Annie L. Burton was an entrepreneur and restaurateur, who moved to Boston as a young woman after spending her childhood enslaved on an Alabama plantation. Annie spent decades as a domestic servant, first in the south, and then in the north, in Newton, the South End, Wellesley, Jamaica Plain, and other neighborhoods in and around Boston. For most Black women in the years and decades after emancipation, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and washing and ironing for white families were among the only opportunities available for paid work, making Annie’s experience utterly typical. Two things make her life unique: her decision to bet on herself and open a series of restaurants, first in Florida, then in Park Square in Boston, and then in a number of New England resort towns; and her decision, just after the turn of the 20th century, to put pen to page and write her story down and publish it, preserving the details of her life in a way that wasn’t available to most of her peers.
Joseph Lee and his Bread Machines (episode 268)
Joseph Lee was a hotelier, caterer, and one of the richest men in his adopted hometown of Newton. By the time of his death in 1908, Lee had worked as a servant, a baker, and for the National Coast Survey; he had worked on ships, in hotels, and at amusement parks. He had earned a vast fortune in hotels, lost most of it, and earned another one through his patented inventions that helped change the way Americans eat. He had entertained English nobles and American presidents. And he had raised three daughters and one son, who was a star Ivy League tackle before graduating from Harvard. If you make bread at home, or meatballs, or fried chicken, or casserole, you are the beneficiary of the technology Joseph Lee developed. That would be a remarkable life for anyone, but Joseph Lee was enslaved in South Carolina until he was about 15 years old, making his accomplishments even more remarkable.
Continue reading Joseph Lee and his Bread Machines (episode 268)
Watchmen, Redcoats, and a Fire in the Old Boston Jail (episode 267)
In the 1760s, the town gaol (jail) where prisoners were held while awaiting trial was a cold, dark, and truly terrifying edifice on Queen Street, just up the hill from the Old State House. When a fire was discovered in the jailhouse just after 10pm on January 30, 1769, it briefly became the focal point of the long-simmering tensions between the town and the occupying British soldiers that would eventually culminate in the Boston Massacre. Who deliberately set the fire in the jail, and why were some of the prisoners grievously injured before they could be rescued? Who was responsible for patrolling the streets of a city under military occupation? What was the legal role of the occupiers during a fire emergency, and how did the fire at the old Boston jail become a surprising story of cooperation between the rival factions in Boston? Listen now for all those answers and more!
Continue reading Watchmen, Redcoats, and a Fire in the Old Boston Jail (episode 267)
They Burnt Tolerable Well: In Search of Boston’s First Street Lamps (episode 266)
How can something as simple as streetlights transform a city? What can the Boston Massacre teach us about how dark the streets and alleyways of Boston were in the years before streetlights? How did the town decide to buy English oil lamps for the streets but fuel them with American whale oil? How did Boston’s very first street lamps survive a shipwreck and the Boston Tea Party, and who decided where they would be installed and how they would be maintained? In the era of climate change, what does the future hold for Boston’s quaint remaining gas street lamps? Let’s find out!
Continue reading They Burnt Tolerable Well: In Search of Boston’s First Street Lamps (episode 266)
Frank Hart: the First Black Ultrarunning Star, with Davy Crockett (episode 265)
Frank Hart was a transplant to Boston who became a famous star in a sport that no longer really exists. Hart was a pedestrian, competing in grueling six-day races where the winner was the person who could run, walk, or even crawl the most miles by the time the clock ran out. He made his debut in the Bean Pot Tramp here in Boston, but he followed the money to races in New York, London, San Francisco, and beyond, becoming one of America’s first famous Black athletes. However, Frank Hart’s career declined along with the popularity of pedestrianism, while the rise of Jim Crow raised new hurdles for a Black competitor. Joining us this week to discuss the rise and fall of Frank Hart is Davy Crockett, the host of the Ultrarunning History podcast and author of the new biography Frank Hart: The First Black Ultrarunning Star.
Continue reading Frank Hart: the First Black Ultrarunning Star, with Davy Crockett (episode 265)
Madam & Miss Will Shake Their Heels Abroad: In Search of America’s First Concert (episode 264)
How did Boston come to host the first concert ever performed in what’s now the United States? Why was Boston resistant to the idea of a concert until almost 60 years after they became common in our ancestral city of London? When did Puritan Boston relax its rules and customs enough to allow public performances of secular music? Who brought the idea of charging for admission to a musical performance to colonial Boston, and what artistic legacy did he leave behind here? Listen now to find out!
A Christmas Eve Execution (episode 263)
Boston witnessed a grim Christmas in 1774, at the height of the British occupation. There had been redcoats in Boston for six years at that point, but after the Tea Party the previous December, the number of occupying troops skyrocketed, until there was nearly one British soldier for every adult male Bostonian. They were there to enforce the intolerable acts, and their presence only fanned the flames of rebellion in the colony. An increased Army presence in Boston always led to an increase in desertions, and December 1774 was no exception. On the 17th, while his unit was away on exercises, Private William Ferguson got really drunk, and then he either tried to desert and start a new life here in America, or he went to see about getting some laundry done. Either way, he was convicted, and Boston was shocked to bear witness to an execution by firing squad in the middle of Boston Common, bright and early on Christmas Eve.
Thanksgiving Classics (episode 262)
For Thanksgiving, we are revisiting three classic episodes of HUB History. First, learn how the carol “Over the River and Through the Wood” started out as a Thanksgiving song, and why the songwriter’s extreme beliefs almost cost her livelihood. Then, hear how 19th century Boston got the vast flocks of turkeys needed for a traditional Thanksgiving to market, and then to the dining room table. And finally, prepare to be surprised when you hear that college students, even Harvard students and even John Adams’ kids, have been known to drink and cause trouble, such as the 1787 Thanksgiving day riot.
The Trolley of Death (episode 261)
106 years ago this week, a terrible accident took place within sight of South Station. November 7, 1916 was election day in Boston, but it was an otherwise completely ordinary autumn afternoon for the passengers who packed themselves into streetcar number 393 of the Boston Elevated Railway for their evening commute through South Boston to South Station and Downtown Crossing. The everyday monotony of the trip home was shattered in an instant, when the streetcar crashed through the closed gates of the Summer Street bridge and plunged through the open drawbridge and into the dark and frigid water below. How many could be saved, and how many would have to perish for this evening to be remembered as Boston’s greatest moment of tragedy for a generation?
The Gentlemen’s Mob (episode 260)
19th Century Boston was a riotous town, and in past episodes, we’ve examined everything from anti-draft riots to anti-catholic riots to anti-immigrant riots that took place in this city in the 19th century. The incident on Washington Street on October 21, 1835 was different, however. Where most of Boston’s 19th century riots erupted from street violence among and directed by the working classes, the mob’s attack on the Female Anti Slavery Society and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was led by a group characterized as “gentlemen of property and influence.” Enraged by the audacity of radical calls for immediate abolition, this mob of respectable gentlemen broke down the doors, scattered members of the Female Anti Slavery Society, nearly lynched William Lloyd Garrison, and inspired abolitionist leader Maria Chapman to exclaim, “If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere!”