By Heather Rockwood, Communications Manager

Part 1 of Journey to the South Pole includes an incomplete timeline of pole travel and looks at the diaries of Charles Francis Adams (CFA, 1807–1886), who was reading a book in 1831 about the southern-most expedition toward the South Pole at that time. It also covers John Quincy Adams’ (JQA, 1767–1848) diary mention of James Byers’ application to Congress for funding of an expedition to settle the South Shetland Islands. These are two typical stories of South Pole expeditions. This next story is unusual.

In 1820, a book was published called Symzonia: Voyage of Discovery, by Captain Adam Seaborn, probably a pseudonym. This sci-fi story is about a journey to the poles, and the discovery that they are an opening into the Earth, which is hollow, and inhabitable. Explorer Jeremiah N. Reynolds (1799–1858) heard about the book’s theory from John Cleves Symmes (1780–1829), who is considered to be the real author of the book. Reynolds then made numerous petitions to Congress for funding an expedition to the South Pole, according to The Maritime Studies Program of Williams College & Mystic Seaport, although he and Symmes parted ways soon after his petitions began.  

CFA notes that he met with Reynolds on 21 April 1827, while Reynolds was in Washington lecturing and lobbying for the expedition to the South Pole: “In the evening, Reynolds, the expedition man, called to see me and drew me out of myself for an hour.” CFA wrote about him again a few days later on 29 April 1827: “Particularly in reading some papers of Mr. Reynolds upon the subject of his expedition. I think him very clever, but without polish to make it tell as it ought.” He did not have faith in Reynolds abilities to convince Congress.

On 22 February 1828, President JQA wrote a note about a ball he attended that evening, at which he met Reynolds: “I met at the Ball, besides other Strangers, Mr Reynolds the projector of an expedition to the South-Pole.” On 13 June 1828, JQA notes that “Mr Reynolds the projector of an Expedition to the South Pole was here— A Bill for that purpose was reported by the Naval Committee to the House of Representatives at their last Session, but the House could not reach it in Season—A Resolution of the House did pass however recommending that one of the Public Vessels should be employed on an exploring Expedition to the South-Sea— Reynolds says that a Merchant brig, will be sent with her upon Speculation.” Following up on this, in JQA’s diary on 17 November 1828, he wrote: “Southard Saml. L. The South Pole Expedition— Jones to command—Instruments to be purchased.” Reynolds’ petition was successful; however, the funding disappeared when JQA lost the presidential election to Andrew Jackson in 1829.

Reynolds then succeeded in gaining private funding for the expedition which started in 1829, with Reynolds aboard the ship. The voyage reached the Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica, but then turned back. When the ship reached Chile, the crew mutinied and left Reynolds behind. He spent two years in Chile until the US frigate Potomac brought him back to the United States.

Reynold’s tale does not end here. Watch for Journey to the South Pole, Part 3, where Reynolds tale will end and JQA meets a man with a scientific theory about the pole’s magnetism. Further reading: Tales of a Hollow Earth: Tracing the Legacy of John Cleves Symmes in Antarctic Exploration and Fiction, by L. I. Chaplow, 2011, a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of Masters of Antarctic Studies at the University of Canterbury.

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Manager

John Quincy Adams (JQA, 1767–1848), world traveler that he was, never visited either of the Earth’s poles, nor did his son, Charles Francis Adams (CFA, 1807–1886). In their diaries, they noted reading books about such travels, meeting people who journeyed there, and speaking to others who had scientific theories about the poles. Come with me on an expedition through JQA’s and CFA’s diaries to find out what the poles meant to early 19th century thinkers.

First, an incomplete timeline of US pole expeditions:

• 1819–1823: Several voyages by seal hunters
• 1829–1831: James Eights and the Palmer-Pendleton Expedition
• 1838–1842: US Exploring Expedition (also known as Wilke’s Expedition)
• 1928: Admiral Richard Byrd’s Expedition

From 1822 to 1824, James Weddell (1787–1834) was on his third seal hunting voyage in the South Orkneys and South Shetland Islands. Because hunting had been disappointing, Weddell turned his ship south toward the South Pole. The season was unusually mild, and on 20 February 1823, his ship reached 532 miles farther south than any other ship previously. Although a few icebergs could be seen, no land was in sight. He turned the ship around and sheltered at South Georgia. Because he had gone slightly farther south than James Cook in 1773–1774, Weddell wrote a book about the journey. The first edition of A voyage towards the South Pole: performed in the years 1822–24, containing an examination of the Antarctic Sea… was published in 1825, but was enlarged in 1827 with new information from the companion ship on the voyage. On 1 April 1831, CFA was reading this book, “began Weddel’s Voyage to the South Pole. He went farther than any body and says he saw a clear Sea, which is extraordinary enough.” He finished it that weekend on Sunday, 3 April 1831, “Finished Weddell’s Voyage. It is the Account of a Man not much versed in Science who made a daring Voyage in pursuit of Commercial Speculation. He gives An Account of the South Seas somewhat varying from that of his predecessor Cook. And he says he penetrated to 74 degrees South with a clear Sea. I see no reason to disbelieve him. If so however, the question of land might easily be settled.”

On 20 September 1820, General Daniel Parker (1782–1846), then the Inspector General of the US Army, spoke with JQA about a seal expedition application he had received when serving as Secretary of State to President James Monroe. The application was from the New York ship owner James Byers. JQA wrote in his diary: “General Parker came with a new application from Mr Byers of New-York, for a public vessel to protect their Sealing Settlement expedition to the South-Pole—I told him of Homans’s objections but promised to mention the affair again to the President.” Byers wanted the US government to fund a settlement in the South Shetland Islands, off the coast of Antarctica, and for the US to send a warship with the settlers to take possession of the area. His application was denied, but the trip and settlement still happened. The settlers built dwellings and were visited mainly by seal hunters from Britain, New England, and New York. The settlement’s peninsula was named Byers Peninsula in 1958.

In Journey to the South Pole, Part 2, we will look at JQA’s and CFA’s interactions with a man obsessed with reaching the South Pole to prove a theory that the Earth is hollow.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist 

On this first day of Women’s History Month, I’d like to tell you about a remarkable woman who makes a brief appearance in one of our collections: Florence Bascom.

One of the things I enjoy about working as an archivist—and writing for the Beehive—is the opportunity to research a wide variety of interesting people from all eras of American history. Bascom’s name was familiar to me, but I didn’t know much about her.

The collection in question is the Benjamin-Owen family papers, which consists primarily of letters to Mary Curtiss (Benjamin) Owen and her son from family members and friends. Included are four letters from Bascom to Owen, written between 1912 and 1929. The two women were distant cousins; their great-grandfathers were brothers.

Mary Curtiss Benjamin, who went by the nickname May, was born in 1860 in Egremont, a small town at the southwestern edge of Massachusetts. In 1889, she married George F. Owen and moved with him to Colorado Springs. May Owen was an active suffragist there, and just four year later, Colorado became the first U.S. state to pass women’s suffrage by popular referendum.

Florence Bascom, two years younger than Owen, was herself the daughter of a suffragist. She was born in Williamstown, Mass., and distinguished herself early by earning a Bachelor of Arts, a Bachelor of Science, and a Master’s degree in geology from the University of Wisconsin. In 1893, she became the first woman to earn a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. (She was required to sit behind a screen in classrooms to separate her from the male students.)

Bascom taught at the college level both before and after her doctoral studies and, in 1895, was asked to found and head the geology department at Bryn Mawr College, where she would go on to teach for over three decades. Bascom also published dozens of papers on geology, worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, and belonged to many professional geological and scientific organizations.

When I came across Bascom’s letters, the first thing I noticed was how hard it is to read her handwriting. See for yourself!

The substance of the letters is fairly mundane. Bascom primarily discusses news of mutual family members and asks after Owen’s son. As for her scientific work, she occasionally mentions fieldwork and conferences, but only in passing. She also references her love of horseback riding.

The spiciest passage relates to her opinion on smoking, apparently in response to a question from Owen about women’s use of tobacco: “I am for women’s right to use it every time but I hate to see it used in excess by man or woman. It is after all a self-indulgent, somewhat inconsiderate-of-others, doubtfully hygienic and expensive habit.”

Slight though their content is, these letters are enough to give us a sense of Bascom’s thoughtfulness. I particularly like the way she asks Owen, “Are you fairly comfortable in your surroundings, May, and happy in your daily life? Please let me know frankly if you need what I could give you…”

Even though I wasn’t very familiar with her, Bascom’s accomplishments did not go unnoticed by her contemporaries. I found a number of notices about her published during her lifetime. The American Geologist reported on her in 1893 when she earned her Ph.D., remarking that her work had “attracted much attention,” and again in 1895 when she accepted the position at Bryn Mawr.

In 1898, The Chautauquan was already listing the 36-year-old geologist in an article on “Some American Women in Science,” alongside other illustrious names. She was also profiled in The Key (1916), a publication of Kappa Kappa Gamma, and later included in a book called Famous Women (1926), which ranks her with the likes of Marie Curie and Maria Mitchell.

Bascom died in 1945. Her namesakes have included a glacial lake in Massachusetts, a building at Johns Hopkins, a Venusian crater, and an S-type asteroid.

As far as I can tell, these letters are the first Florence Bascom manuscripts acquired by the MHS, but both Bryn Mawr and Smith College have significant collections of her papers.

By Meg Szydlik, Visitor Services Coordinator

February is the part of winter that always feels drearier than any other time of year, at least for me. With that in mind, I wanted to do research on something lighter to counter the snowy days and bitter cold. So I decided to pull out the Fenway Victory Gardens’ collection to explore. The history of the organization and the gardens, founded in 1942 and located in the beautiful Emerald Necklace, can be gleaned from both official statistics and tantalizing pieces of decades-old drama, which peak through the information about plots and plant growth. It tells a small piece of the story of the Fenway area–an area that’s been home to the MHS for more than a century.

The Fenway Gardens’ website explains their origins as a victory garden, which was a WWII movement to increase access to fresh food grown by citizens, with the goal of stretching ration coupons and increasing food sent overseas to troops. There were victory gardens all across America, but the Fenway Gardens of Boston are one of the few that are still around. The records held at the MHS span from 1944 to 2011 and include details of the gardens themselves as well as memberships, board communications, and gardening paraphernalia. The maps of the gardens demonstrate that in many ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. While many new gardeners appear each year, I noticed over the decades people maintained their gardens year after year, contributing to green space in the city, many assisting other gardeners with their plots as well. The records are a charming peek into the kind of neighborly relationships that sustained the Fenway Gardens for more than 80 years.

The Fenway Victory Gardens were not always assured of success, however. Many documents describe the vandalism that took place in the area and requests for police protection of the Gardens. The safety of the site was frequently called into question by gardeners. Despite these concerns, there was an emphasis on inclusivity, with the 1981 anti-discrimination policy reading “this society shall not discriminate on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, or sexual preference” and the 1975 release of a booklet offering community resources for all types of groups, including the elderly, students, and “gay individuals.” The focus on accessibility for all also extended to disabled people, according to an undated report on improving the space for access, which included feedback from real disabled individuals. The Gardens were under constant threat however, and one of the letters by a long-term gardener recalls that in the late 70s, the nearby Red Sox wanted to buy out the space for a parking lot. The community rallied and saved the Gardens instead. If you’ve had trouble parking for a game, I suppose you can blame Fenway Gardens! I think it was worth it though. They are a wonderful piece of community history!

In 2020, the MHS received a plot of our very own after a couple of years of being on the waiting list! Led by the intrepid Laura Wulf, our Photographic & Digital Imaging Specialist, MHS staff members cleaned up the overgrown weeds and built a beautiful respite. The Fenway Victory Gardens are free and open to the public to stroll through. It is such a beautiful site that I highly recommend doing so!

By Maggie Parfitt, Visitor Services Coordinator

One of the best things about working at the MHS is when a coworker sends a link to a catalogue listing with a “you’d like this” message. Recently, I was sent the motherlode of fashion plates in the MHS collection in our 1872 edition of Robert Chamber’s The Book of Days. While there’s too many to include here, I wanted to share some of my favorites, along with some fashion plate background, and some of the ways researchers reference them to support textual research. They’re not just for looking at! (But the looking is also fun).

First things first: what is a fashion plate? Fashion plates, as the name suggests, are illustrations of fashionable dress published in ladies’ magazines and journals starting around the 1780s and continuing through the 19th century. Armed with these illustrations women would travel to their trusted mantua-maker/dressmaker for a new gown inspired by the style in the plate. Some fashion plates even went so far as to include names of milliner’s shops, or the name of the dressmaker who invented the design.

When preserved in their original published contexts fashion plates often include written descriptions detailing fabric types, accessories, and garment names. Sources like these are key for filling in visual gaps in the written record. They help material culturalists and dress historians puzzle together disparate pieces of information like fabric advertisements in period newspapers or mentions of specific garments in letters, diaries, and journals. With all these pieces we can start identifying extant garments more completely and assemble robust theories of the dress of the past.

While a useful tool, it’s important to remember fashion plates were primarily marketing. They reflect a dressmaker’s interpretation of the silhouettes and details in style at the moment, and aren’t necessarily indicative of actual garments. Think of the difference between runway shows and red carpets. While both are modern examples of “high fashion,” red carpet styles have been edited down by individual taste. This does mean you can find fashion plates that are A LOT – with seemingly every accessory piled on there.

I hope you enjoyed a quick look at just a few of the fashion plates in the MHS’s collection. While meant to inform the fashions for 19^th century society – the upper classes of England and France, they provide great insight into the shapes, silhouettes, and accessories of all classes. I can imagine women of the time pursuing fashion plates and picking and choosing their favorites, much like we do today!

By Heather Rockwood, Communications Manager

While searching the online collection and archives of the MHS for objects and stories to share on social media, I find myself going down rabbit holes when I find slight hints of an interesting story. Recently, this happened with a historical figure of note that I had never heard of, despite having done theater in my youth and being familiar with US history and art. That man was William Dunlap.

William Dunlap (1766–1839) is touted as the father of American theater; he was also influential in art, literature, and design. He is perhaps most famous for his play André, which depicted George Washington on stage for the first time after the United States became a nation. On opening night in 1798, the play caused a bit of a scandal. It tells the story of the British spy Major John André, who Washington executed during the American Revolution. One of the characters in the play is a soldier in the Continental Army. He becomes furious with Washington over the execution and tears the black cockade from the hat he was wearing and throws it to the ground. The audience erupted in fury at such desecration of a sacred Federalist symbol. They booed vociferously and then rioted after the play finished, forcing Dunlap to change the ending.

Charles Frances Adams wrote in his diary of two occasions when he saw the Dunlap play, The Stranger, in 1833 and 1837, although the note in 1837 reveals he had seen the play in 1825 and 1834 as well. Adams wrote this about the play, “This is a piece I never can see without feeling it. Indeed I am more touched by it than by any. If this is the test of a good piece it certainly is good, but I require rather more. I feel the inconsistencies in the character of the heroine, and the affectations of sentiment, it contains.”

Despite having lost an eye to an errantly thrown rock by a school friend as a boy, Dunlap was also a trained artist. He was mainly a portraitist, and the MHS holds a portrait he painted in New York City in 1811 or 1812 after his Park Theatre closed in 1805. The portrait is miniature watercolor of Elizabeth Oliver Lyde. When viewed up close, it shows great attention to the lines of her face, the shadowing and light on her cap and clothes, and the depth of emotion in her eyes.

Not only was Dunlap a playwright, but he also wrote History of American Theatre in 1832, the first history of its kind, andHistory of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States in 1834. He also served as the director of New York’s American Academy of Fine Arts in 1817, and then helped to found New York’s National Academy of Design in 1826.

After searching for collection items that are digitized, I was curious to see if the MHS held any of Dunlap’s plays. What I found was a cache of 57 items in book and microfilm form. MHS even has Dunlap’s published diary, Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839): the memoirs of a dramatist, theatrical manager, painter, critic, novelist, and historian! These items can be seen by making an appointment with the MHS Library. You can learn how to make an appointment here.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist 

Previously on the Beehive, a colleague of mine described the early 20th-century diaries of Robert E. Grant, a policeman in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston. The MHS also holds the papers of another policeman, Lieut. James Bruce, a contemporary of Grant’s who lived and worked in Everett.

James Bruce was born in Scotland in 1869, immigrated to the United States in the late 1880s, and was naturalized a few years later. He and his wife (also a naturalized citizen from Scotland) lived at 10 Russell Street in Everett and had four daughters and two sons: Walter, Margaret, Janet, James, Mary, and Emily. Janet died as an infant.

When Lieut. Bruce was patrolling its streets in 1920, Everett’s population was 40,120. According to printed sources, the city was home to many immigrants, primarily from Ireland, England, Scotland, and Canada, as well as 1,129 African Americans.

Bruce’s collection at the MHS consists mostly of volumes documenting his police work, including two diaries, 1921-1922; a precinct arrest log, 1904-1924; and a memoir he wrote called Tattlings of a Retired Police Officer, printed in 1927. Some events described in Tattlings correspond to the log, although Bruce used pseudonyms for publication.

The arrest log, in particular, is a mine of information. Its pages are arranged into columns listing date, full name, nationality, “assisted by” (that is, who assisted Bruce in the arrest), offense, and disposition, or consequence for the arrestee. The first thing that stands out is how many people were arrested for drunkenness—so many that Bruce just used ditto marks to save time.

Other offenses included assault and battery, disturbance of the peace, larceny, breaking and entering, weapons charges, non-support of dependents, destruction of property, automobile violations, probation violations, and false fire alarms. Rare but still present were a few incidents of manslaughter. Some people were arrested for being ‘idle and disorderly” or “stubborn and disobedient,” “exposing his person,” or gambling on a Sunday. Adultery was also an arrestable offense.

And of course, those being the days of Prohibition, there were arrests for the manufacture and sale of liquor, though not as many as I expected.

Some entries are amusing: “vile, indecent & profane language in the street,” “indecent language near a dwelling” (which was worse, I wonder?), “lewd & lascivious cohabitation,” and “feeding [a] horse on [a] public st without an attendant or the wheels being locked.”

Many are disturbing: “two warrants for assault with intent to carnally know & abuse two juvenile females also one warrant for having in his possession obscene pictures for the purpose of corrupting the morals of the young.” Bruce also dealt with cases of incest, neglected children, mental illness, and animal cruelty.

When an arrestee was African American, Bruce indicated their race in a note next to their name. One Black man from the West Indies was arrested for “not having [a] registration card,” and another was AWOL from military service. I was also intrigued by some of the items that were allegedly stolen. Cash or a diamond ring, I understand, even “five hens,” but “four baby carriage wheels”?

James Bruce was injured in a fall in 1924 and retired from the Everett police force. He died in 1932.

In my research for this blog, I uncovered evidence of a shocking family tragedy. According to the Boston Globe, on 26 February 1922, James Bruce was handling his gun at home, apparently unaware it was loaded. The gun discharged, and the bullet struck his daughter Mary, a 17-year-old student at Everett High School. She died at the hospital six days later.

When I looked through Bruce’s collection for anything that might shed light on this incident, I found no reference to it, except by omission. The last entry in his 1922 diary was written on 24 February, two days before the shooting. The rest of the volume is blank.