Tag:

Unitarians

Six Stops From the People’s Guide to Greater Boston

One of our favorite books is the People’s Guide to Greater Boston, a tour guide that goes beyond the usual listing of tourist attractions.

The authors — Joseph Nevins, Suren Moodliar and Eleni Macrakis — take readers to sites of “oppression, resistance, organization or transformation.” Stops include the homes of wealthy opium smugglers, slaveowners, mill owners and imperialists.

People’s Guide

Published by University of California Press People’s Guides series, it also presents themed tours, such as a One Percent Tour of Greater Boston, a Malcolm and Martin Tour and a Sacco and Vanzetti Tour.

The Elias Hasket Derby House.

The One Percent Tour, for example, features the home of the Immigration Restriction League in Boston, the home of 18th-century millionaire Elias Hasket Derby in Salem and Elmwood, where British lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver lived in Cambridge.

To give you an idea of the places to which the book takes the reader, we bring you six stops from the People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

1. Noah Worcester House, Brighton

Marker for Noah Worcester house between these triple-deckers. image courtesy @ 2021 Google

The U.S. Postal Department erected a small monument between 437 and 439 Washington St. in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. It looks like a headstone, but it marks the home of Noah Worcester, Brighton’s first postmaster.

Worcester was more than a postmaster, however. He worked as a writer, a minister and a pioneer in the American peace movement.

Born in Hollis, N.H., in 1758, he marched to Boston with his father’s militia company at 16. He narrowly escaped imprisonment during the Battle of Bunker Hill. He later fought in the Battle of Bennington. The carnage he saw on the battlefield helped persuade him to give peace a chance.

Worcester married, had children and entered the Unitarian ministry in New Hampshire. He published arguments defending the Unitarian creed, which brought him to the attention of prominent clergymen William Ellery Channing and John Lowell. They invited him to come to Boston to edit a new publication, The Christian Disciple. He accepted, and then he started the Massachusetts Peace Society.

In 1814, he wrote a treatise, A Solemn Review of the Custom of War, considered a classic of antiwar writing. He also received an appointment as Brighton’s postmaster, but his daughter Sally apparently did all the work.

Channing, in a tribute to him, wrote,

He was struck, as no other man within my acquaintance has been, with the monstrous incongruity between the spirit of Christianity and the spirit of Christian communities; between Christ’s teaching of peace, mercy, forgiveness, and the wars which divide and desolate the church and the world.

437-439 Washington St., Brighton

2. Parmenter Street Chapel, North End, Boston

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be here. Image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

The Parmenter Street Chapel used to be across from the North End branch of the Boston Public Library. In its courtyard was a sand garden. Not just any sand garden (we’d call it a sand box) but the sand garden that launched a thousand playgrounds across the country.

It began with a doctor who saw children playing in sand gardens in Berlin’s public parks. She brought the idea back in 1885 to the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, a reformist group of upper-class women. Poor immigrants had flooded into Boston, and the ladies didn’t think the children had enough open space for play. They believed structured, supervised play in and around sand gardens would teach working-class, immigrant children morality and manners. It would also improve health and hygiene and turn the children into good U.S. citizens.

Neighborhood mothers supervised the children at first, but then MEHA hired “matrons” to take over. Within five years they supervised 21 sand gardens in Boston, augmenting the sandbox play by leading singing and dancing. Ten years after the first pile of sand was dumped on Parmenter Street, 39 cities had at least one playground.

The Parmenter Street Chapel is gone, replaced by a large brick building that houses a theater and apartments.

20 Parmenter Street, North End

3. United Fruit Co. Headquarters, Boston

United Fruit’s staff in Jamaica at a time when the company was promoting tourism.

You know it as Chiquita Brands International, now in North Carolina, but it started out on Long Wharf as the Boston Fruit Company in 1870. In 1899, the company merged with its rival, the Tropical Trading and Transport Company. They named themselves the United Fruit Company. From about 1900 to 1903, the multinational also known as ‘the Octopus’ had its headquarters at 60 State St. A plaque marks the site, now a skyscraper.

Within a decade of the merger, United Fruit grew into a banana empire, the largest agricultural enterprise in the world. At its height in the mid-1950s it had 100,000 employees, a fleet of merchant ships and 1,500 miles of railroad in Latin America. It also had few scruples.

60 State St., former home of United Fruit, according to the People’s Guide.

In 1954, United Fruit worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. Arbenz had had the temerity to redistribute land to the people of Guatemala. United Fruit owned 70 percent of Guatemala’s private land in 1942, according to the People’s Guide. Arbenz’ overthrow led to three decades of military dictatorship and war in which U.S.-backed forces killed 200,000 Guatemalans.

Another legacy of the United Fruit Company: the many Afro-Caribbean immigrants who came to Boston on United Fruit ships.

The company then moved to 131 State Street in 1903, then to 1 Federal Street and finally to 80 Federal Street.

60 State Street, Boston

4. Walter E. Fernald State School, Waltham

The Fernald School, now closed.

Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward’s husband, founded the school in Boston in 1848 to care for people with developmental disabilities. Political correctness hadn’t entered the lexicon yet, so Howe called it the Experimental School for Teaching and Training Idiotic Children.

The school moved to Waltham in 1887 under the leadership of Walter E. Fernald, a proponent of eugenics. Later it took his name. The school began to conduct scientific experiments, and to take children who had no developmental disabilities. They just came from poor families.

In 1946, the school started The Science Club, run by scientists from MIT. They enticed boys to join the club with promises of trips to the beach, Red Sox games and gifts. The boys ate a special diet that included cereal with milk. They didn’t know, nor did their parents, that the scientists had laced their food with radioactive tracers.

Quaker Oats Co. sponsored the experiment on the boys – without their parents’ knowledge or permission. The National Institutes of Health and the Atomic Energy Commission also paid for the project.

In 1993, former Fernald students sued Quaker Oats and MIT. They settled out of court for $1.85 million in 1998. The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments reported the studies were morally troubling though the doses involved were low and the children probably weren’t harmed. It also questioned the fairness of selecting institutionalized children.

The Fernald School closed in 2014.

200 Trapelo Rd., Waltham

5. Wamesit, Lowell

The former site of Wamesit, according to the People’s Guide

Middlesex Community College sits at the place where the Merrimack and Concord rivers meet. The land, once called Wamesit, belonged to a village of praying Indians from the Pennacook tribe. The Pennacook came to Wamesit to gather and to trade before English missionaries converted them to Christianity in the 1640s.

Passaconaway, the Pennacook leader, may have agreed to let missionaries establish the praying village as a way to curtail land grabs by the English. It didn’t work, of course. During King Philip’s War, neighbors murdered several of the Indians despite their peaceful and friendly attitudes toward the English. Wamesit disappeared after the war, its people either killed, captured or fled.

33 Walkway, Middlesex Community College, Lowell

6. Maypole Hill Park, Quincy

Maypole HIll. image courtesy @ 2021 Google.

A marker on Maypole Hill memorializes Thomas Morton, an English colonist who infuriated the Puritans who lived nearby at Plimoth Plantation. Morton, a lawyer, established a trading post and settlement he called Merrymount and invited his friends, including Native Americans, to party there. Morton had no problem with same sex relationships, which also angered the Puritans.

On May 1, 1627, Morton and his pals put up an 80-foot maypole, which the Puritans viewed as pagan. When he did it again a year later, they marched over, chopped it down and sent Morton back to England.

He returned, and they arrested him again, seized his property and deported him a second time to England.

Morton returned again 10 years later. The Puritans imprisoned him again, and he died in 1647.

A marker indicates where Morton’s Maypole once stood, and the seal of the City of Quincy marks the site of his trading post.

90 Samoset Ave., Quincy

End Notes to the People’s Guide

Images: Middlesex Community College, By Emw – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16292989; 60 State St. By Frankg – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2542027. Derby House By Daderot at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18002977.

This story last updated in 2023.

0 comment 728 views

Abner Kneeland, The Free-Speech Martyr Convicted of Blasphemy in 1838

Abner Kneeland was a powerful and energetic Universalist minister whose religious doubts and political beliefs sent him to a Massachusetts prison in 1838.

Abner Kneeland

Depending on who you asked, Abner Kneeland was either ‘a venerable, learned and strictly moral man,’ or ‘hoary-headed apostle of Satan.’

He was also a free thinker and a pantheist, which is what got him into trouble, at least technically. But he was prosecuted as much for telling working people and immigrants to question authority.

His conviction was widely denounced and no one was ever prosecuted for blasphemy in Massachusetts again.

Young Abner Kneeland

Abner Kneeland was born on April 7, 1774 in Gardner, Mass., the sixth of 10 children born to Timothy and Moriah Stone Kneeland. He studied for a year at an academy in Chesterfield, N.H., but then his formal education stopped. Abner and his older brother then moved to Dummerston, Vt., to follow his father’s trade of carpentry. He also taught school and wrote a spelling book. By the age of 27 he joined the Baptist church in nearby Putney, Vt., and began to preach. Within three years he was converted to Universalism.

In 1804 he was ordained as an itinerant minister in New Hampshire, and settled down with his wife in Langdon. In 1811 he moved to a promising church in Charlestown, Mass. However, he abruptly resigned the ministry three years later, overcome by religious doubts.

Doubts

Kneeland and his wife then went into the dry goods business in Salem, Mass. His good friend Hosea Ballou, a prominent Universalist theologian, brought him back to the ministry in 1816 and he took up a pulpit in Whitestone, N.Y. But again his doubts asserted themselves.

He then moved to a parish in Philadelphia in 1818. Kneeland energetically led the church, publishing sermons and tracts, editing newspapers, compiling a hymnal, translating the New Testament and developing a new system of spelling. He fell under the influence of utopian socialist Robert Owen and began to adopt then-radical ideas about social reform. Before his free thinking got him into trouble in Philadelphia, he moved to a church in New York City.

Federal Street Theater

He began to attract attention, not of the good kind, while preaching in New York. He and his followers broke off from his church, forming the Second Universalist Society, but soon he offended them, too. Kneeland allowed a radical feminist and abolitionist, Frances Wright, to speak from his pulpit when no one else in New York would give her a platform. Universalists from as far away as Maine passed resolutions denouncing him. He questioned the existence of one God and the divinity of Jesus Christ. By 1830, the Universalists kicked him out of the church.

Infidel Orgies

The next year he moved to Boston, where he found a ready audience. As a lecturer for the First Society of Free Enquirers he spoke to 2,000 people on Sunday mornings at the Federal Street Theater and to as many on Wednesdays. Critics called them ‘infidel orgies.’

Two thousand people, mostly poor immigrants, subscribed to his publication, The Investigator. In it, Abner Kneeland criticized the conservative influence of religion on society and supported equal rights for women and all races. He thought women should keep their own names and bank accounts and spoke out for birth control, divorce and interracial marriage.

As a member of the Society he believed it wrong to teach children creeds, miracles and religious doctrine. He preached critical investigation of religious truths was the basis of good citizenship.

Kneeland’s popularity unsettled Boston’s elite. They worried he would influence the laboring classes to disrespect authority and question their humble place in society.

Blasphemy

Abner Kneeland landed in court after declaring his beliefs in 1833. “I am not an Atheist, but a Pantheist; that is, instead of believing there is no God, I believe that in the abstract, all is God,” he said. “[T]he whole duty of man consists in living as long as he can, and in promoting as much happiness as he can while he lives.”

In December 1833 he printed a letter explaining his differences with Universalism. “Universalists believe in a god which I do not; but believe that their god, with all his moral attributes, (aside from nature itself,) is nothing more than a chimera of their own imagination.”

For that, he faced prosecution five times for blasphemy. His first three trials ended in hung juries.

Abner Kneeland used three arguments to defend himself: first, that he never denied the existence of God, he just denied the existence of a god. Second, the law violated the Massachusetts’ Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of religion. And third, the law violated the guarantee of freedom of the press.

The arguments didn’t impress the Supreme Judicial Court, though it took two years for Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw to issue his decision. Shaw’s decision was criticized as one of the worst of the 2,200 he handed down during his career. In it, he argued Kneeland had blasphemed God with malicious intent. He defended Massachusetts’ blasphemy laws, and he concluded freedom of the press did not gibve a ‘general license for scandal, calumny and falsehood.’ Unlimited freedom of the press would prevent authorities from punishing ‘all incitation to treason, assassination, and all other crimes however atrocious.’

Backlash

Lemuel Shaw decided against Abner Kneeland.

Ralph Waldo Emerson signed a letter defending Kneeland. So did William Lloyd Garrison, Bronson Alcott and Theodore Parker. More people, however, signed letters supporting the court.

Kneeland served all of 60 days in prison – and became a martyr for the cause of free speech.

The London Investigator criticized the prosecution in 1857. It called Kneeland “a venerable, learned and strictly moral man sentenced and carried to jail for publishing his honest belief on matters of religion.”

“Massachusetts, which is so much extolled as being superior to all other States, is probably the only State in the Union where the Christian bigotry that used to burn heretics at the stake is still suffered to disgrace the statute-book,” remarked the Investigator. The Windsor, Vt., Statesman opined, “that if Kneeland could not speak his mind the very cause for which the Pilgrims came was overthrown. ”

After his release, Abner Kneeland moved to Iowa, where he started a utopian community called Salubria. He died August 27, 1844, and the community failed soon afterward.

With thanks to the Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography. This story about Abner Kneeland was updated in 2022.

0 comment 648 views

The Rev. William Bentley, on the Alert for Salem Fires in January

At the turn of the 19^th century, the Rev. William Bentley was constantly on the alert for Salem fires. But unlike many townspeople he didn’t rush to condemn the victims.

Salem fire fears were exacerbated by calamitous, well-known fires in New York City and elsewhere.

Fighting a Fire – (Painting by William Chappel, 1770s, Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Edward W. C. Arnold Collection of New York Prints, Maps, and Pictures, Bequest of Edward W. C. Arnold, 1954)

New Englanders who lived in densely populated towns like Boston and Salem always had anxiety about the threat of fire, especially on very cold days.

Local officials passed all sorts of laws to prevent fires. They put arsonists to death. When Joshua Lamb’s home in Roxbury, Mass., burned down in 1681, his black servant Maria took the blame. She was found guilty and burned to ashes on Boston Common.

Salem Fires

William Bentley took a kindlier view. He was the beloved Unitarian minister of the East Church in Salem, Mass., from 1783 to his death in 1819. Bentley gave half his salary to the poor, lived modestly and emphasized good works over harsh doctrine. He was interested in everything. Little escaped his attention, and he wrote it all down in his diary. He chose Salem fires as a frequent topic.

On Jan. 18, 1806, William Bentley noted in his diary that two fires were wrongly blamed on arson:

We have news of a House burnt in Bradford & a Barn in Haverhill. As is usual, blame is not fixed upon neglect but incendiary purposes. These fires are kindled by great carelessness.

Bad Master

William Bentley, always on the lookout for Salem fires.

The open hearth was the center of New England domestic life and the center of New England’s homes. Nathaniel Hawthorne made the central hearth a major feature in The House of the Seven Gables.

But as New Englanders used to say, “Fire is a good servant, but a bad master.”

After Boston’s first 70 years, Cotton Mather complained “ten times has the fire made notable ruins among us.”

Congregationalist ministers like Mather viewed fires as evidence of God’s displeasure with mankind.

But William Bentley, a product of the Enlightenment, tried to avert calamitous fires through prevention and prompt intervention. He also belonged to one of Salem’s fire clubs.

Fire Clubs

Fire clubs existed in Salem since 1744, according to Cyrus Mason Tracy in his 1878 book, Standard History of Essex County, Massachusetts, Embracing a History of the County from Its First Settlement to the Present Time: With a History and Description of Its Towns and Cities. The Most Historic County of America.

Each member was required to have two substantial leather buckets, and they were usually painted with the name and device of the club. Many of these buckets may still be found hanging in the front or rear hall-ways of the old houses of Salem, usually under the stairs or on some projections or cornice.

The owner kept the buckets handy, and when a fire alarm went off, he took his buckets and repaired to the scene of the fire. Or at least he was supposed to.

He then helped passing water from the cisterns to the tubs of the engines, or threw it onto the fire directly. Tracy also wrote each fire club member had a bag to take property from buildings, and a bed-key to take down the old-fashioned bedsteads. Most of the clubs had ladders at convenient places about the town, he wrote.

In 1805, Bentley’s club tried to prevent fires by discouraging the “smoaking” of “segars” (cigars).

On December 12, 1805, he wrote:

Our Fire Club dinner. Great consent of parties. The measure most urged was to unite our efforts with other clubs to prevent the smoaking segars along the streets & in shops & outhouses. Many distressing fires are imputed to this careless practice.

Cold Januaries

Bentley was constantly on the alert for fire, not just in Salem. On Jan. 29, 1806, he wrote, “We had some apprehensions, from the ringing of the bell this evening, of a fire at Marblehead, but we found it was the First Night Lecture…

January was an especially bad month for fires.

On Jan. 5, 1804, he wrote,

The uncommon severity of the season has called for great caution in our wooden towns. Several fires have been arrested at their first appearance as at Col. Lee’s & Dr. Oliver’s, the one from firing a chimney & the other from a beam under a hearth as in the old construction.

On the morning of Jan. 18, 1804 another day of sudden cold, there was a slight earthquake. Wrote Bentley, “The people in general ran to their windows to see what heavy carriage was passing, & thence to their chimneys to see whether they were on fire.”

Horse Out of the Barn

Leather fire buckets

The day after a Salem fire, people inevitably drew up proposals to prevent another one. On the cold night of Jan. 16, 1806, a fire burned down three new houses in Carpenter Street. It started among shavings by children feeding the fire while their parents attended a lecture. Most of the men in the neighborhood were at the same lecture, and the fire spread to two other wooden houses. The next day, Bentley wrote,

it was proposed to make it an obligation to rebuild in brick. We see the great danger to which we are exposed from the very great number of Wooden buildings.

Twelve days later, the cry of “fire” awakened the town. The Cushing & Co. printing company burned down.

The next day, Bentley wrote:

…the town officers gathered this day to take some precautions respecting stoves used in Shops & Offices, & prevention the spread of fires.

With thanks to The Encyclopedia of New England.

This story last updated in 2023.

12 comments 515 views

Flashback Photo: Ralph Adams Cram, High Priest of Gothic Revival Architecture

Ralph Adams Cram was a renaissance man who believed the Renaissance was an unfortunate detour for western culture.

Ralph Adams Cram. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Cram designed great buildings in his lifetime in both the Gothic Revival and Art Deco styles. He was a talented essayist and an accomplished writer of horror stories. H.P. Lovecraft praised his story, ‘The Dead Valley,’ which appeared in a collection called ‘a classic of weird fiction.’

Cram led a complicated life. He was a high church Anglican who co-founded the Catholic periodical Commonweal. Though married – happily, by most accounts – to a wealthy Virginia woman, he spent summers at a homosexual monastery in Wales.

Once a household name, Ralph Adams Cram is pretty much forgotten today, unlike his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright.

All Saints Church, Ashmont

He was born on Dec. 16, 1863 in Hampton Falls, N.H., the son of the Rev. William Augustine, a Unitarian minister, and Sarah Elizabeth Cram.

He grew up during the Gilded Age, a time of stultifying, fussy Victorian art and architecture. Cram sought to return to the glories of the medieval age and to reinvent American church and college architecture.

After graduating from Exeter, he moved to Boston to study architecture for five years in the architectural firm of Rotch & Tilden. He then traveled to Rome to study classical architecture. On Christmas Eve at Midnight Mass he had a dramatic conversion experience. He turned away from his Unitarian roots and from then on practiced as an ardent Anglo-Catholic. Cram’s biographer, Douglas Shand-Tucci, wrote the Anglican church appealed to Cram because of its ‘grand liturgy, its ancient intellectual power, its splendid churches of every period, its virtual identity with English culture.’

In 1889, Ralph Adams Cram set up his firm at No. 1 Park Square in Boston; his first commission was remodeling a tenement house in Brighton. He and his partner, Charles Francis Wentworth, then decided to concentrate on churches. They won commissions for four churches: two in Boston neighborhoods, All Saints Church in Ashmont and Christ Church in Hyde Park,; the Swedenborgian Church in Newtonville, Mass., and St. Paul’s Church in Brockton, Mass.

Princeton University Chapel

In 1900, Cram married Elizabeth Carrington Read, the daughter of a Civil War captain. When he returned from his honeymoon in Italy he almost threw out an invitation to undertake his next project: a building campaign at West Point. From his success there he would go on to become the consulting architect at Princeton, Wheaton, Sweet Briar, Boston University, University of Richmond and Wellesley Colleges. He would also head the architecture department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cram believed his style, dubbed ‘Collegiate Gothic,’ was the only one that expressed the educational ideals that Princeton and other universities inherited from medieval England.

St. John the Divine

Cram designed great buildings in his lifetime, including the Doheny Library at the University of Southern California, Emmanuel Church in Newport, R.I., and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

His legacy can be found throughout the churches and colleges of the Northeast, especially at Princeton, Phillips Exeter Academy, St. George’s School, St. Paul’s School and Williams College.

Hunt Memorial Library, Nashua, N.H.

He also designed distinctive Art Deco buildings, including the Federal building in Boston.

During the 1920s, he was a household name. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and the New York Times called him ‘one of the most prominent Episcopalian laymen in the country.’

Ralph Adams Cram died Sept. 22, 1942. The Episcopal Church honors him on Dec. 16 as a feast day.

First Unitarian Church, Newton, Mass. Ralph Adams Cram designed the building, Frederick Law Olmsted the grounds.

12 comments 409 views

William Bentley Mourns His Ne’er-Do-Well Brother in 1804

Salem minister William Bentley believed his brother Thomas led a life of dissipation because he was named after the wrong grandfather.

William was born June 22, 1759 in Boston. He graduated from Harvard in 1777. Though his parents were disinterested in his education, he got a good one because of the grandfather for whom he was named.

After graduation, William Bentley taught school and tutored Harvard students in Latin and Greek.

Crowninshield-Bentley House

In 1783 he was ordained a Unitarian minister and became pastor of the Second Congregational Church, known as the East Church, in Salem, Mass. He preached a gospel of good works, which was well liked by his parishioners, and gave half his salary to the poor.

William Bentley lived modestly as a boarder at what is now the Crowninshield-Bentley House. He was an indefatigable reader and diarist who amassed 4,000 books, one of the largest libraries in the United States. Every week, he wrote a much-copied column summarizing world events for the Salem Gazette. He continued to tutor and teach; mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch was one of his students.

Bentley spoke seven languages fluently. He was admired by Thomas Jefferson, who offered him jobs as chaplain of the U.S. Congress and president of the University of Virginia. He declined both.

His brother led a much different life.

On Dec. 11, 1804, William Bentley wrote in his diary that Thomas had just died.

This day died my Brother Thomas Bentley, in Boston. He was of the twin children born 10 Jan. 1764. He was not so well educated as he might have been, as my F. (father) took no pains to give his children as good education as he had himself & my Mother had none at all. Thomas was named after his G.F. (grandfather) Bentley, as I was after my G.F. Paine. He was inferior to none of us in point of capacity, but the G.F. after whom he was named did not take such care of him as I received for my name. He was bound an apprentice to one Emery, a jeweler, or Silversmith, who was then in high reputation. My Brother made all the proficiency in his art known in his time and added such other parts as his fruitful invention assisted & was a good Engraver upon Silver, & for his business. In all this time he was taught nothing which led to correct his manners & a taste for songs & social glee soon gave a wrong bent to his genius. It was hoped that marriage would put him right, but alas, the woman he married had not sprightliness enough to amuse him, or prudence enough to govern him, & he soon became a pet companion. After having increased his family & deranged his affairs. After having been a heavy tax upon our feelings & interest, he ventured down to Gloucester. In that place he confirmed all his ill habits & got not good ones, till stripped of all his property he returned to Boston. He found ready employment, but he never found ready resolution to be steady. After having tired all his friends, he returned with his family into the arms of his Parents. Our mothers soon fell a victim to her cares. In her complaints he was removed into the country but he still was unreformed & habitually intemperate. He was brought back to his father’s house on the 7 & died on the 11 of December. He has left a wife & four small children. Thomas was good tempered, sacredly honest, a man of truth, & when temperate, of ceaseless industry. Ingenious, persevering, he was excellent in his calling. But he loved society & he found not such as he loved at home. Dissipation succeeded to his social indulgences & he died pitied & yet without an enemy.

William Bentley died December 29, 1819 of a heart attack. The Crowninshield-Bentley House is now owned by the Peabody Essex Museum and is open for tours in the summer.

3 comments 261 views