School Days

School is back in session, and teachers confronted by unruly students may turn wistful and remember the good old days when children in Melrose always behaved. Alas, it was never so.

The most vivid description of school life in early Melrose can be found in a typed manuscript written by Levi S. Gould (1831-1917) in 1909. Gould, who would one day become Melrose’s first mayor, grew up at 51 Ashland Street, a house we have previously described in our entry on Georgian architecture. He attended Melrose’s only public school, a small two-story structure on the corner of Main and Upham Streets that was built in 1829 and burned down in 1845. Younger children were taught in the first-floor classroom, typically by a woman, while older children were taught on the floor above, usually by a man.

Gould’s father, Dr. Levi Gould, was a surgeon by trade who also taught the older class in that schoolhouse. Decades later, his son described his classroom:

“Dr. Gould ruled with a rod of iron literally, or at least he had a ruler fashioned from spring steel which he did not hesitate to use when an emergency arose. On one occasion at the commencement of the term, he was set upon by three school outlaws from 18 to 20 years of age. Backing up into a corner of the school room he belabored his assailants with the ruler and when the fray was ended two of them had their scalps laid open while the third had lost an ear. Sending one of the scholars for his saddle bags, he bandaged up the heads of two of them and sewed the severed ear onto the third and went on with the school as though nothing had happened.

“On another occasion a young fellow, with more valor than discretion, tried conclusions with my honored sire, and finding himself getting the worst of it, suddenly vaulted out of the window, but nothing daunted the doughty Doctor jumped after him. After an exciting chase which nearly encircled the village he was captured and brought back in triumph, receiving a suitable castigation for his escapade.”

We wish the teachers and students in the Melrose schools all the best in this new academic year. May your classrooms prove to be more placid than Dr. Gould’s.

Eleanor and Stephen Harris

On an October Day in 1967, Eleanor VanBuskirk Harris had a terrible premonition at her home at 87 Boston Rock Road. She was staring at a photograph of the US Navy ship on which her son, Lt. Cdr. Stephen Harris, was about to deploy. The photo went hazy, and she watched as five enemy ships floated into view and surrounded her son’s vessel. Coming out of her reverie, she felt frightened, but told no one about her vision.

Three months later, it all came true. Stephen, a graduate of Melrose High and Harvard, worked for the Navy as a cryptologist on board the USS Pueblo, a surveillance ship that listened in on North Korean radio chatter. On January 23rd, 1968, after a two-hour chase, it was captured by a small flotilla of North Korean Navy vessels. Below decks, Harris and his men tried desperately to burn the many classified documents they had on board, but could not finish the job in time.

The 82 sailors of the USS Pueblo became POWs, and for the next eleven months would be subjected to frequent beatings, interrogations, and a diet of turnips. Harris would survive those months through constant prayer, alone and, when possible, with his cellmates.

Back in Melrose, Eleanor also prayed—and she wrote. As one of Melrose’s most charismatic and dedicated teachers, she knew how to motivate people. With the nation’s attention riveted on Vietnam and domestic turmoil, she wrote to every member of the Senate to remind them of her missing son and his crewmates. After one of her letters was read on a national newscast, she received a call from the State Department requesting that she stop, as her supporters had inundated the phones and mailrooms of Washington.

Her diligence paid off. On December 23rd, 1968, the North Korean government allowed their prisoners to leave. Stephen and Eleanor were reunited a few days later in San Diego. At first, Eleanor did not recognize her son. He had lost 50 pounds, and was so weak that he had to rely on a wheelchair.

Weeks spent back in Melrose restored Stephen’s health. But his ordeal was not yet over. In April he faced a Navy tribunal, which recommended that he and Captain Lloyd Bucher be court-martialed for allowing classified documents to fall into enemy hands. Navy Secretary John H. Chafee overruled the tribunal, saying that the men had already been punished enough.

While Stephen was reinstated, any hopes of advancement had been dashed. Still, as he would tell many audiences afterwards, his misfortune had only served to strengthen his Christian faith. A few years later, he would tell his story in the book “My Anchor Held.” His mother would also write a memoir about that awful year, titled “The Ship that Never Returned.”

The USS Pueblo never did return, and has never been decommissioned. It is now a museum run by the North Korean government in Pyongyang. Eleanor died in 2011, at age 105. Stephen died on May 18, 2020, at age 82.

The Mountain House

There is no structure in Melrose with a longer and more complicated history than 28-30 Tappan Street. It dates back at least in part to the 17th century, spent most of its history at another location, and was the birthplace of modern manufacturing in Melrose.

Around 1640, on what became the northwest corner of Vinton and Maple Streets, John Sprague, one of the first white residents of Melrose, built a house. In 1742, the house was inherited by Isaac Green, who demolished the structure but salvaged materials from it to build a new house. In 1806 this house was purchased by Jonathan Barrett, who enlarged it and dubbed it “The Mountain House” in honor of its location at the base of the hill then known as Barrett’s Mount.

At that time, it was common for farmers to take up shoemaking during the long winter months. Barrett was a bit more ambitious. He hired a half-dozen laborers to live and work on site, and built an ell onto his house to serve as a workspace. Small in scale, powered only by human hands, it was Melrose’s first factory, and inaugurated a long shoemaking tradition. As for Barrett, he did not get to enjoy his success, dying in 1821 at age 46. Because he died suddenly, a probate inventory was taken of his belongings, including the shoe factory, which you can read below.

The house remained in the Barrett family for some decades. You can see it labeled on the 1875 map of Melrose. Around 1885, the house was sold and moved to an unknown location. On the 1889 map, you can see that the house has been removed from the corner of Maple and Vinton, but has yet to make the move to the corner of Sanford and Tappan. The 1897 map shows the house at its present location. In its new neighborhood, the house would for some decades become a grocery store operated by Irish immigrant brothers Jeremiah and Dennis Lucey.

It is now a six-unit condominium building, making it the only structure in Melrose that has been a single-family home, a factory, a mixed retail-residential space, and now a multifamily residence. If parts of the building do in fact date to 1640, it is also the most successful recycling project in the city’s history.

Student-Teacher Relationship

In June of 1906, MHS student Katherine Brown invited 10 of her closest friends up to her house at 286 West Emerson Street to let them in on a secret. She was engaged to be married, and her fiancé was their English teacher, J. Thatcher Sears.

No one was surprised. Everybody knew they had been a pair since the start of Katherine’s junior year, and that their classroom relationship had been bolstered by time spent together in their church’s youth group. They were married a year later in the bride’s backyard, with the full support of her parents, their pastor, and over 100 friends and family. As one newspaper account put it, their relationship was “generally accepted by their many friends as the most natural thing in the world.”

Why was a relationship that would today be considered criminal thought of as “natural” in 1906?

For about 300 years. the age of first marriage in New England had remained consistent: early twenties for women, mid-twenties for men. Katherine and Thatcher married when she was 20 and he was 26, which was within the socially expected age range.

While their relationship had begun when Katherine was too young for marriage, Thatcher had bided his time through a long, public courtship, which made their eventual union all the more respectable.

The relationship satisfied marriage ideals both old and new. Thatcher was a Harvard graduate, and Katherine was the daughter of a bank clerk, so they were compatible by traditional standards of social class. In contrast, their initial relationship as student and teacher appealed to the modern, romantic ideal of love as an improbable union of opposites.

Most importantly, however, almost all marriages in 1906 were based on explicit legal and social inequality, such that the jarring power imbalance between Katherine and Thatcher would have struck most of their contemporaries as normal, if not desirable. As Katherine herself put it, “I am more fortunate than the rest of the girls in that, when I leave school, I am not going to lose the teacher.”

Thatcher continued teaching, becoming headmaster of a private academy. Katherine chaired the English department there. They were married for over fifty years.

Irma Moore Gurney

Ever since he had come to Melrose, Mayor Eugene H. Moore had lived a charmed life. Yet that life would end with a tragic death and a family scandal that would leave him broken.

Moore had grown up poor in Somerset, Massachusetts, spending his teenage years working in a nail factory. Following the death of his father, Moore moved with his mother and siblings to Melrose, where he met and fell in love with Annie Foster. Annie was the daughter of D. W. Foster, Melrose’s most prominent attorney. After they were married, his father-in-law gave him the funds to buy up most of the land that became the far east side of Melrose between Upham Street and the Lynn Fells Parkway.

There Moore followed his dream. On his estate, which he dubbed “Moorelands,” he became a gentleman farmer specializing in purebred animals. His chickens won prizes, and he had a barn built that housed over 3,500 fancy pigeons. By the 1880s, he had found his true passion in dogs. He became one of the country’s most esteemed breeders of champion Mastiffs and St. Bernards. His most famous dog was Lord Melrose, a massive St. Bernard who was insured for $20,000, far exceeding the value of most Melrose houses.

In March 1903, Moore’s 19-year-old daughter Irma married 23-year-old Howard Gurney at a grand wedding in the family home at 247 Porter Street. Shortly thereafter, Moore built the young couple a house just around the corner at 82 East Street, and they soon gave him two granddaughters. Everything appeared to be perfect. But there was something wrong.

The marriage of Irma and Howard at Melrose had not been their first. They had married secretly in Worcester a little over a month before. When their first daughter was born, it was too early to have been conceived in wedlock.

When Moore was elected Mayor of Melrose in 1907, he hired Irma as his personal secretary. It was played up as an amusing novelty, but may have masked a desperate need. At that time, genteel mothers with young children were not expected to be employed. In the 1910 Melrose business directory, Irma was listed as a clerk; her husband’s listing was absent, as it always had been.

In June 1911, Irma was stricken with appendicitis. The appendix burst. She was a few weeks shy of her 28th birthday. The informant of her death was her brother-in-law, not her husband. Visiting hours for her casket began that Thursday at 3 o’clock, and lasted until almost midnight. Irma had made many friends in Melrose.

Those friends all came to her funeral at Trinity Church the next day. City offices were closed, and flags hung at half-staff. Following the service, hundreds of cars and carriages made the pilgrimage from the church to Wyoming Cemetery. In the first car were Irma’s father and her husband. In the very last coach, dressed in plainclothes, were Captain O. E. Drown and Patrolman William C. McCarthy of the Melrose Police.

The procession wended its way to the high hill at the back of the cemetery where so many of Melrose’s most prominent people were buried. Irma’s casket was laid in its plot. As the last clod of dirt was shoveled on, Howard Gurney turned to leave, and Drown and McCarthy emerged from the crowd, grabbed him, handcuffed him, shoved him into their waiting carriage, and drove off, much to the horror of Gurney’s daughters, and to the grim satisfaction of Eugene Moore.

A week before, Gurney had cashed a forged check for $28 at a store in Stoneham. Moore had been informed of the infraction, and had conspired with the police to have his hated son-in-law arrested at this dramatic moment. The man who had groomed so many prize show dogs had an eye for theatrics, and newspapers across the country ran the story of the arrest.

Gurney was found guilty of forging the check, and did time at Concord Prison. In 1921 he was arrested on charges of larceny for forging another check, but died at age 40 before he could be brought to trial.

Following the funeral, Mayor Moore suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was confined to his home. His wife, Annie, issued a statement saying that he would not run for reelection. He died in 1919, and all of his pallbearers were former mayors of Melrose.

Annie raised their granddaughters.