In the late 1990s, Ronald R. Rindge donated a collection of materials that had belonged to his grandfather, the philanthropist Frederick Hastings Rindge (1857-1905). Earlier this month, Frederick Hastings Rindge’s great-great-granddaughter, Melissa Rindge, came to visit the commission. CHC Executive Director Charles Sullivan showed Melissa a selection of Rindge items. This collection is comprised of materials relating to the Rindge family’s business interests in New England and Frederick Hastings Rindge’s donations to the city of Cambridge, including the Cambridge Public Library (1887), Cambridge Manual Training School (1888), and City Hall (1889).
Charlie showing Melissa the Cambridge Manual Training School Yearbook from the class of 1897.
Born to a wealthy textile merchant family in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 21, 1857, Frederick Hastings Ridge grew up to become a successful businessman. Rindge was privately tutored before continuing his education at Harvard. The passing of his parents in the late 1880s left him with an inherited estate of approximately 2 million dollars.
Portrait of Frederick Hastings Rindge from his book Happy Days in Southern California.
The Cambridge Historical Commission is proud to house the Frederick Hastings Rindge Collection, which contains materials from 1852-2001. Included are correspondence, photographs, financial records, family papers, and architectural drawings, among other items.
Ledger page detailing real estate and property inventory, 1 July 1893.
Rindge’s business interests in New England comprised a number of textile mills and manufacturing companies and he owned a large number of real estate properties, mostly inherited from his father. Many of our records represent the family business as well as Rindge’s philanthropic efforts.
Photograph of Monadnock Mills, located in Claremont, New Hampshire c. 1890s.Monadnock Mills comparison financial statement, 31 May and 30 November 1897. Francis J. Parker was one of Frederick Hastings Rindge’s business managers.Happy Days in Southern California was published in 1898. The book begins with a history of this region and follows with descriptions of animals, flora, and scenery.
In 1888 Rindge relocated to California, where he purchased large tracts in Los Angeles and a 17,000-acre Spanish land grant north of Santa Monica that is now occupied by the town of Malibu. Between 1888 and 1890, Rindge’s old schoolmate, William E. Russell, then Mayor of Cambridge, urged him to fund the construction of a number of projects in Cambridge, including the Cambridge Manual Training School (later renamed the Rindge Manual Training School and now the Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School). Rindge hired the architects, superintended the construction, hired the faculty, reviewed applications from students, and supported the school for five years before turning it over to the city. Because Rindge was living in California, all these matters were the subject of extensive correspondence with his agents in Boston.
Rindge Manual Training School Register, March 1903.Photograph of the Rindge Manual Training School baseball team, 1925.
Many records held in the collection relate to the Cambridge Manual Training School and Camp Rindge, a summer camp program for the CMTS students at Lake Winnipesaukee, NH.
A tent erected at Camp Rindge, c. 1893.
This collection is open for viewing and research at the Cambridge Historical Commission. Stop by during our research hours: Monday: 4:00-7:00PM, and Tuesday/Thursday: 9:30-11:30AM and 2:00-4:00PM, or feel free to call and make an appointment with our archivist!
Last week, we received a special visit from Richard Pennington, a former librarian for the Boston Globe. Mr. Pennington and Lisa Tuite, the Globe’s Head of Library, donated seven boxes of newspaper clippings from the Globe’s newspaper clipping morgue. The clippings date from 1900 to around 1977 (with some from the 1980s) and include interesting news stories and information pertaining to Cambridge. The stories come not only from the Boston Globe, but from other newspapers and publications, including the Boston Herald and the Transcript.
The newspaper clippings are arranged by subject, and they run the gamut of topics related to Cambridge history: from specific Cambridge buildings (of particular interest to the Commission), to local politics, to schools, historic riots, and Cambridge businesses.
According to Pennington, “The Globe was clipped from around 1900 until it went electronic in 1977 – it was the first newspaper to store its content in a computer for retrieval.” The content of the clipped, indexed and filed newspaper clippings often depended on the preference of the librarian at the time. Pennington also added that, “The city desk also had a decades-long policy of sending ephemera to the library to be added to the clipping files, and this included small photographs. Occasionally odd book chapters and magazine articles were added to the files.”
Pennington helped with the recent and ongoing transition of the Boston Globe Library’s collections to new institutions, as the Globe relocates from their Morrissey Boulevard location back to downtown Boston. Pennington was assistant librarian at the Globe when he left in 2007. The large majority of the Boston Globe clippings collection was transferred to Northeastern University — however, the Cambridge Historical Commission was fortunate enough to receive a great portion of this collection for our research files.
The newspaper clippings will be processed, cross-indexed with our architectural inventory files, and a finding aid will be created for researchers. The collection is currently not open for research.
The Cambridge Recreation Department Collection is now processed and available for research! This collection was donated to the Cambridge Historical Commission in August 1995 by Curtis Gaines, an employee of Human Services.
The Collection
This collection includes scrapbooks, books, and photographs that once belonged to the Recreation Department, as well as photographs that were already in the possession of the CHC. Much of the materials consist of City Council orders concerning park maintenance and upkeep, as well as department financial matters. The collection also includes budget appropriations materials, planning materials for parks and playgrounds, and department reports.
Preliminary Design for the Proposed Observatory Hill Park, Cambridge Planning Board, March 1950. Courtesy of the Cambridge Historical Commission.
A Brief History of the Recreation Department
The Cambridge Recreation Department was established in 1892 as the Cambridge, Massachusetts Park Commission. The Board of Park Commissioners with chairman General E. W. Hincks were now tasked with providing Cambridge citizens with a worthy park system. Previously, Cambridge only had a few poorly planned and maintained public parks with no public programs.
Cambridge City Council Order March 29, 1892, ordering “…the Committee on Parks be directed to consider and report upon the advisability of purchasing a tract of land…”
The commissioners hired landscape architect Charles Eliot and his firm, Olmsted, Olmsted, & Eliot to improve the existing parks and plan new ones in poorer, more congested neighborhoods. In 1894, the city acquired Donnelly Field in East Cambridge, Rindge Field in North Cambridge, and the entire Cambridge frontage of the Charles River. The latter section gave the department 800 acres of mud flat and degraded salt marsh by eminent domain and by 1914 a park was created along the length of the city’s shoreline. In 1910, the city began to construct playgrounds and to operate recreation programs there, and these functions expanded after the riverfront park was transferred to the Metropolitan District Commission in 1921.
City Council Order asking that the Park Commissioners purchase “Jerry’s Pit” to create a swimming pool. Dated April 7, 1914.
Maypole events were organized by the Cambridge Park Commission in the 1920s and 1930s. After the crowning of a “May Queen,” the young and gaily attired girls of the city would dance around the Maypole. Following this ceremony, there would be music, baskets of flowers, and other spring-themed activities for the children.
This image depicts a scene from a May festival on the Cambridge Common c.1925. Courtesy of the Cambridge Historical Commission.
After World War II, the responsibilities of the Park Commission were divided between the Department of Public Works and the Human Services Department. DPW began to oversee the parks, while Human Services took over recreational programs.
A group of teenagers posing on the ice during the 1940s. Three are holding hockey sticks.
For the past several weeks, our Spring 2017 Simmons archives intern, Chun Yu Tsui, has been working on re-processing the Ellis & Andrews real estate collection. This collection was donated to the CHC in 1994 by Helen Moulton, owner and president of the Ellis & Andrews real estate firm from 1979-1994.
As part of the re-processing project, Chun Yu has reorganized the first two boxes from the collection; mainly, changing a box of real estate correspondence from chronological order to alphabetical order. Since so many of the letters received by Ellis & Melledge (the original company name) mentioned specific streets and addresses for sale, we thought reorganizing the correspondence alphabetically would be much easier for researchers.
In addition to finding out about the history of the oldest real estate firm in Cambridge, researchers might now be interested in finding information on the history of their home or building lots. The reorganization of the real estate correspondence will now allow researchers to search for their street or address by name.
Below, read about the collection and Chun Yu’s experience reprocessing a huge box of correspondence from 1893-1896.
Background on Ellis & Andrews*
Established in 1888, the firm of Ellis & Andrews was Cambridge’s oldest real estate company. First located at 910 Main Street (now Massachusetts Ave.) in Quincy Square, it was founded by William Rogers Ellis as the Ellis Real Estate & Insurance Company. In 1893, Cambridge native Robert Melledge joined the firm, which was renamed Ellis & Melledge, it moved to the Lyceum Building (now the Harvard Cooperative Society). In 1903 William Ellis died and Melledge extended partnership to Ellis’s son, Benjamin Pierce Ellis. Two years later Benjamin left the company to work independently, and in 1913 Melledge moved his firm to its present location in the Brattle Building at 4 Brattle Street, Cambridge. In 1917 Robert Melledge died and Benjamin Ellis returned to succeed his father. In 1920 he joined Cambridge real estate veteran Edward A. Andrews in business and the firm became Ellis & Andrews. Seven years later Edward Bowditch joined the company as an agent; by 1928 he was a co-owner. Edward Andrews died in 1936, and the firm was subsequently renamed Ellis & Bowditch. His son, Dwight Andrews, continued to work as an agent until he was called to duty in World War II. After the war, Dwight Andrews returned and the firm was again called Ellis & Andrews. In 1955, Andrews became sole owner; in 1961 John Norris joined as a partner; and in 1979 Helen Moulton bought the agency and became the president. The agency lost its independent status when it merged with another firm in 1994.
This is an example of correspondence to Ellis & Melledge from a Cambridge resident, Mrs. Charles Goodhue. In the letter, Mrs. Goodhue writes, “I want a house with 8 or 9 sleeping rooms – including servant’s room.”
The Collection*
The Ellis & Andrews Collection contains both business and personal correspondence from c. 1889 to 1986, with the bulk of the material from 1890-1935. These materials are organized in several individual archival boxes, which are then stored in five larger boxes. The collection contains various forms of printed material, including correspondence (business and personal); interviews from local newspapers; real estate advertisements; sales ledgers; a daybook (business transactions); postcards; invoices; and notes on a history of the Ellis-Andrews Insurance Agency.
The files of a personal nature contain correspondence between Edward and Elizabeth Andrews, and information on the estate of Edward Andrews. Biographical information (including obituaries) can be found on William Rogers Ellis, Benjiman P. Ellis, Robert J. Melledge, and Edward A. Andrews. There are also two files on Dwight Andrews which contain a variety of materials, but most of the information is from the 1980s.
This is an example of correspondence to Ellis & Melledge from a Cambridge resident. The resident writes, “I wouldn’t advise being too stiff on prices for rooms. Don’t refuse a reasonable offer from good man.”This example of correspondence to Ellis & Melledge from W.A. Mason & Son shows the scenario of three surveyors measuring distances for engineering work, indicating how the city of Cambridge was developed in the late 19th century.
Reorganizing the Collection
The “Scope and Content” note in the original finding aid created by Matthew Hall in April 1995, and reformatted by Megan Schwenke in April 2012, only describes one of the small document boxes located in one of the collection’s five huge white storage boxes. Therefore, apart from double-checking the box that was already processed, five weeks ago I as an intern started sorting through another box of documentation and correspondence from the collection, marked “1893-1896”. Those materials were originally sorted by year, but this form of arrangement might not be very helpful for researchers to find the desired documentation, especially for this box containing materials only within such a short period. With the guidance given by my supervisor, I decided to alphabetize the correspondence by address in order to foster easy searching, and then to rearrange the series and update the finding aid accordingly. Unfortunately, I could not finish processing everything in that box before the end of my internship, since that box contains too much documentation, many of it written in illegible or complex handwriting. Yet, this valuable experience really opens my eyes to approaching archival materials in the late 19th century.
This business postcard shows notes from W.A. Mason & Son, located in Central Square, Cambridge, a civil engineering and surveying company which Ellis & Melledge partnered with in the late 19th-century.
Click the following text to open the Ellis & Andrews Collection finding aid. Please note: this collection is currently being reprocessed, and the finding aid linked here may not be the most recent version. The collection is still open for research, however, so please contact the Archivist for more information.
*The background and collection notes are taken from the collection finding aid.
Thanks to the hard work of our archives interns and assistants, many of our archival collections are now available for research at the Cambridge Historical Commission. We are constantly processing new and existing collections, so check here often for updates.
Click here to discover full finding aids for the collections listed below (as well as many other collections in our archives):
Cambridge Engineering Department Collection
Cambridge Ephemera Collection (Updated). This collection contains ephemera related to Cambridge industry and business, institutions and organizations, local history, photographs and published materials.
Cambridge Traffic Department Collection
Cambridge Women’s Commission Collection. The collection is comprised of photographs, negatives, and planning materials relating to Cambridge Women’s Commission activities between 1979 and 1993.
Charles W. Eliot 2nd Collection. Eliot was a landscape architect and early advocate of urban planning.
Corcoran’s Department Store Collection
Doyle Family Photograph Collection
Frederick Hastings Rindge Collection (includes materials from Cambridge Rindge & Latin and Rindge/Cambridge Manual Training School)
Gladys G. Boyce Photograph Collection
The Electronics Corporation of America Collection (Updated)
Ella Jepson Nylander Photograph Collection
Harvard Naval Radio School Collection
Henry Deeks Photograph Collection
Latino History and Culture in Cambridge Research Collection
Lois M. Bowen Photograph Collection (Updated). Cambridge-based photographer and entrepreneur.
William Lawrence Galvin Collection (Updated). Cambridge architect.
Above Image:
Corcoran’s Department Store, new store opening, 615 Mass Ave, 4/13/1940. Corcoran’s Department Store Collection.
About our archives:
The Cambridge Historical Commission maintains an archive of material on Cambridge buildings, organizations, and people. The primary collection is the Inventory of Cambridge Buildings, which documents every building in the city. Other collections include materials on Cambridge businesses and industries, transportation in all its forms, local government, biographical files, ethnic and minority groups, social history, and more.
