USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 20
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Similar customs were kept up here until the table d'hôte system was abolished. And the price of board was only $1.50 a day, $2.00 securing a parlor as well as a bedroom!
The bill of fare for the first dinner in the Tremont House has come down to us and is of decided interest because it is fairly typical of the state " American plan " dinner consumed by our grandfathers. The soups were terrapin and Julienne, and terrapin in two forms as well as cod, bass, trout, haddock and blackfish were found in the " first course " (sic). Then for the " second course " came boiled chicken, boiled turkey, boiled mutton and boiled ham together with veal in several forms, chicken salad, and " vol au vent aux Huitres." The roast course included beef, mutton, chicken, duck, par- tridge, plover, quail, woodcock, mongrel geese and turkey. "Pastry, puddings, jelly, Blanc- mange and Meringues a la crême" made up the "fourth course," while for "dessert " were offered seckel pears and choice grapes.
One interesting custom, which obtained at the Tremont House, in its early days, was that of providing slippers for the guests while their high top boots were being blacked or greased. These, in various hues and sizes, were arranged in a row in the office. On New Year's Day transients were served, free of charge, with all the sherry they could drink and regular boarders
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with all the eggnog they found it convenient to imbibe.
In June, 1833, when President Andrew Jack- son came to Boston to open the new dry-dock in the Charlestown Navy Yard and to celebrate the docking there of Old Ironsides, he and his secretaries, as well as Commodore Isaac Hull and Martin Van Buren, then vice-president, put up at the Tremont House. Here, too, Charles Dickens stopped on his first visit to America in 1842; and the house was the head- quarters, the previous year, of the Prince De Joinville. In June, 1843, President Tyler and the members of his cabinet were guests here, - the occasion of their visit to Boston being the completion of Bunker Hill Monument. Among the theatrical lights who put up here, while playing in Boston, were Edwin Forrest and William C. Macready. Daniel Webster often stayed here, when he had come up to town from his Marshfield farm, and Mr. Stevens is authority for the statement that "here he wrote some of his undying speeches and ora- tions."
The personality of the man in charge of the Tremont House must have had not a little to do with the enormous success which the hotel at- tained. Many of the landlords had as fine a sense of the dignity of their calling as have the doctors and lawyers of our own time. Paran Stevens,
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who was here from 1852-1863, was a born hotel man.
Mr. Stevens, who was a born hotel man, had previously presided for five years over the Revere House in Bowdoin Square (now, alas ! no longer standing), a memorial erected to Paul Revere in 1847 by a company of gen- tlemen connected with the Charitable Mechanics Association, of which Revere had been first presi- dent. The house stood on the site of the dwell- ing and grounds of Kirk Boott, one of the emi- nent merchants of old Boston, and father of that Kirk Boott who was connected with early manu- facturing in the city of Lawrence. Here Jenny Lind stopped during her memorable Boston sea- son ; and Presidents Fillmore, Pierce, Johnson, General (and then President) Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, the late King Edward, when Prince of Wales, the Grand Duke Alexis, King Kalakaua, the Emperor Dom Pedro, Christine Nilsson, Parepa Rosa, Adelina Patti and hosts of other well-known people were entertained here. From the balcony in front of one of the large parlor windows famous speeches were made by many noted public men in response to the call of the assembled crowds. Another Boston hotel of ancient and honorable history is the United States, whose seal dates back to 1826 and which, though built before the railroad, had the good fortune to have
E
THE REVERE HOUSE, RECENTLY TORN DOWN.
TREMONT HOUSE IN 1870.
HOLMES' "THE LONG PATH", BOSTON COMMON, FROM THE CORNER OF JOY AND BEACON STREETS TO BOYLSTON STREET.
Page 383
Copyright, 1888, by the Notman Photograph Co. OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES IN THE STUDY OF HIS BEACON STREET HOME. From a photograph.
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behind it men who foresaw the coming of that change and planned for it. Daniel Webster lived here for a while and it was here that Charles Sumner entertained Dickens.
The American House dates from 1835. It was to this place that Emerson and Whitman adjourned for what Walt describes as " a bully dinner " after the Sage of Concord and the Good Gray Poet had for hours been tramping up and down Boston Common arguing about the wisdom or folly of publishing "Leaves of Grass."
Intimately bound up with the development of hotels and means of transportation is the growth of newspapers and increased facility in mail transmission. As late as 1835 it cost eighteen and three-quarters cents to send a letter of a single sheet from Boston to New York. Necessarily, therefore, newspapers pre- ferred copying from sheets issued in, other cities to maintaining their own correspondents in New York and elsewhere. In 1825 Boston had four daily papers, three tri-weekly ones, seven semi-weeklies and fifteen weekly sheets. News gathering then meant actual physical adventure and particularly was this true in the field of marine intelligence.
The first regular marine service in Boston was established by Samuel Topliff, who had been a supercargo in the employment of William
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Gray and who was well acquainted with the hazards of the deep. He fully understood, also, how eager merchants are for the earliest possible news of their vessels. As it was only through the news-room (situated at first in the Exchange Coffee House) that merchants could obtain reliable information and so buy stocks intelligently, Mr. Topliff came to be a great power in the community. His accuracy was so well established that his name was frequently forged at the end of dispatches with the hope of enhancing the price of certain commodities and inflating stock values.1
A man thus indorsed would not, of course, long remain in another's pay and soon Mr. Topliff became himself proprietor of the reading room and by his marked ability in its conduct developed a business very satisfactory to the merchants and very remunerative to himself. Under him headquarters were removed to the Merchants' Hall building, on the corner of Congress and Water Streets, an admirable site for the reason that the postoffice was then in the same building.
Topliff's news-room was a kind of club as well as an information bureau. It was the head- quarters for the merchants who dropped in regularly in the morning before proceeding to their counting-rooms and offices. Besides its 1 See Topliff's Travels, Boston Athenæum, 1903.
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" telegraph " (a system of signals operated on Long Island) it maintained two boats, from which Mr. Topliff or his assistant boarded in- coming vessels in quest of the latest marine news. The facts thus obtained were recorded for the benefit of subscribers in one of seven books, each devoted to some branch of the subject.
From Merchants' Hall Mr. Topliff moved his headquarters to the Old State House and there his news-room continued to flourish until 1842 when he withdrew from the business. For some years before this he had obtained a good deal of his information by the use of a telescope stationed at the top of his house at 32 Washington Square, Fort Hill.
But just as the stage coach was superseded by the railroad and the tavern by the hotel so this picturesque method of news gathering was swept away when, early in the forties, Samuel Finley Breese Morse,1 of Charlestown, invented and perfected the electric telegraph. The day of things " modern " was at hand.
1 See The Romance of Old New England Roof-Trees.
CHAPTER XII
THE GREAT BOSTON FIRE
B OSTON had had several destructive fires during the period covered by this book. In 1824 a fire originated near the corner of Charles and Chestnut Streets, spread to Beacon Street and destroyed sixteen buildings, thus inflicting on the city the great loss (for that time) of $150,000. On Fast Day, in 1825, fifty stores valued at a million dollars were burned in Central and Kilby Streets, and in November of the same year ten buildings on Court Street containing many lawyers' offices were destroyed. In May, 1835, there came still another fire which rendered more than one hundred families homeless by the destruction of buildings in Blackstone, Pond and Salem Streets.
The great Boston Fire, however, did not come until 1872. It broke out shortly after seven o'clock on Saturday evening, November 9, in the four story granite block at the corner of Summer and Kingston Streets. Ere it was extinguished, it had burned over a space of
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sixty-five acres destroying property valued at seventy-five million dollars!
This fire is of interest to us not simply because it was a spectacular and impressive conflagra- tion, but also because it utterly changed the aspect of Boston in that district over which it burned. Mr. Harold Murdock has very cleverly brought this fact out in the introduction to his little book, made up of what purport to be "Letters Written by a Gentleman in Boston to His Friend in Paris Describing the Great Fire." He here points out that a member of the Harvard Class of 1872 who might have left Boston immediately after his graduation to return to-day for the first time "would look in vain for the old landmarks and accustomed sights of his boyhood days." Christ Church, Faneuil Hall, the Old State House, The Old South Church, King's Chapel and the Park Street spire he would still find, to be sure. But the Common would have lost its gates and its Old Elm,1 Tremont Street its far-famed trees planted by coachmaker Paddock, and Summer Street all of that old-time beauty and charm which made it, even in the early seventies, a region to be reverenced.
For Boston in 1872 was still a small city, comparatively, and a quaintly attractive one;
1 The old elm on Boston Common was the first thing Dean Stanley asked Edward Everett Hale to show him when he visited Boston.
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it covered a territory of less than thirty square miles and embraced a population of 250,000. Roxbury had been annexed in 1868, and Dor- chester in 1870, but Brighton and West Rox- bury were still separate towns. That the city had not yet learned how to deal adequately with a great crisis is, however, shown by what happened when this fire broke out.
To be sure, conditions were untoward. It had been a very rainy day and almost every horse in the city was ill with the strange disease which, for want of a better name, was called "the epizootic." Yet there were four hundred and seventy-five paid men in the Boston fire depart- ment- and the scene of the disaster was a centrally located one. The real trouble appears to have been that everybody thought some one else must have given the alarm, with the result that it was not given at all for some time. When the engines arrived upon the scene the fire had already made great headway. And although no wind was stirring it spread rapidly, crossing Summer Street and entering both Devonshire and Otis Streets. It also burned eastward down Summer Street to Church Green and from there went on rapidly to Broad Street and along High and Purchase Streets towards Fort Hill. Thus nearly everything in the terri- tory bounded by Washington Street on the west, Summer Street on the south, the water,
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Oliver Street and Liberty Square on the east, and State Street on the north was taken in.
Happily, Fort Hill which, at this time, had been cut away but not built upon, gave the firemen a vantage point of which they made excellent use and from this stand on the one hand and from the Old South Church and the then new Post Office, on the other, an attack was made with such steadiness and pluck that, on Sunday afternoon, the flames were effectively quenched. Naturally, however, the city was in a deplorable condition. Thousands upon thou- sands had seen their property consumed or had been thrown out of employment for they knew not how long, and the terrible excitement of the anxious night and day during which the fire raged had unstrung the nerves of the strongest. The whole community was on the verge of panic, for every vacant space was filled with hastily moved furniture or mer- chandise and pickpockets and petty thieves wandered to and fro at will. Finding that the police were quite inadequate to cope with the situation, a whole brigade of militia was called out to do active duty (with the Old South for their barracks) and guards were set to patrol the streets at night. Fortunately, these precautions served to prevent any very shocking breach of the peace.
Though the number of dwelling houses which
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had been destroyed was comparatively small the loss of income by the stopping of employment was so large that measures of relief had to be organized at once. But the assistance freely and generously offered by the people of other
cities was not needed. There was, indeed, a surplus of twenty thousand dollars - of the $341,913.68 collected in Boston itself - to re- turn when the relief committee was dismissed. Fourteen lives were lost in the fire, seven being firemen. For the families of these the relief committee - of which Otis Norcross was treas- urer - made permanent provision by placing in the hands of Martin Brimmer, Samuel D. Warren, Avery Plumer, William Endicott, Jr., and George Higginson $81,870.90 in trust. To aid working women and girls nearly seventy thousand dollars was expended in clothing, food, rent, sewing machines and transportation; to families burned out and to other sufferers, coal, " wood, stoves, furniture, clothing and other nec- essaries money to the amount of nearly seventy- --- five thousand dollars was expended, while almost twenty thousand dollars was invested in the work of relieving the men who had lost their employment by the fire. The committee seems to have acted with great discretion in all this administering of relief.
Of all the buildings swept away by the fire Trinity Church was perhaps the most pic-
OLD TRINITY CHURCH AFTER THE BOSTON FIRE. Page 361.
ANOTHER VIEW OF THE FIRE RUINS.
OLD
TRINITY
CHURCH, SUMMER STREET, ABOUT
1870.
PHILLIPS BROOKS, AET. 21.
From an ambrotype.
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turesque. Built (in 1829) of stately granite, with a tower of impressive architecture, it was at this time the weekly resort, because of the preaching of the young Phillips Brooks, of a large and varied company of people. Brooks had come here from Philadelphia in 1869, a handsome young bachelor of thirty-three, filled with immense devotion to his work and dis- tinguished by rare powers of eloquence. It was largely through the influence of the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, long one of the first citizens of Boston, that Brooks had been called to the conservative old parish, but Winthrop's enthusiasm over the young preacher was soon justified by the crowds he drew. From the very beginning of Brooks's incumbency Sexton Dillon had hard work seating the throngs who flocked to listen to him. Vainly did the worthy man strive to meet an emergency so wholly unlike anything he had hitherto known in his long administration. Then he tried to sort the people who presented themselves for admission! " Dillon once came to me in the vestry-room," said Mr. Brooks in speaking of the matter to a friend, " to tell me of a method he had devised to reduce the numbers who sought admittance to the church. ‘When a young man and a young woman come together, I separate them,' he explained, and he expected me to approve the fiendish plan."
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The journalistic habit of giving space to current church news seems to have dated from these golden days in old Trinity. I find the following description of a Sunday morning there: "The old building seems the fitting place of worship for the solid men of Boston. There is an air of ancient respectability about it. ... The deep roomy pews, thoughtfully padded, seem adjusted for sleeping, and though seven can sit comfortably in them, if you humbly ask for the fifth seat in some of them, beware of the lofty look and high-bred scorn which seems to say, 'Are not the galleries free to negro servants and strangers? .. I shall have to let you in, I suppose. Take that prayer-book and keep quiet; service has begun. Don't you see Mr. Brooks? '
"Yes, we do see the Rev. Phillips Brooks, a tall, stout, powerfully built man, with smooth, boyish face and very near-sighted eyes, which nevertheless, by the help of glasses, seem to search you out in whatever dark corner you may be hidden. He is reading the service with a thin voice and rapid, breathless, almost stuttering delivery and yet with a certain impulsive and pleading earnestness that carries even Congregationalists onto their knees, and takes them to the throne of grace."
Brooks felt very keenly the loss of the old church. Plans for the present edifice on Copley
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Square were already underway, to be sure, but that he had a great fondness for old Trinity we see from his letters written at the time. " The desolation [of the fire] is bewildering. Old Trinity seemed safe all night, but toward morning the fire swept into her rear and there was no chance. She went at four in the morning. I saw her well afire, inside and out, carried off some books and robes and left her. She went majestically and her great tower stands now as solid as ever, a most picturesque and stately ruin. She died in dignity. I did not know how much I liked the great gloomy old thing till I saw her windows bursting and the flame running along the old high pews."
Yet Phillips Brooks's sermon in Huntington Hall, the following Sunday, was full of an onward and upward sweep, of insistence that life comes through death - the lesson of the fre.
CHAPTER XIII
SOME FAMOUS VISITORS AND THE WAY WE ENTERTAINED THEM
M ANY of the famous people who came to Boston for a visit during the period covered by this book have been discussed in connection with the mission which brought them here; and others will, for lack of space, be passed over entirely or merely mentioned. But the visits of Charles Dickens in 1842 and in 1867 call for more detailed attention. His first coming was the sensation of the early half of the nineteenth century. From the day of his arrival in the city press and people vied with each other to do him honor and so great was his vogue that a wit declared him " Fanny Ellslerized," that piquant dancer having been similarly lionized during her stay in Boston. Three days after his arrival in Boston Dickens gave a sitting for the Francis Alexander portrait of himself long owned by Mrs. James T. Fields, and as great a throng attended him from the Tremont House - his headquarters - to the artist's studio at 41 Tremont Row as if he had been Royalty. Dickens has recorded in the
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"Boston" chapter of his American Notes his impressions of the city and of its institutions during this visit of 1842. The most satisfying passage is that which describes his tour of the Perkins Institution, then situated in South Boston, and his wonder at what had there been done for Laura Bridgman, Dr. Howe's famous pupil.
During Dickens's visit in 1867 he was enter- tained by Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields in the charming old house at 148 Charles Street in which Mrs. Fields lived till she died among the souvenirs of her many grateful guests. In that pleasant volume, Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches, this lady, who was Dickens's hostess on Christmas Eve and who afterwards, that same night, heard him read "the Carol," paints vividly the enthusiasm with which the beloved writer was received by his audience. " The whole house rose and cheered ! The people looked at him with gratitude as one who held a candle in a dark way."
It was during this visit that there occurred the famous Walking-Match, posters of which are now dearly prized by American collectors of Dickensiana. Dickens had said that his agent, George Dolby, could outwalk Osgood; but James T. Fields was of the opinion that his partner, Osgood, was the better man. Ac-
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cordingly, the match was arranged "for two hats a side and the glory of their respective countries " (Dolby was an Englishman, of course).
The time set for the contest was Feb. 29, 1868, and the course was to be over the Mill Dam road to Newton Centre, a route Dickens and Fields had already traversed in preparation for the " event." When the author and publisher went over the ground they became very thirsty, only to find that the stores of the village supplied nothing except a few oranges! They purchased these, however, and sat down on a doorstep to enjoy them. In the " sporting narrative " which Dickens had to write concerning the match (won by Osgood) he indulges in a highly characteristic sentence about this incident:
"Six miles and a half, good measure, from the first tree in the Mill Dam road lies the little village (with no refreshments in it but five oranges and a bottle of blacking) of Newton Centre."
Mr. Dolby, in speaking of the " Great Walking Match," was ever wont to affirm that England must have won had not Mrs. Fields arrived on the scene in her carriage, and, turning around, accompanied Osgood the rest of the walk, plying him the whole time with bread soaked in brandy. All, with the exception of
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Osgood, of course, felt that she showed great favoritism in this respect: but she frankly admitted that she would have done the same by the Englishman had she met him coming in first.
To Dickens, as to many another distinguished visitor from abroad, Boston gave a ball; tickets for the function that bears his name brought forty dollars each! Usually, these great balls were given at the Boston Theatre, which was equipped with a floor made in sections and so arranged that it could be fitted on over the parquet seats, thus giving extensive dancing space on a level with the stage. Here were held a number of functions that figure in the social history of the period. The Tigers' Ball, February 28, 1859; the Mount Vernon Ball, March 4, 1859; Firemen's Military and Civic Ball, March 18, 1859; Grand Juvenile Ball, March 23, 1859; National Sailors' Fair, Novem- ber 7, 1864; and State Military Ball, March 5, 1866. During the war a Fair in Aid of the Sanitary Commission also took place here and many a Bostonian, still living, recalls pleasantly the splendid entertainment and dance given in this place in honor of the Russian Grand Duke Alexis, December 8, 1871.
All these balls, however, pale before the memory of that given to the late Edward VII of England during his visit to Boston in 1860.
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This is generally known as the Renfrew ball because it was as Baron Renfrew that the young prince was travelling. Entrance to the city was made by the railroad from Albany and the Boston Journal of October 18, 1860, records as an important item of news the fact that the prince was able to take a lunch of " cold ham, tongue and woodcock while the train was in motion!" The prince and his suite entered by the station in Longwood, were greeted by Mayor Lincoln and then made their way, attended by a large military escort, through Roxbury to his quarters in the Revere House. On the following day the young prince - he was then nineteen - attended among other functions a musical festival in Music Hall at which twelve hundred children sang to the accompaniment of an orchestra led by Carl Zerrahn. This the prince pronounced the most thoroughly enjoyable event of his visit.
But it is upon the ball, held Thursday even- ing, October 18, that chroniclers of the visit are wont to dwell with most unction. The com- mittee in charge of invitations included such imposing personages as Longfellow, Edward Everett and Jared Sparks; but lesser people might have been more efficient. The crowd was so great that three ladies fainted on the way to the ball room and one had a fit. Possibly, however, it was the flutter incident to meeting
RENFREW BALL IN THE BOSTON THEATRE.
ANCIENT AND HONORABLE ARTILLERY DRILL- ING ON BRATTLE STREET IN 1858.
THE LATE EDWARD VII. AS HE LOOKED WHEN VISITING BOSTON IN 1860.
From a photograph made by command of Queen Victoria just before the Prince sailed for America.
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a young prince, and not the crowd, which was responsible for this; one newspaper observes that " the excitement that agitated the minds of the young ladies as they prepared to enter was very great and betrayed itself in flushed faces, bewildered looks and disarranged gowns." Dr. Samuel A. Green, mayor of Boston in 1882, and for more than fifty years a prominent mem- ber of the Massachusetts Historical Society, has said that the ball came near precipitating a crisis in governmental affairs, which, in its seriousness, was not unlike the etiquette differ- ences between President Washington and Gov- ernor Hancock, in 1789. The question of the hour as regards the ball, was, " Who should dance in the first set with the prince?" This strictly social discussion centered around the wife of the governor of the State and the equally worthy helpmeet of the mayor of the city. Which lady should have the honor of being the prince's first partner?
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