Roswell Gleason by Anthony M. Sammarco

When we think of silver plate, the names of Reed & Barton, Rogers and Lunt come to mind. Few of us realize that the first attempts at silver plating base metal in this country took place on Washington Street, near Four Corners, in the mid 19th century.

Roswell Gleason (1799-1887) was born in Putney, Vermont, the son of Reuben and Abigail Fuller Gleason, but came to Dorchester as a young apprentice to William Wilcox, a tinsmith at Four Corners. In 1822, after Wilcox’s death, Gleason was able to conduct business on his own. His shop produced tin and pewter items that were used in every home of the period, but it was the introduction of Britannia that brought fame to Gleason. Britannia is a pewter alloy composed of lead, tin and other metals to form a pliable metal that withstands constant use. Gleason, through melding and experiment, made a large array of Britannia ware serving pieces that had a more durable quality than the softer pewter. His business was successful enough that he moved from the former Wilcox shop to a new factory at the present site of “Mother’s Rest.”

The new factory employed numerous workmen, and was to produce a high quality Britannia ware that was sold not just locally, but shipped by barge, boat and train throughout the eastern seaboard. Gleason produced lamps that held whale oil, teapots and coffeepots, and caster sets that became a staple in most households; the designs and the quality of his products brought the attention, and inevitable purchase, of buyers from Stowell & Company and Lows, Ball & Company, two fashionable Boston shops.

However, it was in the late 1840’s that Gleason learned of beautiful wares that had a polished surface that looked as if it was made from the finest solid silver. Urged by his friend Daniel Webster, Gleason sent his sons Roswell Gleason, Jr. (1826-1866) and Edward Gleason (1829-1862) to England to study the process of silver plating; they returned after a short while with not simply the knowledge to produce silver plated metal, but with English workmen who were trained and skillful in the process. “In 1849 he … increased his business by introducing the art of silver plating, and was the pioneer of that business in America.” With the establishment of this new line in his already successful business, Roswell Gleason was to make silver tea services available for those with fancy tastes but not the money to purchase solid silver services. With the availability of silver plate, Gleason revolutionized the silver industry, and made cruets, pitchers, services, and serving pieces available at a fraction of the cost of solid silver.

It was precisely the ability of Gleason’s adaptation to changing public tastes and the changing methods of production that enabled him to revel in phenomenal success. His career was successful, and he was fortunate in his family, for he married Rebecca Tucker Vose (1805-1891) of Milton, daughter of Reuben and Polly Willis Vose, and built a splendid mansion, known as “Lilacs,” for her in 1837. His success as a businessman allowed him the finest material comforts, and his large Gothic villa was on Washington Street, just south of his factory. The house was one of the finest in Dorchester, with superb panoramic views of Dorchester Bay from the piazzas. It was complete with a stable and grapery, and had white lilacs planted about the property, from cuttings secured from those at Mount Vernon, President George Washington’s estate in Virginia. With a playing fountain, and a large carriage drive, the estate was not just an elegant country seat, but testimony to Gleason’s ability as a businessman. He was listed in the book Rich Men of Massachusetts in 1851 and he was honored and esteemed in Dorchester. His financial support of the Christopher Gibson School located on School Street was widely appreciated and he served as captain of the Dorchester Rifle Company, a local drill company composed of Dorchesterites who met at Mount Bowdoin to exchange sham battles and to feast upon lavish dinners prepared for the occasion. Gleason was successful and popular, and the deaths of his sons effectively ended his business.

Both of Rebecca and Roswell Gleason’s sons died relatively young. It was their deaths that prompted Gleason’s closing of the business. The Civil War had ended the shipments of his wares to southern markets, and an explosion in his factory caused tremendous damage. Unable to continue, Gleason closed the silver plate and Britannia ware factory in 1871 and retired to a life of ease as near a “millionaire” as had ever been known in Dorchester. He continued his support of local charities, including the Second Church in Codman Square, where he attended both morning and afternoon services every Sunday. He eventually went blind, but maintained a sense of duty to the end. His death came suddenly, and he was buried in his family lot in the Codman Cemetery, the parish burial ground of the Second Church on Norfolk Street.

The family, the only surviving child being Mary Frances Gleason Vandervoort (1825-1885,) maintained “Lilacs” as a virtual museum, with many Gleason produced items among the family antiques. A fire destroyed a portion of the house, and rather than rebuild, the house was moved to face Dorchester Bay and the former carriage drive to the stable was cut through and renamed Ridge Road (now Claybourne Street.) The wealth amassed by Roswell Gleason during the 19^th century enabled him to live in comfort, and to amass a large estate; however, it was that estate that made the greatest fortune for the family, as after the annexation of Dorchester to the city of Boston in 1870, land values skyrocketed and were the best investment one could make. “Lilacs” stood atop the hill at the corner of Park and Claybourne Streets, not just as a reminder of the man who built it, but as a monument to the silver plated empire he created on Washington Street in Dorchester.

Howard Johnson: 28 Flavors by Anthony M. Sammarco

Howard Johnson created an orange roofed empire of ice cream shops and restaurants that stretched from Maine to Florida and from the east coast to the west coast. Known as the father of the “franchise industry” he revolutionized the restaurant industry in the United States and ensured good food and quality prices that brought customers back for more.

Howard Deering Johnson (1897-1972) was born in Wollaston, a part of Quincy, the son of John H. and Olive Belle Wright Johnson. His father was treasurer of the United Retailers Company, a cigar manufactory on Summer Street in Boston; Howard Johnson left school to begin work with his father, but he entered World War I, serving in the American Expeditionary Force, 26th Infantry Division, in France before returning after the Armistice to rejoin his father. His father’s death in 1921 left him heavily in debt, however Howard Johnson was in 1925 to open a corner store at 93 Beale Street in Quincy, where he had a soda fountain and sold newspapers, cigars and three flavors of ice cream. In the 1920’s Johnson began producing a rich ice cream with a doubled butterfat and natural ingredients that brought repeat customers, which was augmented by grilled frankfurters and fried clams. His ice cream stand on Wollaston Beach proved so successful that in 1929 he was able to open his first restaurant in Quincy Square’s Granite Trust Building. Here, he opened a restaurant that served New England fare throughout the day, with specials that attracted business people as well as families.

Howard Johnson’s restaurant was well placed, located at the junction of Dennis F. Ryan Parkway and Hancock Street in a thriving shopping district. In 1929 Eugene O’Neill’s play “Strange Interlude” was banned in Boston by Malcolm Nichols, the mayor, and the New England Watch & Ward Society, and was moved by the Theatre Guild to Quincy, in a theatre opposite his new restaurant. As the play was extremely long, there was a dinner interlude and the theatre-goers flocked across the street to Howard Johnson’s. The restaurant was a great success but the impact of the Great Depression caused severe problems and the credit line his business depended upon was restricted by his bank. The concept of franchising his name was a fairly new business idea but if he let a franchisee use the Howard Johnson name, and purchased all food and supplies from him, he could charge a fee in exchange of the use of his logo, “Simple Simon and the Pie Man.” The franchise concept was quite successful and Johnson is thought of as the “Father of the modern restaurant franchise” in the United States.

Howard Johnson restaurants, in attractive Colonial Revival buildings sporting orange roofs and sea blue shutters, began to be franchised throughout the New England area; by the late 1930’s, with the ascendancy of the automobile, these restaurants were opened on major roads and interstate highways where the travelling public could be assured of consistently high quality foods that was the same served locally or in Maine or Florida. These franchised restaurants sprang up as if by magic throughout the eastern seaboard serving the same delicious Ipswich clams, grilled frankfurters, chops and steaks and twenty eight flavors of his famous ice cream. In 1939 Reader’s Digest did an article that said “Who is Howard Johnson?” so well know had his name become through his successful franchise concept. The public had come to expect quality service, affordable prices and family friendly service and the restaurants became known as the “Landmark for Hungry Americans.”

Opened on June 15, 1935, the restaurant in Dorchester was among the first of the franchises and was awarded to franchisee Harry L. Densberger.  Located on the Old Colony Parkway (now known as the William T. Morrissey Boulevard) near Neponset Circle, those travelling south in the two decades before the Southeast Expressway was built in the 1950’s passed the orange roofed restaurant, and with ample parking space and a solid tradition of quality and family friendly service, was a major attraction for the travelling public. Following World War II, Howard Johnson was expanding so rapidly that his empire was perceived as the world’s largest food chain with hundreds of restaurants serving standardized fare such as fresh roast turkey, the newfangled clam strips as well as whole clams, and twenty eight flavors of delicious ice cream that the public had come to love. The diligent business acumen was incredible and he was quoted as saying that “I think that [building my business] was my only form of recreation. I never played golf. I never played tennis. I never did anything after I left school. I ate, slept, and thought of nothing but the business.”

Howard Johnson retired as president in 1959, his son Howard Brennan Johnson assuming his position with a company that had 675 restaurants, 175 motor lodges and annual sales of $127 million dollars. However, the founder never really retired, as he “continued to monitor his restaurants for cleanliness and proper food preparation. He would be chauffeured in a black Cadillac bearing the license plate HJ-28 [his initials and 28 flavors of ice cream] while performing unannounced inspections of the restaurants.” He created an orange roof empire that attracted the public on a daily basis. “His contribution to the restaurant industry was the idea of centralized buying and a commissary system to prepare menu items for distribution to his restaurants. This helped to insure a uniform consistency and quality, as well as lower costs.” The American public repaid him in kind, as his name will forever be remembered by referring to him and his restaurants as the uncontested “King of the Road.”

Hyde Park by Anthony M. Sammarco

Hyde Park was the last town to be annexed to the city of Boston, becoming in 1912 the southernmost neighborhood of the city located between Milton and Dedham, Massachusetts. Named by the Reverend Henry Lyman after the aristocratic borough of Hyde Park in London, England it was incorporated as an independent town on April 26, 1868 from sections of the towns of Dorchester, Milton and Dedham, Massachusetts.

Hyde Park has evolved as a bucolic suburb located just seven miles from downtown Boston. Located on the Neponset River with panoramic vistas of the Blue Hills, the town began prior to the Civil War when a group of land investors and developers known as the “Twenty Associates” purchased one hundred acres of land at $200.00 per acre in Milton’s Fairmount section; they laid out Fairmount Avenue, flanked by Warren and Williams Avenues, that connected Brush Hill Road and Water Street (now Truman Highway,) which paralleled the river. Here the associates, headed by Alpheus Perley Blake (1832-1916,) who is considered the founder of Hyde Park, had George Currier build twenty identical wood framed houses that were typical of the middle class dwellings being built throughout the Boston area at the time. The associates included William E. Abbot, Amos Angell, Ira L. Benton, Enoch Blake, John Newton Brown, George W. Currier, Hypolitus Fisk, John C. French, David Higgins, John S. Hobbs, Samuel Salmon Mooney, William Nightingale, J. Wentworth Payson, Dwight B. Rich, Alphonso Robinson, William H. Seavey, Daniel Warren, and John Williams.

For two decades, the Twenty Associates and their families were joined by others who were attracted to the area and the convenience of transportation with the Boston and Providence Railroad and the Midlands branch of the New York & New England Railroad having depots within walking distance of the new homes, and a short commute to Boston for business or pleasure. The Boston Land Company, of which Blake was president, and the Hyde Park Real Estate and Building Company, headed by Henry A. Rich, attracted many new residents that purchased building lots that would eventually see the increase of population to fifteen hundred by 1887.

During the Civil War, Camp Meigs, named for Brigadier General Montgomery Cunningham Meigs (1816-1892,) was opened in the Readville section of what was then Dedham. Here Union Civil War troops were assembled and trained, including Company 54, the first African American troop that was led by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, and which was immortalized in the stirring movie “Glory.” Another well known regiment that trained at Camp Meigs was the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry, half of which was recruited in California and transported by clipper ships to Readville for training before being sent to Virginia to fight in the Civil War.

The immediate years following the Civil War were momentous, as there was a movement to incorporate Hyde Park as an independent town. In 1868, following months of acrimonious and often bitter debate, the commonwealth of Massachusetts accepted Hyde Park as an independent town with the creation of a town government with a board of

selectmen, the first to serve being Henry Sturgis Grew, chairman, Zenas Allen, Benjamin Radford, William Stuart and Martin Whitcher. In 1870 a town hall was erected, having been moved from Boston and adapted for use by the new town. The town hall was erected at the corner of

River Street

and

Gordon Avenue

, and would serve as the seat of government until January 1, 1912 when the town was annexed to Boston. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the population dramatically increased as residents of Boston’s densely populated neighborhoods sought more open space and “looked to the outskirts and discovered Hyde Park.” With houses set on large lots of land with attractive tree lined streets, convenient shopping areas, numerous churches, and schools within walking distance, and ease of transportation, Hyde Park’s population amazingly grew from fifteen hundred in 1887 to fifteen thousand at the time of its annexation to Boston.

Since the mid nineteenth century, Hyde Park's residents had traditionally been people of English descent, but by the early twentieth century had a far larger percentage of Polish, Italian, and Irish ethnicities similar to other parts of the city. Today, Hyde Park is a diverse neighborhood with the descendants of the earlier residents being joined by African-American, Hispanics and Asian-Americans, making it a thriving and diverse nexus of cultures. Residents, no matter what their origin, share the common desire to live in a comfortable, safe and well kept suburban city neighborhood with a rich history and sense of tradition.

In the early part of the twentieth century, a prominent harness racing track, called the Readville Trotting Park, was located in Readville on a part of the former Camp Meigs. The racing track was later used for auto racing before it became a Stop & Shop warehouse and distribution center, and which is now used as a multi-use warehouse property. Today, Hyde Park can proudly boast of the George Wright Golf Course, named for baseball Hall of Famer and Cincinnati Reds shortstop George Wright (1847-1937.) After retiring, he moved to Boston and he cofounded the sporting goods business of Wright & Ditson. The championship golf course was designed by the famous golf course designer Donald Ross, and is considered to be one of his finest designs. The Hyde Park Branch of the Boston Public Library is a wonderful library that was once the town of Hyde Park’s library that was built in 1899 on

Harvard Avenue

. Greatly enlarged in 2000 with a modern design by Schwartz Silver Architects, the library’s classic Grecian Ionic design with gray Roman brick and terra cotta trimming is now offset by the walls of glass in the new addition, opening the space to the world around it.

This Then & Now book on Hyde Park, Massachusetts prominently highlights the squares, homes, streets, churches and schools of this lovely neighborhood of Boston. Comparing old photographs with contemporary ones, it shows why this place has been called “Home” by generations of Americans, all of whom pride themselves as being proud residents of Hyde Park.

John J. Enneking

John J. Enneking

“One of the world’s greatest landscape painters”

                                                             by Anthony M. Sammarco

     I think one of my favorite artists is John Joseph Enneking, a noted impressionist painter and a leader of the "Boston School" of painting. A resident of Hyde Park for many years, he was noted for his paintings depicting the Neponset River from the Baker Chocolate Company, the Eagle Paper Mill and the old Sumner House in Hyde Park and especially of the vivid landscapes of the Blue Hills in Milton.

Seen in the accompanying photograph, cows graze on the banks of the Neponset River as others drink. Though the focal point of the painting is the large shade trees in the center, in the distance can be seen Paul’s Bridge, which spans the Neponset River and after 1868 connected Milton on the left and Hyde Park on the right. This charming landscape, probably painted about 1885, shows an area once known as the Fowl Meadows that still retains much of its natural charm as it is part of the Metropolitan District Commission.

Paul’s Bridge, a stone arched bridge, was built in 1850 and was named for Ebenezer Paul, a large land owner in the area before Hyde Park was incorporated into an independent town in 1868; there had been a bridge here as early as the seventeenth century, called  Hubbard’s Bridge. At one time, Hyde Park was part of Milton, Dorchester and Dedham and in 1868 the town of Milton ceded 400 acres to Hyde Park, most of the area of Fairmount Hill that sloped down to Water Street, or what is now known as Truman Highway.

John Joseph Enneking (1841-1916) was a native of Minster, Auglaize County, Ohio and was raised on a farm. Orphaned at the age of fifteen, he lived with an aunt until he enrolled at Mount St. Mary’s College in Cincinnati, but left to enlist in the Union army during the Civil War, during which he was severely wounded in action and honorably discharged. He moved to Boston where he initially studied industrial drawing and lithography, but later became a tinsmith. He married Mary Eliot of Hyde Park, and they eventually built a large Queen Anne house at 17 Webster Street in Hyde Park where they lived from 1879 until their deaths.. The Eliots descended from the Reverend John Eliot, teacher of the Roxbury Church in the seventeenth century and “Apostle to the Indians,” in that he translated the Bible into the native tongue of the Indians, and his descendants were large landowners in the new town of Hyde Park.

Encouraged by his wife to pursue art as his career, the Ennekings went to Europe where in the 1870’s he studied at the Royal Academy in Munich as well as with artists Charles-Francois Daubigny, Camille Corot and Jean-Francois Millet in Paris, all of whom became close friends. These artists were all accomplished in their “Barbizon” style of painting, but Enneking evolved more as an impressionistic painter following his return to the United States. It was said that in the early sunrise and at twilight, Enneking with sketch book in hand and colors on a palate, wandered through the area, especially the Blue Hills, where he did sketches and studies that were later used in the painting of canvases done in his studio. Among his best known was the “Sentinel Series” of bare trees silhouetted against the sky in the Blue Hills. These small studies were no more than 8 by 10 at the largest and often captured the vividness of the sky with the “sentinels” prominent in the center. I’m fortunate to have been able to acquire two of these studies, of which I am immensely proud, though my closest friend said that they, in regards to their thick impressionistic quality, look like “vomit on artist board.” Oh well, I still enjoy them.

Enneking was a member of the Twentieth Century Club, the Pudding Stone Club, the Boston Art Club, the Paint and Clay Club of Boston, and the Boston Guild of Artists. However, he was also one of “The Ten,” a group of ten artists considered to be the finest of their time in the United States. In 1915 he was honored with a lavish testimonial dinner at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston’s Back Bay where more than five hundred fellow artists, museum directors, art collectors and city officials applauded as he was crowned with a laurel wreath for his artistic achievements.

As park commissioner for the town of Hyde Park, he was a noted conservationist. The woodlands of the old Grew Estate, the vast estate of Henry Sturgis Grew and known as Grew’s Woods, were later to become part of the Stony Brook Reservation, and the serpentine road leading from West Roxbury to Hyde Park was named the Enneking Parkway in his honor. Upon his death in 1916, he was buried at Fairlawn Cemetery in Hyde Park, his memorial a naturalistic boulder of Roxbury pudding stone.