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Manufactory House

Tremont Street at Hamilton Place, Downtown Boston

Located on the site of what is today Suffolk Law School, Manufactory House was a two-story brick building that served as a refuge for Boston’s most destitute residents—the sick, poor, and homeless. The Province of Massachusetts Bay had built it in 1754 to provide a place to weave textiles and employment for Bostonians.

In the aftermath of the French and Indian War and the Seven Years’ War (a much larger conflict involving the major European powers), the British sought to impose taxes on imports to the American colonies to help fill Britain’s coffers. Protests, boycotts, and often violent harassment of tax collectors and colonial officials led the British to send troops to occupy Boston, an epicenter of the anti-Royalist actions, to restore order. Arriving at Long Wharf at the beginning of October 1768, the unwelcome troops needed quarters in light of the coming winter and the governor determined that Manufactory House would be an appropriate location.

Depiction of Manufactory House from the 1930s. Source: Boston Landmarks Commission, City of Boston.

On October 19, the sheriff, lieutenant governor, and the chief justice arrived at Manufactory House to evict the tenants. (Although weaving still took place in the building’s basement, by this time Manufactory House was chiefly a housing site for Boston’s neediest.) The residents, having secured the building’s doors and windows, refused to vacate the premises. Eventually, a crowd hostile to the eviction formed outside, and British troops were called in. With a tense stand-off ensuing and the possibility of violence erupting, Governor Bernard ordered the withdrawal of the troops.

Although a relatively brief event, the stand-off at Manufactory House was highly significant as an act of resistance of Bostonians to armed British troops. Moreover, it illuminates the deep roots of anti-eviction and housing rights work of contemporary organizations such as City Life/Vida Urbana and the Boston Tenant Coalition.

Manufactory House became a British military hospital following the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. After independence, it briefly served (1791-1792) as the original home of the Massachusetts Historical Society and later housed the Massachusetts Bank. Razed around 1806, Manufactory House is memorialized with a small plaque on the Hamilton Street side of the Suffolk University Law School building.

Marker on the Hamilton Street side of Suffolk Law School.

Getting there:

Red or Green Line to Park Street Station. The site is diagonally across (looking leftward) from the steps of the Park Street Church on the corner of Tremont and Park Streets.

To learn more:

Richard Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution, New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Nearby points of interest:

Orpheum Theater, 1 Hamilton Place. The Orpheum is the original home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and one of the oldest theaters in the United States. Built in 1852, it has long been one of Boston’s top concert venues.

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Richard Plumer House

79 Federal Street, Newburyport

Richard Plumer (1812-1881) was the postmaster of Newburyport, as well as the owner and operator of a dry goods store at 46 State Street, a few buildings down from the post office. In 1830, he bought a home on Federal Street, one that would serve as a station on the Underground Railroad.  Plumer and his family members housed and clandestinely transported an untold number of individuals fleeing slavery to other stations or agents of the “railroad” as they headed to Canada. In 1841, Plumer hosted Frederick Douglass at his home.

Built around 1700, Richard Plumer’s house, currently a private residence, still stands. A plaque on the front of the building commemorates Plumer’s abolitionist activism.

Richard Plumer House, 79 Federal Street, Newburyport.

Getting there:

Commuter Rail from North Station to Newburyport. The house is located between High Street and Horton Street.

To learn more:

William Hallett, Newburyport and the Civil War, Charleston, South Carolina: The History Press, 2012.

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Red Sun Press

94 Green Street, Jamaica Plain

Printed by Red Sun Press, circa 1976. The Boston Committee for Medical Aid to El Salvador poster (undated) was also printed by Red Sun Press, probably during the 1980s.

Founded in 1973 by individuals active in the anti-war, civil rights, environmental, and women’s rights movements, Red Sun Press is a worker-owned and -run printing cooperative. It began with $350 and a small printing press in a basement in Cambridge. In the mid-1980s, it moved to Jamaica Plain.

Red Sun is a socially- and environmentally-responsible business. It uses ecologically sustainable paper, recycles all its wastepaper and utilizes vegetable-based inks. The print shop’s profits are distributed fairly among its workers, all of whom are union members (United Auto Workers, Local 1596).

A progressive “movement” press, Run Sun has designed and printed countless activist posters, calendars, and pamphlets over its more than 40 years of existence.

Red Sun Press, March 2017.

Getting there:

Orange Line to Green Street Station.  Upon exiting the station, go left on Green Street. Red Sun Press is on the right side of street, on the corner of Lamartine Street. (0.1 mile, about a two-minute walk.)

To learn more:

Red Sun Pres website: http://www.redsunpress.com/

Talia Whyte, “Social conscience is key for J.P. printer,” The Bay State Banner, September 30, 2009.

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W. E. B. Du Bois Residence

20 Flagg Street, Cambridge

W. E. B. DuBois, circa 1907. Public domain, Credit: NPS.gov

One of the great civil and human rights advocates of the 20th century and a major public intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois rented a room at this house from 1890 to 1893 while a graduate student at Harvard University. In 1895, he became the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Du Bois, a strong opponent of accommodationist approaches to race relations and an unwavering advocate of full civil rights for African Americans, was politically allied with Boston’s William Monroe Trotter.* Together, they helped to found, in 1905, the Niagara Movement, a forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1910, Du Bois became the editor of the NAACP’s monthly magazine, The Crisis.

One of the founders of modern sociology, Du Bois was the author of Black Reconstruction in America (1935). His most famous work, among his many books, is The Souls of Black Folk. First published in 1903, it is a collection of essays on race, labor, and culture. In it, he famously decried “the problem of the color line” as “the problem of the Twentieth Century.”

Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868, Du Bois was active in the Pan-Africanist movement. In 1961, he joined the U.S. Communist Party, and then moved to Accra, Ghana, where he died in 1963.

The house at 20 Flagg Street, part of the Cambridge African American Heritage Trail, has a historical marker about Du Bois in front of it. In the 1980s, Harvard sold the building. It is now a private home.

20 Flagg Street, 2017. Photo by Eleni Macrakis.

Getting there:

Red Line to Harvard Square Station. About a 0.6 mile (12-minute) walk via Mt. Auburn Street.

*Regarding William Monroe Trotter, see the site entry associated with his home in Dorchester in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.

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Rockledge (Home of William Lloyd Garrison)

125 Highland Street, Roxbury

William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879. Source: Library of Congress (public domain).

In 1864, William Lloyd Garrison, the famed abolitionist and publisher of the Boston-based, anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, moved to the “Boston Highlands” of Roxbury with his family.

Rockledge was the name given to the half-acre estate. Due to the declining health and limited mobility of Garrison’s wife, Helen—an active abolitionist as well—it was thought best to move to what was then a relatively bucolic suburb. (The City of Boston did not annex Roxbury until 1868.) The Garrison family held onto the property until the deaths of both Helen (1876) and William (1879).

Rockledge, circa 1898. Source: Boston Public Library, Arts Department, via Digital Commonwealth.

In an area today known as both Highland Park and Fort Hill, the original building, altered somewhat over the decades, and a later addition still stand. Beginning in 1904, Rockledge served as a nursing home, one run by the Episcopal Sisters of the Society of St. Margaret for low-income African-American women and children. Today, Rockledge, a National Historic Landmark, is part of Emmanuel College’s Notre Dame campus, where the 30 or so student residents dedicate themselves to community service and social justice.

Getting there:

Orange Line to Jackson Square Station. (0.6 mile, about a 14-minute walk.) The Emmanuel campus is accessed from Highland Avenue, a small street above and behind Rockledge.

Related site:

William Lloyd Garrison birthplace and family home, 3-5 School Street, Newburyport. (We explore this site in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston.)

Nearby:

Highland Park, former home of a Revolutionary War fort and the site of Fort Hill Tower, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It affords a beautiful view of much of Boston. 

To learn more:

Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

National Park Service, National Registry of Historic Places nomination application, 1965.

Rocheleau, Matt. “Emmanuel College has lofty mission at quiet Roxbury site,” The Boston Globe, September 22, 2014.

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Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation

154 Moody Street, Waltham

Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, 1978. Public domain.

The Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation is housed in part what was of one of the first factories in the United States. It is also the site of the world’s first integrated factory—one in which all aspects of the manufacturing process are housed within a single entity. As such, many consider it the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. It was there, in 1813, that Francis Cabot Lowell, a wealthy Bostonian, along with a group of investors that historians have called the Boston Associates (but who were never formally organized as such), established the Boston Manufacturing Company.

Producing cotton textiles, the factory relied on a workforce of approximately 300 laborers—largely young, unmarried women in its initial years—and on the energy provided by a small waterfall along the Charles River. The factory housed the country’s first power loom, the design of which Lowell had effectively stolen (and then adapted with the help of Paul Moody, a mechanic/engineer) from the mills of Manchester, England. In a stunning act of industrial espionage, he visited English factories and recorded to memory strongly guarded secrets and carried them back to the United States just before the War of 1812 broke out.

While wealth accumulation was certainly central to the goals of Lowell and his fellow investors, they had a larger social mission as well, one that grew out of their concern that the United States avoid the excesses of the English industrial experience in terms of filthy cities, urban poverty, and dire working conditions, and one modeled on a different approach to industrial development practiced in Scotland. Boston Manufacturing paid its employees in cash (rather than script, which was very common at the time) and, at least initially, at levels higher than prevailing wages for female workers (which were considerably less than those received by male workers). It also owned boarding houses in which its female workers stayed; the houses were staffed by a matron. As a way of instilling confidence in families who sent their daughters to work in Waltham, the company ensured the good moral standing of the women, enforcing standards of behavior and dress and requiring weekly attendance at church. While working conditions were not easy—12-hour days, six days a week in a room with lint-filled air—they were considerably better than those at factories elsewhere.

Over time, the logic of industrial capitalism undermined the pretense of any high-minded mission on the part of the Boston Manufacturing Company. In the face of rising competition in the textile industry, working conditions deteriorated at the Waltham factory as manifested by increased work assignments and lower wages. By the mid-1800s, the workforce was also characterized by a growing number of Irish (largely immigrant) laborers—many of them children.

What came to be known as the Waltham-Lowell system speaks to its geographic origins in so-called “Watch City” (as it grew rapidly, Waltham later became one of the world’s leading producers of watches) and the fact that it spread to what is now Lowell, Massachusetts.

Today, Waltham, which lies about 12 miles west of Downtown Boston, is a city of approximately 60,000. The Boston Manufacturing Company closed in 1930. The Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation, which opened in 1988, tells the story of the company and of other aspects of Waltham’s industrial history.

Getting there:

Commuter rail from North Station (Framingham line), or MBTA bus from Downtown Boston, to Waltham Station. The museum is just below (going downhill) the station, on the Charles River, in the direction opposite that of the Waltham Common. Less than a five-minute walk.

Nearby sites of interest:

Waltham Common (across from the train station), the site of the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival (on the Saturday of Mother’s Day weekend), the largest such festival in New England.

Brandeis University, 415 South Street.

To learn more:

Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993.

Howard M. Gitelman. “The Waltham System and the Coming of the Irish,” Labor History, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1967: 227-253.

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Walpole State Prison/MCI-Cedar Junction at Walpole

2405 Main Street, South Walpole

Walpole State Prison inmates at rally for better conditions, September 29, 1971. Source: Boston Public Library Arts Department, Digital Commonwealth.

In 1970, Walpole State Prison was considered one of the most violent prisons in the United States. That same year, Francis Sargent, a liberal Republican dedicated to prison reform, won the Massachusetts governorship. In the aftermath of the prisoner rebellion and its bloody suppression at Attica in upstate New York in 1971, prison reform took on greater urgency in Massachusetts.

In this context, Sargent’s administration allowed members of the National Prisoners Reform Association (NPRA), a union of the incarcerated founded at a prison in Cranston, Rhode Island, to contact inmates at Walpole. Around the same time, two inmates, Ralph Hamm and Robert Dellelo, one Black and one White, were working to build a cross-racial alliance of Walpole prisoners. The pair would become the key organizers of a NPRA chapter at Walpole. The union was dedicated to racial justice, nonviolence, and prison abolition, and was effective at building alliances with political progressives outside the institution. Eventually, Walpole’s NPRA chapter won the right to engage in collective bargaining with the prison administration over labor issues as well as prison conditions.

In the face of growing prisoner power and an expansion of programs that lessened the incarcerated population, the guards’ union rebelled and walked off the job on March 14, 1973. For the next two months, the NPRA and its members—with the help of civilian observers—ran almost the entire prison, managing everything from the hospital to the kitchen while establishing a school and a conflict resolution process. One result was that levels of violence in the prison plummeted. Under political pressure, however, state authorities eventually and violently reasserted control of Walpole with returning guards aided by the state police, bringing an end to unprecedented experiment in prisoner self-determination.

Prisoners searched after cell block riot, Walpole State Prison, circa 1969. Photo by Spencer Grant.
Source: Boston Public Library Art Department, Digital Commonwealth.

Opened in 1956 to replace Charlestown State Prison, Walpole, a maximum-security facility, is today called MCI-Cedar Junction. It serves as the Massachusetts Department of Corrections’ “reception and diagnostic center” and, as such, receives all entering male prisoners in the state before they are assigned to another institution.

Getting there:

MBTA Commuter Rail to Walpole. The prison is 3.7 miles away.

To learn more:

Jamie Bissonette with Ralph Hamm. Robert Dellelo, and Edward Rodman, When the Prisoners Ran Walpole: A True Story in the Movement for Prison Abolition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: South End Press, 2008.

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Stone-Davis Hall, Wellesley College

106 Central Street, Wellesley

Emily Greene Balch in Hungary, circa 1900.

Wellesley College is a liberal arts college for women in the affluent town of Wellesley, about 19 miles west of downtown Boston. An elite institution, it has about 2,400 students and an endowment of almost $2 billion. Its alumnae association has been characterized as the world’s most powerful women’s network.  Two out of the three women who have served as U.S. secretary of state (Madeline Albright and Hillary Clinton), for example, are graduates. Less well known is a Wellesley professor who worked to challenge war and militarism, at a high cost to her academic career, and who eventually won the Nobel Peace Prize: Emily Greene Balch.

Balch helped to found Denison House (part of the settlement house movement, and a site in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston) in Boston’s Chinatown in 1892, serving as its first headworker. After graduate studies, she became a professor at Wellesley and the chair of its Department of Economics and Sociology, teaching courses (from 1869 to 1918) on a variety of topics including the history of socialism, labor issues, immigration, and the economic role of women.

Balch was a strong supporter of worker rights and helped to found the Women’s Trade Union League. She self-identified as a socialist, while rejecting the notion of class struggle. An internationalist, feminist, Christian (first Unitarian and later Quaker), and pacifist, Balch attended the International Congress of Women at The Hague in 1915, as a U.S. delegate and helped found the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (which still exists today). Balch worked to end World War I through international mediation, while publicly opposing U.S. entry into the conflict and the military draft and supporting the rights of conscientious objectors and non-citizens. Her activism and the positions she took ultimately led Wellesley’s board of trustees to refuse to reappoint Balch, at 52, when her contract expired in 1918—despite her having the support of departmental colleagues and the College’s president.

After her firing from Wellesley, Balch continued her activism, particularly with the WILPF, and worked to oppose war as well as racism and imperialism—the U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) a key concern. In 1946, Balch received the Nobel Peace Prize “for her lifelong work for disarmament and peace.”

From 1898 to 1900, Emily Greene Balch lived on the Wellesley College campus at Stone Hall, a building destroyed by fire in 1927. On the same site now stands Stone-Davis Hall.

Balch died in Cambridge in 1961, at the age of 94. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery, two miles away from where she was raised (130 Prince Street) in Jamaica Plain.

Stone Hall, Wellesley College, date unknown. Source: Wellesley College Archives Image Gallery,

Getting there:

Commuter rail (Worcester Line) from South Station to Wellesley Square. 1.0 mile (20-minute) walk.

To learn more:

Robert W. Dimand, “Emily Greene Balch, Political Economist,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 70, No. 2, 2011: 464-479.

Melinda Plastas, “A Different Burden: Race and the Social Thought of Emily Greene Balch,” Peace and Change, Vol. 33, No. 4, October 2008: 469-508.

Judy D. Whipps, “The Feminist Pacifism of Emily Greene Balch, Nobel Peace Laureate,” NWSA Journal, Vol. 18, No. 3, 2006: 122-132.

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Randolph High School

70 Memorial Parkway, Randolph

Screenshot from The New York Times website. Photo caption reads: “Susan Shapiro standing outside Randolph, Mass., High School. ‘The flag don’t mean nothing,’ she said.”

On the second day of the 1984 school year, Randolph High School senior Susan Shapiro remained seated in her homeroom while her fellow students stood for the daily playing of the “Star Spangled Banner” and the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom system. Her homeroom teacher ordered Shapiro to stand. Motivated not by a particular politics, but by her view that the U.S. flag is an unimportant symbol which no one should be coerced to honor, Shapiro did stand that day. The next day, however, she invoked her constitutional right to stay in her seat.

Some students in the high school began insulting and taunting Shapiro as she continued her refusal to stand during the daily ritual. Meanwhile, some in the Randolph community fanned the flames. Gerald Rumbos, commander of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter, for example, stated: “You can do anything you want in this country, but if you don’t stand up for the flag, you don’t belong in this country.” Matters intensified when, in November 1984, a local newspaper reported the story, which led to national media coverage. Shapiro and her family then became the targets of large amounts of hate mail and phone calls, many of them very threatening and overtly anti-Semitic. As such, her family pulled Susan out of school for fear of her safety.

Shapiro received support from many—including the American Civil Liberties Union, numerous Vietnam War veterans, and singer Joan Baez. She also had the backing of the U.S. Supreme Court: a 1943 decision (West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnett) regarding the expulsion from school of a Jehovah’s Witness for refusing to salute the flag established that such refusal is a form of free speech.

A few weeks after the controversy exploded, Shapiro returned to Randolph High School. In the face of ongoing harassment, Shapiro’s parents filed a suit on her behalf—against her homeroom teacher, school officials, and the Town of Randolph—in the U.S. District Court in Boston seeking a court order affirming her right not to participate in the nationalist ritual.

In mid-June 1985, the superintendent of Randolph’s public school system and her homeroom teacher expressed regret for what had transpired. On the same day, the Shapiro family dropped the lawsuit, Susan’s right to refuse effectively upheld.

Getting there:

A MBTA bus from Ashmont Station (Red Line) stops close to the high school.

To learn more:

Nat Hentoff, Boston Boy, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.  

Peter Mancusi, “Randolph Senior Drop Suit Against School and Town,” The Boston Globe, June 15, 1985.

David Margolick, “Taking a Stand Against Standing for the Pledge of Allegiance,” The New York Times, November 30, 1984.

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Charles Street Jail (Suffolk County Jail)

215 Charles Street, West End

The Charles Street Jail opened in 1851 as a facility that housed arrestees awaiting trial within Suffolk County. The building employed a reform-minded style which allowed for natural light and ventilation within the structure to provide an adequate quality of life for inmates. Over its many decades of existence, the jail held not only those accused of common crimes, but also many arrested for political reasons—including numerous women who demonstrated support for the suffrage amendment by protesting President Woodrow Wilson’s visit to Boston in 1919. Its better-known prisoners included Malcolm Little (Malcolm X), Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Boston Mayor James Michael Curley, prisoners from two German U-boats during World War I, and William R. Baird Jr., a birth control activist.

Suffragists protest President Woodrow Wilson outside the Charles Street Jail, February 1919. Source: Historic New England.

In 1971, inmates sued the Suffolk County Sheriff and the Massachusetts Commissioner of Corrections for a violation of their constitutional rights due to the overcrowding in the jail. Federal Judge W. Arthur Garrity, best known for his desegregation decision (1974) in the Boston Public Schools, spent the night in the jail in 1973. His experience led him to declare the jail’s conditions unconstitutional and to order its closing. It wasn’t until 1990, however, that the jail closed and the prisoners were transferred to a new facility, the Suffolk County Jail, on Nashua Street.

What was the Charles Street Jail is now part of the Liberty Hotel, a luxury hotel owned by Massachusetts General Hospital and a site on the National Registry of Historic Places. The ironically named facility is centered around the jail’s circular rotunda surrounded by several levels of catwalks that used to connect the jail cells to one another; they now act as hallways between guestrooms, meeting rooms, and the hotel’s high-end restaurants and bars—ones with names such as Clink and the Alibi.

The Liberty Hotel Boston, former Charles Street Jail. Photo by Eleni Macrakis, August 2014.

Getting there:

Red Line to Charles/MGH Station. The site is across the street from the station.

To learn more:

Boniface, Russell. “Breaking Out of Jail.” The News of America’s Community of Architects. Volume 14, October 12, 2007.

“Liberty Hotel History.” The Liberty Hotel: A Luxury Collection Hotel, Boston.

Inmates of Suffolk County Jail v. J Kearney. 928 F 2d 33 (1991).

Walton, Krista. “Free at Last: A remarkable restoration transformed Boston’s notorious Charles Street Jail into the sparkling Liberty Hotel.” Preservation (September/October 2009).

Photo credit:

The photo, titled “Entrance to Suffolk County Jail,” at the top of the entry is from September 11, 1964. Source: Brearley Collection, Arts Department, Boston Public Library, via Digital Commonwealth.