April 30th - May 6th

May 4, 1883

April 30,1717 - Town agrees to buy land for burying ground
May 6,1872 -  Charles River approved for town water supply
May 4, 1883 - First bicycle ride up Corey Hill
May 1, 2007 - Women form majority of Select Board for first time

April 30,1717
Town agrees to buy land for burying ground
A committee appointed by Town Meeting agreed to buy, for eight pounds, a half acre of land on Walnut Street from Samuel Clark Jr. to be used as a burying ground. The land was near the newly formed meeting house of the town's first church, now known as First Parish, which was formed that year.

The Old Burying Ground on Walnut Street

Clark was given the right of herbage, or the use of grass cut from the property for hay, in exchange for maintaining a fence along the front of the cemetery. The original part of the burying ground holds the remains of members of many early Brookline families. It was expanded in 1840 with purchase of an additional three quarters of an acre from a descendant of Clark.

The Old Burying Ground also holds the remains of a number of enslaved men and women. A stone honoring their memory was installed in the outside wall of the cemetery in 2009.

2009 stone in memory of enslaved men and women who were interred in the Old Burying Ground

May 6, 1872
Charles River approved for town water supply
Town Meeting accepted an act of the state legislature authorizing Brookline to take water from the Charles River for the town's first municipal water supply. The town had pushed for the legislation after being rebuffed by the City of Boston for access to its water supply, despite the fact that part of Boston's water system -- the Boylston Street Reservoir -- was located in Brookline.

Brookline had considered other sources for its water, including Massapoag Pond in Dunstable, before settling on the Charles River. A pumping station was built on the shore of the river in West Roxbury, in an area known as Cow Island, 

Cow Island pumping station on the Charles River under construction in the 1870s (Brookline Preservation Department)

Water ran through a filtration system before being pumped to an open town reservoir on Fisher Hill (later replaced by a covered reservoir). It continued to be used until being phased out after Brookline joined the Metropolitan District.

Part of an 1884 atlas showing the Brookline waterworks along the Charles River in West Roxbury

May 4, 1883
First bicycle ride up Corey Hill
One of the high points in metropolitan Boston-- literally and figuratively -- for bicyclists in the 1880s was Corey Hill in Brookline. Wheelmen strove to become the first to make it to the top of the hill and, after that barrier was broken in 1883, to set a new record time or simply challenge themselves to conquer the steep incline. (See the image at the top of this post.)

"The hill is one of the steepest and longest in the vicinity of Boston," wrote the Boston Globe on July 29, 1883, shortly after the first successful ascent "and hundreds of wheelmen have unsuccessfully tried to ride up."

H.D. Corey (fittingly enough) became the first to make the climb on a bicycle, a Rudge Light Roadster. Corey was a noted Boston wheelman. (The following year he would become one of the first to ride a bicycle down Mt. Washington, the highest peak in New England.)

This 1884 advertisement in the Yale Literary Magazine described the Rudge Light Roadster as "The only Bicycle that has ever been ridden up Corey Hill."

May 1, 2007
Women form majority of Select Board for first time
It took 40 years after women won the right to vote before the first woman was elected to Brookline's governing body (then known as the Board of Selectmen) in 1960. It would take another 47 years before the board  --still called the Board of Selectmen -- had a female majority for the first time.

Brookline's Board of Selectmen as shown with the Town Administrator in the town's 2007 Annual Report

Jesse Mermell, who had finished third in a five-person race for two seats in 2006, easily topped a male opponent for the one seat open in 2007. She thus joined Betsy DeWitt, the top vote-getter in 2006, and Nancy Daly, elected in 2005, on the board.

The elections of the three women marked a quick turnaround for Brookline. Daly's election two years earlier ended 15 years of male-only representation on the board. The name of the governing body would not be changed from Board of Selectmen to Select Board until 2017.

April 23rd - April 29th

April 24, 1923
(Click image for larger view)

April 23, 1861 - Grandson of Willam Dawes, first to enlist
April 24, 1923 - Brookline rejects movie theater in referendum
April 26, 1981 - Dedication of Olmsted National Historic Site
April 29, 1989 - 130 arrested at anti-abortion action

April 23,1861
Grandson of Willam Dawes, first to enlist
Seventy-six years after his grandfather rode through Brookline on his way to Lexington at the start of the Revolutionary War, 27-year-old William Dwight Goddard became the first Brookline man to enlist in the Union Army at the start of the Civil War.

Goddard was the son of Mehitabel May Dawes Goddard, youngest daughter of William Dawes. Born in 1796, she married Samuel Goddard of Brookline in 1818.

William D. Goddard served only a short time in the army. He died in 1866. Mehitabel Goddard died in 1882. Both are buried, along with Samuel and other family members, in the Old Burying Ground on Walnut Street.

Headstones marking the graves of Mehitabel Dawes Goddard and her son William in the Old Burying Ground.

April 24, 1923
Brookline rejects movie theater in referendum
By 1913, moving picture theaters had been approved all around the Boston area, including in Dorchester, Roxbury, Back Bay, Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Belmont, and Watertown. But Brookline, which first rejected the idea of a theater in 1911, remained a holdout.

In April 1923, the issue was put before the voters in a non-binding referendum. Both side mobilized ahead of the vote. Opponents took out a full-page ad in the Brookline Chronicle (shown above.) The same issue of the paper carried a dozen letters to the editor, pro and con, including the one shown below signed "A Mother."

This letter to the editor was one of many published in the Brookline Chronicle ahead of the April 24th referendum.

In the end, voters overwhelmingly rejected the notion of a movie theater in town, 5,634 to 1,659. It would be another 10 years before Brookline got its first movie theater, the Coolidge Corner Theatre. (Read much more in this two part blog post on the long struggle to bring the movies to town.)

April 26,1981
Dedication of Olmsted National Historic Site
The Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site, encompassing Olmsted's former Brookline home and office, was officially dedicated. The dedication took place on Olmsted's birthday, the last of four days of activities held by the National Association of Olmsted Parks as part of its national conference.

 

Fairsted, the home and office of Frederick Law Olmsted. Courtesy National Park Service.

The house and office complex, known as Fairsted, is at 99 Warren Street, near the Brookline Reservoir. Olmsted moved into the house in 1883 and it continued to be used by the Olmsted firm until 1979. The property was acquired by the National Park Service in 1980.

Tours of Fairsted began that May. See the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site for more pictures and information about visiting.

April 29,1989
130 arrested at anti-abortion action
The latest in a long series of efforts to block the entrances to Brookline clinics offering abortion services resulted in the arrest of 130 individuals, the largest number of arrests up to that time. Nationally, there were more than a thousand arrests at actions organized, like the one in Brookline, by the anti-abortion organization Operation Rescue.

The action of the anti-abortion group and the arrests were reported in Brookline, Boston, and national newspapers.

Attempts to block the entrances to three Brookline facilities had been taking place for six months prior to April. They continued well into 1991 -- there were more than 240 arrested in June of that year -- before court injunctions and increased fines and jail terms helped bring an end to them..

In December 1994, an anti-abortion gunman attacked two of the same clinics that had been targeted by Operation Rescue, killing receptionists at the clinics and wounding five other people.

April 16th - April 22nd

April 18-19, 1775

April 18-19, 1775 - William Dawes rides through Brookline
April 22, 1861 - Brookline men and the Civil War
April 19, 1893 - Fourth building of First Parish dedicated
April 20, 1931 - Black protest at Longwood Towers

April 18-19, 1775
William Dawes rides through Brookline
William Dawes, who brought news that British troops were on their way from Boston to Lexington and Concord at the start of the Revolutionary War, passed through Brookline on his way. Dawes took the longer route (via Boston Neck and today's Coolidge Corner) while Paul Revere was rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown where he borrowed a horse for his more famous ride.

This map from the Paul Revere House shows the rides of Paul Revere (blue), William Dawes (green), and Samuel Prescott (purple).

Dawes and Revere both made it to Lexington but were intercepted by a British patrol on the way to Concord. (Dawes escaped back to Lexington. Revere was held briefly and has his horse taken. A third man, Samuel Prescott, carried the news to Concord.)

Dawes' ride is recreated each year on Patriots Day, as shown above, stopping at the Devotion House. (The real Dawes did not stop.)

April 22, 1861
Brookline men and the Civil War
Ten days after the attack on Fort Sumter the men of Brookline gathered to sign their names on a document promising to "enroll themselves for the purpose of acquiring a knowledge of military drill and discipline, under the orders of the Military Committee of the Town."

When it came time for 24-year old Julius A. Phelps to sign he added, next to his signature, "Ready to go." The next man to sign added ditto marks next to his name, and several more townsmen followed Phelps' example, indicating they too were "Ready to go."

Fourteen months later Phelps was dead, one of the first of the Brookline men to give his life in defense of the Union. His name is one of 72 on the Civil War memorial installed in the old Town Hall in 1884 and now on display in the lobby of the current Town Hall.

A photograph of Julius Phelps published with those of other Brookline men killed in the Civil War

April 19, 1893
Fourth building of First Parish dedicated
Brookline's oldest church, now known as First Parish, has had four different buildings since the first was constructed in 1717. The current building, now 130 years old, has lasted longer than any of its predecessors.

First Parish church. Lantern slide from the collection of the Brookline Historical Society

The dedication of the building was attended by the leaders of all of the churches in the town, as well as members of the congregation and others from the broader Brookline community. Rev. Harold N. Brown, pastor of the church since 1873, was one of several who spoke.

"Dear friends, members of the church, and you who have shown your interest by being present on this occasion," he said, "whatever feelings of joy I may have as I look into the audience is tempered very strongly by the increased responsibility. What shall we do with this church? Tonight we dedicate, but in reality we consecrate it. The task of years is still before us. Let us hope by our prayers that the peace of God may come to all who worship here, and that this house may grow sacred and hallowed in days to come."

April 20, 1931
Black protest at Longwood Towers
Demonstrators picketed in front of the ballroom of the Longwood Towers on Chapel Street to protest the barring of five Black students and their escorts from a senior prom being held there by Girls High School in Roxbury.

Black and white protesters. mostly women, from the League of Struggle for Negro Rights¹ joined the organization's head, John W. Youngblood, in picketing the residential hotel. They carried signs with such slogans as "Down with discrimination," and "They are in league with the lynchers in the South." 

Youngblood and others thought the discrimination was instigated by several girls from the South on the prom committee. Three of the couples insisted on their rights and were eventually let in to the dance. The demonstration continued until broken up by Brookline police who tore up the picketers' signs and arrested one woman who refused to leave.

Boston Globe, April 21, 1931

 ¹ The League of Struggle for Negro Rights was the civil rights organization of the American Communist Party. Langston Hughes was its honorary chair in the mid-1930s.

April 9th - April 15th

April 15, 1955

April 11, 1891 - Brief strike of laborers ends in agreement
April 9, 1916 - Brookline suffragists at forefront of "Suffrage Special"
April 9, 1933 - Beer for sale in Brookline after 46 years
April 15, 1955 - Busy Bee, Brookline’s oldest existing restaurant

April 11, 1891
Brief strike of laborers ends in agreement
A four-day strike by laborers working for Brookline contractors ended with an agreement to meet their demands for a reduction in their working day from 10 hours to nine hours at the same pay rate of $1.75 per day. Some news accounts had put the number of men on strike as high as 200.

Start of a Boston Herald report on the strike, April 9, 1891

The men on strike included laborers working for James Driscoll, M.J. O'Hearne, P.S. Allen, Thomas J. Kelley, and Frank Quimby. Among the projects they were working on for local contractors were a new sewer line, the Riverdale Park (now Cutler Park) on the Charles River in West Roxbury, and the construction of the Beaconsfield Terraces apartments near Washington Square.

One contractor employing mostly Italian immigrant workers on a Corey Hill improvement project refused to accede to his workers' demand for the same hours and wages to which the other contractors had agreed.

April 9, 1916
Brookline suffragists at forefront of "Suffrage Special"
Brookline suffrage leaders Agnes Morey, her daughter Katherine Morey, and Gertrude Newell, were among a group of 23 women that set out from Washington, D.C. on a journey across the country to highlight the campaign for women's right to vote.

This photo, which appeared in newspapers across the U.S., shows suffragists gathered in Washington at the start of a cross-country trip to promote voting rights. Brookline suffrage leaders in the photo include Agnes Morey, second from left, Katherine Morey, fourth from the right, and Gertrude Newell, far right. (Click image for larger view)

The women participating in the journey visited 12 states in the west that had already granted women the right to vote. Newell announced her intention to establish residence in Kansas so she could vote in that state. Several other women planned to do the same "believing [reported the Brookline Townsman] that they could easily afford to relinquish the few rights belonging to them in a non-suffrage state."

April 9, 1933
Beer for sale in Brookline after 46 years

Brookline had become a dry town in 1887 -- 33 years before national Prohibition -- when Town Meeting voted to ban the sale of intoxicating liquors. Prohibition came to an end with the April 7th passage of the Cullen-Harrison Act permitting the sale of 3.2 beer and light wine. Two days later, the Brookline Board of Selectmen granted 31 licenses to sell or serve beer in town.

At least one local restaurant wasted no time: Gurley's Restaurant in Coolidge Corner (where Otto Pizza is today) advertised "legal beer" in the April 13 edition of the weekly Brookline Chronicle.

Beer licenses remained temporary until a town-wide referendum voted overwhelmingly in favor of them two months later. See 1933: After 46 Years, Beer Back in Brookline for more details.

April 15, 1955
Busy Bee, Brookline’s oldest existing restaurant

Brookline today has more than 120 restaurants, with major concentrations in Coolidge Corner, Brookline Village, Washington Square, and St. Mary’s/Beacon Street, and pockets elsewhere. The oldest of these is the Busy Bee at 1046 Beacon Street, which opened in 1955. (See the ad at the top of this post.)

The Busy Bee (Photo from Busy Bee website)

The storefront where Busy Bee is opened in 1921 and housed a variety of business -- including (for a short time) one featuring miniature bowling!  -- before the first of a series of short-lived restaurants opened there in 1949.

There is one Brookline storefront that has been a restaurant location -- though not the same restaurant -- even longer than Busy Bee. It's 1016 Commonwealth Avenue at the corner of Babcock Street, now T. Anthony's. The space was occupied by the Hawthorne Lunch restaurant from 1923 to 1933. Later restaurants include a branch of the Walnut Lunch chain and the Babcock Luncheonette. T. Anthony's took over the space in 1964.

April 2nd - April 8th

 

April 4, 1974

April 3, 1848 - Town seal adopted
April 8, 1848 - Brookline branch railroad opened to public
April 6, 1960 - Dr. John Rock and birth control pill
April 4, 1974 - Town votes to acquire Hall’s Pond 

April 3, 1848
Town seal adopted

Town Seal

Brookline Town Meeting voted to accept the now ubiquitous Town Seal. It was described as picturing "a group of agricultural and farming implements, a view of the City of Boston in the distance, with a train of cars running between the two places" and bearing the inscription "Muddy River, a part of Boston. Founded 1630. Brookline incorporated 1705."

The design, according to a report from then Town Clerk Artemas Newall, was "intended to be emblematical of the character of the Town from its early settlement, when designated and known as Boston Cornfield & Boston Plantation, to the present time,— the inscription to perpetuate, in a degree, its early historical associations."

The symbolism, according to a report from the town Preservation Office, "asserts that Brookline was not just suburban but prosperously agrarian—a suitable home, perhaps, for the country gentleman." The seal, engraved on steel, was executed for the town by Francis N. Mitchell of Boston at a cost of $56 which included 100 embossed impressions and a press to be used for copying.

For more on what is pictured on the seal, see What's That on the Town Seal?

April 8, 1848
Brookline branch railroad opened to public
Residents of Brookline and surrounding communities were given a free preview of the new Brookline branch of the Boston and Worcester Railroad, two days before its official opening on April 10th. 

This notice about the opening of the Brookline branch of the Boston and Worcester Rail Road appeared in the Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser on April 3, 1848

The Boston and Worcester -- Massachusetts' first passenger railroad -- was chartered in 1831 and opened its first branch, to West Newton, in 1833. Tracks to Worcester were completed in 1834, and the original single track was replaced by a double track between 1839 and 1843.

The new Brookline branch ran between Boston and Brookline Village, with the station located where the Brookline Village T stop on the Green line is today. Tickets were 10-cents for a single ride or $3 for 36 rides.

This sketch of the locomotive used on trains between Brookline and Boston was made by Frank Kimball Rogers in 1930

April 6, 1960
Dr. John Rock and the birth control pill
Brookline's Dr. John Rock, one of the key figures in the development of the birth control pill, told a meeting of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology in Cincinnati that he believed the pill, which was based on the natural rhythms of the body, would be an acceptable method of birth control for Catholics.

Rock, who lived on Pill Hill and did much of his work at the Free Hospital for Women on Pond Street, was a devout Catholic who reportedly attended mass at St. Mary's of the Assumption in Brookline every day. In 1931, he had been one of 15 doctors -- and the only Catholic -- to sign a petition urging repeal of Massachusetts’ prohibitions on sharing contraceptive information. In 1949 he had co-authored a book called Voluntary Parenthood that explained different methods of contraception for a lay audience.

Dr. John Rock at St. Mary's Church. Life magazine, "A Catholic doctor speaks up," May 10, 1963 

Rock was devastated when, in 1968, Pope Paul VI ruled against all forms of birth control except the rhythm method. Around the same time, he lost his clinic due to hospital mergers, Harvard politics, and other changes. In 1971, he moved to NH to live with his daughter.  He died there in 1984. 

April 4, 1974
Town votes to acquire Hall’s Pond 
Town Meeting voted to authorize the Select Board to purchase or take by eminent domain an area of approximately 3.5 acres around Hall's Pond. It was also voted to appropriate $82,000 to acquire the pond and $20,000 to prepare it for "passive recreation."

Hall's Pond was once part of the Cedar Swamp wetland. The swamp and its marshy outflow were largely underdeveloped until after the Civil War. By stages, Cedar Swamp was filled in until all that remained was a one-acre pond called Swallow Pond that was used largely as a storm drainage pit for the surrounding area. 

The Hall's Pond / Amory Park area as seen on the 1893 and 1907 atlases (Click image for larger view)

For much more on the history of Hall's Pond, including more maps and photographs, visit the Friends of Hall Pond website and its history section.