USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > The site of Saint Paul's Cathedral, Boston, and its neighborhood > Part 11
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1 Gleaner Articles. No. 6.
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IT. for curing Robert Munson, his arm being broke, and his hand being wounded by shot; in money £3.
IT. For curing Gerimyah Bumsted, in money, £6."
Dr. Edward Ellis and his wife Sarah had ten chil- dren. Robert Ellis, their ninth child, was appointed "chirurgeon for the Expedition to Port Royal," August 19, 1710. He became sole owner of the estate, as is shown by his will, which was proved in 1720.
The name of Edward Ellis appears in a list of more than a hundred of the "Handycraftsmen" of Boston who petitioned the General Court in May, 1677, for protection in their several callings. They complained of finding themselves at a disadvantage owing to the frequent intrusions of "strangers from all parts, espe- cially such as are not desirably qualified ... and many times the stranger drawes away much of the custome from his neighbour; whereby it has come to pass that several inhabitants that have lived comfort- ably upon their trades, cannot subsist, which is very pernicious and prejudicial to the Town." The Court appointed a Committee to look into the matter, but their report does not appear to have been placed on record.
Samuel Banister appears to have been the next pro- prietor, although no deed to him is recorded. He was the second son of Thomas Banister, who be-
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came the owner of a part of the original home-lot of William Blackstone on the western slope of Beacon Hill. This property was known as "Banister's Gar- dens." Thomas Banister was a vestryman of King's Chapel. He was also one of several gentlemen who were empowered to manage the affairs of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in New England and the parts adjacent, in the year 1704.
Samuel Banister sold his house and land, August 26, 1729, to Peter Luce of Boston, merchant, for £650. Mr. Luce was also a vestryman of King's Chapel, and a subscriber to the fund which was raised in 1730, when the first steps were taken for the for- mation of Trinity Church.
Mr. Luce owned the estate for eighteen years, and sold it, August 30, 1747, to Sylvester Gardiner, of Boston.
Doctor Sylvester Gardiner
S YLVESTER GARDINER (1717-1786) was a. native of South Kingston, Rhode Island. He was a great-grandson of Joseph Gardiner (one of the early settlers of Narragansett), and the fourth child of William Gardiner. He had his early schooling in Boston, and then devoted eight years to the study of Medicine in London and Paris. Returning to
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Boston, he at once became prominent as an accom- plished physician and surgeon. Dr. Gardiner had also an apothecary shop on Marlborough, now a part of Washington Street, at the Sign of the Unicorn.
In 1750 he gave public notice that he had on hand and for sale a large stock of the freshest and best of all kinds of Drugs and Medicines; and that he was prepared to furnish physicians and apothecaries in Town and Country with whatever they might need in the line of their Professions.
The physicians of the New England Colonies de- pended chiefly upon this establishment for their med- ical supplies. In the autumn of 1745 the Town Clerk of Boston was ordered by the Selectmen to issue a warrant directed to the Constables, requiring them in his Majesty's name to warn all the citizens of the Town to convene at Faneuil Hall, in order to consider a Petition signed by a large number of the inhabi- tants, praying that some measures be taken to prevent Doctor Sylvester Gardiner's having a "Hospital House in said Town (as he purposes), for the Re- ception of Persons sick of Epidemical and Infectious Diseases."
It appears, however, that Dr. Gardiner received permission to build such a hospital, which he main- tained for many years. . .
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At a Town meeting, March 9, 1757, Dr. Gardiner presented a petition that the Town would lease to him for the term of thirty-three years "the marsh or sunken lands at the bottom of the Common, upon the terms he therein proposes, vizt., that he will Damm out the Sea From such Marsh and Lands, so that the whole may become dry and good Ground, the Town allowing him to Set the Fence near the Brow of the Hill, adjoyning to said marsh, running From South to North, and across a little Ridge or Hill that divides the north part of the Marsh from a Sunken pond below the powder house."1
This petition was at first dismissed, but was after- ward granted; and the tract described was leased to Dr. Gardiner on the terms above mentioned. This land appears to have extended from the present Park Square northerly, and to have included a considera- ble part of the so-called Parade Ground of the Com- mon.2
Dr. Gardiner served as a vestryman and warden of King's Chapel during a period of about forty years. Having greatly prospered in his profession, and having acquired a large fortune, he began to
' This was built about 1706 on the hill, where the Soldiers' Monument stands.
'Town Records, May 12, 1752.
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make investments in real estate, and gradually ac- quired immense tracts of land in Maine, which was then a part of Massachusetts, and especially in the region of the Kennebec River. He owned at one time no less than one hundred thousand acres. To him belongs the credit of founding, in 1760, the pres- ent city of Gardiner, where he built an Episcopal Church, many dwelling-houses, and several mills. This settlement in its early years bore the name of Gardinerston.
Dr. Gardiner's house in Boston was frequented by the most prominent people of the town. At the out- break of the Revolution, his sympathies were with the mother country. He was one of the large number of Loyalists, who accompanied the British troops on their departure from Boston, March 17, 1776; and his name appears in the list of those who were formally proscribed as enemies of the new State, in 1778. His property was confiscated, and much of it was sold at public auction. Dr. Gardiner spent some years at Poole, Dorset, England, but returned to America, and made his home at Newport, Rhode Island.
Under an "Act to provide for the payment of Debts due from the Conspirators and Absentees, and for the recovery of debts due to them," Richard Cranch and Samuel Henshaw, being the major part of the
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Committee authorized to sell the Estates of said Con- spirators and Absentees, and to give good and suffi- cient Deeds to the purchasers in the name and behalf of the Commonwealth, conveyed to John Boies of Boston, merchant, October 26, 1782, a parcel of real estate formerly the property of Sylvester Gardiner, Esq., Absentee, for the sum of £800."
This estate had a frontage of about 51 feet on Winter Street, and a depth of 66 feet. It was bounded on the west by land of John R. Sigourney, and on the south and east by land of Doctor John Sprague.
John Boies
M R. BOIES was probably near of kin to Jere- miah Smith Boies, who became the owner of a portion of the Leverett Pasture lot in 1791, as else- where mentioned. The name was originally Du Boyce, and belonged to a French Huguenot family, one of whose members, the progenitor of the Boies family in America, fled to Scotland to avoid religious persecution. Thence he went to Ireland, and later came to this country.
John Boies established a paper mill at the upper Fall of the Charles River in Waltham about the year 1785. The site of the mill and its surroundings
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were very picturesque, and the region was known as Eden Vale.
In the Autumn of 1795 Mr. Boies produced paper which was made of potato vines; and this was said to have been the first attempt to make paper out of a vegetable substance in Massachusetts. John Boies sold his manufacturing interests in Waltham to the Boston Manufacturing Company, who erected their first cotton-mill on the site of the old paper-mill in 1813; and in this mill the power-loom was used for the first time in America. The successful introduc- tion and employment of the power-loom in England dates from about the same period.1
Samuel Adams, Patriot
A FTER owning the estate about two years, Mr. Boies sold it, in the year 1784, for £100o, to the eminent patriot, Samuel Adams, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and afterward Governor of Massachusetts. Mr. Adams had been forced by the exigencies of the troublous ante-Rev- olutionary period to retire with his family to the country, abandoning his house on Purchase Street.
During the Siege of Boston, that house became the ' The Memorial History of Boston. IV. 84.
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abode of British officers. And when, after the Evac- uation in the early Spring of 1776, Mr. Adams sought to reoccupy his home, which was also his birth-place, it was found to be uninhabitable. The interior had been wantonly mutilated. Blasphemous writings had been cut in the window-panes, doors had been un- hinged and burned for fuel, and evidences of van- dalism were everywhere apparent. For several years thereafter the Adams family lived in retirement at Dedham.
The mansion on the corner of Winter Place was a substantial, three-storied, wooden and brick struc- ture, which was still standing when Saint Paul's Church was built in 1820. Its clapboard sides had been painted yellow, but had become shabby and weather-beaten. The oaken front door was adorned with a brass knocker. The windows of the lower story were within two feet of the ground. Over the arch of the front entrance was a large bow-win- dow. The windows were mostly small, and accord- ing to the statistics of the United States Direct Tax of 1798, there were thirty-two of them. The houses above and below, on the south side of Winter Street, were similar in appearance, except that there were several small shops, one of which, adjoining Mr. Adams's house on the west, was a bakery. In The
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Life of Samuel Adams, by William V. Wells (III, 333), we find a description of the Adams home, as follows :
"In the rear of the residence was a paved court- yard, and a garden adorned with flowers and shrub- bery. The interior was a model of neatness and thrifty house-keeping. The front door opened into a broad entry, from which a staircase with heavily- capped, twisted banisters led to the upper stories, and terminated near a bow-window on the second land- ing. There were two parlors, one of them being used by Mr. Adams as a sitting-room and library, and here he was wont to receive his more intimate friends."
Tremont Street at that time was paved in the mid- dle only with cobble-stones procured from the neigh- boring beach. And this pavement was used by pe- destrians and the drivers of vehicles alike. Nothing, it has been said, better illustrates Boston's develop- ment than the evolution of Tremont Street from a · series of narrow, crooked lanes and cow-paths to a metropolitan thoroughfare. . . .
Many volumes containing old tax-lists, beginning with the year 1780, are kept in the basement of the Boston City Hall Annex. Under the heading "oc- cupation," some interesting particulars are given about tax-payers. The list for 1780 was printed in
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the ninth volume of the Bostonian Society's Publica- tions. In the volume for 1790 Samuel Adams is named as a "worthy of 1775," and Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf as an "old Gentleman."
Isaiah Thomas, Printer
.
SAIAH THOMAS (1749-1831) was the proprie- and tor of an estate on the south side of Winter Street, east of the home of Samuel Adams. He was a na- tive of Boston; the son of Moses and Fidelity (Grant) Thomas. His father was through life a "rolling- stone," having been successively a soldier, mariner, trader, farmer and school-master. The son used to say that his early education consisted of six weeks' schooling and no more. When seven years of age he was apprenticed to Zachariah Fowle, a Salem Street printer, who sold small books and ballads on the highway's, as was the custom in those days. Mr. Fowle agreed to instruct his apprentice in "the art and mystery of a printer," and he had ample oppor- tunities for so doing, inasmuch as their association was maintained for eleven years. At the age of about eighteen Isaiah Thomas set out to seek his fortune, and obtained employment in Halifax, Nova Scotia; Portsmouth, N. H., and Charleston, S. C. He then
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returned to Boston, and having become of age, he formed a partnership with Mr. Fowle, his former master, in 1770; and the new firm began the publica- tion of the Massachusetts Spy. Zachariah Fowle soon retired from the partnership, and Mr. Thomas continued to print and edit the Spy, which became a leading upholder of Whig principles, and was there- fore hostile to the government. Shortly before the opening of the Revolution, Mr. Thomas removed his printing office to Worcester, where he continued to publish the Spy, with some intermissions, for many years. Returning to Boston in 1788, he formed a partnership with Ebenezer T. Andrews, under the firm name of Thomas and Andrews. Mr. Thomas was the author of a History of Printing. He was the founder of the American Antiquarian Society, and its President for many years.
Ebenezer Turell Andrews (1766-1851) owned the house, Number 15 Winter Street, and lived there for about twenty-five years. In his youth he was ap- prenticed to Isaiah Thomas, printer, then of Worces- ter, and for several years was an inmate of the lat- ter's household, as was the custom for apprentices in those days. At the age of twenty-one he was ad- mitted to partnership with Mr. Thomas, and their firm became well known throughout the country. Mr.
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Andrews was a public-spirited citizen, and was con- nected with various business enterprises, being one of the incorporators of the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company. He was also one of the found- ers of the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, and of the Tremont Bank. His son, Wil- liam Turell Andrews, graduated at Harvard in 1812, being then seventeen years of age. He became Treas- urer of the College, and held other positions of trust.
In January, 1789, the firm of Thomas and An- drews began the publication of the Massachusetts Magazine, or Monthly Museum of Knowledge and Rational Entertainment.
The contents of this periodical were of a miscel- laneous character. For example, the issue of Janu- ary, 1791, included a biographical sketch of Gover- nor Bowdoin; an Article on Ashes for Manure; Es- says on Generosity and Internal Agreeableness; an Account of the Creek Indians; Story of the Poor Lit- tle Greek; the General Observer No. XXI; Natural History and Description of the Tyger Cat of the Cape of Good Hope; Vanessa, or the Feast of Rea- son; the Bashful Man; the Matrimonial Creed; Franklin's Parable against Persecution; On the Com- parative Advantages and Disadvantages of a Canal from Barnstable Bay to Buzzard's Bay; the Player
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and his Wife; the Wounded Officer ; Manners, Sump- tuary Laws, etc., of the early Inhabitants of New England; Compendium of Grecian Morality; Disser- tation on the Causes and Effects of Spasm in Fevers ; on Revenge and Cruelty; Description of two Clocks, presented by the East India Company to the Emperor of China; Meteorological Imaginations and Conjec- tures, by Dr. Franklin; a Striking Piece of Ancient History; the Condemned Prisoner; Reflections, ad- dressed to the Head and the Heart; further Thoughts on Sandwich Canal and the erection of a Light House at Clay Pounds; Monthly Review. Also an Ode on the New Year, 1791; Sonnet to General Lincoln; Lines to Eloisa, on her reading a Novel; Bacchus's Shrine; Sonnet to Cruelia ; Elegy on a Village Swain ; Lines on taking a Pansy from beneath the Snow; on hearing a Lady sing Fidelle, our Forefathers' song, written in 1630; extract from the Zenith of Glory; Stanzas inscribed to Lord Dorchester; Epigram on reading a late Military Letter; and Rebus.
Colonel Samuel Swett
A NOTHER well-known owner of real estate in this part of Winter Street was Colonel Samuel Swett (1782-1866), lawyer, soldier, merchant and
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military writer. He was a native of Newburyport, where he attended a Grammar School. After gradu- ating at Harvard in 1800, he taught school in Rox- bury, and later studied law in the office of Judge Charles Jackson in Boston. Being admitted to the Essex Bar in 1804, he practised at Salem for several years. In 1810 he withdrew from his profession, be- came a resident of Boston, and a partner in the mer- cantile firm of W. B. Swett and Company. He was soon after elected the first commander of the New England Guards and, during the latter part of the War of 1812, he served as a topographical engineer on the staff of Major-General George Izard, being em- ployed along the northern frontier. In 1820, when Saint Paul's Church was finished, Colonel Swett was an Aide-de-Camp on the staff of Governor John Brooks. He married, in 1807, Lucia, daughter of Hon. William Gray, and had four sons and a daugh- ter, Lucia Gray Swett, who married Francis Alex- ander, a well-known portrait-painter. They became residents of Florence, Italy, where Mrs. Alexander was living in the year 1915, being then one hundred and one years old. Her daughter Francesca is an au- thoress, and a skilful delincator of Tuscan peasant life. Her work in this line was warmly commended by her friend, John Ruskin, the noted art critic. Colo-
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nel Swett was a vestryman of King's Chapel, and a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. Among his more important writings on military subjects was an Account of the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Other Winter Street Residents
A MONG the townspeople, besides those already mentioned, who had residences or places of busi- ness on Winter Street toward the end of the eighteenth century, were John Fessenden and James Carter, school-masters. The latter was in charge of the Free Writing School, afterward known as the Centre Reading and Writing School, which was at- tended by more than four hundred scholars.
In August, 1796, Mr. Carter received permission from the Selectmen to accommodate himself with an- other house, and to let his former home, which was "too small for his growing family." Other residents of Winter Street at this period were William Donni- son, shop-keeper and Adjutant General; George Trott, merchant, and Lieutenant Colonel of the Massachu- setts Regiment of Artillery ; Ebenezer Farley, a mer- chant, and Samuel Cobb, Representative and Select- man for several years. Of trades-people there were
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quite a number, including John Roberts and Thomas Wilkinson, chaise-makers; Wheelock and Simmons, livery-stable; Edward and Samuel Russell, painters; Joseph Snelling, book-binder; John Mills, house- wright; John Long, cabinet-maker; Frederick Ockes and William Laughton, bakers. In 1810 John Chris- tian Rauschner, a Dane, occupied a house, number two, on the north side of the street. He was a mod- eler in wax, who attained marked distinction in his specialty. Rauschner appears to have been of a rov- ing disposition, and changed his residence often, hav- ing lived in Philadelphia, New York and Salem, Mas- sachusetts, being occupied with his work as an "artist in wax." Several of his miniature portraits are in the Essex Institute at Salem; others are to be seen in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. . . . 1
Among the residents above mentioned were two bakers. There were no bread-wagons in Boston in those days. Loaves of bread were carried about in covered wheel-barrows, and were required by law to be of a specified weight.
It was not uncommon for a Selectman to stop a wheel-barrow, and weigh the loaves on the spot. If found to be underweight, they were confiscated, and
1 Ethel Stanwood Bolton. Wax Portraits and Silhouettes. Bos- ton. 1914.
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sent to the Alms-house.
The writer of an Article in the Farmer's Almanach:, May, 1837, advocated home-baking, on the score of economy, as follows: "Hark, 'tis the jingle of the baker's bells; hot bread, who buys? Have a care now, Mr. Sweetmouth, how you let this bill run up! Wheat-loaves, gingerbread, hot buns and seed-cakes, these are all very clever. But there is my Aunt Sarah's brown bread; sweet, pleasant and wholesome. Don't give it up for a cartload of muffins and jumbles. There is no discount on my Aunt Sarah's cooking. Give me a plate of her nut-cakes in preference to all the sweet-meats of the city. . . Bread," continued this writer, "is called the staff of life, the main sup- porting food; but this important article may come too dear. Let your good wife, then, have her own hands in the kneading-trough, nor heed too much the music of the baker's boy."
According to English custom, the weight, price and measure of certain marketable articles were deter- mined by ordinance or assize, such as the "assize of bread and ale," which dates from the reign of Henry III in the thirteenth century.
At a meeting of the Selectmen of Boston, Septem- ber 2, 1796, the text of the "assize of bread" was pub- lished for the instruction of bakers and Clerks of the
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Market.
The duties of the latter included the inspection of weights and measures; and for the better protection of house-keepers, Clerks of the Market were charged to be vigilant in preventing all frauds and abuses which might arise. At the Selectmen's meeting above mentioned, the several bakers within the Town were ordered "to mark their Bread, which they bake for Sale, with the first letter of their Christian-Names, and with the first and last letters of their Sur-Names." Moreover, such bread as was not well baked, and loaves made of inferior flour, were liable to seizure by the authorities. The heaviness of a loaf was for- merly determined by Troy weight. In 1735 the stand- ard weight of a penny white loaf was three ounces and five penny-weights; that of a sixpenny wheaten loaf was somewhat over a pound.
From the large number of New England bakeries in early times, and the penalties imposed for short- weight loaves, it appears that the house-wives did but little home baking. Among the various kinds of bread then in popular use, were simnels,1 or cakes made of fine flour ; cracknels, a kind of brittle, fancy biscuit; wastels, cakes of the finest quality, and cocket-
1 Alice Morse Earle: Customs and Fashions in Old New Eng- land.
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bread, a less choice grade of wheat-bread; manchet, made from the whitest wheaten flour; cheat-loaves, of coarser quality, and buns made of sweetened bread, baked in small cakes.
In later medieval times simnels were a luxury which none but wealthy persons of high rank could afford; and wastel-bread was a favorite among the well-to-do of the middle classes. Tourte, a kind of coarse cake, made of unbolted meal, was a staple ar- ticle of diet for the poor. During the reign of Rich- ard II, in the fourteenth century, bakers of tourte bread were not allowed to have a bolting-sieve in their possession.
Sir Walter Scott, in The Monastery, describes Mysie, daughter of Hob the Miller, as having a com- plexion fair as "her father's finest bolten flour, out of which was made the Abbot's own wastel-bread."
Ezekiel Price, Secretary
E ZEKIEL PRICE (1728-1802) was living in Winter Street in 1780 or thereabout, and in the list of tax-payers of that year, he is set down as a "scribe." Mr. Price was prominent in public life, and held various offices both under the Crown, and after the Revolution. He served as Secretary to
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Governors William Shirley, Thomas Pownall and Sir Francis Bernard. He was also clerk of the Court of Common Pleas under both Colonial and State rule. By profession he was a Notary Public and Insurance broker. Mr. Price was also active in town affairs, serving as a Selectman for about thirty years. His later residence was on Tremont Street, where the Bos- ton Museum afterward stood. During the Siege of Boston he lived with his family in Stoughton where he kept an Interesting Diary, which has been pre- served.
Thomas William Parsons, Poet
T HOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS (1819-1891), American poet and translator, had his home at number 18 Winter Street. He took a six years' course at the Boston Public Latin School, and at the age of seventeen went abroad with his father, and spent the winter of 1836-7 in Italy, where he became an earnest student of Dante, a portion of whose Divine Comedy he afterward translated. This version was pronounced the most successful reproduction of the spirit and power of that great work, in the English language. His Hudson River was the noblest tribute which any stream on this Continent has ever re-
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ceived.1 Mr. Parsons published a volume of poems in 1854. Although not a graduate of any university, he received from Harvard the degree of Master of Arts. He was a Fellow of the American Academy.
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