Before the Bomb Cyclone, before Superstorm Sandy, a historically severe storm hit Boston in 1804. Meteorologists say that the tropical cyclone would be counted as a category 2 hurricane today, with winds of 96 to 110 miles per hour. It wasn’t just the wind that made 1804 storm so memorable, although the wind was damaging enough, causing problems for industries representing a large sector of the early 19th economy and wrecking buildings that are major Freedom Trail attractions today. What made the storm so memorable was the fact that it was the first known tropical cyclone to carry snow, giving it the enduring nickname, the Snow Hurricane.
The Snow Hurricane
- Sidney Perley’s Historic Storms of New England
- William Bentley’s diary
- The three steeples of Old North Church
- The header image is a NOAA GOES satellite image of the 2018 “bomb cyclone”
- More on the rescue of the crew of HMS Bounty
Boston Book Club
Starting in 1965, designers Peter Chermyeff and Tom Geismar designed the visual language of Boston’s transit network from the ground up. Over the next five years, their agency worked out every detail of the new MBTA’s visual identity, from the iconic T logo to the colors of the subway lines to cleaning up and modernizing stations.
They discuss this process in the September 2018 article “How Boston Got Its T.” Here’s an excerpt where they explain a couple of those decisions:
We also wanted to establish the identity of the system and flag it in the streetscape. People had an affinity for the song “Charlie on the MTA” and the name change to “MBTA” was too long. Our core team started thinking about different ways to make something work and eventually came up with simple “T.” It made sense as a name and image that would apply and be understandable at a distance or in conversation. It connects with all the words associated with the service: “transit,” “transportation,” “tunnel,” “tube,” and so on. It made all the sense in the world to go with “T” and have it displayed in a lollipop logo on trains, buildings, and streets.
Tom worked the logo out in great detail. We were unflinching in our recognition that this was not a truly original idea. Stockholm had already had a black “T” in a white circle for the Tunnelbana. It wasn’t necessary for us to be original, just to be right.
The lines themselves lacked identity, so we thought that color coding them would make huge difference. We applied the same process to all four lines. They had been identified by terminus, but most of those names were unclear to non-locals. I remember sitting in my Cambridge office preparing for a meeting with the MBTA in which I would be proposing colored lines. I had markers in front of me and I chose red for the line that went to Harvard since it’s a well-known institution whose main color is crimson. One line went up the North Shore of Boston up to the coastal areas, so it seemed obvious to call that the Blue Line. The line that serves Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace was an obvious choice for green. And then the fourth line ended up being orange for no particular reason beyond color balance. This was 20 years before the Silver Line was added.
That allowed us to give lines understood names. Instead of Harvard-Ashmont—no one visiting Boston knows what Ashmont is—now you have the Red Line. The presence of color reinforces that identity to help people find their way around.
Read the entire interview to learn how Arlington Street served as a model for an upgraded, modern station; how the team created our iconic T system map; or where the designers think their vision was implemented poorly.
Upcoming Event
Way back in episode 27, we reviewed the two cases of execution by fire in the history of Massachusetts, both of which involved enslaved women who were accused of crimes against their enslavers, and both of which involved male co-defendants who were hanged instead of being burned at the stake like the women. One of those co-defendants was named Mark, and his life is the topic of a brown bag lunch at noon on October 16 at the Massachusetts Historical Society titled “The Last & Living Words of Mark: Following the Clues to the Enslaved Man’s Life, Afterlife, and to his Community in Boston, Charlestown, and South Shore Massachusetts.”
A woman named Mariah, who was enslaved in the household of Joshua Lamb of Roxbury, allegedly set fire to the Lamb house and a neighboring house in July of 1681. While she was awaiting trial, a man named Jack who had escaped from his enslavers in Western Mass was also accused of an unrelated arson. The two defendants were tried at the same Court of Assistants in Boston, with Governor Simon Bradstreet presiding, and they were sentenced to death for the capital crime of arson. Samuel Sewall’s diary records that they were both executed on September 22, 1681. According to the sentence of the court, Mariah was burned to death, while Jack was hanged. When Jack was dead, in accordance with the sentence, his body was ”then taken doune & burnt to Ashes in the fire with Mariah.”
Not quite 75 years later, during the administration of Governor William Shirley, a woman named Phillis suffered a similar fate. In July of 1755, a Charlestown resident named John Codman died. After an inquest named arsenic poisoning as the cause of death, suspicion fell on the African Americans who were enslaved by Codman. Under questioning, a man named Mark admitted to leading a conspiracy to poison Codman with arsenic and a substance called black lead. He had acquired the poisons from neighbors who were enslaved by doctors, and then Codman’s enslaved cooks Phoebe and Phillis slipped the materials into his food. At trial, Phoebe turned state’s witness, while Phillis and Mark were convicted of the crime of petty treason: rising up against their legal owners. For her cooperation, Phoebe was shipped to a sugar plantation in the Caribbean, where life for enslaved laborers was brutal and short. Mark was sentenced to be hanged, and Phillis was sentenced to be burned to death. Both sentences were carried out on September 18, 1755.
Our earlier episode focused on the terrible fate of Phillis, barely mentioning Mark. After he was dead, his body was prepared for public display on Charlestown Common. His body would remain there for decades, becoming a well known public landmark. Historian Josiah Bartlett recorded how a surgeon on his way to join a regiment for service in the French and Indian War in 1758 stopped to examine Mark’s body. He wrote in his diary:
There’s no exact record of when Mark’s body was cut down or decomposed, but it remained a landmark when Paul Revere embarked on his famous ride 20 years later. In a 1798 letter to Jeremy Belknap, the minister and founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Revere described the beginning of his ride to Lexington: “I set off upon a very good Horse; it was then about 11 o’Clock, & very pleasant. After I had passed Charlestown Neck, & got nearly opposite where Mark was hung in chains, I saw two men on Horse back, under a Tree.”
Mark’s life and death is often seen as a footnote to Paul Revere’s famous ride, and even in our podcast, he was a footnote to the execution of Phillis by fire. The lunchtime talk by independent researcher Catherine Sasanov at MHS on October 16 will attempt to restore his humanity, putting Mark back in the center of his own story. Here’s how the MHS website describes the event:
Mark (1725-1755), a blacksmith, husband, and father, might have slipped from public memory if not for his brutal end: his body gibbeted for decades on Charlestown Common for the poisoning of his enslaver, John Codman. This project, grounded in Mark’s testimony, approaches “legal” and other documents as crime scenes; attention to clues, connections, and seemingly insignificant details unlock important, previously unrecognized aspects of Mark’s world, thwarting their original intent: the enforcement of slavery’s status quo.
The talk is free and open to the public, just pack a lunch to enjoy while Sasanov is speaking.