From the old country to the new world, and from the mill towns of the northeast to the farmlands of the American south.
This article made its first appearance in the Boston Tab newspaper on February 9th 2001, and subsequently appeared in my collection of Boston history essays, Boston Miscellany: An Essential History of the Hub (History Press, 2008). I offer it again here, accompanied by many additional illustrations. WPM The Chestnut Hill Reservoir originally contained two basins---the …
Continue reading Nathaniel J. Bradlee: A Prolific 19th Century Boston Architect
This article first appeared in the Allston-Brighton Tab on February 23, 1999 and several years later in my book Allston-Brighton in Transition: From Cattle Town to Streetcar Suburb (2007). I offer it again here, with slight modifications, and additional illustrations, as the first in a series of articles on aspects of American architectural history. WPM Prolific …
Continue reading Thomas W. Silloway: Allston-Brighton’s Master Builder
[This article originally appeared in the Boston Tab newspaper in May 1999] Contemporary Boston is a city of many great museums. The history of museum keeping in Boston had its modest beginnings in 1791, with the arrival from Philadelphia of one Daniel Bowen, age thirty-one, a close friend of the patriot-painter Charles Willson Peale of …
Continue reading Daniel Bowen: Boston’s Pioneer Museum Keeper
This interesting and profusely illustrated book traces the history of the four Sandonatese families from which author James Gantilucci descends (the Gentillucis, Cuginis, Quintilianis, and Cedrones).
We next turn to John Trumbull, the third and last of our “Patriot Painters. Trumbull became America’s first great history painter.
Boston’s Allston section is said to be the only community in the United States named for an artist---the great Romantic painter Washington Allston (1779-1843). This is of course is no small distinction. Allston “Self-Portrait, completed in 1805. By the 1820s this European trained painter was regarded as the greatest artist America had yet produced, having …
Born in 1738, the son of recently-arrived Irish Protestant immigrants, John Singleton Copley was raised in cramped quarters over the family’s tobacco shop on Boston’ Long Wharf.
On October 7, 1873 the voters of the independent towns of Brookline and Brighton made sharply contrasting decisions on the question of annexation to the City of Boston. While two-thirds of Brookline’s electors rejected merger with the metropolis, fully 81 percent of Brighton’s electors eagerly embraced the opportunity to join the city. Why did …
Continue reading Annexation Embraced: Brighton’s 1873 Acceptance of Boston
On October 7, 1873 the neighboring towns of Brookline, Brighton, and West Roxbury faced a momentous decision---whether to continue to be self-governing entities, or to relinquish their political independence to the City of Boston.
On October 7, 1873 the voters of the independent towns of Brookline and Brighton made sharply contrasting decisions on the question of annexation to the City of Boston. While two-thirds of Brookline’s electors rejected merger with the metropolis, fully 81 percent of Brighton’s electors eagerly embraced the opportunity to join the city. Why did these …
Local Historian North & South 