  park  at  Savin  Hill,  and  any  vacant  lot 


along  the  way  that  there  was  anything  to  feed  on, 
they'd  have  the  cows  feed.  The  atmosphere  was  subur- 
ban to  the  degree  that  there  were  orchards.  A  lot  of 
people  had  various  types  of  trees — pear,  apple,  cherry. 
But  the  residential  section  was  the  way  it  is  now  with 
few  exceptions.  The  things  that  have  changed  dramat- 
ically is  that  we  didn't  have  rapid  transit  or  the  Ex- 
pressway or  Morrissey  Boulevard.  All  that  was  a  marsh 
that  ran  from  the  railroad  tracks  way  out  to  the  gas 
house. 

"When  I  was  a  kid,  most  of  my  time  was  spent  out 
in  that  marsh.  I  guess  every  kid  in  the  neighborhood 
found  the  marsh  a  big  attraction  for  various  reasons. 
But  primarily  because  of  a  squatter.  What  his  real 
name  was  I  don't  know  but  we  all  called  him  Captain 
Brown.  He  lived  in  an  old  houseboat  put  up  on  dry 
land  and  he  took  care  of  boats  for  anybody. 

"That  was  a  fascinating  place  to  visit,  because  he 
had  every  type  of  boat.  He  had  an  airplane  which  at 
the  time  was  the  most  unusual  thing  you'd  ever  want 
to  see.  It  was  a  frame  simply  covered  with  canvas  and 
a  motor.  I  don't  think  I've  known  of  it  ever  to  fly. 
Whatever  might  be  floating  Captain  Brown  would 
scrounge  and  bring  back.  So  it  was  not  only  a  place  to 
store  boats  and  to  have  your  boats  fixed  but  to  sit 
around  and  talk  with  this  old  guy.  It  was  an  interesting 
place  to  visit. 

"I  had  a  small  rowboat;  I  was  co-owner  with  a 
couple  of  other  neighborhood  kids.  We'd  go  out  during 
the  day;  we  had  this  marsh  with  various  tributaries  to 
explore. 

"Every  day  you  found  something  different  that  you 
never  realized  was  there  before.  Down  in  back  of  the 
foundry  at  Mt.  Vernon  Street  and  Morrissey  Boule- 
vard, where  the  Boston  Globe  parking  lot  is  now,  we 
had  an  area  where  we  played  baseball  and  football.  It 
was  called  the  'Rubber  Ground.'  Whatever  the  compo- 
sition of  the  material  that  was  in  there,  a  lot  of  it  was 
the  cinders  from  the  railroad.  The  ground  had  a  kmd 
of  resilience  to  it,  so  that  nobody  could  ever  get  hurt 


21 


Sailing  in  Dorchester  Bay,  igoy 


Repairing  boats  at 
Savin  Hill  Yacht  Club 


there.  Whatever  game  you'd  play,  it  would  have  a  rub- 
bery-like effect,  so  we  used  to  call  it  the  'Rubber 
Ground.' 

"And,  of  course,  like  for  most  kids,  the  dump  was  a 
fascinating  place.  As  I  recall,  they  would  compress  the 
ground,  and  in  the  winter-time  the  snow  would  get  on 
it.  We  used  to  take  barrel  staves  and  make  skis  out  of 
them.  I  was  skiing  there  one  day  and  I  fell.  A  sharp 
piece  of  glass  was  underneath  the  snow  and  cut  me 
down  the  side  of  myself  My  mother  called  our  family 


doctor  who  lived  on  Hancock  Street.  He  had  been  our 
doctor  in  Roxbury  and  he  too  moved  to  Dorchester. 

"This  doctor's  name  was  Doctor  Mansfield.  He  was 
the  type  of  family  doctor  you  never  hear  of  today.  He 
knew  every  one  of  us — knew  everything  that  was  wrong 
with  anybody.  And  if  you  called  him  no  matter  what 
time  of  the  day  or  night  and  regardless  of  the  fact  that 
he  had  no  car  or  any  type  of  transportation  except 
walking,  he'd  get  to  you.  And  I  don't  know,  he  re- 
tained his  health.  He  never  put  on  an  ounce.  He  was  a 


23 


From  a  Savin  Hill  family 


tall  guy,  but  he  was  very  thin.  A  marvelous  man,  real- 
ly. Wonderful  disposition.  Great  guy. 

"I  went  to  work  for  Edison.  In  the  beginning  I  had 
a  job  that  was  known  as  a  'street  lamp  trimmer'  which 
was  the  same  as  being  a  lamplighter.  I  was  working 
and  making  $23  a  week  during  the  depression  and  all 
around  me  I  saw  men  with  families  who  couldn't  get  a 
job  and  were  out  on  WPA  work  projects.  Job  security. 
I  think  a  lot  of  people  in  this  community  were  looking 
for  job  security.  The  depression  was  the  catalyst  that 
forced  them  into  that  position.  Very  many  of  the  peo- 
ple in  this  community  work  for  utilities,  or  on  the  po- 
lice or  fire  or  work  for  the  city  or  state.  They're  all 
looking  for  the  same  thing — stability.  I  think  that  most 
of  the  reasons  people  like  myself  and  other  s  went  into 
these  kinds  of  jobs  was  because  we  were  looking  for  sta- 
bihty. 

"As  for  civic  organizations,  many  began  to  form 
immediately  after  World  War  I.  They  ran  until  the  de- 
pression, and  the  depression  kind  of  killed  everyone's 
incentive. 


24 


<um,  turn  of  the  century 

"There  was  an  organization  here  back  in  1908 
called  the  Savin  Hill  Civic  Improvement  Association 
that  went  along  until  about  1925  or  then.  It  kind  of 
died.  It  came  back  in  about  1928 — the  depression 
killed  it.  There  was  no  more  organization.  The  people 
of  Savin  Hill  came  to  me  and  said,  You  know,  we've 
got  to  have  one.  I  said.  Fine,  let's  get  an  organization 
together.  We  put  an  organization  together  and  it  only 
lasted  a  year.  Most  of  the  people  were  also  in  Columbia 
Civic,  which  they  felt  had  a  better  future.  The  Savin 
Hill  group  got  together  and  said.  Let's  combine  with 
Columbia  Civic.  That's  how  we  became  Columbia- 
Savin  Hill  Civic  Association. 

"Around  1959  or  i960,  there  was  a  man  that 
worked  for  Dorchester  House.  He  was  a  minister;  his 
name  was  Brown.  He  was  a  marvelous  individual  as  far 
as  getting  people  to  work  with  various  elements  in  the 
community.  We  had  a  problem  here  with  an  old  wood- 
en schoolhouse  that  was  torn  down  and  made  a  vacant 
lot.  This  fellow  Brown  came  down  and  told  us  that  we 
ought  to  organize  and  encourage  the  city  to  get  some- 


thing  done.  As  a  result  we  got  the  Ryan  playground. 
He  did  the  same  in  other  communities.  Then  about 
1 96 1  he  suggested  the  idea  that  we  should  have  not 
only  individual  community  organizations  but  an  over- 
all organization  and  thus  DUNA  (Dorchester  United 
Neighborhood  Association)  was  formed. 

"People  can't  expect  to  live  in  an  urban  society 
with  all  the  problems  that  you  have  with  the  various 
bureaucracies — how  are  you  going  to  face  these  as  in- 
dividuals? YouVe  got  to  have  some  community  group 
together  to  speak  for  you  and  know  the  ways  things  get 
done." 

Lower  Mills,  Codman  Hill,  &  Cedar  Grove 

"But  as  to  the  Irish  Americans,  they  would  sweep  the 
entire  world." 

A  native  of  Kiltartan  Parish, 
Co.  Galway,  1909 


The  perspective  of  Irishmen  in  County  Galway, 
across  "the  Big  Pond,"  paralleled  that  of  Yankees  liv- 
ing at  the  Southern  tip  of  Dorchester  at  the  turn  of  the 
century,  as  Irish  immigrants  moved  out  from  the  cen- 
ter city. 

The  Rev.  Daniel  Dunn,  pastor  of  St.  Margaret's  Par- 
ish, was  a  member  of  one  of  the  first  Irish  families  to  arrive  in 
Lower  Mills.  He  tells  what  life  was  like  for  a  young  boy  in  a 
changing  community  §0 years  ago: 

"My  father's  family — my  father,  my  mother,  two 
small  children — myself  and  my  sister  at  the  time — and 
another  couple,  an  Irish  American  couple  who  bought 
the  house  two  doors  away  at  the  same  time  when  they 
were  both  sold  at  auction,  were  the  first  Irish-Ameri- 
cans and  Catholics  on  the  street.  There  was  actually  a 
protest  meeting  held  at  the  time  which  was  reported  by 
a  younger  member  of  one  of  the  families  in  whose  home 
the  protest  meeting  was  held.  She  said  to  my  mother, 


25 


'Mrs.  Dunn,  when  you  were  going  to  move  here,  all  the 
neighbors  came  to  my  house  and  they  had  a  meeting. 
And,  they  said  it  was  bad  enough  that  you  were  Irish 
and  you  were  Catholic,  but  your  husband  is  a  police- 
man and  Mr.  Moore  is  a  mailman.  So  we're  not  only 
going  to  have  Irish  and  Catholic  here,  but  it's  going  to 
be  Uniform  Alley.'  This  was  the  thinking.  It  did  not 
take  long,  evidently,  before  they  lost  their  fears  be- 
cause we  found  that  they  were  friendly.  The  stereo- 
typed, stage-character  'Irishman'  was  all  that  some  of 
them  had  known  about  Irish  people.  They  found,  very 
shortly,  that  having  a  police  officer  living  in  the  dis- 
trict, before  the  days  of  police  radio,  before  the  days  of 
a  regular  patrol  in  that  end  of  that  town  meant  addi- 
tional security. 

"I  lived  in  a  neighborhood  that  was  not  very  popu- 
lated with  children.  Most  of  the  people  seemed  to  have 
been  of  retirement  age.  We  rode  a  bicycle  to  go  down 
to  Tenean  Beach  to  go  swimming.  We  would  have  to 
go  up  as  far  as  what  we  called  'Pat's  Hill'  to  find 
enough  boys  for  a  football  game  between  two  teams. 

"Pat's  Hill  was  the  name  of  a  great  hill,  which  is 
now  Standard  Street  and  Freeland  Street.  It  was  called 
Pat's  Hill  because  that  was  where  Pat  Fallon's  cows 
used  to  graze.  It  was  a  very  high  hill,  and  it  was  un- 
paved  perhaps  until  1920  or  so,  as  many  of  the  other 
streets  in  Dorchester  were  unpaved.  And  very  few  side- 
walks were  paved  until  perhaps  about  19 14,  just  before 
the  first  World  War.  In  the  spring,  these  unpaved  side- 
walks were  very  muddy.  And  if  you  lived  on  a  paved 
street  with  an  unpaved  sidewalk,  you  walked  on  the 
street,  or  else  you  could  lose  your  rubbers  in  the  mud. 
Many  a  child  going  to  school  in  the  springtime  wearing 
rubbers  would  lose  one,  or  perhaps  two,  on  the  way 
home. 

"We  sometimes  would  go  hiking.  A  group  of  high 
school  boys  would  take  a  walk  from  the  Lower  Mills 
over  to  Central  Avenue,  Milton,  all  the  way  to  Milton 
High  School,  then  back  Brook  Road  and  come  down 


over  Milton  hill.  Just  to  socialize  and  talk,  as  they 
walked  along,  minding  their  business  as  they  went 
their  way. 

"One  of  the  ambitions,  publicly  expressed  in  the 
schoolyard,  but  perhaps  kept  secret  from  their  folks, 
was  the  ambition  of  many  eighth  grade  boys,  to  get  out 
of  school  and  go  to  work  on  the  furniture  wagon  driv- 
ing Telless'  mules.  Telless  had  one  team  of  mules  and 
several  of  horses.  The  newest  driver  was  always  started 
on  the  mules  and  often  was  sitting  in  a  couple  of  weeks 
on  crutches.  But  everybody  hoped  they  could  conquer 
the  mules,  and  perhaps  get  out  of  school,  by  going  to 
work  for  Telless. 

"During  the  First  World  War,  at  the  end  of  the  car- 
line  at  the  car  barn  in  Lower  Mills  Village  we  would 
see  sailors  in  their  uniforms  getting  off  the  cars.  The 
children  would  frequently  ask  questions  and  perhaps 
most  often  ask  if  he  had  a  harmonica  and  if  he  would 
play  a  tune.  At  that  time,  harmonicas  became  quite 
popular — the  mouth  organ — the  sailors  were  aboard 
ship  and  they  had  time,  and  they  would  learn  from 
some  of  their  buddies. 

"One  source  of  interest  of  the  boys  and  the  girls 
would  be  to  go  down  to  Vose's  Grove  on  the  days  when 
we  heard  there  was  a  coal  barge  coming  in.  One  could 
hear  the  great  whistles  of  the  tugboats  coming  up  the 
Neponset  River,  bringing  the  coal  barges  to  Godfrey's 
Wharf  on  the  Milton  side  of  the  Neponset  River.  Hav- 
ing heard  the  whistle  of  the  tugs,  we  knew  that  a  barge 
was  coming  in,  or,  if  there  had  been  one  unloading, 
that  it  was  going  out.  So,  by  going  down  Medway 
Street  and  crossing  the  bridge  over  what  is  now  the 
M  BTA  tracks,  we  could  stand  and  watch  the  maneu- 
vering of  the  tugs. 

"Nearly  every  year,  in  my  recollections  from  the 
time  that  I  was  in  elementary  school,  up  into  high 
school,  it  seemed  that  there  was  an  annual  drowning — 
a  fatality,  somewhere  in  the  Neponset  River,  between 
Neponset  and  Mattapan.  And  despite  all  the  warnings, 


26 


Walter  Baker's  Mill,  Miiton,  Dorchester,  Mass. 


Baker'' s  chocolate  mill,  c.  igio 


it  was  not  until  the  fatality  would  happen  each  year 
that  some  of  the  warning  against  going  out  on  the  ice  in 
the  river  would  be  taken  seriously. 

"In  the  winter  on  a  no  school  day,  the  no  school  for 
Milton  would  be  sounded  on  the  whistle  of  Walter  Bak- 
er's Chocolate  Mill.  But  in  Dorchester  you  had  to  go  to 
the  nearest  firehouse  to  find  out  that  there  was  no 
school.  The  nearest  firehouse  to  where  we  used  to  live 
was  up  on  River  Street,  which  was  past  either  of  the 


schools  that  we  had  ever  attended.  Even  elementary 
school.  So  it  was  necessary  for  us  to  walk  up,  past  the 
school  we  attended,  and  go  down  to  look  at  the  front  of 
the  firehouse  where  they  had  a  sign  that  said  'No 
school,'  because  of  the  snow.  And  then  you  had  to  walk 
back  through  the  snow  and  to  your  home. 

"One  of  the  interesting  activities  at  our  Gilbert 
Stuart  School  was  the  appearance  periodically  of 
'Grandfather  Swan.'  His  full  name  was  Walter  Swan. 


27 


He  was  a  member  of  the  Grand  Army  of  the  Republic, 
who  still  had  his  uniform,  and  he  would  tell  us  tales  of 
his  work  while  he  was  in  the  campaign  with  the  Army 
of  the  North  during  the  Civil  War.  He  was  there  at  the 
invitation  of  the  schoolmaster. 

"From  the  time  I  was  in  the  early  eighth  grade,  I  be- 
lieve, I  was  delivering  newspapers  in  the  morning.  It 


was  necessary  to  meet  the  5:15  car  at  the  Lower  Mills 
to  get  your  newspapers,  to  make  the  route  that  took 
you  all  the  way  down  through  Cedar  Grove,  and  then, 
afternoons,  I  used  to  work  around  the  stores.  In  191 9  I 
went  to  work  for  O'Keeffe  Grocery  Company  after 
school.  Hours  were,  at  that  time,  in  the  store,  from  7:30 
a.m.  to  6:15  p.m.,  if  you  worked  all  day.  On  Saturday, 


28 


you  worked  from  7:30  a.m.  to  10:15  p.m.  straight 
through,  with  time  out  for  lunch.  I  went  to  work  when 
I  was  old  enough  to  get  a  working  certificate  at  four- 
teen, so  I  could  pay  my  tuition  at  Boston  College  High 
School.  At  B.C.  High  we  were  expected  to  study  three 
hours  a  night,  so  that  didn't  leave  any  spare  time. 

"Because  of  the  people  who  came  into  the  store — 
the  young  Irish  brides,  asking  for  whatever  groceries 
they  wanted  and  talking  about  the  raisins  and  the  cur- 
rants or  asking  whether  or  not  certain  canned  vegeta- 
bles were  the  same  as  the  fresh  vegetables — -I  realized 
there  were  a  lot  of  young  Irish  people  moving  in. 

"There  was  a  constant  growth  in  St.  Gregory's  con- 
gregation during  that  period.  They  were  constantly 
building.  They  added  a  school — which  must  have 
opened  in  about  i  g  1 6  or  1 9 1  7.  I  was  an  altarboy  at  the 
first  Mass  when  the  children  of  the  first  and  second 
grades  were  brought  to  St.  Gregory's  school  for  the 
opening.  I  have  very  clear  recollections  of  being  wel- 
comed back  one  day  by  the  very  interested  teachers  in 
our  public  schools  to  find  out  how  many  had  showed 
up  for  the  opening  of  the  Catholic  school.  Ordinarily 
when  we  came  back  from  serving  a  funeral  they  would 
just  say,  "alright,  you  may  go  back  to  your  class."  For 
that  day,  we  were  like  some  foreign  diplomats  who 
were  being  asked  questions." 

But  not  all  of  the  new  people  coming  into  Southern  Dorchester 
were  Irish.  A  little  over  a  decade  after  World  War  /,  a  young 
Italian  couple  moved  to  newly-developing  Cedar  Grove.  Phil 
Petrocelli  talks  about  his  first  years  in  the  new  St.  Bren- 
dan's Parish: 

"We  both  lived  in  St.  Margaret's  parish.  We  got 
married  in  St.  Margaret's — came  out  here,  in  '30,  to 
Gallivan  Boulevard.  I  told  a  woman  I  worked  with  we 
were  going  to  get  married,  and  she  said,  'Well,  there's  a 
house  near  me.'  So  we  came  out,  and  we  hired  it  just  by 
going  out  and  looking  at  it.  When  we  first  came  here, 
Gallivan  Boulevard  had  been  recently  made.  It  was  or- 
iginally Codman  Street.  On  the  left  hand  side  of  Galli- 


van Boulevard,  there  was  a  swamp.  In  the  thirties  they 
built  homes  there.  Before  that  it  was  all  just  one  big 
swamp.  This  is  all  built  up  since. 

"When  Rose  and  I  were  married,  I  thought  the  on- 
ly Italian  out  here  was  me.  It  was  unusual  for  Italian 
and  Irish  people  to  marry  each  other  then.  The  Irish 
didn't  like  the  Italian,  the  Italian  didn't  like  the  Irish. 
It  was  just  what  you  might  call  clannishness.  Now,  in 
the  church  bulletin,  you  will  very  often  see  an  Irish 
name  and  an  Italian  name  together  for  a  marriage. 
Our  children  now,  one  married  a  Scotch  Belgian.  My 
oldest  boy  married  a  French  English  girl.  And  another 
married  a  Lithuanian.  This  is  the  way  our  family  is — 
it's  commonplace  now. 

"When  I  first  came  here,  I  went  to  a  couple  of 
meetings  of  the  Cedar  Grove  Civic  Improvement  As- 
sociation. I  didn't  seem  to  get  anywhere.  Everything  I 
got  up  just  didn't  seem  to  be  wanted  around  here.  My 
name  was  Italian.  I  sensed  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact  I  had 
to  jam  down  in  the  corner  to  make  sure  I  was  going  to 
stay  here.  I  had  to  threaten  to  beat  a  couple  of  guys. 
This  was  1930. 

"The  fortunate  thing  was  that  the  community  was 
Catholic.  St.  Brendan's  was  completed  in  '33. 

"The  church  started  down  here  where  Jordan  Den- 
nis is — that  was  the  Granite  Avenue  garage.  Saturday 
nights,  or  Sunday  morning  early,  we'd  take  all  the  cars 
out — leave  them  in  the  yard — lay  down  the  canvas  or 
not;  if  the  thing  were  dry,  set  the  chairs  out,  and  in  the 
corner,  a  little  platform  with  a  hand  organ.  At  the 
front  of  the  garage  was  a  big  purple  curtain  and  you 
could  pull  it  apart,  and  that  would  be  the  altar.  This 
was  prior  to  the  building  of  the  church.  That's  when  I 
first  became  an  usher.  After  Mass,  we'd  close  it  up. 
They'd  put  back  the  trucks.  Then  we  built  this  church. 
Oh,  was  it  cold  at  the  dedication.  We  had  the  Harvard 
College  Glee  Club,  a  violinist,  and  the  builder,  and  I 
think  it  cost  us  around  $100,000.  And  eventually  we 
got  the  school." 

"/<  was  stories  that  brought  us  here,^''  an  Irish  immigrant  tells 


29 


us,  ''stories  of  how  good  life  was."  Stories  of  enterprise,  of  suc- 
cess, and  prosperity.  There  were  funny  stories,  too.  Walter 
McLean  is  a  distinguished  gentleman,  a  Harvard  graduate 
of  historical  expertise  who  taught  at  Dorchester  High  School 
for  many  years.  He  spends  much  of  his  time  walking  all  over 
Dorchester  to  visit  friends,  playing  piano  music  or  swapping 
memories.  He  will  spin  tale  after  tale,  keeping  a  perfectly 
straight  face,  until  the  gullible  listener  realizes  his  leg  is  being 
pulled.  One  of  his  favorite  stories  concerns  an  enterprise  of  his 
father's,  the  manufacture  of  "Finn  AIcCool's  Great  Irish 
Liniment." 

"The  story  of  Finn  McCool's  Great  Irish  Liniment 
will  give  you  quite  a  laugh.  It's  not  so  much  a  figment 
of  the  imagination  as  it  is  a  bunch  of  stories  that  are 
prominent,  let  us  say,  because  people  take  things  on 
faith — particularly  if  they  are  of  Irish  extraction. 

"In  1892  or  thereabouts,  two  ex-Navy  men  and  my 
father  were  associated  with  Engine  Company  9^8, 
which  was  on  Salem  Street  in  the  North  End.  Of 
course  in  the  Navy  one  had,  at  some  time  another,  ail- 
ments— bruises,  breaks,  and  so  forth.  Somewhere  out  of 
the  clear  sky  a  mixture  of  ingredients  was  put  together 
in  such  a  fashion  that  when  rubbed  on  a  bruise  or  a 
sprain  or  even  the  jaw  gave  relief  to  the  person  who 
was  suffering  from  pain.  Remembering  this,  these  men 
decided  that  they  would  make  their  own  liniment. 

"Around  i8go  there  were  a  good  many  cock  fights 
occuring  in  places  just  outside  of  Boston,  even  though 
it  was  against  the  law.  In  order  to  give  the  roosters  un- 
usual strength,  they  were  fed  one  of  the  ingredients 
from  the  egg.  That  left  the  other  ingredient  available. 
There  was  so  much  of  that  ingredient  left  that  a  wise 
thought  occurred  to  those  two  ex-Navy  men:  why  not 
combine  that  ingredient  with  two  other  elements  to 
make  their  liniment.  So,  it  was  invented. 

"The  liniment  was  made  in  the  basement  of  old 
Engine  ^8^s  station  on  Salem  Street.  A  label  was  de- 
vised which  read:  'Finn  McCool's  Great  Irish  Lini- 
ment. Good  for  man  or  beast.  Useful  for  chilblains, 
neuralgia,  teethaches,  and  so  forth.'  They  chose  the 


name  'Finn  McCool'  because,  in  old  legends,  he  was 
supposedly  the  strongest  man  in  Ireland — and  that  lin- 
iment was  very  powerful.  The  labels  also  carried  the 
signature,  'Brian  O'Rourke,  Proprietor.'  This  was  my 
father's  pseudonym,  not,  of  course,  his  real  name.  And 
the  address  given  was  the  address  of  my  father  before 
he  got  married. 

"Well,  folks  do  try  things  out,  and  as  soon  as  one 
told  an  Irishman  that  Finn  McCool's  Great  Irish  Lin- 
iment was  available  and  that  some  of  it  had  been 
smuggled  in  by  Cunard  liners,  that  made  the  picture 
even  better.  It  was  sold  for  25  cents  a  bottle.  And  with 
the  faith  of  the  Irish,  there  were  a  good  many  people 
who  believed  it  could  cure  anything. 

"Of  course,  good  stories  began  to  be  told  about  the 
great  liniment.  One  of  the  very  best  stories  was  told  by 
a  character  named  Lee  Dennis  Harrington.  Dennis 
bought  some  of  the  liniment,  and  when  his  wife  saw  it 
was  Finn  McCool's  she  used  the  contents  herself.  Har- 
rington had  pains  in  his  legs  from  arthritis  or  rheuma- 
tism, but  when  he  went  to  rub  the  leg  with  that  lini- 
ment he  discovered  that  the  bottle  was  empty.  So  he 
went  to  the  Engine  house  and  said  he  had  squeezed 
the  bottle,  had  removed  the  label  from  the  bottle,  and 
had  put  the  label  on  his  leg.  From  that  day  on,  he 
never  had  a  pain  from  arthritis. 

"A  story  was  told  of  a  Mr.  Russell,  who  had  lost  one 
leg  in  the  Boer  War  and  had  a  wooden  stump  which 
was  kept  on  his  leg  by  a  leather  strap.  Mr.  Russell  was 
unfortunately  bothered  by  splinters  as  he  rubbed  his 
wooden  leg.  He  was  advised  to  use  some  of  the  lini- 
ment. It  so  polished  his  wooden  leg  that  he  never  suf- 
fered from  splinters  thereafter. 

"Another  individual — I'm  not  certain  whether  he's 
Irish,  or  Yankee,  or  perhaps  Jewish — but  the  man  at 
any  rate  was  the  owner  of  a  hardware  store.  Now  he, 
too,  had  heard  of  the  liniment.  One  day  he  discovered 
that  the  hinges  on  the  door  of  his  business  establish- 
ment were  creaking.  'By  heavens,'  he  said,  'I'll  use 
some  of  this  since  they  claim  that  it  can  do  anything.' 


30 


And  to  be  sure,  the  liniment  did  a  swell  job  in  remov- 
ing the  squeak  from  the  hinges. 

"So  you  can  see  the  value  of  Finn  McCool's  lini- 
ment. People  of  varied  backgrounds  used  it  in  all  kinds 
of  ways  with  fine  results." 

Neponset,  Pope's  Hill  &  Port  Norfolk 

The  romance  and  fortunes  that  were  the  New  Eng- 
land whaling  industry  were  part  and  parcel  of  life  on 
the  nineteenth  century  Dorchester  waterfront.  Head- 
quarters for  seafaring  Dorchester  was  "Commercial 
Point",  now  known  by  its  Indian  name,  "Tenean."  By 
the  1 830s,  the  fishing  industry  of  the  town  was  in  its 
heyday.  Whalers  on  cod  fishing  boats  pulled  into  a 
"modern  wharf",  fish  flakes  were  fashioned  for  cod 
drying,  coopers  built  their  barrels,  and  a  store  opened 


to  sell  sailors'  outfits.  In  1 833  alone,  seventy  four  vessels 
unloaded  at  Neponset  Village. 

While  Dorchester  fishing  business  declined  quickly 
after  the  1840s,  the  memory  of  the  seaport  echoed  in 
the  twentieth  century  in  Lawley's  Shipyards,  where 
many  famous  yachts  of  "America's  Cup"  fame  were 
built.  The  old  harbor  became  important  again  during 
World  War  II,  as  Navy  personnel  moved  in  to  build 
ships  for  the  war.  The  section  of  Neponset  bordering 
the  ocean  is  called  "Port  Norfolk",  a  small  seaport  vil- 
lage physically  isolated  from  the  rest  of  Dorchester  by 
Morrissey  Boulevard. 

Mary  Maloney  and  Josephine  Jepsen  are  close 
friends  who  have  lived  in  Port  Norfolk  all  their  lives.  Both 
women  have  enjoyed  bringing  up  their  children  in  the  intimate 
neighborhood  they  themselves  grew  up  in,  and  both  are  actively 


31 


.S7.  A/uis  CTO  Band,  igjo's 


involved  in  community  affairs.  Mrs.  Moloney  tells  how  her 
family  came  to  live  in  Port  Norfolk: 

"I  was  born  on  Walnut  Street.  My  parents  came 
here  in  1918.  My  mother  and  father  had  hved  in  Fram- 
ingham  and  my  father  was  seeking  work.  They  were 
newly  married.  He  came  out  to  work  at  the  Foundry. 
They  bought  the  home  of  my  mother's  cousins,  who 
had  been  living  there  since  the  i8oos.  My  mother's 
cousins'  parents  had  come  from  Ireland  and  settled 
there.  I  was  quite  fascinated  as  a  child  that  my  moth- 
er's cousins  told  us  of  there  being  Indians  living  down 
by  Tenean  in  the  wooded  area  that  no  longer  exists. 
There  were  Indians  there  when  she  was  a  child.  A 
small  group  living  down  by  the  water. 

"My  mother's  cousins  were  lovely  people.  She  was 
a  seamstress  and  sewed  for  many  of  the  people  who 
lived  in  the  area.  They  all  had  very  large  and  very 
lovely  and  well-cared  for  homes.  It  was  a  very  good 
place  to  live." 

Mrs.  Jepsen  joins  the  conversation: 

"My  father  worked  at  the  A.T.  Stearns  lumber 
company  which  was  on  Water  Street.  That's  why  they 
settled  in  Dorchester.  So  he  would  be  close  to  work, 
within  walking  distance." 


"My  parents  came  from  Ireland.  They  were  mar- 
ried at  the  old  St.  Ann's  Church  on  Minot  Street  where 
I  was  baptized.  That's  long  gone  now.  When  they 
made  the  first  boulevard  they  called  it  Old  Colony 
Parkway.  Then  the  second  boulevard  was  completed 
and  then  they  changed  it  to  Morrissey  Boulevard.  So 
Mears  Street  was  taken  away.  It  was  taken  away  and  I 
came  to  Walnut  Street  in  1920.  I  went  to  St.  Ann's 
school.  I  was  married  in  Walnut  Street,  and  I  still  live 
there. 

"I  can  remember  growing  up.  What  sticks  out  in 
my  mind,  as  compared  to  today,  is  our  access  to  the 
waterfront.  We  could  walk  down  just  by  my  house 
and  spend  the  day  swimming  in  the  Neponset  River, 
which  was  clean  at  the  time.  Now,  industry  has  com- 
pletely blocked  any  free  waterway  along  the  Neponset 
River.  There  is  a  piece  at  O.G.  Kelley's  now.  Perhaps 
someone  would  see  fit  to  give  it  back  to  us  as  a  park  or  a 
recreation  area." 
Both  ladies  trade  reminiscences: 

"During  the  summer,  of  course,  our  favorite  pas- 
time was  going  down  to  the  river  to  swim.  We  had  our 
own  raft.  It  was  like  having  your  own  private  swim- 
ming area.  Then  in  winter  months  they  would  flood 


32 


Garvey  Park  for  ice  skating.  As  we  grew  older,  they 
had  the  Winter  Gardens  Skating  Rink.  That  was  a  nice 
place  to  go.  They  had  skating  in  winter  and  dancing 
during  the  summer." 

"What  made  it  a  good  neighborhood  was  that  peo- 
ple got  along  well  with  one  another.  Perhaps  it  was  be- 
cause it  was  a  stable  neighborhood.  There  weren't  peo- 
ple moving  in  and  out;  it  was  people  who  had  lived 
here  for  many,  many  years." 

"The  neighbors  were  close  and  helped  one  another. 
World  War  II,  though,  seemed  to  bring  a  change  in  the 
neighborhood.  Up  until  that  point  Lawley's  was  ship- 
building, yacht  building.  In  past  years,  they  built  the 
Yankee  and  some  of  those  beautiful  ships  that  sailed  in 
the  races  to  Bermuda.  But  with  the  coming  of  World 
War  II  the  government  came  in.  They  brought  in 
workers  to  build  LCI's — they're  landing  crafts.  They 
worked  twenty  four  hours  a  day.  This  brought  tran- 
sients— people  who  worked  during  the  war  years  and 
went  away.  Some  stayed — like  our  neighbors  up  the 
street,  very  lovely  people.  At  that  point,  a  good  many 
of  the  neighbors  moved  away." 

"Other  than  the  strangers  coming  and  going  dur- 
ing the  war,  you  recognized  people  going  to  their  daily 
work  at  Steam's  or  Lawley's.  It  was  a  matter  of  who 
you  knew  in  the  neighborhood." 

"Now,  I  think  that  everyone  mingles  with  the  rest 
of  the  community  and  goes  to  the  schools  for  their  ac- 
tivities. Children  do,  and  senior  citizens. 

"There  is  new  hope  in  strengthening  the  spirit  of 
community  here.  Many  families  have  lived  in  Pope's 
Hill,  Neponset,  and  Port  Norfolk  through  several  gen- 
eratings.  Hopefully,  today's  turbulence  will  only 
strengthen  their  long-term  trust  in  the  true  spirit  of 
neighborhood,  as  it  has  in  the  past." 

The  earliest  days  of  Dorchester's  history  saw  a 
number  of  prominent  women.  For  example,  Sarah 
Wentworth  Apthorp  who  wrote  one  of  the  first  Amer- 
ican novels,  The  Power  of  Sympathy.  Victorian  Dor- 


chester brought  the  suburban  ladies'  garden  clubs  and 
cultural  societies,  as  well  as  more  political  endeavors. 
Dorchester  women  were  prominent  in  the  Abolitionist 
Movement,  forming  the  Dorchester  Female  Anti-Slav- 
ery Society  in  1835.  And  Dorchester  was  not  without 
its  feminist  activists.  The  best-known  was  Lucy  Stone 
of  Pope's  Hill,  a  suffragette  who  was  the  first  American 
woman  to  retain  her  maiden  name  after  marriage,  a 
courageous  act  for  a  Victorian  lady.  Her  daughter, 
Alice  Stone  Blackwell,  writes  of  her: 

"Lucy's  mother,  when  informed  of  the  sex  of  the 
new  baby,  said,  'Oh,  dear!  I  am  sorry  it  is  a  girl.  A 
woman's  life  is  so  hard!' 

"The  little  girl  early  became  indignant  at  the  way 
she  saw  her  mother  and  other  women  treated  by 
their  husbands  and  by  the  laws;  and  she  made  up 
her  mind  that  those  laws  must  be  changed. 

"As  an  adult,  she  travelled  over  a  large  part  of  the 
United  States.  In  most  of  the  towns  where  she  lec- 
tured no  woman  had  ever  spoken  in  public  before, 
and  curiosity  attracted  immense  audiences.  The 
speaker  was  a  great  surprise  to  them.  The  general 
idea  of  a  woman's  rights  advocate,  on  the  part  of 
those  who  had  never  seen  one,  was  a  tall,  gaunt,  an- 
gular woman,  with  aggressive  manners,  a  mascu- 
line air,  and  a  strident  voice,  scolding  at  the  men. 
Instead,  they  found  a  tiny  woman  with  quiet  unas- 
suming manners,  a  winning  presence,  and  the 
sweetest  voice  ever  possessed  by  a  public  speaker. 
This  voice  became  celebrated.  It  was  so  musical 
and  delicious  that  persons,  who  had  once  heard  her 
lecture,  hearing  her  utter  a  few  words,  years  after- 
ward, on  a  railroad  car  or  in  a  stage  coach,  where 
it  was  too  dark  to  recognize  faces,  would  at  once  ex- 
claim unhesitatingly:  'That  is  Lucy  Stone!'" 

In  everyday  life,  Mrs.  Stone  was  determinedly  normal.  The 
Neponset  she  lived  in  was  almost  an  ideal  village,  probably  very 
similar  to  the  a'a))  Henrietta  Russell  remembers  it. 


33 


Home  of  the  famous  suffragette,  Lucy  Stone,  on  Pope's  Hill 


Mrs.  Russell,  a  gentle  but  determined  Ifldy  in  her  seventies,  has 
held  many  offices  in  community  organizations,  and  a  few  years 
ago  was  named  to  the  Mayor's  Commission  on  the  Elderly.  In 
her  mellifluous  voice,  she  talks  of  the  JVeponset  she  remembers: 
"I  was  born  in  Scotland.  My  father  and  mother 


and  I  came  to  West  Roxbury  and  I  went  to  school 
there  until  I  was  fourteen.  My  father  was  a  monument 
mason,  a  stonecarver.  He  did  many  of  the  monuments 
that  are  in  the  Public  Garden.  In  fact,  he  did  the  Ro- 
man eagle  that's  on  the  front  of  St.  Anne's  church.  As 


34 


years  went  on,  it  was  more  machine  work;  it  wasn't 
hand  work.  So  he  got  a  job  in  the  Fore  River  shipyard. 
He  decided  that  it  was  too  long  a  ride  to  go  from  West 
Roxbury  over  here  to  Fore  River,  so  he  looked  around 
and  bought  this  home.  I  grew  up  here,  went  to  Dor- 
chester High  which  was  a  very  good  high  school.  At 
that  time  it  was  a  coed  school. 

"From  high  school  I  went  into  the  John  Hancock. 
I  worked  there  for  five  years  until  I  met  this  nice  young 
man.  We  used  to  have  bonfires  down  at  Garvey  play- 
ground on  the  Fourth  of  July.  Everybody  in  the  neigh- 
borhood went  to  them.  I  met  him  there — I  was  intro- 
duced by  a  good  friend  of  mine.  In  fact,  we're  very 
good  friends  still.  We  went  together  for  five  years,  and 
got  married.  When  I  got  married,  my  father  built  a 
home  in  back  and  I  moved  into  this  house.  Fve  been 
here  ever  since.  Fve  raised  three  sons  and  one  daugh- 
ter, and  have  ten  grandchildren  and  a  great-grand- 
child. 

"This  neighborhood  really  hasn't  changed  too 
much  because  most  of  the  people  who  live  here  have 
owned  their  own  homes  and  stayed  here.  But  in  back, 
where  the  First  National  is  now,  and  Morrissey  Boule- 
vard, we  used  to  have  large  fields.  There  used  to  be  a 
ball  field  the  kids  played  in.  In  fact,  we  used  to  go 
skating,  because  the  water  used  to  come  up  from  the 
Neponset  River.  And  in  the  wintertime,  all  the  families 
used  to  coast  down  Pope's  Hill.  One  of  the  families  had 
a  double  runner.  We'd  start  at  the  top,  and  we'd  go  all 
the  way  down.  At  the  time,  there  were  trains  down 
there.  Pope's  Hill  Station.  We'd  go  all  the  way  down  to 
Pope's  Hill  Station  with  the  double  runner.  I  can  re- 
m'ember  one  time  I  had  the  minister  on  it.  We  got  near 
the  bottom  and  the  runners  came  oflT.  He  went  flying ! 

"My  husband  and  I  were  both  Scottish  Protestants. 
There  were  quite  a  few  Irish  Catholics  in  the  neighbor- 
hood. We  got  along  fine.  In  fact,  I  was  a  representative 
down  at  St.  Ann's  when  Bishop  Stokes  came  and  they 
had  a  communion  breakfast.  A  friend  asked  me  if  I 


would  go  down  and  participate  and  I  certainly  did." 

Julia  Wright  and  Mary  Duchaney  are  sisters  who 
have  lived  in  Neponset  since  igog.  They  were  best  friends  as 
children.  After  high-school  graduation,  each  of  them  went  to 
work  for  the  telephone  company.  They  married  near  the  same 
time  and  moved  to  the  same  street  on  Pope's  Hill.  They  talk  to- 
gether of  their  memories  of  St.  Arm's  Parish: 

"We  used  to  call  McCone  Street  the  League  of  Na- 
tions because  there  were  all  kinds.  There  were  Italians, 
Swedish,  Polish,  French  people.  All  kinds.  There  were 
three  Protestant  churches  in  Neponset.  On  one  of  the 
Protestant  Churches,  at  the  corner  of  Oakland  and 
Walnut,  was  the  town  clock.  The  fire  house  was  right 
across;  the  firemen  used  to  take  care  of  that  clock  and 
wind  it.  Everybody  in  town  would  listen  for  the  town 
clock  to  strike.  It  was  certainly  something  to  remember 
in  Neponset. 

"The  neighborhood  was  not  all  Irish,  but  a  good 
proportion.  Before  the  turn  of  the  century,  Neponset 
was  settled  by  all  Yankees.  We  were  here  in  1909  and 
there  were  lovely  estates,  all  those  beautiful  homes  peo- 
ple had  made — they  had  maids  and  everything.  After 
they  died,  the  Irish  came  in.  We  remember  the  seven- 
teenth of  March  years  ago.  Matthew  Cummings  was 
the  national  president  of  the  Hibernians.  On  the  seven- 
teenth of  March  he'd  have  a  great  big  event.  They'd 
have  Irish  singers  and  prominent  speakers — John 
McCormack,  James  Michael  Curley,  Judge  Fenton.  Of 
course,  with  Irish  ancestry.  That  was  one  of  the  high- 
lights of  the  town.  Mr.  Cummings  put  Neponset  on  the 
map  for  the  time  being." 

"You'd  have  some  wonderful  occasions.  They'd 
have  dances.  St.  Ann's  would  have  a  reunion  once  a 
year  which  meant  a  get-together  for  all  the  parishion- 
ers. And  some  that  left  the  parish  would  come  back  for 
the  reunion." 

"Some  wonderful  occasions.  It  was  really  almost  a 
country  town — Neponset  years  ago." 


35 


Ashmont,  Shawmut  &  Codman  Square 

Charles  Paget  was  the  custodian  of  Wainwright  Park  in 
Codman  Square  for  over  thirty  years.  The  park  became  his  per- 
sonal demesne.  He  took  an  intimate  interest  in  making  sure  the 
grass  and  fence  were  kept  in  proper  order,  and  had  a  fatherly 
concern  for  several  generations  of  neighborhood  children.  Mr. 
Paget  saw  many  a  boy  and  girl  through  childhood  crises,  al- 
ways ready  to  bandage  a  scratch,  fix  a  broken  shoe-lace,  mediate 
a  dispute,  or  laugh  at  the  same  riddle  told  by  the  twentieth 
child. 

Although  handicapped  by  the  after-effects  of  a  childhood 
bout  with  polio,  ^''Charlie,'''  up  until  his  death  about  a  week 
after  this  interview,  never  missed  a  day  of  work,  taking  only 
Saturday  afternoons  and  Sundays  for  himself.  The  children 
who  used  the  park  were  genuinely  his  children.  Charlie  chatted 
with  a  couple  of  old  friends  about  the  days  when  he  grew  up: 

"I've  lived  in  this  section,  Shawmut,  all  but  the 
first  five  years  of  my  life.  I  was  born  in  the  Savin  Hill 
section  of  Dorchester,  and  we  moved  up  here  to  Shaw- 
mut when  I  was  five  years  old.  I  lived  first  on  Welles 
Avenue  and  then  on  Argyle  Street,  which  is  around  the 
corner,  and  at  my  present  address  on  Moultrie  Street. 
When  we  moved  here  there  was  a  lot  of  vacant  land. 
Meadow  with  trees  on  it.  I  remember  Mr.  Gallup  used 
to  have  a  cow  down  on  Welles  Avenue.  My  father  used 
to  tell  a  story  about  that.  Woke  up  one  night,  he  could 
hear  this  mumbling  going  on — it  was  the  summertime, 
the  windows  were  open — so  he  went  to  the  front  of  the 
house  to  look  across  the  street.  There  were  these  two 
fellows  standing  over  there,  leaning  over  the  makeshift 
fence  that  was  around  the  field,  you  know,  and  they'd 
had  a  little  too  much  to  drink.  'What's  that  over  there,' 
one  of  them  said.  'That's  a  cow,  that's  a  mooly  cow.'  So 
the  cow  comes  ambling  over,  you  know,  and  he  pats 
the  cow  on  the  nose  and  says,  'Nice  mooly  cow,  nice 
mooly,  nice  mooly  cow.'  And  my  father  say^  when  he 
found  that  was  all  it  was,  he  didn't  worry  anymore,  he 
went  back  to  bed  again.  But  that  was  Mr.  Gallup's 
cow.  Mr.  Gallup  owned  a  livery  stable  over  on  Barnes 


Street.  It's  now  called  Banton  Street.  He  also  had 
small  stable  of  trotting  horses.  He  used  to  take  his  trot 
ting  horses  out.  He  belonged  to  the  Dorchester  Gentle- 
men's Driving  Club.  That  was  a  group  of  men  with 
trotting  horses  and  they  used  to  race  them  up  in  Frank- 
lin Field  every  Saturday  afternoon.  Mr.  Gallup  used  to 
race  a  horse  named  Ashmont. 

"This  was  a  middle-class  neighborhood  when  we 
came.  There  was  a  sprinkling  of  Irish.  Of  course  I  can 
still  remember  the  days  when  they  elected  Republican 
representatives  out  here — a  Democrat  didn't  stand  a 
chance.  Which  is  quite  different  from  the  way  it  is  now. 
The  Democrats,  I  think,  were  transplants  from  South 
Boston  and  other  parts  of  the  city.  They  drifted  out 
here  for  a  better  life — and  also,  I  think,  because  of 
schools  and  good  transportation. 

"There  was  a  steam  railroad  coming  out  through 
here  where  the  transit  is  now.  You  could  get  the  train 
at  South  Station  and  ride  out  there,  though  we  didn't 
do  that  as  a  rule  because  you  could  get  on  the  trolley 
car  for  a  dime.  But  the  trolley  car  stopped  at  practical- 
ly every  street-corner  so  you  almost  had  to  bring  your 
lunch  to  go  to  town. 

"And  then  a  man  who  lived  near  St.  Matthew's 
Church  came  up  with  the  idea  to  electrify  the  Shaw- 
mut Branch  of  the  steam  trains  and  put  the  line 
through  Dorchester.  It  was  quite  a  bonanza  because  it 
led  to  a  good  deal  of  development  of  this  section.  The 
only  bad  feature  of  it  was  it  did  kill  business  on  Dor- 
chester Avenue  where  the  trolley  car  had  run." 
He  remembers  the  streetcars  most  vividly  on  one  particular 
day — November  ii,  igi8  .  .  . 

"I  remember  the  streetcars,  the  old  trolley  cars,  go- 
ing up  Dorchester  Avenue  with  milk  cans  tied  to  the 
backs,  the  car  clanking  along  the  street.  At  that  time  I 
was  going  to  Whittier  School,  in  the  first  grade,  and  the 
First  World  War  ended.  I  can  remember  being  a  little 
bewildered  as  to  why  they  brought  us  all  out  into  the 
schoolyard  about  eleven  o'clock  in  the  morning  and 
gave  us  all  American  flags  to  march  around  with.  Of 


36 


Mayor  John  F.  Fitzgerald  {"Honey  Fitz")  receiving  the  Prize  Cup 

course  the  next  day  was  a  holiday,  Armistice  Day — we 
didn't  reahze  the  impact  of  the  war. 
He  recalls  other  "big  days"  as  a  child  .  .  . 

"I  can  remember  the  day  they  got  the  hippopota- 
mus for  the  Franklin  Park  Zoo.  Everyone  in  Dorches- 
ter went  over  to  get  a  look  at  the  new  hippopotamus. 
And  then  we  had  the  Tercentenary  in  Dorchester  in 


a  race  sponsored  by  the  Dorchester  Gentlemen's  Driving  Club,  igii 

1930.  I  remember  the  big  parade  they  had.  The  Lord 
Mayor  of  Dorchester,  England  was  over  here.  They 
gave  him  quite  a  time.  And  the  school  cadets  marched 
in  the  parade. 

Jack  McCreadv,  a  friend  of  Charlie  Paget' s,  has  been  a 
resident  of  Ashmont  Hill  all  his  life.  The  hill  developed  as  a 


37 


^  10  Carrulli  Street 


"garden  suburb"  in  the  late  nineteenth  century,  an  elegant  home 
for  wealthy  Bostonians.  One  of  its  most  famous  residents  was 
Mayor  John  {"Honey  Fitz")  Fitzgerald.  It  has  recently  un- 
dergone a  "renaissance,"  becoming  a  fashionable  address 
again,  this  time  for  young  urbanites  interested  in  maintaining 
beautiful  Victorian  homes  in  a  convenient  section  of  the  city. 
"It  has  been  a  very  pleasant  place  to  live.  We 


weren't  crowded  and  as  congested  as  you  would  be  in 
some  other  areas  of  the  city.  We  had  a  bit  of  what  you 
might  call  suburban  living — sunshine,  open  areas. 
Even  Codman  Square  was  a  country  village  kind  of 
area.  Yet  we  were  convenient  to  the  city.  I  think  that 
really  made  the  area.  Until  we  hit  our  present  prob- 
lems— and  these  are  common  not  only  to  Dorchester 


38 


but  to  the  entire  city.  It  isn't  quite  as  dominant  in  this 
area,  luckily,  and  we  hope  we  can  keep  these  tensions 
down. 

"Economically,  this  is  not  quite  the  area  it  was 
when  I  was  a  youngster,  but  I  would  say  it's  basically 
the  same,  no  great  changes.  Ashmont  Hill  has  pre- 
served its  character  better  than  most  areas  in  Dorches- 
ter in  comparison  to  what  it  was  forty  or  fifty  years  ago. 
The  houses  are  still  standing  and  this  attracts  a  certain 
type  of  people  who  appreciate  the  old  architecture.  It 
did  hit  a  slight  slump  during  the  depression,  when  no- 
body had  any  money,  but  there's  now  a  regeneration 
of  pride  in  our  buildings  and  our  homes.  People  are  re- 
pairing and  maintaining  them.  I  think  the  people  sud- 
denly have  become  really  proud  of  their  homes  here 
and  want  to  spread  the  good  word  about  Dorchester 
and  save  Dorchester." 


An  area  close  to  Ashmont  Hill,  physically  and  spiritually  is 
Wellesley  Park,  with  its  gaslight  lamps  and  attractive  park 
area.  Caroline  DeVoe  remembers  it  as  an  ideal  neigh- 
borhood. 

"I've  lived  in  Dorchester  all  my  life,  and  I  like  the 
community  very  much.  I  first  lived  on  the  other  side  of 
Field's  Corner,  and  moved  here  to  Wellesley  Park  in 
1 93 1 .  I  remember  it  was — today  we  would  use  the 
word  'integrated.'  There  were  Jewish  people  in  the 
neighborhood  and  Protestants  and  Catholics.  I  was 
connected  with  the  Episcopal  Church  up  on  Columbia 
Road.  I  had  girl  friends  who  were  Congregationalists 
and  Baptists  and  everything  else  and  I  did  go  to  their 
churches  and  they'd  go  to  mine  with  me  for  activities 
and  we  thought  nothing  of  it,  because  everybody  was 
one. 

"My  girl  friends  and  I  liked  to  walk.  In  the  eve- 


39 


nings  we'd  go  walking  down  to  Lower  Mills,  or  up  to 
the  Codman  woods,  up  on  Codman  Hill.  Things 
weren't  as  complicated  as  they  are  today. 

"My  friends  and  I  were  in  church  together.  I  was 
very  active  in  the  church.  We  very  rarely  went  out  two 
together.  It  was  a  group — six  of  us — three  fellows  and 
three  girls— all  of  us  were  working.  My  brother  and  I — 
he'd  always  have  his  friends  in  and  I'd  have  mine — my 
home  was  always  an  open  place;  and  I  followed 
through  with  my  own  family.  I  married  in  1946  and 
my  husband  and  I  bought  this  house.  We  found  this 
neighborhood  the  best  there  was  for  raising  a  family. 
My  children  would  rarely  go  to  Town  Field  or  any 
place  because  they  had  their  own  friends  within  the 
neighborhood.  One  of  the  good  points  is  because  we 
had  no  feeling  of  Protestant  or  Catholic.  Of  course  I 
was  a  Protestant  until  I  married.  I  eventually  became 
Catholic  and  there  was  no  fear.  Nobody  ever  thought 
anything  about  it.  If  I  had  it  to  do  over  again,  as  a 
young  woman  preparing  to  raise  a  family,  I  would  de- 
finitely like  to  move  into  this  neighborhood." 

Mt.  Bowdoin  &  Franklin  Field 

Frederick  Law  Olmstead,  probably  the  greatest 
American  landscape  architect,  designed  Franklin  Field 
as  "The  Pendant  of  the  Emerald  Necklace,"  a  beauty 
and  recreation  spot  for  the  enjoyment  of  city  residents. 
And  the  field  plays  a  dominant  role  in  the  memory  of 
the  residents  of  Mattapan,  Mt.  Bowdoin  and  the  area 
adjacent  to  it.  Mattapan,  still  technically  a  section  of 
Dorchester,  was  originally  called  "Upper  Mills,"  a 
counterpart  to  "Lower  Mills,"  where  Samuel  Baker 
made  his  chocolate.  The  Franklin  Field — Mt.  Bowdoin 
— Mattapan  area  was  considered  "the  country,"  and 
River  Street  was  "a  naturally  beautiful  country  road." 
The  district  did  not  begin  to  develop  significantly 
until  the  turn  of  the  century. 

Older  residents  remember  the  area  as  a  "cosmopol- 


itan sort  of  place,"  with  a  few  Yankee  families,  some 
Irish  and  a  mixture  of  other  nationalities.  As  the  cen- 
tury progressed,  Jewish  people  began  to  move  out  of 
the  North  and  West  Ends,  and  the  district  became  a 
pulsating  center  of  Jewish  life  in  Boston.  The  area 
boasted  many  synagogues  and  kosher  shops;  Yiddish 
was  commonly  heard  on  the  street.  In  the  1950s,  most 
of  the  area's  Jews  began  to  move  further  out  to  the  sub- 
urbs, as  black  people  moved  in  from  neighboring  Rox- 
bury,  so  that  today  the  district  is  predominantly  com- 
posed of  native  and  immigrant  blacks. 

WiLLARD  Delue  is  a  y§-y ear-old  gentleman  who  worked 
as  a  reporter  for  the  Boston  Globe  for  many  years.  In  the  igsos 
he  wrote  a  series  of  historical  articles  which  are  still  of  value  to 
researchers.  Mr.  DeLue,  an  articulate  and  kind  man  with  de- 
termined posture,  tells  his  memories  of  growing  up  on  Seaver 
Street. 

"Sometime  in  the  spring  or  early  summer  of  1897 
my  family  moved  from  West  Roxbury  to  a  five-bed- 
room half-house  (you'd  call  it  a  duplex  today)  which 
is  still  in  that  part  of  Seaver  Street  between  Columbia 
Road  and  Erie  Street.  I  was  then  seven  years  old;  and  I 
was  to  spend  the  next  25  years  there  and  in  other 
houses  within  the  triangular  section  of  West  Dorchester 
bounded  by  Washington  Street  from  Grove  Hall  to 
Codman  Square,  Talbot  Avenue  to  Franklin  Field, 
and  then  back  to  Grove  Hall — an  area  that  25  years 
earlier  had  been  almost  entirely  farmlands  and  other 
open  spaces.  While  building  was  going  in  most  of  the 
once  open  spaces,  there  remained  a  touch  of  rural  at- 
mosphere where  the  Greenwoods  still  occupied  their 
attractive  old  farmhouse  on  what  was  left  of  their  once- 
extensive  lands  fronting  on  Harvard  Street,  between 
the  railroad  tracks  and  Glenway  Street.  The  Sarah 
Greenwood  School  is  on  part  of  that  plot. 

"This  was  actually  a  return  to  Dorchester,  for  I  had 
been  born  here,  in  a  three-decker  in  Gouldville  Ter- 
race, which  runs  off"  Brook  Avenue.  The  Terrace, 
which  I'm  told  is  now  a  devasted  area  without  any  res- 


40 


Sheep  feeding  in 
idents,  is  a  very  short  one,  yet  long  enough  to  cross  the 
old  Roxbury  town  line.  I  just  happened  to  be  born  on 
the  Dorchester  part  of  it.  In  a  short  time  we  had  moved 
to  Dacia  Street,  near  Quincy,  and  then  the  family  took 
off  for  West  Roxbury — leaving  behind  in  Dorchester 
and  in  adjacent  sections  of  Roxbury,  some  very  old 
friends,  who,  like  themselves,  had  come  out  from  the 
densely  populated  South  Cove  section  of  the  inner  city. 


Franklin  I'm  I, 


"I  suppose  our  return  had  been  prompted  in  part 
by  a  desire  to  get  back  closer  to  those  old  friends;  but 
there  also  must  have  been  the  appeal  of  Dorchester's 
excellent  streetcar  and  steam-railroad  transportation 
facilities,  which  made  downtown  Boston  speedily  ac- 
cessible. 

"And  then  there  had  been  the  trend.  Everybody 
seemed  to  be  coming  this  way,  and  had  been  before 


41 


Dorchester  became  a  part  of  Boston  in  1870.  That's 
probably  why  my  parents  had  come  in  the  first  place. 
It  was  a  real  migration,  perhaps  dominated  by  families 
oflrish  and  Catholic  origins.  And,  as  we  now  know,  it 
was  the  first  of  three  migrations  that  were  successively 
to  change  the  character  of  our  part  of  the  old  Yankee 
Protestant  town. 

"Dorchester  landowners  and  their,  developers 
played  a  major  role  in  stimulating  this  population 
boom.  Good  transportation  was  a  theme  they  all  talked 
and  wrote  about.  Typical  is  a  booklet  issued  in  1880  by 
the  Dorchester  Land  Company,  which  owned  about 
all  the  high  land  between  present  Quincy  and  Hamil- 
ton Streets  and  from  Columbia  Road  back  to  Bowdoin 
Street.  The  book  tells  about  the  horsecars  in  Bowdoin 
Street,  every  30  minutes  and  just  a  five-cent  fare  to 
Boston;  steam  trains  from  Bird  Street  Station — six  in- 
bound morning  trains,  up  to  nine  o'clock,  and  seven 
outbound  trains  from  2:30  in  the  afternoon  to  7:30. 
And  there  were  other  trains  through  the  day.  You 
could  get  14  tickets  for  a  dollar,  or  a  three-month  sea- 
son ticket  for  Si 2.00  to  get  you  into  or  out  of  Boston. 

"Well,  that  same  steam  railroad  came  out  from 
Bird  Street  to  the  Mt.  Bowdoin  Station,  which  was 
right  below  the  bridge  on  the  corner  of  Washington 
and  Erie  Streets,  and  so  just  a  few  steps  from  Seaver 
Street.  The  tracks  went  on  for  a  half  mile  or  so  to  the 
Harvard  Street  Station.  Later,  when  I  was  going  to 
work,  the  rush-hour  trains  were  far  more  frequent  than 
those  of  1880.  And  they  were  long  trains — six  or  more 
cars,  packed  to  the  limit  with  plenty  of  standees  aboard 
them.  The  railroad  stations  are  gone  without  trace. 
And,  if  there  are  any  trains  on  those  tracks,  they  are 
freights  hauled  by  diesels;  and  so  the  people  who  live 
along  there  miss  the  night-sounds  I  remember  so  well 
— the  mournful  whistles  of  the  steam  locomotives,  and 
the  laborious  puffing  as  they  came  up  the  slope  to  Mt. 
Bowdoin  Station. 

"The  Seaver  Street  of  my  boyhood  was  pretty  well 
built  up  and  had  been  for  some  years.  Built  up  with  the 


homes  of  well,  I  guess,  middle-class  families.  Some 
were  probably  very  upper  middle  class,  and  some 
down  in  the  lower  middle  class,  where  we  probably 
rated,  although  we  did  have  a  maid,  that  is  to  say  a 
servant  girl.  I  don't  mention  that  as  a  status  symbol, 
though  perhaps  it  was.  But  I  think  our  having  a  maid 
had  something  to  do  with  our  return  to  Dorchester.  I 
know  my  mother  had  trouble  keeping  a  maid  in  West 
Roxbury.  They  were  marooned  there;  too  far  in  the 
sticks,  a  long  way  from  friends. 

"While  there  were  no  signs  of  opulence  in  our  part 
of  Seaver  Street,  there  was  plenty  of  opulence  just 
around  the  corner.  Up  at  Columbia  Road  and  Wash- 
ington Street  were  the  estates  of  four  distinguished 
Dorchester  families — one  on  each  corner — the  Wilders, 
Adamses,  Morses,  and  Athertons.  The  Boston  mer- 
chants and  bankers  who  founded  them  were  gone,  but 
their  families  were  still  there  in  the  old  homes,  which, 
though  I  didn't  realize  it,  were  symbols  of  a  Dorchester 
era  that  was  just  about  gone. 

"Our  area  of  Seaver  Street  and  its  immediate 
neighborhood  was  a  pretty  cosmopolitan  sort  of  place. 
The  people  were  mostly  Yankees.  The  Irish  were  ever- 
ywhere but  they  were  never  overwhelmingly  domi- 
nant. There  were  Dutch,  German,  Scots,  Armenian, 
French  among  the  boys  and  girls  I  played  with.  There 
was  also  a  mixture  at  the  little  shopping  center  up  at 
the  corner  of  Washington  and  Erie  Streets,  close  to  the 
Mount  Bowdoin  Station.  There  was  the  R.E.  Nolan 
grocer  or  market  man,  who  served  some  of  the  com- 
fortably fixed  families  of  the  area.  I  can  remember  his 
wooden  delivery  boxes  with  'REN'  on  them.  Nearby 
was  grocery  man  Dave  Klein.  I  worked  for  him  on  Sat- 
urdays at  one  time.  Dave  used  to  walk  around  his  place 
singing  'My  mother  and  father  were  Irish,  and  I  am 
Irish  too/and  we  keep  the  pig  in  the  parlor/and  he  is 
Irish,  too.' 

"Up  at  Washington  and  Erie  was  the  barber  shop 
of  Gus  Haake.  Then  there  was  the  newsdealer  and  the 
candy  shop  man  named  Bean.  I'm  not  sure  of  the 


42 


name,  but  I  delivered  papers  for  him,  up  among  the 
rich  people  on  Mt.  Bowdoin,  and  sometime  waited  on 
customers  at  the  candy  counter,  and  was  permitted  to 
sample  the  goods.  And  there  was  a  Chinese  laundry 
man,  for  whom  I  used  to  do  errands,  including  getting 
pork  chops  over  at  Klein's.  So  you  see  it  was  quite  a 
mixed  community. 

"Seaver  Street  was  pretty  well  built  up  when  we 
arrived  at  it.  Yet  the  whole  area  wasn't.  It  still  was  a 
great  place  for  kids  to  grow  up  in.  We  had  a  field  beside 
our  house — 'our'  field  we  called  it,  because  it  was 
owned  by  the  owner  of  our  house.  And  it  had  a  big  ap- 
ple tree  in  it  close  to  the  sidewalk.  Greening  apples,  I 
remember  that.  And  then,  just  a  few  steps  down  the 
street  was  a  huge  cherry  tree,  in  Phillip  McMahon's 
yard,  and  then  across  the  street,  with  the  other  trees  in 
it,  was  a  broad  field.  And  all  the  trees,  except  the  cher- 
ry tree,  were  beautifully  climbable. 

"The  big  field  across  the  way  led  to  broader  spaces, 
and  to  some  other  friends.  The  broader  spaces  were 
once  a  part  of  the  famous  Oakland  Garden  amusement 
park,  operated  by  a  horse-car  company.  It  was,  I 
guess,  something  like  the  later  Norumbega  Park  in  Au- 
burndale.  It  had  a  zoo  of  some  sort;  a  zoological  gar- 
den, as  they  called  it.  And  one  of  the  park's  notable 
features  was  a  large,  artificial  lake  in  which  floated  a 
good  size  full-rigged  ship.  On  its  deck,  at  one  period,  a 
light  opera  company  staged  performances  of  Gilbert 
and  Sullivan's  Pinafore. 

"Oakland  Garden  occupied  all  the  land  between 
Columbia  Road  and  Blue  Hill  Avenue  at  the  north 
and  Erie  Street  at  the  south,  and  then  from  Seaver 
Street  over  to  Michigan  Avenue.  The  park  had  gone 
out  of  business  just  a  few  years  before  we  came  to  Sea- 
ver Street;  the  only  trace  of  it  was  a  high  board  fence 
that  ran  along  behind  some  of  the  Seaver  Street  houses. 
Well,  when  the  Oakland  Garden  closed,  the  developers 
stepped  in  and  Walcott  Street  had  been  laid  out  and 
almost  every  lot  in  it  had  been  built  on  by  the  time  we 
got  there.  But  Hewins  Street,  between  us  and  Walcott 


Street,  was  still  in  the  making.  A  few  houses  had  been 
built  at  the  head  of  it — up  by  Columbia  Road — but  the 
rest,  where  the  ground  was  a  little  low,  was  just  an 
empty  road  on  top  of  an  embankment.  The  bank  made 
a  perfect  place  for  digging  holes  as  fireplaces  and  for 
roasting  potatoes.  The  beautifully  burnt  skins  and  half 
raw  insides,  we  thought  delicious. 

"Over  across  there,  on  Walcott  Street,  were  more 
of  our  friends.  Aubrey  Lyons,  a  son  of  Leopold  Lyons, 
a  member  of  the  Boston  Globe  staff  specializing  in 
news  of  the  Jewish  community.  He  was,  I  think,  one  of 
the  founders  of  B'nai  B'rith,  and  a  close  relative  of  the 
very  distinguished  Boston  clothier  and  former  Con- 
gressman, Leopold  Morse. 

"The  streets  were  a  perfectly  safe  place  to  play  in 
those  days  when  there  were  no  speeding  automobiles 
around.  So  little  traffic  of  any  kind,  for  that  matter, 
that  long  before  a  soap  box  derby  was  heard  of  we  had 
our  equivalent.  And  where?  Right  on  the  Columbia 
Road  hill!  We'd  start  up  towards  Franklin  Park,  roll 
down  the  slope  and  past  Seaver  Street,  with  nothing  at 
all  to  hinder,  though  Columbia  Road  had  recently 
been  made  a  wide  boulevard.  No  danger  from  traffic — 
just  a  few  horse-drawn  vehicles,  and,  of  course,  there 
were  bicycles. 

"I  suppose  that  period  might  have  been  a  peak  in 
the  popularity  of  cycling.  I  know  that  I  had  a  bicycle. 
I'm  told  it  was  the  smallest  size  made;  and  my  mother 
had  one.  She  and  a  few  of  the  other  women  had  their 
bicycle  club,  and  used  to  go  off  occasionally  on  short 
runs.  I  remember  how  my  mother  looked  in  her  bicy- 
cling skirt.  She  made  it  herself,  I  think.  It  was  well 
above  the  ankles  (quite  shocking)  and  had  rows  and 
rows  of  stitching  around  the  bottom  of  it. 

"There  was  one  automobile  around — the  first  auto- 
mobile I  ever  saw  and  the  first  one  I  ever  heard.  It  be- 
longed to  Billy  Ourish — who  owned  a  bicycle  shop  at 
Grove  Hall.  And  I  think  it  was  a  two-cylinder  Cadil- 
lac. Anyway,  it  was  noisy.  You  could  hear  it  coming  as 
Ourish  rode  along  Washington  Street,  either  to  or  from 


43 


Tobogamiing 

on  Schoolmaster's  Hill, 

Franklin  Park,  igsj 


his  home,  which  was  near  Fenelon  Street — you  know, 
bang,  bang,  bang — and  we'd  run  up  Glenarm  Street  to 
get  a  look  at  it.  In  a  few  years,  Ourish's  bicycle  shop 
became  an  automobile  repair  and  sales  place. 

"As  we  got  a  little  older,  some  of  us  developed  an 
interest  in  theatricals.  The  St.  Martyn's  Guild  affairs 
must  have  generated  some  of  it;  but  the  more  immedi- 
ate cause  was  discovery  that  our  friend  Myron  Clark's 
father  had  been  on  the  stage. 

"Before  Clark  turned  to  painting  as  a  life-work,  he 
had  been  a  member  of  a  famous  light-opera  company, 
the  Bostonians.  So,  when  we  boys  gathered  at  Myron's 
house,  his  father  often  talked  to  us  about  the  stage,  and 
I  remember  him  singing  a  snatch  of  song  from  an  opera 
called  'Maritana,'  or  something  like  that. 

"About  all  of  us  had  been  to  the  theatre.  I  know  I 
had,  several  times.  So  now  we  decided  to  have  our  own 
theatre — -in  Myron's  cellar.  Our  productions  were  lim- 
ited to  a  few  imitations,  which  failed  to  interest  our 
audience,  consisting  of  Myron's  sister  Helen,  usually 
called  'the  Tyke.'  Both  are  still  around. 


"Then  we  turned  to  making  a  miniature  theatre.  It 
was  a  good  one — sturdy,  built  with  care,  with  prosceni- 
um arch,  movable  wings,  and  a  backdrop  of  Mt.  Vesu- 
vius, all  made  by  us  but  painted  by  Myron's  father. 
Later  we  moved  it  over  to  the  cellar  of  one  of  our 
friends  in  Wolcott  or  Hewins  Street,  installed  battery- 
powered  electric  lights,  and,  before  a  large  audience, 
put  on  a  sensational  spectacle,  the  Eruption  of  Vesuvius, 
with  flashing  lightning,  ominous  thunder,  and  a  grand 
finale  of  fire  blazing  from  the  mountain-top — powder 
from  a  few  firecrackers,  I  guess — and  then  darkness. 
When  the  lights  came  on,  our  trick  scenery  had  been 
released,  and  the  buildings  were  in  ruins. 

"All  these,  of  course,  were  in  summer.  Come  win- 
ter, if  we  had  plenty  of  snow,  there'd  be  our  running  up 
Glenarm  Street  to  see  the  street-railway  snowplows  go 
past,  sending  up  clouds  and  curls  of  snow  because  they 
cleared  not  only  the  car-tracks  but  also  the  street  be- 
side them.  That,  I  think,  was  part  of  the  arrangement 
made  when  they  were  permitted  to  lay  the  tracks. 

"As  for  the  lesser  streets,  there  was  never  a  snow- 


44 

II 


plow;  the  city  plowed  the  sidewalks,  but  never  the 
streets.  It  was  up  to  horses  to  break  up  the  drifts.  The 
pungs  they  hauled  were  great  for  getting  rides  on — 
hitching  rides — 'going  punging,'  we'd  say.  You'd  grab 
the  low  pung  body  and  then  get  one  foot  on  to  the  run- 
ners. Or  you  sometimes  could  sit  on  a  little  shelf  that 
ran  along  outside  the  pung. 

"There  was  tobogganing  up  in  Franklin  Park.  No 
toboggan  chutes  at  first,  but  there  were  good  slopes  on 
the  hills  all  around  the  golf  course  valley.  And  then  a 
chute  was  put  up  at  Schoolmaster's  Hill  and  another 
on  a  side  hill.  I  remember  that  a  couple  of  us  boys 
made  our  own  toboggan  from  thin  boxwood,  with  half 
a  cheese  box  for  a  front.  We  got  into  a  chute  with  it, 
got  stuck  about  half  way  down  with  a  heavy  real  to- 
boggan speeding  towards  our  tail,  and  barely  got  our 
so-called  toboggan  out  without  causing  a  wreck.  We 
were  not  invited  to  return  to  the  chutes. 

"A  good  part  of  the  field  would  be  flooded  for  skat- 
ing and  when  you  had  had  enough  skating,  and  were 
in  the  money,  you  could  cross  Talbot  Avenue  to  Hen- 
dries  for  a  snack. 

"Hendries' — Hendries'  Hall — was  a  real  Dorches- 
ter institution.  The  Hendries  brothers  started  making 
ice  cream  way  back  in  the  dark  ages  near  the  corner  of 
Talbot  Avenue  and  Nightingale  Street,  and  they  had 
prospered. 

"By  the  time  I  knew  the  place  the  Hendries  had 
built  a  handsome  structure  with  a  hall  on  the  second 
floor  that  became  one  of  the  most  popular  spots  in  Bos- 
ton for  dances,  wedding  parties,  or  other  social  gather- 
ings. At  one  period,  there  was  a  sort  of  veranda  cafe,  so 
you  could  sit  out  and  watch  the  activity  on  the  field. 

"Hendries'  Hall — and  it  really  was  a  beautiful  one 
was  not  the  only  place  for  social  gatherings.  There  was 
and  is  Whitton  Hall  (which  the  older  people  knew  as 
Whiten  Hall)  in  the  Dorchester  Women's  Club  near 
Codman  Square.  There  was  Lithgow  Hall,  upstairs  in 
the  brick  building,  now  boarded  up,  at  the  corner  of 
Talbot  Avenue  and  Washington  Street.  About  a  mile 


away,  close  to  what  was  known  as  the  Four  Corners — 
where  Washington,  Bowdoin,  and  Harvard  Streets 
come  together — ^just  beyond  that  was  Norfolk  Hall,  a 
lofty  building  which  disappeared  in  recent  years. 
There  were  two  big  halls  in  it,  one  above  the  other. 
The  lower  or  second  hall,  which  had  been  the  movie 
theatre,  was  at  a  later  period  the  regular  meeting  place 
of  Shawmut  Council,  Knights  of  Columbus,  to  which 
I  belonged.  The  upper  hall  was  used  on  certain  nights 
by  the  Odd  Fellows,  who,  as  I  recall,  owned  the  build- 
ing. 

"One  night  when  both  organizations  were  meeting, 
the  K  of  C  had  scheduled  an  initiation  of  new  mem- 
bers. One  of  our  prospective  brothers,  unacquainted 
with  the  place,  walked  up  to  the  third  floor,  and  an- 
nounced that  he  was  there  to  be  initiated.  As  the  Odd 
Fellows  also  were  holding  an  initiation  that  night,  and 
expected  strangers,  they  gave  our  man  a  hearty  wel- 
come. The  initiation  ceremony  was  well  under  way 
and  the  prospective  K  of  C  was  close  to  becoming  an 
Odd  Fellow,  when  he  decided  that  something  was 
wrong,  and  spoke  to  the  man  standing  next  to  him. 
Well,  I  understand  there  was  consternation  all  round. 
Our  man  finally  came  to  the  right  place,  pledged  not 
to  tell  anything  he  had  seen  or  heard  upstairs. 

"Then  there  were  the  bungalow  parties.  I  can't 
place  the  bungalow-party  era  exactly,  but  it  must  have 
begun  somewhere  around  1910,  perhaps  a  little  earlier. 
The  bungalows  were,  as  their  name  implies,  small, 
one-story  buildings,  designed  especially  for  intimate 
group  parties.  For  dancing  they  provided  recorded 
music,  and  sometimes  a  mechanical  piano;  and,  for  re- 
freshments, commonly  arranged  to  have  big  punch- 
bowls of  frappe — not  a  modern  'frappe'  but  merely 
lightly  frozen  sherbet. 

"There  was  a  Fitzderick  Bungalow  in  a  lightly 
wooded  but  not  remote  spot  just  off  Norfolk  Street;  the 
Jaquiminot,  perched  on  the  slope  of  Jones  Hill,  above 
Hancock  Street;  and  DeLue's  Bungalow,  close  to  the 
Neponset,  just  off  River  Street,  Mattapan.  The  Bunga- 


45 


low  Parties  were  necessarily  small  ones — just  groups  of 
friends  and  acquaintances,  who  came  almost  invaria- 
bly as  couples.  But  the  couples  didn't  dance  together 
the  whole  evening,  as  I  understand  couples  so  often  do 
in  these  times.  There  was  always  a  general  mixing. 
When  the  bungalow  era  ended  I  don't  know,  but  it 
must  be  remembered  with  pleasure  by  many  persons 
still  around. 

"Those  early  days  in  Seaver  Street  ended  for  me — 
though  the  friendships  and  associations  continued — in 
1904,  when  we  moved  to  West  Park  Street.  Great 
changes  have  come.  But  I  think  if  I  went  back  there 
and  stood  at  the  Erie  Street  corner  where  the  little  shop 
of  the  five-cent  pies  still  stands  (whether  occupied  or 
not,  I  don't  know) — I'm  sure  I  could  find,  in  a  small 
vacant  lot  across  the  street,  a  beaten  path  leading  in  to 
the  back,  and  then  along  the  side,  of  what  was  once 
Murtagh's  neighborhood  store.  The  store  faced  Elling- 
ton Street,  which  was  Elmo  Street  when  I  knew  it. 

■'I  was  in  Murty's,  as  we  called  it,  when  a  girl  came 
in  with  a  bag  of  lemons.  She  wanted  to  return  them. 
'What's  wrong?'  asked  whoever  was  tending  store  that 
day.  'My  mother  says  they're  too  sour,'  the  girl  said. 

"Across  fiom  Murtagh's  was  a  great  open  space — 
perhaps  not  as  large  as  I  imagine  it  to  have  been,  but 
large  enough  to  carry  the  annual  Night  before  the 
Fourth  community  bonfire,  without  endangering  any 
of  the  neighboring  houses. 

"On  the  far  side  of  the  field  was  Fowler  Street,  run- 
ning off  Greenwood,  and  then,  along  a  way,  was  York 
Street,  in  which  my  family  lived  when  I  was  married  in 
191 7.  I  had  set  up  my  own  establishment  in  Kenberma 
Road,  ex-Coffee  Court. 

"The  York  Street  house  was  a  two-family  afTair. 
Soon  after  my  marriage,  the  Snows,  who  lived  upstairs, 
moved  away  from  Dorchester,  and  a  new  family 
moved  in — and  before  long  my  mother  was  bragging 
about  how  well  she  was  able  to  cook  Jewish  dishes.  The 
woman  upstairs  had  taught  her. 

"By  that  time.  Temple  Beth-El  was  in  Fowler 

46 


Street;  and  in  another  dozen  years  the  Seaver  Street 
that  I  had  known  was  almost  solidly  Jewish  territory. 
Almost.  Because  though  by  1930  there  were  Moretskys 
and  Reubens  in  our  old  house,  there  were  also  Crow- 
leys  and  O'Connors  around,  and  Annie  McMahon 
still  was  in  the  house  w'th  the  big  cherry  tree." 

"Well,  so  much  for  Seaver  Street  and  its  neighbors, 
for  similar  changes  had  been  going  on  all  around  it.  Up 
Harvard  Street  way,  by  1930  Loring's  Drug  Store  had 
become  Trachtenberg's,  as  also  had  Harring  &  Teele's 
at  Harvard  and  Washington.  Burke's  had  moved  to 
Braintree;  and  the  length  of  Harvard  Street  down  to 
Franklin  Field  had  become  dominantly  Jewish.  Con- 
gregation Adath  Bnai  Israel  had  appeared  in  Gleason 
Street,  where  the  long-established  Harvard  Congrega- 
tional Church  had  succumbed  to  the  new  pressures. 
Congregation  Chai  Odum  was  in  Nightingale  Street, 
Anshi  Lebovitch  in  Glenway,  and  Linas  Hazedec  in 
Michigan  Avenue,  along  with  pioneer  Temple  Beth  El 
in  Fowler. 

"In  Jewish-lined  Esmond  Street — from  which  the 
Barrys  and  Joyces  and  almost  all  the  old  neighbors  had 
moved  to  Brookline  and  Newton  and  other  foreign 
places — St.  Leo's  stood  firm,  because  other  parts  of  its 
parish  had  experienced  less  change,  and  the  church 
building  itself  was  small  and  relatively  economical  to 
maintain. 

"And  so  things  stood  until  the  third  of  the  migra- 
tions— the  black  migration — began  rolling  into  this 
West  Dor  chester  area.  Today  there  are  new  churches 
around — new  names.  Perhaps  there's  a  Jewish  congre- 
gation among  them. 

"Little  St.  Mark's  Church  in  Columbia  Road  near 
Seaver,  still  Episcopal,  is  solidly  black.  Occasionally 
one  of  its  old  white  members  drops  in  for  a  service. 
St.  Leo's  is  95  percent  black,  its  congregation  rep- 
resenting six  or  eight  different  countries  and  five  differ- 
ent languages.  And  since  45  percent  of  its  people  are  of 
Haitian  origins,  St.  Leo's  has  been  formally  designated 


Capt.  Lemuel  Clap 
House,  c.  i86g 


a  Haitian  Center;  and,  of  its  three  Sunday  masses,  one 
is  in  French." 

The  Dorchester  that  most  of  the  people  in  these 
pages  have  described  is  an  urban  area  that  has  been 
through  many  changes  in  this  century — changes  in 
physical  development,  industries,  transportation,  hous- 
ing, and  social  changes — in  ethnic  groups,  family  life, 
religion,  leisure.  At  the  time  Mr.  Ward  of  Meeting- 
House  Hill  was  young,  for  example,  farmers  drove  bul- 
locks through  Dorchester  to  the  Brighton  Cattle  Mar- 
ket. Father  Dunn's  family  was  one  of  the  first  Irish 
families  to  move  into  Yankee  Lower  Mills.  And  most  of 
the  people  in  these  interviews  would  have  defined  the 
part  of  Dorchester  they  came  from  by  the  Catholic  par- 
ish they  lived  in. 

Dorchester  has  never  been  a  smug,  static  suburb. 
The  process  of  change  that  has  characterized  the  area 
throughout  the  century  continues  to  the  present.  Since 
the  1950s,  the  period  the  reminiscences  bring  us  to, 
Dorchester  has  again  been  moved  by  the  winds  of 
change.  Since  World  War  H,  the  population  has 
changed  from  predominantly  white,  of  various  ethnic 
groups,  to  a  racially  integrated  community,  with  some 
mostly  white  neighborhoods,  some  black,  and  many 
mixed. 

Much  of  Dorchester's  migration  has  been  an  inter- 
nal process.  As  one  resident  said,  "When  Dorchester 
people  move,  they  move  to  another  part  of  Dorches- 
ter." But  many  have  moved  away,  as  suburbia  became 


fashionable,  or  even,  with  increasing  job  mobility,  out 
of  the  state. 

Statistics  tell  us  something  about  the  changes.  In 
1966,  Dorchester's  black  population  was  six  percent; 
now  it  is  almost  half.  Dorchester  has  an  increasing 
number  of  elderly  people,  and,  by  city  median,  it  has 
become  somewhat  poorer.  Immigrants  continue  to 
move  into  all  sections  of  the  district.  Spanish  and 
French  are  commonly  heard  in  many  shopping  areas 
as  Cubans,  Puerto  Ricans  and  Haitians  become  a  part 
of  Dorchester  life.  Dorchester  is  no  longer  the  heart  of 
Jewish  life  in  the  city.  The  Jewish  community  has  all 
but  disappeared  in  the  last  fifteen  years.  A  few  families 
have  moved  to  other  towns  and  cities  because  of  the 
controversy  over  forced  busing.  And  there  is  a  new 
phenomenon — a  whole  new  group  of  young  profes- 
sionals moving  into  Dorchester's  beautiful  Victorian 
homes  and  rehabilitating  them. 

All  of  these  things  do  not  happen  without  some 
conflict,  some  pain,  just  as  in  the  past.  Dorchester  citi- 
zens have  organized  community  groups  to  help  their 
neighborhoods  accomodate  the  new  and  still  retain 
their  particular  identities.  Many  residents  think  that  it 
is  the  intense  pride  and  intimacy  within  the  myriad 
small  communities  of  the  district  that  allows  it  to  main- 
tain stability  in  the  midst  of  change.  Dorchester  has,  in 
its  345-year  history,  become  used  to  change,  and  has 
learned  to  adjust  to  it  with  a  degree  of  grace  that  makes 
it  outstanding  among  Boston's  neighborhoods.  Dor- 
chester's citizens  have  much  to  be  proud  of. 


Police  of  Station  11,  igii 


47 


South  Boston  Branch  Librar/ 
646  East  Broadway 
South  Boston.  MA  0?''^^ 

Project  Staff 

Katie  Kenneally,  writer,  project  coordinator 
Anne  L.  Millet,  editor 
Jan  Cor  ash,  photographic  editor 
Harron  Ellenson,  director  Boston  200 
Michael  and  Winifred  Bixler,  typography 


ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:  The  experience  and  insights  of  many  Dorchester  residents  contributed 
to  the  making  of  this  history.  We  would  hke  to  thank  especially  Bill  Sweeney,  interviewer,  Kath- 
leen Kilgore  for  editorial  help,  the  Dorchester  Bicentennial  Committee,  John  Madden,  Chair- 
man, the  Dorchester  Historical  Society  and  the  following  participants:  Rev.  James  K.  Allen, 
Donald  F.  Brown,  Ruth  Brown,  the  late  Richard  Bonney,  John  J.  Cadigan,  Jim  Carney,  Regina 
Krajewski  Clifton,  Willard  DeLue,  Caroline  C.  DeVoe,  Lawrence  DiCara,  Mary  L.  Duchaney, 
John  J.  Donovan,  Fr.  Daniel  F.  Dunn,  Bertha  J.  Glavin,  Martin  E.  Glavin,  Josephine  Jepsen, 
Mary  E.  Kennedy,  Alfred  J.  LaBollita,  Veronica  Lehane,  Patricia  Lloyd,  Francis  Maloney, 
Mary  Maloney,  Jack  McCready,  Walter  McLean,  Charles  F.  Murphy,  the  late  Charles  L. 
Paget,  Earl  Perkins,  Philip  Petrocelli,  Julia  Ruiz,  Henrietta  Russell,  Nina  Solomita,  June  Tam- 
mi,  Myrna  Wiley,  and  Julia  V.  Wright. 

PHOTO  CREDITS:  Peter  Brooks,  Bob  Johnston,  Boston  Architectural  Center,  designers  of  the  Dor- 
chester Neighborhood  Exhibits,  Rev.  James  Allen,  The  Boston  Globe,  the  Bostonian  Society, 
the  Print  Department  of  the  Boston  Public  Library,  Riva  and  Romas  Brickus,  Ruth  Brown, 
William  Busick,  Agnes  Casey,  the  Columbia-Savin  Hill  Civic  Association,  the  Dorchester  His- 
torical Society,  Fred  Dudley,  Lawrence  Etta,  the  Institute  of  Contemporary  Art,  Walter  Mc- 
Lean, William  Melchin,  Olmsted  Associates,  Inc.,  Julia  Ruiz,  St.  Peter's  Church,  Robert 
Severy,  Douglass  Shand  Tucci,  John  J.  Ward  and  The  Society  for  the  Preservation  of  New 
England  Antiquities. 

SPONSORS:  The  Boston  Neighborhood  Histories  Project  was  made  possible  through  the  support  of: 
The  Blanchard  Foundation,  the  Godfrey  M.  Hyams  Trust,  the  Massachusetts  Bicentennial 
Commission,  Workingmens  Co-operative  Bank,  and  the  people  of  the  City  of  Boston. 


BOSTON  PUBLIC  LIBRARY 


3  9999  05674  801  3 


Boston  enjoys  an  international  reputation  as  the  birthplace  of  our  American 
Revolution.  Today,  as  the  nation  celebrates  its  200th  anniversary,  that  struggle 
for  freedom  again  draws  attention  to  Boston.  The  heritage  of  Paul  Revere,  Sam 
Adams,  Faneuil  Hall  and  Bunker  Hill  still  fire  our  romantic  imaginations. 

But  a  heritage  is  more  than  a  few  great  names  or  places — it  is  a  culture, 
social  history  and,  above  all,  it  is  people.  Here  in  Boston,  one  of  our  most  cher- 
ished traditions  is  a  rich  and  varied  neighborhood  life.  The  history  of  our  neigh- 
borhood communities  is  a  fascinating  and  genuinely  American  story — a  story 
of  proud  and  ancient  peoples  and  customs,  preserved  and  at  the  same  time 
transformed  by  the  American  urban  experience. 

So  to  celebrate  our  nation's  birthday  we  have  undertaken  to  chronicle 
Boston's  neighborhood  histories.  Compiled  largely  from  the  oral  accounts  of 
living  Bostonians,  these  histories  capture  in  vivid  detail  the  breadth  and  depth 
of  our  city's  complex  past.  They  remind  us  of  the  most  important  component 
of  Boston's  heritage — people,which  is,  after  all,what  the  Bicentennial  is  all  about. 


Kevin  H.  White,  Mayor 


Boston  200