USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Newton > Tercentenary history of Newton, 1630-1930 > Part 32
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ment all other councils in New England and stands high among all the companies in the country. The Company is developing and training new leaders constantly, and the troops have never lacked for leaders among the men.
The Boy Scout movement always had the flavor of the open. Scouts learned to follow trails on long hikes, camped out and did their own cooking and learned to take care of themselves under all circumstances. After a time the scout troops began to think about permanent camps to which they could go for outings. The Newton boys were fortunate in securing permission from Richard Hale, the owner of property in Dover and Westwood, to use certain parts of his land, and in 1924 thirty-three acres were pur- chased and camp quarters constructed. For four years the scouts frequently visited the camp and enjoyed the free- dom of the wild. Then through the generosity of Horace W. Orr and others it was possible to acquire a larger prop- erty of one hundred and seventy-five acres on the side of Nobscot Mountain in Sudbury. There ten new camps were built, and much of the earlier camp property was sold. At Nobscot there is ample space for the boys to enjoy themselves and hark back to the primitive days of freedom, but forest fires in the spring of 1930 compelled the reconstruction of camp buildings.
The Scout organization has held successful rallies of the various troops at the Riverside Recreation Grounds, at the Technical High School, where a first-class scout made a fire with the bow drill, and at the Young Men's Christian Association. Newton scouts were present at a rally of the Greater Boston Council at which the founder of the movement, Gen. Sir Robert Baden Powell, made an address. A recent incident in Scout history was the Inter- national Jamboree in England in the summer of 1929. Six- teen Newton scouts with a scout master joined other Amer- ican boys in a journey to share in the celebration, getting
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a thrill from their experience and duly impressing their hosts. Sixty-five Norumbega boys spent several weeks of the summer at a Scout camp on Cape Cod. A troop of sea scouts has regular practice in handling boats on the Charles River and now has approximately eight hundred scouts in twenty troops. The Norumbega Council, which is composed now solely of Newton scouts, maintains well- equipped headquarters in Newtonville.
In a period when outdoor life was so attractive and athletics appealed to girls as well as boys, it was to be expected that the girls would yearn for an organization similar to the Boy Scouts. At first it was not clear which of several organizations would become most popular, but the Girl Scouts soon outdistanced the others. In the spring of 1917 four troops were organized in the city, and others soon followed. The Scouts were organized thoroughly by the next year, with Miss Caroline L. Freeman as local director and Mrs. Frank A. Day as commissioner, an office which she held for ten years. The rush of girls into the troops made them unwieldy and they were divided until after twelve years the number of troops had increased to twenty-four with nine hundred members.
Hardly were the girls organized when the war broke out, and war relief was the first community task. They had war gardens and preserved and canned fruits and vege- tables. One hundred and sixty of the scouts earned the certificate of Victory Girls by giving five dollars or more to war service. Fifty awards were given for war gardens or Red Cross work. Seven French orphans were supported. The girls were trained in home hygiene and the care of the sick. They have helped flood sufferers and made layettes for the Newton Hospital. One hundred dollars have been raised annually by means of moving pictures for a bed in the Children's Hospital. Not a few of the scouts have won high awards for special achievement. A bugle and drum
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corps enlisted thirty-two girls and a beginners' corps of forty was formed.
Every village has a troop commission of interested women, knit together by a central council. Headquarters were opened at Newtonville in 1927, thus uniting more closely the organizations of the different villages. There a Christmas shop sold Christmas decorations, which made possible a year around shop for scout equipment and a beach wagon for the scout camp. The outdoor life of the camp was desired from the beginning, and the generosity of Mrs. Frank A. Day gave the girls a camp of their own at Nonesuch Pond in Natick. Starting with tent equip- ment Camp Mary Day expanded until cabins were added to accommodate thirty girls and their officers, and many were the single days and week-ends spent in the open by the Newton members. Their gatherings in the Council Bowl under the stars after a full day of organized work and play gave them a better knowledge of the great out-of- doors.
When the Scouts were ten years old as an organiza- tion, they started a magazine called Treasure Hunt, which is published monthly by the girls. Many of the Newton Scouts corresponded with girls in foreign countries. Girl Guides or Girl Scouts is an international, unsectarian or- ganization, and is supported in forty foreign countries, one of the present-day means of promoting international peace. The aims of the organization everywhere are to help the girls develop physique and character, and to become better citizens than they would otherwise be. The expenses of the organization with its executive secretary have been met by the personal contributions of friends of the scouts.
The Scout organizations and the summer camps were the means of a new acquaintance with nature, such as the children of an older time used to enjoy. The menagerie at Norumbega Park or at the circus showed them how foreign
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animals and some of the wilder American beasts looked. On a July day a deer appeared in Newtonville and jumped to the railroad tracks where it was so injured that it had to be killed. But on the Scout hikes foxes were seen some- times in the Warren Woods or over the city border to the west. The boys and girls learned how to find their way in the woods, to track rabbits and crows on the ground or on the snow, and to learn the species of plants and trees and birds.
Supplementing the Scout troops were the bird clubs. In 1916 the Newton Centre Bird Club was actively en- gaged in stimulating public interest by bird lectures. The Newton Highlands Improvement Association organized the Highlands Bird Club, and invited in an expert to tell the members of the Club how to undertake field expeditions. Teachers in the schools gave instruction in nature study and invited the children to bring in specimens of flowers. On Saturdays the stroller might come upon a small group of bird students along Quinobequin Road or on the river reaches in the vicinity of Norumbega. There redwings hovered over the rushes, a kingfisher rattled upstream, a merganser flew low over the water. When a redheaded woodpecker wandered off his southern beat and chanced to spend a few days in Auburndale, he was detected by the sharp eye of an amateur ornithologist, and when a Hens- low's sparrow ventured to stray by the river at Waban his presence was published broadcast by another observer. The English pheasant spread rapidly in the woods and pro- vided another game bird for fall shooting.
When the law was on against shooting in the woods, the devotees of the gun resorted to trap shooting, and a few became sharpshooters. Louis F. Curtis of Newton Highlands won the New England amateur championship in trap shooting in 1917. Mrs. Burton P. Gray of Newton Centre won a national contest in archery, and in later
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years Dr. Paul Crouch and Miss Dorothy Smith won the national title several times.
During the spring and summer seasons canoes swarmed on the river. Young people came in their own cars and on the railroad, got out their own canoes or hired them at Norumbega or Riverside, and spent long hours paddling, drifting, and resting among the nooks and by-ways of the stream. Two hundred enthusiasts from the six boathouses at Auburndale and Riverside organized the Auburndale- Riverside Canoe Association and held gala days every year near the recreation grounds. After long agitation of the matter a new Weston bridge was built during the sum- mer of 1916, when traffic was diverted over another route by way of Riverside. Many people thus got their first glimpse of the boathouse there, of the recreation grounds, and of the high railway enbankment and the station where the Highland Circuit branched from the main line of the Boston and Albany. The new Weston bridge was artis- tically designed, broad enough to accommodate the heavy traffic, and well lighted after dark. Motorists drove hither from all directions, and especially on Sunday afternoons parked automobiles lined the approaches to the bridge and dotted the river shore. Red, blue, and yellow canoes, often floating two or three abreast, dashes of color from a girl's sweater or a pillow, and the blue and green of river and woods, presented a pattern of colors which delighted the eye. Hundreds of people preferred to spend their time in the park where different entertainment was provided for them, and where many patronized the restaurant and listened to the jazz orchestra and remained into the eve- ning.
The American people had learned how to devise many methods of social recreation, some of them combined with a definite cultural or civic purpose. Such was the Newton Amateur Opera Association which was formed to present
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light opera, partly for the amusement of the members and partly because they liked to develop an art pleasing to their friends. In one of their first seasons they gave three performances of "Erminie" at Players Hall. At another time they presented "Floradora." These ambitious young people liked to remember that Emma Eames, the renowned opera singer, sang at a concert in Armory Hall, when she was starting for Europe to study music, that Roland Hayes sang "Sky Blue Water" at a social gathering in the Baptist church in Newton Centre before he won his na- tional reputation, that Dai Buell was even then beginning to gather laurels as a pianist, and that Mademoiselle Radeska was born in Newtonville, attended the public schools at Newton Highlands, and though she lost her sight at the age of thirteen, kept on with her study of music, until she sang in Symphony Hall with the best of the concert singers.
Among the young people's organizations on the north side of the city was the College Club of Auburndale, where young men and women who had graduated from college found congenial company and kept up their interest in literature, art and current events. The Central Club of Newtonville was organized by the minister of the Congre- gational church in 1906 to promote the civic, social and religious interests of the community. An event of interest which especially concerned the boys of the community was the meeting of the twenty-sixth anniversary conference of the older Young Men's Christian Association boys of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which brought into Newton homes seven hundred boys for three days on a week-end. Eighty associations were represented by an earnest body of young fellows who listened with apparent eagerness to the speakers and the proposals which they made, and who made an impressive picture as they sat about the banquet tables in the Armory. The observer
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might have been justified in feeling that America was safe for democracy and democracy satisfying for America when such boys formed the backbone of a national organ- ization like the Young Men's Christian Association.
The Young Men's Christian Association in the city had arrived at the place where it seemed imperative to build better quarters. In 1903 the Association had moved back to Eliot Block, where it had been organized. The second and third floors were remodeled, a physical director and boys' secretary were added to the employed force, and the membership grew rapidly. But expansion demanded enlargement physically. In 1909 an all-Newton financial campaign was carried out, which resulted in the raising of one hundred and fifty-four thousand dollars for a new building. Rival teams had done it all in six days. A build- ing committee purchased six and one-half acres of land on Church Street, and in September, 1911, the building was completed and opened for public inspection. It had been designed after the fashion of a country club, and was equipped with all that such an association could reasonably expect. The boys had their own suite of rooms, an assembly hall for three hundred was located on the second floor, and higher up were thirty-four bedrooms. Two years were required to free the building from debt, and then dedicatory services were held by the eleven hundred and sixty mem- bers who constituted the organization. The trustees gave a bronze tablet, which was placed over the mantel above the fireplace, as a memorial to Frank A. Day, whose gen- erosity and leadership had helped to make the building possible.
In 1927 the fiftieth anniversary meeting of the Asso- ciation was held with appropriate exercises, and the follow- ing year an anniversary fund of one hundred thousand dollars was raised in order to remodel the present structure, purchase additional land for the one hundred and forty
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boys at Camp Day, and provide a permanent fund to improve and expand the program of the Association. The membership has grown to the number of fifteen hundred men and boys.
Meantime older men in the city were enjoying their club life. They sang in the Hunnewell and Highland glee clubs; they whooped it up for Roosevelt in the Newton Roosevelt Club; they spent their energy inaugurating the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks in the Armory in 1915, cultivating brotherhood among the Knights of Pythias, or carrying out the ritual in the halls of the Odd Fellows or Masons. The old Masonic hall in Central Block, Newtonville, was dedicated to Odd Fellowship in June, 1910, with five hundred guests, representing twenty- five different lodges. There Waban Lodge and the S. P. Lawrence Lodge of Rebekahs made their home, and there four years later the Odd Fellows observed the ninety-fifth anniversary of their order with a brilliant gathering of seven lodges and six hundred persons in attendance. Those who attended the entertainment and dance declared that it surpassed anything of the kind in the history of Odd Fellowship in Newton. Dalhousie Lodge of Freemasons celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1910 with music and addresses, taking pride in its membership of six hundred and forty-two.
In the year 1916 the Waban Improvement Society suggested the organization of a Neighborhood Club in the village. Waban had enjoyed a comfortable growth, espe- cially on the side streets off the main highway of Beacon Street; a large modern brick schoolhouse had been erected, two churches were growing in strength, and it seemed the right time to have a neighborhood club and a clubhouse near the centre of the village. The result was the Waban Neighborhood Club, which was able to obtain the Willis estate of eighty thousand square feet on Beacon Street and
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to erect a clubhouse in bungalow style, large enough to provide clubrooms, a hall capable of seating four hundred or providing a dance floor for one hundred couples, bowl- ing and pool accommodations, and screened piazzas. The grounds provided space for tennis, which had enjoyed popular vogue in Waban for a number of years. The build- ing was expected to cost thirty thousand dollars, and it was hoped to have one hundred and fifty families in the membership of the Club. The growth of Waban in subse- quent years more than justified the success of the experi- ment, and the Waban Club took its permanent place with similar clubs in other villages.
These other villages were producing new as well as maintaining old organizations. New subjects of interest called for special alignments. Such was the case with the Newton Circle. A small group of women who had caught the vision of human service realized that no organization in the city was caring specifically for juvenile delinquents and methods of prevention as well as cure. They met in 1914 and created the Newton Circle. The organization has worked in cooperation with the Newton District Court and in affiliation with the Florence Crittenton League. The three objects of prevention, protection, and recreation for those who are in special need have been kept in view. Through the aid of the Crittenton Homes unmarried moth- ers and their babies have been cared for and brought under helpful influences. Stubborn children or wayward girls, complained of by parents or police, have been kept from becoming cases for the courts. Recreational methods in use have been band concerts with dancing, where the Playground Commission of the city has assisted. Vaca- tions have been provided for neglected children who were particularly in need or were under the care of the Court. After ten years of activity the Circle extended its constit- uency by forming a Junior Circle, which should be qual-
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ified to carry on in the future the enterprise so well begun.
Another organization with a special mission which had its beginnings about the same time was the Good Govern- ment Club of Auburndale. This was founded under the initial presidency of Principal Guy M. Winslow at Lasell Seminary in 1912. The Club was intended to be a non- partisan organization for the purpose of educating voters to appreciate good citizenship and to demand worthy candidates for office. Committees on candidates and on legislation were appointed, and candidates for office were invited to address the public on their own principles and policies. When matters of special interest arose other meetings were held for discussion. It was a rule of the Club that any of its members who took political office should thereby forfeit their membership in the committee, which was the directing body of the Club. The organization has continued to perform a civic service by stressing the prin- ciples of good government.
In the year 1913 a new cultural association was organ- ized by twenty-seven women and given the name of the Christian Era Study Club. They had the laudable pur- pose of becoming better acquainted with the history of the nineteen Christian centuries, and divided the task of sup- plying mutual information by assigning each member a part in the program once or twice a year. Meetings were held at private homes once in three weeks during the sea- son of seven fall and winter months. Beginning with a study of the origins of Christianity and its extension west- ward, the Club steadily pursued its course through Europe in the Middle Ages, studied the epochal changes of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, and by 1923 were reach- ing out to an understanding of the Scandinavian civiliza- tion and contemporary art in other countries. During the current year they have been occupied with the early nine- teenth century. They have travelled across the centuries
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in the spirit of adventure and to them history is freighted with interest and intellectual wealth.
The Auburndale and Newton Highlands women's clubs came into existence during these years, but their main history falls into a later period. The Christian Era Study Club represented a tendency of small groups to meet apart for a specific purpose. The Woman's Club stood for the larger unity of the women of a village as a whole. The city federation of women's clubs provided a still more comprehensive integration. Indicative of this spirit was the attempt made for several years at Newton Highlands to bring together in a union club day all the local women's organizations, like the C. L. S. C. and the Mothers' Club. These two tendencies, the one of integra- tion, the other of separation, were likely to continue to be felt, but the distraction of the war turned all minds to united effort in a new direction.
Two organizations with the same patriotic purpose continued to represent the past glories of the American Revolution. The Daughters of the Revolution celebrated its fifteenth anniversary in 1911. Two years later it erected Revolutionary War tablets in the Newton library, and a bronze tablet to the memory of Sarah Hull in the front of the Technical High School. Two years subsequently it gave a notable pageant of historical women at the Hunnewell Club as a reminder of its aim. The Daughters of the American Revolution realized the ambitious project of a chapter house by purchasing the old Baury house at Lower Falls. Its historical contributions in recent months to the tercentenary history of the city are historical papers on the history of the old cemeteries, of the early churches, of the post offices, and of the local chapter house.
While certain people were interested especially in local antiquities others were more concerned with the social quests of the present. They were imbued with a zeal for
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social reform in an industrial age when the less fortunate were hampered by their limitations and sometimes were guilty of social delinquency. The evils of human malad- justment weighed heavily upon the minds of the conscien- tious men and women and made them eager to know the latest methods and theories for easing misery and solving problems. It was to this sort of people that the Christian Forum appealed, a series of public meetings maintained for several years by the Eliot Church in Newton, the New- ton South Forum which for a shorter time was held at Bray Hall, Newton Centre, or Lincoln Hall, Newton Highlands, and the Auburndale Forum of later years. Some of the most popular forum speakers of Europe and America drew large audiences while the enthusiasm lasted, but the curi- osity seekers turned presently to a more novel attraction and the war absorbed the attention of the rest.
Villagers normally were interested in what was hap- pening in the different churches. A large proportion of the people had their church affiliations and regularly attended the services of the churches with which they were con- nected; others liked to go on occasions of special attraction to public addresses, sociables, baptisms, concerts and other entertainments. Normally, too, there was a pious rivalry between churches as between fraternal organizations, and a quiet bidding for the interest and support of the public. No church liked to lose a family from its own constituency and discover presently that it had become affiliated with another church in the community. It suspected that undue influence had been used to bring about the changed rela- tion. In Newton interdenominational friendship was more in evidence than in many communities. One hundred years ago and more Doctor Homer and Father Grafton were personal friends. Churches were hospitable to one another in times of disaster, as on the occasion of the burn- ing of the Eliot Church when other churches in the village
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at once offered their meetinghouses for the worship of the Congregationalists. When the Unitarians at West New- ton started to build their new church edifice the Congrega- tionalists invited them to cross the street and use their house of worship.
Religion presented a perennial attraction. Even though some were repelled by its austerities or made un- comfortable by its obligations, others felt its charm or bowed to its imperative summons to duty. The age-old Catholicism kept its hold upon its families and with a grow- ing population found new churches necessary. The beauty and order of Episcopacy made its appeal to an increasing number of folk who did not find so much satisfaction in the simpler, plainer worship and organization of the Puritan tradition, and the number of Episcopal churches increased. The older churches added continually to their membership and maintained the principles of their traditional religion while they pondered newer interpretations and worked out novel methods of church activity. The attitude of the modern citizen was different from that of the Puritan colo- nist. The former deference to clerical authority was absent in the man or woman who had delved into the profundities of modern philosophy or become accustomed to look to the scientist for authority. Many of them had been to col- lege, and they were inclined to be impatient with the the- ology and with the assumptions of the pulpit. Others were not interested in what the preacher had to say and were attracted more by the golf course or the Sunday paper, the society of their fellows or the lure of the road, than by the man in the pulpit or the churchgoers in the pew. It was still good form to go to church, but religion was no longer indispensable.
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