By Susan Martin

As we constantly work to update and improve descriptions of our holdings here at the MHS, we often find interesting and unexpected items buried in large collections, usually items by previously unidentified or misidentified relatives. A staff member recently identified the author of an anonymous diary in the papers of Massachusetts Governor John Davis Long. The diary was kept by Long’s sister, Persis Seaver (Long) Bartlett (1828-1893), from 14 Oct. 1889 to 30 June 1892.

Unfortunately, the circumstances that prompted Persis to write the diary were very sad ones. Her younger son, Percival Temple Bartlett, suffered from tuberculosis, and he and Persis were traveling West in hopes that a change in climate would alleviate his condition. The trip was ultimately unsuccessful, and Percy died in San Antonio, Texas, on 20 May 1890 at the age of 27. The diary documents his deteriorating health and his mother’s feelings at every stage of his illness and after his death. It’s a very personal and fascinating account of loss that still resonates 120 years later.

By 1889, Persis had been a widow for over 20 years. She had also lost her parents, a sister, a brother, and a daughter. Her older son, Stephen Long Bartlett, was a businessman in Boston, and her brother John and his family lived in Hingham, Mass. But writing so many miles from home, Persis described her feelings of isolation, helplessness, and anxiety as the sole caretaker of her weakening son. A typical diary entry reads: “I am thinking of him, so much, as I sit in my room adjoining his, while he sleeps and breathes, too short, and coughs too often….His case looks very discouraging to me. I hope I am mistaken.”

Persis recorded the daily changes in Percy’s symptoms, treatment, appetite, energy, and attitude. At various times, he suffered from the measles, “the grippe,” lameness, depression, and even, for some time, lost his voice entirely. Persis also worried about the weather and its effect on her son’s health. For example: “Clear and cold. Now comes their winter here, frost that has killed the strawberries and vegetables, and stripped the trees of their leaves and blossoms. A season of cold never known here before. Some how bad luck follows us where we go.”

The most poignant diary entries are those containing little details of Percy’s gradual decline. On 10 Mar. 1890, Persis wrote: “Percy and I walk to the Ice factory, a short distance, to be weighed. He weighs 115. I 132. Can it be possible this is my bright, sunny, strong Percy that walk[s] by my side so weak…[?]” The seats on a streetcar “are hard for his poor thin body.” A little later, “Percival and I ride a little way. I can see he reluctantly allows me to get out and open the gate. His shortness of breath and weakness is terrible for me to see, but how much harder for him to bear.”

After Percy’s death and her return to Massachusetts, Persis continued, on every page, to express her longing for him. She noted the monthly anniversaries of his death. Whenever her other son, Stephen, showed any sign of illness, she was overcome with anxiety. (In fact, Stephen would survive her by 44 years.) She also maintained a close relationship with a Miss Minnie Speare, who had been, it seems, Percy’s sweetheart. And although her lost son would never be far from her mind, Persis was able to write, on 3 Mar. 1891: “Sometimes I can bear it better than at others. Some days I am a little braver.”

For more information about the diary of Persis Seaver (Long) Bartlett, see the collection record in our online catalog ABIGAIL. Or visit the library to spend time reading the diary.

By By Laura Prieto, Simmons College

Love letters come in many varieties, but there’s a resonant familiarity about the language of longing.

Alice Bache Gould and Henrietta Child came of age as neighbors on Kirkland Street in Cambridge. The young women shared a keen love of books, and enjoyed discussing their ideas and projects.  Literary accomplishments marked the male and female lines of both of their families; Alice’s relatives included poet Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy Waterston, and author Catharine Sedgwick was Henrietta’s great-aunt.

Henrietta continued her studies informally while Alice’s ambitions took her away from New England: to Bryn Mawr for a bachelor’s degree and eventually to the University of Chicago for doctoral work in mathematics. Alice hoped for a career as a scholar and university teacher while Henrietta felt an obligation to her family at home. In 1896, both young women lost their brilliant fathers, astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould and Harvard professor Francis James Child.  Alice continued to travel in ever wider circles, from Cambridge to Chicago to the Caribbean. She could not land the kind of teaching positions she wanted and she found it increasingly hard to work on her dissertation.

Through those restless years, Alice stayed bound to Henrietta through letters. They wrote lengthily and often, sometimes daily.  Advice, observations, jokes, recipes, and frivolities, all have their place on the pages exchanged. The two women even continued their serious studies together through their correspondence, taking up the History of Mathematics written in 1758 by French author Jean Étienne Montucla (1725-1799).  Alice visited Henrietta in October 1902 before embarking for Puerto Rico with another friend and neighbor, Susie Preble. “I see the Navy has followed you to have a sight of those low-necked dresses you took with you,” teased Henrietta.

Alice and Henrietta’s affection and intimacy are always in evidence, but their long separation in 1902-1903 led Henrietta to chafe against her “duty” to stay with her mother and sister. (Alice Bache Gould Papers, MsN-1309, Box 14, Folder 9) She confessed to Alice,

I have been indulging in thoughts, or dreams perhaps, about you, thinking how it would be if we could go off together, how we should get along — whether you would not be almost as depressed with me as without me, but still that I would risk it gladly if it were right to leave home — because I did not like to have you go off by yourself & I thought in some ways it would be a change that I could put to use. I could study & cheer you up a bit & together — Well the rest was sentiment & not over wise, not according to the real way of life I suppose.

I am going to Montucla now, & be sensible.

Your loving friend,

Henrietta

I think of you a lot.

Don’t be discouraged, my little girl. Keep up brave heart, & try to make the best of things just as they are, then they will not be so bad. I should like to be beside you to night when the lights were out & then we could have a talk.

Henrietta’s language is so passionate, and seems so un-self-conscious. What should we make of it? In the 1970s, women’s historians like Carroll Smith-Rosenberg began to study the “romantic friendships” that blossomed between women in nineteenth-century America. These intense relationships often began at school and were nurtured within the “female world” of the domestic sphere, wherein women were supposed to be the affectionate, sentimental, innocent sex. In adulthood, such relationships could co-exist alongside a woman’s conventional male-female courtships and marriage, or they could become her primary commitments. When the women in question lived together, they might be called a “Boston marriage.” Whether they were lovers in a physical sense is usually impossible to prove either way, and scholars differ on whether the sexual aspects even matter. Are the erotic possibilities essential or a prurient distraction?

They never lived together, as Henrietta fantasized doing; but Henrietta Child and Alice Bache Gould fit the quintessential profile of romantic friends. They were well educated women of a certain social class who addressed one another with deep love and intimacy. They expressed their feelings for one another in the language of courtship, welcomed physical closeness, and used playful, maternal endearments (“my little girl”). They never married. If anything is surprising to the historian in their letters, it is their timing. Henrietta wrote her letter a decade after the sensationalized trial of Alice Mitchell, who said she murdered her dear friend Freda Ward “because she loved her” and could not be with her. The court and the press accused Mitchell of “unnatural affection,” sexual perversion, and insanity. By then, the theories of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and other pioneers of sexology had begun to classify “homosexuality” as a psychiatric disorder. Publicity cast new suspicion on intense same-sex friendships, making unseemly what had no one had objected to before. Yet in early 1900s Cambridge, proper young women could still “indulge” in feelings of love for one another.

Alice’s search for fulfillment eventually took her to Simancas, Spain, where she conducted ground-breaking archival research on Columbus’ first voyage and worked for the U.S. embassy during World War I. Henrietta ended up on an adventure of her own. In 1911, after her mother’s death, she left New England to teach at the Hindman Settlement School in rural Berea, Kentucky. She spent the rest of her life there, as an inspiring storyteller in the local school system.

An increasingly hostile climate and the pressures of family may have kept them from “going off together;” but their loving friendships helped give Henrietta and Alice the strength to pursue meaningful lives, on their own terms.

By Daniel Hinchen

“…to write a history of the Hoosac Tunnel in all its details would be an almost endless task. The legislative bills and hearings, the reports of committees, remonstrances and private pamphlets on the subject, if stacked up in an orderly pile, would rival the size of the mountain itself.” (Orson Dalrymple, History of the Hoosac Tunnel,  3.)

One of the benefits of creating these blog posts is the opportunity to gain some background on topics that were previously unfamiliar to me. While the research does not go into a great deal of depth, it is a good way to get some “quick and dirty” facts and to expand familiarity with the great collections here at the MHS.

And today’s topic is no exception. When initially given the assignment, the name itself, the Hoosac Tunnel, was not completely unfamiliar to me, but there was absolutely no background knowledge in my mind to illustrate it.

So, a few specifics: the Hoosac Tunnel is about 4.75 miles long and is located between Florida, Mass. and North Adams, Mass. It cuts through the Hoosac Range, a southern extension of Vermont’s Green Mountains. It was a part of the Boston and Maine Railroad, connecting Boston to Troy, New York by way of Greenfield, Mass. This rail system is now part of the Pan Am Railways network.

While the physical work of creating the tunnel started in 1851, the original planning for a new route across Massachusetts began as early as 1819 with discussion of a canal project, which, even then, proposed a tunnel through the Hoosac Range. Over time, proposals and ideas morphed and the national rail building craze turned the canal project into a tunnel project, with formal fundraising beginning in 1848.

Ambiguous beginnings were matched by indefinite endings, and the completion of the Hoosac Tunnel included many firsts: the first work train passed through on 9 February 1875. In that same year the first freight train passed through on 5 April, and the first passenger train on 13 October. The work was totally finished in 1877 with the completion of the stone facing on the east portal. But the reason that the tunnel gets our attention today is that on 27 November 1873 the center of the tunnel was opened, joining the eastern and western halves. With the final blast, the longest tunnel in the western hemisphere (second in the world) was finally completed. It would hold this title until 1916.

And that is the quick and dirty of the Hoosac Tunnel.

If you would like to find out more about this impressive feat of engineering in Massachusetts History, visit the MHS website to search our online catalog, ABIGAIL, and search for the subject “Hoosac Tunnel” and find out what resources we have available! 

By Anna J. Cook

Back in 2009 Jeremy Dibbell brought us an account of colonial Boston’s Pope’s Day celebrations of 1745 as witnessed by Rev. James Freeman, a founding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Little remembered today, Pope’s Day was an annual festival here in Boston – the New England counterpart to the English Guy Fawkes Day. You can explore the origins of Pope’s Day on the excellent 5^th of November in Boston website, sponsored by the Bostonian Society.

Today, I’d like to share with you another account of Pope’s Day as written by Boston merchant and loyalist Isaac Winslow (1743-1793). In a letter on 15 November 1765 and later incorporated into a family history written by his son, also named Isaac. Isaac Winslow, Jr., writes in the Winslow Family Memorial:

 [My father] says “The 5th of November happily disappointed ones fears, a union was formed between the South and North, by the mediation of the principal gentlemen of the town” – The Popes (meaning probably, the South end and north end processions) [“] paraded the Streets together, all day, and after burning them at the close of it, all was quiet in the evening. There were no disguises of visages, but the two leaders, M’cIntosh of the South, and Swift of the North, (the same who was so badly wounded last year, were dress’d out in a very gay manner, The authorities[”] he says [“]did not interfere at all in the matter[”] (MacKintosh was one of the most active of the mob which destroyed Governor Hutchinsons  house in North Square 26 August 1765, and was arrested by the Sheriff, but could not be committed on account of the popular interference).

The younger Isaac goes on to write:

On the anniversary of “Pope day” on the 5th of November, there had always existed a bitter rivalry between the South and North parts of the town, which party should capture and destroy each others Pope – the effigies of whom accompanied by others of the Devil and his Imps were carried about in procession on that day & he added by a distinguished fighting character from each Section – the Northern procession going to the South, and vice versa accompanied each other with a vast concourse of people – They usually met each other in or about Dock Square where the contest took place – These conflicts were very severe, but this year (1765) the popular leaders had excited in the minds of the people such a determined opposition to the Stamp act, that they succeeded in making peace, between the two parties who had before always been at swords points with each other.

 A full transcript of the Winslow Family Memorial can be read online (PDF). The account of Pope’s Day is on page 65-66 of the transcript.

By Daniel Hinchen

“Never since the clink of the first hammer of civilization that rung its notes upon the tri-mountains of the present town or city of Boston, has there been or is there likely to be, such a gala day as that of the 25^th of October, 1848! The entrance and reception of Washington, of Lafayette, and the still greater acclamation, parade and pageant that welcomed ‘Old Hickory,’ the Bunker Hill Celebration, all, all fall far behind the brilliancy, fervor and grandeur of the demonstration mode by the citizens of Boston and country adjacent upon this great occasion—introduction of the waters of Lake Cochituate into our city!”

Such was the joy in Boston and surrounding areas when the new aqueduct was opened in 1848, giving the citizens what they wanted and needed for so long: water that was not only fresh, but free.

While a modern day parade that hails our sports teams as champions draws thousands of loyal fans to the streets, none will celebrate an event that had such an impact on the city or attract such a diverse crowd. While some put their hopes and emotion into supporting the Bruins or the Red Sox and cheer their victories, this was a cause to celebrate lives saved and enriched.

People from all walks and all professions were in attendance. The great procession included, among others: firemen, military, various committee members, Governor Briggs, state officers, municipal authorities, clergy, physicians, mechanics, reporters. There were printers pulling a printing press that spat out flyers and programs as the group proceeded. All of these groups were represented in the first two divisions of the parade, which consisted of at least six divisions! And this does not include the people watching the procession. “We certainly never saw Boston so packed with people before; for miles nothing but compact masses of human beings were to be seen in our streets.”

The procession ended at Boston Common, at which point the performances began. There was singing by the Handel & Haydn Society, a prayer by a reverend minister, an ode sung by schoolchildren and penned by James Russell Lowell. A report on behalf of the Water Commission followed, along with an address by the Mayor. Finally, the water was turned on and the chorus from the Oratorio of Elijah was proclaimed.

Thinking of this event serves as a reminder of the major steps that a city like Boston takes in its development, and that the running water that is now taken for granted was once cause for unparalleled festivities, celebration, and joy.

To learn more about the celebration, or the struggle to bring additional clean water into Boston in the 19th century, visit the MHS library to discover additional source materials.

By Elaine Grublin

Yesterday walking around neighborhood in the sunny but crisp fall weather — Kenmore Square filled with bustling pedestrians, many carrying lightweight jackets thrown over their arms, others basking in the last warm days of season and braving the elements sans jackets — brought this image from the 1940s to  mind. Arriving at the MHS this morning I immediately went to the stacks to find the image. A close inspection revealed the image was likely captured in the spring rather than the fall, but the essence of Boston in the changing seasons is still there.

To relive this photographic moment today, head over to the Kenmore Square area and stand in front of Eastern Standard (528 Commonwealth Ave) looking down Commonwealth toward the Back Bay. In the image the two black signs on posts just behind the sign for the Kenmore Cafeteria mark the entrance to Kenmore Station.

Original photograph from Massachusetts Views, Boston Streets, Massachusetts Historical Society.