USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 19
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Even as late as 1835 going to New York by stage was a good deal of an undertaking and for at least a fortnight in advance would be a sub- ject of much conversation on the part of the intending traveller and his friends. Then the adventurous one would go to the stage office at 7 Elm Street, engage a seat for his journey and leave word for the stage to call at his home for him. The following evening at 7.30 the old vehicle would come lumbering up to his door and his trunk would be strapped on the rack behind. This process and the return trip to the office for the mail occupied until 10 P. M. when the stage would really set out on its jour- ney. One who took the trip in the month of February, 1835, has thus described it:
" We left the stage office on time, five pas- sengers on the inside. The route out of the city was through Elm, Hanover, Court, Cam- bridge and Charles Streets over the Milldam. The Milldam commenced at Arlington Street and ran over what is now called Beacon Street as far as Brookline Avenue. The toll-gate was located about opposite the foot of Clarendon
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Street. Then out through Brookline, Brighton and Newton we travelled, stopping at the tavern to change horses, which was done every ten or twelve hours of the journey.
" After riding all night - and a bitter cold night it was and snowing fast - we arrived at the town of Sturbridge on the Worcester turn- pike. Here we had breakfast. At this place we changed from wheels to runners. At noon we reached Hartford, Connecticut, and had a good hot dinner. From here the sleighing became poor. Many times during the evening the gentlemen had to get out and walk. Ar- rived at New Haven for supper - another wild night. We had our breakfast at a tavern on the old Boston Post Road. Every time the stage stopped for a change of horses or for meals the gentlemen went for something in the shape of hot toddy, the price of which was three cents. . The price of meals was: breakfast and supper twenty-five cents each - dinner 372 cents. You could make the latter price by paying a quarter and ninepence, which was twelve and a half cents. Most of the taverns set a good table with plenty of food well cooked.
" On arriving in New York we drove through the Bowery, Chatham Street, Broadway, Cort- land Street to the stage house, arriving at noon having been thirty-eight hours on our journey. The fare, including meals, was $17.50. Tired
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and lame we were, too, when the trip was ended."
How greatly the coming of the railroad facilitated travel to New York is seen by the fact that, in 1839, persons wishing to make the journey could leave Boston for Providence (in all but the winter months) at four o'clock in the afternoon, taking the steamer immedi- ately upon arriving in the Rhode Island city and get into New York at eleven the next morning. The total expense, including supper and stateroom, was now $7.00, a saving of $10.50 over the cost of that trip which, in 1835, made our friend " tired and lame."
The ramifications of the stage coach as a commercial institution were, however, so varied and so numerous that, for a long time, it was quite the custom to talk of the " calamity of railways." The Boston Traveller encouraged this cordially, for it was a " stage coach paper," issued on Tuesdays and Fridays (beginning in 1825), for the express purpose of giving all the latest news about stage routes. How large a volume of patronage the stage coach as an institution commanded may be judged from the fact that, in 1832, there were ninety-three lines of stages running out of Boston. Time tables and stage lists were issued by Badger and Porter from 1825 to 1836, and all this time the Eastern Stage Company, a consolidation
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of stage coach interests, was doing an enormous business in coach-making and blacksmithing as well as in its stages and taverns. Moreover, the taverns in the cities no less than in the country towns were, in many cases, owned by those who controlled stock in the stage lines. One chronicler tells us that "the taverns of Boston were the original business exchanges; they combined the Counting House, the Ex- change Office, the Reading-room and the Bank. Each represented a locality.
"To the Lamb Tavern . people went 'to see a man from Dedham'- it was the resort of all from Norfolk County. The old Eastern Stage House in Ann Street was fre- quented by 'down Easters,' captains of vessels, formerly from the Penobscot and Kennebec; there were to be seen groups of sturdy men seated round an enormous fire-place, chalking down the price of bark and lumber, and shippers bringing in a vagrant tarpaulin to 'sign the articles.' To the Exchange Coffee House re- sorted the nabobs of Essex County; here those aristocratic eastern towns, Newburyport and Portsmouth, were represented by ship owners and ship builders, merchants of the first class."
The Lamb Tavern here referred to was on the site of the present Adams House and its sign is mentioned as early as 1746 in the books written by foreign visitors to Boston. In later
THOMAS GOLD APPLETON, THE FAMOUS BOSTON WIT.
From the painting by Frederic Vinton, in the pos- session of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Page 382.
OLD FRANKLIN STREET, SHOWING THE ROOMS OF THE "BOSTON LIBRARY " OVER THE ARCH ON THE RIGHT.
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20088. S.FRANK &ROCKETS
BROMFIELD HOUSE, ABOUT 1860.
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days it was kept by Laban Adams, father of "Oliver Optic" Adams. Near by, on Hayward Place, long famous as the resort of Bohemian diners-out, was another noted inn called the White Horse.
In the nineteenth century, however, the unique claim to a picturesque cognomen and sign-board belonged to the Indian Queen on Bromfield Street. This was a noted stage tavern and it was kept - - till 1816 - by Isaac Trask and afterwards by his widow Nabby. Then it began to be called the Bromfield House. One of its landlords was Simeon Boyden, father of Dwight Boyden, the first landlord of the Tremont House, and of Frederic Boyden, one of the early landlords of the Astor House, New York. Subsequently the Bromfield House was kept by Preston Shepard (1823) who was, in turn, followed as a landlord by the Crocketts, father and son.
Mrs. Kate Gannett Wells has written charm- ingly 1 of the entertainment which used to be offered in this picturesque old hostelry :
"In the days of the Crocketts, Col. Selden Crockett and his son S. Frank Crockett (1844- 1869), its great courtyard was renowned for the vehicles of all kinds which drove into it from the suburbs and the city proper. In this yard was a wonderful well, concerning which Mr.
1 In the New England Magazine of January, 1893.
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Sumner, a provision dealer of great local fame for his fresh and salted meats, always declared that 'one bucket of water from Crockett's well made better brine than two buckets of Cochituate.' The hotel also had a cupboard, which answered all the purposes of a bar; for in those days one might as well have a house without a roof as a hotel without a bar; but it was abandoned long before the hotel was closed.
" Mrs. Crockett herself presided over all internal affairs, with a matronly grace and old- fashioned New England order. Neither French dishes nor 'ambiguous entrées ' ever garnished the table. Dinners such as these were given - boiled salt fish with pork scraps, hashed calf's head and dropped eggs, corned beef and cabbage, cottage pudding and cranberry pie! . Once New York's Fifth Avenue Hotel was obliged to submit to serving Col. Crockett's original baked beans and brown bread, steaming hot, for a party of Boston merchants, who when in New York, ordered them to be sent on for their Sunday breakfast from the Bromfield House by the Saturday night train, protected by close coverings.
" Col. Crockett often stood at his front door on Bromfield Street welcoming his guests and leading them to the dining room where he carved. He was a man of undeviating honor,
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true patriotism, and quick kindliness, 'a good man to tie to ' as many a one said who sought his aid. This house was the dinner centre of the old-fashioned Jacksonian Democracy, Frank- lin Pierce, Caleb Cushing . . . Hon. George S. Hillard and many others were constantly there; even Governor Andrew said that the best relief he obtained from his duties at the State House was the mid-day dinner at Col. Crockett's. At the farewell dinner, April 7, 1869, when the house was closed forever, B. P. Shillaber wrote an ode called 'The Old Bromfield House ' which was sung to the tune of 'Auld Lang Syne.'"
With the introduction of the "hourlies " several hotels quite near Boston came to be well known, among them the old Norfolk House, which stood on the site of the present Norfolk House in Eliot Square, Roxbury. This was the first public house in the vicinity and it was the terminus of a very profitable line of " bus- ses." Previous to the inception of this enter- prise (in 1826) the stage coaches on the various roads running out of Boston had been the only regular means of public conveyance by which a person could get from one part of the city to another or from the city to its immediate suburbs. But in the same year that Brooks Bowman was inspired to set up this service for Roxbury Stephen Wiley established a similar
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line to Charlestown and Ebenezer Kimball a line to East Cambridge. Ere long many such coaches were plying between Boston and the suburbs. Boston was connected with South Boston, then a favorite residential section, by a single coach which made six trips each day, Sundays excepted. Its Boston headquarters were at the Washington Coffee House, which stood on Washington Street, near Milk Street, and its route over the Dover Street Bridge. Men did not use the " hourlies " much, their principal patrons being women or old and infirm persons. The fare was twelve and a half cents each way for a long time, but by 1853 the line to the Norfolk House, of which H. King was then proprietor, advertised a coach every seven and a half minutes during week- days at a fare of six cents.
The " Governor Brooks," an omnibus drawn by four horses and having seats for eighteen passengers inside and for six outside, began in 1835 to run regularly from Winnisimmet Ferry at the foot of Hanover Street to Roxbury, two and a half hours being allowed for the round trip and the price of a single passage being twelve and a half cents. In 1846 Messrs. Hobbs and Prescott started the Dock Square and Canton Street line, which was purchased in 1851 by J. H. Hathorne.
For a long time Cambridge had only half
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hour omnibus service with no conveyance leaving Boston after twelve o'clock at night. A story is told in this connection which shows the kindness as well as the shrewdness of President Walker.1 He had been attending a committee meeting of the Historical Society, held at the house of Chief Justice Shaw on Mount Vernon Street, and found that he had only just time to catch the last omnibus out. Just as he and Rev. George E. Ellis, with whom he was walking, reached the head of Brattle Street, the coach's starting-place, the president said suddenly, " I think I will walk to Cam- bridge. There may be some young men in the omnibus who would rather not see me at this time."
Colonel Higginson has told of sundry narrow escapes from "nautical eminence " experienced by him and James Russell Lowell when- while walking back to Cambridge on dark nights together, after hearing Emerson lecture - they would be hailed from the river by seamen in search of those who could pilot their craft up the Charles. For there were no lights across the intervening space and Boston and Cambridge were then very far apart - at night. Up to 1856 toll was charged passengers on this bridge, one cent for those on foot and "fourpence " for all vehicles. A favorite
1 President of Harvard 1853-1860.
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sport with Harvard students was "running toll."
The Stackpole House, which stood at the corner of Milk and Devonshire Streets, was another famous resort. Originally a private house it was an imposing, Colonial building with a hospitable front hall running through its centre and spacious rooms on each side. It rejoiced in a front yard which contained two gigantic chestnut trees under which, on summer evenings, guests might be seen smoking real Havana cigars at three cents apiece and drinking such beverages as they might prefer at fourpence. A chained bear often disported himself in this yard and now and then a peacock strutted up and down airing his gorgeous tail and giving color to the scene. Other Boston hostelries of the olden days were the Mansion House, the Pearl Street House, the Commercial Coffee House, - where the Exchange Club now is, - Wilde's, Doolittle's and the Elm Street House .. Most of these had courtyards paved with cobble stones and were favorite taverns with stage travellers.
At the Marlborough House, which long stood on Washington Street between Bromfield and Winter Streets (and was famous as a temperance hotel), Gen. Lafayette was entertained in 1824 with a banquet at which a distinguished com- pany was present. Nathaniel Rogers was the
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proprietor here beginning in 1836, and on his parlor wall was this printed regulation : " Family worship to be attended every morning and evening. No intoxicating liquors to be sold or used in the house. No money to be received at the office on the Sabbath nor will any company be received on that day except in cases of necessity. Cold and warm baths are provided here for the accommodation of boarders and a vegetable diet for those who prefer it. The best efforts are promised by the landlord to furnish the table with the products of free labor. Smoking of cigars not allowed on any part of the premises."
This prohibition of liquor, tobacco and the products of slave labor made the Marlborough very popular with the anti-slavery people, most of whom regarded smoking as well as tippling and slave owning as a crime. Which reminds me of a story that Julian Haw- thorne 1 tells to illustrate his contention that. his uncle, Horace Mann, had a vacuum where his sense of humor should have been. Haw- thorne, the romancer, had once admitted in Mann's presence that he occasionally smoked a cigar, whereupon the reformer, greatly ex- cited, said, "Did I understand you to say, Mr. Hawthorne, that you actually use to- bacco? "
1 In Hawthorne and His Circle.
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" Yes, I smoke a cigar once in a while," was the comfortable reply.
Horace Mann could not keep his seat. He started and paced the room menacingly. His high admiration for Hawthorne's genius and his deep affection for him as a man were obviously greatly shaken by this admission. But the need of being true to his colors at any cost was upon him and he soon said, in an agitated voice: "Then, Mr. Hawthorne, it is my duty to tell you that I no longer have the same respect for you that I have had." With which he turned and strode from the contamina- ting presence of an occasional smoker.
Among the inns mentioned in Bowen's Boston Guide for 1833 are the Exchange Coffee House, kept by Hart Davenport, with accommodation for one hundred and thirty guests and the price of board and lodging one dollar a day, seven dollars a week, and two hundred and sixty dollars a year. It is stipulated that " annual boarders " shall make express agreements with the proprietor and that all lodgers shall try to be in by eleven o'clock, the "retiring hour." The Commercial Coffee House, on Milk Street near Liberty Square, is referred to as the stopping place of " some Providence and hourly stages " and the City Tavern (Doolittle's) as the point of departure for " Salem, Gloucester and other stages." The Merchants' Hotel, 42
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Hanover Street, is the headquarters of the " Providence and northward stage," and the Eastern Stage House at 84 Ann Street is the terminus of the line after which it had been named. On Howard Street flourished " Kil- burn's (formerly Holland's Coffee House) ; "
at 158 Washington Street the Washington Coffee House, kept by Lewis Boutell; " on Washington Street, opposite Boylston Market, the Lafayette Hotel kept by Mr. S. Haskell; " and on Wash- ington Street, near Essex, the Liberty Tree Tavern of which one G. Cummings appears to have been the proprietor.
The naïve advertisements of some of these houses are quite entertaining. The New Eng- land Coffee House was inordinately proud of the fact that it had water on its fourth story " by hydraulic pressure " and that the entire house was lighted by gas. In the Boston Adver- tiser of September 1, 1831, I find a notice of the Julien House, 67 Congress Street, which informs the public that it is kept by "Miss Sarah Hawks and Company " and that " Gentlemen and ladies from the country who are in pursuit of board and pleasant situation will be thank- fully received." But the prestige of the stage inn is fading fast now, for six months later (in March, 1831) one comes, in the Advertiser files, upon an editorial endorsement of a petition for a railroad to Worcester which has been
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signed by H. G. Otis, Joseph Coolidge, Israel Thorndike, Henry Sargent, Horace Gray, F. J. Oliver and Robert G. Shaw. This paper was not particularly dependent upon stage-coach patronage and, from the very first, heartily endorsed the enemy. Nathan Hale of the Advertiser is for this reason often called "the father of the railroad system of the State."
According to George Glover Crocker, who has made a special study 1 of the history of transportation facilities in and about Boston, the first report to the Massachusetts Legisla- ture in favor of a railroad for passenger traffic was made in 1827 when it was decided that the idea was feasible. At this time it was planned to have a path on each side of the rails, like the canal tow paths, for the horses who should convey the cars. Already Gridley Bryant had in this fashion drawn from the granite quarries in Quincy to the Neponset River near by the granite used in the construction of Bunker Hill Monument. To be sure, there had been much opposition to the granting of the charter necessary for the construction of this railroad, involving as it did the taking of a right of way by eminent domain. But the patriotic purpose for which the road was to be used finally caused the vote in its favor to be carried by a bare majority.
1 From the Stage Coach to the Railroad Train and the Street Car.
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OLD BOWDOIN SQUARE, SHOWING AN EARLY HOME OF FRANCIS PARKMAN.
TRAIN USED IN 1835 ON FIRST TRIP OVER BOSTON AND LOWELL ROAD.
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FORT HILL SQUARE IN 1858.
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Every step in the development of railroading was opposed by those endowed with " good common sense." Captain Basil Hall, who in 1827 rode by stage coach over the present route of the Boston and Albany railroad, said, " Those Yankees talk of constructing a railroad over this route; as a practical engineer I pronounce it simply impossible." And in the June of that year there appeared in the Boston Courier a satirical article from the pen of the editor, Joseph T. Buckingham, which ridiculed the " railroad mania " and declared a line from Boston to Albany to be " as useless as a railroad from Boston to the Moon."
Yet Buckingham himself joined the " fa- natics " the next year. Nearly all the editors, indeed, printed congratulatory notices when, on March 17, 1834, the first New England experiment with a locomotive was made on the Boston and Worcester road, then completed as far as Newton. Regular passenger service to this town, with three trains a day in either direction, began on May 16, the trip being made in nineteen minutes and the fare being 372 cents. When Harriet Martineau visited us, late in 1835, she was able to record " very speedy communication " between Boston and New York by way of Providence, - the dis- tance " being performed in twenty hours by rail-road and steam-boat." The same writer
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was a good deal impressed by the expenditure of "some thousands of dollars " to clear the tracks of the recently completed Boston and Lowell road from a single fall of snow.
Considerable local interest attaches to the development of this last-named railroad be- cause it connected Boston with the new seat of textile manufacturing founded by a remark- able group of Boston men, prominent among whom were the Lowells, Appletons, Lawrences, Jacksons, Millses, Reads and Lymans. The charter of the Boston and Lowell railroad was obtained through the influence of Daniel Web- ster and provided that, for thirty years, no road should be built parallel with it. From the start this road was taken rather more seriously than the road to Worcester, whose average speed had been only ten miles an hour and which went so slowly on up-grades that farmers and berry pickers, stationed alongside the rails, could pass their wares to the conductor on the moving train to sell for them in the city.
Four years were required to build the Boston and Lowell road and, on Wednesday, May 27, 1835, its rails were used for the first time. The engine employed was the "Stephenson " and had been built by the Robert Stephenson Company at Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, the previous year. This highly important adjunct of the road was shipped from England to Boston
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and there taken apart and drawn by canal boat up the old Middlesex Canal to Lowell. On its first trip the twenty-six miles to Boston was made in one hour and seventeen minutes. The cars drawn by this "made in England " engine, were modelled after the stage coach and seated six persons. The conductor, called the captain, rode, without shelter, where the stage driver would have sat and the brakeman rode backwards at a cor- responding seat at the other end. The engine had no whistle and there was no cab for the engineer. The particular guardian of the " Stephenson " was named William Robinson and he had been imported from England with the engine. He was an enthusiastic horseman and a good deal of a dandy. Often he would be so busy exercising the fast stepper he stabled in Boston that the train for Lowell would start an hour late! At first there were no baggage cars and no checks, and seats in the forward car, where cinders circulated freely, were somewhat cheaper than further back. For, as Tony Weller pointed out, travelling after an engine was not an unmixed joy.
The stage coach and the tavern had reached the height of their glory together and together they declined. For now an altogether different type of hostelry was required, and in Boston steps had already been taken to meet the new
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need. By 1828 it had become an actual neces- sity that the city should have a house for the entertainment of visitors which should not only be spacious but should possess as well dignity and beauty. Accordingly there was erected by subscription the Tremont House, the pioneer first class hotel in America. Peter C. Brooks and David Sears gave ten thousand dollars each to the undertaking, and Harrison Gray Otis, Samuel Appleton, Thomas Handa- syd Perkins, William Lawrence, Henry Hovey, Samuel Eliot, Josiah Quincy, Edmund Dwight, Robert G. Shaw, John L. Gardner and Fred- erick Tudor were among the other well-known Bostonians who contributed liberally to the enterprise. The corner stone was laid July 4, 1828, and the house was opened to the public in October, 1829, its initial event being a sub- scription dinner over which Mayor Quincy presided. Among the distinguished guests were Judge Joseph Story, Daniel Webster, Peter C. Brooks and Edward Everett, the latter making the occasion notable by his delivery of a witty and remarkably felicitous speech.
" In the erection of this hotel," he then said, " Bostonians have certainly shown that they think the worshipful company of travellers ought to be as well bestowed as circumstances admit. . I will, with your leave, propose a toast: ' The memory of Columbus, the father
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of American travellers, who thought the world too narrow for him, even before he was sure there was any other; who crossed the un- known Atlantic for a trip of pleasure, and discovered a new continent for his watering place.'"
The first manager of the new hostelry was Dwight Boyden and he belongs at the head of a noteworthy list of men who took great joy in serving the public at this famous old stand. In his day the dining room procedure at the Tremont House was as elaborate as the steps and figures in an old-fashioned minuet. "The waiters," says Benjamin F. Stevens, who wrote the hotel's valedictory, "filed into the upper end of the room where the landlord stood with a long white apron around him, and carving knife and fork in hand; and at the sound of a bell one seized upon a quantity of plates, another knives, a third forks, a fourth a lot of large soup spoons, and a fifth the smaller spoons. At the second sound of the bell they moved into line, and at the third marched with sedate steps behind the chairs of the guests, and simultaneously the bearers of plates, knives, forks and spoons, with a flourish of the hand, placed the different articles upon the table before the guests, and then gracefully stepped back into line ready to carry out their orders. In the meantime, the landlord was carving."
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