Join us tomorrow for an illustrated talk with Leslie Brunetta and Paula Paris and learn more about Cambridge’s Black Patriots and the Black Cantabrigians that lived and worked here in the years following the Revolutionary War.
Leslie Brunetta is a writer who has been a member of the Cambridge Black History Project since 2020. She stumbled into researching Cambridge Black history after discovering that Francis Prince Clary, activist and assistant to the first Harvard chemistry professor, had lived on her street in Mid Cambridge. She has published a number of profiles of historical Black figures in Cambridge Day and the Mount Auburn Cemetery website. She just published an essay at Commonplace about a well-known Black author’s formidable widow employed by William Dean Howells as a housekeeper on Sacramento St.
Paula Paris is a lifelong resident of West Cambridge. She is a member of First Church in Cambridge and is active in many community organizations including the Cambridge Historical Commission and the Cambridge Black History Project. She is Deputy Director of the educational non-profit JFY NetWorks, which prepares underserved youth for college and the workplace. Learn more about First Church’s racial justice work online here.
Due to weather, this event has been postponed to Sunday February 23, 2025 | 2-4pm
The Cambridge Museum of History & Culture invites you to experienceGrace: The History of Black Churches in Cambridge, an exhibition honoring Black History Month that shall be on display throughout February at the Kendall Public Lobby. Throughout this nation’s history, Black Churches have been a cornerstone of community, culture, and resilience, and this has certainly been the case in Cambridge. Black Churches have played an essential role not only in the spiritual lives of their congregants, but also serving as incubators for social justice, education, and community building. Gracestrives to illuminate part of the rich history and contributions by highlighting just some of these enduring institutions, focusing on their collective, enduring legacy in our community. By showcasing the history of these important institutions, Grace aims to foster a deeper understanding of their significance in Cambridge’s past, present, and future.
The Grace Exhibitis made possible by the generous work of community curators: Chandra Salvi Harrington, Deacon Cheryl Maynard, Dr. Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Dr. Janie Ward, Dr. Kris Manjapra, Lynette Riley-Belle, Patricia Weems, Reverend Dr. Ellis I. Washington, Reverend Lorraine Thornhill, Sister Danita Callender, and Valerie Beaudrault, in fellowship with church congregations across the city. We would like to thank our generous sponsors for the tremendous support and incredible platform to connect, share, and learn: BXP, Cambridge Arts, The Cambridge Historical Commission, The Cambridge Redevelopment Authority, The Office of Mayor E. Denise Simmons, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
For more information about The Cambridge Museum of History & Culture, please their website at www.cambridgehistorymuseum.com or connect with them by phone at (617) 349-4327.
Join Black History in Action for Cambridgeport (BHAC) this Sunday, February 9th, for a panel discussion titled “In our Midst: The Grace of the Black Church”
Panelists include: ⭐ Mayor Denise Simmons, Moderator ⭐ Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Harvard Divinity School ⭐ Rev. Jeffrey Brown, Twelfth Baptist in Roxbury ⭐ Rev. Irene Monroe, Theologian, Syndicated Columnist
The Black Church names myriad places, but it also names an idea and paradigm of endurance, renewal, liberation, and grassroots community organizing.
At historic St. Augustine’s African Orthodox Church, learn from panelists about the places and the ideas that define the ongoing grace of the Black churches in our midst. This panel is presented in conjunction with the exhibition “Grace: The History of Black Churches in Cambridge” at The Kendall Public Lobby this February—more details on these events at the links below:
Perhaps not as well-known as other prominent members of the Black community in Cambridge in the 19th century is Reverend Henry Buckner (c.1832 Virginia – 1893 Worcester, Mass). Reverend Buckner founded what became the first African American church in Cambridge. It all began in 1870 when he and a group of his like-minded friends met for prayer in his living room at #32 Hastings Street. In 1873, the group was associated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and was subsequently known as the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church. Note that the church website lists it as St. Paul Church—singular—though it is inevitably referred to as plural: St. Paul’s.
Buckner was born in Virginia around 1830. Given the date and location of his birth, it is likely that Buckner was born into enslavement. And, given his name, it is possible that the Buckner family of Virginia were Henry’s enslavers. Henry’s wife, Georgiana Watters, was also born in Virginia around 1830. Her death was noted in the Cambridge Press on February 23, 1889. Five months later, Buckner married Mary P. Mingo (b. 1844 in Virginia). This was both Henry and Mary’s second marriage. Their marriage document lists Henry’s mother as Ann Killis; Mary’ Mingo’s parents were Isaac and Sarah Watters.
Henry Buckner first appears in Cambridge in the 1870 Census, listing him as a blacksmith living in a predominately Black neighborhood (street unnamed). The value of his real estate was an impressive $2000—valued around $40,000 in today’s currency. Henry was not listed in the 1869 Cambridge Directory. The 1872 Directory lists him living at #32R Hastings Street, which ran between Moore St and Portland St in East Cambridge. His occupation was listed as “laborer” until 1892 when he was listed as “Rev. Henry Buckner.”
City Directory 1879
After 1893, Cambridge changed its street numbering system, and the Buckner’s home was henceforth listed as #70. You can see #70 on the map below just a few doors down from the St. Paul A.M.E. at the corner of Hastings and Portland Streets. Hastings St was closed by 1960, and today the Draper Labs garage stands on church’s former site.
Atlas of the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts by G.W. Bromley and Co., 1894 (detail)
In 1900, the current pastor of the Church, Rev. W. H. Burrell, wrote an article for the Cambridge Chronicleabout the founding of St. Paul A.M.E.
Cambridge Chronicle February 3, 1900
The article continues:
“The little society rapidly grew to such proportions that it was soon found necessary to secure a more commodious place of worship, and after selecting a suitable location, leased of Mr. James C. Davis (who afterward became a staunch friend of this struggling society) the lot of land corner Portland and Hastings streets, on which the church building now stands, and erected the St. Paul’s A. M. E. church, which for twenty-four years, has stood battling for the right, and which for many years was the only place of worship of the colored people in the city of Cambridge…”
Exterior view of Wood Memorial Church, later St Paul A.M.E., at 50 Portland St (later 98 Portland), no date (CHC collections)
In 1899, Pastor Burrell had begun a remodeling drive. The article concluded with a touching appeal for funds:
In 1882, Buckner represented his church at the first meeting of “colored temperance organizations of Cambridge and Boston” and was named temporary chairman of the group:
Boston Globe August 23, 1882
Of course, Buckner regularly attended the New England Conference of the A.M.E. Church at Newport, Worcester and other locations. In 1890, at the Conference in Worcester, Mass, Buckner’s transfer to Westfield, Mass was announced. The Pittsfield papers noted that Buckner had served there in 1884 and 1885, noting that in January of 1885 he was called back to Cambridge “on account of his wife’s sickness.”
The June 17, 1890 edition of the Boston Globe noted that Buckner was again transferred to Westfield. Several days earlier, on June 14, he had been referred to as a “supernumerary” in the Worcester Daily Spy. The following year, in June of 1891, he opened the devotional exercises at the morning session of the A.M.E. conference in Newport, Rhode Island (Boston Globe, June 11, 1891).
View of Wood Memorial Church at 31 Austin St (now Bishop Allen Drive) as published in Cambridge Illustrated, ca. 1889-1893
It is difficult to locate any information about Rev. Buckner after 1891. A clue as to his death may be seen in the 1893 City Directory under his last name. The only Buckner listed is “Buckner Henry Mrs house 70 Hastings.” Women were generally listed this way only after their husbands were deceased. Meanwhile, the church Henry had founded moved to the corner of Columbia Ave and Austin St in Cambridge after the congregation outgrew their former building at the corner of Portland and Hastings Street. In 1920, the church purchased the Wood Memorial Church on Austin Street (now Bishop Allen Drive).
Postcard showing Wood Memorial Church c. 1910. (CHC collections)
In 1974, Austin Street was renamed Bishop Allen Drive, after the founder of the A.M.E. Church in America. A little over two centuries earlier, in 1784, Richard Allen had founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
Richard Allen: Image Encyclopedia Britannica
Also in 1974, St. Paul A.M.E. opened the Henry Buckner School at 85 Bishop Allen Drive with the mission to provide care for toddlers, pre-school learning, and kindergarten. So, though we don’t know exactly when the Rev. Henry Buckner passed on, his memory lives on forever in this school.
The St Paul A.M.E. Church at 37 Bishop Allen Drive as photographed by Christopher Hail ca. 1985.
Today’s post was written by Kathleen M. Fox
SOURCES
Cambridge Public Library Newspapers and City Directories
The Arts and Crafts Movement developed in England in the 1860s in response to the increasing industrialization of production. Factories were turning out everything from furniture and fabric to architectural elements and selling all cheaply. Advocates of the movement believed that these mass-produced items lacked style, beauty, and individuality and desired a return to the unique, high-quality goods made by artisans and artists using traditional methods.
Arts and Crafts ideals migrated to America beginning in the 1880s. In 1897, the first US exhibition of contemporary crafts was organized by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and sparked a design reform movement in the United States. Craftspeople, consumers, and manufacturers realized the aesthetic and technical potential of the applied arts. Architects, artists, and intellectuals were influenced by their studies of old English architecture and design; Gothic Revival and Tudor Revival buildings proliferated in Cambridge and across the country.
The brothers Bertram and Harry Goodhue were early practitioners of medieval Gothic design and helped transform American architecture and art for decades to come.
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue
Bertram Goodhue, undated. Courtesy of Panama-California Exposition Digital Archive.
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (1869-1924) was born in Pomfret, Connecticut, to Charles Wells Goodhue and his second wife, Helen Grosvenor Eldredge. Bertram attended the New Haven Collegiate and Commercial Institute. He became enamored of the Gothic-style buildings on Yale’s nearby campus. He wanted to become an architect himself but could not afford university, so in lieu of formal training, at sixteen years old he moved to Manhattan to apprentice at the architectural firm of Renwick, Aspinwall and Russell. He later relocated to Boston, where he joined other young, artistic intellectuals to found Boston’s Society of Arts and Crafts. Through this group Goodhue met Ralph Adams Cram; the two men would be business partners for almost twenty-five years. In 1891, they founded the architectural firm of Cram, Wentworth and Goodhue (renamed Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson in 1898 after Wentworth’s death) and became proponents of Neo-Gothic architecture, accepting commissions from significant ecclesiastical, academic, and institutional clients. Their 1902 design of the United States Military Academy at West Point was a major milestone in the firm’s career.
Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (left) and Ralph Adams Cram (center) in their Boston architectural studio with a client (and a dog). Courtesy of Cram & Ferguson archives.
Soon after, the company opened an office in New York where Goodhue would preside, leaving Cram to operate in Boston. At first, the men worked as a productive team, complementing each other’s strengths; later they began to compete, sometimes submitting independent proposals for the same commission. The partnership ended when Cram was selected as the architect of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan– on Goodhue’s supposed turf. When Goodhue left to begin his own practice in 1914, Cram had already created his dreamed-of Gothic Revival commission at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, and continued to work in the Gothic style mode for the rest of his career. Goodhue branched out from the Gothic mode which gained him such prominence, and designed notable Byzantine and Spanish Revival buildings all over the country. He died in 1924 at the age of fifty-four and at his request was interred in a wall vault at the Church of the Intercession, the building he considered his finest design. The centerpiece of the monument is a life-size effigy of Goodhue in the manner of those preserved in medieval English country churches.
Church of the Intercession, designed by Bertram Goodhue, the building he considered his finest design. Image c.1915 by Wurst Brothers.Bertram Goodhue Tomb in the Church of the Intercession, Image by Samuel H. Gottscho.
Harry Eldredge Goodhue
Harry Eldredge Goodhue (1873-1918), Bertram’s younger brother, was born in Pomfret, Connecticut, and attended the Holderness School in Plymouth, New Hampshire. In 1892, at nineteen, he joined the Boston Art Students’ Association and became an advocate for and expert in traditional stained glassmaking processes. Harry began designing stained glass for his brother’s firm and was sent to Europe to study, draw, and collect medieval stained glass. In 1900, Bertram Goodhue’s firm was chosen as the architect of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Newport, Rhode Island; in 1902, Harry began designing their Brown Memorial Window, his first major commission. The window was the first in America to be made of antique glass in accordance with techniques refined in thirteenth-century Europe. From this, Harry became known as one of only three stained glass artisans then reviving the art of medieval glassmaking.
Harry Goodhue opened his own shop at 23 Church Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, in 1903, soon after completing the memorial window. He was sought-after by church people and architects who were intrigued by the medieval quality of his translucent and richly colored hand-blown stained glass and preferred it to the opaque opalescent glass that was popular at the time. Opalescent stained glass was developed in the late nineteenth century by John La Farge and Louis C. Tiffany and presents a milky, streaky, and iridescent appearance. In 1903 Harry wrote a piece for the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts’ monthly publication, Handicraft, criticizing the opalescent “American” style as not really stained glass, for it is absolutely different from what has been understood by the term.” In a subsequent issue, the artist Sarah Wyman Whitman (featured previously on our blog) wrote in opposition to Goodhue’s opinion and praised the experimentations of La Farge and Tiffany in the development of the opalescent/American method and claimed that academics and experts varied in their preference.
Circa 1930 image of 23 Church Street with added fourth floor for Goodhue studio. Cambridge Historical Commission Photograph.
With additional positive press and commissions from churches and homeowners, Goodhue outgrew his studio on Church Street. When asked, the property owner obliged him by adding an entire floor to the building. The addition was completed in 1907, and Goodhue expanded his company. However, by 1916, Harry’s business was in decline, and he closed his Cambridge shop. 23 Church street would later be heavily altered in 1936 when the top three floors were removed and the building redesigned in the Art Deco style we see today.
23 Church Street (2019). CHC staff photo.
After closing his Cambridge shop, Harry became affiliated with Vaughan & O’Neill & Co. that had a studio on Sudbury Street. Harry’s brother Bertram felt that this company was beneath his brother and refused to order windows from them. Between 1903 and his death in 1918, Goodhue created antique stained glass windows for more than seventy buildings in twenty-one states and Canada. During fifteen plus years of perfecting his craft, he trained dozens of apprentices, including his wife, Mary, and their eldest son, Harry.
Mary Louise (Wright) Goodhue (1876-1965) was born in Cincinnati to Juliet and Daniel T. Wright. Her father was a judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, and her brother, Daniel, held an Associate Justice seat on the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. Mary married Harry Goodhue in 1904 and had three sons, Harry, Daniel, and William. The couple settled in Cambridge and first resided on Buckingham Place, soon after, relocating to a rental on Martin Street. By 1908 the family had bought a house lot on Fayerweather Street and hired the architectural firm of Newhall and Blevins to design an Arts and Crafts style house. Mary taught singing and violin at her home to young students and assisted her husband in his growing stained glass company.
Depiction of Mary Louise Goodhue, 1920. Boston Globe clipping.
Mrs. Goodhue was the president of the Cambridge Musical Club, as well as a suffragist. When Harry died in 1918, she took over the stained glass company; she fulfilled commissions and taught their eldest son the art of making antique glass. In a 1920 Boston Globe article, Mary explained her ability to take over the family business so quickly. “Having worked so much with my husband, it comes easy for me to carry on the business. I have hundreds of his designs to guide me and find little trouble in selecting portions of them for the work I get. I know all about his ideals and became so impregnated with his imagination and genius that I love the work, even as did he.” She continued, “when he [Harry] died, I simply had to take up the practical part of the work, but as I was well taught in the artistic part, I found no trouble in mastering the business part.” The article listed Mary as the only female, stained glass maker in America and highlighted her winning proposal for a memorial window to be placed in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in celebration of the Massachusetts Bay Tercentenary. She had bested dozens of male artists to win the commission.
Mary Goodhue is credited with stained glass windows in churches in the Boston area and as far as Providence and Detroit. Her memorial windows at Pilgrim Hall and the First Parish Church of Brookline are her most notable. When Harry, the oldest, came of age, he took up the family business, and Mary returned to her other passion, music. In 1935 she wrote “Stagefright and its Cure“, to help musicians and public speakers understand the psychological reasons for stage fright and ways to overcome it. Mary lived at the family home on Fayerweather Street until her mid-80s. After the Great Depression, when her children had left home, she converted the single-family to a duplex and rented out one side for income. She died in Braintree, Massachusetts, at eighty-eight years old.
56 Fayerweather Street, built in 1914 for Harry and Mary Goodhue. CHC photo 11-2021.
Harry “Wright Goodhue
Harry Wright Goodhue (1905-1931) closely followed his father’s footsteps in medieval stained glass artistry, but in order to distinguish himself from his father, he went by Wright Goodhue, his middle and mother’s maiden name. Growing up in Cambridge, Wright spent most of his free time in his father’s studio, learning how to make stained glass windows the old way. Wright’s “studio” was described in a newspaper account published when he was 11 years old. “In a corner of the roomy studio where his father works, young Harry set up his easel and his drawing board. Here he spends long hours depicting the deeds of the Round Table knights, the battles of biblical heroes…”
He attended the Russell School before attending the Cambridge Latin School, leaving after two years. Instead of a conventional education, Wright attended evening classes at the Boston Normal Art School and worked as a draftsman at the architectural firm of Allen & Collins during the day at just 16 years old.
His first two professional projects were executed in 1921 at just sixteen years old. He designed the ornamental details for the wooden doors at Lindsey Memorial Chapel (an addition designed by Allen & Collens to Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Newbury Street, Boston, and he designed his first stained glass window – the chancel window for his uncle Bertram’s First Cong. Church, Montclair, New Jersey. Soon after, while working as a draftsman under Allen & Collens, Wright was asked to design 36 stained glass medallions for the Teachers’ College at Columbia University, a commission the practice was working on. This commission allowed Wright and his mother to purchase a studio space in Boston, when Wright was just eighteen.
Soon after, when his employer received the contract to design the Second Universalist Church (now St. Clement Eucharistic Shrine) in Boston, he was asked to provide windows for the Gothic style building. Together with his mother, the artist, in his teens, furnished designs and made the windows. Soon after, stained glass commissions came in rapidly. Window commissions overwhelmed the small operation included an 18-foot rose window for the Sacred Heart Church in Jersey City. Wright completed three commissions in Cambridge. He designed six circular clerestory windows as part of Allen & Collens’ 1923 restoration of Bigelow Chapel at Mount Auburn Cemetery, the Josephine Peabody Marks window for Radcliffe College, and the Martha and Lazarus Window at St. James Church in North Cambridge. Wright began to regret his lack of formal education, and even as his workload grew, he began to study for the entrance exam for admission to Harvard. He was admitted to Harvard in 1927 at the age of 22. Spread thin between his work and schooling, he left at the end of two years, without a degree.
1924 passport application photo of Wright Goodhue, then 19 years old.
As his prominence in the field grew, the young man became consumed with work. His career hit a crescendo when Allen & Collens were selected to collaborate on the design of the 22-story Riverside Church in Manhattan, with Wright asked to design and make some of the windows for the massive edifice. The Riverside Church was modeled after the 13th Century Gothic cathedral in Chartres, France, a building Wright understood well from his earlier trip to Chartres and other medieval towns and cities in Europe. Wright’s 1924 passport application explained he would be visiting France and England to “study”. This trip was possibly inspired by the Riverside Church commission and from his father’s writings about the Chartres Cathedral and it’s renowned 12th-century stained glass windows.
Clipping of Wright Goodhue with his mother, Mary Louise Goodhue, designing the Mercy window for Riverside Church, NY. Photo courtesy of Riverside Church Archives.
In 1930, Wright married Cornelia Evans, an academic and writer, who studied at Lasell Seminary for Young Women and Wellesley College, both in Massachusetts, and later Columbia University, New York City. The couple resided in Greenwich Village. Tragically, in 1931 just one month after his 26th birthday, Wright Goodhue died by suicide at a hotel in Providence. He was buried in the family plot in the Old North Cemetery in Pomfret, Connecticut. After his death, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, featured his work in an exhibition. His mother also donated some of his works to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In his 1936 autobiography, Ralph Adams Cram, an architect who worked with Wright on numerous commissions, recalled Wright’s “great, unhappy, and unique genius”. Cram reminisced about Wright’s genius in a 1932 piece in Stained Glass Magazine, where he mentioned Wright’s final completed piece, a wood sculpture “Madonna and Child”. Cram writes, “There is something mystical about this last work of his which, in a way, links it with the shadow that came heavily and increasingly upon him during the last years of his life…”
Photograph of Wright’s final completed work, “Madonna and Child”. From Stained Glass Magazine 09-1932.1929 photograph of Wright Goodhue, less than two years before his death. Photo courtesy of Albert M. Tannler.
The North Cambridge Community Church was a predominantly Black church and community center located at 161-171 Walden Street from 1929/1930 until its demolition in 1949. It was a significant part of Cambridge’s Black community during the early-and-mid-twentieth century.
Circa 1930, churchgoers at the entrance of the new church building on Walden Street. Pictured: Cordelia (Weems) Wilson, Mrs. William L. Crawford, Marie Weems Davis.
The story of the church begins with Samuel O. Weems and his wife, Gertrude Howard. Both Weems and Howard graduated with teaching degrees from Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia in 1909. After marrying in 1910, the couple settled on a farm in Poughkeepsie, New York, where their first two children were born. Weems found an ad in the paper for the New Church Theological School (Swedenborgianism) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and after writing to the school’s president, he was encouraged to join the school.
Weems and his family moved to Cambridge by 1913, and in 1916 Weems graduated from the school and became the first African American to be ordained as a reverend into the Swedenborgian Church. That year, along with friends and a fellow Hamptonian, William L. Crawford, Weems founded the North Cambridge Community Church in his family’s home at 28 Hubbard Avenue (no longer extant).
Reverend Samuel O. Weems and Gertrude Howard Weems with their first two children, Cordelia and Marie, leaving 75D Prentiss Street for North Cambridge, ca. 1915.
The North Cambridge Community Church was part of a New Church Mission and was created in line with Weems’ following of Swedenborg philosophy: the church was open to anyone, nonsectarian, and created strong religious and social service programs for the community. By the early twentieth century, Black churches were already established in the Central Square area, but in North Cambridge, Weems’ church was the only local place where Black people could freely worship, and hosted the only social service agency in the area for the Black community.
The church was immediately successful and was especially popular with families wishing to send their children to Sunday School and summer classes. By 1927, inadequate space and an encroaching development forced the family and church to move out of their house. The Weems family moved to 14 Hubbard Avenue, and the church purchased an empty plot of land around 161-171 Walden Street (across from Raymond Park). They contracted the firm of Frohman, Robb and Little to design a new building with a chapel, recreational hall and vocational shop.
North Cambridge Community Church, 1930 Bromley Atlas.
Top and bottom images, article from the Boston Evening Transcript, February 19, 1927. Top: proposed church building; Bottom: Image of Reverend Weems working in the machine shop of the Boston and Maine Railroad. Credit: Marie Davis.
In 1930, following a fundraising campaign (including the above article), two stories of the proposed new church were built. It featured a Neo-Georgian triangular-shaped entrance leading downstairs into the interior; this lower level housed an auditorium that could seat 300 people and a large stage that accommodated theatrical and musical productions. The church hosted many musicians and speakers, such as North Pole explorer Matthew Henson; Florence Buck, a Unitarian minister; and John Orth, then the only living student of Franz Listz.
Wedding party and guests coming out of the church, 171 Walden Street, June 6, 1937. Credit: Marie Davis.
Although the full proposed church building was never constructed, the church’s congregation thrived. It hosted two church services each Sunday and year-round programs and activities, many centered around educating local youth: Sunday school, summer school, the Troop 9 Boy Scouts of America, Camp Fire for girls, a church garden, and vocational classes on sewing, printing, music, gardening, and woodworking.
Scouts and Vacation Bible School at summer closing exercises outside of the church building, 1940. Credit: Marie Davis.
Reverend Weems was one of the leaders in the local civil rights movement. In the 1930s, Weems was vocal in speaking out against the treatment of the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American boys who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931. Weems and his family frequently attended civil rights rallies and meetings, and brought in speakers to the church to discuss peace and current events.
Cambridge Tribune, December 6, 1935
According to the Weems’ daughter, Marie Davis, the congregation had a positive relationship with the neighborhood. One particular exception involved the actions of a hostile neighbor: on warm days, when the church’s front door was open and Reverend Weems’ voice could be heard outside, the neighbor would call the police on the church. According to Marie Davis, the police would come downstairs to the sanctuary and stand there while her father continued preaching.
Harvest celebration, 1940. Credit: Marie Davis.
Beginning in 1946 the congregation began to break up, and in 1949 the building was demolished by the Cambridge Housing Authority for the Lincoln Way veterans housing development (built 1950). Reverend and Gertrude Weems and several of their seven children remained active in community and religious organizations.
Former site of North Cambridge Community Church, white building (center).
Marie Davis’s recollections of the church and Black spiritual life in Cambridge can be read in “In Our Own Words: Stories of North Cambridge, 1900-1960, as told to Sarah Boyer” (1997).
The following is an excerpt from Swedenborg Chapel Planning Study by Mark Careaga, AIA.
View of the Chapel from Kirkland Street, near the Quincy Street intersection. CHC Collection.
The Cambridge Society of the New Jerusalem – the formal name of the congregation that worships at Swedenborg Chapel – was formed in 1888. The following year, the New Church Theological School purchased the Treadwell-Sparks house at 48 Quincy Street, directly south of the site where the chapel would later be built in 1901. Named for Jared Sparks, professor of ancient and modern history and president of Harvard University (1849-53), the Treadwell-Sparks house would become the home for the theological school for nearly 70 years. Ten years after the school moved into Sparks House, planning commenced for the chapel, which would serve both the congregation and the school.(26)
Original exterior details of the Chapel for the New Church Theological School by Warren, Smith and Biscoe Architects, ca. 1901. Cambridge Society of the New Jerusalem Archives.
Drawing of the Chapel by the architect, ca. 1900. CHC Collection.
The chapel’s architect was Herbert Langford Warren (1857-1917), a prominent Boston architect among whose many accomplishments include being a founder and president of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston. He was also the first “dean of the School of Architecture at Harvard, having taught there continuously since offering the first course in architecture in 1893.”(27) Warren was a lifelong practicing Swedenborgian, influenced by his father’s commitment to the faith. As an architect, Warren had distinct preferences for English styles,(29) which may stem from his roots (he was born, reared, and educated in Manchester, England (30), from Swedenborgianism’s roots (the church was founded in England in 1787 by devotees of Emanuel Swedenborg’s distinctive Christian theology (31), or both. The chapel’s design reflects the English gothic style consistent with Warren’s deeply felt affection for the medieval English parish church, which he expressed to his students in his lectures.
Below is a description of the Chapel published by the Cambridge Society of the New Jerusalem.
View of Sparks House to the right of the Chapel, later moved to Kirkland Street. Undated photograph, CHC Collection.
In the 1960s, the school decided to relocate to Newton, Massachusetts and sold the Sparks House property to Harvard. Given the historical significance of the house, Harvard relocated it a short distance away on Kirkland Street, where it remains today as the home for the minister of Harvard Memorial Church. As Robert Kiven observed in 1968, this was in fact the second time that Sparks House had been moved.(32) As City of Cambridge preservation planner Sally Zimmerman notes, “in 1901, the house was turned 90 degrees and moved south on its lot to make room for the chapel’s construction.”(33)
The New Church Theological School’s establishment at Sparks House marked the beginning of a century-long transformation of Quincy Street. Starting in the 1840s, Quincy Street began to unseat “Professor’s Row” (Kirkland Street) “as a prime residential location for those connected to [Harvard College], and it remained so up to the end of the nineteenth century, as a cosmopolitan group of noted academics settled along the street’s length.”(34) This can be seen in the 1865 map below, which shows five faculty houses on the west side of Quincy Street, in Harvard Yard, eventually replaced by expansion of academic facilities – in particular, Robinson Hall, Sever Hall, and Emerson Hall.
Map of Cambridge from 1865 showing faculty housing on Quincy Street. The Chapel would be built where “Prof Lovering” is located, just below “Kirkland St.” City of Cambridge GIS.
Map from 1916 showing the Church of the New Jerusalem, now known as the Swedenborg Chapel. Bromley 1916 atlas, CHC Collection.
The transformation began with the Fogg Museum, designed by architects Coolidge, Shepley, Bullfinch, and Abbott of Boston and built in 1927, taking over 28-36 Quincy Street. In 1963, the Le Corbusier-designed Carpenter Center was completed, with its iconic ramp structurally integrated with a basement library book-stacks facility that was added to the back of the Fogg in 1961 to expand the Fine Arts Library.(35) In 1963, the Minoru Yamasaki-designed William James Hall was completed to house Harvard’s Department of Psychology, which William James was instrumental in establishing.(36) James’ father, Henry James, Sr., was deeply influenced by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg.(37) Six years later work began at 48 Quincy Street to construct Gund Hall for the Harvard Graduate School of Design (“GSD”), bringing the school that Herbert Langford Warren had founded in the late 1800s directly next door to the chapel he designed for his fellow Swedenborgians and affiliated theological school. Lastly, the Sackler Museum was constructed in 1985, replacing the 1951 Allston Burr Lecture Hall,(38) an outdated science building that had supplanted two smaller residential buildings for Harvard College.
View of lancet window with hand carved detailing. Photo courtesy of M. Careaga.
By the time it relocated to Newton in the 1960s, the New Church Theological School had changed its name to the Swedenborg School of Religion (SSR), and the school constructed an annex on the north side of the chapel, facing Kirkland Street. Designed by Cambridge architect Arthur Brooks, it provided fellowship space and other ancillary functions to support the Cambridge Society congregation, which continued to hold services at the chapel after the school’s departure. By the late 1990s, SSR announced its intentions to sell the chapel property to raise much-needed capital to support its operations. Concerned about the potential loss of a significant work of architecture, the local community and the Cambridge Historical Commission lobbied successfully to obtain City of Cambridge landmark status for the chapel in 1999, paving the way for the Massachusetts New Church Union and the Cambridge Society of the New Jerusalem to purchase the property from SSR in 2001. The chapel site is the only parcel of land that the university does not own on the city block bounded by Quincy Street, Kirkland Street, Sumner Road, and Cambridge Street. Regardless of its status as private property separate from the university, the chapel and its land are intimately connected to Harvard, woven into the physical fabric of the university’s campus as well as through the intersecting histories of Harvard University and the Cambridge Society of the New Jerusalem.
View of reredos and alter. Photo courtesy of M. Careaga.
Today, along with its own congregation, the Swedenborg Chapel hosts two other worshipping communities as well as a monthly Taize candlelight service.
Mark Careaga is Principal and Founder of Mark Careaga Architect LLC, in Cambridge MA. He can be found online at http://www.mcarq.co and on Twitter and Instagram @mcarqco
References
26. Maureen Meister, Architecture and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Boston: Harvard’s H. Langford Warren (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2003), 110.
27. Meister, 1.
28. Meister, 7-8.
29. cf. Meister, 5, 110.
30. Meister, 8.
31. Meister, 8.
32. Robert H. Kiven, “Letter from the Editor,” The Messenger 188, no.10 (October 1968): 142-143.
34. Sally Zimmerman, “Church of the New Jerusalem / Swedenborg Chapel, 50 Quincy Street, Landmark Designation Study Report,” prepared for the Cambridge Historical Commission, March 5, 1999, 8. This report can be accessed online at: https://www.cambridgema.gov/~/media/Files/historicalcommission/pdf/Landmark_reports/lm_quincy_50.pdf.
35. Zimmerman, “Landmark Designation Study Report,” 8.
36. Natalie Moravek, “William James Hall,” in “William James’ Cambridge,” website designed and hosted by the Cambridge Historical Society, accessed February 7, 2019, https://cambridgehistory.org/james/James 5.html.
37. “Famous Swedenborgians,” part of the website of the Swedenborgian Church of North America, accessed February 7, 2019, https://swedenborg.org/famous-swedenborgians/henry-james-sr/. The web page cites the following source: Alfred Halbegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York: Frrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).
38. Susan E. Maycock and Charles M. Sullivan, Building Old Cambridge: Architecture and Development (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2016), 817. Allston Burr was designed by architect Jean-Paul Carlihan of Coolidge, Shepley, Bullfinch & Abbott.
Located at 239 Harvard Street in The Port neighborhood, the St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church (originally the Harvard Street Methodist Episcopal Church) has stood since before the American Civil War and has been a neighborhood landmark ever since.
239 Harvard Street, photo taken 07-2019.
Its story began when group of Methodists first congregated in 1835 with the hopes of gathering funds for their own place of worship. In 1843, a wooden structure was dedicated on the present site. The building was enlarged in 1851, only to be destroyed by fire in 1857. A second church was then built by Boston architect Harvey Graves. Suffering the same fate as the first, the wooden church burned to the ground three years later. Undeterred and learning their lesson, the church then hired Graves again to design a “fire-proof brick structure”. The cornerstone was laid in 1861 and the building was dedicated in 1862, this was the last church built in Cambridge before the Civil War.
1873 Atlas map showing church location.
Circa 1870s lantern-slide showing original church design.
The handsome brick church was built with the symmetrical, volumetric treatment of a Greek temple with the architectural details of Romanesque and Gothic treatments. The front walls project outward at the middle to form an entrance tower, which is divided by brick string courses into a deeply recessed entrance. Above, the church had a massive bell-tower with large clocks on all four sides. The tower was capped with a tasteful dome standing approximately 130 feet above the street.
Side view postcard image. Postcard part of CHC Postcard Collection.
Colorized postcard image. Postcard part of CHC Postcard Collection.
By 1910, the tower was turning heads not for its beauty, but as it would sway back and forth with the wind, all above nearby playgrounds and pedestrians below. In 1914, the trustees of the church decided that the best thing to do would be to take the steeple down. The removal of the steeple necessitated the removal of the old clock, that for so many years kept the people in that section of the city posted on the time of day, as it was the only public clock within sight of homes in that vicinity. The tower that for just over 50 years and had rung out notes of joy on holidays such as Christmas and the Fourth of July and on other days, slow and solemn tones as with the death of Lincoln, was demolished.
1970 photo of church taken as part of CHC Architectural Survey.
In 1941, the Harvard Street Methodist Church merged with Epworth Methodist, forming the Harvard-Epworth Methodist Church, which is located at 1555 Mass. Ave. That same year, St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, formerly located at 211 Columbia Street, moved in. According to the “Historical Sketch of St. Bartholomew’s Protestant Episcopal Church of Cambridge”, prepared for the WPA Survey of State and Local Historical Records in 1936.
[The Church] “organized by the St. Andrew’s Association, an original group of seventeen Negroes who resented the segregation of Negro children in the Sunday School classes at St. Peter’s Church. Under the leadership of Mr. John S. Brown, the association held weekly meetings in the homes of various members for three months prior to the organization of the church. After the matter of segregation had been brought to the attention of Bishop Lawrence (William), who did not favor a separate church for negroes, he suggested that Mr. Brown and his people share worship with a small congregation of white people who were then worshipping at St. Bartholomew’s on Columbia Street. A group of forty negro worshippers marched into the church one Sunday morning, coming back every week with more and more members. The Bishop then advised turning the church over to the negro congregation with a white rector as a pastor. The members informed the Bishop that they desired a leader of their own race to represent them. In 1908, Rev. George Alexander McGuire, a native of Antigua, became the first settled pastor of the congregation”.
The church is still home to St. Bartholomew’s and it is an active congregation.
Sources:
Cambridge Chronicle Archives.
Historical Sketch of St. Bartholomew’s Protestant Episcopal Church of Cambridge
Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge, Volume 3: Cambridgeport, 1971.
View of chapel from the street with bell tower in the back
Located along Memorial Drive across from the Charles River is the Society of Saint John the Evangelist monastery and chapel designed by Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942). Completed in 1936, the complex includes a monastery with a two-tiered bell tower, a chapel, and a guest house. A proponent of Gothic Revival and Collegiate Gothic architecture, Cram was inspired by Gothic architecture in England and furthered those ideas in his designs of numerous churches in the U.S., including St. John the Divine in New York, as well as libraries and academic buildings. Isabella Stewart Gardner, the great philanthropist and patron of the arts in Boston, helped select the site and provided financial support for the purchase of the property.
View of courtyard and brick arcade
Dedicated to St. Mary and St. John, the chapel’s exterior is constructed of seam-face granite block with buff limestone trim, and an arcaded brick cloister supporting the stucco monastery.
Plan of the chapel published in Architectural Record, June 1941
The interior features Indiana limestone pillars and arches, marble floors in the choir and sanctuary, green slate floor in the ante-chapel, and stained glass windows designed by Charles J. Connick. The trussed roof beams were originally part of a wooden bridge over the Mystic River that was removed at the same time the chapel was being built. Cram’s meticulous attention to detail extended to the design of the crucifix and candlesticks for the high altar.
View of Chapel interior with slate floor in foreground, photo by C. Ripman and L. Sturm
View of limestone arches and stained glass windows, photo by C. Ripman and L. Sturm
The chapel is open to the public for prayer services, and the monastery hosts retreats.
View of stained glass windows including the rose window above which depicts heaven
On Saturday October 27th at 1:30pm, the Cambridgeport Neighborhood Association will lead a walking tour of the 12 religious buildings nestled into the neighborhood of Cambridgeport. The tour will meet at the intersection of Magazine Street and Green Street (at the area in front of the First Baptist Church) at 1:30pm and proceed from there, lasting about 2 hours. The event is co-sponsored by the Cambridge Historical Commission and the Cambridge Peace Commission, as well as C-port’s own Gallery 263.
The tour will end at the gallery (263 Pearl St, Cambridge MA) for some refreshments and an exhibition of architectural drawings of these buildings. During the tour, we will have the privilege of going inside some of these buildings, and we will be joined by representatives from several of the churches along the way. For questions about accessibility or to request accommodations please contact GABE@MIT.EDU
