USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Newton > Tercentenary history of Newton, 1630-1930 > Part 25
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Rip Van Winkle is amazed at the massive masonry of Echo Bridge, and is much relieved to escape with safety to the placid open country along Quinobequin Road. Loiter- ing by the way to observe the pleasant scenes along the river, listening to the songs of birds and stopping now and then to examine the growing crops in the cultivated fields, he feels more at home than in the villages. Above him on the bluff along the river are rising the houses of those who are glad to break new ground while they are not far from the privileges of church and school and society. Waban was finding a place on the map of the city with its new streets, its railroad station, and the Sudbury aqueduct passing through. The Waban Improvement Society had been watchful for the best interests of the early settlers.
The year 1896 was marked by the organization of the Episcopal church and the Waban Woman's Club. The Church of the Good Shepherd was organized at a meeting of residents held in Waban Hall, and a chapel was built on land that cost only a small sum because of the generosity of William C. Strong, who gave most of it. Twenty-nine persons made voluntary contributions to the building fund, and many of the special furnishings of the church, including a memorial window, a lectern, and a communion set, were gifts from residents and other persons interested in the church. Reverend William H. Williams was the first minister of the parish, but Reverend James C. Sharp
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succeeded him in 1904, and remained fourteen years. Dur- ing his ministry the parish prospered, but the withdrawal of some of its members to help form the Union Church reduced its constituency. Three other ministers have succeeded one another in the pastorate.
The Waban Woman's Club at its inception was small in membership, and its meetings at members' homes under the direction of Mrs. William H. Gould, the first president, were delightfully informal. Papers were prepared and read on art and archaeology, literature and philanthropy. The next year the cathedrals of England were studied, with a half hour of each meeting devoted to current events. Steadily the membership grew from about ten to more than fifty, and the Club joined the city and state federa- tions. Dues were raised from twenty-five cents to two dol- lars, and lecturers began to talk instead of members read- ing papers at every meeting. The Club broadened its activities to contribute pictures to the Roger Wolcott School. It presented a play for the benefit of the new Waban Neighborhood Club in later years. During the World War it gave every other meeting to an all-day war service program. It joined the Improvement Society in promoting the project of a new schoolhouse, and it inau- gurated a yearly gift for a scholarship.
Waban had two preparatory schools, thus helping to keep up the reputation of the city for private schools. C. E. Fish kept a school for boys and the Windsor Hall School for girls was fitting them for college under the prin- cipalship of Dr. Charles H. Clark.
Down along the river on the way to Lower Falls are patches of open woods, where jack-in-the-pulpit grows large in the spring and tanagers flash red against the foli- age, where the stream lags as it brushes against the bushes, and in the fall acorns drop as the frost reddens the leaves. From this sylvan scene the wayfarer emerges into Wash-
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ington Street, where the gong of the trolley car sounds above the tap of the woodpecker and factory oil greases the blue water of the river. At Lower Falls he finds paper mills as in the olden days, but under different management and with new machinery. Beside the mills the Perrin Methodist Church had been built recently. It was like several of the other Methodist structures in town, an inex- pensive wooden building of modest size, with accommoda- tions not too modern for Sunday school, prayer meeting, and social purposes. Methodists in the village had wor- shipped since 1867 in different halls, but they could not remain permanently satisfied there, and they were willing to sacrifice to the limit of their ability in order to raise the necessary seven thousand dollars.
After more than a century St. Mary's still stands on the high land above the river with the cemetery around it. Recent decades have brought to the church physical expansion. A chapel has been added, changes made in the chancel, various furnishings supplied by the communi- cants, gas and city water installed, and a rectory built. The seventy-fifth anniversary had been observed in 1888. Then came the vested boy choir and the organization of the choir guild society, and in 1900 the installation of a new organ. As the wayfarer looks about he remembers the early days of the parish when it was the outpost of epis- copacy and its only representative in the town, and he feels a deep respect for those who planted their ancient faith here, though he himself was of those who long ago had expressed so emphatically their dissent from the Angli- can Church.
One of the most prominent men in Lower Falls died in 1893. This was Dr. Charles F. Crehore, a native of New- ton, who had been graduated from Harvard as a doctor of medicine, but after a short practice gave it up to assume the management of his father's mill. During the Civil
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War he served as a surgeon for a time, but returned to manufacture press paper and cards for Jacquard looms. The enterprise was an old one, dating from 1825, and had been uniformly successful. Dr. Crehore continued as sole owner after 1868 until he admitted his son Frederick into partnership in 1883. Dr. Crehore was an attendant at St. Mary's Church, was highly esteemed in the commun- ity, and was regarded as a kind and benevolent citizen.
If the wayfarer had turned back from Lower Falls toward the villages on the north side, or had ventured to board one of the cars of the Wellesley and Boston Street Railway Company, he would have climbed the long hill from Lower Falls village to the corner of Beacon Street where the "Great Signboards" were, and possibly he might have seen a group of cyclists who had ridden out from Bos- ton over the "sandpaper" highway and were preparing to return by way of Washington Street, the favorite cycling trip out of Boston in those days.
A short distance would have taken him to the Newton Hospital. He would have marvelled at the changes in medical and surgical appliances within a hundred years. Many lives might have been saved in colonial days with cottage hospitals. But the Newton Hospital already was outgrowing its modest name. It had soon been apparent to the hospital authorities that there was serious need of a contagious ward and a morgue. The friends of the Hospital went to work to raise the money, and the city gave its aid. The Board of Aldermen appropriated a sum sufficient to provide a contagious ward. Young women of the city organized as the "Merry Workers," and raised three hun- dred dollars for the children's ward, and a group of them in one of the churches offered an entertainment which brought in money enough to pay for a physician's desk for the office. The girls of the high school paid for a lounge by admitting the public to a calisthenic drill. A children's
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Christmas collection in the churches furnished the kitchen. Certain individuals supplied the beds in the men's and the women's wards. Grace Church provided an operating room. The five hundred members of the Ladies Hospital Aid Association each paid an annual fee of two dol- lars. The directors solicited gifts of money and needed articles, and a visiting committee went monthly to the Hospital.
By 1892, that is within five and a half years of the opening of the Hospital, 849 patients had been treated, and fifty thousand dollars had been put into land and build- ings. There was a central building with separate wards for men, women, and special patients, a double ward for contagious diseases and a ward for small-pox cases. But the home for nurses had not yet been provided, and con- valescent and maternity quarters were needed, not to speak of an endowment. Two years later the directors could re- port that the nurses' home had been provided and twenty- three pupils were in training, a new heating plant had been installed, and the dining-room had been enlarged. The city was paying for the poor patients who could not pay their own bills. The churches were contributing $5,500 a year, while patients' fees and the earnings of nurses for service outside the hospital brought in more than $8,000. The Aid Association was buying furnishings and supplies, and an endowment fund had been started. The total cost for the year had been nearly $19,000.
Four years passed, and in 1898 the annual report of the Hospital announced the gift of an operating building from the Haskells and Emersons, the Eldredge ward for sur- gical cases from the Leonards, a children's ward from the Dennisons, and the Mellen Bray ward for further surgical accommodations. E. L. Pickard of Auburndale paid for the expense of connecting corridors, and already a subway was planned to connect the nurses' home with the hospital.
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The institution long since had been accepted as a com- munity responsibility.
Across Washington Street from the Hospital was a stretch of fields on both sides of the railroad set apart to the object of keeping people well, the grounds of the Wood- land Golf Club. Golf had stirred the enthusiasm of New- ton men early in the decade, and clubs were formed in rapid succession in different parts of the city. The clubs at Newton and Newton Centre were organized in 1895, with about one hundred and fifty members each, using nine holes for play in each case. The Woodland Golf Club came into existence the next year, enrolled one hundred members, although there were no near residences, and took an old house for its headquarters. It, too, laid out its grounds with nine holes. In 1897 the Chestnut Hill Golf Club with one hundred members prepared its nine holes on the slope of Waban Hill in the east part of the city, and the Braeburn Country Club at West Newton with larger ambitions for the future laid out its course for the time to include nine holes. It had one hundred active and two hun- dred associate members, who delighted in the hazardous course. Still another, the Albemarle Golf Club, began to use the grounds now overlooked by the Fessenden School at West Newton in the fall of 1899, and within a year one hundred active members were enrolled. The Common- wealth Golf Club with one hundred and forty members informally dedicated its links in the month of May, 1898. All these clubs were destined for varying degrees of popu- larity, and Woodland and Braeburn became widely known. In time certain of the courses were lengthened and well- appointed club houses were built, while the number of members increased into the hundreds. For a time there was friendly rivalry among the clubs and their members, and the whole city was interested when Reverend E. M. Noyes, champion for two years of the Newton Centre
THE BRAEBURN COUNTRY CLUB, AT WEST NEWTON
M
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club, won the golf championship of Newton on the links of the Newton Golf Club, receiving a silver loving cup with the title.
The wayfarer, accustomed to value land by its eco- nomic use, finds it hard to justify its use for golf, or to understand how men in their right minds could spend so much time and energy knocking a ball about and tramping miles in quest of such questionable recreation.
After an inspection of the hospital building he is ready to proceed, and he finds himself presently passing the Woodland Park Hotel, which is enjoying a patronage that must have been surprising even to its optimistic proprie- tors. An annex was added in 1890. The building seems imposing for a country hotel, with its round towers at either end of the building, fourteen new sleeping rooms upstairs, bowling alleys, billiard, smoking and reading rooms below. The boulevard is just beyond, and perhaps by this time the wayfarer yields to a fancy to visit Nor- umbega, to ride in a steamer on the river, as wonderful in its way as a railroad train, or to visit the boathouses at Riverside with their hundreds of canoes. Venturesome so far he might even dare to try the sensation of riding on the railroad from Riverside to Auburndale, and then, going through the subway which the Improvement Society had obtained from the railroad, find his way to Lasell Semi- nary. He remembers Susannah Rowson's School for young females at Newton Corner, but the wildest dreams of her conventional young ladies would not have envisioned military drill such as he witnessed on the lawn at Lasell. In the year 1900 the students there rejoiced in a new gym- nasium southwest of the main building, in which was abundant space for exercise, with a swimming tank, recita- tion and classrooms, and an assembly hall with a large stage. Already two years earlier the graduating class had given a memorial hall for a chapel, club rooms, and an art
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gallery, at an estimated cost of about twenty-five thou- sand dollars.
More to his liking would be the meetings of the Au- burndale Review Club of women. As far back as 1886 Auburndale had groups of women who met regularly for study. They read Shakespeare, but had no definite pro- gram of organization. In the year 1891 a number of women met to talk over plans for a club which would be stimu- lating intellectually and agreeable socially. Because the women of the village seldom met except at the churches, it was thought best to make the Club interdenominational in order to widen acquaintance. At first meetings were held every Tuesday for two hours in the forenoon. The first subject of study was the sixteenth century. The ambi- tious spirit of the Club appears in one of the early pro- grams when nine papers were read on the history and literature of England, Spain, France, Germany and Italy. Soon it was voted to have a five-minute recess at each meeting, which promoted the second object of the Club, "social intercourse." Before long the meetings were held fortnightly.
During thirty-eight years the study of the Club has been directed principally to literature, travel and history, with occasional excursions into the field of art, drama and current events. Once a year the Club planned a guest meeting, with an entertainment suggested by the topic of the year. Plays, living pictures, musicales, old-fashioned "last-day-of-school" exercises were among the special kinds of diversion. In 1924 the Review Club took the initiative in the project to secure a new library building for Auburndale by voting four hundred dollars as a con- tribution. It has been the custom of the Club to distribute to Newton philanthropies nearly all the money remaining in the treasury at the end of each year. The distinctive character of the Review Club has been its friendly atmos-
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phere, the result of a small group with unity of purpose meeting in the different homes. It was out of the inspira- tion generated by this organization that the Auburndale Woman's Club was formed, because it was by five mem- bers of the Review Club that the Auburndale Woman's Club was mothered.
A club with a similar purpose was the West End Liter- ary Club, which was organized at West Newton in 1890, with Mrs. Horace Taylor as the first president. Its consti- tution permitted the members to choose such subjects as they wished, but the main purpose of the Club was liter- ary. It elected to meet on Monday afternoons at the homes of the members during the season from November to April. The number of members was limited to twenty.
The west part of the city lost three valuable citizens in Albert F. Noyes, for seventeen years the city engineer, in charge of the plans for the sewer system and the new filter basin and reservoirs; Charles C. Burr, prominent in Congregational church circles and a generous philanthro- pist; and Charles Robinson, who declined a nomination to the mayoralty of the city but represented Newton in the Legislature, served Tufts College as a trustee and the Universalist church at Newtonville, which he attended, and made horticulture his hobby.
The Congregational church at Auburndale was pros- pering with the growth of the village. In 1892 the chapel was remodelled and extended to provide more classrooms, and the pulpit and platform of the auditorium were rear- ranged. During the same year the church observed the fortieth anniversary of its organization with a supper and an historical address by Reverend Calvin Cutler, who had been pastor since 1867. About the same time a weekly calendar was issued for the first time, and six years later appeared the first issue of The Greeting. A junior young people's society was formed, the envelope system of
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weekly offerings was adopted, and other evidences ap- peared of wise and efficient leadership. On the ninth of November, 1900, the church celebrated its fiftieth anni- versary.
Religion was still a recognized factor in family and community, but it had ceased to have much recognition in the schools. The days of the New England Primer, the Westminster Catechism, and New Testament study had passed. Religious education was relegated mostly to the Sunday school. There the instruction was old-fashioned. While new methods of teaching and modern textbooks were revolutionizing the classrooms of the public schools, the churches were content with untrained teachers, anti- quated methods, and lesson quarterlies planned and writ- ten by biblical commentators far removed from practical contacts with most of the schools. Evangelical schools depended everywhere on an International Lesson Com- mittee and its uniform lessons. Reverend F. A. Peloubet, D.D., of Auburndale was gaining an international reputa- tion from his annual "Notes" on the lessons of each Sun- day, until "Peloubet's Notes" became a household phrase. Reverend Erastus Blakeslee, a son of the First Church, was pioneering with graded lessons and improved methods of teaching until he too won a national reputation. But the developments of a psychology of religion were yet to come and of most novel methods of the new religious education.
Missionary education was the purpose of certain church auxiliaries. Women formed their local domestic and foreign societies, which met regularly for the dissemi- nation of missionary information and the collection of small sums of money, and children's missionary education was cared for through their junior societies. The Chris- tian Endeavor movement had accelerated rapidly, and young people's societies under denominational oversight
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were a part of the church organization of Baptists as well as Congregationalists. The presence of Dr. F. E. Clark in Auburndale, the residence of missionary secretaries in the Newtons, the missionary homes in Auburndale and New- ton Centre, the visits of missionaries on furlough, and the near-by church and missionary headquarters of several denominations in Boston, all stimulated an interest in religious missions. The national movement of Baptist women for foreign missions was started in the Newton Centre church in 1871, primarily through the influence of the two daughters of Marshall Rice, Mrs. Alvah Hovey and Mrs. C. H. Carpenter, herself a missionary. The event was celebrated in 1896 in the church.
Two findings that the wayfarer might have made when he arrived in West Newton were an old man and an old tree. The man had been living since 1797, the tree thirty years longer still. Edward Ryan was the first Irishman to make Newton his home, and the oldest resident when he died in 1894. He, like the wayfarer, had seen nearly one hundred years come and go, had grown to maturity as the War of 1812 passed by, had voted presumably for Andrew Jackson as President, and had heard the discus- sions over slavery. He had seen the growth of his Catholic faith in Newton, and he was to be buried from St. Ber- nard's in his own village. He was a contractor by trade, literally building himself into the community, and he made contribution to the future population of his adopted city by leaving behind him eight sons and eight daughters.
The old tree was one of several ancient elms which were still standing in different parts of the city. One was on the old Hyde estate in Newton. It had been set out by Samuel Hyde when he arrived among the first settlers of the town, and had grown to measure fifteen feet in circum- ference. A second was at Upper Falls. It had been brought from the woods long years before, and had stood near the
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boarding house connected with the Pettee Machine Shops. A third was standing on the estate of Governor Claflin in Newtonville, suggesting the name of "Old Elms" for his estate. That specimen measured fifteen feet around. The tree at West Newton stood on the estate of B. F. Hough- ton, and was of approximately equal size. Besides the ancient elms there were two oaks near the Eliot railroad station which were thought to be more than two hundred years old, and two pear trees in the Smallwood's orchard in Newton which were reputed to be equally ancient, and one of which was ten feet in circumference.
Seth Davis was no longer living to greet Rip Van Winkle, and the curious old schoolroom where he disci- plined the boys with the four R's of readin', 'ritin', 'rith- metic, and a rod of birch were gone too. But the Allen School was still flourishing. In 1892 the alumni association of the school started the custom of holding an annual reunion at which three hundred gathered three years later. But Nathaniel T. Allen was getting old, and at the end of the century he sold his interest to two educators, Albert E. Bailey and Frank H. Wood. They continued classes in the old building, but Wood soon left and Bailey purchased the Fitzpatrick estate on Waltham Street, and erected a new building. It was delightfully modern in its appointments with the unusual features of a pipe organ and a swimming tank, and under the new management the old institution became a popular boys' school. In 1907 the school was transferred to Everett Jones who became headmaster, but he in turn surrendered it to Thomas Chalmers, who changed it into a military school and kept it until the old school went out of existence.
Up on West Newton hill, where the well-to-do had their beautiful estates, thirteen men formed the Neighbor- hood Club in 1890 with a membership for the single pur- pose of social enjoyment. They built a small clubhouse
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and constructed tennis courts of high quality, where they invited the highest players of the country to compete, and even of England. By 1895 the Club was agitating for better quarters, and in 1898 it was reincorporated under the new name of the Neighborhood Club. It remained consistently a social club, but the men shared their pleas- ures with their wives and children. The Club kept gaining in popularity until it came to number one hundred and fifty members.
An event of the year 1893 was the presentation in City Hall of J. Eliot Trowbridge's oratorio, "Paul the Apostle," by the West Newton Orchestral Club with a chorus of seventy voices.
At West Newton the wayfarer would have rejoiced over the prosperity of both churches and schools. The Lincoln Park Baptist Church never had enrolled a large membership, but it gained strength under the ministry of Reverend E. F. Snell, who became its pastor in the second half of the decade. The Myrtle Baptist Church of colored folk rebuilt their sanctuary after a disastrous fire. More convenient quarters were provided for classrooms and prayer meetings, and the people joyfully celebrated the dedication with four days of meetings.
Reverend T. P. Prudden, D.D., had been installed as pastor of the Congregational church, succeeding Dr. Patrick, and extensive improvements were made. The auditorium was enlarged by the addition of transepts, new pews were purchased, and six new memorial windows enriched the building. In the parlors of the church the Congregational Club observed its tenth anniversary in 1896, when various addresses were given and fourteen of the original members enjoyed the reunion. If he could have laid aside his orthodox prejudice, the visitor from the past would have applauded the progress of the Unitarian church under the leadership of Reverend Julius C. Jaynes.
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He had come to the city at the opening of the year 1885, his sermons had attracted new attendants at the services of worship, and within two years it was necessary to add space for more pews. The old edifice lacked beauty, but the sermons of the minister made his audience forget their surroundings. It was certain that before long a new church building must be erected, a hope that was realized soon after the new century began. Mr. Jaynes gave the best part of his life to the church in West Newton, remaining with it for thirty-seven years, reinforced at every point by the charming personality of his wife.
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