USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Winthrop > The history of Winthrop, Massachusetts ; 1630-1952 > Part 19
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The high school graduation of 1890 witnessed the presenta- tion of diplomas by W. J. Stover, chairman of the school com- mittee, to: Nellie Bacon, Jennie Bird, May Floyd, Ernest Mac- Gowan, Winnie Tewksbury and Harry C. Whorf. At this point it is desirable to mention the Whorf family, one of the most talented families ever in Winthrop. Harry Whorf, who became the father of three sons who have become nationally prominent in the diverse fields of art, drama, and archeology, was himself a man of many talents. For many years, beginning as a mere boy when he photographed the Indian skeletons, as just men- tioned, he was one of the most distinguished residents, ably assisted by his charming wife, Sarah Lee. The town is the richer for this family, although none of the sons now live in Winthrop.
The year 1890 brought the end of the once important Sea Shore Home at the Beach. For years this charitable institution had been serving unfortunate children of Boston by giving them a summer at the oceanside. This was considered well enough
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by residents so long as there was plenty of room along the beach. But beginning early in 1890, many beach residents found reason to complain of "sanitary conditions". Protests became more and more vigorous as the summer wore on until finally, the manage- ment of the Home closed its doors August 19, 1890.
This period saw Captain James Flanagan, Winthrop's life- saver, make his twelfth rescue; an event which was noted by the Massachusetts Humane Society giving him its cherished medal.
The Winthrop Yacht Club was experiencing considerable difficulty with the flats between Point Shirley, Short Beach and Snake Island so an appropriation was obtained to dredge a 35 foot channel, 3,900 feet long from Rice's Wharf, used by steam- boats making Crystal Cove, and the outer edge of deep water off Snake Island. Finished by June 30, 1891, three feet of water remained in the channel at low tide.
In 1891 also, Channing Howard was elected to the Board of Trustees of the Winthrop Public Library and he, together with David Floyd, were responsible for the construction of the present Frost Public Library Building, which was in its day one of the best town library buildings in New England. It was designed by the late Willard Bacon, prominent architect. It is still in service, almost unchanged, although the number of books have reached about 35,000 and the population served is ten times what it was then. Plans for an addition, it may be added, have been prepared, but the present high cost of construction has led the Trustees to postpone operations.
On October 4, 1890, one of the very few robberies in Win- throp occurred. The Post Office safe was blown open and some $55 was taken. Some of the money lost was the personal prop- erty of the Postmaster, Warren Belcher, who served in that capacity for over 50 years.
One of Winthrop's most famous residents at this time was Captain Gilman C. Parker, master of the ill-fated Marie Celeste, which was wrecked under such mysterious circumstances that the enigma became one of the most famous of sea stories. Hail- ing from Winthrop, he had been in prosperous condition for many years but in this period he suffered grave financial re- verses and accepted a job as gate tender at the Winthrop Beach railroad station. His friends subscribed to a fund to help him but he suffered so very greatly from his misfortunes that he died in July of 1891.
This was the time when the Washington Avenue Bridge was filled in. It had been planned to purchase fill but Boynton Bro- thers, who were dredging the harbor channel in to Rice's Wharf, supplied the fill free of charge and the bridge soon was nothing but a memory.
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It was in November of 1890 that the Winthrop Police De- partment was definitely established by the appointment of Silas P. Fales as chief of police. The job, imagined to be a sinecure, developed into one of some difficulty.
In July of 1891, hoodlums once again distinguished them- selves in observing the Night Before the Fourth. A gang of boys and young men attacked Patrolman George Matthews and when Chief Fales came to the rescue he too was beaten seriously. This angered most of the sober citizens in town and plans were made to end such nuisance forever. The plan succeeded and the Night Before, just as Hallowe'en, has become a pale shadow of what it once was.
The year 1890 also saw the beginning of the construction of the great North Metropolitan Sewer. In May of that year, gangs of Italian laborers were sent down to the Point and built a village of crude shacks. The first bricks were laid on June 6th and the sewer was built with remarkable expedition. This same year the United States Army began building our first two harbor defense forts, although actual construction did not begin until the following year. Huge rifles were put into place at Fort Heath and a mortar battery was built at Fort Banks. Fort Heath be- came outmoded by the time World War II arrived and the 16- inch rifles were removed when a new fort was built out on Na- hant, and another constructed out on Deer Island. How much value even these new forts, scarcely ten years old, now have is problematical.
Fort Banks' mortar battery, a tower of strength during the Spanish-American War, when Winthrop people, like most Bos- tonians, were afraid of the guns of the Spanish fleet, until the ships were easily destroyed at Santiago, was worthless even by the time of World War I. The Fort was used as a reception center in World War II and was also the site of the Hospital of the First Corps Area. In 1950 Fort Banks was withdrawn from active use, but the outbreak of hostilities in Korea, caused it to be re-activated in 1951. Its value today is chiefly administrative.
William H. Gardner (Billy) began to attract attention in the Nineties by his work as an amateur dramatist and composer. He saw one of his first plays, "Hearts of Long Ago" presented to the public and went on to write other plays and songs; one of them at least destined for immortality; his "Can't You Hear Me Calling, Caroline".
As has been said, in the beginning, when all Winthrop was farms each family raised its own fluid milk as a matter of course. In the 19th century, however, as Winthrop began its transforma- tion to its present condition, there began to be a number of fami- lies without milk of their own and hence an opportunity arose
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1850. Milk man of those days. Edward Magee with his three year old son E. Augustus (Gus) Magee. Looking south up Revere St. from site of present Hut- chinson St. Barn on left is on Summit Ave. and site of Fort Banks on right.
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1890. Looking east up Jefferson St. hill toward Fremont St. from Winthrop Center station platform. The site of the present theatre is on the right and stores on the left.
to sell fluid milk in Winthrop. William Tewksbury was, as noted, Winthrop's first milk man. He kept his cows on Deer Island and rowed across the Gut with the milk to his barn on the mainland where he kept his horses and carts. He was followed in the business by William Floyd. After many years as Milkman No. 2 he transferred his mantle to Nelson Floyd. Nelson Floyd developed the business from a few cows which he at first pas- tured in what is now Thornton Park and from a barn in the back of the family property on what is now Willow Avenue, to a very thriving establishment with barns on Buchanan Street. This business was operated by him until the early Nineteen Twenties when it was purchased and operated by William Johnson who about 1930 sold out to the Hood Company, thus ending Win- throp's milk business which had been operated profitably for just about a century.
The Nineties brought the departure of one of Winthrop's leading families, the Lorings. As a boy and young man, Judge Loring had gunned along the wild Winthrop shore. One day in 1845, he and his wife, returning from Nahant to Boston on the steamer line which then operated through the Gut, suggested that they consider Winthrop as the site of their perma- nent home. She assented and in 1847 George B. Emerson, Judge Loring's friend, helped him select the site which became the Loring estate. In June of 1890 Judge Loring died and his family soon left town. Two of his sons grew up in Winthrop-Dr. Frank Loring and Dr. E. G. Loring. The new home of the family was at Washington, D. C., where the Judge and his family had also maintained a home because of his work there as a justice of the court of claims of the United States.
As is nearly always the case when a town is more or less sharply divided into sections, as Winthrop is, for all its capsule size, one section every now and then, is apt to become indignant over fancied wrongs-as for example neglect in the expenditure of tax funds. In 1892 this was the case with Winthrop High- lands. Citizens circulated a petition to have themselves incor- porated into a new town. They thought they were being that badly treated by the Center.
However, the Highlanders made it clear that they would drop the petition-which did not have the ghost of a chance of winning support in the General Court anyhow-if the Town Meeting would give the section a better sewer. But this, too, was self evidently absurd for the Great Metropolitan sewer was just about completed, giving Winthrop a really good system-all the town had to do was to make appropriate connections into the great brick tunnel under its streets.
Two things worried the town about this sewer. One was
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the presence of the disreputable shacks built by the laborers and the conditions of the streets which had been dug up. This was soon adjusted for the Board of Sewer Commissioners from the State House came down and directed that conditions in Win- throp be restored to the "status quo".
The other point of concern was that the laws establishing what has become in modern days the Metropolitan District Com- mission, made it clear that the cost of developments, of main- tenance, and of operation, were to be born by the towns and cities concerned. For example Winthrop was just told that it was required to pay sums which were spent by the Commis- sioners. This, it was alleged loudly was "taxation without rep- resentation"-the cause of the Revolution. However, nothing was done and the Metropolitan District Commission continued on its path and has become a very large and very important agency-and the towns and the cities in the District still pay what they are told to pay. Fortunately, the Commission has been, in the past, officered and staffed by men of high ability and character.
Trouble with fires continued in the Gay Nineties, even though the Beach Company equipped itself with a new hose wagon and a cooperative arrangement was made with Revere to help each other in time of need. Two fires demonstrated that fire-fighting was still not all that it should be. In the summer of 1891, the Devoe stables were burned to ashes and 16 valuable horses were lost. A few months later, the Hotel Hawthorne caught fire at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. Despite the prompt attendance of both Winthrop Fire Companies and a Revere Com- pany, the hotel burned down. The water in the hydrants failed after 40 minutes.
The Nineties were the years of ambitious cruises by yacht clubs and in 1891, the Winthrop Yacht Club fleet, led by the flagship, Commodore Cushing's "Nymbus", cruised to Camden, Maine. These long summer cruises have long since been given over and most of the marine activities of the town's yacht clubs now are confined to the racing of small boats.
Another half century of Winthrop's history remains but at this point the running narrative will be broken to include various chapters which are concerned with particular developments of Winthrop. Then the running narrative will be continued to the present time.
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Chapter Twelve TRANSPORTATION
WINTHROP has one of the oddest histories of transporta- tion of all the towns and cities in Greater Boston. In considera- tion of the very short distance to Boston, it is strange that we have had so much difficulty with transport. One trouble is that the town is emptied each work-day morning and then filled up at night. We have two peak loads. Between them, there is little travel.
It is also strange that, in the days when the electric street car served so many communities so very well, Winthrop was without any such service. In short, our history of transport, which runs from stage coach and sailing ships, through rail- roads and steamboats to motor buses, is unparalleled. The Win- throp Visitor in the early part of this century, commenting upon the failure of an attempt to build a street car line, remarked editorially, "We have as varied and peculiar a history (of trans- port) as any town in the world. We put it large and repeat- in the world".
As remarked in earlier chapters, for the first two centuries of Winthrop's history, travel and transport was either by water or overland through Beachmont, Revere, Everett, Medford, Somerville, Cambridge and Brookline down Roxbury Neck to Boston-a long way around over roads which were hardly worth the name. This overland route was all of 20 miles-a day's trip, each way.
In the state as a whole, transportation flourished as various inventions of the industrial age were put into practice. Boston had the first turnpikes and stage coaches in the nation-and also the first steam railroad. For a time canals flourished and Boston again, with the "ditch" to Lowell, led the country. Just so, Bos- ton when the time came had some of the first street railroads, first horse cars and then electric railways-but Winthrop was so small and so indifferent that all these improved means of travel passed the town by for years.
It may seem amazing to modern citizens of Winthrop but in the first third of the 19th century Winthrop's transportation system had changed but very little from the 17th century. Lucius
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Floyd says that there were but three public ways in the town: Revere Street, Shirley Street and Winthrop Street, which last ran only as far as where the Town Hall is located. He wrote, in part, ". .. houses were reached by cart paths running in all directions, the line fences crossing the town ways and making travel tedious. Only three houses were on the public streets. I remember driving from my house (The Deane Winthrop House) to Jos. Belcher's on Sunnyside when I had to open and close nine gates and bars. When C. L. Bartlett first came here to live, he drove to Boston and encountered six gates and bars." Winthrop then was just a farming community, beautiful and well culti- vated, but as for roads, there were nothing but rutted tracks. There were 16 farms in town and 15 yoke of oxen were used to provide motive power. Horses were seldom seen, until at least the time of the Civil War. Deacon David Floyd, father of Lucius Floyd, owned the first horse in town, Lucius reported.
The beaches were empty, save for wrecks of ships or stranded whales. Dr. Ingalls reported that when he bought 43 acres of land at the Spray in 1875, to "inaugurate a city by the sea, the only apparent use of the long stretches of beach between the hills was to enforce the mandate of the mighty Jehovah by staying the proud waves of the agressive ocean and affording the neighboring farmers abundance of kelp, rockweed, etc." Until the doctor came to town no one had dreamed of building cottages along what is now the crowded boulevard. There were no houses at all on Winthrop beach, save that there were two Tewksbury houses and John Flanagan's at the foot of Great Head.
The fisheries and the salt works at Point Shirley had col- lapsed and thus the farmers had no need for transport other than what their oxen and their boats provided. What few letters came into town were carried by a man on horseback, whenever there was any mail at all. As late as 1852, when Winthrop became a town, there were still but five public streets-Beach Street, Shirley Street, Winthrop Street, Main Street and Pleasant Street. By mid-century the trip to Boston had been shortened to eight miles, via the road through Beachmont to Revere Beach and then to Revere Center and into Boston through Chelsea and over the bridges which by then crossed the Mystic and the Charles. Yet the roads were still so poor and the oxen so slow that Lucius Floyd remembered, it was customary to start, say with a load of hay, from Winthrop by two or three in the morn- ing if it was hoped to make the round trip in a day.
The minister and the school teacher and many other people going by foot, as most people did prior to 1839, commonly came and went via Belle Isle (Orient Heights). By planning to arrive at Belle Isle Inlet at low tide, men could walk across the gravel
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bottom by just taking their shoes and socks off. A boat was commonly kept at Schooner Dock, near the old Pleasant Street Railroad Station, for the use of anyone wanting to cross but it was noted that the boat was almost always on the wrong side of the inlet. Evidently there was not traffic enough to pay a living wage to a ferryman.
As a sidelight on these visiting ministers, the late A. Theo- dore Tewksbury, used to tell a story of his younger days. At the time he speaks of, the Winthrop Methodist Church was served by a non-resident pastor who was a farmer in a neighboring town. He farmed all week and preached in Winthrop on Sundays. Tewksbury said this minister once concluded an earnest and lengthy prayer with this sentence: "Lord bless North Chelsea, bless Winthrop and touch lightly on Point Shirley".
In 1835 the General Court granted permission to build a bridge across Belle Isle Inlet from Breed's Island (Orient Heights) to Chelsea Point, which was then the usual name for Winthrop, replacing the colonial Pullin or Pullen or Pulling Poynte. The Winthrop end of this bridge was at what is now the western extremity of Main Street. The bridge, which was 20 feet wide, was built with money raised by subscription. Lest it may seem that the size and importance of Winthrop at this time has been somewhat slighted, it might be well to point out that all of Orient Heights was just one farm and had but two houses. Noddle Island (East Boston) had just one house and eight inhabitants. Beachmont was the Sales Farm and had but two houses.
The Winthrop bridge was authorized in 1843 by the Legis- lature to be a toll bridge and it remained such until its purchase by the City of Boston in 1851. During those years, traffic flowed across the bridge in volume sufficient to support both the bridge and a tollman. Some of these tollmen were: Samuel Hatch, Henry H. Fay, Cyrus T. Moore and Henry Bates. According to the old toll bridge sign, now preserved in the Winthrop Public Library, the rates were : hack, 17 cents ; carryall, 10 cents ; chaise, 8 cents; wagon, 6 cents; oxteam, 6 cents; 2-horse team, 8 cents ; man on horseback, 5 cents; horse, mule or cow, 2 cents; person on foot, 1 cent; sheep or swine 1/2 cent and, school chil- dren, free. In 1849, for example, the tolls reported were as fol- lows: foot passengers, 4740; sleighs, 577 (over a period of 40 days) ; teams, 5960; horseback riders, 232, hacks, 176; omni- buses, 25; oxteams, 30; yoke of oxen, 3, cattle, 10, and pigs 20.
The freeing of the bridge from tolls was an important poli- tical battle; free bridges and temperance were the political high- lights in 1850 and Edward Floyd was elected on a free bridge ticket to the 1851 General Court. This was at the time when the
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East Boston Ferry was instituted and the road through East Boston and Orient Heights from the ferry to the bridge was completed. Thus Winthrop, about 220 years after its first occu- pation by white men, had a direct road to Boston. This was the beginning of the end of Winthrop's isolation and existence as a purely farming community.
The first evidence of the break in the solid agricultural front was the purchase of land for estates. George B. Emerson, educator and naturalist, together with his friend, Edward C. Loring, justice of the United States Court of Claims at Wash- ington, and later its chief justice, purchased what is now Court Park and, in 1847, built fine country homes. Emerson's son-in- law, Judge John Lowell, also soon became a summer resident. In 1850, Hiram Plummer and his son-in-law, Charles L. Bartlett, the father of Major General William F. Bartlett (Winthrop's Civil War hero) settled at what is now Bartlett Park and built other attractive homes. Other newcomers, whose interest in Winthrop was aroused by the fact of improved transportation, at about this time included : Washington F. Davis, William Wood, and Dr. George S. Carter, who built at Sunnyside. The Lawes- Piper-Huckins house was erected on Main Street in 1857 and also the Lawton House was put up nearby and Dr. Ira Warren built on Pleasant Street. These newcomers drove in to Boston most mornings and drove home at night, thus establishing a custom which a century later now distinguishes nearly everyone in Winthrop. They were the town's first commuters.
Of more general importance in transportation was the work of Albert Richardson. A native of New Hampshire, he came to Winthrop in 1841 as a youth, with the rest of his family. In 1848 he started the first stage and express line, running between Maverick Square, East Boston and Point Shirley. Subsequently he extended the west end of his line from Maverick to Scollay Square, making use of the East Boston Ferry. He ran two regu- lar trips a day with the fare being 15 cents to Winthrop and 25 cents to Scollay Square. There was considerable business, par- ticularly at the Point, what with the Revere Copper Works re- quiring service and with Taft's famous restaurant bringing down many a bon vivant from Boston. Sometimes diners at Taft's required a special trip to take them home after a convivial eve- ning-for which special service five cents extra was charged. Maybe there were tips, too.
After nine years of operation, Richardson sold the stage line to John Lane of East Boston but he very shortly sold to David P. Matthews of Main Street, Winthrop. Matthews did not find the operation of a stage to his liking either and in 1863, right in the middle of the Civil War, he sold to Elijah and Leon-
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Winthrop and Boston OMNIBUS FOR TAFTS' HOTEL
SUMMER ARRANGEMENT.
On and after Monday, April 21st, Coach will leave as follows:
Point Shirley, 6 1-2 and 9 A. M., 12 1-2 and 5 P. M.
Winthrop Centre, 7 and 9 1-2 A. M., and 1 and 5 1-2 P. M.
East Boston,-Old Ferry, on East Boston side, at 8 and 10 1-2 A. M., and 2 1.2 and 6 1-2 P. M.
SUNDAYS.
Point Shirley, 7 1-2 A. M., and 5 P. M.
Winthrop Centre, 8 A. M., and 5 1-2 P. M. Leave the Ferry at 9 A. M., and 6 1-2 P. M.
A. RICHARDSON.
WINTHROP, April 14th, 1856.
This is a reduced copy of an original time-table of Albert Richardson's stage referred to on page 184.
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ard O. Tewksbury, familiarly known to Winthrop people as Lije and Len. These two gentlemen operated the stage for about ten years, apparently selling out for $2,000 to the horse railroad in 1873. This definitely ended the stages to Point Shirley al- though there was another line from Orient Heights to Winthrop Center for 11 years after this date.
The first stage, which was driven by Albert Richardson him- self, was a three-seated carryall which provided room for nine or ten passengers, perhaps more if they did not mind too much being crowded. This carryall was drawn by a team of pony- horses-by which seems to be meant a pair of horses of compar- atively small size but some agility. This was replaced in time by a thorough-brace stage coach which was drawn by larger and stronger horses. Then came a "Great Eastern" coach which was a cumbersome and lumbering vehicle that had but one virtue- its capacity, like the present buses, seems to have been unlimited. O. F. Belcher has recorded that, as a boy, he once counted 52 persons aboard including many on top. This practice of carrying passengers aloft caused the coach to sway considerably, for all its slow pace, and many feared it would tip over. It did once, in East Boston, as a letter from Mrs. Judith C. Tewksbury reports. No one was seriously injured.
The first railroad to serve Winthrop was a horse-car line known as the "Winthrop Railroad Company". It was first char- tered by the General Court in 1861 but it encountered financial difficulties and fully ten years were occupied in raising the neces- sary capital, reported to have been $100,000-which seems to have been considerable for the times. Finally, in 1871 and 1872, the road was built and cars, looking something like the old elec- tric cars some of us may remember in Boston, were put into operation, tugged by two horses-usually broken-down, old hacks. The road started well, the management reporting that it carried 5,000 passengers the first month. Commencing at Taft's famed Hotel at the Point, it ran along Shirley Street to what is now Revere Street, to Magee's Corner, then up Winthrop Street by the Town Hall to Payne's Corner (Washington and Pleasant and Winthrop) and then the length of Pleasant Street to Main Street over the bridge to Saratoga Street, through Breed's Island and the Fourth Section to the corner of Saratoga and Chelsea Street where it ran over the tracks of the Metropolitan Horse Railway to Maverick Square and the ferry. The horse and car barns of the road were on Revere St. at Magee's Corner. The promoters and first officers seem to have been William A. Saunders of Cam- bridge, William H. Kimball of Boston, Charles Durham of Chel- sea, W. R. Stockton of Cambridge and-representing Winthrop, John Belcher, Richard Shackford and Charles N. White. The
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