Ropewalks in the West End

The West End Museum has just opened a new exhibit on ropemaking in the area from the mid-1700s through the late 1800s. Less than a hundred yards from the museum’s building at 150 Staniford Street is the site of Boston’s earliest recorded “ropefield,” set up by John Harrison in 1642.

Because sailing ships needed rope, the cordage industry was a very important part of Boston’s economy through the Age of Sail. Rope factories required long stretches of land and employed many people, making them (along with shipyards) among the first businesses in town that operated much more like big factories than family workshops.

On 2 March 1770, ropemaker William Green insulted Pvt. Patrick Walker as he passed John Gray’s ropewalk, near modern Post Office Square. Their argument led to a series of brawls that culminated three days later in the Boston Massacre. Gray had fired Green after he heard about the trouble. But an experienced ropemaker was valuable, and I found in the accounts of John Box and Benjamin Austin’s ropewalk that Green found work there in the West End before the end of the year.

A West End ropewalk supplied the anchor cable for the U.S.S. Constitution during the War of 1812. A couple of decades later, engineers applied the technology of mechanized spinning to ropemaking and truly industrialized the process; the Charlestown Navy Yard became the U.S. Navy’s principal source of cordage.

The museum’s press release says:

The new exhibit in the Main Exhibit Hall at the West End Museum, traces the history, vitality and economic significance of the rope-making industry in colonial and federal Boston with graphic and model renderings, interactive displays, artifacts, videos, and more.

Events linked to this exhibit include:

• Thomas K. Burgess’s walking tour “Ropewalks of the West End and Beyond,” 2 June starting at 10:30 A.M. at the museum, $15 ($7 for members).
• showings of Steve Fetsch’s documentary Ropewalk: A Cordage Engineer’s Journey Through History, 5 June and 19 July at the museum, 6:30-8:00 P.M., free.
• Duane Lucia’s walking tour “The Marriage of Wharf and Waterfall,” 7 August starting at 6:30 P.M. at the museum, $15 ($7 for members).

This exhibit will be on display until 18 August. (The thumbnail photo above, though taken by Lucia in connection with this exhibit, shows the Plymouth Cordage Company’s equipment now at Mystic Seaport.)

Alex Cain on Burgoyne’s Loyal Volunteers, 2 June

On Saturday, 2 June, the group that reenacts McAlpin’s Corps of Loyal Volunteers, a Loyalist military unit formed in 1777, will drill at the Oaks Mansion in Worcester, starting at 11:00 A.M. As part of that event, Alex Cain, also author of We Stood Our Ground: Lexington in the First Years of the American Revolution, will speak about the Loyalist units in Gen. John Burgoyne’s army.

Daniel McAlpin was a retired British army captain just settled in Stillwater, New York, when the war began. In September 1776 he received a secret commission from Gen. William Howe and began recruiting a regiment to support the Crown. Patriot neighbors caught on, and he had to escape and go into hiding.

McAlpin joined Burgoyne at Fort Edward in 1777 as the British thrust downward from Canada. His corps, numbering fewer than 200 men, formed that August. The Online Institute for Advanced Loyalist Studies shares several documents related to McAlpin’s command.

Most of Burgoyne’s army consisted of British regulars and troops sent from Germany. The relatively few Loyalists were at extra risk if captured, in danger of being treated as traitors to the new U.S. of A. rather than ordinary prisoners of war. So how did the general look out for those men when he surrendered after the Battles of Saratoga? That will no doubt be part of Cain’s talk.

The Oaks is located at 140 Lincoln Street in Worcester. Judge Timothy Paine (1730-1793) began its construction in 1774, then ran into trouble as his Loyalist leanings made him unpopular. It took about twenty years before the mansion was completed in its first state.

Samuel Williams: minister, astronomer, fugitive,…

Along with future physician Isaac Rand (profiled yesterday), Prof. John Winthrop took a young man named Samuel Williams (1743-1817) up to Newfoundland in 1761 to help observe the transit of Venus.

After that experience Williams, son of a Waltham minister (and former young captive from the Deerfield raid of 1704), set out on a rather conventional career path. He became minister at Bradford, Massachusetts. But he also kept up his scientific interests. In 1769 Williams observed the decade’s second transit of Venus from Newbury, publishing his observations through the American Philosophical Society seventeen years later.

In 1780 Williams succeeded Winthrop as Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard. That year he wrote about New England’s famous “Dark Day” and led a small college expedition to Maine to watch the Moon eclipse the Sun.

That trip was hampered by the fact that Williams decided that the best place to make his observations was an island in Penobscot Bay which the British military had just defended from a large Massachusetts attack. As with the 1761 transit of Venus, however, warring governments were willing to let gentlemen make observations for the sake of science.

Later in the 1780s, Harvard student John Quincy Adams wrote: “Mr. Williams is more generally esteemed by the students, than any other member of this government [i.e., college faculty]. He is more affable and familiar with the students, and does not affect that ridiculous pomp which is so generally prevalent here.”

But in 1788 Prof. Williams suddenly had to depart Harvard—and the U.S. of A. He was charged with forgery for falsifying a receipt from a trust he administered. Williams rode north, leaving his family in Cambridge to await word of where to find him.

Williams settled in Rutland, Vermont, and found work as a legal copyist and minister, first fill-in and then full-time. He brought his family north and rebuilt a respectable life. Williams launched the Rutland Herald newspaper and edited it for three years. He published a history of the state and a short history of the Revolution for use in schools. Williams helped found the University of Vermont and in 1806 used his astronomical knowledge to settle the state’s northern boundary with Canada.

One of the telescopes Williams reportedly used is shown above courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution. The museum’s webpage says Williams used this one to observe the 1769 transit of Venus, but also implies he was a Harvard professor at the time. Soon I’ll share links to more of Williams’s equipment.

In 2009 Robert Friend Rothschild published Two Brides for Apollo, a sympathetic biography of Williams. I believe the title refers to the two types of astronomical events Williams studied: the transit of Venus and the solar eclipse.

Dr. Isaac Rand and the “Important Branch of Obstetrics”

After reading that Prof. John Winthrop took two recent Harvard graduates with him to Newfoundland in 1761 to observe the transit of Venus, as described yesterday, I wondered what had become of those young men. What do you do with your life after having seen “the Savage coast of Labrador”?

Isaac Rand (1743-1822) went into medicine. He trained with Dr. James Lloyd, and like his mentor he sided with the Crown when war broke out and stayed in Boston through the siege. However, both men opted not to leave with the British military.

Within a few months of the evacuation, Rand was managing a smallpox hospital for the local authorities. He overcame suspicions about his political leanings by staying out of the fight and working hard for his patients.

After the war, Rand became a founding member of the Humane Society of Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and the Massachusetts Bible Society.

Dr. James Thacher wrote of Rand:

Previous to this period strong efforts had been made by the physicians of Boston, and more particularly by the late Dr. James Lloyd, to rescue from the hands of unqualified females, the important branch of obstetrics, and to raise it to an honorable rank in the profession. So great was considered the necessity of changing the practice in this respect, that Dr. L., even while engaged in the most extensive and lucrative business in the town, made a visit to Europe partly for the purpose of qualifying himself for the exigences which the practice of this highly responsible and important branch of obstetrics continually furnishes. His efforts succeeded; that business gradually fell into the hands of the physicians, and Dr. Rand and his contemporaries completed what had been begun by Dr. Lloyd. In this branch Dr. R. acquired a high and deserved reputation.

That of course reflects a physician’s professional bias about who’s best at birthing babies.

The engraving of obstetrical forceps above originally appeared in André Levret’s Observations sur les causes et les accidens de plusieurs accouchemens laborieux, published in 1750. The image comes from this National Institutes of Health history of cesarean sections.

Prof. Winthrop Gets a Good Look at Venus

Prof. John Winthrop of Harvard College (portrayed here by John Singleton Copley, in an image that comes courtesy of the university’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments) was among the many scientists who scrambled to observe the transit of Venus in 1761.

His report on the event to the worldwide scientific community included praise for “His Excellency FRANCIS BERNARD, Esq. Governor of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay, inspired with a just zeal for the advancement of Literature, which he demonstrates on every opportunity.”

In 1761 Bernard was newly arrived in Massachusetts, and that April he helped secure government support for Winthrop’s research. In just a few years the governor would become very unpopular, with Winthrop quietly supporting that Whig opposition.

As the professor knew from Edmund Halley’s calculation years before, “Newfoundland was the only British Plantation in which one [observation] could be made, and indeed the most western part of the Earth where the end of the Transit could be observ’d.” Therefore, he set out for “the Savage coast of Labrador” with two recent Harvard graduates, Samuel Williams and Isaac Rand, both eighteen years old. They took along most of the college’s astronomical equipment, viz.:

an excellent Pendulum clock, one of Hadley’s Octants with Nonius divisions and fitted in a new manner to observe on shore as well as sea, a refracting telescope with cross wires at half right angles for taking differences of Right Ascension and Declination, and a curious reflecting telescope, adjusted with spirit-levels at right angles to each other and having horizontal and vertical wires for taking correpondent altitudes, or differences of altitudes and azimuths.

Winthrop and his assistants arrived in Newfoundland on Massachusetts’s provincial ship in late May 1761. They set up their equipment and checked and rechecked it, Winthrop wrote, “with an assiduity which the infinite swarms of insects, that were in possession of the hill, were not able to abate, tho’ they persecuted us severely and without intermission, both by day and by night, with their venomous stings.”

The morning of 6 June was “serene and calm.” Prof. Winthrop wrote:

at 4h 18m we had the high satisfaction of seeing that most agreeable Sight, VENUS ON THE SUN, and of showing it in our telescopes to the Gentlemen of the place who had assembled very early on the hill to behold so curious a spectacle. The Planet at first appear’d dim thro’ the cloud, but in a short time became more distinct and better defined.

Winthrop recorded the time of transit and sketched what he saw, telling his readers:

The above observations gave me so many differences between the Sun’s and Venus’s altitudes and azimuths, from whence by spherical trigonometry I deduc’d the Planet’s right Ascensions and Declinations and, from them, in the last place, her Longitudes and Latitudes. It would be neither of entertainment nor use to the Reader to insert the particulars of such tedious calculations. . . .

The comparison of the observations made in the N.W. parts of the world with those in the S.E., when all of them come to be laid together, will give the true path of Venus, abstracted from parallax, by which means the quantity of the parallax will at length be discovered. The right determination of which point will render this year 1761 an ever-memorable era in the annals of astronomy.

Those quotations comes from this edited version [P.D.F. download] of Winthrop’s report.

Winthrop planned to view the 1769 transit from Newfoundland as well, but a fire at Harvard destroyed the astronomical instruments. He asked Benjamin Franklin to send a new set from London, as this Dutch Transit of Venus website describes.

Unfortunately, there was a heavy demand for astronomical devices all over Europe as the second transit approached. Then telescope-maker James Short died before delivering Winthrop’s order. On 11 March 1769, Franklin wrote to Winthrop that he’d managed to get that brass reflecting telescope from Short’s estate, but he was still waiting for the other tools from another craftsman. During the 1769 transit, Winthrop was stuck in Cambridge.

(Thanks to Boston 1775 reader Robert C. Mitchell for some of the links used in this posting.)

Chasing Venus with Andrea Wulf, 29-30 May

Historian Andrea Wulf will speak about her new book, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens, at two local sites next week. On Tuesday, 29 May, she’ll talk to the Lexington Historical Society at 7:30 P.M. That event will take place in the Lexington Depot, and is free.

The next evening at 7:00, Wulf will speak at the Arnold Arboretum—an appropriate locale since her previous books include Brother Gardeners and Founding Gardeners, about horticulture in the eighteenth century. This talk will cost $10 for Massachusetts Historical Society and Arnold Arboretum members or fellows, $20 for others, and pre-registration is required (call 617-384-5277). Wulf will speak in the Weld Hill Research Building. (Boston 1775 readers may recall that Weld Hill was our best guess for the location of the Continental Army’s fallback position in the summer of 1775.)

Chasing Venus describes the international scientific endeavor to observe the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769, as predicted decades earlier by astronomer Edmund Halley. On those occasions the planet moved in front of the Sun, appearing as a small black dot against the light.

Earlier this spring the Boston Globe’s review of Chasing Venus described the scientists’ efforts:

The obstacles confronting the platoon of observers were formidable. Britain and France were at war, but this did not deter fellow astronomers from linking up with each other. Indeed, a Frenchman, Joseph-Nicolas Delisle, took the lead. With contacts in Amsterdam, Basel, Florence, Vienna, and St. Petersburg, Delisle was a whirlwind planner and a hub of scientific back and forth. A skilled surveyor, his “mappemonde,” which highlighted the best spots around the globe to glimpse the transit, became an essential document for astronomers.

The theory of the transit was fine and good, but setting up the viewing stations proved a challenge. Getting to far-flung locations was dangerous work. For the 1761 transit, the British sent a man to St. Helena island, a tiny isolated speck in the south Atlantic. A colleague of Delisle’s, Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche trekked 4,000 miles from Paris to the depths of Siberia, only to be attacked by villagers who thought his fancy scientific instruments had magical powers: They blamed him for bringing on devastating floods. Two British fellows named [Charles] Mason and [Jeremiah] Dixon (surveyors of the famous line) were nearly smashed to bits by a French warship as they attempted to get to Sumatra. They nearly quit in fear and frustration.

But surely the most star-crossed (literally) of the Venus observers was the extravagantly named Frenchman Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisière. His name notwithstanding, Le Gentil’s odyssey would be anything but nice. His was a story of tragic near misses. For the 1761 transit, Le Gentil was to journey to Pondicherry, then a French possession in India. War got in the way — the British laid siege to the town, and Le Gentil instead went to Mauritius, where he was waylaid by dysentery. On June 6, the day of transit, he was on a rolling ship, and he could not get an accurate fix on the planet. Eight years later, he made it back to Pondicherry for the 1769 transits, but weather marred the viewing. Poor Le Gentil had come so far “only to be the spectator of a fatal cloud.”

Wulf’s book and talk are timely because there will be a transit of Venus visible in Massachusetts on 5-6 June—assuming the weather cooperates. The Harvard Observatory has set up a viewing time for the public on the evening of 5 June.

TOMORROW: A Massachusetts scientist in 1761.

Boston N.H.P. Welcomes Visitors Real and Virtual Today

This morning Boston National Historical Park opens its new visitor center in Faneuil Hall—the reason I’ve been exploring stories of that landmark this week. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who oversees the National Park Service, will be in town for the public opening at 11:30 A.M., along with elected officials.

Yesterday the park released an “NPS Boston” app for mobile devices, produced with GuideOne and available through iTunes. (An Android version is on the way.) I downloaded this to my iPad and tried it out.

The app is designed to help people plan their visit to the historic sites in Boston linked to the park and find their way from one site to another. It also augments such a visit with a little background information.

At least in its iPad form, the app has to be used in landscape mode. It starts with a map of Boston, the relevant sites marked with blue teardrop pins and little diagrams. “Sites” under the top menu choice have two or more photographs each. Some points in the Charlestown Navy Yard even come with short videos, but those show industrial ropemaking and the like, so they might not satisfy visitors looking for Revolutionary history.

“Sites” covers all the locations on the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail, landmarks of the Charlestown Navy Yard, and Dorchester Heights. Most are clustered in central Boston, with another concentration in Charlestown. Dorchester Heights remains off on its own, but at least it has equal billing.

The Boston Harbor Islands and Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters sites are parts of different national parks, and are therefore noted only on the Massachusetts map and at the end of the F.A.Q. list, though they also have Revolutionary significance and are within reach for people visiting the city for a day. Other maps show all the country’s other national parks, including Minute Man, Adams, Salem Maritime, Springfield Armory, and so on.

The “Tours” section of the app starts with the complete Freedom Trail, a shorter version for people who don’t want to spend “4-8 hours,” the Black Heritage Trail (now starting from Faneuil Hall rather than the monument to the U.S. 54th Regiment), and a “Create Your Tour” feature that will highlight the sites the user chooses. The last checks those pins on the map, but doesn’t calculate a route or walking time.

There are also “Thematic Tours,” all starting from Faneuil Hall. These include “Paul Revere’s Boston” and two tours of different lengths that combine sites on the Freedom Trail and Black Heritage Trail under the theme of political activism and rights. Another tour focuses on the Navy Yard only. All these thematic tours include very short audio recordings.

The app works best when one has a good wireless or cell connection. It appears to download elements as requested, so simply downloading the app and then going out of range means you might well be missing images, recordings, or the F.A.Q. It can use your own location information, though I’m not sure how that works since I was well off the map while testing.

I hope the programming contains room for expansion. For example, one question describes how much Boston has been expanded by landfill; a link to the peninsula’s original dimensions on the main map could show that more powerfully. A timeline could remind users of how the major events in Boston history line up. And the keyword “restroom” is nowhere to be found, though I have to believe it appears in a frequently asked question.

Free and up-to-date, the “NPS Boston” app is a useful program for iPhone and iPad owners visiting from near or far. For deeper information, visitors should still consult books, guides, and signage at the sites.

The Grasshopper on Faneuil Hall

Click on the thumbnail at the right to see a nice photograph of the grasshopper-shaped weathervane atop Faneuil Hall, taken by Steve Borichevsky.

That grasshopper was the work of Boston metalworker Shem Drowne (1683-1774), who also created a rooster weathervane for the New Brick Meeting in the North End, a wavy banner for Christ (Old North) Church, and an Indian figure for the Province House. (Drowne himself was a member of the First Baptist Meeting.)

An Indian appeared on the Massachusetts provincial seal, and therefore an appropriate figure to top the governor’s mansion. A rooster was an old Christian symbol. But what did a grasshopper mean in Boston?

Apparently what mattered was what a grasshopper meant in London. A weathervane in that shape topped the Royal Exchange built by Sir Thomas Gresham in 1571. The insect thus became a symbol of worldwide British commerce.

According to Lucius Manlius Sargent, the mercantile Faneuil family brought that symbol to Boston:

…a gilded grasshopper, as many of us well remember, whirled about, of yore, upon the little spire, that rose above the summerhouse, appurtenant to the mansion, where Peter Faneuil lived, and died. That house was built, and occupied, by his uncle, Andrew; and he had some seven acres, for his garden thereabouts. It was upon the westerly side of old Treamount Street. . . . The selection of a grasshopper, for a vane, was made, in imitation of their example, who placed the very same thing, upon the pinnacle of the Royal Exchange, in London.

Thus, Boston probably commissioned Drowne to make a big grasshopper weathervane for Faneuil Hall to honor Peter Faneuil for funding its construction and to signal arrivals from London that Boston was a commercial center, too.

Peter Faneuil’s Tombstone

On Monday, Boston 1775 reader Daud Alzayer asked me about how Peter Faneuil’s name appeared on his tomb. That turns out to be a rather hard question to answer.

In a Boston Transcript essay published before 1852 and collected in 1856 in Dealings with the Dead, the Boston antiquarian, temperance advocate, and slavery apologist Lucius Manlius Sargent wrote about Peter Faneuil’s tomb in the Granary Burying-Ground:

The remains of this noble-spirited descendant of the Huguenots of Rochelle were deposited, in the Faneuil tomb, in the westerly corner of the Granary Ground. This tomb is of dark freestone, with a freestone slab. Upon the easterly end of the tomb, there is a tablet of slate, upon which are sculptured, with manifest care and skill, the family arms; while, upon the freestone slab, are inscribed, at the top, M. M.—memento mori, of course,—and, at the bottom of the slab—a cruel apology for the old Huguenot patronymic—“Peter Funel. 1742,” and nothing more.

But a few paragraphs later, Sargent wrote that the inscription was “P. Funel,” nothing more. In 1856 Thomas Bridgman’s The Pilgrims of Boston and Their Descendants listed the burial site this way: “TOMB OF P. FUNEL, 1742” over a coat of arms. I don’t know of any drawing or photograph of the tomb from this period to nail down that text and how formal it looked.

Sargent imagined that Andrew Faneuil, Peter’s uncle, originally commissioned the tomb with his own coat of arms, and that years after Peter was interred there Bostonians began to wonder. “Whereabouts was it, that Peter Faneuil was buried?” Sargent’s imagination continued:

Some worthy old citizen—God bless him—who knew rather more of this matter than his neighbors, and was well aware, that the arms would be but a dead letter to posterity, resolved to serve the public, and remedy the defect. Up he goes into the Granary Ground, in the very spirit of Old Mortality, and, with all his orthography in his ear, inscribes P. Funel upon the tablet!

When might that have happened? The Old Style date “1742” suggests the carver worked before the British Empire shifted to the Gregorian calendar in 1752. But Peter Faneuil’s brother Benjamin lived in Boston and Cambridge until 1784, and his sons were prominent Loyalist merchants. Other members of the family remained in Massachusetts in the 1800s. Would a “worthy old citizen” really have done some unauthorized carving on their family tomb? Despite such unanswered questions, lots of people accepted Sargent’s guesses.

By the late twentieth century, however, authors were positing that the real reason for a “P. Funel” inscription was that a stonecutter had scratched that name on the slab in order to identify the customer it was meant for. Which would mean Andrew hadn’t commissioned that tomb; Peter had. So that theory also raises questions.

By then the mysterious inscription was long gone. In 1900, Abram English Brown reported that the top of the Faneuil tomb had been carved with Peter Faneuil’s full name, in the standard spelling, and the New Style date “March 3, 1743,” as well as the surnames of some family members who died later. That’s the way it appears today, as shown above courtesy of Find a Grave or in this Flickr image.

How Did People Pronounce “Faneuil Hall”?

In 1740, the New Rochelle-born merchant Peter Faneuil (shown at left courtesy of the New York Public Library) offered Boston money to erect a grand new building with space for town meetings and shops. By a very close vote (367–360), the town accepted his gift. Faneuil died six months after the building went up.

In his 1825 novel Lionel Lincoln, James Fenimore Cooper declared that Bostonians pronounced the name of that building “Funnel Hall.” Other American novelists repeated that phrase: Seba Smith in The Life and Writings of Major Jack Downing of Downingville (1833); Thomas Chandler Haliburton in The Attaché: or, Sam Slick in England (1843); Eliza Leslie in The Young Revolutionists (1845); and so on.

Cooper was from upstate New York, Smith from Maine, Haliburton from Nova Scotia, and Leslie from Pennsylvania. None of them wrote from great personal experience with old Bostonians. Some late-1800s authors from Massachusetts attributed the “Funnel Hall” pronunciation to their grandfathers, but by then the earlier books might have affected how they understood the past.

One clue to how people of the Revolutionary period pronounced the name “Faneuil” is how they spelled it, In particular, people who had less formal education or hadn’t seen the name on paper might have written it phonetically. Eighteenth-century folks weren’t shy about respelling words to their liking.

In looking at period sources, I found most people used the spelling “Faneuil,” but “Fanuel” was also common. I’ve seen that variant in a 1734 Massachusetts General Court resolution, the record of Boston town meetings, reports to Customs officials, an itinerary of the Rev. Ezra Stiles, the orderly book of Gen. William Howe, and letters by Dr. Thomas Young, Henry Pelham, John Adams, Joseph Barrell, Belcher Noyes, and others. In the early 1800s “Fanuel Hall” was printed in guidebooks, town directories, and advertisements, suggesting that it was widely accepted.

I also found some rarer variants:

• Thomas Chute, record of writs delivered as an Essex County deputy sheriff, 1733-37: “Funel” as the surname of Peter Faneuil and his brother Andrew.
• John Rowe, diary, 1768: ”Fanewil Hall” and “Fanewill Hall.”
• Concord town meeting, 1768: “Fannel Hall.”
• Maj. Francis Hutcheson, 1775: “Fannel Hall.”
• John Adams, autobiography, written 1802-07: “Phanuel Hall.” (Was he trying to be cute?)
• scratched on Peter Faneuil’s tomb at an unknown date: “P. Funel.” (More about this variant tomorrow.)

I didn’t find anyone spelling “Faneuil Hall” as “Funnel Hall” except in post-Revolutionary newspaper articles that were obvious political parodies. That’s not to say people didn’t pronounce the name like “funnel,” especially when they referred to the Faneuil brothers decades before the Revolutionary War. But it makes it less likely.

The much more common “Faneuil,” “Fanuel,” “Fannel,” and the like suggest to me that most Bostonians pronounced the first vowel in “Faneuil” as an A, and then disagreed about the rest of the word. The same way we do today.