Happy Old Years

A new year has arrived, but I've been taking some time to look back -- way back.

While at my mother's house after Christmas, my sister, brother and I spent some time rummaging through the basement. I do this every once in a while to look at old photos and other mementos. This time, my sister found a shoe box with a treasure trove of old stuff that belonged to our grandfather, who died long before any of the three of us were born.

There are documents related to his time as a Mason in Vermont:

There are also documents related to the international travel he undertook as a salesman for the Jones & Lamson Machine Co., which made automatic lathes (the company, founded in 1869, lives on as J&L Metrology in Springfield, VT). My grandfather, George Hazen Brigham, Sr., was traveling on business in Russia when the revolution began in 1917.

"During my second trip to Moscow we began to hear of riots in Petrograd; and as the situation grew worse, exaggerated reports of the number killed were circulated," he wrote in an article titled, "A Jones & Lamson Man in Russia During the Revolution," in an industrial machinery publication. "It was only after the second or third day of the revolution in Petrograd that we saw anything of it in Moscow. First the electric cars stopped, then the cabs, and then all public and private conveyances disappeared....About noon on the second day of the revolution the red flag appeared in Moscow, and then all but the active manifestants disappeared as if by magic and were not seen again until it had become evident that there would be no resistance."

After traveling across Russia for 10 days on the Trans-Siberian Railway, he went to Japan, which he found much more pleasant compared to the chaotic Russia.

"Japan was a wonderful contrast to Russia, the officers were...courteous and the baggage was soon examined," he wrote in the article. "Everywhere we saw evidence of organization (and) energy, and could readily understand the reason for the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war." My grandfather was an engineer, so he took special notice of the transportation infrastructure in Japan. "Their train service is excellent, their roadbeds are rock-ballasted and dustless, most of the locomotives are American, and their express trains compare favorably with ours."

Here is a document that allowed him into (and, perhaps more importantly, out of) Japan. I had to split the scan into two photos:

As amazing as these documents are, I've gotten just as much enjoyment out of reading his yearly diaries.

Picking one at random (1926), I learned from one of the 365 very short entries that my grandfather took my grandmother, Josephine (he called her "Jo"), to a Broadway production of "Naughty Cinderella." A farce starring Irene Bordoni, the show ran for 121 performances between November 1925 and February 1926, according to the Internet Broadway Database.

In the 1925 diary, I learned of the silent film, "Charley's Aunt." A farce that was first performed on a London stage in 1892, "Charley's Aunt" was revived many times in numerous countries in the ensuing decades, the last being in 1970.

The Internet being the awesome tool that it is, I was able to find a 10-minute clip of the 1925 film:

Pretty cool to be able to watch the same movie that my grandfather watched more than 90 years ago!

As I said, my grandfather died long before my siblings and I were born. He passed away from lung cancer in 1953 at age 64. I gathered from talking to my father over the years, that his dad was somewhat strict and distant with his three sons. After traveling the world in the 1910's, he settled down in the U.S., where he continued to travel on a more local basis (from his diary: "Thursday, October 22, 1925: "In Newark, Bloomfield, NYC and Brooklyn today."). By 1929, the year my father (the second son) was born, he had a real estate business with a partner, but lost everything when his partner took off with the money.

I'm so happy that years ago my brother spearheaded a project to record my parents' respective biographies. I tapped my mother for information about the subject of my father's father, and she forwarded me some great passages from the biography.

"My Dad (was) originally an engineering salesman for Jones and Lamson Co. which was a tool machine company in Springfield, Vermont," my father told us. "At some point they moved to Philadelphia, where my brother George was born. At some point he left Jones and Lamson because he didn't get along with the sales manager and so they were living in Philly. Eventually they moved to New Jersey and my Dad went into the real estate business (with another person). I don't know how he met him or anything about him. I don't know how long they were in business, but eventually his partner turned out to be a crook and wiped out all of the company money and left town."

Wow.

"My father never talked about it," my dad continued in the biography. "Dad went into bankruptcy I guess. I don't know if that happened before or after the crash - October 1929 - but eventually they lost the house (they owned it) and lost the car and moved to Orange, NJ in a flat in a 3 or 4 family house."

Man, that is a serious blow. The last bit my mom forwarded says a lot: "Then my Dad was working for the Golden Key Coffee Co. where he drove a small pickup truck and I don't know how long he did that."

My grandfather must have felt like a real dude, traveling to Europe and Japan in his finest clothes, making sales of large equipment, writing diaries in French. Oh, did I not mention that some of his diaries are written in the "langue de Moliere"?

He did alright for himself, considering he was an orphan at age 3. I'd forgotten until I went back to my Ancestry.com account that my grandfather's father died when he was 3; his mother when he was 1. He and his siblings -- two brothers, John and Alfred, and a sister, Eunice -- were raised by relatives. My grandfather was raised by an older cousin about whom my father knew little. This guardian sent my grandfather to private school in Montpelier and the University of Vermont, from which he graduated with an engineering degree, I think (his education was a sore spot with his brother John, who went by Wes, according to my father. None of the other siblings went to college.) He married my grandmother in 1920, I believe, and did fairly well career-wise as far as I can tell.

While I'm finding it difficult in reading the diaries to get a real picture of my grandfather, some everyday details come through. In 1925 he bought a Nash, although he doesn't say what model or whether it was new or used. My dad used to talk about Nashes, and I believe he owned at least one in his life.

My grandfather spent A LOT of time traveling around New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania for work, but I'm not sure what company he was selling equipment for at this point. He mentions working on his car with some frequency, and also going for pleasure drives."Went for a nice long drive this eve" was a regular notation. I can relate to that.

As befits a father in the early decades of the 20th century, he didn't spend a lot of time with his kids, at least so far as I can tell in the diaries. His first son, my uncle George, was born in 1924. My grandfather rarely mentions his oldest son in the diaries, other than to indicate when my grandmother took the boy to the doctor.

He mentions needing a "Palm Beach suit" in one diary entry, which seems like a pretty fancy outfit. From the Ask Andy About Clothes blog, I learned that such a suit was "made from Palm Beach cloth, a warm weather blend of mohair and cotton" that was popular many years ago.

Another cool little thing of note: my grandfather, probably like most people of the time, referred to the morning as "forenoon."

He also makes note of the weather on just about every day of the year, and mentions with regularity having dinner with friends. "Sunday, August 9, 1925: Mr & Mrs (illegible) were in for dinner & the eve. Went for a ride. Rained very hard just after we got back."

So imagine going from this life -- maybe he was a bit sentimental about his bachelor days traveling the world and keeping diaries in a foreign language, but things seemed pretty good stateside with a wife, a son (George Jr.), a nice car, close friends and a decent job -- to losing everything you had and working as a coffee salesman and moving, during the Depression, from one relative's house to another in Vermont and New Hampshire. A man who never really knew his parents, and who was separated from his siblings, finds success, only to end up broken and seeking shelter in the homes of others again.

My dad always said that his father didn't talk much about his past life, and it's no wonder why. I'm thankful that I have many of my grandfather's papers and old photo albums, so I can gain some sort of connection. I've been told I look a little bit like George Hazen Brigham, Sr., which feels good to hear.

Maybe someday I'll hire somebody to translate his French diaries. Perhaps that's where all the secrets are....

A Sign

Over at my other blog, The Backside of America, I chronicle the hidden elements of our world, from run-down mills and abandoned factories, to ghost signs, shuttered movie theaters and forgotten quarries. Of late, I've been consumed with putting together as full a picture of possible of the backside of my adopted hometown, Newton, Mass.

I spend a LOT of time poring over old atlases and maps on the City of Newton web site and conducting online searches to try and figure out what the 13 neighborhoods of Newton looked like a hundred years ago. I'm trying to ascertain which buildings from the early 20th century are still around, and how their uses have changed. I also want to know what buildings are long gone, and what's in their place now.

I also peruse Google Maps, as I look up addresses from old atlases and see where they are so I can take pictures. While looking at online maps today as part of an ongoing process to learn about an abandoned house in Newton's tony Chestnut Hill section, I came across this image on Google:

I'm used to seeing people walking their dogs on Google Maps, or just strutting along, but this image stopped me in my tracks. This property is a convent owned by the Daughters of Mary of Nazareth. I'm not religious in the least, but I'll take this as a sign that an answer will come soon about the nearby abandoned property....

Know Your Home

Beth and I were lied to about the two homes we have owned, and I suspect that if you own an older house you were, too.

Oh, I'm not talking about dry rot, skeletons buried in the basement or a convoluted title showing that members of the Winter Hill Gang could swoop in here at any time and move into our basement. No, I'm talking about the dates of the homes.

I'm gonna work my way backwards. When we bought our current home, in Newton, Mass., in 2003 the sell sheet indicated the American Foursquare was built in 1915. We instantly fell in love with the original woodwork in much of the first floor, and other details including a plate rail in the dining room and built-in storage seats in the living room.

The house has a big porch and a finished attic, a great fireplace and a half-finished basement. Previous owners had completed renovations including closing off the door from the living room to the kitchen, adding a skylight in the attic and updating the kitchen. We've added a deck off the back, a mudroom off the kitchen and a master bathroom, and reconfigured the kids' bathroom.

For the most part, though, the house looks like it did when it was built. We take pride in knowing that our house is one of the older ones on the street. Most of the houses around us appear to date from the 1930's-1950's. Over the years we'd talked about throwing a party of some sort to celebrate the 100th anniversary of our home. With 2015 looming, I went to city hall and pulled the inspectional services file on our place. I wanted to find out who had built the house and the names of previous owners, and see if there were any useful bits of information that might help us personalize our celebration.

Maybe there will be pictures! I thought. Maybe we'll find out that there used to be a garage where the shed now stands. Or perhaps a map showing that the small lot next to ours used to be part of our land.

My big discovery? The house wasn't built in 1915. It was built in 1923. We need to wait eight more years to plan a 100th anniversary party. I'm not sure why the sell sheet said 1915. I don't believe there was anything here prior, but perhaps another party had applied for a permit to build in 1915 but never followed through.

The owner of the property, McKenzie MacLeod, filed for a building permit in January 1921, and then again in November 1922. I'm not sure why the house wasn't built after MacLeod filed for the permit initially. Perhaps he ran into financial troubles. The house was completed in the spring of '23, when the city issued a permit for plumbing.

When we added a master bathroom and tore apart the existing upstairs bathroom, the demo crew ripped out a LOT of cast iron pipes. The guys told me that a four-foot section weighed about 200 pounds, and they needed four guys to lift it up and out the second story window and into the dumpster below.

A few days later one of my neighbors asked me if we'd given permission for someone to remove the cast iron from the dumpster, because he'd seen somebody take it. I said no. So either thieves were eying the lode, or my builder allowed someone to come on the property and take it. Wonder how much they made off it.

The building was designed by Frederick Gowing, a Boston-based architect who wrote a book, Building Plans for Colonial Dwellings, Bungalows, Cottages, and Other Medium Cost Homes, in 1925. He also wrote a book called Building Plans for Modern Homes, copies of which are floating around on eBay. Maybe I'll buy one in the next eight years.

Our first home, in Boston's West Roxbury neighborhood, has a bit of a more interesting story behind it.

Located on St. Theresa Avenue, the house is just a short distance from West Roxbury's commercial mainline, Centre Street. Situated directly across from the prestigious Roxbury Latin School, the house is a Dutch Colonial with a nice porch, a narrow lot with plenty of shade and cool curving staircase up to the second floor. Beth and I put a lot of sweat equity into the place, because we didn't have kids. We tore up wall-to-wall carpets and the tack strips from the living room, dining room, stairs, and bedrooms; stripped wallpaper in every room; patched, primed and painted the whole place; and ripped a giant spice cabinet off the kitchen wall.

Eventually, after we completed that work and had someone come in and sand the floors, we called in an electrician to upgrade some things. He told us that in addition to old gas lines (some of which he capped for us), we had knob-and-tube wiring, because when the house was built, people weren't sure whether gas or electricity would be the future.

"What year was this house built?" he asked.

"The sell sheet said 1930."

"No, this house is older than that," he replied. "Pre-World War I, for sure."

He told me I could go to the Boston Building Department to pull the file for the house. "1010 Mass. Ave.," he said.

A few weeks later I made the trip to Roxbury, got the file and started poring over it. I went right to the bottom of the stack of documents, invoices and permits, and learned that, as the electrician told me, the house dated to before The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy.

The house was built in 1911. I was confused why the sell sheet indicated the house was built in 1930. How could there be such a disparity? Flipping through a few more documents, I found one that gave me the answer. In 1930, the city of Boston reconfigured what was then known as Cottage Avenue. The street was moved west a bit, curving away from our house, giving it a much longer front yard than houses that were built later. The street was renamed St. Theresa Avenue, after the Catholic parish at the foot of street.

With the answer to my question in hand, I continued to look through the file to see if there was anything else of interest.

That's when I noticed the name of the owner of the property when it was built: Earl Sloan. I don't recall all these years later whether the documents in the folder included information about Sloan, or whether I did an Internet search when I got home. What I found out is that Sloan was the "doctor" behind Sloan's Liniment, a pain relief product developed in the 19th century. The liniment is available online to this day.

In the early part of the 20th century, Sloan lived on an estate in West Roxbury known as Pine Lodge. Previous owners of the estate included bank presidents and Boston's fire commissioner. Our house was evidently one of several on the property; I assume a caretaker or some other employee of Sloan's lived in the house. There is a Pine Lodge road in the nearby vicinity, but alas no traces of the estate.

So if you own an older home, or are at least the second owner of your house, and you're at all curious about the place you live, it's worth asking your town or city clerk about accessing the building file. Every house has a story. I'd love to hear yours.

Hidden History

I'm a history buff, but not the kind who reads tomes about World War I, watches Hitler documentaries on the History Channel or re-enacts the Civil War.

I've researched my family's genealogy, and I enjoy learning about long-forgotten automobile brands, or looking at photos of vanished motels on Route 66. I maintain another blog, The Backside of America, where I post photos and write a little bit about faded parts of this country, from abandoned railroad tracks to moldering factory buildings, rusty cars left to die in the woods to old ski hills that have become magnets for taggers. The blog has several loyal contributors, thankfully.

I've spent quite a bit of time in the last few years tromping around urban, suburban and rural landscapes trying to uncover bits and pieces of the past.

Earlier this week, while doing some research online for a series of children's books, I stumbled across a piece of hidden history that fascinates me with its glimpse into the not-so-distant past and confuses me as to why it still exists.

The Walden Street Cattle Pass in Cambridge was built in 1857 in order to move cows from the railroad (now the Fitchburg line of the commuter rail) to nearby stockyards. Although those yards were closed around 1870, cattle continued to be unloaded from what eventually came to be known as Porter Square, herded down Massachusetts Avenue through Harvard Square, and to the slaughterhouses across the Charles River in Brighton (This information is available at a number of web sites, most of which seem to have gotten it from a plaque on the Walden Street Bridge, which I checked out yesterday).

(This isn't my picture, obviously. It came from Wikipedia.)

I loved discovering some of the history of Porter Square, an area I've hung out in and driven through countless times in my 20+ years in the Boston area. The square was named for Zachariah Porter, who ran a popular hotel and restaurant in the area. The porterhouse steak was named in his honor as well.

And the idea of cattle being herded down Mass. Ave and on through Harvard Square is quite the visual. Nowadays, the stretch between Porter and Harvard squares is jammed with funky shops, cool restaurants, hair salons, music stores, etc. And of course, Harvard Square is "where the weirdos" hang out, as any conservative worth his or her salt will tell you.

The cattle pass was added to the National Historic Register in 1994, and restored in 2007-8 when the Walden Street bridge was torn down and replaced. Here's the thing, though: you can't actually see the cattle pass unless you ride the commuter train, because the new bridge covers it completely.

Yes, this fascinating piece of history is hidden away under the bridge. I tried to see it when I stopped by yesterday, but it's impossible. According to one online source, the Cambridge City Council has discussed creating a vantage point for viewing the tunnel.

While I applaud the state for restoring the cattle pass, I wonder about spending money on a place that almost nobody can appreciate in person. I don't really see the city council spending money to construct a scenic overlook for this landmark.

This discovery set me to wondering about other historical remnants that exist out of our view. This curiosity is what gave birth to the urban exploration movement, and what leads me to Google Maps, looking for places to take pictures and shed a little light on the past.