History of the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants – Founding
The following history is based on the thesis written by Alicia Crane Williams in 1982, published with additions for the Society’s Centennial in 1996.Â
The renewed interest in American history brought about by the celebration of the centennial of the United States in 1876 spawned the formation of dozens of hereditary and patriotic organizations. By the mid 1890s organizations such as the Daughters of the American Revolution were attracting members interested in perpetuating the memory of their ancestors who had helped to found this country. Genealogy became a popular hobby and these organizations gave people the opportunity to socialize with others in their genealogical families. The idea of a society for descendants of the Mayflower passengers was realized first in the state of New York on December 22, 1894. Three more states followed in 1896: Connecticut on March 7, Massachusetts on March 28, and Pennsylvania on July 1. In 1897 these four state societies joined to form the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, which has since chartered state societies in all fifty U.S. states, the District of Columbia, the Dominion of Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
The Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants was founded by George Ernest Bowman who gathered twenty-two men and eight women, many of them his relatives, to sign the papers of incorporation in Boston stating the purposes of the society were patriotic, antiquarian, and historical. To view these documents and the name change in 1924, click here.
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The first annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants was held on November 21, 1896, at the Tuileries in Boston. Such illustrious people as Governor Roger Wolcott, Mayor Josiah Quincy (III) of Boston, Charles Eliot of Harvard, and historian Justin Winsor were invited. None came. Among those who did attend that first dinner were Winslow Warren, Collector of the Port of Boston; Arthur Lord, President of the Pilgrim Society; Henry E. Cooper, Minister of Foreign affairs for Hawaii; and the Marquis Paul de Rousiers. Out of a total membership of about one hundred at that time, fifty-five members joined with forty guests to enjoy dinner, music and various addresses.
Typical of the large dinner meetings held in the early years of the society is the report given in the Boston Evening Transcript of November 22, 1900, which described the walls of the State Suite of the Vendome Hotel decorated with the Flags of England, Holland, and the United States. Beside each plate on the tables was a tiny dish with four grains of corn “to emphasize the contrast between the want of the Pilgrim fathers and the plenty in which their sons and daughters live.” Menu cards were illustrated with pictures and the text of the Compact, and at the lower end of the hall, partially hidden by screens, was a quintet from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The menu for the 1905 celebration of the signing of the Compact included Cape oysters, bisque of lobster aux soufflés, consomme printaniere, fried smelts with tartar sauce, pommes Italienne, roast Philadelphia capon with cranberry sauce, filet of beef with marron sauce, hubbard squash, string beans, crème de menthe punch, sweetbreads en croustades, pear fritters glace au cognac, harlequin ice cream, assorted cake, fruit, cheese, and coffee. Speakers at the annual dinners were usually trotted out in droves to make “short” remarks, rather than featuring one speaker on one subject as is common now. Subjects centered on the bravery and purity of the Pilgrims or the responsibilities of their descendants to carry on the morality and character of their forefathers in a changing world, such as the following by Winslow Warren:
[The Pilgrims’] love of liberty and of law and order, recognizing the responsibility to a higher power above, has been inherited by their descendants. It is our duty to see that Massachusetts is true to that spirit … What the country needs is a sense of its history. There are no heroes to the unheroic. The Mayflower crossed not only the ocean, but the centuries.
Speakers were usually prominent people in local or state arenas of politics, history, education, or culture including Hosea M. Knowlton, Attorney General of Massachusetts, Prof. Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard, Elmer Capen of Tufts, incorporator Charles Francis Adams, and Katharine Lee Bates of Wellesley College.
There were also occasional meetings with a speaker reading a prepared paper followed by a reception. These were usually attended by one hundred to two hundred people and subjects included “The Relation of the Pilgrims to Their Times,” “The Pilgrim and the Puritan,” “Colonial and Revolutionary Society Life,” “The Cheerful Side of the Pilgrim Character,” “The Pilgrims, the Foundation Builders of the Republic,” “Some New England Women of Colonial Days,” and “The Myth of Mary Chilton.”
Excursions outside of Boston drew from thirty to seventy-five people who would take a special car on the train from Boston to the nearest station and travel by boat, electric car, or carriage from there. In May of 1897 members went to Plymouth where barges carried them to the Pilgrim monument, Plymouth Rock, Burial Hill, and so forth. Dinner was served at the Samoset House, and Plymouth historian, William T. Davis, spoke on “Pilgrim Anniversaries of Former Days.” In June of 1899 they journeyed to Squantum Inn, Quincy (fare from Boston by steamer ten cents, by train and electric car, 11 cents), where they had a shore dinner. June 1900 saw members traveling to Duxbury to visit Powder Point, Duxbury Beach, the Standish Monument, etc. In June 1903 they gathered at Salem to view the only extant Mayflower gravestone (that of Richard More), and a September 1905 pilgrimage led to the Society’s small lot, referred to as the “Bradford Meerstead,” and other sights in Kingston.
Celebrating Forefathers Day (December 21 st, the day the Mayflower landed in Plymouth – as opposed to November 21 st when it reached Provincetown and the Compact was signed) was George Ernest Bowman’s idea. One of the first recorded celebrations of the Pilgrims by their descendants was on Forefathers Day in 1799. In February of 1899, at a special meeting, Bowman read an account of the “Feast of the Sons of the Pilgrims” on that occasion one hundred years before. The idea was well-received and in December of 1900 a service was held at the Central Church in Boston complete with an original song, The Breaking Waves Dash’d High. Kings Chapel, Trinity Church, First Church, Arlington Street Church and Mt. Vernon Church each held services in the next six years. The 1905 address by the Reverend Albert Parker Fitch at Mount Vernon Church was printed in The Mayflower Descendant:
The consciousness of a great past is a precious inheritance and a powerful incentive for a nation … Let us meditate upon this thought that the true descent is the unbroken transmission of spirit, vision and ideal … Am I true to my inheritance … I have received these national ideals, these public gifts of the spirit of popular government, universal education, religious liberty, noble responsibility for the best interests of man kind … Success is measured, not by what we achieve for ourselves, but by what we achieve for others …These are the things and the only things, members of the Society of Mayflower Descendants, which give you the right to the high ancestry you claim.
After the Society’s move to Mt. Vernon Street in 1906, more informal monthly “at-home” days at the Society’s rooms, featuring tea and light refreshments, were begun.
In addition to social events, the society began publication in 1899 of the quarterly magazine The Mayflower Descendant, edited by George Ernest Bowman. Recognized as the most authoritative publication on Mayflower genealogy, the magazine gave the society a reputation for genealogical accuracy and integrity. Bowman’s vision was to present genealogies of the Mayflower passengers that exhausted every available source of information. A smaller section of the magazine called Pilgrim Notes and Queries was briefly published independently. Books of transcriptions of town vital records for Brewster, Halifax, and Truro were also produced, as were epitaphs from graveyards in Kingston, Yarmouth, and Yarmouthport, and a reprint of Governor Bradford’s letterbook.
The Society’s first offices were rented rooms at 623 Tremont Building. They later moved into 53 Mt. Vernon Street, where they stayed for twenty-three years until the building on 9 Walnut Street was purchased. Bowman began an ambitious acquisitions program beginning with the item that is still the Society’s most valuable possession. The Brewster Book, a wast or blank book containing records, letters, lists, commissions, and children’s drawings, had apparently been part of Elder William Brewster’s estate and the main entries had been kept by his son Jonathan Brewster. It was donated to the Society by Cordilla W. Fitch of Morrisville, Vermont, who had inherited it. Mr. Fitch also donated the second most important manuscript in the Society’s collection, the diary of Jabez Fitch Jr., kept between 1749 and 1812.
While Society dinners had always been fancy formal affairs, they were not noted for attracting nationally prominent guests. In the teens and soon in the twenties, however, the growth of “society” and the corresponding growth of newspaper coverage of same, brought these dinners into the limelight. The hereditary society became an outward trapping of society, and because the meetings were bright and pretty, they were newsworthy.
It began with William Howard Taft, a classmate and friend of Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants incorporator, Arthur Dana, who was made an “Honorary Member” in 1914. The award was presented to Taft, then a professor at Harvard, at the Compact Day celebration on December 8, 1914 at the Copley Plaza. Nearly three hundred people listened to Taft’s long, witty and historically well-versed remarks, including the comment that the Mayflower Society was the only one of those which had given him honorary membership into which he could have gotten on his own (at the time it was believed that Taft was a descendant of Francis Cooke, a line that has since been disproved):
It suits me to be a member of the Mayflower Society; I think we belong to the middle class, that is where I feel at home. We were not the aristocrats when we left England, and I think we have always retained that element of strength, of not being too high and not being too low, but just ourselves.
In 1916 the 20 th anniversary dinner was attended by Lt. Governor Calvin Coolidge and Speaker of the Massachusetts House (later Governor of Massachusetts) Channing H. Cox, among many other local politicians. Cox’s wife was a member, as later were Massachusetts Governor Alvin Fuller’s wife and the Mayor of Boston, Andrew J. Peters. This close association with the State House and City Hall led to the Society’s social prominence culminating in the 1927 dinner. In 1916, Cox was the main speaker of the evening, and looking forward to the 300 th anniversary celebrations in 1920, he noted:
Greater than all else, we should strive to create in America a regard for what the Pilgrims stood for…that after all we are not descended from cowards, but from brave men, we will have reached the true spirit of the occasion…With more than half the population of Massachusetts of foreign descent, it is time to teach that only by adherence to the fundamentals on which the Pilgrims founded it can we hope to endure …
At the same meeting the Reverend Julian C. Jaynes noted that pride of ancestry “is one of those few great things which a man acquires without personal effort, because a Mayflower descendant, like a poet, is born, not made.”
One of the few times the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants ventured into the political arena was in 1919 after the famous Boston Police Strike. The Society’s social ties with Governor Coolidge (who was not eligible for membership but was the honored guest at the Society’s annual meetings of 1916, 1919 and 1920), as well as its membership’s ideals of law and order (three men who served as Governor of Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants during the 1940s participated in breaking the strike), spurred the Board to write a resolution “emphatically” supporting the stand of the Governor and Police Commissioner, and stating that “none of the men who ‘deserted their posts of duty, letting in the enemy’ should be reappointed as members of the Police Force …” There is no record of the Society ever issuing another statement on any political topic.
The 300th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims in 1920 was an event of national prominence. The post-war era of the Roaring Twenties was just beginning, America was a world power, and she was feeling good about herself. The story of the Pilgrims, benefiting from superior public relations by such as poet Longfellow and orator Daniel Webster during the previous century, was the story of America. So important was the celebration, that it was not the private organizations such as the Mayflower or Pilgrim societies which led in planning the festivities, but the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which appropriated public funds and appointed a commission especially for the anniversary. Among their plans were the renovation of the Plymouth waterfront area (at a cost of $800,000) and the building of a memorial hall in Plymouth ($665,000). The General Society of Mayflower Descendants planned a restoration of the Cole’s Hill burial ground, for which the Massachusetts Society’s quota of the cost (¼ of the total) was $6,400. The year-long celebrations in Plymouth included parades, dedications, and construction, and they culminated in a life-size pageant of the landing. People came from distant parts to see the spectacular events.
The most spectacular society meeting, however, was held in 1927 when Bowman and his cohorts pulled out all the stops and achieved that pinnacle of social success for which hereditary societies are usually remembered. Held in the gold-and-rose tinted Louis XIV Ballroom of the Somerset Hotel, the honored guests were Sir Esme Howard, Ambassador from Great Britain, and his wife, Lady Isabella. There being no substitute for royalty, no matter how minor, publicity on the step-by-step progress of plans for this event began as early as October. Engraved invitations were sent, the arrival of each participant to town was recorded, souvenir menus were prepared, and five hundred to six hundred members and guests made reservations, filling the main ballroom and spilling over into a second. When it was over, the newspapers reported:
The keeper of the social records in that tome devoted to high and mighty personages and their affairs will, without doubt, devote a considerable space and much gilded ink to appropriately describe the Mayflower dinner last evening at the hotel Somerset…Mayflower descendants, hundreds strong, came out for the commemoration celebration of the Signing of the Compact, 307 years ago. And to fittingly glorify their celebration they gathered at the honor table such a scintillating galaxy of star guests as seldom is seen about one board.
Also in attendance were Mrs. Alvin Tufts Fuller, wife of the Governor of Massachusetts, Sir Thomas Tait of Canada, and Senator Frederick H. Gillett:
For lions of only slightly lesser importance, The Descendants corralled ever so many luminaries of society, diplomacy, the service and the law to grace the honor table …Colonels and generals, admirals, judges, consul generals and such made up a company of two score, their uniforms and their decorations a far cry indeed from the drab and homespun those signers wore when they drew up the famous Compact …Speeches colorful as the the gowns of the feminine guests, and of wit as scintillating as their jewels, flowed in rounded periods …
Sir Esme’s speech emphasized the ties between England and America and warned that those trying to destroy Anglo-American friendship would lead to another world war. Senator Gillett made mention of the recent Saco-Venzetti case and “was vociferously applauded when he paid tribute to Massachusetts and her courts …,” while Judge Webster Thayer sat at the head table. Thayer had upheld the conviction despite defense appeals. After such an event, all succeeding social gatherings pale.
The Society’s major achievement of this decade was the acquisition of the building at 9 Walnut Street on Beacon Hill for $33,000. Over $18,000 of renovations had to be made to the five-story brick building which was already one hundred years old (the fifth story had been added in 1857). From the second floor balcony, the famous Frog Pond on Boston Common could be seen if one leaned way out and looked sharp right.
Immediately after moving into the house on July 15, 1926, a campaign was begun to pay off the mortgage. An assessment of $2.00 per member was made and dues were increased from $6 to $8. The mortgage was paid off on March 18, 1928, and at the Annual Meeting on the 28 th, a mortgage-burning ceremony took place, the ashes placed in a specially engraved silver box. To fill the house, the Society began an expanded collection program. Mrs. Alden A. Thorndike, chairman of the House Committee, donated a valuable collection of old Staffordshire china and an antique cabinet to hold it. Miss Clara Endicot Sears gave a Court Cupboard made in 1676, and Miss Mary Patterson Lord presented three large portraits which were hung in the reception rooms. In the meantime, Bowman just about cornered the market on Brewster imprints (books printed by William Brewster on his printing press), setting the cap on the Society’s select collection. In his report for 1921, Bowman noted that seven Brewster imprints had been given to the Society, bringing the total collection to ten, of which four were duplicates. He claimed this collection ranked only behind Yale and Bodleian Library at Oxford. In addition, Bowman wanted a complete collection of all editions of Nathaniel Norton’s New Englands Memorial. By 1922 he had editions two through seven and lacked only the first, which had been printed in 1669. An imperfect copy was presented to the Society in 1924, but an unusually fine copy was later located by Bowman, and $1,350 was raised to buy it.
With one exception the Society meetings during the Thirties were quiet affairs held at the Society house or in a nearby auditorium. Only the Compact Day dinner on November 22, 1935 approached the glory of the past. Held in the same ballroom at the Somerset as the 1927 dinner, it again brought together a notable head table of military men and politicians. Included were Rear Admiral Reginald R. Belknap, former Governors Fuller, Allen and Cox, Charles Francis Adams, the German and Netherlands Counsuls, the President of Boston University, and so forth. Attendance was nearly five hundred and a message from President Roosevelt was read. This time, however, the spirit was not as glittering or gay. In many ways it seemed a forced attempt to regain the 1927 high. Speeches reflected the changing times and were heavy on bolstering military policies. The Society house provided an excellent place for frequent lectures and teas, often attended by one hundred or more. Anniversaries of Pilgrim events were also celebrated, and every Christmas Eve the house was illuminated in the custom of Beacon Hill and members and guests were welcomed in the evening.
After three decades of steady increases in membership, the Great Depression hit the Society hard. Between December 31, 1930 and December 31, 1942, there was a loss of 612 members, or 36 percent of the total membership. Most of this loss occurred by the end of 1934. Financial restrictions led first to the delay and then the abandonment of The Mayflower Descendant and no new projects were undertaken.
George Ernest Bowman died September 5, 1941, after suffering a heart attack on the street near 9 Walnut walking back from the Somerset Club. The last living incorporator of the Society, Bowman’s health had been poor for a number of years, and he had been in and out of the hospital several times. Bowman was 81 years old and was survived by his sister Mrs. William Dwight Parkinson of Fitchburg and several of her children.
Bowman’s successor as Secretary was a remarkable woman. Isabelle Frances (Cushman) Nason, age 60, was born in Halifax, Massachusetts, in 1881, the daughter of Frank H. and Cordelia W. (Cushing) Cushman. She grew up in Plymouth and had a deep affection for the town and its history. She married Frank L. Nason in 1908 but had no children. A paragon of the hereditary / patriotic society matron, Isabelle, in her lifetime, was regent of the Massachusetts Daughters of the American Revolution, registrar of the National DAR, president of the Alden Kindred, founder and first president of the Massachusetts Court of Assistants, and the National Society of Women Descendants of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, founder of the Patriot’s Society, member of the Colonial Dames and the Huguenot Society, and one of the organizers of Plimoth Plantation. She was also a staunch Republican and member of the National, Massachusetts and Norwell Republican Clubs. In her spare time, she wrote historical plays. She was a diminutive woman with a personality as pleasing as Bowman’s was acerbic. However, although she stated that Mayflower was a bit closer to her than any of the other societies with which she was involved, Nason’s time was divided among many such “children.” In addition, her husband was ill, and she often had to abandon the office to take care of him. At most, she would be in the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants office once or twice a week, the rest of the work being handled by the hired secretary. Nonetheless, her attention to the detail of the duties of the Secretary was complete. She answered every inquiry in a warm and friendly manner.
The most crucial problem facing those whose job it was to administer the Society after Bowman’s death, was finding out what was going on. Complicating matters at the time was the illness and retirement of his long-time secretary, Miss Richardson (who was in the hospital when he died), and the sudden heart attack and retirement of John Smith, custodian of the house. Along with Bowman, these two people had been responsible for the office and the house since it had been purchased. Mrs. Nason and the other Board of Assistants found themselves without a clue to what or where anything was. As Mrs. Nason put it, “Therefore a new Secretary, and new secretary to the Secretary, and a new Custodian had to take over, none of them having done actual work for this Society before. It had taken these four years [1941-1945] to try to get in the even stride of the work.”
 In 1950 the Society inaugurated an energetic series of “ancestor” teas in honor of each of the Mayflower families. Held at the house or at some suitable place associated with the ancestor, the teas featured lectures, show and tell exhibitions, and the like. The first, a Bradford Tea, attracted about sixty people despite a stormy day in January and set the tradition for successful turnouts. At that meeting a facsimile of William Bradford’s History of Plimoth Plantation was borrowed from the State Library. The Winslow Tea in February featured Governor General Pratt and the SAR color guard. A Brewster Tea showed off heirloom jewelry and the Brewster imprints, and the Cook Tea was held at “Soul’s Rest” in Halifax, the home of a descendant. The Eaton-Fuller Day featured Mrs. Nason as a descendant of 15 heads of Pilgrim households, and the Chilton Day was held at the Old South Meeting House, followed by a visit to the marker placed for Mary (Chilton) Winslow in 1924 and to her tomb in Kings Chapel.
The largest of the teas was Doty Day in January of 1954, at which former Governor Charles Tapley spoke and Miss Elizabeth Storer showed pictures. More Day was held at the Essex Institute in Salem despite there being no descendants of Richard More in the Society at that time (the first joined in 1957). By the Annual Meeting in 1954, all of the Compact signers who had descendants had been honored by a tea. These regular meetings had become so popular that in June of 1954 a “new member” tea was held for those who had been elected during the past two years, and Mrs. Grace Bonsall and Mr. Tapley described the furnishings and paintings in the house.
Meetings were planned well in advance and a yearly schedule of events was distributed to the membership. The usual schedule called for historical talks at the house in January and February, the Annual Meeting in March, another talk in April, followed by a garden party at the house in May. The Peregrination to Plymouth would be held in June, as usual, and then a visit to Col. Clement Kennedy’s New Ocean House in Swampscott in October (Kennedy was a Governor of the Society and it was through his association with Bing Crosby, who vacationed at New Ocean House, that the actor/singer became a member of the Society), Compact Day in November, and Forefather’s Day in December.
The major excitement during this decade came in 1957 when a replica of the original Mayflower was built in England and sailed to Plymouth in a recreation of the Pilgrims’ voyage. The builder, Warwick Charlton, who had read William Bradford’s History of Plimoth Plantation as a British soldier while at sea returning from the North African Campaign, engaged William A. Baker, a naval architect associated with Plimoth Plantation, who had done exhaustive research on 17 th century ships. Mayflower II was launched at Brixham in Devon on September 22, 1956, and left for America under the orders of Captain Alan J. Villiers from Dartmouth on April 20, 1957. She arrived at Plymouth on June 13 th after a storm at sea and a becalming and was welcomed by Vice President Richard Nixon and all the former Governors of Massachusetts. The Boston Globe reported:
There was a special adventurousness about the Pilgrims’ enterprise. This gives it somewhat the same kind of attraction Lindbergh’s flight to Paris enjoyed over more highly organized air crossings in the 1920s. The men and women of Plymouth seem friendlier, kindlier people, moreover, than the rigorous Puritans who settled Boston.
After making fun of the project, the Boston Herald editorialist proclaimed:
Who, we would like to know, would admit he gave a hoot about the Mayflower and Plymouth (or Plimoth) and all that stuff? Who thinks that English Captain Villiers is anything but a showoff? Who would ever go down to greet that big, fat boat? Who would ever be so silly as to say that the Mayflower II is the most delightful thing to hit New England in a decade?
We would that’s who! That’s our hat sailing over the tip-top-t’gallant-stunsail boom, or whatever it’s called. We must have a Pilgrim somewhere in our family tree. If we don’t we’ll just quietly make one up.
Eventually the Mayflower II found her home with Plimoth Plantation, the museum replica of the original Pilgrims’ homes in Plymouth that had been established in Plymouth in 1948. In 1958 Mrs. Nason retired as Secretary because of illness and Mrs. Eric Patch was elected for one term. Adele Allen, who was the Historian General of the General Society and whose office was then still at 9 Walnut Street (before the General Society acquired the house in Plymouth), took on the newly-created position of Executive Secretary. Adele (Waterman) Allen had been the second woman to hold the office of Historian General. A graduate of Simmons in 1917, Adele had served as State Chairman of Genealogical Records for the Massachusetts DAR, and as Registrar of the Chief Justice Cushing Chapter of DAR, as well as the Massachusetts Society of Daughters of Colonial Wars, of the Massachusetts Society of American Colonists, and of the Massachusetts Society of Daughters of Founders and Patriots. With her late husband, John K. Allen, she was co-compiler of Thomas Bancroft and Some of his Descendants, and she had been secretary and editor of the Monthly Review for the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston for thirteen years.
The Society’s house at 9 Walnut Street was increasingly feeling its age and the neighborhood was badly deteriorating. The first thought of moving came in 1961 when the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS) was forced from its Ashburton Place location because of the construction of a government building. Stephen Thrall, chairman of the House Committee, was asked to take up the matter of joint occupancy with NEHGS in their new location. The treasurer of NEHGS was Frederick Kimball, also a Mayflower Society member. However, because of the lack of space in the new NEHGS location at 101 Newbury Street, the matter was not developed at that time.
In 1966 when the custodians of the house moved out without notice, the matter was brought to a head. Discussions included selling while real estate values were high or combining with other organizations to renovate. Architects from Plimoth Plantation were invited to make a survey of the house, and it was found that $50,000 would be needed to renovate the building. An offer from the First Corps of Cadets, which had recently purchased their building at 227 Commonwealth Avenue, of the third floor plus a meeting room in their facilities, turned the tide in favor of renting instead of buying a new property. On November 14, 1967, 9 Walnut Street was sold for $60,000, just about double its purchase price 40 years before, leased space for five years at 227 Commonwealth Avenue.
Needless to say, after forty years in one place, moving from a five-story house to a little over one floor caused a great upheaval. Most of the valuable items of furniture were moved and eventually were loaned to the General Society’s Mayflower House in Plymouth, but a significant amount of valuable china, books, archives, and miscellanea were put into “temporary” storage.
Between the 300 th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims in 1920 and the 350 th anniversary in 1970, America had changed considerably. Whereas the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had funded the 1920 program and appointed a special commission for its planning, in 1970 even the town of Plymouth could not be coaxed into monetary support for a “private” celebration. The population of Plymouth had changed dramatically and descendants of the Pilgrims were now outnumbered by descendants of later immigrants. While the town selectmen did vote an appropriation, it was canceled by a referendum vote, and the entire fund-raising burden was placed on the private sector despite the town’s close reliance on the tourist trade.
The General Society decreed that it had no funds at all, throwing the responsibility for celebrating the anniversary into the laps of the individual state societies. Robert Bartlett, Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants’ Elder, was on the Plymouth Committee established by private interests in the town. Bartlett and the Committee asked for $10,000 from the Massachusetts Society, but the Board of Assistants, besides not having that amount of money to give, felt it also had an obligation to support the General Society’s Five Generation Project established in 1960 to publish authoritative books on the first five generations of Mayflower descendants. Massachusetts finally donated $500 to the General Society and $1,500 to the Plymouth Committee. The Committee then turned to federal and state assistance matched by private funds. Plans included the purchase of land for a Mayflower Park in Plymouth to begin “the decade of rededication.” In the end, the anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims was a local event, neither approaching the national recognition of the Tercentenary, nor the media excitement of the sailing of Mayflower II.
Until the house at 9 Walnut Street was sold in 1967, social events continued very much in the same form as in the Fifties. The May meeting at the house, traditionally a “garden party,” was changed in 1961 to a “new member” party, Governor Eugene Carver noted that in his time they had never gone out into the garden and he would personally rather not show it to anyone. Among the topics of monthly meetings were: “Pilgrim Houses of Plimoth Plantation,” “Herbs and Medicines of the Pilgrims,” “Old Books of the Pilgrims” (given by John E. Alden of the rare book department of the Boston Public Library), and “Boston Illustrated 1670-1775.” A series of these lectures was given by staff members of the Museum of Fine Arts and another by the Boston Public Library.
In the early years of the decade, the Annual and Compact Day meetings were held at the Harvard or Union Clubs. In 1964 the Compact Day dinner became a feature at the Boston Museum of Science for four years. Members of other patriotic and hereditary societies, such as Colonial Wars, Founders and Patriots, and Colonial Dames, were invited to join Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants at the Compact Day meetings.
At the Peregrination to Plymouth, catered for the first time in 1961, attendance continued to be high. After several years at the Plimoth Plantation, the luncheons were returned to the Mayflower House, but the Plantation was open to members. In 1965 members helped fasten the sills and frames for the Alden, Cooke and Soule houses at the Plantation.
With no national celebration planned for the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims in 1970 and the General Society unable to fund any projects, Massachusetts found itself free to create its own anniversary project. Starting late, because they had waited for the General Society to announce its plans, an ad hoc committee was appointed in April of 1970. Through the interest of Society member Bradford Washburn, Director of the Museum of Science in Boston, and in cooperation with Plimoth Plantation, the committee decided to build a model of Plimoth Plantation for exhibit in the Science Museum. The model (10 by 16 feet, built on a scale of 5/32 of an inch to the foot) was designed by model-maker Robert D. Wild to incorporate the latest results of research on the Pilgrims’ houses and would include twenty-two houses and two hundred figures of men, women, children, and animals. It was to be displayed with the model of the Mayflower that the Museum owned, and wall dioramas about Pilgrim life were to be developed later. The Mayflower Society would maintain title to the model. The final cost of the model was $28,000, and it was presented at the Compact Day meeting in 1972. The Plantation model was placed on the main floor of the Museum at the feet of the two-story dinosaur. In 1981 the Society was notified the model would be moved to a lower floor where it would be more appropriately presented, and in 1994 the Museum returned the model to the Society.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society again offered space in their library at 101 Newbury Street in 1972 and this time the offer was accepted. These new quarters were on the third floor of the building. The lease was renewed in 1976 with a handshake agreement between NEHGS president Richard Johnson and Massachusetts Mayflower Governor Howard Mayo. However, within days of Johnson’s death in September 1977, the Society was suddenly notified by the new NEHGS administration that the lease would not be renewed, and for the third time in ten years the Massachusetts Society moved. In January 1978, the Society moved into two and one half rooms at the Statler Office Building in Park Square, Boston.
The Society’s possessions, in “temporary” storage since 1966, were finally brought out in 1979 and temporarily re-stored in the basement of the General Society’s Mayflower House in Plymouth. This material was appraised, the most valuable items placed on loan with the Mayflower House and other historic houses in Plymouth, and the rest disposed of. Among the valuable collections found in storage was the set of Staffordshire plates now displayed at the Mayflower House in a lighted cabinet built by Stuart Hall.
The Society By-laws had always directed that annual meetings must be held in Boston. By the mid 1970s and early 1980s, however, most of the membership of the Society lived outside of Boston. When attendance at annual meetings dropped to unacceptable lows, the By-laws were amended to allow meetings in any location. Thereafter, Annual and Compact Day meetings have been rotated among the North and South shores, west of Boston, as well as in Boston proper. A Mayflower Ball was held at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston in 1975, present one debutante. The Peregrination to Plymouth was held at various places in Plymouth, and a Cape Cod group of members was established in 1976, which held local meetings on the Cape for a few years.
The Compact , a quarterly newsletter with Society news and events, was inaugurated in 1980 to increase interaction among the Society’s Board and officers and the membership. Membership gains, while steady, were not large and attention was turned to recruiting applicants. Each new member was sent a package containing copies of their approved lineage forms and preliminary applications to be used by members and their families. Special pins were awarded to honor fifty year members. Educational material was developed and distributed to schools and significant donations were made to Plimoth Plantation for their publications fund (part of which was used for the transcription and publication of Plymouth Colony Wills), the Pilgrim Society, and the General Society of Mayflower Descendants. A scholarship fund for descendants of the Wampanoag Tribe called the Thanksgiving Scholarship was established by Governor John W. Frenning. A Friends of the Pilgrims category was established for family members not genealogically eligible for membership.
Adele Allen retired in 1980 after twenty years of devoted service to the Society. The Society’s office has been modernized under several executive secretaries, including Alicia Williams, Shirley Pizziferri, and Audrey Drummond. Electric typewriters, word processors, and eventually computers were added to the office. Microfilm copies of the first two hundred volumes of Plymouth County deeds were acquired and a microfilm reader-printer was donated to the library.
A special Christmas Tea was held at the Mayflower House in Plymouth in 1980. Annual meetings were held at various facilities in the Boston suburbs and speakers included William Martin, author of Back Bay (and later of Cape Cod), and J. Allyn Bradford in costume speaking as his ancestor William Bradford. Compact Day dinners were held at the Weston Golf Club, the Hawthorne Inn in Salem, the Daniel Webster Inn in Sandwich, and facilities as far west as Spencer and Springfield. Small membership teas were held in the homes of members to recruit applicants. The Peregrination to Plymouth was held at Plimoth Plantation’s membership house and later at its new facilities inside the Plantation, as well as the National Monument to the Forefathers in Plymouth.
Susan Thrall, the Society’s only woman Governor, was elected in 1980. She was also the only child of a former governor to hold that office, her father, D. Stephen Thrall, having been governor in the 1960s. A survey showed that the membership felt the most important purpose of the nearly eighty-year-old Society was historical and genealogical research and to tell the Pilgrim story, but it was also necessary to do something tangible and worthwhile in collecting, preserving, and communicating historical and genealogical information that might be lost to future generations. Asked why they joined the Mayflower Society, members indicated many had joined because of others in their family. Some joined because of their interest in genealogy and history, and many because of their pride in the association with the Pilgrim story:
I have always taken great pride in my heritage and felt it only right that I should support this organization to which I am privileged to belong. I think one should be proud of his ancestors and should act and conduct himself in such a way that those ancestors would be as proud of him as he is of them. I don’t mean that one should go about bragging about his forebears. Every person should realize that even though all of his ancestors grew to a height of seven feet, only he and he alone can do his own growing. I don’t think we can have a future unless we have a past to look back to, to see where we have come from, and if we have made the most of our opportunities.
Asked what the Society should be doing to further fulfill its purposes, respondents stressed the need to involve younger people:
At the single meeting I attended, about 25 years of more ago, my wife and I remarked that everyone present except us looked old enough to have come over on the Mayflo wer in person.
Another important job was to eliminate any image of elitism:
Though our schools and churches change the People’s impression that all Mayflower descendants are snobs to be avoided…Be they rich or poor, newly arrived on these shores or descendants, encourage each human to discover what his family did to help build this country.
In 1983, the New England Historic Genealogical Society invited the Society to return to rooms at their library at 101 Newbury Street. This time the Society occupied the rear half of the second floor at the library.
In 1985, under the editorship of Alicia Crane Williams, volume 35 of The Mayflower Descendant was published after a hiatus of 48 years. Two volumes of Middleborough Vital Records were produced in 1985 and 1990. Revisions of some of Families of the Pilgrims, a series of pamphlets published by the Society in the 1950s, were published, until the General Society began publishing its series of Mayflower Families in Progress, which overlapped with the families series. The Bowman File, a microfiche reproduction of the Mayflower genealogies done by George Ernest Bowman, was produced for sale.
The Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants entered the last decade of the century in strong financial condition thanks to some significant bequests during the 1980s and wise investment of its endowment. Once more the Society packed its boxes and moved from the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s building in 1993 when that organization’s expansion plans required the space we were using. The Society’s newest and current office is at 376 Boylston Street in Boston, where our library, open to all members and applicants for membership, contains thousands of volumes of vital records, family genealogies, town histories, and other material useful for Mayflower family research.
Mayflower Passengers 1620 , an authoritative listing of the Mayflower passengers and what happened to them published in 1992, has become an instant best seller for the Society. In 1993 the Museum of Science dismantled the reproduction of Plimoth Plantation that the Society had created for the 350th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims, which had been on display at the Museum since 1972. Each house, with people, animals, trees, bushes, fences, and so forth, was individually encased by Stuart Hall and auctioned at the Compact Day meeting in 1994 to raise money for the Centennial programs.
In 1995, the 375th Anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims was celebrated with several events throughout the year. Massachusetts Mayflower Society Governor Richard Maxwell and other members participated in a parade and the swearing in of 104 new American citizens by Supreme Court Justice Souter in July.
Recognizing the significance of the Society’s Centennial in 1996, the Board of Assistants began planning early for appropriate celebrations. The Centennial Archives Project paid for professional cataloguing and arrangement of the thousands of documents collected throughout the Society’s lifetime. The Brewster Book was given preservation care and microfilmed so researchers could read the entire manuscript, which is the Society’s most valuable possession and long kept in a bank vault. A special Centennial annual meeting and a trip to England and Holland have also been arranged. Souvenir items were created to raise funds for the Centennial.
As the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants enters its second century, it enjoys financial stability and record membership figures. The Society’s office, much moved about in the last thirty years, has settled in a building conveniently located to public transportation and still near the New England Historic Genealogical Society. The office contains two computers, a FAX machine, and other modern amenities overseen by our loyal and able staff – Executive Secretary, Audrey Drummond; Genealogist, Carolyn Bingham; and assistant Anne Urbaczewski. The future looks bright for our Society to continue its mission to seek out new members and spread the story of our Pilgrim mothers and fathers to “a remote posterity.”
History of the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants – Incorporators
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GEORGE ERNEST BOWMAN, age 36, born in Manchester, NH in 1860, son of George Augustus and Ernestine (Lord) Bowman, was brother of incorporator Austin Lord Bowman, second cousin to incorporators Arthur Payson Dana, Nathaniel Upham Walker and Charles P. Clark Jr. and first cousin once removed to incorporators Edward Lord Clark and Charles P. Clark Sr., all of whom were descendants of Pilgrim William Brewster through the Lord family. George’s father, a graduate of Bowdoin College and Princeton Theological Seminary, was a Congregational minister at Kennebunkport, Maine, New York City, Manchester, New Hampshire, and South Windsor, Connecticut. He also served as a member of the Connecticut legislature. George Ernest’s mother was the daughter of Charles Austin Lord, also a graduate of Bowdoin, a professor of languages at Marion College in Missouri, and later the editor of the religious paper Christian Mirror. He was active in the formation of the first Temperance Society in New York City and served as superintendent of schools for the state of Maine.
George’s older sister, Caroline North Bowman, was born in 1856 at Portland and married William Dwight Parkinson, son of the Rev. Royal Parkinson. Mrs. Parkinson and her three sons, Dana, Herman and Royal, all became members of the Mayflower Society, and several descendants are still members. His brother, Austin Lord Bowman, was incorporator number 27 (see below).
George Ernest Bowman was the product of a highly academic background, deeply influenced by religion and temperance. He graduated from Hartford Public School and went on to Yale, graduating with his brother Austin in the class of 1883, and receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree. George tried private tutoring in Farmington, Connecticut, and teaching at a day school in Plainfield, New Jersey, but in 1886 he joined D.C. Heath & Company, publishers of school books and came to Boston. In 1892 he changed to the insurance business as an agent for Hartford Life and Annuity, which he left in 1896 to pursue “historical researches.”
Bowman’s interest in genealogy apparently began shortly after his graduation from Yale. In 1895 he became one of the founders of the Boston chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution, serving as its first secretary and second president. He also belonged, during his lifetime, to the Society of Colonial Wars in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Society of the Cincinnati, the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth, the Cape Cod Pilgrim Memorial Association, the Standish Monument Association, the Old Colony Historical Society, the Order of Colonial Governors, the Yale Club, the Boston City Club, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the Order of the Masons, the Congregational church and the Republican party. Meticulous in his personal habits, good-looking and always well-groomed, Bowman was a man of crisp, definite opinions, often curt, blunt and terse. At the same time, he could be courteous, gentlemanly, a favorite of the ladies, and could command the loyalty of friends and associates. Walter M. Pratt, former Governor of Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants, wrote a biography of Bowman in 1963, describing him as:
An ideal secretary, businesslike and systematic, with a nervous energy that kept him on the jump and his two stenographers busy … [George would be remembered for] the great pains and patient labor he gave to historical and genealogical research … his insistence on accuracy, and his ability to discriminate between dependable and undependable evidence….
During his lifetime, Bowman’s control over the Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants was absolute. He served as the Society’s first and only Secretary until his death in 1941 and performed the duties of the Historian by processing all lineage papers and amassing a genealogical collection that filled more than fifty file drawers. Walter Pratt related that shortly after his own election to the Society in 1917, and finding himself chairman of the nominating committee, he approached Bowman to plead limited knowledge for such a position:
“Not at all,” said Mr. Bowman, “Here are some suggestions,” and handed over a paper with the complete slate he hoped would be elected. New members seldom argue. I figure Mr. Bowman knew who would be best for the Society, showed the list to the other members of the committee, and we placed the named in nomination. Mr. Bowman at times lacked tact, but he certainly was a clever politician.
Bowman chose his officers from the ranks of the Social Register and Who’s Who, saying “It gives the Society desirable publicity.” But Pratt claimed he never chose rubber-stamp types. As a rule, Pratt says, Bowman chose business and professional men and women, “who did not hesitate to assert themselves.” Underneath it all, however, they were there at the sufferance of Bowman, and while their talents and energies helped Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants to prosper, it was Bowman who stood at the helm.
ARTHUR PAYSON DANA, age 41, a lawyer, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1855, son of Charles B. and Phoebe Walker (Payson) Dana. He graduated from Yale in 1878 and was a classmate and close friend of William Howard Taft. He received his law degree from Boston University in 1884 and practiced law in Boston for over fifty years. Arthur lived in Wellesley and the Dana Hall School there was named for his father.
MYLES STANDISH, age 45, a physician, was born in Boston in 1851, the eldest child of Francis and Caroline A. ( Rogers) Standish and descendant of the original Myles Standish. He went to Roxbury Latin School and received degrees from Bowdoin before graduating from Harvard Medical School in 1879 and attending the University of Berlin , Germany , 1880-1881. He taught at Dartmouth Medical School for many years and was a professor at Harvard. Standish was connected with various Boston hospitals, such as Carney, Mass. Charitable Eye and Ear Infirmary, Boston City , and Massachusetts General. He was president of the American Ophthalmologic Society and a recognized leader in his specialty, diseases of the eye. He was very involved with the Standish Monument Association in Duxbury until the state took it over, and was the author of the genealogy on his family entitled, The Standishes of America.
WINSLOW WARREN, age 58, a lawyer, was born in Plymouth in 1838, son of Winslow and Margaret ( Bartlett) Warren and descendant of Pilgrim Richard Warren . His great-grandfather, General James Warren, was a graduate of Harvard in 1745. Winslow received his AB degree from Harvard in 1858 and an LLB in 1861. He studied law and practiced with the firm of Sidney Bartlett. From 1864 to 1894 he was U.S. Commissioner for Massachusetts, and from 1894 to 1898 he was Collector of the Port of Boston under Grover Cleveland. He resumed his lay practice in 1898 at which time he also became an overseer of Harvard.
NATHANIEL UPHAM WALKER, age 41, was born in Concord, NH in 1855, son of Joseph B. and Elizabeth Lord (Upham) Walker. His grandfather, Nathaniel Gookin Upham( Dartmouth 1820) was a jurist on the New Hampshire state supreme court, president of the Concord Railroad, and friend of President Pierce. Nathaniel graduated from Phillips Andover (1873) and Yale (1877) where he was active in athletics, particularly baseball and football. He was on the first Yale team to play Harvard, where he later received his law degree (1880).
CHARLES PETER CLARK Jr., age 38, was born in Jamaica Plain, Boston, in 1858, son of incorporator No. 17, Charles Peter Clark, and his wife Caroline Tyler . Clark became president of the Old Colony Railroad, a subsidiary of his father’s New Haven Railroad, retiring in 1928 to take a position with the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities where he became a bureau chief.
HENRY DURFEE POPE, age 60, was born in Clinton, Georgia, in 1836, son of Wilson and Sarah (Eldredge) Pope, and descended from Richard Warren. He was treasurer of the Rice, Kendall Paper Co. until his retirement in 1898.
EDWARD LORD CLARK, age 58, was born in Nashua, New Hampshire in 1838, clergyman, son of Peter and Susan (Lord) Clark. His father was a lawyer and treasurer of the Concord Railroad. Edward was ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1861 after graduating from Brown in 1858, and went on to graduate from Andover Theological Seminary in 1863 and receive his DD degree from Williams in 1880. He served as chaplain to the 12 th Massachusetts Volunteers (1861-1866), was pastor of the First Church in North Bridgewater (1863-1866), in New Haven (1867-1873), Presbyterian Church of the Puritans in New York (1873-1893), and the Central Congregational Church in Boston (1893-1902).
SOLOMON LORIN KEITH, age 48, a cashier, was born in Bridgewater in 1848, son of Solomon and Maria L. (Parsons) Keith and a descendant of John Alden. Keith was with the Bridgewater Savings Bank for fifty years, serving as treasurer at the time of his death in 1916.
NATHAN APPLETON, age 53, a writer, was born in Boston in 1843, son of Nathan and Harriot Coffin (Sumner) Appleton and a descendant of Elder Brewster. His father was a manufacturer (cotton mills), banker and politician who died before young Nathan came of age, leaving a substantial fortune. Nathan graduated from Harvard in 1863 and served with the Fifth Massachusetts Battery during the Civil War, taking part in the battle of Rappahannock Station, the Mine Run, and Wilderness campaigns before being wounded in May 1864. He was present at the surrender of Lee at Appomattox. After the war, Nathan traveled abroad to Russia, Paris, Constantinople, and the Suez, where he assisted in the opening of the Suez Canal. He also became interested in the French attempt to build a Panama canal, acting as French general agent for the canal in the United States.
CHARLES WILLIAM GALLOUPE, age 38, a physician, was born in Lynn in 1858, son of Isaac Francis and Lydia D. (Ellis) Galloupe and a descendant of Elder Brewster. He graduated from Harvard with an AB degree in 1879 and then received his MD in 1883. His father was also a graduate of the Harvard Medical School (1849) and practiced in Lynn except during distinguished service in the Civil War. Charles practiced with his father in Lynn until 1892 when he moved to Boston, and he also had military service as assistant surgeon of the Eighth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia for seven years. He traveled and studied in such places as Paris, Vienna, Budapest , Cairo, England, Norway, Russia, Japan and China.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, age 61, was born in Boston in 1835, son of Charles Francis and Abigail Brown (Brooks) Adams, grandson of U.S. President John Quincy Adams, great-grandson of President John Adams, and descendant of John Alden. His father was minister of the United States to Great Britain 1861-1867. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1856. During the Civil War he served in South Carolina and Virginia with the First Regiment of the Massachusetts Cavalry and the Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry at Point Lookout, Maryland, attaining the rank of Brigadier-General. He then turned his attention to railroads, becoming president of the Union Pacific Railroad Company.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD, age 65, was born 1831 in Boston, only son of Gamaliel an Sophia (Rice) Bradford, fifth in a row to bear that name, and a descendant of Governor William Bradford. His father was a physician and had been superintendent of the Massachusetts General Hospital . Gamaliel graduated from Harvard in 1849 at the age Of nineteen and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He entered his cousins’ banking House (Blake Brothers and Company) as a clerk and became a partner in 1858. Both He and his father were identified with the anti-slavery movement. During the Civil War he had charge of the foreign exchange department and could not be spared for Military service. He was the founder of the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War and announced his candidacy for Governor of Massachusetts in 1897, at the age of 66, but never held public office. He wrote one book, The Lesson of popular Government , in 1898, and his motto was “One Man and One Plan” indicating more power should be placed in the executive branch of government. He died August 20, 1911 from injuries sustained when he was struck by trolley car near his son’s home in Wellesley Hills.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS 2d, age 30, a lawyer, was born in 1866 in Quincy, son of John Quincy and Fanny Cadwallader (Crowninshield) Adams, great-grandson of President John Quincy Adams, descendant of John Alden. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1888 (LLB 1892), practiced law for a short while, then served one term as councilman in Quincy and two as mayor of that city. He became directing or controlling head of several banks and large corporations, was treasurer of Harvard for thirty years. A noted yachtsman, Charles also served as Secretary of the Navy (1929-1933) and was instrumental in the success of the London Naval Conference in 1930, which reduced the size of the navies of the signatories.
WALTER KENDALL WATKINS, age 41, a genealogist, was born in 1855 in Boston , son of Samuel Augustus and Jeanette C. (Bjornberg) Watkins, descendant of Isaac Allerton and a well-known antiquary, genealogist, and historian. His maternal grandfather was a Swedish officer under Napoleon who marched to Moscow in 1812 and later immigrated to the United States. Watkins graduated from Boston English High School in 1874 and immediately went to work as a clerk in a wood-turning firm. In 1879 he worked for the Photo-Electrotype Company where he collected material for their publication, Antique Views of Boston and became a recognized authority on the history of Boston.
GAMALIEL BRADFORD 6th, age 33, was born 1863 in Boston, son of incorporator Gamaliel Bradford and his wife, Clara C. Hinsman, and descendant of Governor Bradford. He entered Harvard with the class of 1886 but was forced out in his freshman year because of his health and spent the rest of his life as a semi-invalid from neurasthenia. Gamaliel became a well-known biographer or “psychograph,”whose biography of General Lee was acclaimed, who wrote such essays, as “Types of American Character,” “Confederate Portraits” and “Portraits of Women” and who was considered the father of modern biography.
CHARLES PETER CLARK (Sr.), age 60, was born in 1836 in Nashua, New Hampshire, son of Peter and Susan (Lord) Clark, descendant of Elder Brewster. Clark attended Phillips Academy and entered Dartmouth in 1852 but was forced by ill health to leave (he received an honorary degree in 1871). He purchased a ship and engaged in foreign travel, and during the Civil War commanded ironclads in the Mississippi squadron. He entered the railroad business in 1870 and rose to be president and director of the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad, transforming it into the preeminent transportation system of New England. During Mayor Josiah Quincy (III)’s term, Clark was instrumental in building South Station.
MARY ADAMS QUINCY, age 60, was born in 1836 in Boston, daughter of Charles Francis and Abigail Brown (Brooks) Adams, and wife of Henry Parker Quincy. Mary was the first of the eight women incorporators to sign the articles of agreement, And, as with most of the others, it is very hard to find biographical information on her. Her obituary mentions only her descent from the presidents. Her husband was the son of anti-slavery author, Edmund Quincy, and grandson of Josiah Quincy (I), Mayor of Boston. Henry was a prominent physician of Boston and Dedham, and he was an instructor at the Harvard Medical School until shortly before his death in 1899.
MARCUS MORTON, age 34, lawyer, was born in 1862 in Andover, son of Marcus and Abby Bowler (Hoppin) Morton and descendant of William Bradford. Morton was a classmate of the Bowmans at Yale, after which he studied two years at the Harvard Law School and entered a law office in Boston, before being admitted to the Bar in 1886. He ran for governor 16 times, winning the office twice. In 1909, he was appointed judge of the Superior Court of Massachusetts for life. His father had held the same appointment from 1859 to 1869 and was on the state Supreme Court from 1869-1890, serving as Chief Justice from 1882. His grandfather, also named Marcus Morton, was on the Supreme Court bench from 1825 to 1840, when he resigned to become Governor of Massachusetts. Marcus Mortons served as judges in the Massachusetts courts for a total of 76 years in the span of three lives from 1784 to 1939.
ELLEN SEVER HALE, age 61, was born in 1835 in Kingston, daughter of John and Anna (Dana) Sever, descendant of Edward Winslow, widow of the Rev. Theodore Tebetts of Rochester, New Hampshire, and wife of George Sylsby Hale. Her father was a country-store keeper who “sold Daniel Webster his rum in Plymouth County, Mass.” Her first husband was a graduate of Harvard in 1851 and died in 1863. Her second husband was the son of the Hon. Salma Hale, author of Hales’ History of the U.S., member of Congress from New Hampshire and loser to Daniel Webster in the famous ” Dartmouth College” case. George S. Hale was a graduate of Harvard in 1844 and practiced law in Boston. He was solicitor for the Boston and Worcester Railroad, the Boston and Albany, and others.
LENA FARRINGTON CUSHMAN, age 40, was born in 1856 in Auburn, Maine, daughter of Enoch Chandler and Mary Eliza (Seabury) Farrington, descendant of John Alden, and wife of incorporator Charles Livingston Cushman. Mrs. Cushman was the only woman to list an occupation on her membership papers: “Care of my family.” She and her husband were also the only married couple among the incorporators.
CHARLES LIVINGSTON CUSHMAN, age 39, born 1857 in West Minot, Maine, son of Ara and Julia W. (Morse) Cushman, descendant of Isaac Allerton and husband of incorporator Lena Farrington Cushman. They resided in Auburn, Maine, where he was listed as a superintendent in the 1896 city directory.
LUCRETIA SMITH REMICK, age 40, was born in 1856 in Chelsea, daughter of John Gilman and Elizabeth W. (Smith) Pillsbury, descendant of John Alden, and wife of John Anthony Remick. On her mother’s side she was first-cousin-once-removed to the wife (Mary Alden Osgood) of Irish Revolution hero, Robert Erskine Childers, and twice-removed to his son, Erskine Hamilton Childers, who became President of Ireland.
ELEANOR ARMISTEAD APPLETON, age 24, was born in 1872 in Paris, daughter of William Sumner and Edith (Stuart) Appleton, descendant of James Chilton. She was the youngest incorporator. Her father was “numismatist, and genealogist, of Boston,” and her brother was William Sumner Appleton, who founded the Society for Preservation of New England Antiquities. Eleanor later married Lt. Col. Robert H.F. Standen, a British Army officer, and resided in Kent, England, and Marseilles, France.
ELINOR CURTIS, age 27, was born in Boston in 1869, daughter of Greeley Stevenson and Harriot (Appleton) Curtis, descendant of James Chilton. Her father was a Lt. Colonel in the Massachusetts cavalry during the Civil War and an engineer in Boston. Elinor later married Charles Hopkinson who painted the portraits of Harvard presidents Eliot, Lowell and Conant; of Calvin Coolidge and Oliver Wendell Holmes. His works hang in the White House, the National Gallery of Art, Fogg Museum at Harvard, etc.
MARY RIVERS, age 56, was born in 1840 in Providence, daughter of George and Geraldine (Russell) Rivers, and a descendant of Richard Warren. Her mother’s brother, Henry Wheaton, was a distinguished writer on international law and U.S. minister at Berlin. Mary was a long-time resident of Milton and was deeply interested in historical research and genealogical matters. She lived in the ” Russell Place,” which was once a residence of Governor Hutchinson.
AUSTIN LORD BOWMAN, age 35, a civil engineer, was born 1861 in Manchester, New Hampshire, son of George Augustus and Ernestine (Lord) Bowman, descendant of William Brewster, and brother of George Ernest Bowman. Austin graduated from Yale in the same class with his brother (1883). He became involved in railroad engineering and construction work for the Hartford & Harlem, the Minnesota & Northwestern, and the Chicago, St. Paul & Kansas City railroads, among others. He took part in the construction of the Kings County Elevated railroad in Brooklyn and in 1896 was the superintendent for the Federal government on the construction of the snag boat, Roanoke. Austin received second prize in the Montreal Bridge Company’s world-wide competition for a design for a bridge over the St. Lawrence River in Montreal.
EMILY MARSHALL MORISON, age 39, was born in 1857 in Hartford, daughter of Samuel and Emily Marshall (Otis) Eliot, descendant of Bradford, wife of John H. Morison, and mother of historian Samuel Eliot Morison. Emily’s father was a well-known “historian, educator, philanthropist” of Boston. Her son’s autobiography, One Boy’s Boston 1887-1901, is a literate explanation of the lifestyle of the type of people who founded Massachusetts Society of Mayflower Descendants. Although the Mayflower Society is not mentioned in the book, Morison notes that his grandmother, Emily Marshall (Otis) (granddaughter of Harrison Gray Otis) “… also went in for patriotic societies, such as the Colonial Dames, and the D.A.R. (then in its innocent heyday); and for these she took a great deal of teasing in the family…” [mostly for the gusto with which these dames planned their dinner meetings and menus].
FRANCIS RUSSELL STODDARD, age 52, occupation “nothing at present,” was born at Plymouth in 1844, the son of Isaac N. and Martha LeBaron (Thomas) Stoddard, and a descendant of Governor Bradford. Stoddard graduated from Harvard (AB 1866, AM 1870) and became Deputy Collector of the Boston City Treasurer’s department from 1869 until 1875, when he was appointed Cashier and Assistant Collector of the City of Boston, which post he held until 1896. He then turned to banking and brokerage until 1898, when he was elected Treasurer of the Sherwood Manufacturing Company in Buffalo, New York, then went on to New York City and became involved in banking there.
EDWIN SHEPARD BARRETT. Barrett was dropped from the rolls in January of 1897 for failing to file proofs of lineage. He had been elected an Assistant in March of 1896 and was active in the early Board meetings, including being one of the committee appointed to consider the establishment of a General Society. In 1897 he was president of the state chapter of the S.A.R., of which Nathan Appleton was one of the vice presidents, and Bowman was president of the Boston Chapter. His obituary in 1928 notes he was one of the first permanent letter-carriers in Somerville in 1873, and that his family homestead in that town was an original landmark.