Beacon Street Diary

Gifts from Dr. John Leslie Lobingier

At the 155th Annual meeting of the Massachusetts Congregational Christian Conference in May 1954, held in Bethany Congregational Church, Quincy, MA, Dr. John L. Lobingier was designated Emeritus Secretary of Christian Education. Dr. Lobingier had been Conference Minister of Education from 1942-1954. The resolution for this honor reads in part: "He has directed the work of our youth in this Commonwealth with great insight and vision."

I started looking into Dr. Lobingier when I was reviewing a shelf of plays in the library's stacks. The shelf list cards indicated that these short one act plays were gifts of Dr. Lobingier. The necrology in the United Church of Christ Year Book for 1974 listed the following: He was born in Chicago, IL on January 1, 1884. He studied at Union and Lexington Theological Seminary and was ordained a Disciple of Christ in Lexington, KY in June 1907. From 1906 to 1907 he was assistant pastor at Magnolia Avenue Christian Church then pastor of Christian Church of Ocean Park, CA from 1908-11. His next pastoral assignment was Christian Church of Santa Monica CA from 1911-14. In 1921, he became pastor of United Church of Christ, Oberlin, OH and was there until 1926. He then began his other religious work in this building at 14 Beacon Street with the Society of World Fellowships and the Congregational Education Society until 1926 before moving to the Massachusetts Congregational Conference. Dr. Lobingier died in Winchester, MA on August 4, 1974 at the age of 90.

Having learned about Dr. Lobingier's involvement with religious education, I began to understand the reasoning behind this gift of plays. The plays are Baker's Plays, currently owned by Samuel French Inc. The origin of Baker's Plays dates back to the 19th century. According to Katy DiSavino, "Baker's predecessor, the Herbert Sweet Company, published and sold plays in Boston from 1845-1872. When the great Boston Fire of 1872 destroyed many of the company's printing plates and other material, it moved into the newly rebuilt district and continued operation under the name of George M. Baker & Company." George's brother, Walter took over the company in 1892 and in 1921 the company became Baker's Plays. Baker's was known for its list of family friendly and religious plays. It offered an large selection of plays suitable for high school and middle school students.

Typical of these plays is one titled "The Friendly Kingdom" by Dorothy Clark Wilson. The play is described as the story of a boy king who follows the commandment "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Another play, "The Years Ahead" by Elliot Field, is the story of a young couple who declines a "tempting business offer in Boston" and decides despite family pressure to go as missionaries to Persia.

-Claudette

Reminder -- Brown Bag Lunch: The Great Equalizer?

Don't forget to let us know if you'll be joining us for tomorrow's free lunchtime lecture.

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Park Ranger Dorothy Rivera will give us an exclusive preview of a new National Park Service tour The Great Equalizer?: Black Boston and the Struggle for Education.

Join us to discuss the growth of the educational system in Massachusetts and the role that it played in the struggle for civil rights and abolition from the colonial period through the 20th century.

This event is the first in a new partnership with the Boston African American National Historic Site which is headquartered here at 14 Beacon Street.

Wednesday, May 22nd
12:00 - 1:00 pm

Program begins promptly at noon.

Free.
Register through SurveyMonkey.

 

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image "The Misses Cooke's school room" courtesy of the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons

Successful reference

A patron sent a picture of this gorgeous church out in rural Wisconsin. The cheerfulness of the day that our patron, Major, captured and the charming quality of the church encourages a bit of the backstory of why he sent the photo.

Major emailed me initially to get help getting a copy of his ancestor's obituary notice, which is in our "Find a Congregationalist" (aka Necrology) database. The Yearbook that the Rev. Stevens was listed in was available online through the Internet Archive. That success lead to questions about whatever happened to the church and the graveyard that Stevens served? I was able to confirm there was only one church in the area he could have been at, that it had closed, and the local town or county office might help direct to their locations. Finally, some many days later, Major wrote one more time, to report a complete success: the church and graveyard are still in excellent condition. He was able to visit and find out a bit more about his ancestor. He found out on this first trip that there's a Civil War museum in the church basement now and the sexton maintains the original ledger book. Major got confirmation about Rev. Stevens's presence, plus a portrait of the gentleman is still on hand. He had the satisfaction of some mysteries solved. I had the satisfaction of knowing that I helped direct him to the answers. Thank you for that.

-Jessica

Book review -- Red Ink

Review of Red Ink: Native Americans Picking Up the Pen in the Colonial Period by Drew Lopenzina
(SUNY Press. 2012)

One of the things I enjoy in my job as Librarian is spending time reading about newly published books that will fit into our collections. Perusing academic publications, I was intrigued by the title Red Ink. One of my responses was to consider the political correctness of "red" and Native Americans. Looking into the book, I found the "red" did describe the literature of Native Americans AND the red ink used to correct and change the meaning and output of the Natives by the white culture. Red was also the color of bloodshed in the contacts between Native and other cultures. I will admit I had not considered a written record of Native American although I was familiar with the colonial missionary work that taught reading and writing. My thinking was that the tradition was oral and that any Native American literature was about the Natives not by them.

Lopenzia reviews America colonial literature and reports Native Americans were very active writers in the Colonial period and acquired the skill rapidly. This book includes the story of Samson Occom, who learned the western style of writing through the missionary schools and became a Presbyterian minister. He was the first Native American to publish his writings in English. Occom was a missionary and a teacher and raised a notable amount of money that would fund Dartmouth College. He used his knowledge to protect the Native Americans from predatory land rights deals.

Red Ink covers the period from first European contact with Native Americans to the founding of Brothertown in 1785. Chapters describe Wussuckwheke, or the Painted Letter, Praying Indians, Printing Devils, King Philips Signature, maintenance of Native tradition in hidden transcripts, and the road to Brothertown. Comprehensive detail notes and an extensive bibliography are included. An interesting note to researchers — in 2006 Joanna Brooks collected all of Occom's writings together.

Drew Lopenzina is professor of Early American and Native American literature at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, VA. His work has appeared in the journals American Literature, American Quarterly, American Indian Quarterly and others. He is currently working on a biography of the nineteenth-century Pequot activist and minister William Apess.

-Claudette

Boston: where the streets have new names

While researching the histories of the churches in our 1843 Boston Almanac church engravings digital exhibit, I used a lot of historical maps to figure out where some of the buildings used to be. The names and configurations of Boston's streets have changed a lot over the centuries, for a number of reasons.The Back Bay marshland was filled in to create a new neighborhood; fires and revitalization projects caused entire sections of the city to be rebuilt in new ways; and existing streets have been renamed to honor prominent individuals.

A recent blog post by the Mass. State Library has some further insights:

For instance there used to be two streets in what is now Government Center called King Street and Queen Street. King Street is now State Street and Queen Street is now Court Street. In the book: What they never told you about Boston, or, What they did that were lies by Walt Kelley. He tells us that King and Queen Streets were changed to distance themselves from the Royalty in England. In 1722 these two streets were near Corn Hill which is near where Tremont Street and Cambridge Street meet. King Street was named after King Charles I who was in power when the Puritans settled in Boston in 1630. Charles Street, the Charles River and Charlestown, Massachusetts are all named for King Charles I as well.

John Bonner map of Boston from 1722.
Copy of rare map of Boston.
Published by George B. Foster, Boston, 1872

If you'd like to do some further investigation of your own, the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library has digitized approximately 200,000 maps and 5,000 atlases from around the world, including almost 600 depicting Boston itself.

Researchers, start your engines.

--Robin

Brown Bag Lunch: The Great Equalizer?

Park Ranger Dorothy Rivera will give us an exclusive preview of a new National Park Service tour The Great Equalizer?: Black Boston and the Struggle for Education.

Join us to discuss the growth of the educational system in Massachusetts and the role that it played in the struggle for civil rights and abolition from the colonial period through the 20th century.

This event is the first in a new partnership with the Boston African American National Historic Site which is headquartered here at 14 Beacon Street.

Wednesday, May 22nd
12:00 - 1:00 pm

Program begins promptly at noon.

Free.
Register through SurveyMonkey.

 

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image "The Misses Cooke's school room" courtesy of the Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons

Boston in Danger

By the Rivers of Watertown we sat down and wept,
When we remember'd thee, O Boston.
Lord God of Heaven, preserve them, defend them,
Deliver and restore them unto us again.
...
A voices was heard in Roxbury which echo'd thro' the Continent,
Weeping for Boston because of their Danger.

William Billings wrote this remarkable song while his city was under lockdown. In July 1774, King George III decided it was time to punish the citizens of Boston for their infamous "tea party" and put the city under martial law and closed its ports; the main land entry, the narrow "Boston Neck", was guarded by soldiers. British authorities assumed that without food or supplies the citizens would soon come crawling back to royal authority.

How strange and how familiar the "Lament Over Boston" seems today. Many of us will recognize it as a riff on Psalm 137 and its opening line, "By the rivers of Babylon we sat down and wept when we remembered thee O Zion." But the parallels with the turmoil of the past week are downright uncanny, almost as if in some spooky prophetic way that song had been composed for all of us.

As Mark Twain (supposedly) said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." The circumstances were wildly different, but this week our experiences overlapped with 1774 in all kinds of ways: Boston under lockdown, Watertown in mourning, the rest of the Continent echoing with distress — and people choosing love instead of fear.

This might be just another "oh, neat" moment about history, but why stop there? Should it be surprising that someone living before us experienced shock and pain about a city he loved too? Or more than that, should we be surprised that the past actually has something to offer the present? The "Lament Over Boston" tells us that we are not alone, stranded in the present and separated by an enormous crevasse of time. Billings gave all of us alive in April 2013 a striking and beautiful lament, words to use when our own begin to fail.

Our ancestors created a lot of things and then left them behind for us to use. Some are uplifting and wonderful and others frustrating, painful, and in some cases even evil. It is a mistake to think that the past is simply passive, just lying there in case one of us needs a lesson or an anecdote to "apply" to our very different circumstances. Sometimes history jumps out from behind a corner with a yell, astonishing us with its clarity and power. Sometimes it bounds out into the middle of the room when we are least expecting it, forcing us to pay attention and recognize the full scope of the human family — across time as well as ethnicity, geography, and race — and all the fears and hopes we will always share in common.

-Peggy Bendroth

 

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image of the title page of William Billings's The Psalm-Singer's Amusement courtesy of the Beinecke Library at Yale University via Wikimedia Commons

Looking back on New Haven's early history

We've become pretty big fans of historian Francis J. Bremer over the past few years. As part of the celebrations for the 375th anniversary of the founding of New Haven, Connecticut, Bremer led a historical walking tour this past Saturday to share his knowledge about the city's religious founder, John Davenport, its civil leader, Theophilus Eaton, and the colorful history of its early days.

There is an entertaining description of his talk in the New Haven Independent, including prosecutions of heresy and witchcraft, and controversy over infant baptisms.

"One could imagine him [Davenport] being a 17th-century televangelist if had this technology," Bremer quipped.

If you'd like to know more about John Davenport, take a look at Bremer's latest book, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds.

 

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photograph courtesy of the New Haven Independent

Lost and found: U.S. War Department papers

One of the benefits of living in the internet/digital world is the opportunity for collaboration. One such program that I learned about during the spring New England Archivist meeting's keynote by Tom Sheinfeld was the Papers of the War Department 1784-1800. The earliest records created by our government were primarily through the War Department, so when their offices burned in 1800, the nuts and bolts of what made up our infant nation was lost. But maybe not lost forever!

These Papers record far more than the era's military history. Between 1784 and 1800, the War Department was responsible for Indian affairs, veteran affairs, naval affairs (until 1798), as well as militia and army matters. During the 1790s, the Secretary of War spent seven of every ten dollars of the federal budget (debt service excepted). The War Office did business with commercial firms and merchants all across the nation; it was the nation's largest single consumer of fabric, clothing, shoes, food, medicine, building materials, and weapons of all kinds. "Follow the money," it is said, if you want to learn what really happened, and in the early days of the Republic that money trail usually led to the War Office. For example, the War Department operated the nation's only federal social welfare program, providing veterans' benefits (including payments to widows and orphans) to more than 4,000 persons. It also provided internal security, governance, and diplomacy on the vast frontier, and it was the instrument that shaped relations with Native Americans. In many respects, the papers lost in the War Office fire of 1800 constituted the "national archives" of their time.

Through this online project, dedicated souls have been piecing together the puzzle through dozens of repositories that collected correspondence, records, and articles relating to and by the War Department. They provide several search options, allow users to view images of the original documents, and are working on generating crowdsourced transcriptions. This repository is a valuable historical resource, and getting better by the day.

-Jessica

Reminder -- Brown Bag Lunch: "The Sky Above, The Water Beneath, and God Everywhere"

There's still plenty of time to sign up for Thursday's free lunchtime lecture.

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God and Eighteenth-Century Seafarers

Atlantic travel narratives from the eighteenth-century reveal a kaleidoscope of practices and beliefs as people of varying persuasions intermixed on British sailing vessels without the established presence of any single religious tradition. This talk will focus on the spatial dimensions of shipboard life and its effects on passengers' religious practices as well as their interactions with one another. Despite the cramped quarters and social divides aboard ship, people carved out space to practice their religions.

Stephen Berry is an assistant professor of history at Simmons College in Boston. He has recently completed a book manuscript documenting the cultural history of the transatlantic voyage and its meanings for European passengers in the mid-eighteenth century.

Thursday, April 11th
12:00 - 1:00 pm

Program begins promptly at noon.

Free.
Register through SurveyMonkey.