Transcript

Introduction and Personal Announcement

Music

Jake:
[0:04] 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 290 more than just tea. Hi, I’m Jake.
This week marks a big anniversary in Boston history. The 250th anniversary of the Boston tea party.
I had originally planned to release an interview with an expert this week where we debunked some of the most common myths about the destruction of the tea events conspired against me.
However, on the morning when the interview was scheduled, we had to say goodbye to our beloved dog. Duke.
Duke was 14.5 years old and he was a very good boy.

[0:53] He was my constant companion for almost a third of my life. He went on daily walks with me and came along on my morning runs for over a decade.
He loved cheese and peanut butter and pizza crusts. He was a champion commuter on the orange line, the blue line and the commuter rail, he’d experienced canoes, water taxis and high speed ferries and he hated them all.
He did love to travel and he visited all the New England states from the top of Mount Washington to the tip of Cape Cod.
From the trails of the Blue Hills to the Kennedy’s private beach and from Portland to Providence to New Haven, to Burlington.
I can’t say that he loved history as much as we do, but he visited Ticonderoga Valley Forge and many other historic sites at our sides.

[1:43] I canceled the interview that I had planned and then the crazy work schedule I’ve been keeping over the past few weeks, kind of kept me from putting together an elaborate plan for an all new episode.
Luckily the rest of Boston has the 250th anniversary of the tea party covered.
There are commemorative events taking place around the city and throughout December with the highlights being the meeting of the body of the people at Old South and a reenactment at the tea party ships and museum.
Both of which will have already happened. By the time you hear this, we’ll leave the tea to the experts and instead this week, we’ll talk about some of the other cargoes that arrived in Boston on the ill fated T ships.

[2:24] But before we talk about some of the other things that came to Boston on those T ships.
I just wanna pause and thank our Patreon sponsors.
These are the loyal listeners who choose to support the show with $2.05 dollars or even more than that each month and they help offset the costs of making hub history each month.
I pay for things like web hosting and security, podcast, media, hosting, online, audio processing tools, transcription, and now some A I tools that I’ve been trying to use to help speed production.
Being able to rely on the ongoing support of our Patreon sponsors means that I can get on with researching and writing the show.
And I don’t have to worry so much about where the money is gonna come from.
So to everybody who supports 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.

Main Topic: Other Cargoes on the Tea Ships

 

[3:25] Now it’s time for this week’s main topic like any lover of Boston history.
I’ve been familiar with the events that led up to the dumping of the tea on December 16th 1773 and the impact of that act of rebellion since I was a kid.
I can still remember the sketch on Sesame Street where Kermit was a roving reporter who was covering the Boston tea party.
But like the letter T.

[3:52] However, I have to confess that until pretty recently, I hadn’t realized that there would have been other cargoes aboard the four ships that brought tea to Boston in December 1773.
Some of you out there may have had the chance to see the original play Phyllis in Boston at the old South Meeting House over the last few weeks, the play centers on Phyllis Wheatley’s efforts to secure the newly published copies of poems on various subjects, religious and moral.
They were being held in the Dartmouth’s hold while debates raged as to whether the ship could be unloaded.
The audience is reminded that while questions on the fate of the t may have foreshadowed the revolution at the time.
A lot of merchants and families just wanted to get their stuff.
We’ve never released an entire episode about the enslaved poet Phyllis Wheatley.
But back in August 2021 we talked about another talented black artist who was enslaved in Boston, Scipio Moorhead who was advertised as taking faces at the lowest rates, created the portrait of Phyllis that served as the funnest piece of her book which she must have been desperate to get unloaded off the Dartmouth before Boston’s anger overflowed.
A classified ad ran in the Boston Gazette starting in January 1773 and several more times that year.

[5:15] At Mr mclean’s, the watchmaker near the townhouse is a negro man whose extraordinary genius has been assisted by one of the best masters in London.
He takes faces at the lowest rates. Specimens of his performance may be seen at said place.

[5:32] Now, while there were free black people in Massachusetts in the 17 seventies, that was the exception rather than the rule.
In almost every case, when you encounter the word negro in print in that era, it’s referring to someone who is enslaved.
So this advertisement was for an enslaved black man and taking faces meant that he could paint or draw portraits.
He was displaying samples of his work at a watchmaker’s shop near the building we know is the old statehouse probably on today’s state street.
The February 4th, 1773 edition of the gazette was the first one I could find online that carried this advertisement for the services of an enslaved portraitist.
And it also carried ads for enslaved humans themselves like this man who was advertised as part of an estate sale.

[6:23] To be sold by said executor, an extraordinary good negro fellow about 21 years of age.
Also four pair of beds screws, one pair of hands screws a horse and chaise a horse cart.
About 12,000 of good dry boards, a large scale beam that will weigh a ton and end and about 1000 of weights in the same edition of the paper.
There were two ads listing young black girls to be given away for free to new enslavers.
One is listed as being two months old and no age is given for the other who’s just described as a very likely hardy female negro child of as fine a breed as any in America.
So in one breath, we see an enslaved painter who’s described as possessing extraordinary genius, another enslaved man who’s treated his household furniture and two enslaved Children who are deemed literally worthless.

Uncovering the Practice of Slavery in Boston

 

[7:23] From a primary source like this. It’s a lot easier to draw general conclusions about the practice of slavery in Boston in 1773 than it is to gain specific knowledge about the life of any enslaved individual like our painter.
Luckily, we have another strong clue to the identity of the enslaved painter.

[7:44] Thanks to Phyllis Wheatley, we know that there was an African American portrait painter who was working in Boston.
At around this time, Phyllis Wheatley was kidnapped from West Africa when she was about seven years old, brought to Boston and enslaved by the Wheatley family.
Unlike many enslavers in Boston, Susannah Wheatley encouraged Phyllis’s natural creativity and knack for language.
Soon she was reading not only English but also Latin and Greek and she began composing poetry as a teenager.
Now about 20 years old, she was considered a highly skilled poet.
She had just returned from a trip to Britain with her enslavers son, looking for a publisher for a book of poetry.
And later that year, she’d be manumitted, were released from slavery in her now famous 1773 book, poems on various subjects, religious and moral.
She included a poem titled to S ma young African painter on seeing his works, in the Florid style that was so popular among poetry lovers at the time.
It includes the lines still wondrous youth.
Each noble path pursue on deathless glories fix thine ardent view.
Still may the painters and the poets fire to aid thy pencil and thy verse conspire.

Unveiling the Mystery of Phyllis Wheatley’s Poem

 

[9:07] Though Phyllis Wheatley doesn’t identify the wondrous youth beyond the initials.
Sm There are additional clues that let us name the painter as Scipio Moorhead.
In an essay about searching for the details of Scipio’s life in the historic record, historian Eric Slaughter wrote it is in fact, only from Phyllis Wheatley’s poem that we have any knowledge that Scipio Moorhead was a painter, a manuscript note left in pencil by Daniel o’connor, a white reader and his copy of Wheatley’s poems on various subjects indicates that Wheatley’s poem to S Ma young African painter on seeing his works was addressed to Scipio Moorhead, a black quote, servant whose genius inclined him that way, unquote, the materials for narrating Morehead’s life are few.
The fact that someone wrote a poem to him is the only thing that truly distinguishes the archival traces left by or around this particular person from the traces of many other enslaved persons whose lives remain largely invisible to us.

The Moorhead and Wheatley families: Mentorship and Influence

 

[10:12] The Wheatley’s and the Moorhead were neighbors and friends. And there’s been speculation that both the enslaved painter, Scipio and the enslaved poet, Phyllis found mentorship in the household of Reverend John Moorhead and his wife Sarah Parsons Moorhead.
Phyllis Wheatley became famous in both the colonies and England after writing an elegaic poem after the death of Reverend George Whitfield.

[10:36] Whitfield was one of the first itinerant ministers, one of the founders of the Methodist church and one of the founders of the evangelical movement.
His ministry inspired the great awakening that helps explain why the United States remains such a heavily religious nation even today.

[10:53] Though Johnny Moorhead was a prominent Scots Irish Presbyterian, both the Wheatley’s and the Moorhead were influenced by Whitfield’s teaching.
And Sarah Moorhead had composed poems about the minister. In the past, Professor Wendy Raphael Roberts, who’s made a career of studying Phyllis Wheatley compares the language Wheatley used in her elegy for Reverend Whitfield to the language Sarah Moorhead had earlier used.
And she concludes that Sarah Moorhead helped to nurture the creative impulses in both young artists claims have been made for the Reverend Mather Byles as a poetic mentor for Wheatley, an idea that’s now commonplace.
My comparison of what field in poems suggest that Wheatley found another poetic mentor and the revival supporter, Sarah Moorhead, given the friendship between the Moorhead and Wheatley families and Morehead’s mentorship of her own slave, Scipio Moorhead and his artistic pursuits and active mentorship rather than only poetic emulation was quite possible.
The Moorhead household cultivated art and poetry as part of its religious experience and understood them to be tools for steering the winds of a revival.
It would have been a natural extension of Sarah Morehead’s religious and artistic vision to take the young Wheatley under her wing as well.

[12:12] As she was significantly older than the painter Phyllis Wheatley probably had a hand in Scipio’s artistic education herself and slaughter speculates about another potential source.
In the 17 sixties, Scipio might have found a mentor of sorts and Pompei Fleet, a slave in the household of the Boston publisher Thomas Fleet, Pompeii fleets woodcuts for the prodigal daughter made around 1750 may have been copied from a lost English source.
They were subsequently rec copied by other engravers including a young Isaiah Thomas who later wrote about Pompeii in his history of printing in America.

[12:52] Much as it might seem strange to advertise the extraordinary genius of an enslaved painter alongside enslaved Children who were seen as literally worthless.
It also seems strange to both tutor these young people in the arts recognize and encourage their incredible skill and creativity and yet enslave them.
In his book, The City State of Boston, past podcast guest, Mark Peterson explains the mental gymnastics that families like the Moorhead and the Wheatley’s performed to justify enslaving people who they clearly recognized as having inherent value in humanity.
They were all believers in liberty, but their definition of the term, a protestant Christian liberty was complex.
This liberty was not licensed to do what one lists but freedom to know what is right and to do good.
This was a freedom rooted in submission to an omnipotent God’s authority and acceptance of Christ’s love, demonstrated in his substitution atonement for humankind’s sins, which transformed believers from slaves of sin into free and active servants of God’s divine purpose.

[14:01] As chief beneficiaries of the commercial prosperity that Bostonians run from the Atlantic trade.
The members of this circle shared the luxury to treat people they claim to possess as privileged servants like Phyllis or Scipio rather than his field hands in these circles.
The practice of African Chattel, slavery was a serious but Murky prob, as we’ve seen as early as 1700 Samuel Sewell argued that the slave trade was inherently wrong, legalized man stealing and no more justified than the selling of Joseph by his brothers.
Other 18th century Bostonians justified slavery on the grounds that it was wrong to leave a continent in darkness, untouched by Christianity and neglect the souls of those unfortunates already captured into slavery and deposited on American shores.
Some like Harrison Gray, Joseph Sewell and Andrew Elliott, Minister of the New North Church were actively opposed to slavery, refused to own slaves themselves and spoke out against the institution.
Others, John Wheatley and John Moorehead, among them saw no contradiction between owning slaves and treating them humanely as Christians just as they would servants in less permanent forms of bondage.

[15:18] So perhaps Sarah Moorhead believes she was doing the humane thing when she enslaved a young African boy in 1760 gave him the name Scipio.
In his essay, Eric Slaughter, explored the slim details of Scipio’s early life that could be gleaned from historic sources.
Writing on June 11th, 1760 a group of white Bostonians presented a black child.
They called Scipio Saracen to an Anglican minister for baptism.
While it’s possible to reconstruct fundamental facts about the white players in this ceremony and even about the setting in which it took place, the child at its center remains largely invisible.
King’s Chapel, a stone building sometimes called the masterpiece of the first architect of British America.
May itself have been partially constructed by unfree black laborers.
Once inside the building social conventions segregated black and white parishioners.
In the recent past, numerous whites had brought Children of African descent to Reverend Henry Ker for baptism.
Thomas Hayes, one of Scipio’s sponsors was a cordwainer, a shoemaker.
He held the title to a pew in King’s Chapel and it served as a witness in the infant baptisms of at least two other slaves before Scipio Saracen, including Reverend Caner’s own slave, Pompeii.

[16:40] Six years later, Kerwood baptized Hay’s slave. Crispin Scipio’s other sponsor was Sarah Parsons Moorhead, a published poet who had occasionally taught Children how to draw paint and embroider.
Sarah Moorhead was married to the pastor of the Presbyterian church.
Reverend John Moorhead, the surviving baptismal record described Scipio Saracen as a negro servant to Reverend John Moorhead.
But in late colonial New England, a negro servant was synonymous with a slave.
Sarah and John owned Scipio.
His origin is as unclear as his age. Scipio is one of the names most frequently given to newly imported black male slaves by white masters in New England.
In the middle of the 18th century, the names of classical worthies and gods that white masters gave to black men in 18th century, British America Scipio, Cato Caesar, Bacchus Pompeii, Neptune, Nero and Jupiter were the most common.
Such names in Boston marked even baptized slaves as pagan or pre Christian and served to ironize the power dynamic between slaveholders and slaves.

Scipio’s age and impressive skill as a portraitist

 

[17:55] Slaughter points out that one of the details that cannot be gleaned from historic sources is Scipio’s age, when Phyllis wrote about him in 1773 she was about 20 years old and her references to him as a youth indicate that she was at least a little bit older than him.
If he was an infant, when he was baptized in 1760 he might have been as young as 13 years old.
If so, his skill as a portraitist is even more impressive because many people believe that he created the portrait of Phyllis Wheatley that ended up being transposed to an engraving and used as the front is piece for a book of poetry.

[18:33] When her En Slaver Susannah Wheatley fell ill. Phyllis had to cut her 1773 trip to England Shore returning to Boston before she could secure a publisher for a book of poems.
In her absence, Captain Robert Kiff, acting as the Wheatley’s agent continued to search for a sponsor in a letter to the family.
It reported that Selina Hastings, the Countess Huntington was interested in financing the publication, but she had a couple of requests.
I’d like to forget to mention to you, she’s fond of having the book dedicated to her.
But one thing she desired, which she said she hardly thought would be denied her.
That was to have Phyllis’s picture in the front of piece so that if you would get it done, it can be engraved here.
I do imagine it can be easily done and think would contribute greatly to the sale of the book.
I am impatient to hear what the old countess says upon the occasion and she’ll take the earliest opportunity of waiting upon her when she comes to town.

[19:37] At the countess’s request. A portrait was made of Phyllis Wheatley, which is usually attributed to the hand of Scipio Moorhead.
Then that portrait was made into an engraving some articles about Scipio Morehead state that he traveled to London to make the plate for the engraving himself.
But I couldn’t find any period sources to support that claim.
If he created the likeness of Phyllis, it’s likely that he sketched her, painted her portrait and the original was lost after being sent to London and used to create a plate.
The remaining engraving is considered the first portrait of a woman writer at work in the Americas.
In a 1996 article for the William and Mary Quarterly. About 18th century representations of African Americans.
Barbara E LACY describes the unusual nature of this portrait.

[20:25] The funest piece portrait and poems on various subjects, religious and moral is believed to be based on the work of black painter Scipio Moorhead, a member of the household of the Reverend John Moorhead of Boston and a friend of Phyllis Wheatley.
The front is piece shows a slim young woman seated in a curved back chair at an oval table with a quill pen inkwell book and writing paper.
She’s writing but has stopped and lifted her head to compose the next lines.
Her eyes look off but not at the world around her. She is inwardly directed, reading her thoughts.
Yet the inscription of the portrait’s border identifies her as Phyllis Wheatley negro servant to Mr John Wheatley of Boston.
She’s presented to English readers as a woman of refinement, a poet and a servant, an improbable thought provoking combination of roles.

[21:21] I thought that the marginal note by Daniel o’connor that Eric Slaughter told us about might have been the only reference to Scipio by name during his own era.
But past podcast guest, JL Bell turned up one more in conjunction with John Morehead’s death.
The Reverend passed away in December of 1773 and Phyllis Wheatley penned a new poem in his memory address to Mary Moorhead.
Sarah and John’s daughter, the allergy to Miss Mary Moorhead on the death of her father, the Reverend mister John Moorhead focused on the dual loss suffered by the Moorhead family and Reverend Morehead’s church, written in a more simple style than the O de Scipio.
It includes straightforward couplets like thine and the church’s sorrows.
I deplore Moorhead is dead and friendship is no more.

[22:14] In the weeks after the minister’s death, a printer named William mcalpine set the poem in type and sold it as a broadsheet in the streets of Boston into the void left by Morehead’s passing.
Stepped Reverend David mcclure mcclure was an itinerant minister in the early months of 1774.
He preached from pulpits in Salem Newbury Port and at Portsmouth exeter in Dover New Hampshire, his diary entry for April 28th notes that while in Portsmouth, he received an invitation to supply the pulpit of the late venerable Mister Moorhead in Boston.

[22:53] The next entry in his diary from May 4th shows just how closely mccord stepped into the late Johnny Morehead’s shoes put up at the widow.
Warheads found the place convenient for study the family small.
The widow is unhappily deranged.
The distraction is of the melancholy cast silent and averse to company your society.
She was once an accomplished wit and beauty, tenderly beloved by her husband.
Her distraction was thought to be the effect of an uncommon flow of spirits and lively imagination. Too intensely applied to reading and study.
One son and two daughters survive.
The son. Alexander is now a surgeon in the British Navy in Boston Harbor.
Her daughter, Mary takes care of her poor mother, a negro young man does. The housework.
Scipio is an ingenious and serious African. He possesses a natural genius for painting and has taken several tolerable likenesses, and quoting this passage for a 2016 blog post about Sep OJL Bell notes.
It’s a pity that mcclure attributed Sarah Morehead’s depression to too much reading and study rather than say the death of her husband less than six months before.

Rediscovery of an Enslaved Artist in Boston

 

[24:14] That would seem to be the last word on the so called Negro man of extraordinary genius who was advertised in 1773 as taking faces at the lowest rates in Boston, Scipio, who was enslaved by the Moorhead family, was a gifted visual artist who had a friendship with the much more famous Phyllis who was enslaved by the Wheatley family and who was also a gifted poet.
Case closed or maybe not in the early two thousands.
Another enslaved artist who was active in Boston at the same time began to reemerge from the archives.
One of the founders of the Hingham Historical Society in the early 20th century, gave the organization a huge collection of antiques that she had inherited.
Among the collection were portraits of Henry and Christian Barnes.
Along with the collected letters of both Christian Barnes especially was quite a letter writer, writing to her husband when he was away to friends and acquaintances in Boston, after the Barnes family moved from Boston to Marlborough.
And later in life, even to one of the three African Americans whom the family had enslaved, Henry Barnes ran a distillery and he manufactured pearl ash or potassium carbonate, which was used as a Laner before the invention of baking powder.

[25:36] Longtime fans will remember that Evan Horsford of Boston first developed baking powder in the 18 sixties then used his fortune to promote the crackpot theory that Vikings had originally settled the Charles River Valley, learn more about him.
And episode 17, Barnes used the profits from his own leavening agent to buy an estate in Marlborough as well as purchasing at least three African Americans who were enslaved as household servants.
Among them was a woman named Daphne who enters the historical record briefly in May of 1745 when she was baptized at Trinity Church in Boston, church records note that she was an adult and that her son, Prince was baptized alongside her Prince.
We should note is another very common name for enslavement in New England and like Scipio, it was intended to ironize the power dynamic between slaveholders and slaves.

[26:32] While Daphne was taken to Marlborough, when the Barnes family moved there, it appears that Prince was not.
He may have been raised in the household of one of Christian Barnes’s relatives in Hingham. But he’s not mentioned in her letters until November 1769.
In a letter on November 20th, she wrote Daphne’s son, Prince is here and I’m sitting to him for my picture.
He has taken a copy of my brother’s extremely well. And if mine has the least resemblance, I shall have a strong inclination to send it to you purely for the curiosity.
Though it’s nothing but a dog for he has not proper materials to work with.

[27:11] Apparently she approved of his artistic talents because three days later, Christian noted in the letter that Henry had purchased Prince saying I believe he has some design of improving his genius in painting, in both the understatement of the year and a commentary on the inhumanity of slavery.
She adds Daphne appears to be much better reconciled to a state of slavery since her son’s arrival upon the whole, I believe there is not a happier set of Negroes in any kitchen in the province.

Prince’s Artistic Talents and Potential Success

 

[27:43] Christian Barnes put Prince to work practicing his portraiture at first as a novelty.
And within a few months, she wrote where I only did a scan on the qualifications of my limner.
It would be a subject for several sheets.
He is a most surprising instance of the force of natural genius for without the least instruction or improvement, he has taken several faces which are thought to be very well done.
He has taken a copy of my picture which I think has more of my resemblance than Copley’s.
He is now taking his own face, which I will certainly send you as it must be valued as a curiosity by any friend you shall please to bestow it upon.

[28:24] The word Limner in this context just means a portraitist since Barnes already compared his work favorably to John Singleton.
Copley’s one of the most celebrated portrait artists of the 18th century.
It must have been pretty good.
MS Barnes noted that Prince was working with pastels on blue paper and was desperate to find better materials for him to work with.
She wanted to get him decent paints and some instruction because already in March 1770 she saw Prince’s paintings as a potential money making operation.
Writing if you should meet in your travels with anyone who is a proficient in the art, I wish you would make some inquiries into these particulars for people in general.
Think Mister Copley will not be willing to give him any instruction and you know, there is nobody else in Boston that does anything at the business, and I should likewise be obliged to you if you could employ some friend who is a judge of those things to purchase a small assortment of crayons with other materials proper to the business that he may be kept employed in this way till he has made some further improvement.
And then I intend to exhibit him to the public and don’t doubt that he will do honor to the profession.

[29:36] Apparently, her husband, Henry had a reputation for get rich quick schemes because she quickly added you laugh now and think that this is one of Barnes schemes, but you’re quite mistaken.
It’s entirely my own.
And as it is the only one I ever engaged in, I shall be greatly disappointed if it doesn’t succeed.
Christian Barnes must have found some proper paints and canvas for Prince to practice with because before long, she thought that his skills were coming along well enough for the family to make a significant investment in them after he had been enslaved in the Barnes household.
For just over a year, Prince would accompany Henry Barnes on an extended trip to England in February 1771.
Henry wrote to a family friend named Elizabeth Murray Prince comes on extremely well.
He is with a Mister Pine. Historians believe this was Robert Edge Pine who has taken him purely for his genius, Missus Wright tells me I shall carry him a treasure to America.

[30:39] An article for Antiques magazine co-written by Amelia Peck of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Paula Bagger of the Hingham Historical Society explains that, Prince was not in London long but the trip exposed him to new experiences and attitudes.
Pine was a supporter of English radical politics in the American independence movement.
While the Barnes family was loyalist, the abolition of slavery was an issue of growing importance in England.
The following year, an English court held that slavery was not supported by English common law and a number of free black men were achieving prominence in the arts and letters.
It has been suggested that Pine’s father, the noted engraver John Pine was black or of mixed race and this may have affected Prince’s relationship to his teacher.

[31:30] Certainly the new experiences and attitudes that they encountered in London affected Prince’s relationship with Henry. Barnes.
Barnes became increasingly paranoid that Prince might try to escape while he was in the less repressive environment of Old England.
In his 1771 letter to Elizabeth Murray, Henry wrote, I have met with so many disappointments in life that though late I have learned not to be too sanguine in my expectations.
Indeed. His life and situation are so precarious. If he should even attempt his freedom, it would give me such a disgust to him. I should not overlook it.
I want you should return with Bill Fright. Do not let him converse with any of his own color here.

[32:13] Henry had become so fixated on the risk of Prince self emancipating if he was able to make contact with his fellow Black Londoners that he was considering taking on the expense of bringing another enslaved man from home all the way across the Atlantic to keep Prince company, with the probably spurious assumption that a Black New Englander would be more docile.
Instead, he ended up taking Prince back to Massachusetts, which would not become a hotbed of the underground railroad and other abolitionist activities for over a half century.
The article by Peck and Bagger describes Prince’s return to Boston.
In March 1772. Christian reported that Prince had taken five pictures from life since his return.
Three of them as good likenesses as ever Mister Copley took and that she planned a trip to Boston to recommend our Limner to the public.
In January 1773 the ad began running in the Boston gazette for the enslaved portraitist who takes faces at the lowest rates, that February, a Scottish textile merchant named William Dood sat for Prince and 237 years later, it caught the eye of Amelia Peck, a curator of decorative Arts at the Met.
In the article, she co-authored with Paula Bagger. She explains how she first encountered the work of Prince Dema Barnes.

An Unassuming Portrait with a Hidden Story

 

[33:39] At first glance, the small oil portrait of a handsome man in a flowered dressing gown looked somewhat unprepossessing hanging on the wall of a dealer’s booth at an antique show.
In 2010, it had a folksy appeal but wasn’t an obvious candidate for acquisition by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
However, as a curator in the midst of developing an exhibition concerning the worldwide textile trade, between 1518 100 I was particularly taken with a Chintz Banyon worn by the sitter and asked for more information about the picture.

[34:13] The dealer had it on consignment from a person who had purchased it from the family of the subject, William Dood.
It had traveled down through five generations before being sold in its original frame.
The painting was accompanied by a heart shaped brooch thought to be the one pinned to du it’s gown, the stretcher, a part of the frame was signed by the then unknown Prince Dema Barnes and dated 1773.
The whole package proved so appealing that we brought the painting to the museum for examination and further research.
It was certainly a rare example of a vernacular American portrait painted before the revolutionary war.
Initial research in the basic sources didn’t reveal any mention of an artist named Prince Dema Barnes.
But after finding evidence that William Duad was a Scottish immigrant textile merchant who advertised his imported goods in the Boston Papers.
In the early 17 seventies, I was convinced that we needed to acquire the painting.
It would be an interesting addition to the American Wings collection of 18th century portraits, especially in comparison with contemporary works by Boston artists like John Singleton Copley and would be a terrific addition to my upcoming textile exhibition in a Woven Glow.

Prince Dema Barnes: Unknown to Art Historians

 

[35:29] Prince Dema Barnes may have been unknown to Peck and the art historians at the Met, but he was well known to Paula Bagger and the Hingham Historical Society.
Since the early two thousands. Bagger, an attorney and the director of the historical Society have been researching Prince’s life through the Barnes family letters and other correspondents in Boston area archives.
By this time, she knew about a 1745 baptism, his 1769 purchased by the Barnes family and is improving artistic skills. Through the early 17 seventies.
From the letters, she was convinced that the portraits of Henry and Christian Barnes in the Hingham collection had been painted by Prince.
But there was no solid proof in her own article about this project.
Bagger wrote, we got in touch with the metropolitan and were able to share what we had learned about Prince.
The Met invited us to bring our two portraits to its paintings conservation department where they were examined using x radiographs and infrared reflect gray.
The Met concluded that its signed painting by Prince and our two Barnes portraits were all by the same artist.

[36:40] Unfortunately, for almost everyone involved, the discovery of Prince’s artistic talent played out against the backdrop of the rush to revolution.
Christian Barnes’s letter describing Prince’s natural genius and his amazing portrait work.
Even though he only had blue paper and pastel crayons to work with was written two weeks after the Boston massacre.

[37:02] The Barnes family were staunch loyalists and Tories and they tried to ignore the writing on the wall for as long as possible.
In part, they managed this by having Henry decamp to London for several months with Prince as his refusal to boycott British goods brought more and more scrutiny, when they returned, Prince painted the portrait of William Duga.
Then Elizabeth Smith that summer and probably the portraits of the Barnes is around the same time that winter.
The Boston tea party took place before long. It was time for the Barnes family to leave.
Someone destroyed the family coach, burned Henry an effigy and broke all the windows of his manufacturing house.
Some accounts say that the sons of Liberty tartan feathered Henry’s horse and he eventually received a letter threatening far worse treatment.

[37:52] If you only want recompense for the damage, you have done the country in importing goods.
Contrary to the agreement of the body of merchants on this continent, I will recompense for, I am determined to fetch you to terms even if I do it at the expense of my own soul or the cost of a sore back or any other punishment in this world.
Only for the good of my country. For I style myself a son of liberty.
Therefore, if you will shut up your store and sell nothing out nor import any goods, you shall sustain no more damage.
But if not, I will fire your house in store and destroy all your substance you have on the earth and I will take your body and I will tar it and if nothing else will do but death, you shall have it. Certainly.

[38:36] The article in Antiques magazine describes how the Barnes family finally made their escape.
They left for England in late 1775 their goods were confiscated and Henry was banished by the act of the General Court.
In 1778 most of their possessions including the family portraits and Daphne Prince’s mother were left at their Marlborough estate.
The portraits of Henry and Christian both have damage in the area of the paintings where their hearts would have been.
The law is that they were attacked by the patriots who came to seize the estate.

[39:11] Prince considered himself a free man after the Barnes family fled Boston.
But whether legal papers to this effect were signed is unknown in April 1777 Prince.
Now just Prince Dema enlisted in Colonel Thomas Kraft’s Artillery regiment of the Massachusetts Militia.
As an editorial aside, Christian Barnes had been confident back in 1770 that young prince shared the family’s Tory principles.
Writing this surprising genius has every qualification to render him a good servant sober, diligent and faithful.
And I believe as he was born in our family, that he is of Tory principles.
But of that, I am not quite so certain as he has not yet declared himself, enslavers could internalize the ritualistic deference that enslaved household servants had to show to their owners to such a degree that the owners never questioned that their chattel might disagree on anything of importance.
Yet. Prince Demas enlistment is a matros or assistant gunner and a patriot artillery regiment shows how far from the truth.
Christian Barnes’s declaration of his Tory principles actually was.

[40:18] The article continues. His name appears in regimental records through early 1778.
Likely he fell ill. The regiment’s barracks in Boston’s west end were close to the provincial hospital and smallpox was endemic.
And on March 11th, 1778 he wrote his will as Prince Dama Limner and a free negro.
He left all he had to his mother, Daphne Dama.

[40:46] One week later he died, his burial recorded at Trinity Church.

[40:52] We may never know which enslaved African American man was actually advertised in the Boston gazette as taking faces at the lowest rates.
But both candidates experienced profound changes in their lives. In 1775.
The lead up to war in that year also proved to be a turning point in the life of Scipio Moorhead.
Sarah Parsons. Moorhead is believed to have died sometime in late 1774.
And the Boston Gazette and Country Journal of January 2nd, 1775 includes this notice to be sold by public auction on Thursday.
Next at 10 o’clock in the forenoon, all the house furniture belonging to the estate of the Reverend Mister John Moorhead, deceased consisting of tables, chairs, looking glasses, feather beds, bedsteads and bedding, pewter, brass sundry pieces of plate, et cetera.
A valuable collection of books. Also a likely Negro Lad.
The sale to be at the house in Akman lane south end not far from Liberty Tree.

[41:57] In a cruel irony, the advertisement that includes Scipio, the likely Negro Lad is strikingly similar to an ad that appeared in the same paper two years before, in the same edition as the ad for the enslaved painter who took faces at the lowest rates and a state auction offered for sale.
A good Negro fellow about 21 years of age.
If he had never met Phyllis Wheatley Scipio would have likely remained just as anonymous as the 21 year old fellow who was being sold in that 1773 ad.
And after a sale out of the Moorhead family in 1775 he became that anonymous.
Again, there’s no more record of the young African painter who Wheatley called a wondrous youth after that 1775 sale.

[42:45] The Dartmouth where Phyllis Wheatley’s books and Scipio Morehead’s portraits made the voyage to America was one of the three tea ships to arrive in Boston at the end of 1773.
Another aspect of the events that led up to the tea party that I didn’t really know about until relatively recently is that there weren’t just three tea ships, along with the Dartmouth, the Eleanor and the Beaver cargoes of tea were also sent to New York, Philly and Charleston, South Carolina.
There was also 1/4 tea ship bound for Boston. The William, this fourth ship wrecked off of Race Point at the tip of Cape Cod, but the cargo wasn’t entirely lost in this clip from January of this year.
You’ll learn how Boston’s first street lamps were recovered from the storm tossed wreck.

[43:40] I’ve always had a soft spot for the old timey gas street lamps that are found in a handful of historic Boston neighborhoods.
I’m not talking about the old fashioned street lights that you might see on the paths through Boston Common or around the Charlestown Navy Yard.
The ones with the round frosted glass globe atop a metal pole are electric lights that were manufactured to look like old gas lamps.
The ones I’m talking about are entirely angular with no curved glass at all.
They have a metal pole that tends to be smaller in diameter and simpler in design than the ones supporting those electric lights or sometimes a metal elbow attached to a building at the top.
A metal armature angles up to support the lamb which is set in a square metal base, on each side of the square, trapezoidal glass panes reach up and out and then four more trapezoidal panes angle up and back in making the square fixture flared out in the middle and transparent on all four sides.
So to recap, if you see a round base with a round frosted glass globe, that’s an electric light.
If you see a square base with transparent angular glass panels, that’s a gas lamp, at least for now the dead giveaway.
However, is that you can clearly see the fabric mantles inside the clear housing burning brightly with a warm white gas flame.

[45:06] I love how on the streets that use gas lamps, even the red lamps marking fire call boxes are gas.
Look out for them. The next time you’re walking around City Square in Charlestown, Marlborough Street in the back bay, a few blocks around Bay Village or of course, Beacon Hill.

Gas Lamps: Symbol of Historic Boston

 

[45:24] Even though there are really just a handful of streets using gas lamps, they’re such a clear symbol of historic Boston that back when co-host Nikki and I operated a walking tour company, we used the profile of one of these lamps in our company logo, despite being an iconic symbol.
However, they’re not Boston’s original street lamps.
The first gas lamps were installed in Boston in 1828 and the city wasn’t fully converted to gas lighting until the 18 eighties.
Gas lamps are not the beginning of Boston’s history with street lights.
However, to find the first Boston street lights, we have to go back to the series of crises that led up to the American revolution.

[46:07] I was inspired to look into the earliest Boston street lights by a talk about the Boston massacre, in March of 2022 Katie Turner Getty gave a talk around the massacre anniversary about the women who bore witness to the bloody massacre in King Street.

[46:24] Her description of the physical surroundings of the confrontation were very evocative and one of the things she focused on was the darkness of the night.
My mental image of the Boston massacre is shaped by two things.
The Paul revere engraving of the event and the annual reenactment held each march.
In both cases, the participants are well lit by modern street lights in the case of the reenactment and by revere’s imagination in the case of the engraving in reality.
However, the massacre occurred on a cold winter’s night that would have been nearly as dark as a night camping in the white mountains with no street lights.
The sentry and the rowdy crowds surrounding him would have been lit only by the moon, the stars and perhaps by a bit of lamplight spilling out from under someone’s door between their shutters, getty pointed us to a late 19th century print of the massacre by Walter Gilman page which portrays the events unfolding in an inky darkness with the old statehouse barely silhouetted in the moonlight and the faces of the colonists illuminated only by the first muzzle flash as the red coats fire into the crowd.
I’ll include that image in the show notes. And I think it’ll change how you picture the massacre.

[47:42] That isn’t to say that there were no attempts to shed a little light on the streets of Boston before that time, in an essay about lanterns in early America, published in a 1904 edition of the Connecticut magazine C A Quincy Norton describes the scattershot approach to lighting the city’s streets in Boston’s early years.
The streets of Ancient Boston were not regularly lighted until 1774.
Although for a number of years before this state, there were many private lanterns either over the front doors of the larger houses or near the gates opening onto the main streets.
A few of the more pretentious stores also maintain lanterns in front of their doors.
During the winter months, there was as early as 1695 several large iron crescents or fire baskets on the corners of some of the most frequented streets.
These were kept supplied with pine knots by the night watchman and by their flickering smoky light assisted this official in the discharge of his duties.
The first organized approach to street lighting for Boston is tied to another of the crises that helped precipitate our revolution, in the weeks leading up to the event that we remember as the Boston tea party on December 16th, 1773 Boston nervously awaited four tea ships.

[49:02] The Dartmouth arrived first on November 28th, followed by the Eleanor on December 2nd, the beaver arrived in the outer harbor on December 7th, but there had been a case of smallpox on board during the journey.
So she was ordered to anchor at Rainsford Island for a week until the sickness was gone.

[49:20] The beavers move from the outer harbor to Griffin’s wharf on December 15th was the immediate trigger for the destruction of the three cargoes of tea.
The next night, the fourth tea ship known as the William never arrived in Boston.
Five nights earlier, she had encountered a strong gale gotten blown off course and drifted dangerously close to the Cape Band shore on the night of December 10th.
Captain Joseph Loring fought the wind and waves for hours, nearly sinking within sight of the twin lights on Thatcher Island.
Then he beat for open water with the hope of trying again. Another day.
He followed the wind southeast trying to break out of the tight confines of Massachusetts Bay for the relative safety of the open Atlantic.

[50:08] He was unsuccessful. 1774 author Mary Beth Norton described the resulting wreck in a 2016 paper, almost exactly 24 hours after the near disaster at Cape Ann, the William once again encountered waves breaking on a Lee shore.
This time loring could not sail the vessel away from the coast.
So he ordered the anchors to be let out.
She rode to her anchors about half an hour. The sea running very high and wind blowing more violent on shore.
He recalled the William then drifted onto a sandbar where the anchors held the ship for several more hours.
Around nine o’clock on the morning of December 11th, the tide peaked, the storm continued and the surf began to break over the vessel.
By then, the hold was awash with 4 ft of water and the ship’s pumps were proving inadequate.
In desperation, loring decided that it was impossible for her to remain any longer in this condition without loss of the vessel and cargo and our own lives.
And so at his orders, the crew cut the anchor cables.
Just a few minutes later, the vessel ran onto shore about two miles east of race point at the tip of Cape Cod on what are now known as the Peaked Hill Bars.
More than 39 nautical miles from Cape Ann and north of the town of Truro.

[51:37] The first notice of this wreck ran in the Boston newspapers on December 16th, probably getting lost in the news of that evening’s tea party.
When a group of patriots dressed in crude native American costumes destroyed the cargoes of tea that had arrived in Boston.
A few days later, another piece ran in the December 20th Boston gazette and country journal, Captain Loring and a brig from London for this place.
Having 58 chests of the detested tea on board was cast ashore on the back of Cape Cod last Friday.
It is expected the Cape Indians will give us a good account of the tea against our next.
That fate was exactly what the legal owner of the tea was trying to avoid.
After seeing news of the shipwreck in the papers. T consignee Richard Clarke’s son, Jonathan rode as quickly as he could to the outer cape to salvage the Williams cargo.

[52:34] Despite pressure from the local patriots, he was eventually able to gather the tea safely in Provincetown with a little bit of assistance while Clark made the 119 mile ride.
Justice of the peace, John Greenow took charge of the salvage operation.
He compensated the local laborers who took on the job by dividing the contents of one damaged tea chest among them, the night after the work was completed, December 18th, another storm hit race point and what was left of the William was completely destroyed.

[53:11] Local captains from Pow and Truro refused to load the salvaged tea on their vessels.
But eventually Clark and Greenow convinced the captain of a Salem schooner to transport 51 chests of tea to Fort William at Castle Island for safe keeping.
Clark paid Greeno for overseeing the salvage operation with two chests of tea.
One of the chests was seized and burned by Pow patriots while the other was offered for sale by a shady character.
A few months later as reported in the Connecticut Journal Lime March 17th, 1774.
Yesterday, one William Lampson of Martha’s Vineyard came to this town with a bag of tea about £100 on horseback which he was paddling about the country.
It appeared that he was about a business which he supposed would render him obnoxious to the people, which gave reason to suspect that he had some of the detestable tea lately landed at Cape Cod.
And upon examination, it appeared to the satisfaction of all present to be a part of that very tea.
Whereupon a number of the sons of Liberty assembled in the evening kindled a fire and committed its contents to the flames where it was all consumed and the ashes buried on the spot in testimony of their utter abhorrence of all tea subject to a duty for the purpose of raising a revenue in America.
A laudable example for our brethren in Connecticut.

[54:40] The 51 chests of salvaged tea reached Castle Island on January 4th 1774.
By then, most of the tea consigns who’d witnessed the mob’s rage over tea two weeks before had gotten cold feet and the tea sat unsold.

[54:58] By March, much of it had been seized by the customs service for non payment of the controversial duties.
It’s possible that some of Richard Clark’s tea had been redistributed for sale and that it might have been among the tea that was burned by Boston Patriots in a second smaller tea party on March 8th.

Tea ships carried more than just tea.

 

[55:18] Of course, t was not the only cargo carried by the despised tea ships.
Very famously. The Dartmouth was carrying the first edition of poems on various subjects, religious and moral.
The first volume of poetry by Phyllis Wheatley.
But there were also other perfectly mundane cargoes aboard all the tips.
According to Norton’s account, Dew William also carried medicines, black pepper and glass bottles, most importantly to our story this week.
However, it carried about 300 of the first street lights for Boston.
In a postscript to a letter he wrote to a friend in which he describes the destruction of the tea Boston merchant John Andrews noted on December 19th, 1773.
I give you joy of your easy riddance of the baneful err being just informed by the arrival of the post that it’s gone from whence it came.
I forgot to acquaint you last evening that loring in a brig belonging to Clark, one of the consignees is on shore at the back of Cape Cod drove thither by a storm last Friday week.
Who has the last quota of tea for this place being 58 chests which completes the 400.
It’s unlucky that loring has the lamps on board for illuminating our streets.
I am sorry if they are lost as we shall be deprived of their benefit this winter in consequence of it.

[56:47] Bostonians were deprived of street lamps during the winter of 1773 but they wouldn’t be deprived forever.

[56:56] The lamps on their way to Boston were the product of a series of town meetings that culminated in a vote in favor of acquiring street lamps.
On May 11th, 1772 citizens of Boston voluntarily contributed money by subscription to pay for the new lamps.
So all that was needed was enabling legislation that in turn was passed in July 1773 and authorized the purchase of, lamps for enlightening the streets, lanes, alleys or passageways in the town of Boston.
Why this required an act of the state legislature? I’m not quite sure, but the new law does a good job of pointing out why the town needed lights.
The enlightening of streets, lanes, alleys and passageways in large and populous towns by lamps hung up in the night time is not only ornamental but very advantageous to all such persons as have occasion to pass in and through the same about their lawful business and tends greatly for the safety and preservation of the inhabitants by the discovery and prevention of fires.
Burglaries, robberies, thefts and other lesser breaches of the peace.

[58:07] The first section empowers the selectman of Boston to set up an affix such in so many lamps and in such streets, lanes, alleys and passageways in said town for enlightening the same as the town or such persons as they may appoint shall in their judgment, think necessary and for the common benefit, and the better to preserve and regulate such lamps said Selectmen are hereby empowered to appoint in contract with any person or persons for the lighting, cleaning, stuffing and repairing the same.
The second section mandates that anyone who accidentally damages a lamp or the post it’s on will be liable for the cost of repair and that anyone who deliberately damages or destroys one would face a fine of £20.
In addition, if any person or person sentenced to pay the aforesaid fine of £20 and costs shall refuse to pay the same.
He or they shall be punished for the offense by being imprisoned, not exceeding six months or by whipping, not exceeding 20 stripes.
So do not plan on damaging a Boston street lamp.

Selectmen granted power to remove obstructions to street lamps.

 

[59:18] The Selectmen were empowered to take down or remove any post or sign thereon in any street lanes, alleys or passageways in said town, or that now are or hereafter may be fixed or that adjoin to any dwelling house or building in case they shall judge that any such post or sign tends to intercept or in any way lessen the light and said lamp.
If the owner of the obstruction didn’t comply within 48 hours, the selectman could have someone to remove the problem themselves and find the owner Six Shillings for every day. The obstruction remained.
At the same time. The legislation reassured property owners that, the owners of any lamps placed or set up in said town at their own private expense may at any time take down or remove the scene or extinguish the light thereof.
Anything in this act? Notwithstanding.

[1:00:16] Any fines levied against someone who violated the new law by leaving up a sign or post that obstructed the street lamps or by deliberately damaging one of the lamps were to be used for the upkeep and repair of the lamps.
Well, half the fine would go to the repair budget. The other half would be paid out as a bounty to whoever informed on the person who violated the law.
If the town thought that more lamps, repairs or other supporting equipment were necessary beyond what the fines would pay for.
The final section of the law authorized them to levy a tax on all residents to pay for them with the authorizing legislation in place.
It was up to the Selectmen of the town of Boston to appoint a committee to oversee street lighting and it will be left up to that committee to come up with a plan.
Luckily, for us, one of revolutionary Boston’s most reliable diarists was appointed to be part of the committee.
Boston merchant John Rowe’s diary records his first day on the duty.

[1:01:21] March 1st afternoon I spent at Fanuel Hall with the committee about lighting the lamps present were myself Henderson inches, William Phillips, Benjamin Austin and Mr Appleton.
And yes, that is probably the same Benjamin Austin whose son fought a bloody duel to defend his honor in 1806.
You can listen to episode 216 from February 2021.
For more about that story over the course of the next few meetings.
The committee slowly gathered more members, some of whom have famous names, Rose’s diary records, the edition of deacon Ebenezer str of the Brattle Street Church on May 4th.
Then even more members are named later in May as the committee divided the city into lighting districts and chose locations for the lamps.

[1:02:14] May 18th attended the committee about fixing the lamps.
We finished the north part of the town number 1234 and five divisions, present were myself deacon Phillips, deacon Storer Thomas Gray, Mr Appleton Major Dawes, to which were the gentlemen of the several wards, Mr Jonathan Brown, Mr John Leach, Mr Paul Revere, Mr Edward Proctor, Mr Thomas Hitchman, May 24th.
This day, I went with the committee about the lamps to view the wards number 67 and eight, which we finished.
I’m sure you recognize Mister Paul Revere’s name there. A half dozen books and articles I looked at named John Hancock is a member of this committee as well, but I wasn’t able to find his name in Rose’s diary.

[1:03:08] I’m not sure at what point exactly. The committee decided that the lamps needed to be ordered from England. But they did.
They selected lamps that had metal bases and glass tops, not too dissimilar from today’s gas lamps.
The difference of course is that the earlier street lamps did not burn, pressurized gas delivered from centralized gas lines.
Instead, they had a metal oil reservoir at the bottom.
A metal burner that held an adjustable fabric wick and then a glass shade above to shelter the small flame from the wind.
All the parts of the lamps minus the poles or elbows that they’d be mounted to were manufactured in England.
The order had to cross the Atlantic in one direction. Then the lamps had to be manufactured, procured and loaded onto a ship along with some tea to cross the Atlantic in the other direction.

Boston street lamps salvaged alongside tea from shipwreck in December 1773.

 

[1:04:04] It appears that Boston street lamps were salvaged alongside the tea that washed up at Race point in December 1773.
Though I couldn’t find the exact date they were brought back to Boston around the first of the year.
And John Rowe’s diary, there’s a gap in the discussion about the committee for the lamps for a few months following their September meeting until the next meeting is noted on January 8th, 1774.
On that same day, Boston craftsman, Thomas Newell’s diary notes began to make the tops of the glass lamps for this town.
So it appears that although the glass for the street lamps was destroyed in the wreck of the William, the lantern bases were recovered and restored locally, with the oil lamps in Boston and almost ready for installation.
The street lighting committee kicked into high gear in January 1774 with Rose’s diary recording meetings to discuss the details of installing the lamps and how they’d be operated each day.

[1:05:08] January 19th, I attended the carpenter and blacksmith and marking out the places the lamps are to be fixed.
January 20th, this forenoon, the selectman and the committee for the lamps met at Anuel Hall.
We consulted on the method of lighting them and had a long conference with Mr Smith for that purpose.
An appendix to a book about of all things, gas manufacturing plants in Massachusetts contains this critique of early street lamps highlighting the very manual method of lighting them that the town came up with.
They were dim erratic, sometimes blew out in high winds, smoked up their glass enclosures with soot occasionally caught fire and tended to cast local pools of light rather than illuminating a long swath of row, and they had to be manually lit and extinguished each day by roving lamplighters equipped with poles and ladders.
The lamplighter trade originally developed to service street lights that burned whale oil or NAPFA introduced in Boston in 1773 and paid for out of public subscription, and continued as these were replaced by gas lights.

[1:06:22] As that paragraph points out, the new street lamps were fueled by whale oil which burned brighter and whiter than the competition and had the added benefit of being provided by the vast Nantucket New Bedford whaling fleets, after over a decade of street lamps in Boston, John Adams describes a conversation that he had with British Prime Minister, William Pitt the younger.
In a 1785 letter promoting American whale oil is a trade good for import into Britain.
Adams wondered why despite having introduced street lighting into London, nearly a century before Boston, the English seem to prefer an inferior fuel.
He praised the crime fighting nature of the bright white light of Boston street lamps which was provided by American whale oil.

[1:07:12] There could not be a doubt that Spermaceti oil might find a market in most of the great cities of Europe which were illuminated in the night as it is so much better and cheaper than the vegetable oil that’s commonly used.
The fat of the Spermaceti whale gives the clearest and most beautiful flame of any substance that known in nature.
And we are all surprised that you prefer darkness and the consequent robberies, burglaries and murders in your streets.
To the receiving as a Remittance are spermaceti oil.
The lamps around Crosman are square. I know. And in Downing Street too, I suppose are dim by midnight and extinguished by two o’clock.
Whereas our oil would burn bright till nine o’clock in the morning and chase away before the watchmen.
All the villains and save you the trouble and danger of introducing a new police into the city every day.
A Boston lamplighter would make his rounds probably within a single lighting district.
In the morning, he had to extinguish the preceding night’s lamps fill the oil reservoir and Trey wicks that needed it that evening.
He’d make the rounds again, carrying a lantern and a piece of reed or straw that could transfer a flame from his lantern to each street lamp at least until friction matches became common in the mid 18 hundreds.

[1:08:35] The first time that Boston’s lamplighters made their rounds was in March of 1774.
In his diary entry for March 2nd, Thomas Newell, the craftsman who had repaired the lamps wrote a number of lamps in town were lighted this evening.
For the first time, two responsible persons from each ward have been appointed to decide with the approval of the General Committee upon the most fitting locations in which to place the new lanterns, John Rose. Dire entry for the next day. March 3rd simply states last evening, the lamps were lighted for the first time they burnt tolerable. Well, the Massachusetts gazetta that same day gives a sense of how many lamps were available for the first lighting.
Last evening, two or 300 lamps fixed in several streets and lanes of this town were lighted.
They will be of great utility to this metropolis.

Introduction to Quincy Norton’s essay on lanterns in early America

 

[1:09:36] C A Quincy Norton’s essay about lanterns in early America gives us a sense of where these first two or 300 lamps were located, from a careful reading of the historical notes relating to matters that detailed events of this period. In Boston.
It is evident that these street lanterns were distributed over an area of perhaps not more than a mile in either direction from the old statehouse.
No description of these lamps has been found in any of the ancient records of Boston.
The presumption is that they were small tin framed lanterns and that they were suspended from iron cranes that were secured to buildings on the corners of the most frequented thoroughfares.

Transitioning from oil lamps to gas lamps in Boston

 

[1:10:20] At the end of the first month of street lighting, John Rowe and the members of his committee wound down their service.
Rowe’s last diary entry on the subject describes how they delivered their final report.
March 30th town meeting this morning. I was chose moderator.
We delivered in our reports, respecting the erecting and fixing up the lamps in this town.
It was accepted, in 1828 the Boston gas company erected a single gas lamp on a pole in Haymarket square meant as a demonstration lamp.
This privately owned fixture was the first outdoor gas lamp in the city of Boston.
Gas was centrally supplied. So a lamplighter wouldn’t have to fill the oil reservoir on each lamp every day.
The cloth mantles didn’t require daily trimming and rarely burned out and gas could be delivered so cheaply that it eventually became more economical to leave the lamps running than to pay someone to light them every day.

[1:11:23] In 1834 the city made the leap, installing the first public gas lamps around Fanuel Hall.
Over the next few decades, gas slowly replaced oil on the streets of Boston, from the 18 thirties on nearly all new street lights were fueled by gas.
By the 18 nineties, there were conversion kits to easily convert the last few oil lamps over to gas.
While electric arc lights marked a few city squares starting the 18 eighties.
A summary written by Marta Crilly of the city archives describes how Boston converted from gas to electric street lighting at the beginning of the 20th century and then surprisingly began converting some areas back to gas.
A few years later, in 1909, the city began installing tungsten electric lamps.
Three years later, in 1912 tungsten electric lamps began to replace existing na the lamps.
By 1913, all gas lamps in Boston proper had been converted to electric.
The following year, all lamps in lower Roxbury were converted to electric.

[1:12:35] Although the city used electric lamps in Boston proper and areas of Roxbury, it continued to use gas lamps in its residential districts.
The last gas lamps were installed in residential districts in 1948.
During the 19 forties, mercury vapor, electric lamps were also installed on many of Boston’s major streets.

[1:12:58] During the first half of the 20th century. Outside vendors maintained the city’s gas lamps but in 1958 the city took over gas lamp maintenance.
Four years later, the city began to change electric lamps in historic neighborhoods back to gas lamps, electric to gas changeovers continued into the 19 nineties.

[1:13:21] So despite being an iconic symbol of historic Boston, most of the gas lamps that we see on the streets of Boston today were newly installed during the mid 19 sixties.

Gas lamps return to Boston streets in the mid-1960s

 

[1:13:32] Perhaps they’re not quite as historic as I thought, by 2010, which was the most recent figure I could find.
The city of Boston owned about 67,000 street lights, most of which have been converted over to led in the past few years.
About 2800 gas lights remain in service And some of these now have an automatic solar mechanism that allows them to be shut off during the daytime.

Challenges of Maintaining Gas Lamps

 

[1:14:02] In a 2019 interview with boston.com Dan Webb of the city’s street lighting division described the maintenance that the remaining gas lamps require.
First of all, the cloth mantles need frequent replacement at best.
They last about a year and they’re easily damaged by everything from falling ice to a car bumping up against a light pole.
The glass tops of the lamps are also easily destroyed by falling ice and they’re constantly being slowly obscured by soot.
Webb noted that unbroken, clear glass panes are usually replaced about once a year but explained that it can be more frequent in some areas saying when you have a lot of tourists in the city, you want it welcoming, you don’t want them dirty.
So we actually try to step up the game and keep the areas where the tourists are real clean.
And then during the week, we’ll maintain the other areas.

[1:14:59] Beginning in the spring of 2022 the Wu administration started examining the possibility of converting our nostalgic old gas lamps to led in March.
They installed a single led assembly into an existing gas lamp on Stewart Street in Bay Village.
It’s designed to cast a very warm light like the gas burner that it replaces rather than the bluish light that we get from.
Most led street lights, they’re supposed to remain basically maintenance free for 7 to 10 years.
Rather than requiring the fairly constant stream of work that their gas counterparts need.
Saving the city about $200,000 a year.
Replacing our gas street lights would also eliminate a common source of the many constant gas leaks around the city which kill street trees as well as perhaps posing a safety risk.
The gas, whether it’s burned or leaked also contributes to climate change.
And that’s what’s driving this initiative in March of 2022 the city’s chief of streets, Joshua Franklin Hodge told the globe, the planet’s facing a climate emergency and the only way to address that is to transition off fossil fuels, we want to do our part to replace our terribly inefficient gas lighting with something that’s compatible with a sustainable climate.

Mayor Wu’s Plan to Replace Gas Lights with LED

 

[1:16:23] Mayor Wu hopes to replace all the city’s gas lights with led Michael Donaghy.
The city’s street lighting and asset manager told the Boston Sun, our goal is to replicate what was installed here.
We use this type of burner assembly throughout the city. The goal is to have a sense of consistency, perhaps predictably, neighborhood associations in the neighborhoods with gas lamps are opposed to the change in Beacon Hill which has the most gas lamps of any area of the city.
The neighborhood association is just as flatly opposed to led lighting as they were to ad a compliant wheelchair ramps in the back bay.
The new light assemblies are seen as just a bit too red to be installed on Marlborough Street.
Meanwhile, in Bay Village, the head of the neighborhood association said that there wasn’t really a problem with the new light assemblies as long as the lamps in Beacon Hill in the back Bay are converted first.
So Bay Village doesn’t end up with one off lights.

[1:17:31] Well, that about wraps it up for this week to learn more about the enslaved artist Scipio Moorhead and about Boston’s first street lamps.
Check out this week’s show notes at hubor.com/two 90.
I’ll have tons of primary sources for both of this week’s stories, including letters diaries and newspaper articles about Boston’s need for street lamps and the search for the right lighting source.
I’ll also have letters and articles about Boston’s enslaved portraitists as well as the original advertisement for Scipio Morehead’s Talents this week.
I’ll also include some pictures of my dearly departed Duke from some of his earliest days with us to his lovely last weekend and from walks in the woods to cuddles on the couch.
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 and still most active on Twitter, although barely active there.
Either if you’re on Mastodon, you can find me as at Hubor at better dot Boston, or just go to hubor.com and click on the contact us link, while you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you’d 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 that’s all for now.

Music

Jake:
[1:19:02] Stay safe out there listeners.