Fire in the Schoolhouse

On 24 Feb 1780, Boston’s Continental Journal reported:

Early on Tuesday morning last [i.e., 22 February], a fire broke out in the South Writing-School, (near the Laboratory) in this town, which entirely consumed the same; but by the usual activity of the inhabitants, it was happily prevented from doing further mischief.—

’Tis not yet discovered how the fire happened.

Four days later the Boston Gazette added:

Wednesday last a Person was prosecuted for disobeying the Orders of the Firewards in this Town, at the Fire of the South School the Morning preceeding, and fined £.47 for the same.—

[This Information being given, and the second Instance of the Kind, ’tis doubted whether there will be any Need of cautioning Persons in future, against disobeying the Firewards, at the Time of Fire ]

No information on who disobeyed and how.

The selectmen had other business to handle after a fire. They rewarded Richard Hunnewell’s engine company for being the first to arrive on the scene. On 1 March they announced that “those Persons who have taken Stuff from the late Fire [and] refuse to deliver up what they have taken” had one more week to return those goods before being summoned to Faneuil Hall.

In addition, on 23 February the selectmen asked Master Samuel Holbrook how this fire had broken out in his schoolhouse. He couldn’t explain, saying:

that there had been but little Fire [in the stove] that afternoon, and that he left the School the last of any one, and his Son had looked thro. the Windows about 9. OClock, having smelt fire.

I sense that the selectmen found that inadequate. It had been Master Holbrook’s responsibility to check that the schoolhouse stove was left in safe condition at the end of Monday’s lessons.

On 1 March the selectmen recorded: “Mr. Holbrook Master of the South Writing School has sent a Letter of resignation as Master on account of his health.” He was then fifty-one years old.

So now in the middle of the school year the selectmen had to find a new schoolhouse and a new schoolmaster.

TOMORROW: The search.

(John Fenno, Jr.’s 1787 advertisement for leather fire buckets above comes courtesy of Skinner. The leather-dresser’s nephew, also named John Fenno, knew the South Writing School well: he had trained there under Abiah Holbrook and then worked as Samuel Holbrook’s usher in 1773–74.)

“Every thing I had, to amount of Seventy pounds”

Yet another outcome of the Battle of Chelsea Creek was the destruction or removal of various agricultural resources on Hog Island and Noddle’s Island: hay, livestock, and buildings.

Provincial soldiers removed all the animals they could and destroyed the rest to prevent the British military from using it.

Alexander Shirley was a longtime resident of Noddle’s Island, as attested to by Isaiah Tay of Chelsea. In March 1776 Shirley told the Massachusetts legislature that its troops had “set fire to my Hous, & Destroyed all my substance, goods, & provisions, & every thing I had, to amount of Seventy pounds, Lawfull Money, at least.” He had “a large family of Children” to support.

That wasn’t a large estate, and Shirley didn’t claim to have lost crops or animals. That’s because, while he probably tended the island’s livestock and worked the harvest, he didn’t own the farm. He worked for Henry Howell Williams.

Boston vital records show that Alexander Shirley married Eleanor McCurdy in 1750, when he was in his thirties. They had children baptized at Christ Church in the North End. In 1774 Alexander Shirley married Molly King, so Eleanor had probably died.

Alexander Shirley appears to have actually been part of the Chelsea company of provincial soldiers who fought on Noddle’s Island in May 1775. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War lists both Alexander Shirley of Chelsea and Alexander Shirley, Jr., of Chester, New Hampshire, in Capt. Samuel Sprague’s company, along with other men named Shirley—quite possibly related.

After the war, the older Alexander Shirley and his wife went back to living on Noddle’s Island, still working for Williams. In old age he gained the nickname “Governor Shirley” (since William Shirley was no longer using it).

On 17 Feb 1800, Alexander Shirley died “aged eighty-three, an inhabitant of the Island for upwards of fifty years.” The funeral took place the next day from the house of John Fenno, described as “at Winnisimmet-Ferry.” Shirley was buried in the Copp’s Hill cemetery after one last trip across the water.

TOMORROW: The big loser.

Fire Buckets and the Fenno Family

The Skinner auctioneers blog offers Christopher D. Fox’s detailed discussion of firefighting and leather fire buckets in Boston.

In particular, Fox profiles one maker of those buckets:

While there were certainly a number of merchants in Boston from whom fire buckets could be purchased, few seem to have advertised in the papers. In addition, it is very rare to find a mark or signature on a fire bucket that identifies its maker. As a result, the identities of nearly all of the makers of fire buckets around Boston have been lost. One exception to this are the buckets produced by John Fenno Jr.

John Fenno Jr. was born in Boston on May 4, 1732, to John Fenno (1707-1790) and Hannah Capen (1712-1792). He married Katherine Hodges (1729-1810) on April 4, 1755, and together they had six children. Fenno’s father worked in the leather business and it is likely that John learned the leatherworking trade from him. While it is not clear exactly when John Fenno Jr. began working on his own, an advertisement in the Massachusetts Centinel in April 1785 indicates that by then his business was well established. “John Fenno, jun. Hereby gives notice to those gentlemen who are so well disposed as to enter into Fire Societies, and all others, that he continues to make Leather Buckets, strong and neat, of a large size, and handsome shape. — Hoses for Engines, and Hoses for the West-India use — Boots, Gloeshoes, and Shoes of all sizes, at the sign of the Leather Bucket, next door to Dr. Samuel Curtis’s at the South End.” Fortunately for historians and collectors, Fenno’s fire buckets are identifiable as he marked his work with a rectangular stamp reading “I. FENNO” on the back of his buckets near the stitched seam.

Unfortunately, in the spring of 1787 his house burned and Fenno was forced to relocate his business as testified by a newspaper advertisement in May of that year. This advertisement is interesting in that beyond the text describing what he makes and sells, it illustrates two of his principal products; shoes and buckets. Over the next several years his business continued to flourish and he expanded his offerings to include hoses for firefighting equipment and other uses. In October 1794 Fenno placed the following advertisement in the Columbian Centinel: “John Fenno, Informs the Public, that he continues to make Leather Buckets, after the best manner, at the sign of the Bucket, Orange Street, South end, Boston. A number of Buckets may be had on the shortest notice. Said Fenno makes Hoses for Engines, and Hose for the conveyance of Oil and Molasses on board vessels.” Fenno apparently continued his bucket-making business until his death on December 5, 1812.

Fenno’s next-younger brother, Ephraim (1734-1790), also became a leather-dresser in Boston. He turned “melancholy” in the late 1780s, was admitted to the almshouse in November 1788, and died there, as tracked in his son’s letters (P.D.F. download).

John and Ephraim’s uncle Benjamin Fenno (b. 1719) might have been the man who looked after the town granary before the Revolutionary War. That granary eventually was taken down to built the Park Street Church, but it left its name on the neighboring burying-ground.

The next generation of the Fenno family left a literary trail. The bucket-maker John Fenno’s daughter born in 1765 is variously called Janet, Jennet, Jenny, and Jane. As Jenny Fenno and then as Jane Ames, she published three volumes of religious verse, as I discussed here. Here’s a look at her 1805 volume for sale.

Ephraim had a son named John Fenno (1751-1798), who assisted Abiah and then Samuel Holbrook at the South Writing School. After the war and some unsuccessful shopkeeping he became the publisher and editor of the Gazette of the United States, the Federalist Party organ in the nation’s capital (first New York and then Philadelphia). He died of yellow fever, far from Boston.

Studying the Schoolmasters’ Salaries

Toward the end of their 8 May 1770 town meeting, Bostonians turned to approving salaries for the town’s schoolteachers.

There were five town schools—two grammar or Latin schools and three writing schools. However, not all the teachers were compensated equally. Here are the salaries for the masters at each school:

• John Lovell, South Latin School (shown here): £120.
• Samuel Hunt, North Latin School: £100.
• John Proctor, Queen Street Writing School: £100.
• Samuel Holbrook, South Writing School: £100.
• John Tileston, North Writing School: £100.

Obviously, the town valued John Lovell’s services significantly more than any other master. There were a number of factors, including his long tenure at the South Latin School and how that school was twice as large as the North Latin School. But the town always spent more on the grammar schools.

The disparity was even more pronounced when we add in the salaries that the meeting approved for each assistant master or usher:

• James Lovell, usher, South Latin School: £60, plus £40 “as an encouragement for him to remain and exert himself in the Service of the Town the ensuing Year.”
• James Carter, usher, Queen Street Writing School: £50, plus £25 for encouragement.
• Assistant for the South Writing School, to be named later: £50.
• Assistant for the North Writing School, to be paid through Tileston: £34.

Tileston’s assistant was William Dall, who turned seventeen years old in 1770. He was still an apprentice and thus worth only two-thirds of a regular usher’s salary.

At the South Writing School, Samuel Holbrook had become master partway through the school year after the death of his uncle Abiah, but he’d taught at the Queen Street School years before. His assistant might have been John Fenno, born in in 1751 and thus also still under age.

James Carter was an experienced teacher who would take over the Queen Street Writing School in a couple of years, which is probably why the town offered him “encouragement” to stay on the job.

But Boston really encouraged James Lovell at the South Latin School, paying him as an usher as much money as every master but his father. He was a Harvard graduate working under his father, and people might have felt he was turning away better prospects. Indeed, later that year, the congregation at Christ Church invited Lovell to preach during a dispute with their pastor, the Rev. Mather Byles, Jr.

That disparity in spending on the different schools becomes even more stark when we look at the number of children each of those schoolteachers served. Here’s how many scholars a town committee found at each school a couple of months later in 1770:

• South Latin School, 137 boys.
• North Latin School, 56 boys.
• South Writing School, 231 boys.
• Queen Street Writing School, 268 boys.
• North Writing School, 250 boys.

Even without an usher at the North Latin School, the town was paying £320 to give 193 boys a grammar-school education (or, really, part of one since about two-thirds of each entering class dropped out without finishing). That’s per-pupil spending of £1.66.

Meanwhile, the town was spending £459 to educate the other 749 boys in the practical skills of handwriting and arithmetic. That was £0.61 per pupil.

Clearly the system favored the students at the Latin Schools, most of them coming from the town’s richer families. Though Boston prided itself on its public schools, the system wasn’t equitable. (And about half of the boys in town of school age weren’t in the public schools at all. Not to mention no girls or black children.)

There was one more piece of business for Boston’s 8 May 1770 town meeting: to vote £100 to David Jeffries “for his Services as Treasurer of the Town the Year past, and for all his Expences in that Office.” Someone had to pay the schoolmasters.

President Adams’s Birthday Celebrated—in Lisbon

Though there was no public observation of President John Adams’s birthday in Philadelphia in 1797, one branch of the small U.S. government definitely celebrated it.

William Loughton Smith was a fervent Federalist from Charleston, South Carolina. I was going to say he was one of the few men named William Smith in early America not related to Abigail Adams, but then I found that they were distant cousins; Abigail’s first patrilineal ancestor in America was William Loughton Smith’s great-great-grandfather.

During the election of 1796, Smith wrote (or perhaps collaborated with Oliver Wolcott, Jr., in writing) an attack on Thomas Jefferson signed “Phocion.” (Lately that has been ascribed to Alexander Hamilton, but contemporaries seem largely agreed that Smith was responsible; Jefferson and his circle even referred to him as “Phocion Smith.”)

As a reward for Smith, President Adams made him the U.S. minister to Portugal. On 21 Oct 1797 Smith wrote back from his new posting to James McHenry, the Secretary of War:

I wrote you since my return to Lisbon, & have therefore nothing to communicate but the account of the Dinner I gave on the 19th. to the Americans here to celebrate the President’s birth-day: I was not perfectly prepared for such an occasion having been only a fortnight in my house; thinking however that it was best to do the thing even imperfectly than to let the Day pass unnoticed, I exerted myself, & made out tolerably well. I enclose you an account of the Celebration which Fenno will publish I am sure with pleasure; the Toasts are on a Separate paper for your information; you will think them not worth publishing.

Among my Guests was a Captain Israel who informed me that he was the Son of the famous Israel Israel:—we were the best friends in the world; I have been told that there were two or three Jacobins [Democratic-Republicans?] present, but they all behaved extremely well; they joined in the Toasts with great zeal & we sang & were very merry; at first they were bashful, but when I set them the example of singing, they threw aside reserve & were very convivial.

The item that Smith wanted McHenry to give to John Fenno, the Boston-born editor of the Federalist Gazette of the United States, reported:

Thursday the 19th. October being the Anniversary of the President’s Birth, was celebrated at Lisbon by Mr. Smith, the Minister of the United States at that Court, who gave on the Occasion an Entertainment at his Hotel at Buenos-Ayres to a numerous and respectable Company of American Captains & Citizens. After sixteen patriotic Toasts intermixed with convivial songs, the Company, having spent the day with great good humor and festivity, broke up at nine o’clock, much pleased with the occasion, which had collected together so many Americans at such a distance from home. All the American vessels in the Harbour were gayly decorated during the day & at twelve o’clock a federal salute of sixteen guns was fired by some of them in honor of the day, and at five in the afternoon was repeated. This Anniversary occurring on a day, highly distinguished in the Annals of the American Revolution by the Surrender of York-town, the recollection of so auspicious an event could not fail to increase the happiness of the Company.

Of course, Smith was celebrating the 19th of October while Adams had long before adopted 30 October as his Gregorian-calendar birthday.

(Smith’s letter was undated when published in the Sewanee Review, but he must have written it in 1797 because that’s the only year in Adams’s administration when “the 19th. October” was a Thursday.)

Tracking Another Early American Female Poet

Folks from the American Antiquarian Society alerted me yesterday that its catalog entry for the broadside I’ve been discussing is the source of the credit “Composed by H----h W----n.” I’m not sure how that matches the newsletter article saying the document credits “H---. W---.,” but it does suggest a stronger tie to Hannah Wheaton.

We know that broadside came from the print shop of Ezekiel and Sarah Russell because its last line reads:

Sold next Lib. Pole: Where may be also had, the particulars of the late fire, and a poem composed by Miss J---y F--o, a sufferer.

That line thus offers evidence for another American woman publishing poetry by 1787, though her own broadside apparently doesn’t survive. So who was “J---y F--o”?

The name “Jenny” seems like a good guess, and fortunately it was a lot less common in eighteenth-century Boston than “Hannah.” A quick search took me to this page about Jenny Fenno, which appears to have been plagiarized from this Oxford Reference page behind a paywall. So I read the information, tsk-tsk’ing all the while over piracy.

“Jennet Fenno” was born on 26 May 1765, daughter of John and Katharine Fenno. After the Revolutionary War that John Fenno might have had some tie to the town granary, which stood on the site of the Park Street Church (shown above), and gave its name to the neighboring Granary Burying Ground. The 1787 broadside suggests that by that date Jenny Fenno was living in the South End, where the fire spread.

In 1791, “Miss J. Fenno” published Original Compositions in Prose and Verse on Subjects Moral and Religious from the press of Joseph Bumstead. That book included remarks on the fire of 1787, as well as elegies, pious verse, didactic essays, and praise for the British author Elizabeth Singer Rowe. Some remarks in that book indicate that Fenno was a member of Boston’s Second Baptist Church.

On 11 Nov 1794, that church’s minister married Jenny Fenno to James Ames of Bridgewater, a man six years younger than she and with an even more rhyming name. Nahum Mitchell’s history of Bridgewater (1897) and Ann Theobold Chaplin’s Descendants of William Ames (2004) indicate that James and now Jane Ames had children starting the next September, with sons Leonard (who died as a baby), another Leonard (“killed by the falling of a tree”), Franklin, and James, Jr.

Jane Ames’s book was republished in Wrentham in 1803, still credited to her maiden name. Two years later, the Boston printer and Baptist preacher Ensign Lincoln issued Compositions, Original and Selected, by “Mrs. Jane Ames.” It was a collection of Christian essays and poems. Three years after that, Lincoln and his new partner Thomas Edmands published Compositions, Original and Selected…Part Second.

Thus, Jenny Fenno/Jane Ames wrote for the public from 1787 to 1808, at least, while marrying and raising children. I don’t think anyone has indicated those two authors were the same before. According to Chaplin, the widow Ames died in Mansfield on 16 Sept 1849, aged eighty-four.