Hooker Day in Boston (episode 138)

06/23/19 • 39 min

HUB History - Our Favorite Stories from Boston History

Hooker Day was a one-time holiday celebrated in Boston in 1903. While it might sound like this is going to be an X-rated podcast, we’re not talking about that kind of hooker. Civil War General Joseph “Fighting Joe” Hooker was briefly the commander of the main Union force called the Army of the Potomac. Forty years after his command, he was immortalized with a massive statue in front of our State House. When the statue was dedicated, the entire city celebrated a holiday that was called Hooker Day in his honor.

Please support us on Patreon and check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/138/

Hooker Day

Hooker mounted in 1903 Master Joseph Hooker Wood and the sculptors Route of the parade Recalling Hooker’s glory days The State House decked out in bunting with a shrouded statue Ready for the unveiling

Legislation authorizing the erection of a statue of General Hooker at the State House.
Proceedings of the Boston City Council as they prepared for Hooker Day.
The program from the dedication ceremonies for the statue.
Coverage from the Boston Post on June 24 and June 26.
A nice article from the Las Vegas Daily Optic, right next to their coverage of a Harvard-Yale crew race.
The Washington DC Evening Star covered the parade.
The Daily Times of Barre, VT had a story.
Boston Globe articles from June 21, June 22, June 24, June 25, and June 26.
Even the newsletter of the Concord Reformatory for Boys published an article about Hooker Day.
Representative Michelle DuBois puts her foot in it, and tries to clarify.

Boston Book Club

At the end of May, The Smithsonian announced an outstanding acquisition made by the Boston Athenaeum. In a private sale from an...

Please support us on Patreon and check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/138/

Hooker Day

Legislation authorizing the erection of a statue of General Hooker at the State House.
Proceedings of the Boston City Council as they prepared for Hooker Day.
The program from the dedication ceremonies for the statue.
Coverage from the Boston Post on June 24 and June 26.
A nice article from the Las Vegas Daily Optic, right next to their coverage of a Harvard-Yale crew race.
The Washington DC Evening Star covered the parade.
The Daily Times of Barre, VT had a story.
Boston Globe articles from June 21, June 22, June 24, June 25, and June 26.
Even the newsletter of the Concord Reformatory for Boys published an article about Hooker Day.
Representative Michelle DuBois puts her foot in it, and tries to clarify.

Boston Book Club

At the end of May, The Smithsonian announced an outstanding acquisition made by the Boston Athenaeum. In a private sale from an...

Previous Episode

ED Leavitt, Fresh Water, and Steam Power (episode 137)

For centuries before the Quabbin reservoir opened, Boston struggled to provide enough clean, fresh water for its growing population. One of the solutions to this problem was a new reservoir built at Chestnut Hill in the 1880s. The pumping station at this reservoir was home to enormous steam powered pumping engines, and it’s preserved today as the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. Eric Peterson joins us this week to talk about the history of Boston’s water supply, steam power, and a brilliant engineer who designed the steam pumps that provided Boston’s water.

Please support us on Patreon and check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/137/

ED Leavitt

A posthumous profile of Leavitt from the Journal of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers.
Leavitt’s obituary in the Cambridge Chronicle.
Another profile in the Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Model of a Leavitt engine held by the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments.
ED Leavitt’s papers are at the Smithsonian, including a few pictures.

Hoisting engine Pumping engine model Mining engine Mining engine

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to visit the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. It’s really a terrific museum, and one that most people never see.

Boston Book Club

Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is called Eden on the Charles, the Making of Boston, by Michael Rawson. You may have noticed that I’m a bit of an infrastructure nerd, and this is one of my go-to books about the infrastructure that makes up Boston. We’ve used this book as a source for our shows about annexation, perambulating the bounds, and the Mother Brook. It’s both a history of 400 years of urban planning in Boston, and the mirror image of that, which is the environmental history of the city.

Here’s how the publisher’s website describes the book:

Drinking a glass of tap water, strolling in a park, hopping a train for the suburbs: some aspects of city life are so familiar that we don’t think twice about them. But such simple actions are structured by complex relationships with our natural world. The contours of these relationships—social, cultural, political, economic, and legal—were established during America’s first great period of urbanization in the nineteenth century, and Boston, one of the earliest cities in America, often led the nation in designing them. A richly textured cultural and social history of the development of nineteenth-century Boston, this book provides a new environmental perspective on the creation of America’s first cities.

Eden on the Charles explores how Bostonians channeled country lakes through miles of pipeline to provide clean water; dredged the ocean to deepen the harbor; filled tidal flats and covered the peninsula with houses, shops, and factories; and created a metropolitan system of parks and greenways, facilitating the conversion of fields into suburbs. The book shows how, in Boston, different class and ethnic groups brought rival ideas of nature and competing visions of a “city upon a hill” to the process of urbanization—and were forced to conform their goals to the realities of Boston’s distinctive natural setting. The outcomes of their battles for control over the city’s development were ultimately recorded in the very fabric of Boston itself. In Boston’s history, we find the seeds of the environmental relationships that—for better or worse—have defined urban America to this day.

If you want to know more about how the development of Boston’s systems of water and sewage, its filled land and dredged harbor created today’s sprawling city from the puritan village on a peninsula that it evolved from, check out the book.

Upcoming Historical Event

And for our upcoming event this week, we have a talk at the main library in Copley Square this

Next Episode

Founding the Boston Symphony Orchestra (episode 139)

Boston has long been known as the Hub of the Universe, but it’s also a hub of world class arts institutions. One of those institutions is the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This week, we’re looking at the founding of the BSO and the construction of its iconic home, Symphony Hall. We’ll discuss the characters that brought the BSO and Symphony Hall to life, as well as the remarkable features of the concert hall, known for its near-perfect acoustics.

Please support us on Patreon and check out the full show notes at: http://HUBhistory.com/139/

Founding the BSO

Read Symphony Hall’s nomination as a National Historic Landmark and check out the excellent black and white photos that accompanied it.
The Methuen Memorial Music Hall, where the original organ from the Boston Music Hall lives now.
An 1852 article about the opening of the Boston Music Hall.

Program from the inaugural performance at the Boston Music Hall

Boston Book Club

You may recall Michael Patrick MacDonald from our previous Boston Book Club selection, All Souls. A native of South Boston’s Old Colony housing project, MacDonald wrote candidly about the crime, violence, drugs, and poverty that plagued a community that was simultaneously tight-knit and protective of his own.

Michael Patrick MacDonald’s second volume of memoir, called Easter Rising, follows a very different pattern. Here’s how MacDonald’s website describes the book:

In Easter Rising Michael Patrick MacDonald tells the story of how he escaped Old Colony housing project, and learned to live again. Desperate to avoid the “normal” life of crime and drugs that surrounds him, Michael crosses the bridge into the bigger world and reinvents himself in the burgeoning punk rock movement downtown. At nineteen MacDonald escapes further, to Paris and then London. Out of money, he contacts his Irish immigrant grandfather — who offers a loan after securing a promise that Michael will visit Ireland. It is this reluctant journey “home” that reconciles MacDonald with his neighborhood, his family, and his heritage — and the real way forward. A roots journey laced with both rebellion and profound redemption.

Though All Souls is now part of the BPS reading curriculum, Jake and Nikki prefer Easter Rising. An insightful review on GoodReads describes the connection between the two memoirs:

Michael Patrick MacDonald’s All Souls: A Family Story from Southie told the story of the loss of four of his siblings to the violence, poverty, and gangsterism of Boston’s Irish American ghetto. The question “How did you get out?” has haunted MacDonald ever since. In response he has written this new book, a searingly honest story of reinvention that begins with young MacDonald’s breakaway from the soul-crushing walls of Southie’s Old Colony housing project and ends with two healing journeys to Ireland that are unlike anything in Irish American literature.

The story begins with MacDonald’s first urgent forays outside Southie, into Boston and eventually to New York’s East Village, where he becomes part of the club scene swirling around Johnny Rotten, Mission of Burma, the Clash, and other groups. MacDonald’s one-of-a-kind 1980s social history gives us a powerful glimpse of what punk music is for him: a lifesaving form of subversion and self-education. But family tragedies draw him home again, where trauma and guilt lead to an emotional collapse. In a harrowing yet hilarious scene of self-discovery, MacDonald meets his father for the first time — much too late. After this spectacularly failed attempt to connect, MacDonald travels to Ireland, first as an alienated young man who has learned to hate shamrocks with a passion, and then on a second trip with his extraordinary “Ma,” a roots journey laced with both rebellion and profound redemption.

Upcoming Event

Rebecca Byrd of UNC Charlotte is presenting a brown bag lunch event at Massachusetts Historical Society brown bag lunch event on Wednesday June 26 at noon. The topic will be Susie King Taylor: A Legacy of Black Womanhood and Historic Preservation. Taylor was the first Black Army nurse, and she tended to an all Black army troop named the 1st ...