The City Record and Boston News-Letter

The 1812 Gubernatorial Election

Return for the 1812  Massachusetts Governor's Race from Berlin, Massachusetts.  Click to enlarge. (Copyright The City Record and Boston News-Letter, all rights reserved)

The gubernatorial election of 1812 saw the return of Caleb Strong, a Federalist, to the Governor's office after two years of Republican rule.  Strong defeated the Republican Elbridge Gerry, the incumbent, in a close vote.

Some of the pressing issues of the 1812 election might sound familiar to us: highly suspect partisan political machinations, a war on the horizon that the people of Massachusetts regarded with suspicion, and taxation.  Gerry was tied to the administration of James Madison which supported war with England, a position unpopular with the people of Massachusetts, whose maritime commerce would bear the brunt of the English navy's force and the Federalists portrayed themselves as the party of peace.  In addition, when Elbridge Gerry was first elected governor, his supporters made a list of all jobs that could conceivably filled by patronage and began to root out Federalists who held those jobs.

Although voting occurred on 6 April 1812, as late as 18 April 1812 the final voting totals were unknown.  The Columbian Centinel, a Boston newspaper, reported on that day that three towns in Massachusetts and "a few small towns and Plantations and Maine" had yet to be heard from.  The Weekly Messenger (Boston) of 8 May 1812 published a final tally of 52,343 votes for Strong, 50,829 for Gerry.  The number of votes was up substantially from the 1811 election, where Gerry had defeated the Federalist Christopher Gore, 43,325 to 40,146.  After that election Gerry supporters passed an act "which opened the vote for town officers to all adult males except paupers with one year's residence in town and qualified for the vote in other town affairs all persons who paid a poll tax." (James Banner Jr., To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts 1789-1815, New York, 1969, p. 276)  As Banner notes, since town elections and the election for Governor were held on the same day, it was very easy just to allow everyone who qualified to vote in the local election to also allow them to vote in the statewide election even though the requirements might have been slightly different for each.

Turnout was also higher because In the early 19th century Massachusetts towns decided how many representatives each would send to the legislature based on rather loose regulations in the state constitution and, since towns paid the costs of supporting their own representatives while in session (the Commonwealth reimbursed transportation) wealthy communities could send more representatives than poorer communities.  The size of the General Court grew consistently between 1800 and 1810 and the lower house had 745 members in 1812, as opposed to the 258 members in 1801. (Paul Goodman, The Democratic-Republicans of Massachusetts: Politics in a Young Republic, Cambridge, MA 1964, p 142.) 

The 1812 election also introduced the "gerrymander" into the world.  A Republican created redistricting plan which would enable the Republicans to keep the State Senate despite majority support for the Federalist Party was passed by the legislature and signed by Elbridge Gerry.  About two weeks before the election, the Boston Gazette created a cartoon of the  district which ran from Chelsea to Salisbury and named it  the "gerrymander", a stroke of lexicographical genius.  It was quickly picked up by other newspapers, including ones in Newburyport and Salem, and undoubtedly helped sway voters against Gerry.  Gerry's defeat didn't end his political career however, as he moved to Washington D.C. to serve as Vice-President during 1813-1814.

________________

Centre Streets in Boston and a Modest Proposal

I wrote up a few preliminary thoughts about the call to change the name of a portion of Centre Street "Avenue de las Americas" and argued that using "Avenue" as part of the proposed name just didn't sound right from a historical perspective.  After re-reading the history of Centre Street in Roxbury and West Roxbury, I'm now convinced that renaming Centre Street is a bad idea not only in terms of the history, but for planning and wayfinding purposes as well.

The Centre Street in Roxbury/Jamaica Plain is part of the historic road which stretched from the Roxbury meeting house (First Church in Eliot Square) to Dedham and on to Connecticut.  It survives almost intact: the missing piece is where Columbus Avenue breaks it, as seen in the map below:

Other than the one break, it continues all the way down to the Dedham Mall, where the name changes as it crosses into Dedham, close to where it intersects with Washington Street, the colonial era highway running out of Boston. 

Centre Street's current name helps with navigation through Boston.  Losing a street only to have to find it again is frustrating.  The current break in Centre Street is about six hundred feet long, so people can presumably pick up Centre Street again fairly easily by going down Columbus Avenue.  Renaming Centre Street in Jackson Square would make it almost impossible for one to find Centre Street in Jamaica Plain again. 

The name Centre Street also serves history by reminding us of the importance of First Church in Roxbury and of the historic colonial road pattern.  I also think Centre Street is a good name because the current stretch of Centre Street between Jackson and Hyde Square is, after all, one of the most important centers for Boston's Latin community.  Rename that stretch of Centre Street "Centro Street" and give Jackson and Hyde Square new names to provide emphasis at either end of the renamed section.  There should be a Park de Las Americas and a statue of Simon Bolivar as well.

I look forward to seeing the flags of many nations along the street.  The image I have in my head is of Childe Hassam's flag paintings.  Hassam, a Dorchester native, painted dozens of pictures of flags lining the avenues of New York City during World War I and its aftermath.  Below is Avenue of the Allies, Great Britain, 1918 from the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Note:  I should add that Boston being Boston, people might simply believe "Centro Street" to be a typographical error (or worse, just a misspelling) given the number of street signs in Boston which are incorrect.

Centre Streets in Boston

Streets named "Centre" have long been popular in Boston and the towns which were eventually annexed by the city.  Several of the Centre Streets have disappeared: the one in Boston's North End which ran between North and Hanover Streets has been lost, another Boston Centre Street which opened into Cambridge Street was renamed Anderson Street in 1861.  East Boston's Centre Street became Haynes Street in 1868 (the annexation of Roxbury spurred street name changes throughout Boston) and South Boston's Centre Street was renamed Ward Street in 1855.  Brighton had a Centre Street, at least on paper, in the mid-19th Century.

The three remaining Centre Streets are in Dorchester, Roxbury/Jamaica Plain, and West Roxbury.

Centre Street, Dorchester, 1837; from 608 Washington Street, opposite Norfolk Street, to 411 Adams Street; mistake in locatoin (road from Plymouth to Lower Road) rectified, April, 1804; named from Upper Road (now Washington Street) to Lower Road (now Adams Street), March 11, 1840.

Centre Street, Roxbury and West Roxbury, 1825; from Eliot Square to Dedham line; that part of this street lying in Roxbury, and to South Street in West Roxbury [ed. note: the boundary  between Roxbury and West Roxbury ran across Centre Street in Jamaica Plain] laid out, January 19, 1662; called the Middlepost Road from Boston to Hartford; altered from Colonel Draper's through Dedham to Dover line, May, 1795; called "Old road to Dedham" 1823; "Road from the parting stone by J. Riley's store, by Rev. Mr. Gray's meeting house, by Captain Winchester's to Rev. Mr. Flagg's meeting house, and on to Dedham line"; named Centre Street, May 9, 1825; called Boston Road, 1833; name of part in West Roxbury changed to Austin Street, May 3, 1852; name of Austin Street changed to original name of Centre Street, Dec. 2, 1861.

Waterfront Baseball in Boston

Looking Towards San Francisco Bay from AT&T Park, formerly Pac Bell Park, in San Francisco, CA, August 4, 2004 (Photo copyright the City Record and Boston News-Letter, all rights reserved)

I'm a baseball fan and have always appreciated ballparks integrated into the urban fabric.  The trend towards retro neighborhood-style ballparks, spurred by the success of Camden Yards, has been one of the most welcome trends in urban design of the last fifteen years.  While some are more successful than others, and none approach the integration achieved by Fenway Park which is, of course, an urban ballpark which grew up with its neighborhood, they are far better than the multi-purpose stadia which sprang up in the 1960s and 1970s even if the HOK (the architectural firm for the Camden Yards stadium) aesthetic is now something of a cliche.

I know bad ballparks:  I lived in Washington D.C. in the early 1990s and was at one of the last games played at Memorial Stadium in Baltimore.  A baseball fan friend (hi Tom!) and I also ventured out to Cleveland (Muncipal Stadium, a dreary cavern which seated 74,000)  Pittsburgh (Three Rivers Stadium, a concrete monstrosity) and an exhibition game at RFK in DC, a field with dimensions better suited for wiffleball.  I've also been to Twins games in the Metrodome, which is the worst baseball environment I've ever seen and that is something because I played at Raccoon Valley Little League, which had fields located in a river flood plain and has since been wiped out by a flood. 

All of this meant the games I saw at Camden Yards were a welcome change.  Perhaps the best new park I've been to is AT&T Park (née Pac Bell Park) in San Francisco, seen above.  While it has its flaws (you can see how high up I am in the stands, and Barry Bonds plays for the Giants), the amenities are superb (Ghiradelli hot fudge sundaes!) and the view towards San Francisco Bay is unsurpassed.  It is also easily walkable from Market Street and the Moscone Center and light rail runs right by the ballpark.  Throughout the game I kept asking myself, "Why can't we have baseball on the water in Boston?"

When I moved back to Boston in the mid-1990s there had been some talk of a waterfront baseball stadium for the Red Sox, and the 1965 General Plan for Boston has an illustration of what appears to be a Three Rivers Stadium style multi-purpose sports center situated on the Fort Point Channel.  Several years later and with a change of ownership, the Red Sox appear to be ensconced in Fenway for many years to come and the dream of a waterfront ballpark in my lifetime is likely dead.

Fast forward to two days ago.  I'm holding an 1896 map of the area where Northeastern University now stands and I'm looking at the location of the South End Grounds, an old baseball park with frontage on Columbus Avenue, about where Northeastern has a parking garage/parking lot today and Ruggles Street T Station.  Since it is baseball season, the South End Grounds seemed like a good candidate for a writeup in the City Record. 

I knew that the South End Grounds had burned down in 1894 when Boston's National League team, the Beaneaters, was playing there, but I never had given it much thought.  I also knew the stands were quite an architectural marvel in their day.  The Boston Public Library has a picture here.  What I didn't know was that while the park was being rebuilt after the fire, the Beaneaters played at the Congress Street Ball Grounds.  The Congress Street Ball Grounds?  My immediate thought was that there must be a Congress Street in Roxbury or Dorchester that I hadn't heard of.  There couldn't have possibly been a baseball field on Congress Street in the 1890s--after all, I used to work at Russia Wharf and know the area well--where would it have been?  Towards downtown?  I checked my 1896 Annual Report of the Street Laying Out Department, saw only one Congress Street, and realized that it must have been in South Boston. 

After a quick Google search, I came to the realization that Boston actually had what was likely the first waterfront professional baseball park in the United States, built in 1889-90 on Congress Street in South Boston.  I find no small degree of irony that one of the sites where people would have loved to have seen a baseball stadium built in the 1990s was less than a hundred yards from the site of an actual professional baseball park from the 1890s.

This image, a crop of an 1891 ward map from the Boston Public Library (click here for more) shows the location of the ball grounds.  Northern Avenue has been projected but not yet built, and the intensive land making to extend the shoreline and create more wharves has not yet occurred.

So what happened when the Beaneaters played at the Congress Street Grounds?  Richard "Dixie" Tourangeau has written an essay, "Remembering the Congress Street Grounds" which can be downloaded as a pdf from the Society for American Baseball Research website.  The essay covers the building of the grounds, the architecture, the teams that played there, and details of several Beaneaters games. 

The essay also clears up a question which has puzzled me for many years.  As baseball fans know, there are a few single game individual achievements which are very rare:  perfect games, unassisted triple plays, and hitting four home runs in a game are among the rarely seen.  The first major league baseball player to hit four home runs in one game was Bobby Lowe of the Boston Beaneaters on May 30th, 1894.  This feat always seemed particularly heroic to me, given the dead ball of that era.  As it turns out, the left field fence at the Congress Street Grounds was only about 250 feet away from home plate and home runs suddenly become much easier to hit when the Beaneaters began to play in South Boston.  According to Tourangeau, the crowd showered the field with $160 in coins after the game in their appreciation of Lowe's achievement.  Tourangeau also notes that in twenty-seven games, the Beaneaters and their opponents hit 86 home runs, a pace most modern teams can only dream of.  So the next time you're on Congress Street in South Boston, look at the site of the old Congress Street Grounds, and imagine what might have been.

[Updated July 2007: Another post about the Congress Street Grounds]

The image below, from an 1899 map of Boston, shows the Congress Street Grounds as open space, but one can also see the projections for the new wharves.  The rail lines shown on the 1891 map above are gone.  Click image to enlarge. (Image copyright the City Record and Boston News-Letter, all rights reserved)

Walking Tours of Boston's History and Architecture

The Editor of the City Record and Boston News-Letter on a West End Tenement Fire Escape, c. 1990

Now that the weather is apparently improving (as if it could get worse) the time is right to announce that I will begin leading Boston history and architecture walking tours soon.  I've given hundreds of walking tours of Boston, and the walking tours will include Beacon Hill, the Back Bay, South End, North End, Dorchester--almost any neighborhood in Boston.  I also do a walking tour for children through Beacon Hill based on the classic children's book Make Way for Ducklings--I have led hundreds of school children on this tour during the spring.  Tours are generally 1.5 hours long, and the cost is $10 in advance for adults, $12 day of the tour.  Children aged 6 and up are $5, under 6 are free.  I am still working out a schedule, but in general tours will be an evening or two during the week, and on Saturdays.  With sufficient notice and numbers other times can be worked out and custom tours are also possible.  If you are interested, please email me.  More information and a walking tour website will be coming soon.  We won't be going up on any fire escapes (the building I'm in front of has since been torn down) but you will get my knowledge of Boston's architecture and history for the price of movie and some good exercise to boot.  I hope you will join me.

Let One Thousand News Sources Bloom

Newspapers and other publications in Boston from the 1857 Boston Almanac. Click image to enlarge, then click that image to enlarge again. (Image copyright The City Record and Boston News-Letter, all rights reserved).

Compare the list of newspapers and other publications in Boston for the year 1846 with the list above.

The Boston Herald's sale of Community Newspaper Company last week has brought another set of questions about the state of the newspaper industry in Boston.  Most of the focus has been on whether or not Boston should be a two newspaper town and what the sale of CNC means for the future of the Boston Herald.  For examples, read Dan Kennedy, and again here, Mats Tolander, David Scott, the Boston Herald's own story, and Jay Fitzgerald who writes for the Herald and Hub Blog.

After first remembering fondly the history pieces I used to write for the Boston Tab under the "Boston Primer" heading, the question that comes to my mind is whether or not the days of the "full service" newspaper are over.  By full service, I mean the form of newspaper we've come to expect for the pastone hundred years or so: a national news section, a metro/regional section, sports, arts, entertainment, etc. The internet has changed the way people access information.  How much time and effort should a local newspaper spend on non-local sports news when sites like ESPN and CNN/SI exist? Do newspapers really need to focus energy on the entertainment industry when there are 24 hour cable channels devoted to this subject?  And how much does a newspaper's duplication of content on the internet further cannibalize the print version? 

These are questions which I'm sure are debated in media company board rooms across the country--certainly they're not new issues and my thoughts aren't particularly original.  The irony is that while the relevance of entertainment coverage by newspapers may be eclipsed by other forms of media, the selling of movies is still local and the print advertising for movies continues unabated.  On the other hand, Craigslist has devasted the classfied ad sections, Filene's will be gone soon taking away pages of ads, and mergers reduce advertising for banks.  Meanwhile online advertising suffers from a much higher burden of proof of effectiveness than was ever required (or even possible) with print advertising.

Would newspapers be better served by focusing their time and money and local news, local arts, local sports?  Certainly there are opportunities: the Dorchester Reporter, the South End News, the Back Bay Courant, the Bay State Banner, and the Beacon Hill Times all demonstrate that the demand exists for news at the neighborhood level.  Blogs have also started to fill in the cracks in local coverage.  My readers will note that I've joined up with Boston Blogs, a network of Boston based bloggers who are trying to address some of the issues of local content delivery.  Are there niches available for subjects not covered by the print media?  As the editor and writer of the only blog devoted to Boston's history and architecture I like to think so.  The question becomes who are my readers and what is the potential size of my audience?  What is the market for the City Record and Boston News-Letter?  The list of publications available in 1857 shows the sheer variety and number of information sources available to Bostonians.  The blogs of today are helping us regain the diversity of 150 years ago--but how do we ensure they survive?

Update:  Immediately after posting this, I see Christopher Lydon's piece on local news over at Mass Inc.  Go read that, and I will add, "yeah, what he said".

"All our old notions of distance and time will undergo a change" Boston's Railroads in 1846

Railroad lines originating in Boston from the 1846 Boston Almanac. (Image copyright the City Record and Boston News-Letter, all rights reserved)

There has been much talk in recent days about the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority's proposed fare increases.  Local blog responses can be found here.

I've provided a scan of the 1846 map of railroads originating in Boston because I'm fascinated by exactly how much of the current commuter rail system duplicates rail lines that were in place 160 years ago.  There are obvious differences:  there are more lines today and more stations (in some cases at least--look at the number of stations between Attleboro and Providence in 1846).  But the old system had better connections to the rest of New England and even Long Island in addition to the stations which duplicate current ones.  There are also some 1846 railroad lines that are currently missing from the MBTA commuter rail system, most notably ones to Fall River and New Bedford. 

What is hard to imagine is that all of this railroad building was accomplished in twenty years.  The Granite Railroad was constructed in 1826 to haul granite for the Bunker Hill Monument to the Neponset River for transport on to Charlestown and was one of the first railroads in the country.  Twenty years later a Bostonian could travel by train all over New England.  Some of the stations on the 1846 map have names no longer in common use.  Angiers is now Newton Corner, and some of the other unfamiliar names can be found at the Secretary of State's website which lists unincorporated and unofficial names of Massachusetts communities.  This network of railroads also had a significant impact on the flow of information within New England the United States, which I briefly discussed in this post about Allan Pred's book Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840.

Here are the descriptions of the various railroads from the 1846 Boston Almanac:

Railroads Diverging from Boston

We have had prepared, at considerable expense, for the present number of the Boston Almanac, a Diagram of the Railroads diverging from Boston, which shows at a glance the courses and distances of the several routes.  By these different lines of railway, intersecting our ancient Commonwealth in the various directions, the riches of the agricultural, manufacturing, mineral, and other productions of the East, the North, the South, and even the far West, are poured into Boston.  The whole State is brought so near within our reach that it may be, without exaggeration, termed the suburbs of the city.  The farthest boundary of Berkshire is but ten hours from us, and the people of Buffalo are our neighbors.  When the roads now in contemplation are completed, New England will all be brought within a day's ride of our metropolis, and all our old notions of distance and time will undergo a change.  The influence upon the wealth and prosperity of Boston must be beyond calculation, and must surpass any but the most vivid imagination to conceive.

The Boston and Worcester Railroad, taken in connection with the Western Railroad, may be considered the backbone of the frame of Railroads in Massachusetts.  It starts from the corner of Beach and Lincoln, near the United States Hotel, in Boston, and extends through Worcester and Springfield, and the rich interior and western sections of the State, to West Stockbridge on the western boundary, 162 miles, and continues on to Chatham in New York, where one branch continues on to Greenbush, opposite Albany, 200 miles from Boston, and the Hudson Railroad extends to the town of Hudson, 193 miles from Boston.  From this road other routes branch off in different directions.

Happy 302nd Anniversary, Boston News-Letter!

Excerpt from the 23 February 1811 Boston Columbian Centinel (Click image to enlarge.  Image copyright the City Record and Boston News-Letter, all rights reserved)

24 April 2006 will mark the 302nd anniversary of the first issue of the Boston News-Letter, published in Boston by John Campbell. The Boston News-Letter holds the distinction of being the first regularly published newspaper in America. We here at The City Record and Boston News-Letter feel a certain kinship to the Boston News-Letter, having stolen the title of our publication from a publication that stole the title of the Boston News-Letter. The anniversary of the founding of the Boston News-Letter has led us to think more about this blog and blogging in general and we will be posting about Boston newspapers for the next week or so. Also, after careful consideration, we are prepared to claim that the 24th of April will mark the 302nd anniversary of the spiritual start of this blog, making us the oldest blog in existence. How can the City Record and Boston News-Letter make such a claim? Read on.

Years after first encountering Allan Pred's Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1840, it remains one of my favorite obscure history books. Its obscurity is no fault of its author, who does an admirable job making a very technical statistical argument, and it deserves to be more widely known among the general public. Published in 1973 during the first great wave of the “new” urban history (see Note 1 below) Pred's book attempts to describe the flow of information in the United States for the fifty year period preceding the success of the electronic telegraph. In our own time, when information can be transferred almost instantaneously, Pred's analyses of the time elapsed from an event happening to widespread knowledge of its occurrence opens a window on a very different United States. Pred sought to show some urban centers became “information capitals” (my term) and to outline the information gap by looking at newspapers, postal service, interurban commodity flows, and travel between cities. The ability of individuals and groups in some cities to exploit these information gaps for economic advantage allowed for the growth of a system of cities, with primary, secondary, and tertiary ranks.

Pred writes, “In absolute terms, the entire nation was still in a pronounced state of public-information isolation in 1790. Even in Philadelphia and Boston, which were then the first and third cities in the country, newspaper readers were at a considerable temporal remove from most non-local domestic events. This was equally true with respect to many occurrences in the nearby hinterland. For example, the mean time lag between events in Worcester and publication of their reports in Boston, only forty-two miles distant, was almost five days.” (Pred, Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information 38-39).  These time lags were not necessarily a function of distance: Boston and Philadelphia and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are roughly equidistant, but information traveled much more quickly between the former than the latter, primarily because of speed of transportation, but also because of demand for information.

Daily newspapers proved to be an important source of data for Pred. By looking at how long a news item from a Boston newspaper took to be reprinted in a newspaper in New York City, Portsmouth, NH, or Charleston, SC, he could show how the elapsed time for information to reach certain cities changed over a period of years. The illustration above from the 1811 Boston Columbian Centinel is one example of the time lag between Boston and other cities. As transportation technology improved, the information gaps became smaller. New York City eventually took the leading position as the country’s information broker. 

What does this have to do with the Boston News-Letter and this blog?  I'm struck by how similar many blogs are to 18th and 19th century newspapers in the era before the telegraph, a similarity I have been thinking about for some time but which is reinforced by Pred’s methodology of tracking the dissemination of news items from one newspaper to another. Open almost any issue of a small town (or big city, for that matter) newspaper of that time and you will find a collection of local news, state news, national news, and international news along with advertising, poems, fiction, and other non-news writing. Much of the news was reprinted from other papers, sometimes verbatim, other times slightly edited, with or without the local editor’s commentary. Local news would consist of letters from readers on the subjects of the day or short pieces written by the editors. The editors of these small town newspapers should be seen as the first content aggregators.  They subscribed to the out of town newspapers, read them, distilled them, and republished important stories for local consumption. Many newspapers of the time also had a very specific political point of view—objectivity was a fast track to insolvency. 

Today, some blogs operate in much the same manner, especially those dealing with current events. The blog writer picks up a piece of information from another news source and uses the news item as a departure point for adding more facts to the story or their own analysis. Most bloggers don’t have the resources to research and write their own national or state level news which means many news blogs are reactive rather than proactive, a situation which would be familiar to their counterparts from earlier times. And while blogs may have a global reach, many of us still write for a “local” audience in the sense that we often know who are readers are and what types of information they are looking for through comments, emails, log file analyses, and yes, even face-to-face meetings. And like our predecessors, borrowing content is tolerated (within reason) and some blogs even provide a system for crediting each other through trackbacks. 

My analogy isn’t perfect. While some bloggers take news from the largest sources and republish and comment on it, their posts can then move from their blog to a larger aggregator such as Universal Hub or back up to the original news source—even the City Record and Boston News-Letter has appeared on the front of boston.com’s News section. It would be a very rare occurrence for a news item from a small town paper in the 18th or 19th Century to be reprinted in a major metropolitan daily. But when I say that the City Record and Boston News-Letter and other blogs are the spiritual descendents of the original Boston News-Letter, I think I am on firm grounds for staking my claim, which backs up, to my mind, Allan Pred’s conclusion in Urban Growth, “History does not repeat itself, but processes do.” Bloggers and 18th and 19th Century newspaper editors would have a great deal in common to talk about.

Note 1. For an overview of the “New Urban History”, look at Leo Schnore’s “Further Reflections on the ‘New’ Urban History: A Prefatory Note” and Eric Lampard’s “Two Cheers for Quantitative History: An Agnostic Forward”, both in The New Urban History: Quantitative Expolorations by American Historians. Leo Schnore, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press) 1975. If you wish to read a shorter version of Allan Pred’s work that encompasses some of the same subject matter, I direct you to “Large-City Interdependence and the Pre-Electronic Diffusion of Innovations in the United States” in the same volume.

Water, WiFi, and Wherewithal: Updated

A bill from the Boston Aqueduct Corporation, 1828 (image copyright held by The City Record and Boston News-Letter, not to be reproduced without permission)

The following is an edited and updated post of a story which originally appeared on the City Record and Boston News-Letter on 1 March 2005.

Current WiFi Efforts in Boston

Boston's Mayor, Thomas Menino, has announced the creation of a task force to study the viability of providing wireless internet access throughout the City of Boston.  Currently municipal WiFi efforts are limited to Boston's libraries and some Main Streets programs.  While it remains to see if this effort will complement or supercede separate efforts by City Councilor John Tobin and the Boston Foundation, the decision at the city's highest level that municipal WiFi (wireless internet access) is desirable is a positive development.  Since I wrote my initial post on WiFi last March, I've seen a major increase in WiFi in my own neighborhood--as I type this I am within range of four wireless networks and when I take my laptop out of the house I've seen as many as seven or eight networks show up at various points as I walk around.  Clearly demand has risen.

18th and 19th Century Infrastructure and the Public Good

Using historical analogies is a difficult business.  Too often the analogy breaks down in the details because, except for very broad comparisons, history doesn’t really repeat itself and the contexts in which decisions were made are difficult to reproduce.  With that disclaimer in place, I’m going to use an analogy today.  Fred Wilson, in his A VC blog, raises an interesting question about whether or not WiFi (wireless high speed internet access) should be public infrastructure. 

Private companies financed the bulk of capital intensive infrastructure projects in late 18th and early 19th century Boston.  One notable exception was Quincy Market and the issues regarding the construction and public financing were the subject of fierce debate.  Boston’s town (and city, starting in 1823) government faced opposition to taxation and had limited revenue opportunities which made capital formation difficult.  Private investors filled the void by forming companies to build bridges (see this post), turnpikes, water delivery systems and other infrastructure.  In turn, the companies charged tolls and fees to recoup their expenses.  Many of these companies also suffered from under-capitalization and over optimistic revenue projections, but that is another story. 

In order to build their projects, private companies had to obtain a corporate charter from the state. These corporate charters often included mention of the public benefits of the project because the state realized that it was granting an advantage to the private company to the detriment of the general public.  One could argue that these public benefits are similar to the linkage payments present day developers in Boston pay.  For example, the builders of the West Boston Bridge were required by the state to make an annual payment to Harvard College to support indigent scholars because the tolls from the ferries which the bridge replaced had helped to support Harvard. 

Another example is the Delaware and Schuylkill Canal, a project in 1790s Philadelphia that was never completed. Because the canal required the taking of private property through eminent domain (an issue currently before the Supreme Court) for the canal right of way, the proponents of the canal emphasized that the canal would make water more readily available to the citizens of Philadelphia. This did not satisfy opponents of the canal who observed that despite the alleged public benefit, the shares of the canal stock were being traded publicly to the benefit of the shareholders.

While the notion of the corporation existing at the sufferance of the state (and consequently the people) has largely gone by the wayside, this system still exists today in certain industries, with the issue of licenses to television stations as one example.  Along with their general programming, television stations are required to have portions of their schedule devoted to public affairs programming.

Water in Boston and WiFi Parallels

As my regular readers know, I worked on the Boston Almanac Project last year, republishing the entries for all of the Boston events and fires found in the 1838 and 1841 Boston almanacs.  There is much more in the almanacs than the events and fires however, including a list of all the places where water was available to the public in Boston in 1838.  These public water spots co-existed with a private entity, the Boston Aqueduct Company, which delivered water for a fee.  These parallel delivery systems bring me to WiFi networks. Public wells in Boston were limited by some of the same problems affecting private (and public, for that matter) Wi-Fi hot spots. Wells dry up and hot spots disappear as companies decide the fee based structure no longer works. Well water quality declined in Boston as the population grew, likewise, as more people use hot spots, the quality of service can degrade. In addition, using a private WiFi spot leaves one at the mercy of the provider, which can track what you’re up to when you’re online. Conversely, WiFi providers are subject to unwelcome uses. Both wells and WiFi hot spots are examples of uneven distribution. Wells existed only where water was underground and paid WiFi only exists where economically feasible. Vast segments of the population have the potential to be under served. There are projects afoot which seek to replicate the public well model for WiFi here in Boston—see for example CityKi and Newbury Open.Net.  While admirable, the ability to make coverage universal is likely beyond the reach of such organizations.

Read This First

Attention visitors arriving via Google:  we've changed our categories, which means that some of the Google links will take you to pages that no longer have the information you seek.  This should all sort itself out as the new pages get spidered by Google.  Thank you for your patience.  If you don't need the information immediately, bookmark this site and come back in a few days.

I have been making some changes to the configuration of the City Record and Boston News-Letter in anticipation of more frequent posting.  I've cut down on the number of categories and added a little more information to the sidebar.  I'm also designing a new masthead.

Regards,

The Editor

Dorchester and the Birth of Free Public Education

Link: Schools vie for honor of being the oldest - The Boston Globe.

I opened up my Boston Sunday Globe to the Metro Section and immediately noticed a story on the origins of public education in Massachusetts.  The story begins:

"Boston is the birthplace of education in America -- or so the history books say. But the letterhead on Dedham's public schools begs to differ.

And then there is Rehoboth. The tiny town has plunked a white sign beside the highway declaring itself to be the cradle of the nation's schools.

Those are fighting words to Boston Latin School, which ferociously defends its distinction as the nation's oldest public school, founded in 1635."

I immediately said to myself, "Dedham?  Rehoboth?" and started searching for Dorchester in the article.  It was nowhere to be found.  Apparently Rehoboth (in 1643) and Dedham (in 1644) voted to have a tax to support public schools, which is the basis of their claims for being the birthplace of public education.  But what about Dorchester?  Dorchester established the first free tax supported public school in the Commonwealth in 1639.  The Dorchester town records state the following for 20 May 1639:

"It is ordered that the 20th of May 1639, that there shalbe a rent paid of 20ls yeerely foreur imposed upon Tomsons Iland to bee payd p euy p'son that hat p'prtie in the said Iland according to the p'portion that any such p'son shall fro tyme to tyem injoy and posesse there, and this towards the mayntenance of a schoole in Dorchestr this rent of 20ls yeerlyl to bee payd to such a schoolemaster as shall undertake to teach english latin and other tongues and also writing...."
 
I suppose one could argue that the Dorchester school wasn't supported by "general taxation" because the town records say the "rents" from Thompsons Island paid for the school.  By my reading of the town records, the "rent" was actually a proportional property tax.  By 1641 the town recognized that collecting the 20 pounds rent from the approximately "six score" people who held title to land on Thompsons Island was a difficult task. On 7 December 1641 many of those land owners gave the land back to the town of Dorchester and agreed "that from henceforth the said Iland in the same shallbe wholy and foruer bequeathed and given away from themselues and the heires vnto the Town of Dorchester aforesayd for and Towards the maintenance of a free schoole in Dorchester..."  The Town then voted that no more than ten renters should be allowed on Thompson's Island in order to faciliate the collecting of the rent, which would support the school. 

Furthermore, in 1645 the town reaffirmed its committment to public education by declaring that the schoolmaster "shall equally and impartially receive, and instruct such as shall be sent and Committed to him for that end whither their parents be poor or rich not refusing any who have Right and Interest in the School."  [ed. note: language in the preceding quote was modernized] Out of this guiding principle evolved the idea of free public education for all.

The Mather School currently on Meetinghouse Hill in Dorchester honors Richard Mather, the Minister of First Parish in Dorchester.  Mather provided the impetus for the creation of the free school in 1639.  Boston Latin was not a free public school when it began, so while Boston Latin may lay claim to being the oldest school in the state, it is not the oldest free public school.  I'm not certain how "public" Boston Latin was in any case, while the above quote from the 1645 Dorchester town meeting could still be put over the door of every school in Boston.  And Roxbury Latin--as soon as I go through the Dorchester town records to prove there has been a school in continuous existence in Dorchester since 1639 I'm coming after your "oldest continuous school" claim.

It looks as if Rehoboth will have to change its sign promoting itself as the birthplace of public education and Dedham will have to change the letterhead for the school district.  And just think, I cleared up this issue before having my second cup of coffee.