March 26th - April 1st

Approved March 29, 1955 (Opened 1956)

March 30,1857 - Town votes money for a library

March 26,1881 - Women’s suffrage defeated at Town Meeting
March 26, 1931 - Longyear estate on Fisher Hill left for museum March 29,1955 - Town approves Centre Street parking lot

March 30,1857 Town votes money for a public library

Town meeting voted to appropriate funds for the establishment and maintenance of a town library on the first floor of the 1844 Town Hall. The appropriation -- $934 to establish the library $233 for the first year of operation -- came six years after Massachusetts passed legislation enabling cities and towns to appropriate funds for public libraries.

Brookline's 1844 Town Hall stood on Prospect Street between where the current Town Hall and the older Pierce School building are today. It was used as the town police station when a new Town Hall was built in 1873 and was torn down when the 1904 Pierce building was constructed. Prospect Street was eliminated when the current Town Hall was built in the 1960s.

Brookline's public library was not the first in the state, but it was the first established under the 1851 legalization. The town had discussed the need for a school library as early as 1843 and appropriated $45 for the purpose a year later, though it is unclear if one was ever established.

The public library continued to operate in the 1844 Town Hall, taking over additional space over the years, until 1869 when a new library was constructed on the site of the current Brookline Village Library.

For much more on the history of the Public Library of Brookline, see Public Library of Brookline: A History: Celebrating 150 Years of Library Service, written by library staff in 2007.

March 26,1881
Women’s suffrage defeated at Town Meeting

One year after women were first allowed to vote in school committee elections in Brookline, Town Meeting rejected a proposal to allow women to hold town office and "to vote in town affairs on the same terms as male citizens." The vote was 96 against and 37 in favor of the proposal.

The motion had been made by William Ingersoll Bowditch. Bowditch and his wife Sarah were leading figures in the abolition movement in Brookline; their house on Toxteth Street (still standing) was a station on the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War and the end of slavery, they turned their attention increasingly to suffrage. 

William Ingersoll Bowditch and Sarah Rhea Higginson Bowditch

In his 1875 book Taxation of Women in Massachusetts William echoed the old Revolutionary cry of "No taxation without representation."

"We men in America practice a form of tyranny over our own women," he wrote, "which we cannot help admitting to be unjust, without repudiating our own principles...."

William Bowditch died in 1909 at the age of 90. Sarah Bowditch, who was the first woman to vote in the 1880 Brookline School Board election, died in October 1919, two months before her 100th birthday and 10 months before women gained the right to vote with ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. 

March 26, 1931 Longyear estate on Fisher Hill left for museum The will of Mary B. Longyear, who died on March 14th, decreed that her large Fisher Hill home be turned into a museum to display her paintings and historical collections and materials relating to the teachings of Christian Science.

Longyear and her husband, lumber magnate John Longyear, were followers of Christian Science who had the house moved from Marquette, Michigan, on the shore of Lake Superior, to be near Mary Baker Eddy, founder the church. It was dismantled, moved by railroad, and reassembled between 1903 and 1906. 

The Longyear mansion after its move from Michigan and reconstruction on Fisher Hill.

The mansion continued to be used as the museum until the 1995 when the property was sold to a developer for a condo complex incorporating the house. The museum moved to nearby space and opened a new facility in Chestnut Hill in 2001.

March 29,1955 Town approves Centre Street parking lot Concerns about the lack of parking in Coolidge Corner and its impact on local businesses led Town Meeting to approve funds for acquiring several Centre Street properties by eminent domain to create a parking lot.

Town Meeting had rejected such a proposal the previous June despite efforts from a group concerned about a growing number of vacant storefronts in the town's major shopping district.

A group called Save Coolidge Corner took out this half-page advertisement in the Brookline Citizen on June 17, 1954 urging a Yes vote on a plan to turn several Centre Street properties into a parking lot. Although unsuccessful that year, the plan was approved by Town Meeting in 1955. (Click image for larger view)

The acquisitions led to the demolition of six Centre Street houses, four of which were used as boarding houses with multiple residents. The Centre Street parking lot opened in June 1956 with a full page announcement (shown above) from the Coolidge Corner Merchants Association in the Citizen.

(NOTE: I'm tracing what happened to the people displaced by the taking by eminent domain of the six Centre Street residences. More to come. - KL)
 

March 19th - March 25th

March 22, 1858

March 22, 1858 - Vote to lay plank sidewalks on Beacon Street
March 19, 1898 - Lecture on Black university held at Beaconsfield
March 20, 1916 - First Town Meeting under representative format
March 23, 2019 - First recreational marijuana shop in metro Boston opens

March 22, 1858 - Vote to lay plank sidewalks on Beacon Street
The mid-19th century unpaved streets of Brookline were generally adequate for the horse-drawn carriages, carts, and wagons then in use. But dirt and mud were an annoyance, at best, for anyone walking along those streets. 

In March 1858, Town Meeting authorized up to $600 to place wooden, or plank, sidewalks along the marshy stretch of Beacon Street west of the Boston line. (Beacon, laid out in 1850-51, was then an unpaved country lane, less than a third of its current width.) More plank sidewalks were added piecemeal in subsequent years as the town grew. Finally, in 1869, Town Meeting authorized the spending of $8,000 for the laying out of

such walks as they shall deem best suited to the different streets, always remembering that a good sidewalk should protect from mud at all seasons of the year.

Beacon Street got special attention, as seen in the 1880s photo above, looking east from Englewood Avenue. Those wooden Beacon Street sidewalks were replaced when the street was widened and paved in the late 1880s, but wooden sidewalks continued to be used in Brookline for many years. The last ones, kept for largely nostalgic reasons, were removed in the 1950s.  (See The Long History of Wooden Sidewalks in Brookline for more details and photos.)

A plank sidewalk on Rawson Road in 1915. (Photo courtesy of National Park Service. Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site)

March 19, 1898 - Lecture on Black university held at Beaconsfield
Atlanta University, founded in 1865 as the first of the Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs) in the South, was the subject of a talk at the Beaconsfield Casino just outside Washington Square. Speakers included W.E.B. Du Bois, William Lloyd Garrison Jr., and the president of the university, Horace Bumstead.

Left to right: W.E.B. Du Bois; William Lloyd Garrison Jr., and Horace Bumstead

Du Bois, a professor at the university (now Clark Atlanta University), spoke [as reported in the Boston Globe] of efforts of the Black population to improve their lives amid "the chaos of public opinion and passions directed against" members of the race. Garrison, son of the famous abolitionist, said that the fight of Southern Blacks for equality was far more important than the war against Spain being fought at the time.

"The struggle in the Southern states among colored men," said Garrison [as reported in the Boston Herald], "against great and unexpected odds, is far greater, their condition being the legacy of slavery, and conditions of 200 years." It was not something, he said, that could be overcome in 35 years.

NOTE: The Beaconsfield Casino, where the Regency Park apartment building is today, was not a casino in the modern sense. It was a social hub for the Beaconsfield Terraces complex of apartments, which still stand. Garrison was a resident of the complex. 

March 20, 1916 - First Town Meeting under representative format
Brookline became the first town in Massachusetts to hold a Town Meeting with elected representatives voting on warrant articles instead of the old system where all eligible voters had a say in whether articles were passed.

The change had been approved by voters -- men only at that time -- the previous November. The Brookline Chronicle praised the new format as "more like a consultative body bent on working out problems through a free interchange of views than a mass meeting liable to be frightened by its very size into an attitude of hesitancy and reserve."

The town's other paper, the Brookline Townsman, found some humor in the new format, even having a cartoonist illustrate the meeting in its front page. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

Brookline Townsman cartoon, March 25th, 1916. See full coverage in the Townsman and the Chronicle via the digitized newspapers from the Public Library of Brookline.

Read much more about the change in government in this 2009 blog post.


March 23, 2019 - First recreational marijuana shop in metro Boston
The NETA dispensary in Brookline Village became the 13th dispensary in Massachusetts -- and the first in metro Boston -- to sell recreational marijuana. Recreational sales had been legalized following a successful 2016 state ballot initiative.

The NETA store at the corner of Washington and Boylston Streets is located in a former bank building constructed in 1922 for the Brookline Savings Bank (now Brookline Bank). NETA, which had opened the state's first marijuana dispensary in Northampton, had initially taken over the bank space (in 2016) as a dispensary for medical marijuana.

The former bank building, with its dramatic dome, was designed by the Swiss-born architect Franz Joseph Untersee, a longtime resident of Brookline. Untersee also designed the bank's previous building at 366 Washington Street, now the Christian Community church. Other still-standing Untersee-designed buildings in Brookline include the Unified Arts Building at Brookline High School, the school of the St. Mary of the Assumption church, the St. Lawrence church and rectory on Boylston Street, a mixed commercial/residential building at the corner of Cypress and Boylston Streets, and several houses.

Interior of NETA's Brookline building (Photo courtesty of NETA)

March 12th - March 18th

March 18, 1919

March 13,1895 - Establishment of Brookline Education Society
March 18,1919 - Town Meeting votes against annexation
March 15,1921 - First four women take seats in Town Meeting
March 18,1941 - BK votes to use voting machines (a Massachusetts first)

March 13, 1895
Establishment of Brookline Education Society
The Brookline Education Society, an organization created "to bring the school and the home into closer sympathy," was formed in a meeting at the High Street home of Annie E. Crane. "Nothing could be more promising to the cause of education," reporting the organization in its first annual report, "than frequent mutual conferences between teachers and parents."

By November, the Society had more than 400 members and had established a lecture series on education that brought in speakers from Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, and other educational and civic institutions.

This article about Education Society's inaugural lecture series appeared in the Boston Globe on November 15, 1895

In 1915, the organization changed its name to the Brookline Civic Society, reflecting a focus on broader civic concerns than just education. The Civic Society disbanded in 1926.

March 18, 1919
Town Meeting votes against annexation
Boston had grown dramatically between the Civil War and World War I, annexing the neighboring towns of Roxbury, Dorchester, Charlestown, Brighton, West Roxbury, and Hyde Park. (See the map above.) But Brookline resisted.

In 1873, Brighton (northwest of Brookline) and West Roxbury (southwest) voted to join the big city, as did Charlestown, following earlier votes by Roxbury (1868) and Dorchester (1870). The new annexations took effect in 1874. (Brookline lost its Charles River waterfront, given to Boston to connect it with the newly incorporated Brighton district.) But Brookline overwhelmingly rejected annexation, by a vote of 707 to 299. 

Pro-annexation forces in Brookline and in Boston continued to advocate for the town's incorporation into the bigger city. The last gasp came in 1919, seven years after Hyde Park became part of Boston. A bill introduced in the legislature by Boston Mayor Andrew Peters would annex Brookline and nine other communities. Town Meeting voted 198-1 to oppose the plan. Other targeted communities also objected and the bill was withdrawn a week later.

Map showing the annexations proposed under the Peters Bill. Boston Globe, January 10, 1919

March 15,1921
First four women take seats in Town Meeting
Brookline's Town Meeting met with women members for the first time following the first town election after women gained the right to vote. The women were Margaret Robinson, Sybil Holmes, Helen Whitington, and May Johnston.

Robinson was asked if a woman with five children could find time for politics and government.

"I certainly do," she replied [as reported in the Boston Globe]. "I know men with families as large as mine who find the time and don't neglect the families. Why can't women do it?" 

 

Margaret Robinson and her five children, as shown in the Boston Globe, March 14, 1921

Robinson, a resident of The Point neighborhood, continued to serve as a Town Meeting Member until her death in 1935. She also served for six years on the town's School Committee. Four years after her death, the new playground in the neighborhood, built on the site of the former car barn lot for the Boston Elevated Railway Company in the neighborhood, was named after her. 

March 18,1941
Brookline votes to use voting machines (a Massachusetts first)
Town Meeting approved the allocation of funds to purchase a first batch of voting machines for use in elections in the town. Brookline thus became the first municipality in Massachusetts to approve a move from paper to machine balloting.

This example of a 1940s voting machine was used to instruct Brookline voters how to use the new form of balloting. (Photo courtesy of Town Clerk's office)

Voting machines manufactured by the Automatic Voting Machine Corporation had been tested the year before, first in a Brookline High School election and later in one precinct in a town election. The decision by Town Meeting assured that the machines would be gradually rolled out townwide. 

This March 5, 1940 Boston Globe photo shows Louise Jacques of Thayer Place using a voting machine at the Pierce Primary School in an early trial of voting machines. Townwide use of the machines was approved a year later and gradually introduced in all precincts.

Demonstrations showing how to use the new machines were held in various places, beginning with Precinct 9 in South Brookline, as the new voting system was put in place.

Advertisement in the Brookline Citizen ahead of the March 1942 town election

March 5th - March 11th

March 9, 1914

March 7, 1842 - School Committee report on future of town schools
March 9, 1914 - 700-800 attend suffrage meeting at Town Hall
March 8, 1960 - Louise Castle first woman elected to Board of Selectmen
March 9, 1972 - Black BHS students call for change

March 7, 1842
School Committee report on future of town schools
Brookline's commitment to its public schools was evident early on. An 1847 report from the Massachusetts Board of Education -- compiled by its Secretary, Horace Mann -- showed the town spending more money per pupil on education than any other city or town in the Commonwealth in the 1845-46 school year.

Brookline, with 352 pupils between the ages of 4 and 16, spent $8.52 per pupil on education in the 1845-46 school year, more than any other city or town in Massachusetts

That commitment had no doubt been strengthened by a report from the town's school committee three years earlier. The report, submitted to Town Meeting on March 7, 1842, noted that 

none of us put too high an estimate upon a good education, or feel too much the importance of having our children furnished with such means for intellectual culture as the exigences of the age demand. The public schools in this town ought not to be inferior to those of any other town in the Commonwealth, and we ought not to be satisfied without the evidence that we are every year elevating their character and improving their condition.

 
Among the obstacles to quality education cited by the committee were the irregularity of attendance and turnover among teachers. In closing, the committee noted that they

would respectfully suggest to all our citisens the importance of giving still more attention to the great cause of education connected as it is with all that is dear in the weal of our common country.

March 9, 1914
700-800 attend suffrage meeting at Town Hall
Supporters and opponents of suffrage packed Brookline's Town Hall to hear a speech by U.K.-based activist Stanton Coit on "Women and the State." Coit was introduced by Gertrude B. Newell, vice president of Brookline's Equal Suffrage Association.

Coit was scathing in his criticism of upper class women and men who opposed an expansion of voting rights. "The people of Brookline and Back Bay," he said (as reported in the Boston Herald), "do not believe, so far as I can see or have been able to ascertain, in the vote for the poor people or for anything else that is not descended from their families."

Brookline's pro-suffrage activists did, in fact, include many upper class women (and men), though there were clear divides among the elite in the town. The local papers regularly carried both "Equal Suffrage Notes" and "Anti Suffrage Notes", usually on the same page. (The examples below appeared side-by-side on page 5 of the Brookline Townsman after the meeting.)

Brookline Townsman, March 14, 1914

Coit welcomed the opportunity to engage with anti-suffragists, commenting that indifference, rather than opposition, was the biggest obstacle to the suffragists' success. The "antis" declined, however, to participate in the question and answer period that followed the talk. Sarah White, their leader, told the Townsman that his [Coit's] "whole argument was so foolish that it was hardly worthwhile to ask him questions."

March 8, 1960
Louise Castle first woman elected to Board of Selectmen
Louise Castle upset the incumbent chair of the Board of Selectmen to become the first woman elected to the board in the 255-year history of the town. She was only the fourth woman to run for a position on the board.

Louise Castle monitoring election returns at her home in 1960. (Boston Globe photo by LeRoy Ryan)

Castle, who was 50-years old when elected, had been active in town affairs for more than a decade. She had been president of the League of Women Voters and had served on the Council for Planning and Renewal, the Committee on the Structure and Organization of Town Government, and the Community Relations Committee of the Community Council. 

Castle's successful campaign was managed by two men who went on to their own success in politics and government: future governor and presidential candidate Michael Dukakis, a Democrat; and future lieutenant governor and U.S. cabinet officer Elliot Richardson, a Republican.

Castle served on the board for nine years. She died in 2002 at the age of 92. In 2007, women formed a majority on the Board of Selectmen for the first time. The board's name was finally changed to Select Board in 2017.

March 9, 1972
Black BHS students and parents call for change
Racial tensions at Brookline High School came to a head at a meeting at Town Hall where Black students and parents presented a list of 11 changes they said were necessary for Black students to be seen as full members of the school community. 

Page 1 article in the Brookline Chronicle Citizen, March 16, 1972

More than 200 students and parents, along with school and town officials, participated in the meeting, precipitated by threats against Black students near the school the previous day. Ophie A. Franklin, father of a Black student, told the officials that the incident was "only a symptom of the larger and continually escalating problems of harassment and oppression" that had been occurring since the METCO program brought increasing numbers of Black students to the school.

Among the changes called for were: appointment of a Black administrator and other staff at the school; formation of a committee of Black students, parents, and staff;  introduction of staff development programs on Black history; curriculum revisions to recognize minority cultures; and other changes to "create a positive atmosphere and environment suited to to the specific needs of the Black students and staff and for the benefit of the entire Brookline community."