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Stoneham Mass.

Saving the Historic Gas Station

Once New Englanders decided to save the historic Old South Meeting House in 1876, they began to preserve other kinds of historic properties. They saved private homes, taverns, barns, bridges and dams. And then in 1978, New England began saving the historic gas station.

A look at the humble gas station reminds us of how our lives and our landscape changed with the automobile.

Historic gas stations reflect car culture, pop culture, corporate standardization and a kind of customer service that today seems quaint, according to a 2008 Preservation Brief of the National Park Service.

“Across the United States, however, gas stations are slowly being rediscovered for their historic significance,” reported the Brief. “They have even been included on statewide endangered property lists.”

The Historic Gas Station

The invention of the gas pump around the turn of the 20^th century allowed small businesses to sell gas. Car dealers, hardware stores and grocery stores made contracts with refiners. They then installed the pumps and sold gas on the curbside.

Stand-alone gas stations started out as wood or metal shacks. Then they evolved with sturdier material, prefabricated metal sheds or brick. Perhaps they had steel windows and some decoration.

The A.C. Smith Co. gas station

The A.C. Smith & Co. gas station in Quincy, Mass., built in 1926, got listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1996 as an early functional gas station.

In the 1920s, gas stations began to pop up in residential neighborhoods. The neighbors complained about the way they looked, so gas stations began to look like houses. The English cottage or Tudor revival look was especially popular.

A Tudor revival gas station converted to a new use.

By then, the petroleum business had grown intensely competitive, and companies started to compete with unusual architecture. For example, Art’s Auto in Pawtucket has square towers with roofs shaped like pyramids at the corner. A large round bay projects from the center with a conical roof. The historic gas station was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, but Anchor Financial now uses the building as an office.

The former Art’s Auto historic gas station in Pawtucket, R.I.

Colonial Revival

The popularity of historic revival architecture extended to gas stations. Standard Oil especially liked the colonial revival style. So did Boston-based petroleum companies like the Beacon Oil Co., formed in 1919.

Beacon in 1922 hired the architectural firm of Coolidge and Carlson to design Beacon’s prototype station, the “Watertown.” The architects copied elements from Charles Bulfinch’s Massachusetts Statehouse, including columns, balustrade, dome and lantern. Crowning the Watertown’s dome: a globe with lines showing latitude and longitude, to symbolize Boston as the Hub.

The Beacon Gas station in Stoneham, Mass., was a Watertown. It stopped pumping gas after World War II. A series of retailers then moved in, converting it to a produce market, a florist and an ice cream parlor. They didn’t change the building in any significant way, so the National Register of Historic Places listed the historic gas station in 1984.

The Colonial Beacon gas station in Stoneham, Mass. Efforts to save it failed recently.

In Bellows Falls, Vt., the small commercial building at Bridge and Island Streets offers a modest example of a colonial revival gas station. Built in 1935, the National Register of Historic Places listed it in 1990.

Bellows Falls, Vt. gas station

The Box

By the 1930s, oil companies wanted to give an impression of efficiency, cleanliness and standardization. They developed the rectangular box station with large symbols: Shell Oil’s shell, Mobil’s Pegasus and the Texaco star.

historic-gas-stations-star-chevron-new-london

Star Chevron in New London, Conn. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

During the 1970s, a Connecticut photographer named John Margolies began taking slides of roadside attractions throughout the country. In 2016, the Library of Congress collected his work in the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive.

Margolies’ images convinced people that such buildings are worth saving. Below, the picture he took in 1981 of the Mobil station in North Stamford, Conn.

Revival of the Historic Gas Station

Today, many historic gas stations are deteriorating because commercial development moved away from downtown. In other cases, interstates routed traffic away from them.

But some start-up businesses find them ideal homes. In 1978, Ben & Jerry’s opened its first Scoop Shop in a converted gas station in Burlington, Vt.

In Newport, R.I., a streamlined box-type station became an art gallery, which seems to work well. The service bays function as open exhibit space, and the sales office continues as is.

historic-gas-station-newport-art-gallery

This art gallery was once a gas station.

Some people think the historic gas station worth preserving intact. The National Register of Historic Places has listed at least 125 historic gas stations throughout the United States.

The National Park Service even offers guidelines on preserving historic gas stations. For example, preservationists should keep key features, like the V-shaped canopy on Phillips 66 gas stations. It’s also important to keep the roofs the way they were. Tudor revival gas stations should have slate roofs, while the streamlined 1950s versions should have flat roofs.

In 1978, a scholar named John Jakle wrote a study, The American Gasoline Station, 1920 to 1970. In it, he wrote,

They deserve serious attention from historical geographers, architectural historians, and other scholars concerned with the built environment.

A Reader Writes From Boston…

I would like to notify NEHS about what is perhaps the last remnant of the old ESSO gas stations anywhere.

If one goes south (outbound) on Mass Ave to the intersection of Melnea Cass and Southampton St, one can see a domed structure, blue, I think, directly ahead. Though much altered, I am quite sure that it is an old gas station (to the right is the old brick gas storage building that is now a hotel).

A–can someone verify it as an old ESSO station?

and

B–is it worth saving in some way?

If you enjoyed this story, you may also want to read about the glory days of the Berlin Turnpike here.

Images: Colonial Beacon Gas station in Stoneham By User:Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9812615. A.C. Smith By Jameslwoodward – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8321089. Art’s Auto By By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25517406. bellow’s falls By Beyond My Ken – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60097838. All Library of Congress images from the John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

This story was updated in 2022.

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How the Italian Immigrants Came to New England

Italian immigrants put their stamp on New England as indelibly as any Puritan. New England, in fact, is the most Italian region in the United States.

Boston’s North End, 1909, by Lewis Wickes Hine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Today, the descendants of Italian immigrants make up more than 10 percent of the population of every New England state except Vermont and Maine. Any New Englander can recognize the voice of Joe Castiglione or the Magliozzi brothers. And tens of thousands attend the region’s 45 summer festas. They happen from Our Lady of Assumption in Portland to St. Bartholomew in Providence.

Italian Americans have undeniably influenced New England’s food history. Boston’s North End brought us Prince spaghetti, Pastene sauces and Dragone cheese. It also gave us the first Italian café, Café Vittoria, in 1929. Amato’s Italian delicatessen in Portland, Maine, claims to have originated the Italian sandwich. And, of course, Frank Pepe in New Haven invented the white clam apizza.

More recently John Bello of New Britain created SoBe beverages.

Italian-Americans

And yet Italian immigrants have contributed to American history and culture in ways that are typically – well, American. Italian immigrants sculpted the Lincoln Memorial. They frescoed the dome of the Capitol. And they founded the Bank of America, formerly the Bank of Italy.

S. Z Poli of New Haven built a chain of vaudeville theaters and Charles Ponzi of Boston’s North End discovered a new form of financial fraud. Bart Giamatti presided over Yale University and Major League Baseball. Providence’s Edward Valenti created the Ginsu knife and the infomercial.

Mike Eruzione of Winthrop, Mass., captained the U.S. Olympic team that defeated the Russians in 1980. And Filippo Mazzei, a physician friend of Thomas Jefferson, published a pamphlet that contained a familiar line. It read,

All men are by nature equally free and independent.

Jefferson then used it in the Declaration of Independence.

Beginnings

The first Italians were explorers, and not just Christopher Columbus. America got its name from an Italian, Amerigo Vespucci. He explored the east coast of South America from 1499 to 1502.

Giovanni Caboto

Venetian John Cabot – Giovanni Caboto — and his son Sebastian are the reason Americans speak English. That’s because Cabot first explored the mainland in North America in 1497 under the commission of English king Henry VII.

And Giovanni di Verrazano explored the Atlantic coast between Florida and New Brunswick.

Italians also fought in the American Revolution. Afterward, Italian immigrants came to the United States as political refugees, as missionaries and as explorers.

They came as well because of a need for their professional skills. In 1801, Philip Trajetta founded a music conservatory in Boston, the first in the United States. And beginning in 1871, Gaetano Lanza taught mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for over 40 years.

Scattered Italian families settled in Boston between the American Revolution and the Civil War, but the city didn’t attract large groups of immigrants then. There was too little land and too little commercial opportunity. Boston’s homogeneous and self-contained social life also made it forbidding to outsiders.

But 7,000 Italians fought in the Civil War, and six won the Congressional Medal of Honor. New York even recruited infantrymen from Italy for its 39^th regiment, also known as the Garibaldi Guard.

Then after the Civil War, New England’s mills and factories didn’t have enough workers, so they recruited immigrants from overseas.

A Wave of Italian Immigrants

An Italian immigrant family, 1911. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

From 1880 to 1920, an estimated 4 million Italian immigrants arrived in the United States. Most came between 1900 and 1914, and most came from southern Italy and Sicily. Italian unification in 1861 had worsened conditions in the mother country. Plus the soil was exhausted, taxes and tariffs were high and young men were conscripted for seven years

In 1880 about a thousand Italian immigrant families came to Boston. They represented the first wave to the city bypassed by most Europeans, save for the Irish.

These immigrants didn’t speak English. They therefore had to take low-wage jobs and fell prey to labor brokers known as padrones. So they settled in ghettoes known as Little Italys. Those included Front Street in Hartford, Central End in Bridgeport, Shrewsbury Street in Worcester and the South End of Springfield, Mass.

Burlington, Vt., Portsmouth, N.H., and Portland also had Little Italys, but they since disappeared. The once-crowded tenements of the North End of Boston, New Haven’s Wooster Square and Providence’s Federal Hill have all gentrified.

Birds of Passage

About a third of the newcomers were birds of passage, workers who intended to stay until they saved enough money to reestablish themselves in Italy. It wasn’t easy. Italian men ended up working low-paying construction jobs, while women usually worked as seamstresses in garment factories. Many Italian immigrants led the fight for better pay and working conditions. Arturo Giovanitti, Joe Ettor and Carlo Tresca organized the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike.

Many blamed prejudice against Italian immigrants for the 1927 execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. And many Italians Anglicized their names to avoid the stigma of their ethnicity. For example, actor Ernest Borgnine of Hamden, Conn., was originally Ernest Borgnino. Steve Carell, a Concord, Mass., native, would have been Steve Caroselli had his father not changed his name.

World Wars

World War I abruptly ended the massive wave of Italian immigration to America. Then came the restrictive Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924. The Little Italys stabilized and prospered, and English became the predominant language. Italian Americans then started to get better jobs as civil servants and skilled tradesmen, though the Great Depression reversed many of their gains.

Henry Mucci in the Philippines by the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

By the time the United States entered World War II, 600,000 Italians had not become American citizens. The government therefore declared them enemy aliens and required them to report regularly. At the same time, as many as 500,000 Italian-Americans served in the armed forces.

During the war, Italian-American servicemen earned the Medal of Honor. For example, Col. Henry Mucci of Bridgeport led Army Rangers on a daring raid of a POW camp that held survivors of the Bataan Death March.

Postwar Prosperity

The war, however, opened up good-paying jobs to Italian immigrants in defense factories. Then after the war many Italian-Americans took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend college. In the post-war era, Karen Ignani of Providence became CEO of America’s Health Insurance Plans. Samuel Palmisano, of Southport, Conn., was named president and CEO of IBM.

Because they prospered, Italian-Americans gained political power. Ella Grasso won election as governor of Connecticut, the first woman governor elected in her own right. Tom Menino served as Boston’s longest serving mayor, while Massachusetts elected Foster Furcolo, John Volpe and Paul Cellucci as governors. Even Maine had an Italian-American governor, John Baldacci, and Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s mother has Italian ancestry.

Rhode Island

Nearly one in five Rhode Islanders – 18.9 percent – claim Italian ancestry. That makes the Ocean State the most Italian in the country. In 1950, John Pastore became the first Italian American elected to the U.S. Senate. Donald Carcieri, Edward DiPrete and Gina Raimondo since won election as governor. Raimondo now serves as secretary of the U.S. Department of Commerce

And who can forget Buddy Cianci, who for years served as the colorful mayor of Providence?

Gateway Arch to Atwells Avenue in Providence.

Johnston, R.I., the most Italian municipality in the United States, has 46.7 percent of its population claiming Italian ancestry.

Companies like the Silver Spring Bleaching and Dyeing attracted Italian immigrants to Providence’s North End in the 19^th century. Today, 36.7 percent of North Providence residents say they had Italian ancestors.

Famous Italian Americans from Rhode Island include comedienne Ruth Buzzi and novelist Peter Pezzelli. Rhode Island also produced Italian-American athletes — hockey players Jack and Dave Capuano and Olympic skater Marissa Castelli.

Connecticut

Frank Pepe’s pizzeria.

Today, Connecticut ranks as the second most Italian state in America after Rhode Island. A full 18.7 percent of the population claims Italian ancestry.

Roughly half the populations of East Haven, West Haven and North Haven are descended from Italian immigrants. Wooster Square, home of Frank Pepe’s white clam apizza, is a bastion of Italian culture and cuisine. And more than a quarter of the populations of seven Connecticut towns — Northford, North Branford, Oakville, Orange, Wolcott, Derby and Wethersfield — have Italian ancestors.

Stamford sent Andy Robustelli to the Football Hall of Fame and Bobby Valentine to the helm of the Boston Red Sox. Joe Castiglione of Hamden announces Red Sox games on the radio. And Rosa Ponselle of Meriden performed with the Metropolitan Opera during the 1920s and 1930s.

Massachusetts

In Revere, 35.7 percent of residents claim Italian ancestry, making it the most Italian city in Massachusetts. Massachusetts itself ranks as the fourth most Italian state in the country behind New Jersey. That’s because close to 14 percent of Massachusetts residents have Italian ancestry, with a half-million living in metropolitan Boston.

Famous descendants of Italian immigrants to Massachusetts include poet John Ciardi and artist Frank Stella. Massachusetts has also produced such Italian-American athletes as Rocky Marciano, Tony Conigliaro and Joseph Bellino. Aerosmith’s Joe Perry’s mother was Italian, and so was Jay Leno’s dad.

New Hampshire

Yes, New Hampshire ranks as the seventh most Italian state in the country. Nearly 11 percent of its residents say they have Italian ancestors. Salem, along the southern tier, has the densest population of Italian-Americans in New Hampshire at 15.7 percent.

This story was updated in 2022.

Image: Atwells Avenue By Zigamorph – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3996788.

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The Birds’ Best Friend: How Ernest Baynes Saved the Animals

Ernest Baynes was the closest thing New England, and the world for that matter, will ever get to a real-life Dr. Doolittle. All sorts of New England birds and animals–foxes, wolves, chickadees, bears and bison–roamed around and in and out of his house, “Sunset Ridge,” in Meriden, N.H.

Though he never claimed to talk to the animals, he did just about everything else with them. His cordial relations with animals resulted from treating them like friends, he said. And by the standards of his day, animals never had a better friend than Ernest Baynes.

Armed with an outsized reputation as a naturalist, he had a gift for ingratiating himself with powerful people. He used that gift to forever change the fortunes of two particular animals: bison and songbirds.

While it might be a stretch to say that these animals would be extinct without his taking an interest, it’s no stretch to say no one did more to popularize their plight.

Ernest Baynes

Baynes was born in 1868 in Calcutta, India. His parents, John and Helen, were of English origin, and he was educated in English schools as a young boy. At age 11, the family came to Bronx Park, N.Y., and he graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. He went on to attend the College of the City of New York.

In college, Baynes excelled in athletics as a runner and a lacrosse player. He explored the law as a potential career. For a time he worked with his father, who invented celluloid film, in attempting to establish a business.

But he soon settled on nature as his true calling. A bout of typhoid kept him out of the Spanish-American War, and his course was set. A short stint as a reporter for the New York Times had sharpened his writing. Soon he regularly contributed articles on nature and animals to magazines and newspapers in the 1890s.

Wildlife Showman

With no formal education in science, Baynes had a natural ability to examine the natural world. Without the constraints of scholarly publishing, he became a wildlife showman through his articles and appearances.

In 1901, he married and settled in Stoneham, Mass. Here, located near the Middlesex Fells, he studied birds in greater detail. He also took to raising orphaned animals and famously led a children’s brigade in feeding wildlife during one particularly hard winter. In 1903, his father died in Portland, Maine, and the next year Baynes moved farther afield to Meriden. It was here that he adopted the bison as his pet cause, both literally and figuratively.

Two of Baynes’ Tame Buffalo Pulling a Wagon

Baynes’ home was on the edge of the Blue Mountain Forest, also known as Corbin Park, a wildlife preserve established by New Hampshire businessman Austin Corbin. The park was home to a herd of 160 buffaloes, which represented a huge percentage of the overall population.

Bison neared extinction as a result of over-hunting and encroachment on their habitat. Their population fell to just 1,000 animals by 1890, down from its peak of 60 million. Very few were left in the wild. Corbin’s bison herd was a valuable resource for those who wanted to preserve the animals.

Austin Corbin, Jr., was by 1904 entrusted with running the park his father established. However he feared he couldn’t sustain the expense of maintaining the buffalo herd. When Baynes arrived in 1904, he was named conservator for the park. The then immediately began putting his skills to work.

Bison Savior

He authored a series of articles to begin raising public awareness about bison. In them he hinted that if the government did not act, the Corbin buffaloes would not survive.

Baynes tamed some bison, feeding the calves by hand with a bottle. He famously rode around the Corbin estate in a wagon pulled by two trained bison, just like a team of oxen. From time to time bison could even be found wandering inside Baynes’ house.

This hand-rearing of wild animals was something Baynes did frequently. He raised fox, raccoon, and wolves. His attempts at raising a bear came to a bad end, however, when he couldn’t teach the bear house manners. Baynes could not be prevent it from raiding his pantry. The bear then ended his days in the Bronx Zoo.

Baynes Postcard

Baynes used his animal-taming antics to build himself a following and reputation as a naturalist. Not unlike a modern day zookeeper visiting the Tonight Show with exotic animals, Baynes developed a fan base for his lectures. Later, he wrote books. And he used the fame to promote his conservation causes.

When President Teddy Roosevelt visited Corbin Park in 1902 to go hunting, he had already shown an interest in the bison. Roosevelt’s long-standing interest in wildlife led him to establish the National Park System. So in 1904 when Baynes wrote him about plans to help increase the herds of buffalo in the American West, he had a ready-made supporter of the plan in the White House.

The American Bison Society was formed, with Baynes as its founding secretary, and Roosevelt as honorary chairman. Soon, the association became the cause of the day, attracting support from wealthy philanthropists. It became the private-sector partner to the government’s efforts to preserve and increase the numbers of American bison. Baynes’ work paid off, and, within 15 years, the bison population had increased to 20,000. The recovery of the herds was underway.

Ernest Baynes for the Birds

Equally important to Baynes was the fate of the songbirds. His quirky affection for animals was at its over-the-top best when it came to birds. He authored a popular book in 1915: Wild Bird Guests: How to Entertain Them.

Bird feeder window box project

In it he included tips for protecting wild birds from the elements, as well as projects such as a birdfeeder that could be constructed in the window box of a home so people could see the birds up close. As usual, there was an ulterior motive to his showmanship: protecting birds from being killed for their plumage. The book contains lengthy discussions of the economic and natural costs of decimating the bird population.

He extended his activism to establishing one of the first bird sanctuaries in the nation in Meriden. To mark its opening in 1913 he enlisted poet Percy MacKaye, a member of the Cornish Art Colony, to write a play, Sanctuary: A Bird Masque. It was a naked effort at bolstering public opinion against continued slaughter of birds for their plumage.

Sanctuary

With a featured role for himself, the play also included a spot in the cast for the daughters of then-president Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson was in nearby Cornish, N.H., staying at the home of American author Winston Churchill for a short summer break. Baynes mounted the play in Meriden. And no doubt the message was not lost on Wilson, who watched from the audience.

At the time, the Underwood Tariff Bill was in Congress. Bird-lovers everywhere wanted to ensure the bill included a ban on importation of bird feathers for their decorative value. The play helped keep the heat on. When Wilson returned from his vacation to sign the bill, the language about birds hadn’t changed.

An actor in the play Sanctuary: A Bird Masque

The play went on a nationwide tour. It fueled the growth of the movement for bird protection that roared ahead full-steam in the 1910s. And it enjoyed a revival in New Hampshire’s upper valley.

Legacy

Baynes died in January of 1925, leaving a legacy of activism on behalf of animals. But his activism had its limits. He supported the right to conduct medical experiments on animals, an issue as hotly debated then as now.

And his obituary told the story of a varied and interesting life. He traveled the world, usually chronicling the activities of animals. When he died, he was cremated and his ashes scattered on Mount Croydon near his home. A monument on the mountain reads: “Here were scattered the ashes of Ernest Harold Baynes, lover of animals and men, and loved of them. May 1, 1868, January 21, 1925.”

Much of the personal history of Baynes in this article comes from Ernest Harold Baynes, Naturalist and Crusader by Raymond Gorges, 1928. This story was updated in 2022.

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