WWEEEE SSTTOONNEE HHOOUUSSEE

57 Louder’s Lane Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

by Stephen J. Lerman

with Graphic Design by Phyllis M. Lerman

January 2009

Copyright © Stephen J. Lerman

Courtney (Toni) Wilson’s wedding photograph taken in front of the fireplace in the living room of Wee Stone House. Bachrach, 1939.

CHAPTER ONE

THE WILSONS: THE EARLY YEARS OF WEE STONE HOUSE

Shortly after I moved into 57 Louder’s Lane in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts in 1986, I found a photograph in the house, taken in 1939 by Bachrach, the leading society photographer of the day, of a beautiful young woman, wearing an elegant organdy wedding dress, seated on a wooden bench in front of the fireplace in the living room.1 Her identity at the time was unknown and my curiosity was piqued. Following the discovery of the photograph, through personal inquiries, letters, interviews, and library research, I gradually learned the story of the young bride and the unique stone house built by her parents over 80 years ago.

THE WILSON FAMILY2 The bride in the photograph is Courtney Jeanne Wilson, known as Toni, the daughter of John James (1887–1947) and Jeanne Miller Wilson (1896–1985) who built Wee Stone House in 1926-27. Toni’s father was born and raised on a farm in Northern Ireland by a very strict and religious father. He was sent to the best boarding school in Belfast and received a “good education for those days.” However, the confining atmosphere of his home (his four sisters “chaperoned him even when he walked a girl home from church”), the limited career opportunities of the early 1900s in Northern Ireland, and his brother’s departure to the United States, persuaded him to also “go out.” Here, Jack, as he was known in this country, trained horses on an estate near Boston, studied to be an accountant, became a naturalized citizen in 1913, and went to work for the U.S. Rubber Company in Cambridge. He was an avid hunter, skilled marksman, and trout fishing enthusiast. A quiet and reserved “country gentleman,” Jack’s speech was more British than Irish. Toni’s mother was of German origin. Her father was a wool merchant in Lafayette, Indiana, and her mother a schoolteacher. The “ugly duckling” of the family, with a beautiful older sister who was given all the advantages of education and attention, Jeanne grew up an independent tom-boy, riding her pinto pony bareback, often hanging under him like an Indian, and playing trapeze artist in the big barn. As a teen, facing restrictions imposed by her religious father, who allowed no dancing or card playing, and the family fights that ensued when her mother let her sneak out, she left home and from then on worked her own way. She attended Ithaca Conservatory of Music, sang at Chautauqua meetings around the state of New York, studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and was admitted to the chorus of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. During World War I, Jeanne joined the War Community Opera Company of New York and Washington, DC, entertained an audience of 2,000 soldiers at the Hotel Astor in New York City, and was so applauded that she was asked to entertain American troops in France. She organized a troupe called “Tunes, Chalk, and Magic,” which included singers, a cartoonist, and a

Copyright © Stephen J. Lerman

1 The wedding dress was made by Mrs. Gertrude Clinton, a French seamstress who worked out of her home across the street at 68 Louder’s Lane. 2 Courtney Benford (nee Wilson) generously provided detailed information about the Wilson family and photographs, and also reviewed a draft of this manuscript.

magician, and signed up with the Over There Theatre League under the auspices of the YMCA, performing in France for a year and a half. John and Jeanne married in 1919 and moved into a house in West Roxbury. Their only child, Toni, was born in 1920.

THE NICHOLS-BOWDITCH CONNECTION

In 1925, the Wilsons purchased from Henry I. and Eleanor M. Bowditch an 8,000 square foot parcel of land on Louder’s Lane in Jamaica Plain on which to build a house.3 The Bowditchs lived in the elegant 14-room Italianate mansion at 180 Moss Hill Road on the hill above the Wilson property. The mansion’s driveway extended up the hill from Louder’s Lane; it later became the Mossbank Footway. The mansion is the neighborhood’s link to early American history through its association with the illustrious and intertwined Nichols and Bowditch families of Salem, as discussed in Chapter Three.

ERNEST FLAGG AND COLLIER’S, THE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Inspiration for the style and design of Wee Stone House came from an extraordinary architect, Ernest Flagg, whose radical ideas about small, affordable stone houses created a stir in the 1920s and 1930s and resurfaced in more recent years.

Ernest Flagg (1857-1947) was an Ecole des Beaux Arts–trained New York City architect whose commissions included the Singer Tower which, when it was built in 1908, was the tallest skyscraper in New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, praised as one of the most beautiful buildings in America; and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.

Concerned about the short supply, poor quality, and soaring cost of housing, Flagg turned his attention to affordable housing for the common man, as did Frank Lloyd Wright with his budget-minded “Usonian” homes a decade later. In 1922, in Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction, Flagg described his experiments with a number of innovative low-cost techniques, such as standardized grids and modular building systems, elimination of cellars and attics, ridge dormers for light and ventilation, an inexpensive roofing method, and a way of building interior plaster partitions without studs. One of his noteworthy techniques that was used in the construction of Wee Stone House was the method of erecting mosaic rubble exterior walls which he said “so far as the author knows, is new.” The Flagg method of building stone walls involved setting up wooden forms several feet in height, placing fieldstones with the flat side of the stone flush with the inner surface of the outer form, like pieces of a mosaic, propping them in place, shoveling rubble (pebbles, broken stones and bricks) behind the fieldstones, and pouring concrete to hold the rubble and the layer of fieldstones in place. When the wooden forms were removed, they were reused for the next tier of the wall. This method saved money because the work was done by unskilled laborers, rather than highly-paid stonemasons.

Articles about Flagg appeared in McCall’s Magazine, Scientific American, Country Life, House Beautiful, and most prominently in the popular Collier’s, The National Weekly. The May 5, 1923 issue of Collier’s contained a laudatory article written by Harold Cary about Flagg’s methods. As

3 This 8,000 square foot parcel of land was Lot 6 on the Bates and Chellman plan of June 1, 1925. In 1951, 26 years later, a subsequent owner of the house purchased an abutting irregularly-shaped 7,000 square foot parcel of land, behind and beside the house, bringing the 57 Louder’s Lane property to a total of 15,000 square feet. See Chapter Two. The Post-Wilson Era of Wee Stone House.

a result of reader response to the article, the editor of Collier’s asked Cary to build a Flagg masonry house to prove that the Flagg method could, as Cary claimed, save one-third in cost. Cary built his “Collier’s House” in Croton-on-Hudson, Westchester County, New York, and described its construction in a series of seven articles which appeared January through May 1924 in Collier’s and in a best-selling book Build a Home – Save a Third. In 1925, Cary wrote three articles describing his experiences building a second “Collier’s House” in Bryn Mawr Park, Yonkers, New York, as well as an article about two Flagg-style houses in Westport, Connecticut built by Frazier Forman Peters, who himself would later write a book about stone houses. One of the two Westport, Connecticut houses in the Cary article belonged to Dr. Hendrick Willem Van Loon, a noted historian of the day and author of The Story of Mankind. According to the article, it cost $12,300 to build the Van Loon house.

Cary’s articles in Collier’s were followed eagerly by the Wilsons. Many years later, Jeanne Wilson wrote to her daughter Toni:

I wonder if you recall that Jack and I used to fight once a week because I beat him to the newsstand to get the fine old Collier’s Mag to read about Carey’s [sic] house being built by the architect of the Corcoran Gallery who was doing little houses for such people as Hendrick Van Loon… and how we bundled up with curtains on our one seat Dodge, you falling asleep on my lap (at age 5) and Frisky [her husband’s hunting dog] on my legs, on trips to Westport, Connecticut to see those homes.

Toni has a tiny photo of the Van Loon house which they visited and on the back her mother wrote, “Back view of a $12,000 stone house Flagg’s design in N.Y. [sic]. It is a peach. Belongs to Van Loon, well known writer.”

By the late 1940s Flagg’s methods had spread nationwide; Peters alone built nearly 200 Flagg-style stone houses. Flagg’s techniques saw a revival in the 1960s and 70s with the homesteading movement which espoused self-reliance, simplicity, and craftsmanship. Helen and Scott Nearing’s book Living the Good Life introduced a whole new generation to the virtues of economical mosaic rubble stone houses that could be built by people who were not professional stonemasons.

BUILDING WEE STONE HOUSE

Reading Cary’s enthusiastic articles in Collier’s and visiting the houses in Westport, Connecticut had a major impact on the Wilsons’ architectural thinking and they contracted with Harry J. Murray, a builder in West Roxbury, to build a Flagg-style house on their recently-purchased land on Louder’s Lane.

Jeanne Wilson and Murray collaborated on the design of the house. No architect was involved. They borrowed heavily from the design of the Flagg houses in New York and Connecticut, but some features were their own. For example, although dormer windows were common in Flagg houses, eyelid windows, which were used in the Wilson house, were not. Jeanne specified the large size and acoustic qualities of the living room to meet her requirements for her Steinway grand piano, singing practice, and small concerts. She instructed the builder to complete the rest of the house on a more modest scale with the balance of their limited budget.

The patterns in the plaster in each room were different. Fingers and various objects, such as a sponge, were used to create the unique patterns. For example, Toni recalled that her mother created the pattern in the wet plaster of the living room with her fingers.

Construction began in 1926 and was completed in 1927, barely in time for Christmas, when the family had their first meal sitting on nail kegs with the floor still unfinished. According to Boston Building Department records, the estimated cost was $8,500.

They came to name it Wee Stone House because Jack always referred to it with the endearing Irish diminutive as “our wee stone house.”

Years later, Jeanne wrote to Toni about the construction of the house:

No one was smart enough, nor artistic enough to copy our house, which was put up with wooden forms. They came by and stopped and asked if it was a church and Murray (our builder) was afraid to take the forms down! And didn’t until it was finished. (They were supposed to be taken down every six feet, and replaced right to the top.) Of course, we couldn’t wait to see them all come down.

Toni related that her father:

… went to the quarries whenever he was informed of a new blasting, climbed over the mound of stone and selected those with flat sides and good color. We also searched the stone walls in the countryside for unusual stone, particularly the purple red, as Mother wanted more unusual color than the ordinary orange/rust and grey. I think we found them around Concord and Lexington.

Although not a trained stonemason, Jack built the terraced steps from the street to the front door and the retaining wall and terrace on the side and back of the house. He also planted the front embankment with mountain laurel which he hauled out of the woods.

GROWING UP IN WEE STONE HOUSE

Toni was six years old when the family moved from West Roxbury into the Wee Stone House, but she took the bus every morning to West Roxbury to complete grammar school. She attended Girl’s Latin School where she “struggled to keep up.” She took the trolley from Jamaica Plain into Boston. For her last year of high school she won a scholarship at Abbot Academy and graduated summa cum laude.

Years later Toni still had vivid memories of growing up in Wee Stone House. She remembered that her father kept a crock of baked beans in the coals of the furnace in the dark basement; opening days of the hunting season in late October the hunters cleaned their pheasant, partridge, and quail in the basement while the dogs lay on their raised bed pulling burrs from their leg fringes; she rode her bike up the driveway that led to the Bowditch house to play with friends on the hill; she was not allowed to go swimming at the pond on the Slocum property with the Bowditch children because they skinny-dipped; she sat on the stone wall along Louder’s Lane (often called “Lover’s Lane”) with dates, rather than invite them into the house; and she warmed her nightclothes over the embers in the large fireplace and went to bed when it became cold because the furnace was banked down for the night.

One summer amid the Depression of the 1930s when Toni was in her early teens, her mother opened a gift shop in the Rocky Neck section of Gloucester on Cape Ann, site of the oldest working art colony in the United States. Jack lent the enterprise $500. She learned how to buy stock at big gift shows, finding exclusive items to sell, such as Cini’s fine hand-made silver from Boston. Jeanne’s own homemade creamy fudge also proved to be popular. She paid back the loan within a month and continued the shop for several summers.

During summers in Gloucester Toni developed a friendship with Sterling Hayden (1916-86) who took her sailing on his sloop and, although he was 18 to her 14 years-of-age, took her to local dances. Hayden became a ship’s captain, served during World War II as an OSS (the predecessor of the CIA) agent who ran guns through German lines to the Yugoslav partisans, winning a commendation from Marshal Tito, and then had a career as an acclaimed Hollywood star. Hayden’s long list of film credits included Asphalt Jungle, Dr. Strangelove, and The Godfather. Paramount Studios dubbed the 6’ 5” actor “The Most Beautiful Man in the Movies” and “The Beautiful Blond Viking God.” Years later, meeting Toni, when she was grown-up and on a lecture tour, he said, “With your looks, you should have gone into movies instead of me. Wish I had known you when you were 18.”

COLLEGE AND MARRIAGE

Toni attended Wellesley College on a scholarship. As a sophomore, she signed up for an exchange program sponsored by Harvard University at Lingnan University, an elite institution founded by Presbyterian missionaries in Guangzhou (Canton), China. The Japanese invasion of China, however, closed down the exchange program.

Toni had attended meetings in Cambridge of the former Lingnan University exchange students and fell in love with one, Hugh Gordon Deane, Jr. (1916-2001). A Mayflower descendent from a conservative Republican family in Springfield, Hugh had specialized in Chinese history and government at Harvard and studied in China in 1936-37. He graduated from Harvard in 1938 and was about to return to China as a foreign correspondent for the prestigious Christian Science Monitor. Although she had only just finished her sophomore year, Toni and Hugh were married on June 14, 1939 at Harvard Memorial Chapel, followed by a wedding reception at the Wilson home, Wee Stone House. Japanese lanterns were strung around the yard in celebration. Two weeks later, the young couple left for China.

BATTLEFIELD HONEYMOON

The Japanese had seized Manchuria in 1931 and proclaimed the puppet state of Manchukuo. With the Marco Polo Bridge Incident outside Beijing (Peking) as a pretext, the Japanese declared war on China on July 7, 1937, the beginning of China’s Anti-Japanese War that lasted until 1945. The Japanese soon occupied Beijing, the nearby port city of Tianjin (Tientsin), Shanghai, and Nanjing (Nanking), the seat of the Nationalist Government.4 Wuhan on the Yangtze River, where the Nationalist Government had been reestablished, and Guangzhou in the South fell in late 1938. The Nationalists retreated further up the Yangtze River to Chongqing (Chungking) in Sichuan (Szechwan) province, which served as the capital of China for the rest of the war.5

Hugh Deane, on assignment for the Christian Science Monitor, and Toni, his new bride, sailed from Los Angeles on a lengthy voyage aboard a freighter that took them to Yokahama, Shanghai, and Hong Kong and from there on a French mail boat to the Vietnamese (French Indochina) port of Haiphong. Then, they traveled into China from the south by truck by way of Nanning in

4 The occupation of Nanking was marked by one of the worst atrocities in human history, called the Rape of Nanking. Japanese troops savagely slaughtered several hundred thousand Chinese civilians and raped many thousands of women and girls in a brutal month-long rampage. 5 A story on the front page of the Boston Evening Transcript on the same day in 1939 as the Wilson-Deane wedding highlighted the spreading conflict in Asia. The British and French concession areas of Tianjin, forcibly obtained by the western powers from China in 1858, had been blockaded by the Japanese and people there were starving. Britain was debating a retaliatory ban on Japanese ships in its ports of Hong Kong and Singapore.

Guangxi (Kwangsi) province and Guiyang (Kweiyang) in Guizhou (Kweichow) province, finally reaching their destination, Chongqing.

In a series of letters sent home by Toni to her parents, serialized as “Battlefield Honeymoon: Wellesley Bride Looks at Orient” in the magazine section of the Boston Sunday Advertiser in early 1940, Toni provided Americans with a unique perspective on China during those momentous and dangerous times. She described bombing and strafing by Japanese planes; tours of orphanages and schools; and personal details about the rigors of travel in war-torn China, local food, clothing styles, household furnishings, and shopping.

While in Chongqing, the Deanes met Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist Government; Madame Chiang Kai-shek (a graduate of Wellesley College to whom Toni had a letter of introduction from the college president); her sister, Madame Sun Yat-sen, the widow of the founder of the Kuomintang; Chou En-Lai, the Communist foreign minister and liaison to the Nationalists; General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, commander of U.S. forces in the China-Burma-India theater; influential Time magazine correspondent Theodore White; “Old China Hands,” such as John S. Service and Edgar Snow, author of Red Star Over China; and the legendary New Zealander Rewi Alley, founder of the Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement.6 Hugh traveled widely in northwestern China where he had extensive contact with the Red Army. He reported in a prophetic series for the Monitor that Chiang Kai-shek had no support and would not prevail.

AFTER CHINA

Toni spent 1½ years in China. Hugh remained longer, returning just before the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. When Toni returned from China, she brought her pet Lhasa Apso named Wu Peifu, one of the first of this breed in the United States.7 The dog had been given to her by a retired Yangtze River boat captain who ran an antique shop in Shanghai.

During World War II, the Deans lived in Washington, DC where Hugh worked for the Office of War Information and then in Colorado while he trained at the US Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder. Toni lectured about her experiences in China at churches, colleges and rotary clubs. Following a lecture at a church in Washington, DC, Eleanor Roosevelt invited her to lunch at the White House and they had a two hour conversation about the situation in China and Toni’s views on Chiang Kai-shek’s propaganda campaign to influence American public opinion. While Hugh served as a naval intelligence officer on General MacArthur’s staff in the South Pacific, Toni worked in New York City as a program analyst for CBS radio and then as an editor for Vogue.

Shortly after the end of World War II, Hugh and Toni were divorced. Toni subsequently married an internist and lived for 30 years in Larchmont, New York before they retired to Florida.

6 The term “Gung Ho” (Work Together) was the first two Chinese characters and the motto of the Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement, known as Indusco. It entered the English lexicon when US Marine Colonel, later General, Evans F. Carlson, who had worked with Alley for the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives a year before Pearl Harbor used Gung Ho – which became extended to mean unquenchable enthusiasm – as the battle cry of his renowned battalion, “Carlson’s Raiders.” Press coverage of the unit’s victories and a 1943 film Gung Ho!: The Story of Carlson’s Makin Island Raiders (Randolph Scott was Carlson) spread the battalion’s fame and its use of Alley’s motto. The Chinese Industrial Cooperative movement aimed to build hundreds of small, flexible factories in the countryside in response to Japanese destruction of China’s major manufacturing capability. The movement acquired widespread support in the West, both technologic and financial. Hugh Deane interviewed Alley in Chongqing in October 1939 and became a lifelong friend of Alley and supporter of the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. 7 Wu Peifu was a Chinese warlord general who became a national hero shortly before his death in 1939 because he refused to cooperate with the Japanese when they invited him to be the leader of their puppet government in North China.

Hugh returned to Asia, working as a journalist in Japan, China, and Korea, and married a New Zealander on General MacArthur’s staff. He was a founder of the US-China People’s Friendship Association, chief editor of its US-China Review, and editor of the Hotel Voice, a publication for New York City’s unionized hotel workers. During the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted, a victim to the then-popular notion that conspiring Americans had “lost” China to the Communists, and had to support himself for a time by managing a Laundromat. He would never find work again as a staff journalist, but wrote numerous articles and two books, Good Deeds & Gunboats: Two Centuries of American-Chinese Encounters and Korean War: 1945-1953.

After Jack, Toni’s father, died of pneumonia in 1947, Jeanne sold their beloved Wee Stone House. Falling back on her experience in the gift shop business in Gloucester years before, Jeanne managed a high-end gift shop in Palm Beach, Florida, before she retired to Vermont and Florida.

*****

Although Toni did not return to college after her sojourn in China, she remained in contact with some of her former classmates and attended the fiftieth reunion of her class at Wellesley College in May 1991. While in the area, she visited Wee Stone House and reminisced about living here as a child and teenager. During this visit she posed for pictures in front of the fireplace in the living room as she had in the 1939 wedding photograph that was the impetus for this narrative.

Jeanne Miller Wilson in uniform during World War I, performing with YMCA and Over There Theatre League in France (top). Program of her company, “Tunes, Chalk and Magic” in 1918-1919 (bottom). Provided by Courtney Benford (nee Wilson).

John James Wilson and Jeanne Miller Wilson c. 1920 (top). The Wilsons with Toni and Frisky c. 1925-26. (bottom). Provided by Courtney Benford (nee Wilson).

Detail from Plate 10 of the 1924 Bromley Real Estate Atlas, the year before the Wilsons bought the land for Wee Stone House from the Bowditchs. The map shows the Nichols-Bowditch mansion (180 Moss Hill Road) and driveway to Louder’s Lane. It also shows the Chapin house on the north side and house lots on the south side of Louder’s Lane, the laying out of Westchester Road, Lila Road, Calvin Road, Rambler Road and the re-naming of Green Hill Avenue as Whitcomb Avenue. Boston Public Library.

The Wilsons purchased the 8,000 sq. ft. Lot 6 on the Bates & Chellman Plan from the Bowditchs in 1925. Sufflok County Registry of Deeds.

The first in a series of articles in Collier’s The National Weekly, May 5, 1923, by Harold Cary describing Ernest Flagg’s innovative masonry houses and his claim that his methods could save one-third in the cost of construction. This article and subsequent articles in Collier’s influenced the design of Wee Stone House. Boston Public Library.

Flagg’s mosaic rubble technique for building exterior house walls. Ernest Flagg, Small Houses, 1922.

The Dodge in which the Wilsons drove to Westport, Connecticut with Toni and Frisky to see Flagg-style homes (top). The Van Loon house in Westport built by Frazier Forman Peters using Flagg’s methods and visited by the Wilsons in 1925 (bottom). Provided by Courtney Benford (nee Wilson).

Application for Permit to Build, 57 Louder’s Lane, dated September 3, 1926. Boston Building Department.

Front and rear elevations of Wee Stone House. Original on file at the Boston Public Library.

End elevations of Wee Stone House. Original on file at the Boston Public Library.

First floor plan of Wee Stone House. Original on file at the Boston Public Library.

Interior of Wee Stone House during the Wilson era. Provided by Courtney Benford (nee Wilson).

Interior of Wee Stone House during the Wilson era. Provided by Courtney Benford (nee Wilson).

Interior photo of living room of Wee Stone House with Wu Peifu, the Lhasa Apso Toni brought back from China. Provided by Courtney Benford (nee Wilson).

Wellesley College Class of 1941, Freshman Student Directory, 1937. Courtney J. Wilson is second from the right, bottom row.

Announcement in the Boston Evening Transcript on June 14, 1939, of Courtney Wilson’s wedding followed by a reception “at the home of the bride’s parents, Wee Stone House, in Jamaica Plain.” Boston Public Library.

Front page of Boston Evening Transcript on June 14, 1939, the date of Toni’s wedding, with story on the left Indicating the rising tension in China to which the married couple would be departing in two weeks. Boston Public Library.

First of four articles, on this page and the next, based on Toni’s letters from China to her parents, from the magazine section of the Boston Sunday Advertiser, January and February 1940. Boston Public Library.

Cover of Hugh Deane’s book, Good Deeds & Gunboats: Two Centuries of American-Chinese Encounters. Toni’s former husband was a lifelong supporter and admirer of

China.

Toni posing in front of the fireplace of Wee Stone House in 1991, 52 years after her original bridal photograph. Photograph by Hannah Lerman.

CHAPTER TWO

THE POST-WILSON ERA OF WEE STONE HOUSE

In 1947, after the death of Jack Wilson, Jeanne sold the house to Pierre and Margaret Ward. Pierre died less than a year later and his widow sold the house to Robert and Dorothy Ulin. In 1951, the Ulins increased the size of the property by buying an adjacent irregularly shaped piece of land extending from behind the house to the Mossbank Footway and beside the house to the junction of the Mossbank Footway with Louder’s Lane.8 After Dorothy Ulin died in 1967 and Robert Ulin died in 1978, the house passed to their daughter Nancy and son Kenneth. Nancy subsequently sold her share to Kenneth and he lived here until 1984 when Stephen Magowan, assistant manager at a Volvo dealership, and his wife Monette Bales, a flight attendant, purchased it. Magowan and Bales moved after only two years in the house when Magowan was offered a Volvo dealership in North Carolina. A few months before, I had been house hunting in the neighborhood, and when I turned the corner of Lila Road onto Louder’s Lane for the first time, I saw the picturesque stone house set in the woods. I left my business card on the door with a note that said, “I love your house. If you ever think about selling it, please call me.” When Magowan’s out-of-town business opportunity presented itself, he called me. We promptly agreed on the terms of purchase, and in 1986 I became the steward of Wee Stone House. I am a pediatrician, infectious disease specialist, and international health consultant. I retired from pediatric practice in 1997 and since then have led groups of parents who were adopting babies overseas: 22 trips to China, one to Cambodia, and one to Ethiopia, bringing home almost 300 children. I have undertaken three Wee Stone House renovation projects. First, in 1988, with the assistance of a talented architect, Gale Goldberg, I converted the unfinished attic into a master bedroom and bath, constructing a shed dormer to accommodate a bathroom, installing air conditioning and skylights, and commissioning two round stained glass windows depicting the hemlock trees on the property, one at sunrise and the other at sunset.9 Second, in 1989, to be able to access the patio directly from the kitchen, I extended the patio, which had previously ended a short distance beyond the living room door, to

Copyright © Stephen J. Lerman

8 The second piece of land, consisting of 7,000 square feet, was Lot A on the George C. Hallisey plan of January 6, 1950. In the late 1940s, to provide access for children living on Moss Hill to the new Manning School (1941) at the head of Louder’s Lane, the City of Boston built the Mossbank Footway on land that it had carved out of Lot A in 1945 while it was still owned by Eleanor M. Bowditch. 9 The windows were made by Rebecca Breyman, a young woman then working at Lyn Hovey Studios. Breyman had been featured in The Last Window, a documentary about the last stained glass window commission completed by the world-renowned Charles J. Connick Associates. Founded in Boston in 1912, Connick Associates crafted more than 15,000 windows for over 5,000 churches, libraries, and public buildings, including the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Princeton University, and the Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Breyman was the last apprentice at Connick Associates before the venerable firm closed in 1986.

incorporate the existing kitchen door stoop and connect with the steps down to the driveway. And third, in 1993, I completely renovated the kitchen and the basement, again working with Goldberg. Until then, the basement had consisted of a roughly finished bedroom, bath, utility room, and a one-car garage that could not be used because of the sharp turn of the driveway. A built-in wine rack, sauna, work room, and exercise room/studio/office were added, utilizing glass block to frame the door and windows and let in more light. In 1996, Phyllis M. Travis, an executive assistant at a real estate firm in New York City whom I had met the year before on an Earthwatch archaeological expedition to the coast of Turkey, moved into Wee Stone House and in 1999 became my bride. Phyllis, who was raised on a farm in Missouri, completed Harvard’s Landscape Design Program last year. She is the co-steward of the property, in charge of landscape design and maintenance, and likes to say that here she “gets back to her farm roots.”

1950 area plan showing 7,000 sf Lot A between Mossbank Footway and Louder’s Lane that the Ulins purchased in 1951. Suffolk County Registry of Deeds.

Diagram of 57 Louder’s Lane showing Lot 6 on which the Wilsons built Wee Stone House in 1926-27, and Lot A purchased in 1951 by the Ulins. Adapted from Hallisey plan of January 6, 1950 on the previous page, Suffolk County Registry of Deeds.

Rebecca Breymann made the two round stained glass windows, depicting sunset (top) and sunrise (bottom), for the second floor master bath in 1988. She had been featured in The Last Window, a documentary chronicling the last stained glass window commission of the

world-renowned Connick Associates. Breymann was the last apprentice at Connick Associates before it closed in 1986. Photographs by Phyllis Lerman.

CHAPTER THREE

THE NICHOLS AND BOWDITCH FAMILIES ON MOSS HILL

The Nichols-Bowditch house at 180 Moss Hill Road, the Italianate mansion behind Wee Stone House at the top of the Mossbank Footway, is one of the last remnants of Moss Hill as it was in the second half of the nineteenth century - the location of large estates of prominent, well-to-do families. The property for Wee Stone House was purchased in 1925 by the Wilsons from the last members of the Bowditch family to live in the mansion. Originally from Salem, the Nichols and Bowditch families often intermarried and in the mid-nineteenth century bought land and built a number of mansions on Moss Hill. The Nichols family traces its roots back to Susanna Martin who was executed for witchcraft in 1692 during the infamous Salem Witch Trials and to Captain Ichabod Nichols (1719 - 1839), shipmaster and Revolutionary War officer. The progenitor of the Bowditch family was the famous Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) – mathematician, ship’s captain, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and author of The New American Practical Navigator (1802), a book that has gone through 75 editions and almost 1,000,000 copies over a span of 200 years. It is still the guide to navigation widely used by officers in the United States Navy. Known as “The Great Navigator,” Bowditch’s sailing feats were celebrated in Jean Lee Latham’s Newberry Award-winning book Carry on, Mr. Bowditch (1955).

Mary Nichols (1793–1863) built the mansion in 1858. She was the widow of Benjamin R. Nichols (1786-1848), son of Captain Ichabod Nichols, and a prominent Boston lawyer appointed in 1818 by the Massachusetts legislature to arrange and publish the Plymouth Colony records. Their daughter, Lucy Orne Nichols (1816-1883), married the second oldest son of Nathaniel Bowditch, Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch (1806-1889), President of the American Insurance Company and editor of several editions of his father’s navigation book. They had an adjacent estate on Moss Hill which no longer exists. Mary Nichols had purchased the land for the mansion from John James Dixwell (1806-1876) who was married to the youngest daughter of Nathaniel Bowditch, Elizabeth Boardman Ingersoll Bowditch (1832-1888). The Dixwells owned a mansion on Moss Hill, called “Sunnyside,” but it too is gone. At a later point, from 1917 to 1950, the mansion was owned by Henry I. Bowditch (1874 -1926), great grandson of “The Great Navigator” and the director of the Boston Floating Hospital, and his wife, Eleanor M. Bowditch. They were to be the last of the Bowditch family to live there.

Copyright © Stephen J. Lerman

Frontispiece of Nathanial Bowditch’s original The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802. It has gone through 75 editions and almost one million copies over a span of two hundred years. Wikipedia.

Painting of Nathaniel Bowditch by Gilbert Stuart, 1828. It was Stuart’s last painting and was unfinished when the artist died. American Practical Navigator, Volume I, 1984 Edition.

Lucy Orne Nichols (left) was the daughter of Mary Nichols, the widow who built the mansion at 180 Moss Hill Road in 1858. Lucy married Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch (right), the son of Nathanial Bowditch, “The Great Navigator.” Lucy and Jonathan had an adjacent estate on Moss Hill. Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

The Nichols-Bowditch mansion at 180 Moss Hill Road at the time the Wilsons were living in Wee Stone House. Courtesy of the Bowditch Family.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE HISTORY OF LOUDER’S LANE Today it is called Louder’s Lane, but research has revealed that the current spelling is not correct. The lane was named for a local farming family with the surname Lowder (pronounced like the English word “louder”) who lived in the area from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Their ranks included Corporal John Lowder, a Roxbury minuteman who fought in the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, Jamaica Plain was an outlying, rural part of the town of Roxbury, removed from the bustling center of the town and even more distant from the city of Boston.10 The main activity of Jamaica Plain during this time was agriculture, and its farms, orchards, and pastures supplied the needs of the urban core of Roxbury and of Boston. The central transportation artery was an unpaved road called the Upper Road to Dedham (Centre Street). It was lined with farms and widely-spaced farmhouses standing close to the road. It served as a part of the Boston Post Road for stagecoaches carrying passengers and mail between Boston and New York.11 Coming off it in a roughly westerly direction was a short “private town way,” for many years the only street off Centre Street in that direction between Pond Street and Weld Street.

ORIGIN OF THE LANE’S NAME The lane was first mentioned by name in an 1827 deed in which Lucretia Lewis as administratrix of the estate of the late Jabez Lewis, victualler, sold to John Lowder, victualler, for $275 (“he being the highest bidder”) a three acre “parcel of land called the upper swale... bounded southerly on Lowders lane so called…”12 On the earliest map of the Town of Roxbury, one by Hales in 1832, a small dead-end street was shown running west from Centre Street between Moss Hill and Green Hill, but it was not named. Three houses were shown on the west side of Centre Street, just north of the unnamed lane, and the first two houses were each labeled “Lowder.” The next map of Roxbury, done by Whitney, had two versions. The first, in 1843, named the street “Louds Lane,” while the revised version in 1849 made a change of the spelling to “Louders Lane.”13 Subsequent maps, however, referred to it as Lowders or Lowder’s Lane until 1873 when, for no apparent reason, maps and directories consistently began to call it Louders or Louder’s

Copyright © Stephen J. Lerman

10 Boston and Roxbury were separate political entities until 1868 when Roxbury was annexed to Boston. In 1851 West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain separated from Roxbury under the name West Roxbury with Curtis Hall in Jamaica Plain as the town hall. West Roxbury, along with its Jamaica Plain section, was annexed to Boston in 1874. 11 Many years later Centre Street was part of Route 1, the federal highway that extended from Maine to Florida. 12 In 1822 Jabez and Lucretia Lewis built a Federal style farmhouse that was designated a Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 2007 in response to a petition by the Jamaica Hills Association. The farmhouse is located at 1090 Centre Street on land owned by Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum. See the Boston Landmarks Commission excellent Study Report The Lewis-Dawson Farmhouse at the Arnold Arboretum at www.cityofboston.gov/environment. 13 With the exception of the 1849 Whitney map and several Roxbury tax roll entries during the 1840s that used the Louder spelling, all maps, plans, vital records, deeds, wills, directories, and Roxbury and U.S. censuses, before and after, spell the family name Lowder.

Lane, the spelling that continues to the present. The reason for the possessive form is a mystery. After all, it is Washington Street, not Washington’s Street.

THE LOWDER FAMILY

The first Lowder to settle in this area was John Lowder [1]14 (b.1724 - d.1799 at 75 years of consumption),15 the son of William and Elizabeth (nee Danforth) Lowder. He moved here in 1745 from Dorchester when he married Mary [1] Chandler of Roxbury (b.1724 – d.1792). They had four children, John [2] (b. 1747 – d. 1806 at 59 years of dropsy)16 who was referred to in some records as “John, Jr.”, Chandler (b. 1751), Mary [2] (b. 1753 – d. 1818 of dropsy), and Elizabeth (b. 1762). Mary’s [1] father was Zechariah Chandler (b.1695 – d. before 1752) who “lived in West Roxbury on the north side of the Dedham road” and bought a “Negro Boy” for £110 in 1740.17 He left a quarter of his sizable estate to his daughter, Mary [1], the wife of John [1]. The available evidence suggests that John [2] was the Corporal John Lowder of the Third Company in Roxbury, commanded by Captain Lemuel Child, in Colonel William Heath’s Regiment, which fought against the British at the Battle of Lexington on April 19, 1775. This was one of the first companies of minutemen raised in America. John [2] was 28 years old in 1775 and many of the men in this company were his neighbors, such as Davis, Dudley, May, and Weld. The company commander, Captain Lemuel Child, kept the Peacock Tavern, just a short distance south on Centre Street, where it now intersects with Allendale Street.18 John Lowder [2] had at least eight children by two wives. He married Elizabeth Chandler of Andover in 1769 and the next year they had a son John, who apparently died in childhood, followed by William, Henry (b. 1773), Hannah, Betsy and Isaac. Elizabeth Lowder died and John [2] married Mary [3] (d. 1793 of consumption) sometime before 1781 when he had another son John [3] and a daughter Nancy. The half-brothers John [3] and Henry were farmers and important property owners in this area during the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1822, reflecting his prosperity and solid standing in the community, John [3] Lowder paid the substantial sum of $133.50 and $5 per annum for Pew 43 in the Third Parish Meeting House.19 It is of interest that this pew was listed as an asset, along with other real property, in his estate inventory. He married Charlotte who gave birth to John [4], Charlotte (b. 1813) who married George Titcomb, and Harriet (b. 1816) who married

14 One factor that complicates genealogic study of this family is the recurrence of the same name in one generation after another. There were many John, Mary, Elizabeth, William, and Henry Lowders over a century and a half. The names John and Mary appeared so frequently that to maintain clarity I assigned a number in brackets to each John and Mary in sequence who survived into adulthood, for example, John [1] and Mary [1]. 15 Consumption is tuberculosis. 16 Dropsy is congestive heart failure. 17 By the time of the first US Census in 1790, no slaves were tallied in Roxbury. 18 Samuel Adams later bought the Peacock Tavern. 19 The Third Parish Meeting House at this time was a wooden church building replaced in 1853 by the present stone First Church of Jamaica Plain facing Curtis Hall.

George Weld. John [3] died in 1847 at 66 years of age of “affection [sic] of the heart.” He showed marked favoritism in his will toward his son and widow and his two daughters challenged the authenticity of it, as well as their father’s sanity, in Supreme Judicial Court. His widow Charlotte died sometime after 1861. Henry Lowder married Polly Searls in 1800 and later married Mary [4]. Henry died in 1851 at the age of 78 years, with the cause of death listed as “old age,” and records indicate he had no children. He was buried in the First Church of Jamaica Plain graveyard on Eliot Street.20 His widow, Mary [4], lived for another 13 years, dying of cancer in 1864 at 85 years of age. Either Henry’s widow, Mary [4], or John’s [3] widow, Charlotte, was the last of the Lowder family to live in the area. The time from John [1] Lowder’s marriage and his subsequent move to Roxbury until Mary [4] Lowder’s death was a span of 119 years.

LOWDER FAMILY LAND AND HOUSES During this period, the Lowder family had a significant physical presence in this area, with land and houses acquired through both inheritance and purchase, often involving very complex arrangements.21 By the time John [1] married in 1745 and moved to Roxbury, his father-in-law, Zachariah Chandler, owned a 10-12 acre parcel of lowland to the west of what is now the Arnold Arboretum’s Meadow Road. It was known in the sixteenth century as Gore’s Meadow and was used as a hay meadow until it was acquired by the Arboretum in 1888. Zachariah Chandler died by 1752 and this property passed to his daughter, Mary [1], and when she died in 1792, to her daughters, Mary [2] and Elizabeth. Over the following decade, this meadow land underwent a complicated series of partitions, trades, and sales and changed hands completely. In what is also now the Arnold Arboretum, at its northwest tip along Centre Street, behind the Administration Building, John [3] bought a 15 acre upland farm in 1823. It had earlier been described as having orchard, mowing land, and pasture for “considerable grazing stock.” When he died in 1847, his estate inventory did not include this large farm. It continued to be farmed by various owners until it was incorporated into the Arboretum in 1883. On the opposite side of Centre Street, north of Louder’s Lane, are two wood-frame, two story, five bay, hip roof, center entrance, two-chimneys-behind-the-ridge with kitchen ell Federal style farmhouses that stand out as being older than any of the other houses in the neighborhood: 991 and 1011 Centre Street. During the first part of the nineteenth century, both were owned by Henry Lowder and were the two houses labeled “Lowder” on the Hales 1832 map of Roxbury. The architectural historians who conducted the 1982 Jamaica Plain Survey for the Boston Landmarks Commission speculated that either or both of these houses may date from the eighteenth century. My research indicates that the houses were the side-by-side residences of Zachariah Chandler and his son-in-law John [1] Lowder and were built in the middle of the eighteenth century.

20 Henry Lowder’s tombstone is number 66 in the Jamaica Plain Historical Society graveyard survey. 21 The ambiguity of some of the property boundary markers used in the old deeds adds to the difficulty of unraveling the family’s real estate holdings. Examples include “at a point five feet four inches from the western side of the bottom of a large apple tree,” “a pole standing in the ditch,” and “a heap of stones.”

The house furthest to the north and the smaller of the two, 991 Centre Street, was that of Zachariah Chandler. When Chandler died in 1752, the house and land were inherited by his daughters, Mary [1] and Margaret, and when Mary [1] died in 1792, her portion passed to her children, Mary [2], Elizabeth, and John [2]. John [2] was still living in the house in 1804, two years before his death, when he sold it to Sanderson and Blaney, local traders. Henry, John’s [2] son, acquired the house several years later. The larger house to the south, close to the junction with Louder’s Lane, 1011 Centre Street, was originally that of Chandler’s son-in-law, John [1]. Henry had bought two parcels of land totaling 11 acres that extended south from the 991 Centre Street property and along the lower part of Louder’s Lane (”bounded southerly on the town lane so called”). This land surrounded 1011 Centre Street and, in 1807, Henry completed his acquisitions when he bought from his aunts, Mary [2] and Elizabeth, “the land and real estate... land on which the mansion house of (our) late father John [1] Lowder stood, a part of which was set off to Mary [1] Lowder for her Dower [marriage portion] in the year 1753.” In 1849, Henry sold his holdings to John James Dixwell, and in return Henry and his wife Mary [4] received a lifetime estate in the house at 1011 Centre Street. The last holding of the Lowder family was the three acre parcel called “the upper swale” located on the south side of Louder’s Lane that was sold by the estate of Jabez Lewis to John [3] Lowder in 1827, as previously described. It was bounded on its other sides by the farmland and orchard of the Winchester family. Several years before John’s [3] death in 1847, he built a house on the land. It does not appear on the map of 1832, but the tax roll in 1845 values an “unfinished new house” at $300 and his estate inventory in 1849 lists “about 3 acres of land with a house thereon on the southerly side of Lowder’s Lane.” The house’s value increased steadily on the 1856 and 1858 tax rolls. Sale of the property by John’s [3] estate in 1861 was subject to a life interest of his widow, suggesting that at the time there was still a house on it, and an 1875 map shows a small house on the property, then owned by Dixwell. No house is present on the next available map in 1888, so it is concluded that the house was demolished sometime between those two dates.

TRANSITION FROM FARMS TO ESTATES As part of the dramatic mid-nineteenth century transformation of this part of Jamaica Plain from agriculture to large estates, Dixwell added Henry Lowder’s land to his extensive other holdings in the Moss Hill area. In 1855, he sold six acres, which included three acres of land that had formerly belonged to Henry Lowder, to Mary Nichols who built the mansion at 180 Moss Hill.22 He sold other parcels of land during this period to members of the Nichols and Bowditch families on which they created the elegant estates of Moss Hill during the second half of the nineteenth century.23

LOUDER’S LANE IN LITERATURE At least two writers have expressed their admiration for Louder’s Lane. Not many short, dead-end streets can make that claim. A romantic nostalgia for the bucolic past on Louder’s Lane is evident in Harriet Manning Whitcomb’s Annals and Reminisces of Jamaica Plain, 1897:

22 The property of Wee Stone House (57 Louder’s Lane) was part of this six acre parcel. 23 John James Dixwell made a fortune in the India trade and then became president of the Massachusetts National Bank. He married Elzabeth Ingersol Bowditch, the youngest daughter of Nathaniel Bowditch, in 1846. They built an estate named Sunnyside adjacent to 180 Moss Hill Road.

...we are tempted to spare a few moments to stroll through Louder’s Lane. Many times have we proved the truth of Young’s words: “How blessing brighten as they take their flight!” and they ring in our hearts to-day as we wander into this picturesque old way; and we love even more dearly than of yore the quiet, the grassy sides, the wild growths of roses and blackberry-bushes, the tangle of ivy and woodbine, and the lovely vistas through leafy framings of sunny hillsides and woods, of pastures dotted with grazing cattle, and of peaceful farm homes. It is a country idyll, sweet and restful! We may slacken our horses reins while he crops the wayside grass, or we may sit on a fallen stone from the old wall, while we muse of early days when there was no turnstile to block our path, but we should wander on around the loops of Sargent’s woods, and gather at will the blue and white violets, the anemones and columbines and cowslips, without fear of brass-buttoned monitor or coasting wheelman. We see again the dignified form of Manlius Sargent in his stately horse, as he rode through his wood-roads, and many another familiar face of those who sought these rural paths, and cared not yet for “rapid transit,” with its spectral accompaniments. And our hope is akin to a prayer, that what is left of Louder’s Lane may be spared to us yet many years.

And more recently, in 1998, National Book Award nominee, Kathleen Hirsch, in A Home in the Heart of the City described how life on Louder’s Lane satisfied her yearning for community. The bucolic idyll of long ago has become a diverse and dynamic neighborhood whose residents still value its secluded, verdant, and peaceful character.

CODA Louder’s Lane commemorates a family that tilled the soil of this area for over a century, beginning 264 years ago. The name Louder (Lowder) can be added to the list of early Jamaica Plain farmers with streets and places named for them, such as Weld, Curtis, May, Winchester, Heath, Hyde, Holbrook, Wyman, and Gore.

Shown on this page and the next is the 1827 Deed (Vol. 83, Page 335) in which “Lowders lane” is first mentioned by name. John Lowder bought the three acre “upper swale” parcel

from the Estate of Jabez Lewis. Norfolk County Registry of Deeds.

Detail of the first map of Roxbury. Hales, 1832. Louder’s Lane is the unnamed short street between Moss Hill and Green Hill and was at that time the only street off the west side of Centre Street between Pond and Weld Streets. On Centre Street, note the two houses labeled “Lowder” just north of this unnamed street and the Peacock Tavern to the south of it. Benjamin Bussey Collection, Harvard University.

Detail of Whitney’s 1849 map of Roxbury showing “Louders Lane” off Centre Street. Boston Public Library.

On this page and the next are the names of the men in the three Roxbury minute companies, Corporal John Lowder is in the Third Company. Drake, 1908. Courtesy of Nancy LaDue.

Handwritten page from the first U.S. Census in 1790 with an entry for John Lowder (underlined, two-thirds of the way down the middle column) and his household of 2 “free white males of 16 and upwards,” 3 “free white males under 16 years,” and 3 “free white females.”

Map of what is now the Arnold Arboretum about 1770 showing the meadow land of Zachariah Chandler and John Lowder in the upper right. Raup, 1935.

Map of what is now the Arnold Arboretum about 1840 showing the farm of John Lowder at the upper right along Centre Street. Raup, 1935.

The junction of Louder’s Lane and Centre Street showing 1011 Centre Street, the home of John Lowder in the 18th century. The white sign on the elm tree (inset) reads “Lowder’s Lane.” The Chapin house and carriage house are in the background. Note that both streets are unpaved. Undated photograph. Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

1863 plan that shows the location of the “upper swale” parcel south of Lowder’s Lane that was purchased by John Lowder in 1827. Norfolk County Registry of Deeds.

1875 Hopkins map of West Roxbury showing the Nichols and Dixwell acquisitions of the former properties of Henry and John Lowder. Harvard University Map Collection.

Detail from 1888 Bromley Real Estate Atlas map. Boston Public Library. This and the next two maps show the development of estates on Moss Hill at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Detail from 1896 Bromley Real Estate Atlas map. Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

Detail from 1914 Bromley Real Estate Atlas map. Jamaica Plain Historical Society.

REFERENCES

Wilson Family Conversations and correspondence with Courtney Benford (nee Wilson) between 1988 and 2002. Wikepedia: “Sterling Hayden,” www.wikepedia.org/Sterling_Hayden, accessed June 10, 2007. Ernest Flagg Bacon, Madge: Ernest Flagg. Beaux-Arts Architect and Urban Reformer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. Cary, Harold: Build a Home – Save a Third. The Story of Collier’s House. From Plans by Ernest Flagg, Architect. Reynolds Publishing Company, Inc., 1923. Cary, Harold: Articles in Collier’s, The National Weekly: “More Help for Home Builders,” 5 May 1923, 6. “What Will Collier’s House Cost?” 12 January 1924, 7. “Cutting Costs on Collier’s House,” 2 February 1924, 21. “Paying for the Collier’s House,” 16 February 1924, 23. “Getting on with the Collier’s House,” 8 March 1924, 21. “A New Saving in the Collier’s House 29 March 1924, 16. “Collier’s House is Done! Cost $10,767,” 17 May 1924, 14. “Saving a Third on Collier’s Small House,” 28 February 1925, 20. “Collier’s House is Roofed,” 14 March 1925, 20. “Counting the Costs on the Small House,” 6 June 1925, 23. “Don’t Let Building Costs Scare You,” 1 August 1925, 27. Flagg, Ernest: Small Houses. Their Economic Design and Construction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922. Levy, Daniel A.: Ernest Flag and His Impact on Stone House Construction 1920-1954. Graduate School of the University of Maryland Thesis, 1979.

Copyright © Stephen J. Lerman

Nearing, Helen and Scott Nearing: Living the Good Life. Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1954. Peters, Frazier Forman: Houses of Stone. Westport, Connecticut, 1933. China Deane, Jr., Courtney (Toni): Letters from China appeared in The Green Magazine, Boston Sunday Advertiser.

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Deane, Hugh: Good Deeds & Gunboats. Two Centuries of American Chinese Encounters. San Francisco: China Books & Periodicals, 1990 and Beijing, China: Foreign Languages Press, 2003. Deane, Michael: From the Collection of Hugh Dean: East Asian Pamphlets, 1927-1987. An Exhibit at Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College September 15-December 31, 2002. www.digitalcollections.lclark.edu. Accessed June 23, 2007. Rubinstein, Annette T.: “Good Deeds and Gunboats: Two Centuries of American-Chinese Encounters – book reviews.” Monthly Review, February 1992. US Navy Japanese/Oriental Language School Archival Project, Archives, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries: Hugh Dean, JLS 1944, (1916-2001). www.libraries.colorado.edu/archives. Accessed June 23, 2007 Wikepedia: “Wu Peifu.” www.wikepedia.org/Wu_Peifu. Accessed June 13, 2007. Renovations The Last Window. A film by John Bishop. 1988, 2005. Obtained in DVD format from www.media-generation.com. Nichols and Bowditch Families Boston Landmarks Commission: 1982 Survey & Planning Grant. Part II – Jamaica Plain Inventory Forms, No. 171, 180 Moss Hill Road, 1983. Bowditch, Harold: The Bowditch Family of Salem, Massachusetts. Boston: The Recording and Statistical Corporation Press, 1936. Bowditch, Nathaniel: The American Practical Navigator. An Epitome of Navigation. 2002 Bicentennial Edition. Bethesda, Maryland: National Imagery and Mapping Agency, 2002. Latham, Jean Lee: Carry On, Mr. Bowditch. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1955

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Page 212, 1808. Vol. 64, Page 217, 1822. Vol. 68, Page 142, 1823. Vol. 83, Page 335, 1827. Vol. 190, Page 203, 1849. Vol. 239, Page 142, 1855. Vol. 239, Page 143, 1855. Vol. 297, Page 22, 1861. Pickford, Mrs. A. M.: Genealogy of a Branch of the Chandler Family. The Dedham Historical Register, Dedham Historical Society, 53-57, 1902. Raup, Hugh M.: Notes on the Early Uses of Land Now in the Arnold Arboretum. Arnold Arboretum Bulletin. Series 4, Vol. III, Numbers 9-12, 41-74, December 23, 1935. Roxbury Valuation 1825, 1832-33, 1845, 1846, 1847, 1849, 1851, 1856 and 1858. Archives of the City of Boston. The Brookline, Jamaica Plain, and West Roxbury Directory for 1873-4. Boston: Dean Dudley & Co., 1873. United States Census 1790, 1800, 1810, 1820, 1830, 1840, and 1860. Accessed from imageservice.ancestry.com. von Hoffman, Alexander: Local Attachments. The Making on an American Urban Neighborhood, 1850 to 1920. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Whitcomb, Harriet Manning: Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain, 1897. Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1897. Whitney, Charles: Map of the Town of Roxbury, 1843. Harvard Map Collection. Whitney, Charles: Map of the City of Roxbury. Revised in 1849. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library.