Those Here Before Us

When we bought our house in Swampscott eight months ago, the description provided by the realtor indicated it was constructed in 1895.  This date is repeated in the current Town of Swampscott residential assessment record for the property, and made sense to us given what we knew about the neighborhood’s history.  In brief, the neighborhood, formerly the 130-acre estate of cotton magnate Enoch Mudge, was subdivided in 1888 into 190 lots by a group of investors hoping to cash in on the initiation of commuter rail service into Boston after the Civil War. 

Swampscott Station

 Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed Central Park in NYC and Boston’s Emerald Necklace, was hired to design a layout for the development incorporating the natural wooded hills and valleys on the estate that would attract a variety of buyers from the wealthy to those of modest means.  Our house stands on one of these original lots. 

This winter, I found in the public library a detailed local street atlas including Swampscott that provided schematic outlines of existing homes and included names of current owners.  It was dated 1905.  Much to my surprise, our house was not depicted, although our next door neighbor’s was.  There was only an empty lot where our house would have been, labeled with the name “RH Bradford”.  So, if the claim on the title page of the L. J. Richards & Co. Atlas that it was “based upon and carefully compiled from, the best obtainable public and private sources, together with the original work of the publisher’s special corps of engineers” was to be believed, our house didn’t exist in 1905, never mind ten years earlier.

My curiosity got the best of me.   I found myself obsessing over what the real construction date of our house was, and further, who were the original people to live in it over 100 years ago.  Unfortunately, the 1905 Atlas was the final year published.  There are Sanborn Map Company fire insurance atlases published after that date, but these do not include resident names, just descriptions of the houses.  I located a 1907 Sanborn volume for Swampscott which did show the outline of our house, so we can assume that it was constructed between 1905 and 1907.  That was progress, but I still didn’t know anything about the identity of the first owners.

To begin that search, I spent a morning at the Registry of Deeds in Salem.  Here can be found land sale transactions for the region dating back to 1639.  The Registry was a beehive of activity as title searchers, real estate lawyers, developers and the idle curious like myself poured through centuries of transaction documents looking for who knows what nugget of information.  

Unfortunately, the Registry’s mission is to record land sales, not sales of structures built on the land.  By  tracing back the string of our property’s owners prior to us, I found the seminal document describing RH Bradford’s purchase on June 4, 1902 of lot 135 in the Swampscott Land Trust development.  Robert H. Bradford was the coachman (and later chauffeur, once motorcars were introduced on the North Shore) for Elihu Thomson, cofounder with Thomas Edison of General Electric and President of MIT.   But Bradford apparently did not build on the lot, but instead sold it four years later to Charles Chadwick, a carpenter from nearby Lynn.  Within 5 months, Chadwick had turned around and sold “a certain parcel of land” to Alice M. Catheron on October 12 1906.  

Elihu Thomson's former mansion

 

Are you, dear patient reader, following all this?  Remember that the 1907 Sanborn atlas shows a house no longer just a lot at our address.  And when Alice and her husband Allison (really,  that was his name) sold their property on February 16, 1909 to Augustus T. Norton an insurance appraiser, the Registry document describes the property as “a certain parcel of land with buildings thereon”, confirming in my mind at least that the Catherons were the first owners and residents of our Swampscott home.

Now that I had a name to work with, what could I find out about our new acquaintances the Catherons, if anything?   As it turns out, through some further sleuthing in the Swampscott and Lynn Public Libraries, aided by Google and a touch of blogger artistic license, quite a bit.

But first, join me in thinking for a minute about Massachusetts at the turn of the last century.  The Spanish American War had ended, conflicts with native peoples in the West were all but concluded, and the country was at peace.  Women would have to still wait 20 years to obtain the right to vote.  The railroad was king, along with its little brother the streetcar. Using town directories, I learned that the lot owners behind the Catheron’s new home were proprietors of Cullen Brothers, horse shoers and blacksmiths. Individual land transport was still mainly by horse, but with automobiles in the process of crowding them off the streets.  Americans manufactured things in great quantities, for their own use as well as for export.  The next door city of Lynn was known as a shoe manufacturing powerhouse, and the neighbors to the south of the Catherons were Gertrude and George Burt of the EW Burt and Company Shoe Company “makers of the Ground Grippers”.  Electric street lights were installed in the neighborhood ten years before, and the town report for 1895 indicated that 103 cattle and 230 swine resided within the town borders.  The telephone was still rare enough in Swampscott that in the 1920’s when the unmarried sisters Susan and Emma Ford lived in our house, it was specially noted with an asterisk in the town directory that they had “a telephone connection”.  These ladies, who were both bookkeepers, lived in the house for 54 years, part of which time they shared it with their widowed mother.

Enough digression, on to the main event.  Starting with the Swampscott town directory for 1908 which identified Allison G. Catheron as a lawyer with offices on State Street in Boston, I have gathered the following information on the first owners of our home (October 1906-Feb 1909).  Allison was born in Nova Scotia in 1878 and came to Beverly, MA when he was ten years old.  His father was a gardener, so he did not, apparently, come from a moneyed background.  Nonetheless, he attended Bates College in Maine, graduating in 1900 and served the next two years as principal of Norwell, MA High School. Far from a slacker, Allison subsequently attended Harvard Law School, and was admitted to the Suffolk County Bar in 1905.  He married well, taking as his wife the lovely Alice Millett of Beverly in September, 1906.  Alice was no slouch intellectually, having graduated from Wellesley College in 1900.  Were they high school sweethearts in Beverly, or did they meet at a college “mixer” or frat party, perhaps?  These details are lost in the mists of time.

 What is clear is that a month after their marriage, they bought the lot that we now live on, and, most likely, our house was their “starter home”.  Sources indicate that the young couple were Unitarians, and probably would have attended the same UU church Trudi and I are now attending, although it would have been located in Lynn in their day.

Allison and Alice had two daughters, Lorraine and Miriam.  Despite her nonorthodox religion and two girls in the home, the 1914 Woman’s Who’s Who in America indicates that Alice was “against woman suffrage”.  We can be fairly sure that their older daughter Lorraine was born in our house in 1908.  But Allison was a man on the make, and shortly after his daughter’s birth, the Catherons left Swampscott and moved back to Beverly.   

Beginning in 1913, Allison represented Beverly in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and served as Chair of the House Committee on Social Welfare, tackling issues of state support for the aged and the poor, challenges that are very much with us 100 years later.  And so this brief excursion into the past comes to a close, with the final observation that Lorraine Catheron turns out to have been something of a poet, publishing in Harper’s and The New Yorker in the 1940’s.  At some point, if I turn up one of her poems, I might share it with you, if it’s any good.

Note to readers:  This was a fairly time-intensive project, but satisfying to complete in the way that finishing the Sunday crossword is for Trudi, discovering how the pieces and clues fit together to reveal the whole. Deeper than that, it has been part of an effort to set an anchor in our new community, to experience more completely where we now find ourselves in space and time, and to understand more clearly the soil in which we have planted our final roots.