May Day and Frank Collier

Tomorrow is May Day, honored by Socialists and Communists worldwide, a fitting time to remember the persecution and tragic fate of Franklin P. Collier, Jr.

Collier was raised in Melrose at 211 Porter Street. His father was a popular cartoonist for the Boston Traveler newspaper. Like many East Side families since, their social life revolved around the links of Bellevue Golf Club. In 1923, Collier graduated from Melrose High School and matriculated at Dartmouth, where he majored in journalism.

Darkness lay beneath this idyllic, privileged upbringing. In the early 1930s, Collier published two erotic, violent novels. They failed to sell. His father died, and he moved with his mother to 47 Ferdinand Street. He worked as a writer for the WPA, holding leadership roles in the writer’s union.

At some point during these years, he became a devoted Marxist. He was the leader of the Melrose area cell of the Communist Party USA, holding meetings at his house on Ferdinand Street. By 1945, he was manager of the Progressive Bookshop on Beach Street in Boston, the chief source of Communist literature in New England.

During these years he also made the ill-starred acquaintance of Herbert Philbrick, a fellow Melrosian and secret FBI informant. Acting on Philbrick’s accusations, in 1954 the FBI arrested seven Massachusetts Communist leaders, including Collier. Collier had to post a high bail, lost his job, and found himself unemployable.

The state charged Collier and his allies with plotting the violent overthrow of the government. Both the US Supreme Court and the Massachusetts SJC ruled against the legal basis for the prosecution; moreover, no evidence ever surfaced that Collier or the others had ever planned such an attack. Eventually, all charges were dropped.

Collier’s mother died in 1957. In 1958, in despair over her death and his own persecution, he took his own life.

Melrose school children have for decades read “The Crucible” to understand the baseless witch hunts of the McCarthy era. They might do better to study Franklin Collier, the only person in Melrose history arrested, persecuted, and driven to an early death for holding unpopular opinions and reading unpopular books.

Water, water, everywhere ...

Melrose has been in the news today on account of a burst water main. This is a rare occurrence. Here is Melrose, we have a water system so reliable that we rarely stop to think about how it works. Its construction was the most herculean public works project in city history, and it was brought to us by exploited immigrant labor.

In 1867, a corporation representing Melrose, Malden, and Medford purchased Spot Pond for the purpose of supplying water to their towns. In 1870, the first pipes were laid connecting Spot Pond water to Melrose. In 1889, Massachusetts established a new corporation—the direct ancestor of today’s MWRA—to bring sewage to metropolitan Boston. Under its auspices, Melrose began construction of its sewage system in 1892.

What is largely left out of official histories and town documents is how all of this construction was financed and completed. Melrose wanted to build its water and sewage system on the cheap, and turned to short-term contractual labor to get the job done.

We would know little about their work if not for a series of strikes that received national headlines in the summer of 1896. Melrose had contracted with a New York company to complete that season’s sewage work. The company found the cheapest labor available to do the job, about 150 mostly older Italian immigrant men. The contractor refused to pay them wages upfront, and provided no housing. The men built a shanty town in the woods at Swains Pond.

On July 17^th, tensions boiled over. A foreman was attacked, the Melrose police were called in, and they chased the laborers in a running battle back to Swains Pond. The gangs now did their work under police guard. On the 22^nd, an Italian teenager pulled a gun on Frank McLaughlin, the chief of police. The boy was arrested, but Melrose was now in the grip of rumors of an Italian invasion.

The next week, the contractor was fired, and all of the workers were sent packing. Later that summer, 200 new Italian immigrants were brought in to finish the job.

The next time you flush a toilet or take a shower, remember how we got that water.

Melrose Spotlight: the Queen Anne building style

In our architectural tour of Melrose, we now come to a misnomer: “Queen Anne.” This style began in England as a revival of elements popular during the reign of Queen Anne, but in America it evolved into a flamboyant fusion of fantastic elements that bore only passing resemblance to structures built in early 18^th century England.

Familiar to most Melrosians is 647 Main Street, the former Methodist parsonage, now Follow Your Art Community Studios. It is a study in contrasting planes and textures. The tower is the most recognizable Queen Anne element, in this case an octagon topped by a faceted dome. To the right of the tower, the third-story gable has prominent overhanging eaves, and is itself cantilevered over bay windows below. The three small casement windows give the gable a Tudor feel, and contrast with the large, double-hung panes of glass that make up the fenestration on the rest of the house. The main gable of the house is covered in fish scale shingles, whereas elsewhere there is horizontal clapboarding.  As this early postcard attests, the house’s original color was the bright yellow we see today, which was in marked contrast to the dark wood found in its interior.

At 283 Vinton Street we find a welcoming wraparound porch, fenced in with delicate spindles. The three front-facing gables bring a Classical sensibility. But most remarkable here is the varied fenestration. Most of the windows are of the typical double-hung sash type, in great contrast to the exquisite design of the windows in the center gable. That centerpiece is set off by the round window to its right, and the shell pattern carving above the three windows to its left. When we come around the corner, we find a Palladian window, a window surmounted with Georgian style scrollwork, and bay windows in two different styles. This is a glazier’s delight.

When you think of “Victorian Melrose,” chances are that you picture Queen Anne houses, in all of their exuberant colors and shapes. But there was a time not long ago when realtors struggled to sell these “ugly Victorians.” That is why we support historic preservation. What we consider ugly today might just be beloved by the next generation.

Earth Day Remembrance

On this Earth Day, we remember an environmental crisis in Melrose hatched by humans over a century ago.

In 1879, a French scientist living in Medford was conducting experiments on imported European gypsy moths, and he allowed some of them to escape. The larvae of the moths began to eat the foliage in the Fells. Over the course of the following years, the moth population swelled, and by the 1890s millions of moths were living across the Boston area, with the highest concentration just north of the city.

The infestation became so bad that entire forests were defoliated. Newspaper reports described how a single kerosene or electric lamp could draw swarms of thousands of moths. Horrifyingly, the larvae and their excrement would become airborne, fall like rain, and cause a painful, itchy rash like poison ivy on the skin of anyone who came in contact with it. By 1900, gypsy moth exterminators were paid by the city to wander the streets and woodlands of Melrose, searching out larvae to douse with poisons. Even a segment of the Melrose Police Department was put on a seasonal gypsy moth extermination detail.

The US Department of Agriculture realized that the infestation posed a threat to the future of the entire country, and tasked a team of scientists to put an end to it. Their lab was established in 1905 at 17 East Highland Avenue, a private home with an ample backyard. The backyard was crucial, because the scientists built temporary structures there to house new invasive species that they had imported from abroad which they hoped would kill the gypsy moth. A Japanese beetle that ate the larvae, and a fly from Southern Italy with parasitic maggots were two of the best candidates. The scientists would breed them at 17 East Highland, release them in the wild, and observe the results.

The gypsy moth lab lasted until 1932, moving around the corner in 1925 to 964 Main Street. They also owned a storehouse at an as-yet unidentified location, which you can see in the last image. Though not in the numbers seen a century ago, the gypsy moth is still with us, a seasonal reminder of the impact a single human decision can have on the ecosystem.

Lost Melrose, Volume Six

In this installment of Lost Melrose, we remember 775 Main Street, a significant modernist building that the Melrose Historical Commission helped to demolish.

In 2015, Melrose-Wakefield Hospital proposed demolishing five buildings, the entire block of Porter between Main and Rowe, to create temporary parking lots.

Attention immediately focused on 775 Main, and for good reasons. In 1936 this office building had been constructed by the firm of Royal Barry Wills, an architect who was arguably the most culturally influential Melrosian who ever lived. The young architect who drafted the plans for this building was Hugh Stubbins, who had just finished his studies under Walter Gropius, and would go on to become one of the foremost modernist architects of the 20^th century. This building seemed altogether too significant to let fall.

But there was a major problem with this story. Sometime in the intervening decades, an owner had remodeled the building in such a way that nearly all of its modernist elements had been removed or obscured. The roof, the doors, and the windows had all been replaced in a vaguely Colonial Revival fashion, splashes of brick were added, and the eaves of the roof were extended to cover up the distinctive sawtooth bays. In many ways, the cutting-edge structure that had been designed in 1936 was already gone.

Meanwhile, research on 12 Porter Street, one of the other buildings slated for demolition, revealed that it dated to 1820 at the latest, making it one of the few remaining houses in Melrose built in the first quarter of the 19^th century. Since the tenant of 12 Porter was putting up a fight to save his building, the Historical Commission made a calculated decision: we drafted a memorandum that called for the preservation of 12 Porter, while downplaying the significance of 775 Main.

Five years later, 12 Porter is still standing, and 775 Main is still a parking lot. But did we make the right decision? Please let us know in the comments below.

Research the history of your home - tutorial three: Census and city directory records

In our sources series we have covered maps and deeds, which both tell you who owned your house. But who lived in your house?

The most detailed sources for answering that question are census records, which will be familiar to anyone who has done genealogical research. From 1790 to 1840, census records will tell you the name of the head of household; from 1850 to 1940, they will tell you the name of every person in the household, as well as other helpful information such as their age, race, occupation, and place of birth. Using census records, you can start to develop a profile of the former inhabitants of your home.

That’s all well and good, but how can you find out who lived in your home if you don’t have a name? While you cannot search directly by address, on both ancestry.com and familysearch.org you can browse the census records until you find your address. The Melrose census was divided by ward, and ward boundaries haven’t changed much since 1850. Simply open up the year you want to search, find your ward, and start reading through the scanned images. Eventually, you will find your street, and your address—unless you are searching before 1900, in which case there will be no street numbers, as Melrose did not yet have them.

One weakness of census data is that it was only compiled every ten years. Fortunately, street directories and lists of persons are helpful sources for covering the years in between. The Melrose Public Library has a full collection of street directories dating back to 1872; while the library is closed, ancestry.com has a smaller collection dating back to about the same time. Street directories usually only tell you the head of household, but often reveal the work address of that person, which is not revealed in the census. Lists of persons were compiled by the City of Melrose starting in 1916, and list all of the eligible voters in the household; the MPL has a collection of these documents stretching down nearly to the present day.

While the library is closed, they have arranged for you to have free home access to ancestry.com, which you can find here: https://www.melrosepubliclibrary.org/alerts/ancestry-com/.

Focus on Melrose: Clarence DeMar

Melrose has produced many fine athletes in its history, but none so victorious as Clarence DeMar. DeMar won the Boston Marathon seven times, in 1911, 1922, 1923, 1924, 1927, 1928, and 1930, the most in the history of what is now called the men’s division.

DeMar was born in abject poverty in southern Ohio. After his father died, his mother packed up the children and moved to Boston when a relative there promised them free rent. Young Clarence boarded at a school for orphans where he was taught the printer’s trade, which would become his lifelong profession.

By 1910, DeMar was living with his mother and siblings at 43 Union Street, in a house that has long since been demolished. Despite a doctor’s warning—he had a heart murmur—he entered the 1910 Boston Marathon, placing 2^nd; the next year, he won.

This victory led him to a spiritual crisis. DeMar feared that further victories would cause him excessive pride. He did not enter a marathon for ten years, but he usually ran home each day from his job on Franklin Street in Boston, and maintained a strict vegetarian diet. He was also head of the Sunday school at First Baptist Church, and was a Scoutmaster.

By the 1920s, DeMar’s conscience felt at ease, and he began the streak of Boston Marathon wins that would put him in the record books, his final victory coming at age 41.  He always wore the jersey of the Melrose American Legion post, and was closely identified with his hometown. After each win, thousands of Melrosians would line Main Street to welcome him home.

 

In 1929, DeMar married Margaret Ilsley, a fellow Sunday school teacher at First Baptist. Shortly thereafter, they moved to Keene, NH, where they would spend the rest of their lives. In October, 1930, the new Melrose athletic fields—today’s Fred Green and Morelli fields—were dedicated to DeMar.

 

Today, the only visible reminder of what was once Melrose’s most famous citizen is the Marathon Memorial on the Main Street side of Ell Pond, which was dedicated in 2001.

Melrose Spotlight: the Stick building style

In the late 19^th century, architects in Melrose finally abandoned any pretense to simplicity, symmetry, and balance and began creating house styles that worked to overwhelm the senses through dramatic use of unexpected combinations of structural features and surface decorations.

The first of these was the Stick style. Stick began as a response to the new building technologies involved in balloon framing that we discussed in our last post, as the exterior features, known as “stick work,” reference the house’s internal structure. Stick houses often show off elaborate wooden aprons under the eaves. Roofs tend to be steep gables set off with decorative towers ending in elongated spindles.

A dramatic example is 51 Bellevue Avenue. Note the steep cross gables with their delicate aprons. Dormers are likewise steep, with varied surface decoration. The round tower on the left side of the house has an especially elongated roof, ending in a spindle. Note also the corner board trim, which are single pieces of wood extending a full two stories, referencing the balloon framing within.

A simpler, though no less interesting example is 248 East Foster Street. This house features one very steep, irregularly proportioned gable. Every angle of this house features stick trim, and the eves are festooned with a diamond and circle pattern. The porch braces are painted decoratively. The varied slopes, trims, and decorative patterns employed in this house takes what is a simple basic layout—it’s a rectangle—and turns it into an adventure in texture.

At 75 Elm Street, the characteristic corner board trim is missing, but it is still identifiably in the Stick style. It has an almost jarringly angular sensibility, quite elongated, with one’s eyes drawn to the extremely steep, square roof of its tower. The roof of the tower is itself decorated with tiny, angular, ornamental dormers. The unexpected verticality of its massing, unusual roof, and the play of the surface decoration make it unlike anything else in Melrose—which was, of course, exactly what its builder wanted.

Melrose Spotlight: the Folk Victorian building style

Here we see 58, 62, 66, and 68 East Foster Street, and 153, 157, 159, and 163 Linwood Avenue. The Foster Street houses were built by 1889, and the Linwood Ave houses were there by 1903. These are simple gable-end homes. You can find hundreds of homes like them in almost every corner of Melrose; in fact, there’s a good chance that you are reading this post in a similar house right now.

What style would you call them? Some call simple dwellings of the 19^th century “folk Victorian,” and there is a vernacular element here. Houses like these had been built in Melrose for years, and you could be excused for dating them to an earlier time period. Take a look, for example, at 153 Linwood Avenue, at the right side of the second streetscape; with its weighty pediment and columns, it would fit in well with the Greek Revival houses on Cottage Street—yet it is some 70 years younger. In terms of aesthetic values, these houses are traditional.

Yet if you ripped open their walls (and please don’t), you would find the Industrial Revolution. Since the 17^th century, houses in Melrose had been timber-framed, meaning that every structural element was made of wood and fastened together in hand-carved mortice and tenon joints. That made housebuilding a form of highly skilled labor that required long apprenticeship.

By 1875, industrial production techniques had transformed housebuilding, and houses were now balloon-framed. At sawmills, old growth trees could be quickly and precisely cut into standard sizes, some of them up to two stories long. These wooden members could then be hammered together using thousands of machine-made nails, which were now a cheap commodity. Houses could be built in days or weeks instead of months, causing a drop in housing prices. In response, developers parceled out land in narrow strips near the rail stations, leaving just enough frontage for a narrow, gable-end house and a driveway, maximizing their return on investment.

When we hear “Victorian Melrose,” we might think of the city’s ostentatious estates; yet it was the hundreds of balloon-framed, industrially produced houses that truly made the Victorian city work.

Lost Melrose, Volume Five

Back in February, we posted about the plaque in Pine Banks Park that honors the Ensign Thomas Lynde house, which was almost certainly built with enslaved labor. But whatever became of the house? That is the subject of this week’s installment of Lost Melrose.

The plaque was first installed in 1930 as part of the Massachusetts Tercentenary program. At that time, the house was very much in existence, near the northwest corner of Main Street and Banks Place, somewhere in what is today the parking lot of Hunt's Photo and Video. Famed as the oldest house in Melrose, it was the only building in the city honored with such a plaque. Ten years later, in 1940, the Historic American Buildings Survey took the first two photos of the house that you see here.

The third photo was taken by a member of the Melrose Camera Club in 1956, and it was a bit of a requiem, since the house was about to be demolished. In that photo, you can see that the vegetation surrounding the property was spiraling out of control, and apparently things were much the same way on the inside. The house was condemned, the final result of a sad state of affairs that historic preservationists call “demolition by neglect.” Because the building died in that way, there was no hue and cry upon its demise. It had been on life support for a long time.

Following demolition, the plaque was unceremoniously chucked into a dump, where it was later recovered by a scavenger. One day, the scavenger knocked on the door of Suzanne Lynde of Woodland Road, the only person with the Lynde surname then living in Melrose, to ask if she wanted it. She accepted the donation, and the 200 pound plaque lay face down in her backyard for years. In 1994, Lynde attended a lecture on Thomas Lynde given by Anthony Pagano at the Melrose Public Library. Following his presentation, Lynde asked Pagano if he wanted the sign. Pagano then paid to have the plaque cleaned and arranged with the city of Melrose to mount the plaque in its current location.

And that is the strange tale of why the largest and heaviest historical marker in the city describes a building that no longer exists at a location where it never existed.

Research the history of your home: Tutorial two - Deeds

In this installment of our sources series, we examine that most essential of property records, the deed.

When the Puritans arrived in Massachusetts, they brought with them a reverence for written legal documents and private property, a set of values that has lasted for nearly four centuries and given Massachusetts one of the most extensive archives of land ownership in the world. They made copies of these records in books. In 1639, Middlesex County started at Book #1; we are now at Book #77,420. Every single one of these records is now online.

To begin tracing your property’s history, you need only find the current deed. If you can’t find it, look up your house on the Melrose assessor’s database, here:  http://melrose.patriotproperties.com/default.asp. The “legal reference” is the book and page number.

Now that you have the book and page number, you can find the complete text of the deed at the Middlesex South Registry of Deeds, here: https://www.masslandrecords.com/MiddlesexSouth/. Using the “search criteria” dropdown menu, you can also search by address, date, buyer, seller, and other categories.

The Registry’s website only goes back to the year 1900, but not to worry, the older records are also online. The genealogy website of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has scanned in all of the records from the beginning until 1900, here: https://www.familysearch.org/search/collection/2106411. To use this collection, you must create a free ID.

Using deeds, you can establish the complete ownership history of the parcel of land on which you reside since the beginning of English colonization—but it is important to recognize what deeds will not tell you. Most importantly, they will likely not tell you the exact date when your house was built. Their ultimate function is to record land ownership; the buildings on the land are incidental. That said, you can usually tell under whose ownership the house was built. If you find a deed where the property was sold for $300, and five years later it was sold for $4000, the construction of a major capital improvement was undoubtedly the reason.

Melrose Spotlight: the Second Empire building style

Following the Civil War, Melrose housebuilders adopted a style that was a distinctly modern marriage of form and function. The Second Empire style was the signature look of the great urban renewal project that was Baron Haussmann’s Paris. Here was a style that was not a revival of some older form, but was based on contemporary aesthetics and needs.

To identify such homes, you need look to only one feature: the roof. These are mansard roofs, which are four-sided hipped roofs with two distinct slopes, nearly flat on top and then becoming quite steep on the approach to the walls, allowing for fenestration on all sides. Gone was the dark, stuffy attic that became intolerably hot in the summer. All of those windows in the mansard roof meant sunlight and cross breezes and the potential for adding extra bedrooms or a separate apartment. In an era of rising population, the Second Empire style allowed for denser residential spaces.

Take, for example, 147 West Wyoming Avenue. With its ornate brackets, dentil cornice, and wide eaves at the roofline, it is in some respects not too different from an Italianate house. Yet Classical references are missing, as our eyes meet a series of rectangles in contrasting lengths and widths, with diminishing fenestration giving the house the vertical feel of a genteel urban townhouse. With three full floors of living space, this house today contains four apartments.

We find more elegant Second Empire housing on Vine Street. Number 3 Vine, with its finely-wrought dormers, cornice, and brackets, began as a single-family home, but was converted into a two-family structure. Looking down the street, its twin at 9 Vine underwent the same transformation, whereas 13-15 Vine went from a two-family home to a twelve-apartment building.

The most ambitious privately owned Second Empire structure in Melrose was undoubtedly the Waverly Building. Constructed in 1866, it was the tallest inhabited building in 19^th century Melrose, and today contains 30 apartments and 6 commercial spaces. Set next to the railroad depot, it boldly announced to passing travelers that Melrose was an urbane, forward-thinking community that was building for the future.