What could $2,300 buy back in 1762? For Nathan Jones, about 23 square miles of land. The pioneers who settled here struggled with the rocky soil in what was unglamorously called Township Number One. That would be changed to East Hoosac and in 1778 was renamed again to honor Revolutionary rabble-rouser Samuel Adams.
In short order the settlers of Adams tossed aside their plows and tied their fortunes to the small industries that could be powered by the tumbling waters of the Hoosic River. By the mid-1800s Adams was a humming industrial community, churning out paper and textiles and high grade marble. In 1878 the larger part of town was detached and became the smallest city in Massachusetts, North Adams.
In the 1960s, as was common in most every aging industrial town in the Northeast, urban renewal came calling. Building after building in the town’s commercial center along Center Street was flattened and lost forever. The bulldozers were ready to move over to Park Street when an urban renewal proposal was defeated in town council. So that is where we will concentrate our walking tour and we’ll begin at a visitor center that serves all of the Berkshires...
In 1659 a dissenting Connecticut congregation under the leadership of Rev. John Russell founded Hadley as an agricultural community on the east bank of the Connecticut River. John Pynchon purchased the site of the new settlement, a fertile peninsular plain defined by a bend in the Connecticut River, from the Indians on behalf of the settlers. When the first permanent English settlements arrived in 1727, this land and the surrounding area (including present-day Amherst. South
Hadley, and Granby) belonged to the town of Hadley. It gained precinct status in 1734 and eventually township in 1776, shortly before the colonies declared their independence.
When East Hadley incorporated in 1759, the colonial governor named it Amherst, in honor of Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst, a hero of the French andthe Indian War. In 1786, as the American Revolution was ending, many soldiers returning home found themselves in debt. Farmers who were unable to pay taxes and debts had their property and livestock confiscated by the courts. Daniel Shays, a Pelham resident, organized Shays Rebellion in protest. Amherst also opposed the War of 1812. This long tradition of anti-war resolutions continues in Amherst Town Meeting.
In the 19th century, Amherst’s population diversified and the African American and Irish populations increased. Today, over 30% of the school’s population are students of color. Also in the 19th century, Amherst wasknown for its palm leaf factories, with the Hills and Burnett factoriesshipping hundreds of thousands of hats across the country. By the 1930s tastes had changed and both factories went out of business. Presently the Amherst Woman’s Club occupies the former Hills mansion, and is a popular wedding and party venue. Courtesy of the Jones Library, Inc., Amherst, Massachusetts.
Amherst has become the quintessential college town. Amherst College was founded in 1821 “for the classical education of indigent young men of piety and talents for the Christian ministry.” It became coeducational in 1975. The University of Massachusetts, originally named Massachusetts Agricultural College, was founded in 1863 under the provisions of the Federal Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to provide instruction to Massachusetts citizens in the “agricultural, mechanical, and military arts.” In 1931 it became the Massachusetts State College and, in 1947, the University of Massachusetts. Hampshire College was founded in 1970. Today more than 29,000 students swell the population during the school year.
This walking tour will begin on The Common adjoining Amherst College and the center of town...
Size-wise, Andover was one of the largest towns in early Massachusetts. It got so big that it would take the better part of a day to travel from the southern part of town, where the farmlands were, to the northern part of town, where the village formed and the meetinghouse existed. When the people in the South Parish agitated for their own meetinghouse Andover was broken in two in 1855, the town area in the north became North Andover and the agrarian area to the south became Andover.
Only by this time what little remained of Andover’s agricultural beginnings was fast disappearing. By the Revolutionary War there were sawmills and gristmills and ironworks powered by the Shawsheen River. To supply gunpowder for the patriot cause a powder mill started in Andover. It would eventually blow itself out of existence but shortly after that came textile mills and a rubber factory. The patriarchal millowners built housing and recreation halls for their workers and Andover was essentially a mill town its whole existence.
Our walking tour of what became of the land purchased in 1641 for “six pounds of currency and a coat” will begin with the lifeline that arrived in town in 1835 and brought the promise of prosperity that would define Andover in the 19th century and beyond...
Boston - Back Bay, north of Commonwealth
In 1857 the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began to fill in the tidal flats west of the city center. The fill began at the Public Garden and spread westward, eventually taking 25 years to complete the project. From the beginning, Back Bay was designed to be a residential community; over the next 60 years more than 1,500 houses and apartments were built here.
Back Bay represented one of the country’s first concerted efforts to create a homogeneous urban environment on a grand scale. The wide streets and large building lots attracted wealthy Bostonians from Beacon Hill from the beginning. America’s top architects from the Gilded Age are represented throughout the neighborhood. World War I and the Depression led to the dissolution of many of these magnificent single-family mansions and the infiltration of retail establishments.
This walking tour of the Back Bay will begin on Arlington Street, fronting the Public Garden, where you would have gotten your feet wet back in 1857...
The beacon of Beacon Hill once stood just behind the current site of the Massachusetts State House, on the highest point in central Boston. The entire hill was once owned by William Blaxton, the first European settler of Boston, from 1625 to 1635, who eventually sold his land to the Puritans. The hill, and two other nearby hills, were substantially reduced in height to allow the development of housing in the area and to use the earth to create land by filling the Mill Pond, to the northeast.
Until the end of the 18th century, the south slope of Beacon Hill was a pasture owned by painter John Singleton Copley. He sold it to the Mount Vernon Proprietors, to which the architect Charles Bulfinch belonged. During the first quarter of the 19th century, Beacon Hill town houses designed by Bulfinch, Asher Benjamin, and others exhibited influences derived from England, France, and even the Far East. Elements drawn from Ancient Egypt, Greek, and Roman sources enlivened the brick and brownstone-trimmed facades of the Hill’s stylish mansions.
The south slope of Beacon Hill facing the Common was the socially desirable side in the 19th century. “Black” Beacon Hill was on the north slope. The two Hills were largely united on the subject of Abolition and Beacon Hill became one of the staunchest centers of the anti-slavery movement in America.
When development of the Back Bay district got underway, many residents moved to the more fashionable new enclave, which offered larger houses and wider streets. Beacon Hill started to decline and continued on its downward spiral until the second half of the 20th century. Beacon Hill was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 19, 1962 and in recent years it has once again become a very popular district, especially the south slope which attracted wealthy Bostonians.
This walking tour will begin in the Boston Common that fronts the southern border of Beacon Hill along, naturally, Beacon Street...
Charlestown began as an independent community, founded by English colonists before they established Boston across the harbor on the Shawmut Peninsula. As the Massachusetts Bay Company prepared for its massive migration to New England, it dispatched engineer Thomas Graves from England in 1629 to lay out a town for the newcomers. The area of earliest settlement, at Town Hill (now called City Square), still retains the elliptical street pattern that Thomas Graves laid out.
At the beginning of the Revolutionary War, Charlestown’s population had reached about 2,000. Following the battles of Concord and Lexington on April 19, 1775, the British army head toward Charlestown in retreat, and most townspeople fled when they heard the news. Two months later, on June 17, the Battle of Bunker Hill was fought in Charlestown. The American troops lost the battle, but the strength and determination they showed, together with the great British losses, demonstrated that the Colonials were serious about independence. On their way out of town British troops burned the oldest section of Charlestown to the ground and full-fledged reconstruction would not take place until after the war ended in 1781. No other Boston neighborhood has such a fine group of frame houses from this period.
By 1785, 13 wharves lined Charlestown’s harbor, and soon new bridges increased trade. In 1800, the United States Navy opened the Navy Yard at Moulton’s Point, establishing what would become one of Charlestown’s major employers for more than 150 years. Between 1830 and 1870, Charlestown’s population tripled to more than 28,000. It was annexed to Boston in 1874.
Beginning in 1901, the elevated streetcar line made the neighborhood accessible to more people, stimulating industrial growth, but it also casting a visual blight over Charlestown. During World War II, the Navy Yard employed 47,000 workers, but peacetime brought severe unemployment and decline, heightened by the opening of the Tobin Bridge in the 1950s. More change has come in the last two decades, with the dismantling of the “El” and the closing and redevelopment of the Navy Yard revitalizing the old town.
Our walking tour will begin on the site of that fateful battle...
As quickly as the Back Bay developed in the 1870s, another problem festered. A mill company’s dam’s basin became an increasingly noxious open sewer, particularly at low tide. Even then, pollution was a problem, and Bostonians demanded a solution. Enter Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-creator of New York’s Central Park and father of American landscape architecture. He proposed to flush out the stagnant waterway and add naturalistic plantings to emulate the original tide marsh ecology of the Fenway area.
Today we find in the Fens different charms from the ones Olmsted created. The 1910 damming of the Charles River changed the water here from brackish to fresh, rendering his plantings unsupportable. Only two of the original “strong but unobtrusive” bridges, the parks general boundaries and some early trees remain of Olmsted’s design.
The Fens continues to be much loved and utilized. Community gardens; the elegant Kellecher Rose Garden; World War II, Korean and Vietnam War memorial; busy ball fields; and the unusual range of bird species are major attractions. The design of the Fens today mostly reflects the work of landscape architect Arthur Shurtleff. He added the Rose Garden, turned the focus to the Museum of Fine Arts on the east side of the park, and yielded the more formal landscape style popular in the 1920s and 1930s.
Our walking tour will explore the park and surrounding neighborhood, roughly east to Huntington Avenue and Northeastern University, north to I-90 and west to Fenway Park...
Like most areas within Boston, the Financial District has no official definition. It is roughly bounded by Atlantic Avenue, State Street, and Devonshire Street. For most of the 17th and 18th centuries this part of Boston was part of the Atlantic Ocean. As the land was filled in a complex pattern of streets emerged that created a number of squares that were usually triangular in shape. Odd-shaped buildings evolved to fill the unusual spaces.
During the 1800s banks came to dominate State Street. The Financial District came to house the headquarters of mutual fund companies, the Boston Stock Exchange, accounting firms, law offices and brokerages. This walking tour will begin at the center of commerce in Boston as far back as 1740, Faneuil Hall...
For more than 300 years the government of Boston has clustered in the area to the northeast of Boston Common. The first town hall was here, the first public school, the first burial...and so on. Where a colonial landmark has survived it often appears like a first-grader playing on the high school basketball team but these historic buildings manage to hold their own on the modern streetscape with the strength of their character.
This land all belonged to the first white European who settled here in 1622, William Blackstone. The Puritans set up their first hovels in 1630 across the river in Charlestown but quickly resettled here due to presence of a critical natural spring to provide drinking water.
The American Indians called the place “Shawmut” meaning “living waters” but the new arrivals named it Boston after a town back in England. This walking tour will begin in that northeast corner of the Boston Common to see what those settlers created...
North End is Boston's oldest residential community, where people have lived continuously since it was settled in the 1630s. Those people have given the North End its unique character, although a different one every generation or so.
The North End was home to some of Boston’s wealthiest residents and later to the first community of black people created by freed and escaped slaves. In the early 19th century, the Irish began to migrate to the North End in huge numbers and dominated the neighborhood until approximately 1900. The North End then became one of the centers of Jewish life in Boston; Hebrew inscriptions can still be found on several buildings. In the early 20th century, the North End became the center of the Italian community of Boston. It is still largely residential and well-known for its small, authentic Italian restaurants and for the first Italian cafe, Caffe Vittoria.
The construction of the elevated Central Artery (I-93) in the 1950s divided the North End from the rest of Boston. With the completion of the “Big Dig,” the old elevated highway has been completely removed and the North End has re-joined the rest of the city.
This walking tour will begin at water’s edge in the Wharf District on the North End...
The Puritans banned theater along with most other forms of entertainment until 1792 but by the 1850s theatrical performances - especially farces and melodramas - enjoyed immense popularity in Boston. Theaters began to cluster along several blocks of Washington Street and Tremont Street in what was, and still is, called the “Theatre District” - invoking the British spelling still in use in Boston deep into the 1800s.
Boston theater reached its height of popularity in 1900 when 31 theaters offered 50,000 seats to theater-loving Bostonians. But by 1980, the downtown Theatre District teetered on the verge of extinction. The crowds that packed the former historic theaters, then movie houses, turned outward toward suburban shopping malls.
The city set out to clear out the strip joints and porn houses that overtook the decaying Theatre District. Today, the restoration of a number of the city’s splendid historic theaters means that Boston theater is again strong and thriving. The city has the largest group of architecturally outstanding early theaters in North America. Many of them have been meticulously - and magnificently - restored during recent years, and restorations of a couple are still underway.
You’ll still find most theaters clustered within the Theatre District, now confined to several blocks along Washington and Tremont Streets between Boylston and Stuart Streets. Our walking tour will start on the southern end of Boston Common that forms the northern wall of the Theatre District...
Great 19th century poet Poet William Cullen Bryant once described Brockton this way: “The whole place resounds, rather rattles, with the machinery of shoe shops, which turn out millions of shoes, not one of which, I am told,is sold in the place.” For the first 200 years or so of its existence this was farm country with scattered mills and forges the only hint of industry. The town was known as Bridgewater and the district that would become Brockton was cleaved off in 1821 as North Bridgewater. Population was fewer than 2,000 souls.
There were tanneries around as early as the 1700s and a bit of a shoe-making tradition established. By the 1840s Brockton shops where churning out more and more footwear, mostly boots. In 1848 Daniel Howard introduced a quality shoe that sold for $1 which took New York City by storm and it is said that he was producing more shoes than all other manufacturers in town put together to keep up with demand.
Up to that point all shoes were made with practically the same hand tools that were used in Egypt as early as the 14th century B.C. as a part of a sandal maker’s equipment. To the curved awl, the chisel-like knife and the scraper, the shoemakers of the thirty-three intervening centuries had added only a few simple tools such as the pincers, the lapstone, the hammer and a variety of rubbing sticks used for finishing edges and heels. In the 1850s Gordon McKay adapted the new sewing machine technology of the day to shoes, a fortuitous leap in technology that arrived simultaneously with the Civil War. The town landed enormous government boot and shoe orders and became America’s largest shoe producer as it boasted that “half the Union Army was shod by North Bridgewater.”
Other technological advances followed. Lyman Blake of Abington came up with a machine that joined the uppers to the soles of hoes 400 times faster than nailing by hand. Chandler Sprague of Brockton had molds that created left and right shoes in quantity for the first time. By 1874, when the town changed its name to Brockton, it was well on its way to becoming the “Shoe Capital of the World.” By the early 1900s more than 15,000 people were employed in the shoe industry and it was reported that Brockton had the highest percentage of any city in America of working-class people who owned their own homes.
In the 1930s the Great Depression, overseas competition and low-cost Southern labor conspired to bring down the Brockton shoe industry - fast. By the 1960s there was only ten shoe factories left in the city and today only one, FootJoy, a golf shoe manufacturer that can trace its roots to the Burt and Packard Shoe Company founded in Brockton in 1857, survives.
Our walking tour will begin at a souvenir of a time when Brockton was at the forefront of progressive American towns, in the 1880s, when Thomas Alva Edison came to town to provide for the first time electrical power to an entire city that looked forward to a bright future...
For much of its first 200 years this was a region of shifting identities. It was first known as Freetownin 1653 when it was settled by members of the Plymouth Colony as part of Freeman’s Purchase. It would later be known as Fall River from the Quequechan River that flowed through the village. Quequechan being a Wampanoag Indian word believed to mean “Falling River” or “Leaping/Falling Waters.” In 1804 it took the name “Troy” for thirty years before being officially changed back to Fall River on February 12, 1834. All the while Fall River wasn’t even entirely in Massachusetts - it was part of Rhode Island. The boundary creating Fall River, Massachusetts would not be settled until 1861.
Not long afterwards, however, Fall River had a very real identity - “Textile Capital of the World.” The Industrial Revolution came early to the Quequechan River with its eight falls providing power and the tidewater harbor of Mount Hope Bay offering ample transportation of goods. By the early 1800s there was a spinning mill and an iron works and a print works. The railroads arrived in the middle of the 1800s and by 1868 Fall River had surpassed Lowell as the leading textile city in America with over 500,000 spindles. And the boom had yet to occur.
By the 1870s Fall River was second only to Manchester, England in the production of cotton cloth and over the next 50 years the influx of immigrants to jobs in hundreds of mills pushed the population to over 120,000. worker housing in Fall River consisted of thousands of wood-framed multi-family tenements, usually three-floor “triple-deckers” with up to six apartments. The first mills began to close in the early 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s claimed many more. When the bump in demand from World War II faded by the 1950s the textile industry was gone.
With the wealth created by the cotton mills Fall River built like a big city. Impressive Victorian mansions populated the high spots above town and solid, impressive buildings - many constructed from native Fall River granite - line Main Street. The Fall River streetscape, however, has been a restless canvas. The first great fire in Fall River’s history roared through the town center in 1843. On February 2, 1928 fire erupted on the oil-soaked floors of an abandoned mill and were agitated by strong winds. Before fire departments from as far away as Boston and Providence could harness the conflagration six entire blocks of downtown were destroyed. More than $15,000,000 in damages were racked up but there was no loss of life.
The 1960s brought planned destruction when I-95 was routed through the heart of Fall River. The Quequechan River was filled in and re-routed for much of its length and many historic buildings razed. Our walking tour will cross over the highway to both sides of the city and see relics from the age of King Cotton and buildings constructed in the wake of the Great Fire of 1928 and a bit of modern design as well...
What is today Fitchburg was once the western part of Lunenburg that was first settled in 1719 and incorporated in 1728. When people out by this part of the Nashua River became weary of the time it was taking to walk to church and town meetings it became a separate town called Fitchburg in 1764. John Fitch was an early settler and innkeeper. His town would fare better than poor Mr. Fitch. In 1748 Fitch, his wife and five children were attacked and captured by Indians. Although they were set free, his wife died on the trip back to Fitchburg. Fitch eventually became destitute and was passed throughout New England by towns who could no longer afford to care for him and he died on April 8, 1795. No one knows where he is buried.
From the early days this was farming and dairy country but the hilly terrain around town and the tumbling waters flowing through the valley always held the promise of industry. In the first years of the 19th century textile manufacturing had taken hold and paper mills that would become dominant in Fitchburg had started. The locally financed Fitchburg Railroad pushed out from Boston in 1845 and soon there were rail connections to the north, south and west as well. By 1860 there were 136 industrial companies recognized in the town business directory. Over the next 50 years the population, fueled by immigration to man the factories, would explode 400% from less than 10,000 to about 40,000.
The wealth generated by this economic boom showed up on the Fitchburg streetscape in richly ornamented Victorian architecture. Many of the choicest commissions went to Henry Martyn Francis who was born in Lunenburg in 1836. After apprenticing as an architect and working as a carpenter he helped design buildings in Portland, Maine after the Great Portland Fire of 1866. He put out his own shingle on Main Street in Fitchburg in 1868. Before he died forty years later he left behind some 30 schools, 25 churches, several dozen public buildings and hundreds of private residences in a variety of architectural styles.
Our walking tour of Fitchburg will bump into several Francis buildings but we’ll start in an architecturally rich nook of the city that doesn’t feature any of H.M Francis’ work, Monument Park...
Gloucester’s deep water harbor attracted a group of Englishmen from the Dorchester Company, who landed here in 1623 to fish and to establish a settlement. This first company of pioneers made landing at Half Moon Beach, and settled nearby, setting up fishing stages in a field in what is now Stage Fort Park. This settlement’s existence is proclaimed today by a memorial tablet, affixed to a 50’ boulder in that park.
This settlement allows Gloucester to boast the first settlement in what would become the Massachusetts Bay Company, as this town’s first settlement predates both Salem in 1626 and Boston in 1630. Life in this first settlement was harsh and it was short-lived. Around 1626 the place was abandoned, and the people removed themselves to Naumkeag (what is now called Salem) , where more fertile soil for planting was to be found. The meetinghouse was even disassembled and relocated to the new place of settlement. At some point in the following years - though no record exists - the area was slowly resettled. The town was formally incorporated in 1642. It is at this time that the name “Gloucester” first appears on tax rolls, although in various spellings. The town took its name from the great Cathedral City in South-West England, where it is assumed many of its new occupants originated.
This new permanent settlement focused on the Town Green area, an inlet in the marshes at a bend in the Annisquam River. This area is now the site of Grant Circle, a large traffic-rotary at which MA 128 mingles with a major city street (Washington Street/MA 127. Here the first permanent settlers built a meeting house and therefore focused the nexus of their settlement on the ‘Island’ for nearly 100 years. Unlike other early coastal towns in New England, development in Gloucester was not focused around the harbor as it is today, rather it was inland that people settled first. This is evidenced by the placement of the Town Green nearly two miles from the harbor-front.
The town was an important shipbuildingcenter, and the first schooner was reputedly built there in 1713. Gloucester thus became the country’s first fishing port. By the late 19th century, Gloucester was a record-setting port for fisheries under sail. Gloucester’s most famous (and nationally recognized) seafood business was founded in 1849 -- John Pew & Sons. It became Gorton-Pew Fisheries in 1906, and in 1957 changed its name to Gorton’s of Gloucester. The iconicimage of the “Gorton’s Fisherman” and the products he represents, are known throughout the country and beyond. Besides catching and processing seafood, Gloucester is also a center for fish research. The city remained a fishing center as waves of immigrants – primarily Nova Scotian, Sicilian and Portuguese – came to fish the waters off Cape Ann. Fishing remains an important part of the local economy.
This walking tour will start on Gloucester’s famous waterfront and work its way up the hillside...
Its location on important transportation routes has shaped Great Barrington from before written history. When the Mahican Indians lived in the meadows here the area was called Mahaiwe, meaning “the place downstream.” In colonial times when the Dutch and English settled here beginning in 1726, it lay on the New England Path, which connected Fort Orange near Albany, New York with Springfield and then Massachusetts Bay in 1844. In a key moment in the American Revolution, Henry Knox used that path to haul cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights to end the British siege of Boston.
Great Barrington was by then an important hub, having been designated the Berkshire County seat in 1761. The town name came most probably came from Lord Barrington, an English aristocrat who was minister of war for his friend Prime Minister William Pitt, whose name Pittsfield took at the same time. The railroad arrived in 1842 spawning a growth spurt in trade and, following the Civil War, as a summer destination for refugees from the big northeastern cities. Wealthy families built grand homes called Berkshire Cottages here, as others would in Lenox and Stockbridge, cementing the region as a resort destination.
In 1886 William Stanley sent alternating current electricity flowing out of a generating station down Main Street and gave Great Barrington the first electric street lights in the world. But it was another type of light that would be most responsible for shaping the streetscape we’ll see on our walking tour - more than a dozen fires plagued Great Barrington in the 1800s, the most ferocious clearing entire blocks in 1896...
When the village was founded in 1640 on the banks of the Merrimack River it was known as Pentucket, an Indian word roughly translated as “place of the winding river.” That river helped shape the settlement for the better part of 200 years until the rise of bigger ocean-going ships sapped the importance of river towns. The towns merchants shifted their capital to manufacturing, first in hats and then in shoes. By 1836 there were 28 shoe factories in Haverhill with more on the way.
The city incorporated in 1870 as the shoe industry began to hit its stride. The town around Main Street was filled by this time and with the need for bigger and more efficient factories manufacturers turned west, towards the railway and began building around Washington Square, then a residential area. In a ten year period from 1872 to 1882, virtually every shoe and leather maker had moved to this area and replaced the houses with both wooden and brick factories. And then, on an inhumanly cold wintry night on February 17, 1882 a fire started in a stove in one of the shoe company offices. Before the fire was contained 10 acres of downtown Haverhill would be destroyed. Virtually every worker in town was tossed into unemployment.
The conflagration was so sensational that the New York Times wrote about it for days, “The city was full of strangers to-day viewing the ruins left by the fire. Train-loads came from Lowell and Lawrence, and a large number of people from the surrounding towns arrived by all sorts of conveyances. Several safes have been opened to-day, in most f which the contents were found to be unharmed. There were a great many, however, broken by falling from the upper stories, and many open ones can be seen in the ruins, their combustible contents reduced to dust, through which in many cases, shine melted gold and silver. Many disreputable persons came to town yesterday for predatory purposes, but the summary treatment of one man caught pilfering, who was beaten insensible by the citizens and Police, and the cool and praiseworthy diligence of the local authorities, made the plying of their trade extremely dangerous and there has not been a theft to the amount of $1 reported to the City marshal, nor any known tho the citizens.”
Despite the losses, Haverhill manufacturers set out to rebuild immediately and the factories they constructed stand today as some the finest examples of Queen Anne industrial architecture in the country. Humming once again, by 1913 one out of every 10 pairs of shoes worn by Americans originated on a Haverhill factory floor. It had earned the moniker of “Queen Slipper City.”
No one taking out walking tour today will be wearing a Haverhill shoe but many of the old factories remain in the area we will be exploring, designated as the Washington Street Shoe Historic District...
Francis Cabot Lowell got the wheels spinning on the American cotton manufacturing industry spinning after studying British looms and introduced the first practical power loom in America. Looking to expand his operations, Lowell became interested in the spot where the energetic Merrimack River joined the languid waters of the Concord River. By the time his associates Tracy Jackson, Nathan Appleton and Paul Moody founded the Merrimack Manufacturing Company in 1822, Lowell had suffered an untimely death.
Founded as a company town, Lowell became the largest and most significant company town in America. Both men and women, girls actually, slept in corporation lodging houses, ate in company dining halls, shopped in company stores and when they died, were buried in company lots. In return, the workers were expected to report for work at five in the morning and work until seven at night. Women received from $2.25 to four dollars a week and the men about twice that. While the town boomed, working conditions were slow to keep up. The first “mill girls” strike took place in 1834.
As more and more industry established itself in Lowell through the 1800s the mills could no longer be staffed simply with girls from local farms and waves of immigrants descended on expanding factories dramatically changing the character of the city. First came the Irish and then the French-Canadians and eastern Europeans and workers from the Mediterranean countries. Each settled in enclaves around the city, enough Greeks moved here that Lowell was sometimes called “American Athens.”
Its more common nickname was “Spindle City” - the most important textile center in the world. By the 1850s Lowell was the largest industrial complex in the United States. By World War I the population was over 110,000 but the 100-year growth spurt was about to end with a thud. Textile manufacturing moved south so quickly that by 1931 only three major mills remained active and as many as one in three of Lowell workers was on relief or homeless.
Today the population is about the same as it was in Lowell’s heyday a century ago but the city is a vastly different place. Since 1975, over 350 historic structures have been rehabilitated downtown and in 1978 the Lowell National Historical Park was established to tell the story of the Industrial Revolution. We’ll see for ourselves what that make-over has wrought on a walking tour of the town that was built inside the bent elbow of the Merrimack River...
The first settlers in 1629 supposedly mistook the granite outcroppings overlooking the Atlantic Ocean for marble and so the nascent fishing village got a name. Enough wealth came from the sea to build the town that grew into one of the ten largest in the English colonies. So abundant were the fish that the King’s Royal Agent, after visiting Marblehead in 1660, returned to England and declared that Marblehead was “…the Greatest Towne for Fishing in New England.”
When revolutionary feelings fomented in the 1770s, Marblehead was in the fray that would break Colonial rule. Marblehead mariners were at the forefront of what would later become the American Navy and it was the first town to send out a private ships to harass and capture British ships. The town paid a heavy price for the war. Many men were lost and those that returned often found their boats destroyed or rotting. Other wealthy merchants loyal to King George fled to Canada.
Marblehead had peaked economically. The fishing revived but a gale at the Grand Banks of Newfoundland on September 19, 1846 destroyed half the Marblehead fishing fleet and claimed the lives of 65 men and boys. Fishing would never be the same again. The fishing industry was replaced in town by shoe-making for a time but fires in 1877 and 1888 closed the factories.
Once again Marblehead turned to the sea for its sustenance. The town became a resort destination and its exceptional harbor filled with yachts from a half-dozen clubs. The familiar sight of vacationers and tourists helped Marblehead recognize the value of preserving its heritage early on. Today more than 200 houses built before the American Revolution and another 800 constructed in the 1800s still line the winding, hilly streets.
The narrow streets are best explored only on foot but there is usually on-street parking to be had around the the town’s most prominent building. At only 130 years years old it is about the youngest building we will encounter on our walking tour...
The town of Dartmouth was formed from so-called “common land” on June 8, 1664, and included the territory called Acushena, Ponagansett and Coakset. The bounds of the town were defined June 3, 1668. From this territory New Bedford was set off February 23, 1787. Therefore, New Bedford was founded as a town in 1787 and incorporated as a city in 1847.
First mayor Abraham Howland and the new city fathers were predominately Quakers. Followers of the religious teachings of Englishman, George Fox, the Quakers referred to themselves as the “Society of Friends” and “Children of the Light.” Their spiritual mission in life was to spread (diffuse) the “Inner Light of Christ” to all they encountered. So here they were, the Children of the Light, employed in the lighting industry, supplying whale oil to the entire world for lighting.
The town had grown since the economically difficult days of the American Revolution a decade earlier. With its well-protected deep harbor, by 1823 New Bedford had surpassed Nantucket in the number of whaling ships leaving its harbor each year and by 1840, with the arrival of the railroad and easier access to markets in New York and Boston, the port was the whaling capital of the world. New Bedford was for a time “the richest city in the world.”
This walking tour will begin at the Visitor Center for the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, just a couple of blocks from the waterfront of the “city that lit the world”...
The area around the mouth of the Merrimack River has always been an important transportation route and fishing ground. European settlers were setting up a town called Newbury by the 1630s. By 1764 when the port section of the community seceded from Newbury to become Newburyport there was a 100-year tradition of shipbuilding in the town. There would be another 100-some years of seafaring prosperity to come. In 1793 the seeds of the United States Coast Guard were cast on the waters here with the launching of the USRC Massachusetts built by William Searle and commissioned by President George Washington.
By the middle of the 19th century the town was dotted with steam-powered brick mills to complement the riches brought back from the sea. In 1851 the city annexed portions of Newbury and incorporated into a city. However, the end of the age of the wooden clipper ships was not far off and “Clipper City” would fall into serious decline in the early 20th century.
Nothing ever appeared to pull the old maritime town out of its reversal. By the 1950s, with federal money in hand, the bulldozers were ready to level the entire downtown area. There was no definite plan really. Maybe a strip mall or just a parking lot. Just clear the decaying eyesores away. Portions of the waterfront and downtown were razed but before the wrecking balls swung too often the citizens recoiled in horror and a grassroots protest turned the future of Newburyport 180 degrees. Instead of annihilation there would be preservation and restoration.
And so our walking tour can take in buildings by two of America’s most famous early architects, Charles Bulfinch and Robert Mills and houses built in the 1700s by wealthy sea captains and traders. We’ll begin by the banks of the Merrimack River, once bustling wharves, then decaying ghost buildings, and now a waterside park...
For most of its existence, transportation has shaped the fortunes of North Adams - although early on not many people were stopping since the Hoosac Valley was not suitable for farming, riddled with rocky soil and dark, impenetrable swamps. The Mohawk Trail, an Indian trade route which connected Atlantic tribes with tribes in Upstate New York and beyond, passed through here. Eventually loggers discovered the richly forested slopes and settlement began in the 1730s and Fort Massachusetts was constructed at the confluence of the two branches of the Hoosic River; a town named for Boston patriot Samuel Adams was established in 1778.
The streams flowing into the valley spawned numerous small-scale industries as Adams became a milltown. there were textile mills and saw mills, sleigh-makers, a marble works and an iron works. Industry in the town soared to a whole new level in 1848 when work was begun on a tunnel through Hoosac Mountain. The project had its beginnings in 1819 as a planned canal to connect Boston with upstate New York. By 1848, however, it was a railroad tunnel. No one could imagine the difficulties ahead.
The tunnel would not be completed until 1875. More than $21 million was spent. It would cost 193 workers’ lives - by comparison there were 112 deaths in building the Hoover Dam and 11 on the Golden Gate Bridge. When it was finished the 4.75-mile Hoosac Tunnel was the second-longest in the world. Only an 8.5-mile tunnel in the French Alps was longer. It would be longest tunnel in North America for another 50 years. Even today it remains the longest active transportation tunnel east of the Rocky Mountains.
The Hoosac Tunnel transformed North Adams. When construction began there were maybe 2,000 people in town; when the tunnel opened there were more than 15,000. in 1878, North Adams was broken off from Adams and in 1895 became its own city - today it is the smallest city in Massachusetts. North Adams charged into the new century with its industry firing on all pistons.
By the 1980s the factories and mills were empty and rotting. Thomas Krens, director of the Williams College Museum of Art, saw the broken glass and scarred brick buildings as gallery space for large-scale modern art. His vision evolved into the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art that spreads over 13-acres and 25 19th century factory buildings. As a result, North Adams has now become a popular stopping point for travelers on the old Mohawk Trail that is now part of Massachusetts Route 2, which was created as one of the United States’ first scenic highways. But there is plenty to see on the outsides of those buildings as well and our walking tour to see what is there will begin at the traditional center of town...
Pittsfield began as a business deal. In 1738 Colonel Jacob Wendell, bought 24,000 acres of lands known originally as Pontoosuck, a Mohican Indian word meaning “a field or haven for winter deer.” Wendell acquired the land as a speculative venture; there is no evidence he ever visited Western Massachusetts from his home in Boston. Some say he bought the land as a tax dodge to resell without being subject to Boston levies, others say he was looking to develop for settlers. Either way the French and Indian War delayed development on the frontier for many years after some rudimentary settlement in 1743.
By 1761 the village was ready to incorporate. Royal Governor, Sir Francis Bernard named it Pittsfield after British nobleman and politician William Pitt, a vocal supporter of the Americans. Pittsfield was an agricultural community, newly cleared cropfields were nourished by the many streams feeding into the Housatonic River. Merino sheep from Spain were introduced into the area in 1807 and woolen mills dominated the economic climate for most of the rest of the century.
Situated in the center of the Berkshire Hills, the growing town became the county seat in 1868, replacing Lenox. The character of Pittsfield was to change dramatically in 1891, the year it incorporated as a city. William Stanley had recently come to town, up from Great Barrington, to establish his Stanley Manufacturing Company to produce the country’s first alternating current electric transformers. In 1903 the General Electric Corporation purchased controlling interest in Stanley’s company and the nascent corporate giant began establishing a presence in Pittsfield that would reach a peak workforce of over 13,000 and push the population to a high of 50,000.
Widespread layoffs at General Electric in the 1980s began a company withdrawal that would claim all but a few hundred jobs. General Electric left behind an industrial wasteland that became a federally designated Brownfields site. The company left a legacy on the Pittsfield streetscape as well - what was once a town of great estates was now dominated by developments for middle-class workers. Our walking tour of downtown Pittsfield will be dominated mostly by pre-GE structures, many of which have changed usage with as the town has changed through the years. We’ll begin on the original village green which no longer calls to mind the bucolic sheep-raising days of early Pittsfield...
What is today Quincy was settled in 1625 as the northern part of the town of Braintree. It was not until 1792 - by which time early residents such as the Adamses and Hancocks and Quincys had brought great distinction to the town - that it was incorporated as a separate town. The new town took the name of Colonel John Quincy, grandfather of soon-to-be First Lady Abigail Adams.
For its first 200 years Quincy was a farming community. In 1752 King’s Chapel in Boston was constructed of Quincy granite and the quality of the stone became widely known, forcing local authorities to pass laws against its outside use to keep the stone from running out. But in 1825 Quincy granite was selected to build the Bunker Hill Monument and the race for the fine-grained stone was on. The first commercial railroad in the country was constructed so horse-drawn wagons could convey the granite to the wharf on the Neponset River. At one point more than 20 granite quarries were operating in the city and its largest industry attracted immigrants from all over Europe. The last quarry did not close until the 1960s.
By that time the City had developed a second signature industry - naval shipbuilding. During World War I, thirty-six destroyers were built in the drydocks of the Fore River Shipyard and it blossomed into one of the world’s great shipyards during World War II. Shipbuilding lasted until the 1980s.
It is not just heavy industry where Quincy had made a mark on American culture - it is also the birthplace of Howard Johnson’s, where a young cigar-shop owner went into hock to buy a run-down drug store near the train station in 1925, and Dunkin’ Donuts, after William Rosenberg changed the name of his Quincy doughnut shop from “The Open Kettle” in 1950.
We won’t see any Hojos or Dunkin’ Donuts on our walking tour but we will see alot of the Adams family. We’ll see family homes and buildings they helped construct and buildings they owned. So we will start at the Visitor Center for Adams National Historical Park in the heart of Quincy Center. It isn’t a historical site itself but is a good place to get our bearings...
In 1626 Roger Conant led a group of fishermen down from Cape Ann and settled along the Naumkeag River beside a naturally protected harbor. Two years later a land grant and fresh financial support from England put the entire area under the control of the Massachusetts Company. Company man John Endecott became the governor of the fledgling settlement, renamed the village Salem and Roger Conant received 200 acres of land for holding “Naumkeag” together in its first months and stepping aside gracefully as it expanded.
At first Salem was a farming and cod-fishing community but by the early 1700s Salem-built ships helmed by shrewd Yankee captains were plying waters far from home. In 1785 the Grand Turk left the protected harbor bound for the new trade in China. The spices, silks and teas in their cargo holds fetched great wealth and at the time of America’s first census in 1790 Salem, population 10,000, was the sixth largest city in the United States.
Salem’s “Golden Age” of the early 1800s showed itself on the city streets. Native son Samuel McIntire was busy crafting one superb Federal-style mansion after another on Essex Street and Chestnut Street and Federal Street. But just as Salem was incorporating as a city in 1836, the port and its gradually silting harbor were being eclipsed by Boston and New York City. Light manufacturing took up the economic slack by the early 1900s until June 25, 1914 when a series of explosions in the Korn Leather Factory at 57 Boston Street ignited what came to be known as The Great Salem Fire. More than 1,300 buildings burned across 253 acres. In a city of 48,000 people, some 20,000 lost their homes.
Spared however, were much of those esteemed early houses and Salem began to draw on its historic past to lure tourists to town. What turned out to be the main attraction for outsiders, however, was not the wealth of fabulous architecture in the city but a fascination with a dark seven-month period in 1692 when hysteria over witchcraft led to a series of trial that caused 19 people to be hanged and another “pressed to death” by gradually loading stones one after another onto his chest.
Our walking tour will pass several witch-related sites although only one structure remains in Salem that had any direct connection to the trials and we will begin in the center of town in a large municipal parking lot on Church Street...
In 1891 Dr. James Naismith, seeking a game to fill the winter months for his physical education class, had wooden baskets nailed to an elevated track ten feet above the Springfield YMCA gym floor and invented basketball. Dr. Naismith would never play the game that he devised, the only major sport invented in America, a game that would spread more rapidly than any sport in history. Today Springfield is famous as the home of basketball yet in the 1930s in the influential guidebook produced by the federal government, Massachusetts: A Guide To Its Places and People, the invention of basketball is never mentioned in the history of Springfield.
The city has never lacked for influential personalities, tracing back right to the founding of the town by a small group led by William Pynchon. The settlement was originally named Agawam Plantation, but in 1640 it was renamed Springfield after the village near Chelmsford, Essex in England where Pynchon was born. Pynchon guided the settlement through its early years, mostly by cashing in on the region’s beaver population. It is estimated that he exported between 4,000 and 6,000 beaver pelts a year between 1636 and 1652. When he was censured for his religious views in the early 1650s rather than retract his position he returned to England as a wealthy man.
George Washington cast the die for Springfield’s future when he selected the town as the site for the National Armory in the 1770s. The first ramification came when Daniel Shays presented the first armed challenge against the federal government in 1787 and picked the Armory as his target. Shays, a Revolutionary War veteran and farmer, and his “army” of 800 disgruntled taxpayers were repulsed by soldiers outside the walls of Armory, crushing the rebellion.
In the 1800s the Armory would be the catalyst for the industrialization of Springfield. The railroad came to town early and Springfield became an early leader n the manufacture of passenger coaches. Charles and Frank Duryea, built a gasoline powered automobile in their bicycle garage in town in 1893 and after the Duryea Motor Wagon’s first test was successful it became to be the first ever offered for sale. Beginning in 1929 the Granville Brothers (Zantford, Robert, Mark, and Edward) began building airplanes at the Springfield Airport. Their company lasted barely five years and they built only 24 planes but their sophisticated GeeBee planes set world speed records and made their names famous during the Golden Age of Flight in the 1930s.
Our walking tour will begin at the Armory that operated in Springfield for 174 years and is now a national historic site - and important for the walking tourist as a site of free parking for a visitor to the downtown of New England’s fourth largest city...
Stockbridge is the second oldest town in the Berkshires, after Sheffield, established in 1834 as a mission for the Mahican Indian tribe. Their missionary was a Yale reverend named John Sergeant and under his guidance “Indian Town” was a great success and Stockbridge, named for the town in Hampshire, England from which the mission hoped to elicit funds, was incorporated as a town in 1739. Unfortunately Sergeant would live only a decade longer and relations with the Stockbridge Indians deteriorated rapidly. By 1785 their land was sold and the impoverished tribe was led out of the Berkshires - by a son of John Sergeant - to Oneida County, New York where they would gain some notoriety through the writings of James Fenimore Cooper.
The town was little noticed for its first 100 years until the railroad arrived in 1850. But unlike other towns where the Iron Horse brought industry and commerce, to Stockbridge it brought wealthy New Yorkers looking to escape the stale summer air. They built impressive “Berkshire cottages” around town and in America’s Gilded Age the town gained a reputation as the “inland Newport.” In 1853 America’s first village beautification organization, the Laurel Hill Association was formed and continues to this day.
The town gained a reputation as a mecca for writers and artists and it turned out that it would be a magazine illustrator would ingrain Stockbridge into the national psyche. Norman Rockwell spent the final 25 years of his life in Stockbridge, using the downtown scenes for his cover paintings in the Saturday Evening Post and others. And ever since the town has taken pains to insure that those indelible images are not going to go away anytime soon.
Our walking tour will begin off Stockbridge’s busy Main Street and down by the meandering Housatonic River where there is a small park and space for cars and we’ll head up into the town to see why Rockwell once declared, “Stockbridge is the best of America, the best of New England”...
For the first two centuries after settlement in the 1620s there wasn’t much to distinguish one fishing village from the next as they spread out along the North Shore from Boston. By the 1800s individual identities began to emerge and in the community of Swampscott, then part of the town of Lynn, large hotels and resorts began to appear alongside the fishing and lobstering docks. In 1852 a group of 97 Swampscott petitioners asserted to the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that: “1. They are situated somewhat remote from the central portion of Lynn; and 2. That their business is different from that of the principal part of Lynn; and 3. That their convenience and interests would be promoted by a separate government, especially after the citizens of Lynn opted to switch from a town to a city form of government.” The leaders of Lynn took $5,450 for the land it was losing and waved bye-bye.
By the late 1800s more and more of the summer visitors began to plan a permanent move to the Swampscott seashore and with the coming of the Eastern Railroad it became easier to commute to Boston and Salem where the new American professional class could find jobs. The migration did not go unnoticed by some of Swampscott’s wealthier residents.
After financier Enoch Redington Mudge died in 1881 his heirs looked to develop his 130-acre seaside estate in the heart of Swampscott into residential homesites. Their vision went beyond clearing some trees and pounding stakes in the ground. Instead they went to Brookline and hired the “Father of Landscape Architecture,” Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted’s resume included New York City’s Central Park, Boston’s “Emerald Necklace” park system and dozens of other influential projects.
Olmsted brought his philosophy of gently curving lines in harmony with nature to planning the 191 house lots for the new planned community. It was not intended as an enclave solely for the rich but included lots of varying sizes to attract a wide range of homeowners. In 1888 the serpentine streets began to be laid out among the rocky hillsides and verdant valleys. By 1917 the subdivision was largely complete with a rich diversity of houses that spanned the end of the ornamental Victorian Age and carried into the cleaner, unadorned styles of the Craftsman and Arts and Craft builders.
For this residential walking tour we will encounter a neighborhood that 100 years later looks as if it might have existed in Frederick Law Olmsted’s famous sketchbooks…
It took three tries for a settlement in the hills around the Blackstone River to take hold. the first massing of a handful of houses in 1673 was burned to the ground two years later in King Philip’s War against local Indians. The town was resettled and incorporated in 1684. When Queen Anne’s War against the French and Indians erupted in 1702 the settlement was abandoned. The beauty of the area and its geographical advantages demanded another try at settlement, which came in 1713. The town was incorporated under the name Worcester from the famous English town and in 1731 was named county seat, a role it performed until the dissolution of the county government in 1998.
In 1828 the Blackstone Canal began linking Worcester, at the headwaters of the Blackstone River, with Providence and the open sea. The Blackstone Valley became the linchpin of the Industrial Revolution and set Worcester on the path to becoming the greatest industrial city in the United States not on a natural waterway.
There was nothing glitzy about Worcester industry; its wealth was built on a succession of prosaic product. First came Ichabod Washburn’s patented process for extruding steel wire used for pianos and twisting the barbed wire that fenced the American plains. There were the requisite textiles, of course, and William Crompton’s special looms revolutionized the spinning of cotton. The grinding wheels and heavy-duty abrasives of the Norton Company found favor in industrial plants across the globe. And in 1853 Russell Hawes patented the first practical machine for folding envelopes. Suddenly a three-man crew could produce 25,000 envelopes in a single ten-hour day an by the end of the century three out of every five envelopes in America was coming out of the United States envelope Company.
Our walking tour will explore significant buildings constructed in the halcyon days between the Civil War and the Second World War that turned Worcester into New England’s second-most populous city...