What’s In a (Nick)Name (episode 304)

Transcript

Introduction

Jake:
[0:03] Welcome to Hub History where we go far beyond the Freedom Trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the Hub of the Universe. This is episode 304. What’s in a nickname? Hi, I’m Jake. As I record this. I just finished spending a week with my 12 year old niece Sophie. We had a lot of fun. We went to Plymouth Patuxent, the Tea Party Ships and Museum, the Paul Revere House, Old North and of course some other non history related attractions as well. She’s a very outgoing kid. So I actually got to meet a few listeners. I know this might come as a shock to you, but with all the lonely hours of research and then recording alone in a quiet room with a microphone, podcasting tends to attract introverted hosts. So I don’t usually get to meet a lot of fans in the wild. Thanks to Sophie bragging about her podcast host, uncle. I got to shake that up a bit for once. Going to all those tourist attractions made me wonder what people know about Boston when they get here this week. I’m talking about nicknames for Boston and I spent some time asking visitors and locals what they call Boston and why?

Interviews:
[1:20] Do you know any nicknames for the city of Boston? Any other names that people call Boston of the city? No, we just know for the drivers. They are male. I see. Excellent. That’s a good nickname. Thank you. You know how we got that nickname? Because, uh, your driving is so bad. Title town, title town, title town name. Title town is a good nickname. How would you get that nickname? Championships, man? Oh, is that, could that be for like, uh, neighborhoods or just in Boston? I’ll take neighborhood, uh, murder Pan Krakow. The city that used to never sleep next to New York. Twin City, Bean Town.

Jake:
[1:59] We dig into the history of Boston’s nicknames. I just want to pause and say, thank you to everyone who supports Hub History on Patreon. Our sponsors make it possible for us to pay the ongoing costs of making hub history for things like A I tools and transcription, podcast, media, hosting and hosting and security for the website, as well as the incidental costs that seem to come up when making a podcast. For example, when I headed out on the freedom trail to try to record what people know about nicknames for Boston. I couldn’t find the little windscreen for my field recorder, so I had to buy a new one. Both the windscreen and the field recorder it goes on were made possible by our sponsors who commit to supporting the show with as little as $2 a month or as much as $20 or more to everyone who’s already supporting the show. Thank you. If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com/hubor or visit hubor.com and click on the support us link and thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors. Now it’s time for this week’s main topic. Besides lending this podcast a title, the hub is one of the two most widely used and recognized nicknames for Boston.

Interviews:
[3:18] I think it’s because we think we’re the hub of the universe and everything comes through us and we’re kind of, uh, you know, a little haughty about it. It’s the, uh, you think you’re better, better than me, kind of more, uh, mentality. Absolutely. Thank you very much.

Jake:
[3:31] Along with Hub history. It also inspired the name of the local news site, Universal Hub. And I have to say that if you’re listening to this podcast, you’d better be reading U Hub. Also, as I was doing the research for this episode, I stumbled across an article that I can’t seem to lay hands on again right now to properly credit the author. But it said that the Hub probably only continues to exist because newspaper headline writers are looking for the shortest possible way to refer to Boston. And I think there might be a lot of truth to that statement. A couple of my favorites from past podcast episodes are Hub. Band Limits, rock and roll from Mayor John Hein’s attempt to ban fun that we covered in episode 149 in the 1960 John Updike Classic Hub fans, Big Kid Adieu. It’s probably the best baseball writing of all time describing Ted Williams last game at Fenway Park in beautifully simple prose.

Jake:
[4:29] Unlike many of the nicknames for Boston that we’ll discuss this week that evolve slowly over time and have a murky history. The hub has a very concrete origin story and even has a specific place in town where you can snap your hub. Selfie Oliver Wendell Holmes, senior father of the civil war soldier and supreme court justice, wrote an article titled The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table that was published in the April 1858 edition of Atlantic magazine, which he had recently helped to found, in that essay. He recounts a fictionalized conversation over a Boston breakfast table where someone praised France by saying good Americans when they die. Go to Paris.

Jake:
[5:13] In response, a visitor to the city repeated an aphorism that he’d supposedly heard somewhere that said the Boston statehouse is the hub of the solar system. You couldn’t pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creations straightened out for a crowbar.

Jake:
[5:31] The implication of course, is that Bostonians are so full of themselves, so convinced of their moral and intellectual superiority over other places that we believe the entire universe revolves around the city.

Jake:
[5:43] Speaking in the first person Holmes has himself doubled down on this sentiment. In his reply to the fictional tourist, sir said, I I am gratified with your remark. It expresses with pleasing vivacity that which I have sometimes heard, uttered with malignant dullness. The satire of the remark is essentially true of Boston and of all other considerable and inconsiderable places which I have had the privilege of being acquainted. Cockneys think London is the only place in the world Frenchmen. You remember the line about Paris, the court, the world et cetera. And as Paris is the universe to a Frenchman. Of course, the United States are outside of it. See Naples and then die is quite as bad with smaller places. I’ve been about lecturing, you know, and I found the following propositions to hold true of all of them. One, the axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the center of each and every town or city. Two, if more than 50 years have passed since its foundation, it is affectionately styled by the inhabitants, the good old town of whatever its name might happen to be. Three, every collection of its inhabitants that comes together to listen to a stranger is invariably declared to be a remarkably intelligent audience.

Jake:
[7:10] Four. The climate of the place is particularly favorable to longevity. Five, it contains several persons of vast talent, little known to the world.

Jake:
[7:24] Boston is just like other places of its size only perhaps considering its excellent fish market paid fire department, superior monthly publications and correct habit of spelling the English language. It has some right to look down on the mob of cities. I’ll tell you though, if you want to know it, what is the real offense of Boston? It drains a large watershed of its intellect and will not itself be drained, if it would only send away its first rate men instead of its second rate ones. No offense to the well known exceptions of which we are always proud we should be spared such epigram remarks as that which the gentleman has quoted. There can never be a real metropolis in this country until the biggest sinner can drain the lesser ones of their talent and wealth. I have observed by the way that the people who really live in two great cities are by no means so jealous of each other as are those of smaller cities situated within the intellectual basin. Or suction range of one large one of the pretensions of any other. Don’t you see why? Because their promising young author and rising lawyer and large capitalist have been drained off to the neighboring big city. Their prettiest girl has been exported to the same market. All their ambition points there and all their thin gilding of glory comes from there. I hate little toad eating cities.

Jake:
[8:50] Holmes was, of course, having a bit of good natured fun at the expense of his home town by confirming the stranger’s comment. He’s admitting that we are a bit full of ourselves here in Boston. But in doing so, I think he touches on a greater truth about why people love cities like Boston. Certainly, I can see myself and many of my transplant peers in the intellectual watershed that’s drained by Boston and I too can’t stand little toad eating towns.

Jake:
[9:20] Whenever you see Bostonians embracing the moniker hub of the universe because after all the axis of the earth or the hub of the solar system is just too small. When you see that you’ll know that we’re just a bit too big for our britches, but we embrace it. If you want to embrace your inner snob and take a selfie at the hub of the universe, you’ll have to walk just a couple of blocks from the statehouse dome where Oliver Wendell Holmes located it set in the sidewalk at the corner of Winter and Summer Streets. At downtown Crossing, just outside the door to Primark and the stairs down to the Tea station, there’s a bronze and granite plaque in the shape of a compass rose set flush in the sidewalk. The lettering on it says Hub of the universe. Filene’s Boston. It was commissioned by William F. After opening his flagship department store on this corner in 1912, it was out of sight and feared lost while the old violins was demolished and replaced by a languishing pit for nearly a decade, but it was uncovered and restored in 2015. So you can get your selfie with it today.

The Hub of the Universe

Jake:
[10:29] Our next nickname dates from slightly before the time of Oliver Wendell Holmes hub of the solar system. And it conveys the same arrogance about Boston. But without the self deprecating humor of the hub, the moniker the Athens of America might have been coined by William Tudor Junior, whose immediate family were the subjects of two past hub history episodes. He was the son of Billy Tudor, the patriot soldier who’d swam across Boston harbor to woo his loyalist sweetheart, Delia Junior’s mother at the height of the siege. You can hear more about their love story. In episode 131.

Jake:
[11:08] Williams’s brother was Frederick Tudor, the famous ice king who made a fortune after working out how to store and ship ice that was cut from New England ponds to far flung ports from the Caribbean to India. His story can be heard in episode 211 from December 2020. Professor Bob Allison teaches history at Suffolk University and he’s a specialist in both Boston and the revolutionary era along with his academic work. He also hosts the Revolution 250 podcast which has a heavy focus on Boston and New England and a guest post for the Old North blog. In 2017, Professor Allison described how tutor came to coin the term the Athens of America for Boston Bostonians brought about the revolution. And in the generation after William Tudor noted the way Bostonians cherished their historical landmarks such as Fanuel Hall in the same way that the Athenians treasured Greece’s historical legacy. Tudor is credited with calling Boston the Athens of America, suggesting an elevated culture in the old city. Tudor also helped to create the Boston Athenaeum. And in addition to being one of the most versatile writers in Boston was a business agent in the Caribbean for his brother Frederick the Ice King and died on a diplomatic mission to South America.

Jake:
[12:30] His Athens of America note and the nature of his own social status suggests a kind of elitism in Boston culture which might have some truth to it. But Boston was creating a culture that transcended lines of class and status. The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 calls for diffusing wisdom and knowledge through the body of the people and makes it, the duty of the legislatures and Magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature in the sciences and all seminaries of them.

Jake:
[13:04] At a time when Boston was receiving thousands of immigrants from Ireland and Germany, Massachusetts was expanding its public schools to introduce new Americans to the ideas of the past and preparing for the future. At about the same time William Tudor was calling Boston the Athens of America. A Philadelphia artist was using the same term for his own hometown. A 2011 article for public television station Whyy notes the concentration of schools, museums and other institutions of knowledge in Philly after the war as well as the proliferation of Greek revival architecture. At the same time, the article describes how one of the major architects of those revival buildings also popularized the nickname Henry Latrobe’s May 8th, 1811. Oration to Philadelphia’s Society of Artists is often cited as affirming the city as the Athens of America. He dreamed that the days of Greece may be revived in the Woods of America and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western world.

Jake:
[14:11] Unfortunately for us, Philadelphia also claims another nickname that you might have heard for Boston. The cradle of Liberty. Philly claims the name for having been the venue for both continental Congresses. The Declaration of Independence, the Confederation Congress and the constitutional convention. Boston lays a competing claim in part on the grounds that the popular movements that led to the revolutionary war and independence started in Boston as did the war itself. However much of our stake in the moniker, the Cradle of Liberty comes from a single building, since its construction was funded by a slaver, the cradle of liberty might seem like an odd fit for Fanuel Hall, but it’s held that nickname longer than the city of Philadelphia can lay claim to. You can learn a lot more about the early history of Daniel Hall in episode 196 where we describe the theft and recovery of the building’s iconic gold grasshopper weathervane, after a fire gutted the original market hall in 1761 the hall reopened in 1763 as unrest was growing in Boston with the close of the seven years war or French and Indian War.

Jake:
[15:28] The Empire had gone into debt to fund the war. And now the Massachusetts colonists who had benefited greatly from the elimination of the French threat to the North were protesting against a series of taxes on molasses, sugar, paper and eventually tea. The ground floor of the building was a public market, but upstairs was a public great hall which was one of the largest public meeting places in colonial Boston, because it belonged to the town instead of the province or the crown. It was hard for the royal governor to silence the dissidents who spoke out there against imperial policies with a description by the National Park Service. Noting in this hall, Samuel Adams John Hancock, James Otis and others lashed out against such laws as the Sugar and Stamp Acts and called the earliest meetings that ultimately led to the Boston Tea Party here. They kindled the first flames of the struggle that soon led to war and independence, for its role in these early days of the American revolution. Daniel Hall soon became known as the cradle of liberty. It had that nickname before the turn of the 19th century with a story in the August 17th, 1797 edition of the Boston Price current newspaper. Noting in a story about a gathering there, Daniel Hall, the cradle of American liberty was decorated in a style most convenient for the guests.

Jake:
[16:58] Almost 100 50 years later, a young navy veteran and candidate for us. Congress would stand on that same stage to deliver a few remarks on elements of the American character. As the invited Independence Day speaker, he would open his remarks with an acknowledgement of the famous nickname for the building he stood in though it would never quite stick as a nickname for the city on a hill. Young Jack Kennedy started this speech by saying, mister mayor, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, we stand today in the shadow of history. We gather here in the very cradle of liberty.

Jake:
[17:39] JFK returned to Fanuel Hall on the eve of election day. In 1960 he was running for president of the United States and once again, he evoked Boston’s rich patriotic history and the symbolism of the Great Hall. Ladies and gentlemen, we are meeting tonight in Old Fanuel Hall, which is the cradle of American liberty. Here in this hall, men and women met in the days before the American revolution to work for freedom. The 13 steps behind me celebrate the 13 states that first signed the constitution. We are meeting in the old hall which was the scene of Otis’s speeches in Samuel Adams which led up to the American revolution. The next day, Kennedy was elected president and two months later, he returned to Boston to give his last public speech before taking the oath of office. He appeared before a joint session of the legislature and, and thanking the commonwealth and crediting Massachusetts values for steering him to the oval office. He invoked a truly great nickname for Boston, but one that only politicians ever seem to use.

Presidents:
[18:51] But I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arabella 331 years ago, as they too faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. We must always consider. He said that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us today. The eyes of all people are truly upon us and our governments in every branch at every level, national state and local must be as a city upon a hill constructed and inhabited, by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities for. We are setting out upon a voyage in 1961. No less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella. In 1630 we are committing ourselves to tasks of state craft. No less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay colony, be said as it was by terror without and disorder within.

Jake:
[20:15] He took the idea of Boston as a city upon a hill from John Winthrop’s speech, a model of Christian charity which he delivered to his followers just before the Arbella fleet set sail for New England. Winthrop was one of the architects of the great puritan migration to New England and he’d serve as the first governor of the Bay colony. The speech was meant to establish rules of conduct for this new colony which was to be founded upon biblical grounds. One of those rules was to keep their faith and to make it public. We shall find that the God of Israel is among us when 10 of us shall be able to resist 1000 of our enemies. When he shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations. May the Lord make it like that of New England? For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us. We shall be made a story in a byword through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake. We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither. We are going.

Jake:
[21:39] The reference to a city on a hill would be familiar to a puritan audience from the gospel of Matthew chapter five as part of the sermon on the mound as someone who is not raised as a Christian. The sermon on the mount is one of my favorite passages in the Christian Bible because it contains the beatitudes where Jesus blesses the meek and the merciful and the peacemakers. Right after that verse 14 picks up with you are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel. But on a candlestick and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works and glorify your father, which is in heaven.

Jake:
[22:27] Before its boundaries were expanded through annexation and landfill in the mid to late 19th century, Boston was literally a city upon a hill as well with Beacon Hill in the tri mound occupying most of the Shame Peninsula that made up the town’s land mass. Our new statehouse was built at the top of this hill and our town seal portrays a forest of steeples rising up the slopes of the hill to the dome of the statehouse. Our hub of the universe at the top. For some reason, the pet name city upon a hill has never been adopted except by politicians. In fact, 20 years after JFK incorporated, the idea of a city upon a hill into his election eve speech, Ronald Reagan did the exact same thing, on the night before the 1980 presidential election. He said in a televised address.

The Cradle of Liberty

Presidents:
[23:21] These visitors to that city on the Potomac do not come as white or black, red or yellow. They are not Jews or Christians. Conservatives are liberals or Democrats or Republicans. They’re Americans awed by what has gone before. Proud of what for them is still a shining city on a hill. At this very moment, some young American coming up along the Virginia or Maryland shores of the Potomac is seeing for the first time, the lights that glow in the great halls of our government and the monuments to the memory of our great men. Let us resolve tonight that young Americans will always see those potomac lights, that they will always find there a city of hope in a country that is free and let us resolve. They will say of our day and of our generation that we did keep faith with our God, that we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly, that shining city on a hill.

Jake:
[24:31] You know, he sure was a great speaker for such a terrible President Reagan loved

City Upon a Hill

Jake:
[24:37] the imagery of a city upon a hill. And some historians say that he might have believed in a conspiracy theory about a secret order of ancient philosophers who founded the United States as an experiment in self governance. And that an angel was physically present within an and that an angel was physically present inside Independence Hall on July 4th 1776. Luckily, for us, another US president helped to redeem the imagery of a city upon a hill though he was still a US senator from Illinois when he gave the commencement address at UMass Boston in 2006.

Presidents:
[25:13] And it was right here right in these waters where the American experiment began, as the earliest settlers arrived on the shores of Boston and Salem and Plymouth. They dreamed of building a city on a hill. And the world watched. Waiting to see if this improbable idea called America would succeed for over 200 years. It has not because our dream has progressed perfectly. It hasn’t. It’s been scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery and Jim Crow clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war than depression. Yet, the true test of our union is not whether it’s perfect, it’s whether we work to perfect it, whether we recognize, whether we recognize our failings, identify our shortcomings and then rise to meet the challenges of our time.

Jake:
[26:35] You could do worse for a city’s nickname than a phrase that evokes the best kind of American exceptionalism, the dream of a better life and a better world that’s present in our founding documents and values. If that is, we’re all willing to work toward it together. And so it’s pretty disappointing that we only hear about the shining city upon a hill from politicians every 20 years or so. While the dumbest and most lackluster nickname seems to be the one that sticks with everyone from political journalists covering the 2012 Romney campaign to TV, sports announcers to tourists at Quincy market knowing that Boston is.

Interviews:
[27:15] Do you know any nicknames for the city of Boston? Be in town? Do you know how it got that nickname? I assume from Boston Baked Beans, but probably not being in town. Yeah, the town beam down. I’m not sure. But I’ve been to, I, I heard that one bean bean city, the bean city be bean town. That’s it.

Jake:
[27:41] Town, Beantown. I can hardly bring myself to say it out loud. And yet this dumb nickname has quite an interesting and tangled past to learn why Boston is called Bean Town. We have to figure out where baked beans come from. Why Boston’s associated with baked beans and finally why they became a symbol for the city.

Interviews:
[28:03] You know how Boston got the nickname? Beans out because of the, when they were making the beans, they were adding a molasses and it was because of the great tea hardy and all that stuff. Do you think we eat more beans here than other? No, it must be with the coffee. I don’t know the coffee or tea that started coming to Boston eight years ago. I was actually wondering that myself. Oh, there is a huge molasses flood that there was. Yes, I know that. I do know that. I guess if people are just a real fan of Boston baked beans, I guess. Do you think we eat more baked beans in Boston than other cities? Do? Ah, I, I couldn’t tell you, to be honest. Eats a lot of baked beans. The south. Right? I feel like I’ve never seen baked beans on a menu here. Like only a barbecue restaurant. Coleslaw baked beans and like an open face. Boston’s candy though. There, there was a candy be, but I don’t know if you can still get them somewhere. Yeah, there’s a candy shop right over there. I gotta go see if they have some. The town is the Boston bean thing. But it’s, it, people, the only people that say stuff like that aren’t from here. So it’s like, oh, well, from the time no one says that.

Jake:
[29:16] A lot of people think they know where big beans come from based on a legend that goes something like this. After Ta Quantum or Squanto taught the Plymouth pilgrims how to grow corn. Other friendly Wampanoags shared a traditional bean dish with them. They would put beans, maple syrup and a bit of bear fat into a clay pot, bury the pot in their fire pits and cover it with hot coals. A few hours later, baked beans were ready to serve the English colonists replaced bear fat with pork and they replaced maple syrup with molasses and voila. Boston. Baked beans were invented just as the indigenous people who taught the English about this dish magically disappeared from the New England landscape.

The Origins of Boston Baked Beans

Jake:
[30:01] Now, there are some elements of truth to this story. Beans were a very important crop for the Wampanoags and other nations indigenous to coastal New England. As Sophie and I were reminded on our visit to Plymouth patuxent, beans, corn and squash were the three sisters crops grown together in mounds for easier irrigation and sometimes with herring or smelt for fertilizer. The corn provided a trellis for the beans to climb while the broad squash leaves shaded the mounds helping to retain water and discourage weeds. However, as I dug into the origins of Boston baked beans, I learned that there’s little or no evidence that native Americans bake their beans at all. Much less in the sweetened and fatty form that would be familiar to us.

Jake:
[30:50] In America’s founding food. The story of New England cooking, Keith Staveley and Kathleen Fitzgerald Note, there is a tradition that like succotash baked beans was of native origin beans were abundant and they were baked by the Indians in earthen pots just as we bake them to day wrote Alice Morse Earle in 1898, three quarters of a century later, Sally Smith booth was not the first to include the use of underground bean holes among the native methods of baking beans. Indians probably originated this dish from many tribes, baked bean stews and earthen pots placed into a pit and covered with hot ashes. However, there’s no direct evidence of natives baking beans either in earthenware pots or in bean holes in the ground.

Jake:
[31:43] In her wonderful book, The Truth About Baked Beans. An edible history of New England Meg Mucking Haupt explains that the Wampanoag didn’t do much baking at all. There aren’t any contemporary accounts of whoop and dog baking beans in a pit per se. They may have been baking clams and big pits with hot rocks by steaming them in seaweed. Although contemporary accounts mention only clams being brought to a boil, to get rocks hot enough to bake beans in a hole for several hours would require a lot more heat and a lot more firewood than the Wampanoag used for clams. During the first decades. After the pilgrims 1620 arrival, the Wampanoag are not recorded as baking anything apart from putting small bannock type cakes in ashes. Why would anyone bother with such a labor intensive method of preparing beans in a community that didn’t bake anything else? The first people recorded as indulging in this kind of bean hole cookery. As early 20th century outdoors magazines were wont to call it were cooks at main logging camps who had plenty of wood lying around.

Jake:
[32:55] If the Wampanoags didn’t teach early English colonists to bake beans in a pit or pot. Where did this tradition come from? In a 2020 blog post for the Paul Revere House Museum, Alexandra Powell points out that this supposedly native American dish actually has its origins in the late medieval English food ways that those colonists brought with them. The baked beans we enjoy today are a direct descendant from an English bean and bacon pottage dish. Originally from the middle ages. 17th century puritans favored a dish that they could set to cook on Saturday and then consume on Sunday, saving them from labor on the Sabbath.

Jake:
[33:37] The ingredient that sets Boston baked beans. Apart from those medieval English cottages is molasses which would become one of the cornerstones of Boston’s economy for about 200 years from the turn of the 18th century to the advent of prohibition in the early 20th century. And while molasses would become integrated into Boston cooking due to its prevalence here, food wasn’t the reason that the bittersweet brown liquid was so important to Boston rather it was because of drink rum to be specific. Rum was Boston’s entry into the colonial triangle trade which saw manufactured goods and alcohol being shipped from Europe to Africa and exchanged for captives who were shipped to the Americas where they were enslaved and forced to work on plantations that grew staple crops like rice hemp, tobacco, and most importantly, sugarcane that could be exported back to Europe. That sugar cane was roughly refined in a molasses for easier transport and distilling that molasses into rum that could be traded within the colonies and abroad became along with the export of salted cod to Caribbean slave plantations. Boston’s main entry into the triangle trade in a 1956 article published in the journal agricultural history. Gilman Ostrander describes how Boston came to be a massive importer of Caribbean molasses.

Jake:
[35:04] Molasses had many uses in colonial cooking and Boston baked beans. Boston brown bread and Indian pudding model food budgets submitted to Boston newspapers in 1728 by townspeople included beer as a necessary item of food. One budget allotted seven gallons of molasses annually for a family of nine for cooking purposes alone. Another which included molasses for the brewing of beer allotted nine gallons yearly for each member of the family. The colonial rum industry was confined in New England and the middle colonies. And of those only Massachusetts and Rhode Island produced rum for export on a large scale. Massachusetts earliest in the rum industry does not appear to have distilled appreciable amounts of rum in the 17th century by 1717. However, the colony was distilling 200,000 gallons annually according to the customs officer for the port of Boston, by 1750 it supported 63 distilleries which at the average rate of production per still of the early national period would have accounted for about 700,000 gallons annually. That’s a lot of rum.

Jake:
[36:23] Until Fanny farmer, Boston cooking school cookbook, standardized recipes techniques and measures.

Lydia Maria Child’s Baked Bean Recipe

Jake:
[36:30] There was no commonly accepted formula for a version of baked beans. Specific to Boston Medford native Lydia Mariah child was a prolific author, radical abolitionist and her song over the River and through the wood was the subject of our 160th episode. In her 1832 book, The American Frugal Housewife. Child’s baked bean recipe does not include molasses and it doesn’t refer to the dish as Boston baked beans.

Jake:
[36:59] A pound of pork is quite enough for a quart of beans. And that is a large dinner for a common family. The rind of the pork should be slashed. Pieces of pork alternately fat and lean are the most suitable. The cheeks are the best a little pepper sprinkled among the beans. So their place in the bean pot will render them less unhealthy. So eventually Boston came to sweet its beans with the molasses that the town was awash in by the early 17 hundreds. Though of course, not literally until the molasses flood of 1919, the rest of the dish had been imported from England along with the clay pots that would become emblematic of Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In her post for the Paul Revere House blog, Alexandra Powell explains how both the puritans taste for pottage and their clay baking pots resulted from regional variations in Merry Old England.

Jake:
[37:58] As it turned out the seeds of a culinary tradition that favored dishes like baked beans might actually have predating the 17th century arrival of Europeans in Massachusetts Bay colony. Archaeologist Charles cheek posits that the individual culinary profiles of each of the original charter colonies derived directly from the regional differences in the English origins of the initial settlers. The variety of unique food waste existing in the original colonies became a part of these individual charter cultures forged by inherited English regional food traditions and also varying new world environmental factors. An illustrative example of these differences is each colony’s preferred method of cooking. Chesapeake. Columnists inherited their preference for frying and fricasseeing from culinary traditions in Southern England. The same is true of Quaker settlers in the Mid Atlantic who show a preference for boiling like their ancestors in northern England. Finally baking us the Norman Eastern England, the origin point of the puritans who settled the Massachusetts Bay colony.

Jake:
[39:06] This hypothesis is a great example of archaeology coming to the rescue of documentary history. It would be difficult to prove such a direct link between regional English food traditions and their corresponding new world colonies based solely on the historical record, as most references are anecdotal, vague and scattered across few 18th century primary sources like cookery books.

Jake:
[39:30] Archaeologists however, were able to find a larger number of a specific ceramic baking dish in Massachusetts Bay colony excavations than in other colonies such as the Chesapeake. The same is true of archaeological excavations in England which show a preferred method of baking and deposits from eastern England, from which the first settlers to the Massachusetts Bay colony originated.

Jake:
[39:54] By the time of the first World war clay bean pots were ubiquitous souvenir at Fanuel Hall and they were emblazoned on postcards and other knickknacks for sale in downtown Boston. However, one of the earliest recipes to actually refer to Boston baked beans in print also makes it clear that special pots were not necessary to make Boston baked beans. Fanny Farmer whose groundbreaking Boston cooking school cookbook was the subject of our 159th episode, included a recipe for Boston baked beans. In her 1896 1st edition, her version included beans, salt pork, molasses and mustard, which is still considered the canonical recipe. Farmers notes let the home cook know that they can still prepare this dish if they don’t happen to have access to a specialized clay bean pot. The fine reputation which Boston baked beans have gained has been attributed to the earthen bean pot with a small top and bulging sides in which they’re supposed to be cooked. Equally good. Beans have often been eaten where a £5 lard pail was substituted for the broken bean pot.

Jake:
[41:02] In the truth about baked beans. Mag Minha, argues that our association of Boston with baked beans and the proliferation of bean pots that followed were a product of late 19th century nostalgia for a time when Boston might still have deserved the reputation of the Athens of America.

Nostalgia and the Colonial Revival Movement

Jake:
[41:20] She writes the 1876 centennial made New Englanders painfully aware of just how prominent the region had been in 1776. And how much of a national backwater New England had become the West called youth with endless possibilities in cities from New York to Saint Louis, to Denver, to San Francisco were growing dynamic and flush with new money from oil, coal, railroads, mining factories and farms. But New England had history. The centennial sparked the colonial revival movement when New Englanders clawed back their revolutionary past to prove the region wasn’t just a bunch of has beens, cookbook, writers and home economists became entangled in a gluey nostalgia. For times, their grandparents had never witnessed a small subset of New England foods, baked beans, pies, brown bread, boiled dinner were charged with Yankee virtue. They became symbols of New England thrift, hard work and contentment with simple living rather than just another bunch of cheap things to eat.

Jake:
[42:29] This centennial nostalgia collided with advances in food science in Boston, as recounted by Mark Ser in an essay for Saber, the Society for American Baseball Research. Before the Braves moved to Atlanta, they were the Milwaukee Braves and before that, they were the Boston Braves playing in a stadium on today’s BU campus, for a brief period between being referred to as the Red Stockings and taking on the name the Braves, the National League. This National League team was known as the Boston bean eaters. And in his article how Bostonians became the bean eaters. Ser explains, the real breakthrough was in canning. Boston canneries were the first to invent a can that preserved the beans. The key canning firm was Henry Mayo and Company of Boston, which was the first producer of baked beans in cans. The company experienced a setback when after receiving the silver medal for the best baked beans in the world at the Paris World’s Fair. In 1878 Henry Mayo was awarded a contract from the French government for 100,000 dozen cases.

The Rise and Fall of Henry Mayo and Company

Jake:
[43:41] The company attempted to fill it but the French government canceled the contract and Henry Mayo and company was awash in canned goods. It began national advertising which greatly advanced the close tie of Boston to baked beans, but the firm went belly up six years later.

Jake:
[43:59] However, the evolution of baked beans from a Sabbath staple to a symbol of regional pride doesn’t explain how they became synonymous with Boston specifically to the point where people still insist on calling Boston bean town in the year 2024. The years from 1890 to 1907 were the peak years of Boston being the world’s bean capital. The bean era of Boston began with the Grand Army of the Republic Annual Encampment being held in Boston in 1890 ended with Boston’s Old Home Week celebration in 1907. Referring to the 1890 encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, a National Civil War Veterans organization. He writes Boston didn’t roll out a red carpet but did present several 1000 ornamental bean pots marked Beverly Pottery to attendees. Eb Stillings and company sold metal tokens featuring a tag labeled Department of Massachusetts Gar with a bean pot connected by a chain on a card stating that the souvenir was officially endorsed. There were other variations as well. It further solidified the association of Boston baked beans and bean pots across the nation.

Jake:
[45:18] 1890 was the peak of the Gars membership and influence with 410,000 members and tens of thousands attending the encampment in Boston and leaving with beanpot themed souvenirs.

Jake:
[45:33] However, the final hammer blow that forged Beantown into an unforgettable moniker was struck by yet another politician, one who was in the Great Hall in 1946 when JFK invoked Daniel Hall’s reputation as the cradle of liberty writing in Boston magazine. In 2022 Mike Ross, noted John F Fitzgerald, the 39th and 41st mayor of Boston, as well as the grandfather of president John F. Kennedy decided to make baked beans the starring character in Boston’s latest advertising campaign. It was based on Old Home Week, an economic improvement strategy that originated in New Hampshire designed to lure tourists, often former residents who moved away to the region to spend their money, in 1907. Mayor Honey Fitz as Fitzgerald was called, brought the concept to Boston. It will be a splendid opportunity to stimulate public sentiment here and to advertise to the world, the progress that Boston’s been making and the great opportunities that she possesses along industrial and commercial lines. He announced the city mailed 1 million stickers across the country to advertise the special event, all bearing the indelible mark of a baked bean pot.

Jake:
[46:55] If that wasn’t enough, even organizers insisted that the week would feature a Boston Baked Bean Day to celebrate the Staples. Strong association with the city Beantown was officially born with its very own debutante party debuted, like Meg Muck and helped wrote Western cities might have had rapid economic growth and opportunities for young people. But Boston had history who was gonna use that history to try to lure some expats back from the west, at least temporarily, planning for this old Home Week began in earnest in March 1908 with the Boston Globe reporting on the eighth. What was before a mere possibility has now become a certainty for at a meeting of merchants of the city in the Boston Chamber of Commerce. Yesterday afternoon, it was decided that this summer, Boston is to have the grandest Old Home Week celebration ever arranged in this country as now planned by Thomas F Anderson, Head of the City Publicity Bureau. The date for this Old Home Week celebration will be from July 28th to August 3rd.

Planning for Old Home Week

Jake:
[48:02] An elaborate program of events for each day of that period has been laid out but so arranged that the big features will come in practically three of the days of the celebration, leaving the remainder of the time for family reunions, visits to historic places and an opportunity to see the many historic collections and relics which will be ready for the visitors.

Jake:
[48:23] The celebration will start in on Sunday which will be known as Founder’s Day with special services at which reference will be made to the founders of the country and their part in Boston’s history. Then there will be a Patriots Day, a Greater Boston day, a New England Day when the governors of the other states will have an opportunity to meet and shake hands with Governor Curtis Guild Junior, a Woman’s Day. And the celebration will conclude with baked bean day. On which occasion, the bean pots of the housewives of Greater Boston will be advertised to the world as steaming hot with the bean as only Boston housewives know how to prepare it.

Jake:
[49:02] Three weeks later, the focus of baked bean day was already starting to shift with the globe reporting on developments and Old Home Week planning. On March 31st, Mayor Fitzgerald was highly gratified yesterday to learn from Governor Guild that his excellency has decided to further strengthen the military feature of the celebration by arranging to have both brigades of the state militia in Boston on the closing day of the observance. Saturday, August 3rd one brigade will end its annual tour of camp duty that day. And the other will begin its work and the two events will thus synchronize in a local demonstration that will make an impressive and spectacular wind up not only to the old Home Week festivities as a whole, but of the week’s coast defense maneuvers, this will be baked bean day too so that the old Home Week program will end in a fitting blaze of glory.

Jake:
[49:54] The same globe story describes the bean pot stickers that were being printed to promote the event. The bureau has already entered upon its campaign of advertising in connection with the Old Home Week celebration. The first lot of 1 million stickers setting forth the purpose and date of the reunion for use on letters and express packages will be ready in a day or two. These are to be used by the businessmen of Boston and citizens generally and will be furnished to all who wish to use them at cost. It is hoped that several millions of these stickers with their striking design of Boston bean pot and clasp hands will be used between now and next July.

Old Home Week – Military Day

Jake:
[50:34] By the time the inaugural Old Home Week celebration came around in July 1907. The closing Baked Bean Day had been replaced by Military Day with various amateur athletic events and a parade by the State Militia as the main event. On that day, coverage of the Old Home Week was almost pushed off the front page of the globe replaced by a giant headline and illustration of a mass shooting in Boston’s Chinatown. One that we covered is episode 49 very early in the run of this show.

Jake:
[51:07] Perhaps the fading interest in Old Home Week shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise since enthusiasm seemed hard to come by. Even on the opening day of the affair with the July 28th, 1907, New York Times reporting, it was somewhat difficult to stir the people. But by the aid of the newspapers, considerable enthusiasm has been aroused in the last week with the result that most of the principal buildings and stores have been decorated, making the leading thoroughfares a blaze of color. During the evenings, there will be brilliant illuminations. They began this evening. The mayor’s request that the stores be closed on one day in the week was refused. Today by the merchants who assembled at City Hall, the executive committee voted however to request the merchants to permit such of their employees as desire to parade on Wednesday to do so without loss of pay, already, many leading business concerns have agreed to this.

Jake:
[52:07] So to summarize Beantown was born from the trope of the vanishing Indian with the helpful Wampanoags introducing colonists to a dish that they never actually prepared. It was weaned on the triangle trade sweetening the beans with the molasses created by enslaved labor.

The Birth of Beantown

Jake:
[52:24] And it was popularized through a tourism campaign that got only grudging support from the locals. Hey, maybe in the end, Beantown really is an appropriate nickname for Boston.

Jake:
[52:39] To learn more about nicknames for Boston. Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/three 04. I have links to the sources I used about all the nicknames discussed including Oliver Wendell Holmes essay, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table and Updike’s hub fans. Bid Kid I do as well as Bob Allison’s explanation of the Athens of America. There will be transcripts of all the presidential speeches that we talked about from JFK Reagan and Obama along with video or audio where I can find it for Beantown. I’ll have news articles from the globe and the New York Times about Old Home Week recipes for baked beans from Lydia, Mariah child and Fanny farmer. And more information about the classic Boston baked beans candy. I’ll link to the essays I quoted from Alexander Powell, Mark Salter and Gilman Ostrander. There will also be pictures of the bronze hub of the universe in front of the old violins building, postcards promoting Beantown and old Home Week and an oil truck from a local company that welds bean pots to all their bumpers.

Additional Notes and Announcements

Jake:
[53:47] Make sure to also check out Meg Minh’s great book, The Truth About Baked Beans, which I have an affiliate link for as well.

Jake:
[53:57] I have two additional notes before I let you go this week. First of all, I’m still in the market for a job. If you work at a historic site or a history organization around the Boston area, let me know if you hear about any job openings, need someone to do public history interpretation. Hey, I’m great with the public. Need someone to write content for your website or social media. Well, I’ve written about 300 episodes of this show. So, you know, I’m good for it. I’m open to nearly anything that would get me paid for. My love of local history.

Jake:
[54:33] My love of local history also brings me to the second note. I’m going to be presenting at History, Camp Boston for the first time. This August History camp is a history conference without the gatekeeping. There are dozens of presentations throughout the day by expert presenters, but you don’t need to belong to a certain organization or hold a certain credential to attend or present, history camp started in Cambridge in 2014 and it’s since spread to Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Virginia. I’ve been at every history Camp Boston since the first one but this will be my first time presenting. My session will be about the first whale that was ever captivated in the world. A Beluga that was displayed at Boston’s first aquarium in the 18 sixties, just a couple of blocks from Suffolk Law where history camp will be held.

Jake:
[55:29] I’m also gonna moderate a panel discussion about how to interpret the revolution for modern audiences. And one of the panelists will be co-host Emerita Nikki. So if you want to hang out with us, learn more at History, camp.org, if you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubor.com. We’re Hub History on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me as at Hubor at better dot Boston or go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link while you’re on the site. Hit the subscribe blank and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do drop me a line and I’ll send you a hub history sticker as a token of appreciation.

Jake:
[56:21] That’s all for now. Stay safe out there listeners. Uh Here’s the secret post credit sequence of the day. If this episode ends up sounding a bit rougher around the edges than most, it’s because I’m recording it at the height of our June 2024 heat wave and you just can’t record a podcast with an air conditioner in the same room. Stay cool out there listeners.