Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 166, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1915 — Page 3

ROBABLY no American city has quite the marked individuality that Boston boasts of. Twentieth century progress and improvement has done but J little to obliterate its picturesque as/pects, for which antiquarians are duly thankful. One of them, Edward M. ] Bacon, has written a book about it. fXA He calls it “Rambles Around Old Bos- | J’ ton.” The publishers are Little, 4 J Brown & Co. We were three —a visiting Englishmen, the Artist, and Antiquary, says Mr. Bacon. The Artist and Antiquary were the gossiping guides; the Englishment the guided. The Englishman would “do” Old Boston exclusively. He had “done” the blend of the Old and New, and now would hark back to the Old and review it in leisurely strolls among its landmarks. He had asked the Artist and Antiquary to pilot him companionably, and they would meet his wishes, and gladly, for the personal conducting of a stranger so saturated with Old Boston lore as he appeared to be could not be other than agreeable. Beyond the few measured historic memorials, the landmarks he especially would seek were many of them long ago annihilated in those repeated marches of progress or of improvement common to all growing cities, or effaced in the manifold markings over of the topography of the Old Town, than which none other in Christendom has undergone more. Still, if not the identical things, the sites of a select number of them could be identified for him, and their story or legend rehearsed, while the Artist’s pencil would reproduce yet remaining bits of the Old jumbled with the New. Properly our initial ramble was within the narrow bounds of the beginnings of the Puritan capital, the “metropolis of the wilderness,” hanging on the harbor’s edge of the little “pear-shaped,’’ behilled peninsula, for which the founders, those “well-educated, polite persons of good estate,” took Old Boston in England for its name and London for its model. The Lincolnshire borough on the Fitham was to be its prototype only in name. The founders would have their capital town be to New England in its humble way what London was to Old England. So Boston was builded, a likeness in miniature to London. This London look and Old England aspect, we remarked, remained to and through the Revolution; and in a shadowy way remains today, as our guest would see. It was indeed a natural family likeness, for, as the record shows, Boston from the beginning was the central point of the most thoroughly English community in the New World. There was no infusion of a foreign element of consequence until the end of the colony period and the close of the seventeenth century. Then the French Huguenots had begun to appear and mingle with the native Puritans. But while early in the province period this element became sufficient in numbers to set up a church of its own and to bring about some softening of the old austerities of the Puritan town life, it did not Impair the English stamp. These French Huguenots easily assimilated in the community, which welcomed them, and in time these competent artisans and merchants, the Bowdoins, the Faneulls, Chardons, Sigourneys, Reveres, Molineuxes, Greenleafs, became almost as English, or American English, as the rest. Nor was the stamp Impaired by the infusion of Scotch and Irish into the colony in Increasing numbers during the latter half of the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries; nor by the floating population of various nationalities naturally drawn to a port of consequence, as Boston was, the chief in the colonies from the outset. These floaters coming and going merely lent variety and picturesqueness —or brought temporary trouble— to the sober streets. Up to the Revolution the population remained homogeneous, with the dominating influences distinctively of English lineage. When with the Revolution the English yoke was thrown off and the “Bostoneers” tore down every emblem of royalty and every sign of a Tory and burned them in a huge bonfire in front of the old statehouse and afterward renamed King street "State” and Queen street “Court," they could not blot out its English mark. And well into the nineteenth century, when in 1822 Boston emerged from a town to a olty, the population was still "singularly homogeneous;’ It came to cityhood slowly and somewhat reluctantly after repeated attempts, the first early in the colony period. Edmund ■ Quincy in his fascinating life of his distinguished father, Josiah Quincy, writing of the municipality in 1823 during Josiah Quincy’s first administration as mayor —he was the city’s second mayor—observes: “The great Irish and German emigration had not then set in. The city was eminently English in its character and appearance, and probably no town of its size in England had a population of such unmixed English descent as the Boston of that day It was Anglls ipsis Angllor—more English than the English themselves. The inhabitants of New England at that time were descended, with scarcely any admixture of foreign blood, from the Puritan emigration of the seventeenth century." As the founders and settlers brought with them all their beloved old home characteristics and would transplant them, as was possible, ip their new home, so we find their earliest "crooked little streets" with old London names. So the earlier social life, grim though it was with its Puritanical tinge. Is seen to have been old English ta& smaller and narrower way.

BOSTON CLINGS TO ITS INDIVID UALITY

And today, aS we ramble about the shadowy precincts of the Colony Town, we chance delectably here and there upon a twisting street yet holding its first given London name —a Londonlike old court, byway, or alley; a Londonish foot passage making short cut between thoroughfares; an arched way through buildings in old London style. So, too, we find yet lingering, though long since in disguise, an old London fashioned underground passage or two between courts or onetime habitations suggestive of smuggling days and of romance. Such is that grim, underground passage between old Providence court and Harvard place Issuing on Washington street opposite the old South Meeting house, which starts In the cpurt near a plumbing shop and runs aldhgside the huge granite foundations of the rear wall of the old Province house, seat of the royal governors, now long gone save its side wall of Holland brick, which still remains intact. This passage must have eluded Hawthorne, else surely it would have figured in one of his incomparable "legends” of this rare place of provincial pomp and elegance. Then there was, until recent years, that other and more significant passage, opening from this one, and extending under the Province house and the highway in front, eastward toward the sea. Gossip tradition has it or some latterday discoverer has fancied that by this passage some of Howe’s men made their escape to i the waterfront at the evacuation. Others call it smuggler’s passage. In that day the water came up Milk street to the present Library square and southward to old Church Green, which used to be at the junction of Summer and Bedford streets. An explorer of this passage—the engineer of the tavern which now occupies the site of the Province house orchard (a genuine antiquary this engineer, who during service with the tavern from its erection has delved deep into colonial history of this neighborhood)—says that its outlet apparently was somewhere near Church Green. Its was closed up in part in late years by building operations/ and further by the construction of the Washington street tunnel. The peninsula as the colonists found it we recalled from the familiar description of the local historians. It was a neck of land jutting out at the bottom of Massachusetts bay with a fine harbor on its sea side; at its back, the Charles river, uniting at its north end with the Mystic river as it enters the harbor from the north side of Charlestown; its whole territory only about four miles in circuit; its less than eight hundred acres comprising several abrupt elevations, with valleys between. The loftiest elevation was the three-peaked hill in its heart, which gave it its first English name of Trimountain, and became Beacon, on the river side; the next in height, on the barbor front, were the north and south promontories of a great cove, which became respectively Copp’s hill and Fprt hill. The town was begun round about the Market place, which was at the head of the present State street, where is now the old statehouse. About the Market place the first homes were built and the first highways struck out Thence meandered the earliest of those legendary “cow paths,” the lanes from which evolved the “crooked little streets” leading to the home lots and gardens of settlers. State street and Washington street were the first highways, the one "The Great Street to the Sea,” the other “The High Waye to Roxberrie,” where the peninsula joined the mainland, perhaps along Indii n trails. At the outset the “High Waye” reached only as far as School

THE EVENING REPUBLICAN, RENSSELAER, IND.

and Milk streets, where is naw the old South Meeting house, and this was early called Corn’ hill. Soon, however, a further advance was made to Summer, this extension later being called Marlborough street, in commemoration of th* victory of Blenheim. In a few years a third street was added, toward Essex and Boylston streets ; named Newbury. The “sea” then came up in the Great cove from the harbor fairly close to the present square of State street, for high-water mark was at the present Kilby street on the South side and Merchants row on the North side. The Great cove swept inside of these streets. Merchants row followed the shore northward to a smaller cove, stretching from where is now North Market street and the Quincy market (the first Mayor Quincy’s monument) and over the site of Faneuil hall to Dock square, which became the Town dock. Other pioneer highways were the nucleus of the present Tremont street, originally running along the northeastern spurs of the then broad-spreading Beacon hill and passing through the Common; Hanover street, at fir nt a narrow lane, from what is now Scollay square, and Ann, afterward North street, from Dock square, both leading to the ferries by Copp’s hill, where tradition says the Indians had their ferry. Court street was first Prison lane, from the Market place to the prison, a gruesome dungeon, early set up, where now stands the modern City Hali annex. In its day it harbored pirates and Quakers, and Hawthorne fancied it for the opening scenes of his “Scarlet Letter.” School street took its name from the first schoolhouse and the first school, whence sprang the Boston Latin school, which felicitates itself that it antedates the university at Cambridge and “dandled Harvard college on its knee.” Milk street, first Fort lane,” was the first way to Fort hill on the harbor front. Summer st¥eet, first “Mylne lane,” led to “Widow .Tuthill’s Windmill,” near where was Church Green, up to which the water came. “Cow lane,” now High street, led from Church Green, or Mill lane, to the foot of Fort hill. Essex street was originally at its eastern end part of the first cartway to the Neck and Roxbury, a beach road that ran along the south shore of the South cove, another expansive indentation, extending from the harbor on the south side of Fort hill to the Neck. Boylston street, originally “Frog lane,” and holding fast to this bucolic ap pellation into the nineteenth century was a swampy way running westward along the south side of Boston Common toward the open Back bay the back basin of the Charles —then flowing up to a pebbly beach at the Common’s western edge and to the present Park square. Here, then, on the levels about the Great cove, in the form of a crescent, facing the sea and backed by the three-peaked hill, the town was established. The first occupation was within the scant territory bounded, generally speaking, on the east side by State street at the high-water line of the Great cove; northerly by Merchants row around to near the site of Faneuil hall; northwesterly by Dock square and Hanover street; westerly by the great hill and Tremont street; southerly by School and Milk stfeets; and Milk street again to the water, then working up toward the present Liberty square at the junction of Kilby, water and Batterymarch streets. Soon, however, the limits expanded, reaching southward to Summer street, and not long after to Essex and Boylston streets; eastward, to the harbor front at and around Fort hill; westward and northwestward, about another broad cove —this the North cove, later the “Mill cove” with busy mills about it, an indentation on the north of Beacon hill by the widening of the Charles river at its mouth, and covering the space now Haymarket square; and northward, over the peninsula’s north end, which early became the seat of gentility. No further expansion of moment was made through the colony period, and the extension was slight during the Province period. Beacon hill, except its slopes, remained till after the Revolution in its primitive state, its long western reach a place of pastures over which the cows roamed, and the barberry and the wild rose grew. The foot of the Common on the margin of the glinting Back bay was the town’s west boundary till after the Revolution and into the nineteenth century. Till then the tide of the Back bay flowed up the present Beacon street, some 200 feet above the present Charles street. The town’s southern limit, except a few houses toward the Neck on the fourth link of the highway to Roxbury (called Orange street in honor of the house or Orange), was still Essex and Boylston streets. The one landway to the mainland, till after the second decade of the nineteenth century, remained the long, lean Neck to Roxbury. The only waterway, at the beginning of the town, was by means of ships, boats, afterward by scows. No bridge from Boston was built till the Revolution was two years past. So the "storied town” remained, till the close of the historic chapter, a little one, the built-up territory of which could easily be covered in a stroll of a day or two. From its establishment as the capital Boston’s history was so interwoven with that of the Colony that in England the Colony came early to be designated the “Bostoneers,” and the charter which the founders brought with them, and for the retention of which the colonists were in an almost constant struggle, was termed the “Bon ton Charter."

Folk We Touch In Passing

By Julia Chandler Manz

A CARTER OF VIRGINIA When The Woman had settled back in the handsomest of her velvet-lined automobiles her thought traveled across the years that were ended, coming up sharply to the elaborate entertainment of which she had been hostess the evening before, and she smiled a queer twisted smile for which there seemed no reason whatever, for certainly the dinner had been a brilliant affair and had gone off without a hitch. There had been the usual wonderful gold plate and cut glass; the customary perfect cuisine; the same flawless conduct of servants; a brilliant run of repartee, and a hostess whose beauty and charm was an unceasing wonder to all those whose lives she touched. Yet The Woman as she skimmed along over the city streets in her handsome car, smiled her queer and twisted smile as her thought traveled back over the highly successful dinners and scores of other equally brilliant entertainments which she had graced since she became the mistress of The Man’s beautiful home. , When The Woman’s name was announced at the afternoon reception the hostess of the day turned to the Stranger Guest and remarked that the beautiful woman just coming in was one she should cultivate. “She’s a Carter of Virginia, my dear. Belongs to THE Carters. An invitation to her house means an open sesame to society.” The smile of The Woman as she heard, became a wee bit more twisted than formerly, and a flush mounted to the roots of her glittering hair. • Refreshments had been served. The Stranger Guest hovered over The Woman much as if her soul’s salvation depended upon the latter’s pleasure, and other guests at the little gathering openly courted her favor. “Our hostess tells me you are one of the Virginia Carters,” fawned the Stranger Guest, and the flow of small talk ceased an instant awaiting The Woman’s answer. Her fine eyes trav-

"I Am Sorry,” She Said, "But You Are Quite Mistaken.”

eled around the group of faces stamped by the hollow lives behind them, and back again to the eager eyes of her waiting questioner. Then, like a lighted bomb thrown among them came her reply in calculating and cutting tone. “I am sorry,” she said, "but you are quite mistaken. My mother was a Carter, but not a Carter of Virginia. She came from a shiftless little middle West village, and my father was the village blacksmith. My mother wan a farmer’s daughter and the maid of all work for some well-to-do folk in her vicinity. She left school at fourteen and went out to work, and when she was seventeen she married the village blacksmith —a big, fine fellow with plenty of brawn and little of learning. They lived in two rooms where three children came to them —J being the last. "One day a terrible accident happened in the shop and my father, was

killed. My mother loved him, and she grieved herself almost to death, I think we saved her —the babies. We had to be fed and clothed and sheltered you see —it’s a way with babies. So my mother took in washing. We lived in one room and I slept at the foot of the bed. We ate our dinner on a small table by the stove. Sometimes there was not enough to eat, and mother would wish someone would help us, and often'they did — some aid society, or individual, and every time it happened I would go out in the back yard and fling myself in a fit of temper on the ground and claw and paw until I was quite exhausted. You see I had my father’s high spirit, and charity was hateful to me. When I was fourteen I went to work, and step by step I climbed until I became a mannikin in a fashionable importer’s shop. “One day a man came in with his sister. She had won a gown from him on a wager and he had come to help her in the selection, or else to see that she did not pay too much for it. He gave the former reason for' his coming. She said it was the latter. Anyway he liked the mannikin better than the gown, and later he asked me to dinner with hliA. “The man is my husband,” said The Woman quietly. "I was but eighteen when we were married. We lived abroad where he sent me to school for four years before he brought me back to be the mistress and hostess of his house.”

The handsome room was heavy with ominous silence when The Woman’s voice became still. The hostess of the day had given a resentful exclamation in the middle of the recital which told The Woman quite plainly that she did not thank her for her choice of scene for her confession, and the Stranger Guest, who had fawned for The W Oman’s favor, had withdrawn quite to the end of the room during the telling of the sordid little tale, while here and there a smile flitted from shallow face to shallow face in derisive comment, and The Woman, as

she talked,- both saw and understood. “In the two-room house which my father gave my mother when they were married there was no foolish pride. la the one room my mother was afterward able to provide for her babies there was no dishonesty. She made a hard fight but It was a worthy one. And though these years that I have stood silently by while people introduced me "A Carter of Virginia—one of the Carters”—l have been sick with shame; hot with disgust; miserable with hypocrisy and deceit. Why, my own butler has been more honest, Godfearing, and decent than I! “But now you all know and I am glad, glad, glad!** And The Woman made her farewell with a smile that had lost every whit of its twisted queerness, although it radiated something of the amusement she felt in watching the varying «x----pressions of her thoroughly scandaliced auditors. - ?