Sixty days

Historically-minded readers of the Boston Daily Advertiser on 29 May 1876 must have been appalled by auctioneer Samuel Hatch & Co.’s advertisement offering “All the material above the level of the sidewalk (except the corner stone and the clock in the tower) … at 12 o’clock noon on the premises [of the Old South]. Sixty days will be allowed for removal.” For several years, the congregation had been in the process of moving to a new building in Back Bay and trying to dispose of the old church (and the enormously valuable piece of land it sat on). Much dissension and controversy marked the ensuing years, but Hatch’s advertisement seemed to be the final nail in the coffin for the historic church edifice.

Instead, it became a turning point for the structure and a win for a nascent historic preservation movement. The building “above the level of the sidewalk” was indeed sold on auction day—to John N. Roberts, commodore of the South Boston Yacht Club, for the sum of $1350—newspapers reported that he bought it for speculation. But this is only the beginning of the story.

“Talk is cheap—it takes money to buy the Old South”

With just 60 days before the Old South’s demolition was mandated, the citizens of Boston woke from their torpor and moved to save the structure. Doubtless, many citizens of Boston had in their minds the demolition of the Hancock Mansion in 1863 after an unsuccessful campaign to save it. But in the nation’s Centennial year, appeals took on a distinctly historic tone. Christopher P. Cranch wrote in a strongly worded letter to the Advertiser, “It was reserved for Boston to celebrate the Centennial year by permitting an act little dreamed of by our fathers, and for which some future day, the city will feel like repenting in sackcloth and ashes.” After all, the meeting house was set on the land of John Winthrop’s home; was the baptismal place of Benjamin Franklin; the “scene of all those great uprisings which ended in our Independence;” the host to stirring orations by Adams, Quincy, and Warren. It had survived the desecration of British troops who turned the church into a riding school and the flames of the 1872 fire which destroyed most of the downtown. How could Bostonians let this historic gem be destroyed?

According to Elizabeth Putnam Sohier’s account, they couldn’t. She notes, “The indignation of the town broke forth, now the last hour was come … the church was crowded to overflowing; and the affection of the town for her old rallying ground was settled beyond dispute.” Within the space of a month, “twenty ladies of Boston” purchased the building for the sum of $3500 and placed it in trust. Next came the thornier problem of the $400,000 it would take to purchase the land the church sat on.

And so began a relentless fundraising campaign of lectures, exhibits, subscriptions, and concerts, all proceeds going to the purchase fund. Groups in Billerica, Cambridge, and Princeton, Mass., and Newport, R.I. held fundraising events for the benefit of the purchase fund and by December of 1877, nearly half of the $400,000 needed had been raised. Philanthropist Mary Porter Tileston Hemenway, the widow of merchant Augustus Hemenway, contributed $100,000 to the effort and later left bequests to promote the Old South’s history education mission. There were those who argued that in a time of straitened finances, the cost of saving the old meeting house was just too high, that money raised could go to “better” causes, a notion that Harvard president Charles Eliot discounted at an 1877 fundraising meeting in Cambridge

I am not going to undertake, ladies and gentlemen, to account in any way for the impulse, which I am sure we all feel strongly, to save this building. It is chiefly because we love it, I think, that we want to save it, and love is unreasoning, cannot be accounted for, has no logical processes. We love it because it has always been speaking to us of courage, uprightness, independence …

Thanks to the persistence of its supporters, the calls to our Revolutionary heritage prevailed and the Old South Meeting House, where some of the country’s most renowned orators exhorted their audiences to action, survives to this day, with a commitment to history and education. Those early preservation pioneers also paved the way for the salvation of any number of historic buildings sitting in the way of modern progress.