Barry & Shelton

The Shelton and Barry families were close. They were in very different economic circumstances, but they had sons who were fast friends.

John Shelton was a successful Boston grain merchant who had built the spacious lakeside house that is today the Fitch Home. It was in their front parlor that the leading men of the neighborhood had settled on the name of “Melrose” for their new town. His son, John Shelton, Jr., had received his education at a private Boston academy.

The Barry family had moved down from New Hampshire, but Royal Barry, the family father, had died shortly thereafter.  His son William was raised on the little triangle of land between Main and Lynde Streets by his mother and his aged grandfather, a tailor and immigrant from Alsace. Needing to support his younger siblings, he worked in Boston as a clerk at a cloth dealership.

The boys attended a recruitment meeting in Melrose on July 28th, 1862, and were convinced to enlist. They were both 18. At that time, the Army of the Potomac had suffered a series of disastrous defeats, and the need for manpower was so acute that new recruits were being sent directly to the front. The Melrose recruits were assigned to the 13th Massachusetts Regiment, which would be engaged in almost constant fighting through the months of August and September.

The deadliest day in the military history of the United States came on September 17th, at the Battle of Antietam. Shelton and Barry were there. Their friend, Ambrose Dawes, later recalled the scene: “Some little time after the battle commenced, [Shelton] turned to me…. and said “I am hit in the foot, but shall stick to it….” This was the last time I saw him. Soon after, I saw young Barry fall with a bullet through the forehead…. a bullet hit Shelton in the spine, which caused paralysis in the lower limbs…. We know he lived but about 48 hours, with no friends around him….”

The Shelton family managed to locate both bodies and return them to Melrose. They had died less than two months after joining the army. They are buried near one another in Wyoming Cemetery. 

Community service opportunity

If you are enjoying reading about the history of Melrose servicemen and women this week, you may be interested in a volunteer opportunity this weekend that will give you an opportunity to learn more about them. The City of Melrose Office of Veterans' Services is looking for volunteers to place flags on the graves of veterans at Wyoming Cemetery. Anyone able to help out is invited to show up at the main entrance to the cemetery at 10 AM on Saturday morning.

Focus on Melrose: the Morse brothers

The Civil War broke out on April 12th, 1861; One week later, on April 19th, two Melrose brothers, Sidney and George Morse, volunteered for the Union Army. They had grown up on the corner of E. Foster and Florence (the house long since demolished), across from the elm tree where the Melrose militia had gathered on April 19th in 1775.

They were assigned to Company D of the 13th Mass. Regiment, a unit that was attached to the Army of the Potomac. In August of 1862, on the eve of the Second Battle of Bull Run, after months of constant marching, Sidney fell ill with Typhoid Fever, and was found in a state of utter exhaustion. He was placed on a cart with other sick men bound for a hospital in Washington, but was left exposed on the cart without food or water for two days. He died on September 16th. He was 17.

Meanwhile, his older brother George had been shot through the hand at Bull Run. After recuperating, he was promoted to 2nd Lieutenant of the 2nd United States Volunteers, an all-Black regiment commanded by white officers. After spending 43 days in the trenches at the siege of Port Hudson, he was wounded in the head, suffered sunstroke, and contracted Malaria. He was discharged and returned to Melrose.

Despite the protests of his family, he reenlisted, this time as a Lieutenant in the 59th Regiment. In April of 1864, during the Wilderness campaign, he was wounded in the head by a falling tree. With a bandaged head, he led his troops at Spotsylvania, where a bullet killed him. His last words were “Tell the boys I die like a soldier.” He was 24.

He left behind his wife, Elizabeth, whom he had married a month after enlisting, and a son, Horace, who had been born six weeks after the wedding. They lived at 531 Lebanon Street, the home of Elizabeth’s parents.

Following the death of his brother, George had written to his mother “….I only look forward to that time when I shall meet him in that life where there are no wars, nor “rumors of war,” but where all is peace and love. And oh, what a joyful meeting it will be! Father, mother, brothers and sisters, all united in one happy family—never more to part!”

Focus on Melrose: Phineas Upham

As we approach Memorial Day, we will profile some of the Melrosians who have died in warfare. We begin with the first recorded military casualty of a person residing on Melrose soil: Lieutenant Phineas Upham, who died in 1676 while fighting in King Philip’s War.

Upham’s family settled in Melrose in what would become the Upham Street neighborhood around 1648, when he was about 12 years old. In 1658 he married Ruth Wood, with whom he had seven children, among them the Phineas Upham who would have the Upham House built in 1703.

These were years when relations between British settler-colonists and Native peoples were largely peaceful, but tense. Native tribes had been decimated by disease, whereas the British thrived, multiplied, and constantly encroached on Native lands. In June of 1675, for reasons too complicated to explain here, the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, alias King Philip, led his people to take arms against Plymouth Colony. This local conflict quickly spiraled out of control, involving every European and Native government in Southern New England, and would be fought with atrocious ferocity. By the time the war was over, one in twenty people in New England had been killed.

On December 19th, Upham served as an officer in the Great Swamp Fight in Rhode Island, a surprise night attack by the British and their Native allies against the Narragansett tribe. It was bitterly cold and the fighting was fierce. In the end the British set fire to the Narragansett settlement, forcing the women and children of the tribe out into the frozen swamp. Several hundred died from injuries, burns, and freezing to death. The Narragansetts had long been the most powerful tribe in the region, but they never recovered from the losses they suffered that night.

Upham himself received an injury in that fight which would prove fatal. He lingered for ten months, finally dying in October of 1676. He left behind Ruth and seven young children. Three centuries later, his many descendants erected the monument you see here at Bell Rock Cemetery to replace a broken gravestone that once sat next to his wife’s. The stone of his father, John, who outlived him, is nearby.

Melrose Spotlight: the Bungalow

In the first decades of the 20th century, architects on the West Coast developed their own simplifying response to the complexity of Victorian design which would come to be called the California Bungalow. “Bungalow” is a term of Indian origin that arrived in the United States by way of Great Britain, but in its American context it generally refers to a one to two story home with a wide front veranda and dormers emerging from a sloping roof. Such houses are sometimes called Craftsman Bungalows, in that their use of local materials and simplicity of style took inspiration from the ideas of Gustav Stickley, publisher of American Craftsman magazine, a popular periodical of the time.

Here in Melrose, we have a few examples of the form, and the most striking is undoubtedly 102 Richardson Road. The house has a simple layout that is not dissimilar to many others in Melrose, but a few bold architectural choices have given it a unique appearance. The roof is curved in a way that may call to mind East Asian building traditions. The dormer is a long set of narrow windows called squints. The nearly full-length porch is supported by squat, round columns set on wooden piers, leading up to a series of rounded arches. The house sits on a raised foundation, and one enters the front door by ascending a wide staircase. All of these effects make the house feel like a temple atop a hill, giving it a grandeur that competes with its Victorian neighbors despite its essential simplicity of form.

One street over, 131 Ashland Street is something of a composite, a kind of shingle-style bungalow with Classical elements. The house is in the basic bungalow format, a full two stories in height and dominated by an overhanging shingled roof that shelters its full-length front porch. The porch is supported by rounded columns resting on stone block piers, and those same columns reappear around the three dormered windows in the roof above. This house appears to have been a bit of an experiment. Houses of the 20th century would largely lack the ostentation of the previous era, but as these examples show, they would not lack for originality.

Mystery in the Highlands

The Melrose Police blotter this week contained news of a gruesome discovery: part of a human hand was found in the ground at Swains Pond. The authorities were called in, the crime scene was cordoned off, investigators approached the remains, and discovered…. that it was some leftover squid, probably used as bait to catch fish.

This was not the first case of mistaken identity of human remains in the Melrose woods. In late September of 1907, Officer James Hanley of the Melrose Police was on moth extermination detail in the woods at the end of Ferdinand Street when he was appalled to discover a partially buried and charred human leg bone sticking out of the ground. The station was notified, the neighbors were questioned, and the Boston papers were full of the news of a horrific mystery unfolding in Melrose.

The next day, those same newspapers carried a correction: after careful investigation by the city physician, it was determined that Officer Hanley had in fact found a ham bone.

The photo you see of a skull stuck in a broken branch was found last week in those same woods off of Ferdinand Street by the author of this post, who was quite shocked to find it—but remembering the story of Officer Hanley, he resolved not to jump to any rash conclusions!

Research the history of your home - tutorial five: Newspapers

Readers of this space by now will have realized that some of our best images come from newspapers. But are they useful when researching your house? Yes—but probably not for the reasons you might think.

For example, upon learning the death date of someone who lived in your house, you might go looking for an obituary. Nowadays just about all of us will receive a glowing short biography a few days after our death. That is a fairly recent phenomenon; a century ago, most ordinary people received a one sentence death notice. Marriage announcements reached their zenith in the decades after World War II, often containing minute descriptions of wedding parties, but have since gone into decline. Birth announcements at any period have been rare.

You are also not likely to find a notice of the construction and initial sale of your house. Houses were often custom built for a particular buyer and were not advertised on the open market. You are much more likely to find an ad for your house placed at a later sale date.

What are newspapers good for? The advent of searchable text has made them quite useful. You can, for example, search for your exact address in quotes, and every instance of its appearance will be available to you in seconds. The same is true for the names of particular people who lived in your house.

For Melrose research, we have two favorite newspaper websites. One is the Boston Public Library’s newspaper collection, here: www.bpl.org/resources-types/newspapers/. While there are many, many newspapers available there, the most important one for Melrose research is the Boston Globe. The other is the pay site https://www.genealogybank.com/, which has the largest collection of Boston newspapers online. Unfortunately, no Melrose newspaper has yet been added to these collections, which means that microfilm at the Melrose Public Library is your only option for local coverage.

Perhaps the best thing about newspapers are the accidental discoveries. We found these lovely drawings of street scenes of Melrose Square from 1901 while looking for something else. Who knows what else is waiting to be found?

Lost Melrose, Volume Eight

In this installment of Lost Melrose, we remember Deering Lumber—rather specifically, its business office, which was located on the corner of Essex and Willow Streets.

At the time of its sale in 2015, the Deering Lumber Company had been in operation for well over a century, having been founded around the year 1900, as you can see in the map image from 1903. Its original location was further up Tremont Street, across from Ell Pond. It may well have remained there if not for a disastrous fire that broke out 86 years ago today, on May 18, 1935.

Deering Lumber’s entire operation was destroyed, but they must have been well insured, for they were able to reopen the next year at the location they would occupy for the next 80 years, at what is today 158 Essex Street. Not only that, they managed to hire Melrose’s most famous architect, Royal Barry Wills, to design their front offices. Wills gave the building a sophisticated 18th century flair, with an elaborately pedimented Georgian doorframe and varied fenestration that you would not have expected to find at a business known for the whir of buzzsaws and the rumbling of forklifts.

The building later suffered from a rather utilitarian, if unobtrusive rear addition. Nonetheless, it survived the great fire of 1959 that destroyed much of the 1935 Deering Lumber complex, had weathered decades of varied uses, and was unique in being both a tangible link to Melrose’s industrial past, and a rare example of Royal Barry Wills’ commercial work.

The Historical Commission only learned that the building was a Wills design after it was demolished, when Historic New England placed their collection of Royal Barry Wills materials online, from which these architectural drawings are taken. This is yet another example of why we believe a demolition review ordinance is of such importance. Had such an ordinance been in place, we could have documented the structure before it was gone forever.

The Colonial Revival style and Royal Barry Wills

Over the course of the 19th century, house styles became more and more complex, leading in the early years of the 20th century to a backlash and a growing preference for simplicity of form. In Melrose, that often meant a return to the past, to the aesthetic movement called the Colonial Revival.

In the late 19th century, the Yankee descendants of the Puritans who had come to this land in the 17th century saw their cultural dominance erode. They began to set new value on colonial era buildings, believing that newly arrived immigrants could absorb American values by spending time in the virtuous settings of their Puritan ancestors.

Colonial Revival architecture sought to package that virtuous aesthetic in a form that was affordable and modern. It became the dominant style of new house construction in Melrose in the first half of the 20th century. The person most responsible for that dominance was Royal Barry Wills, America’s most influential Colonial Revival architect, who grew up at 51-53 Oakland Street in Melrose.

Wills graduated from Melrose High in 1914, and then studied architecture at MIT, which was to become one of the great centers of architectural Modernism. You could interpret Wills’ domestic vision as a marriage of Colonial Revival aesthetics with the Modernist imperative that houses be technologically advanced spaces that responded to 20th century needs. Wills designed many modernist house plans, but the market he helped to cultivate preferred his Colonial Revival work.

Wills’s own house, built on family land in 1929 at 59 Oakland Street, is a prototypical Wills design. It is a Cape featuring a low-pitched roof, an off-center central chimney, and weathered shingles, all recalling the 17th century. Set askew on its lot, it cleverly hides a two-story addition to its rear. While the aesthetics bring to mind Puritan virtue, functionally the house owes little to the 17th century, as the rooms are arranged for a 20th century family. This vision—at once nostalgic and contemporary—made Wills one of America’s most successful architects, and forever changed the neighborhoods of Melrose.

Lost Melrose, Volume Seven

In this episode of Lost Melrose, we remember 37 Washington Street, a part of the Boston Rubber Shoe Company factory complex that the Melrose Historical Commission agreed to let fall in January of 2016.

The repurposing of the BRSC factory complex into residential space, still ongoing next door at 99 Washington Street, has been by far the most extensive historic preservation project in Melrose history. The initial development required review by the Massachusetts Historical Commission, and because the Melrose Historical Commission is the local proxy of the MHC, we became the legal arbiter of the project's historical integrity.

There were a number of difficult decisions in that process. Most memorably, the developer at one point floated the idea of demolishing the original smokestack and replacing it with an artificial copy. Our commission refused to budge on that point, and the smokestack remains. When we were asked a couple of years later to allow the demolition of 37 Washington Street, a building that significantly postdated the core factory complex and that had few distinctive features to recommend it, we were much more sympathetic.

In return for our support of the demolition, we asked for one small bit of mitigation: that an interpretive panel detailing the history of the site be placed along Washington Street for the edification of passersby. The developers agreed to this concession, a panel was designed, it was reviewed by the Planning Board and the Historical Commission in 2018--and three years and three site owners later, we are still waiting for its installation. You can see the draft of the panel in the second image. It profiles the use of the building in the 1950s as the site of the National Radio Company, a manufacturer of short-wave radios, and of the Vogue Doll Company in the late 1960s, creators of the popular Ginny Doll.

We hope that one day soon you will be able to see the full panel for yourself. It’s been a long time coming.

Melrose Spotlight: the Triple Decker

Have you ever noticed that you don’t see many triple-deckers in Melrose? The triple-decker is one of the most distinctive architectural housing styles found in Greater Boston, yet Melrose boasts perhaps less than a dozen examples of the form. This is not an accident. This was by design.

Exactly a century ago, in 1921, the newly-formed Melrose Planning Board submitted their first zoning ordinance to the Board of Aldermen, and fear of triple-deckers was a major motivation. They wrote: “We recommend that a zoning ordinance be adopted as soon as possible. We understand that there is now being considered a plan for erecting a large number of three-flat houses on Lebanon Street near the Malden line. It has been the policy of Melrose to discourage three-flat houses. We believe that this policy has been wise, and that the erection of the above-mentioned houses will be not only a detriment to the city but also a financial burden to it.”

The next year the zoning ordinance was adopted, and triple-deckers were effectively made illegal in Melrose. Yet as the planning board’s memo made clear, Melrose had long had an informal policy “to discourage three-flat houses.”

The reason for this policy, never stated directly at the time, is obvious in retrospect: triple-deckers were associated with immigrant families, who were considered undesirable. A Boston Herald article in 1922 took note of Melrose’s new zoning ordinance against triple-deckers, and concluded “The general class of mill workers, composed for the most part of illiterate foreigners or aliens, are not attracted [to Melrose], which makes for a closer cooperation and better understanding among the people of the community.”

Triple-deckers are today beloved of city planners and homebuyers alike for their sturdy construction and for how they enable high population density at a neighborly scale. A century ago, they were considered firetraps that attracted the wrong sort of people. To note their absence in Melrose is to confront a lasting and costly historical consequence of nativism.

Research the history of your home - tutorial four: Headstones

It is time to return to our sources series, to discuss a weighty type of document: the headstone. Is it worth pursuing the record of the people who lived in your house to the grave? In general, yes.

Some gravestones do not tell us much. The earliest stones tend to be highly stylized: first death’s heads, then cherubim, then urns. In the second quarter of the twentieth century, the stones again became standardized, set in rows, and usually yield no information other than names and dates.

But the Victorian era, lasting roughly from about 1840 to the start of World War I, gave us stones that have as much variety as the houses of the same period, and can tell us a lot about the values of the people who had them carved. Liberty Bigelow, for example, not only wanted to turn his house, today’s Beebe Estate, into a showplace, but paid to have the tallest monument in Wyoming Cemetery, an obelisk over two stories tall. Moses Page was a successful Melrose businessman who was neither Catholic nor Irish, yet he insisted on an elaborate Celtic cross as his memorial—which raises new questions about him. The parents of little Italo Americo Giacobbe memorialized their three-year-old son with the carving of an angel—and the very fact that this poor immigrant couple chose to spend their savings on this stone tells us something significant about them.

Not everyone in Melrose got a stone here. There are no surviving stones for enslaved people. Pauper’s graves, of which there are many at Wyoming Cemetery, have no markers. Catholics and Jews generally preferred to be buried at cemeteries for people of their own faith, and likely rest somewhere outside of Melrose. Fortunately, thanks to the tireless volunteers of findagrave.com, countless photos of gravestones have been uploaded and are fully searchable. Not all burials are represented there, but you are welcome to call Wyoming Cemetery directly so that they can check their complete records.

At this time of year, when the birds are singing and the flowers are in bloom, it is the perfect time to stroll through a local cemetery, and learn some history while you are there.

Focus on Melrose: Fred Green

On November 19th, 1946, a Melrose High School sophomore was fatally injured during a Melrose-Beverly varsity football game at the Manning Bowl in Lynn and died two days later. His teammates from the class of 1948 later dedicated our athletic field in his name. The Tremont Street facility became known as the Fred Green Athletic Field, honoring a fallen boy who classmates described as “unassuming” and of “fine character.”  The complex has been used for more than 80 years by generations of Melrose athletes, students, city organizers, club members, band performers and annual high school graduation.

Decades ago, Green’s classmates came up with the idea of honoring the lost Red Raider. Richard Harlow, a teammate of Fred Green’s and a pallbearer at his funeral, recalled how the field came to be. “At our reunion we decided to create a monument to remember Freddy.” Harlow, a standout MHS athlete and member of the Melrose Athletic Hall of Fame, remembered Green’s injury. “We were playing on the road and we didn’t have home games that year. I remember Freddy came home on the bus. He died from a spleen injury just a few days later. It was a horrible loss.”

The team went on to beat Arlington to win the Div. 1 Class-A championship that season in what Harlow described as “an emotional win.” They qualified to go to Miami to play but officials opted not to because of Green’s death, sending Lynn Classical in their place. “It was such a shock,” said Green’s childhood friend and teammate Sid Field, also a pallbearer at his services. “Fred was a second-string player and it was because we were up by so much at the half that he got some playing time. And then it happened.”

Field, a long-time Melrose parks department head, grew up with Green on School Street and walked to school with him. “He was such a good kid, really hard working, he helped his mother because his father died the year before. He studied while I played; he was so focused and was strong as an ox. If this type of injury happened today he wouldn’t have died. And had he lived, he would have done well in life.” The class of 1948 did not forget their fallen teammate and after their 40th reunion they put together a permanent reminder: The Fred Green rock that sits at the entrance on Tremont Street.

Fred Green grew up at 35 School Street in Melrose, attended Winthrop Elementary before MHS, and left behind a mother and 10 year old brother. According to family years later, because his father had died the year before, and finances were tight, he stayed home longer than he should have for fear of incurring a medical bill. By the time he went to the hospital it was too late.

Special thanks to Jen Gentile, author of the original article that appeared in the Melrose Weekly News on Friday, November 26, 2010.