February, 2021 - The Cambridge Historical Commission Blog

St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church – Cambridge’s Newest Landmark

Posted on February 27, 2021March 2, 2021 by cambridgehistoricalcommission

View of St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church, 1964.

On February 22, the Cambridge City Council unanimously voted to designate St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church a Cambridge Landmark. This designation recognizes only a select number of individual properties that are important to the City as a whole, protecting them so that their unique qualities are maintained for the benefit of all the residents of Cambridge.

Located at 137 Allston Street in Cambridgeport, St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church is owned by the Trustees of The St. Augustine’s Mission. The church is also the home of Black History in Action for Cambridgeport (BHAC), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting programs focused on sharing Black culture, arts, history, and education with the general public. BHAC’s mission is to sustain and revitalize St. Augustine’s as a neighborhood center for assembly, empowerment, and outreach.

View of St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church with recently completed new roof.

The property was originally part of the estate of Mrs. Washington Allston [Martha Remington Dana Allston] as drawn on a survey by William A. Mason and W. S. Barbour dated May 1, 1862 and filed in the Middlesex County (South District) Registry of Deeds, Plan Book 33, Plan 5. The rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Central Square, Rev. Edward M. Gushee, acquired the property in 1886 to construct a mission of St. Peter’s. Rev. Gushee died in 1917 and bequeathed the property to his son Richard, an Episcopal minister in California. A new priest was appointed by the Diocese of Massachusetts, but the congregation dwindled over the next few years and could not sustain the church financially even though Rev. Richard Gushee continued to own the property. In 1927 Rev. Gushee sold the property to Central Square furniture dealer Morris Bobrick, who may have intended to use the property for storage but who defaulted on his mortgage. The property was bought at auction by Nettie E. Fernandez who in turn sold it to individuals associated with the African Orthodox denomination in 1931. The St. Augustine’s property continues to be owned by the trustees of The St. Augustine’s Mission.

Allston Street was named for Washington Allston (1779-1843), an artist who pioneered America’s Romantic movement of landscape painting. He married Martha Remington Dana, the daughter of Chief Justice Francis Dana, who owned most of the property in this area. Allston Street is a through street parallel to Putnam Avenue and intersecting with the main thoroughfares in the neighborhood, including Magazine, Pearl, and Brookline streets. The neighborhood is characterized by dominant north-south streets, uniform intervals between the cross streets, and sustained setbacks. Only on four streets – Green, Franklin, Allston, and Putnam – can one traverse the entire area in an east-west direction. Early building locations appear to have been determined by land elevation or proximity to Central Square. In 1830 there were only three cross streets; in 1854 there were six; and by 1873 the current street layout was virtually complete. South of Allston Street is a slightly elevated and once heavily wooded area known in the 19^th century as Pine Grove. In 1838 Edmund Trowbridge Hastings (1789-1861) and other Dana heirs laid out the Pine Grove subdivision with 131 house lots on Allston, Chestnut, Henry, Waverly, Sidney, Brookline and Pearl Streets. The original plan included a residential square around Fort Washington and another on Brookline Street that became today’s Hasting’s Square. Although some lots were sold, the area was too isolated to attract development even after the Cottage Farm (B.U.) Bridge was completed in 1851. Martha Allston’s land on the north side of Allston Street (including the site of St. Augustine’s Church) was subdivided in 1862 but remained substantially undeveloped until the 1880s, when the neighborhood began to fill up with one- and two-family houses. Construction of the Morse School in 1890 spurred development, and by 1910 the neighborhood was complete. It remains essentially unchanged today, although the school was demolished in 1957 and the site became a park.

From the founding of Cambridge in 1630 to the construction of the West Boston (now Longfellow) Bridge in 1793, only three families lived east of Quincy Street on “the Neck,” a marshy, wooded peninsula formed by the Charles and Millers rivers. The opening of the bridge spurred development. By this time two Cambridge men owned most of the land in Cambridgeport: William Jarvis controlled properties north of Massachusetts Avenue and Justice Francis Dana to the south. (Much of the rest – and all of East Cambridge – fell to Andrew Craigie.)

Jarvis was the U.S. Inspector of Revenue. Dana, who descended from an old Cambridge family and resided on a large estate on Dana Hill, served as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court from 1791 to 1806. The two men worked with the Proprietors of the West Boston Bridge to lay out Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street but did not otherwise develop a master plan for the area. Justice Dana developed his holdings slowly and carefully. In 1798 Jarvis was convicted of misappropriation of customs duties; the federal government seized his properties and sold them off to multiple owners.

Justice Dana died in 1811, and his heirs continued to develop Cambridgeport in the same careful pattern. What is now Allston Street was a part of Justice Dana’s estate left to his daughter, Martha Remington Dana Allston (Mrs. Washington Allston).

St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church was built in 1886-87 as St. Philip’s, a mission of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Central Square. The remote site was chosen to attract parishioners from the surrounding neighborhood who found it difficult to get to church in Central Square. It was the first house of worship to open in the former Pine Grove neighborhood and attracted so many worshipers that it needed to be enlarged two years later.

St. Philip’s was designed by the New Bedford architect Robert Slack, who oversaw both the original construction and the 1888 expansion and worked with the local builders Kelley & McKinnon. Talented and prolific, Slack did not specialize in one style; he designed private homes, churches, and institutions, including a new wing at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

The church is reminiscent of an English village chapel but is distinctly American in its wood construction and simple expression. The exterior was shingled and stained dark red with trimmings of dark blue. The 50-foot-tall tower was surmounted by a gilded cross and enclosed a bell made at the Meneely foundry in Troy, New York. The main entrance was through a foyer on the right front. The interior featured an open-timbered auditorium with rows of cane chairs with hassocks for the congregation, double-hung windows with colored lights, and five decorative chancel windows high above the altar. The 1888 expansion involved cutting off the chancel end and moving it back 31 feet and building a section between with a transept on the south side, making the inserted section 31 feet by 34 feet. This increased the overall length from 60 to 90 feet and doubled the seating capacity to about 400. The basement was finished for use as Sunday School and guild rooms.

Image of church after expansion. Note the original side entrance. *Cambridge Chronicle*, Sept. 15, 1888.

St. Philip’s was a personal project of Rev. Edward M. Gushee, who served at St. Peter’s Episcopal in Central Square until Easter 1888, when he became rector of St. Philip’s. A wealthy, generous man, Rev. Gushee owned the building, presided at services, and was the parish’s sole financial benefactor. Gushee died in 1917, leaving a small allowance to the parish but bequeathing the building to his son Richard, an Episcopal minister in California who apparently had no wish to return to Cambridge. The diocese supplied the parish with a priest for a few years, but the congregation dwindled and could no longer support either a rector or the building. In 1927 Richard put the building up for sale, advertising it as suitable for “storage, church or remodeled for dwelling” (Cambridge Chronicle, August 26, 1927).

In August 1928 Richard Gushee sold the property to Morris Bobrick, a furniture dealer in Central Square who may have used it for storage. Two years later Bobrick sold it to the trustees of a new church, identified in the newspapers as the African Orthodox Society. In 1932 the Cambridge assessors gave the trustees as George Alexander McGuire, Rev. Gladstone St. Clair Nurse, and Elvira Headley.

Bishop George A. McGuire (1866-1934) established the African Orthodox Church in 1921. McGuire was born, raised, and educated on Antigua; he came to the U.S. in 1894 and two years later was ordained an Episcopal priest. He served in numerous parishes and was praised for both his preaching and his organizational skills. In 1910 he attended Boston University’s medical school, but in 1913 he went back to Antigua to nurse his mother.

In 1918 McGuire returned to the U.S. and began to move in a new direction. He campaigned for equal rights for Black Americans and severed his ties with the Episcopal Church to protest its systemic racism and discrimination against Black clergy. McGuire became an associate of Marcus Garvey and worked with Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA); Garvey in turn endorsed McGuire’s idea that true equality and spiritual freedom could only be achieved by an all-Black religious denomination – a church attended by people of color and administered by Black clergy. The bishop broke with Garvey in 1924, probably over the latter’s increasingly radical ideas on racial nationalism.

In the fall of 1921, St. Luke’s African Orthodox Church opened at 252 Green Street (now the site of the Green Street Garage). In 1931 the denomination took possession of the dilapidated St. Philip’s and renamed it St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Pro-Cathedral, with Bishop McGuire at its head. (A pro-cathedral is a church named by a bishop to serve as his seat but which remains under the governance of the vestry.) When Bishop McGuire died in 1934 the African Orthodox Church could claim approximately 30,000 members in thirty congregations in the United States, the West Indies, South America, and Africa.

General Sources

Cambridge Chronicle, June 6, 1887; September15, 1888; January 17, 1930.

Cambridge Sentinel, January 13, 1940.

Cambridge Tribune, June 18, 1887; January 28, 1888.

Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Cambridgeport. Cambridge Historical Commission, 1971.

Harvard Square Library, https://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/cambridge-harvard/washington-allston/

Black History in Action For Cambridgeport, https://www.bhacambridge.org/history

Wikipedia entries for Rev. George A. Maguire and the African Orthodox Church

Black History Month: George D. Callender

Posted on February 26, 2021March 1, 2021 by Meta Partenheimer

Have you ever wondered where Callender Street in Cambridgeport got its name? The original street was approved in 1838 as part of Putnam Place, laid out between 29 Hews Street and 152 Putnam Avenue. In 1874, it was part of Hewes (Hews) Street and extended to 47 Howard Street. For reasons unknown, the street was renamed Grigg Street in 1877 and retained this designation for over seventy years.

Clipping from the *Cambridge Chronicle*, 8 March 1945

On October 18, 1949, the City Council ordered that the name of Grigg Street be changed to Callender Street in honor of Private First Class George Duncan Callender, a young man killed in action during World War II.

View down Callender Street east of Dodge Street, ca. 1950 (Cambridge Planning Board)

George was born in Cambridge on February 3, 1923. His mother, Gladys Odessa Pyle (1902-1966), was born in Saint Michael Parish, Barbados; his father, Eleazer T. Callender, died in 1925 when George was just an infant. Gladys, who went by Odessa, then married Marcus Elder Sr. (1904-1982) on June 3, 1926. Elder was a painter and immigrant from Castries, Saint Lucia. George graduated from Webster School in 1938 and from Rindge Technical School in 1942. In 1941 Callender, nicknamed “Lefty,” became a founding member of the Aggie Associates, or the “Aggies”, an all-Black basketball team based in Cambridge.

Clipping from the *Cambridge Chronicle*, 5 March 1942

George Callender (also spelled “Callendar” in some sources) enlisted on April 22, 1943 and was later assigned to Unit 366th Infantry Regiment, Company M.

U.S., World War II Draft Card for George Duncan Callender

At the time of his enlistment, George was living at 49 Grigg Street and working at Wards Baking Company at 140 Albany Street.

Advertisement for Wards Baking Company, published in the *Cambridge Sentinel*, 8 September 1928

After his enlistment, he trained at Fort Devens, Massachusetts, and at Camp Atterbury, Indiana.

Enlisted Men’s Barracks, Fort Devens, Mass., ca. 1930-1945. Retrieved from https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/cj82kc208

Initial reports stated incorrectly that George died in combat on February 9, 1945, in Tuscany, Italy; later, it was determined that the fight had taken place in Germany. George was laid to rest in Cambridge Cemetery. In 1946 the Aggie Associates were renamed the George D. Callender Associates in memory of him. The house at 49 Grigg, a triple-decker built in 1913 by George B. Blacknell, was later purchased by the Cambridge Housing Authority and demolished in 1953 to make way for the Putnam Gardens housing community. Today, a marker honoring George D. Callender stands at the corner of Putnam Avenue and Callender Street in Cambridgeport.

George D. Callender Square marker, 2021 (CHC staff)

A “Sucker” Whig in Cambridge, 1848

Posted on February 15, 2021February 15, 2021 by cambridgehistoricalcommission

On the night of September 20, 1848, “a capital specimen of a ‘Sucker’ Whig, six feet at least in his stockings,” gave a speech in Cambridge City Hall in favor of the Whig candidates for president and vice president, General Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore (Boston Atlas). “Sucker” seems to have been a general term at the time for a Midwesterner, although its origin is unclear. ¹

This Sucker Whig was the Representative from Illinois, the Honorable Abraham Lincoln. He had attended the state Whig Convention in Worcester on the 13^th and delivered campaign speeches in Worcester, Lowell, Dorchester, and Chelsea. On the morning of the 20^th, he spoke in Dedham.

After having run a successful race for the train departing Dedham, Lincoln returned to the Boston and Providence Railroad depot near Boston Common, arriving in the early evening. He walked across the city to the station of the Fitchburg Railroad on Causeway Street [now North Station] to catch another train. This one took him in a westerly direction, across the Charles River to Cambridge. ²

The Fitchburg Railroad crossed Miller’s Creek (north of East Cambridge), then ran through Somerville to North Cambridge (and beyond). Lincoln would have alighted at one of three stations: two in Somerville, Prospect Street or Somerville (also called Park Street) stations in Somerville and one in Cambridge, Porter Station in North Cambridge (in the same location as today’s). From there, he would have walked.

A lively crowd of local Whigs (and a few reporters) awaited Mr. Lincoln at City Hall, then a simple wood building at the corner of Norfolk and Harvard streets completed 1832 (now site of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church).

Detail from 1854 map of Cambridge. The CEMETERY at the top middle is the Cambridgeport Burying Ground, now the site of Sennott Park. The cemetery is bounded to the north by Broadway, east by Essex Street, west by Norfolk Street, and south by Harvard Street. The townhouse is at the northwest corner of Harvard and Norfolk streets.

A committee of prominent citizens studied the matter of a townhouse carefully and in March 1831 recommended that it should be erected in Cambridgeport, “as more central to the populations of the town than the present house [in Harvard Square].”

The house is to be of wood, forty-six feet in front or breadth, and seventy-six feet long, with posts twenty feet and four inches high, and the roof one fourth of its base in height; on each end of the building, in addition to the aforesaid length, will be a portico, of six feet in width, consisting of six fluted Doric columns, with an entablature and pediment. ³

The town hired Asher Benjamin, a skilled housewright-turned-architect, to design the building in the Greek Revival style then considered suitable for houses of government. (Benjamin published a series of pattern books for ordinary builders. Each included a primer on architectural history and style elements, as well as complete house plans and measured drawings of circular staircases, mantlepieces, fences, and the like.) The town house cost $4,351.19, including furniture and fencing, the first town meeting was held there in March 1832. It burned down on 29 December 1853.

Local newspapers did not print the text of Lincoln’s Cambridge speech on September 20^th, nor have letters or diaries written by those in attendance been found, but a reporter for the Boston Atlas, a Whig newspaper, wrote about the rally enthusiastically.

A sudden shower had descended just before the meeting began, but it did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm of the Whigs present. It was one of those old-fashioned Whig gatherings, which it does a true Whig good to witness. … when the Old Cambridge [Zachary] Taylor Club entered the hall with a splendid band of music, and were received with cheer upon cheer, until the rafters shook and the roof rang, it seemed as if the building could not possibly contain the numbers who thronged to enter it. [The speech was] plain, direct, convincing … a model speech for the campaign. ⁴

Since there was no late train from Cambridge, Mr. Lincoln had to return to his rooms in Boston’s Tremont House by carriage or on foot.

Lincoln made one or two more speeches locally and left for Illinois on September 23, 1848.

Taylor and Fillmore won the election.

Tremont House, Tremont Street, Boston. Undated image.

¹ Sucker Whig: A commenter on an etymology blog noted that people from Illinois used to be called suckers in some neighboring states, perhaps, as another writer speculated, because Illinois men used to travel up the Mississippi River each spring to work and return home in the fall—Missourians called them “suckers” after a common fish that migrated in the same fashion. The Whigs took their name from those Revolutionary American Whigs who had opposed tyranny; this party, formed ca. 1834 in opposition to the authoritarian policies of Andrew Jackson and his Democrats, supported Congressional over presidential power and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism. In 1854, most Northern Whigs joined the newly formed Republican Party.

² Abraham Lincoln Among the Yankees: Abraham Lincoln’s 1848 Visit to Massachusetts by William F. Hanna (Old Colony Historical Society, Taunton, Mass. 1983)

³ The History of Cambridge, Massachusetts by Lucius R. Paige 1877

⁴ Hanna

National Inventor’s Day

Posted on February 11, 2021February 12, 2021 by cambridgehistoricalcommission

DEWEY AND ALMY CHEMICAL CO.

Today we are celebrating Inventor’s Day with a look at two Cambridge inventors who founded the Dewey & Almy Chemical Co. on Harvey Street in North Cambridge: Bradley Dewey and Charles Almy.

Dewey and Almy met on their first day as freshman at Harvard in 1905. They remained friends throughout their years at Harvard and then at MIT, where they studied chemical engineering. After graduation, they went their separate ways until WWI found them assigned to the Chemical Warfare Service. There, both holding the rank of Colonel, they helped supervise the development and production of gas masks. Dewey was in charge of the Gas Production Defense Division, for which he received the Army Distinguished Service medal. Discharged from the army in 1919, the two men went into business together with an aim to provide chemical research that would lead to useful products for industry.

BRADLEY DEWEY

Bradley Dewey was born in Vermont in 1887, the son of Davis Rich Dewey (who became a Professor of Economics at MIT) and Mary Cornelia Hopkins. He received his Harvard B.A. (cum laude) in 1908 then went on to MIT, receiving his second bachelor’s degree, this time in chemical engineering, in 1909. After MIT and until the start of WWI, he worked for the American and Tin Plate company and U.S. Steel.

CHARLES ALMY

Charles Almy was born in 1888 to the Cambridge judge Charles Almy and Mary Ann Cummings. After receiving his A.B. in chemical engineering from Harvard in 1908, he became a research assistant in applied chemistry at MIT. He received his degree in chemical engineering from MIT in 1910. Following graduation, he worked for the American Vulcanized Fibre Co. of Wilmington, Delaware, and the Virginia Red Oil Products Corporation in Baltimore. After establishing Dewey & Almy, he moved away the chemical engineering aspects of the company to become its sales manager. He was described as “a quiet young man with a subdued but absorbing enthusiasm for his business.”

THE DEWEY & ALMY CHEMICAL COMPANY

Their efforts began in a tin shack at 235 Harvey Street in North Cambridge and, literally, at Dewey’s mother’s kitchen stove at 2 Berkeley Street.

Presaging future concerns about the site, neighbors were worried about the possible stink of “rendering grease” and reclaimed rubber, as well as acid production and “similar offensive operations” on the site. (Cambridge Chronicle, 16 August 1919)

Dewey & Almy developed gas masks, synthetic rubber, and rubber-based products, as well as fishing line, latex sealants, plastic bags, and adhesives. During their first decade, the chief product was a water-based compound useful for sealing tin cans and affixing their labels:

Gold Seal Tin Paste: Advertisement from *Canning Age*, 1922

Later, recognizing the needs of the growing frozen foods industry, they developed latex films used for packaging grocery products. A 1939 Life Magazine featured a demonstration of “Cry-O-Vac,” their protective packaging for meats:

“Demonstration of Cryovac Latex Balloon,
Developed by Dewey and Almy Chemical Co. of Cambridge, Massachusetts”

Another invention was an adhesive for gluing cork to the inside of bottle caps. One of their biggest hits was “Grippt,” which they advertised as “One adhesive for every use.” Grippit “cannot wrinkle paper” and is “clean … everlasting.” Smears and excess product “are easily cleaned off with the fingers without soiling them” (Cambridge Sentinel 9 April 1921).

Other products included:

“Multibestos” railroad car brake linings. (Multibestos is a form of asbestos.)

Model train advertising Multibestos (image from eBay)

1943 Signal Corps, U. S. Army Balloon M-278A

U.S. Army Signal Corps balloon via Ehive

“Darex” meteorological balloons

And then, amid all the chemical dispersants, latex and rubber vulcanizing cement, and safe-food packaging, came “Thickit” for use in whipping cream!

Advertisement from *American Stationer And Office Management*, 1921

JERRY’S PIT

In 1942 Dewey & Almy purchased a lot immediately adjacent to Jerry’s Pit. Originally a 19th century clay pit for area brickworks (and probably named for the owner of the pit), the area had become a popular swimming hole. The following year the company donated $5,000 to the city to build bathhouses and toilets on the site, which it agreed to manage. This was no doubt in part to assuage community concerns over possible contaminants from the company. After the W.R. Grace Co. bought Dewey & Almy, these concerns eventually led to the closing of the swimming hole in 1961.

Jerry’s Pond, aka “Jerry’s Pit,” in the 1950s. Near Alewife. (CHC photo)

In 1944 Dewey & Almy received its second Army-Navy Production Award for meritorious services. Charles Almy noted, “This is a tribute to the men and women of our Cambridge plant…I am proud of their determined efforts.”

Preferred Stock of the Dewey and Almy Company dated 20 April 1945.

AFTERWARD

Dewey & Almy opened plants around the world, and the list of its inventions and products is long. In 1954 it was purchased by the W.R. Grace company, which expanded the site to include properties on Whittemore Avenue. After Grace emerged from bankruptcy in 2014, it spun off a separate company, GCP Applied Technologies, which now occupies the site.

During WWII, Bradley Dewey had become Federal Rubber Administrator. He received the medal of the Society of the Chemical Industry in 1944 and was awarded several honorary doctor degrees. He retired as president of Dewey & Almy in 1952 and became chair of the Board of Directors. In the mid-1950s, he formed the Bradley Container Corp., a joint venture with Olin Mathiesen for producing plastic food containers. He sold out to the American Can Company three years later. While in Cambridge he had served two terms on the Cambridge School Committee. He moved to Concord, New Hampshire, in 1968 and died there in 1974 at the age of 98.

Charles Almy died in 1954 at the age of 65. He had been a civic leader in Cambridge, on the Advisory Council of the Cambridge Civic Association, and a Trustee of the Foundation for Vision. He was a director of the Cambridge Trust Co; Vice President of the Cambridge Savings Bank; and President of the Corporation of the Brown & Nichols School, his alma mater. After his death, the Cambridge City Council passed a resolution “attesting to the inspiration and support which he brought to the public officials of Cambridge and to his contributions to the progress which the city has attained …”

Today’s post was written by CHC volunteer, Kathleen Fox.

SOURCES

Cambridge Library digital newspapers online

American Stationer and Office Management Vol. 88, 1921

Cambridge Sentinel 11 June 1921

Canning Age, Vol. 3 1922

Newspapers.com

Genealogybank.com