1910s

Josiah Cooley House, Longmeadow, Massachusetts (7)

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The house at the corner of Longmeadow Street and Emerson Road in Longmeadow, seen from the northeast around the 1910s or 1920s. Image courtesy of the Longmeadow Historical Society, Paesiello Emerson Collection.

The house in 2024:

These two photos show the Josiah Cooley House, which has been discussed in more detail in previous posts. It was built sometime around 1760, but was subsequently expanded around 1827–1835. This involved building the two additions that are shown here in these photos, including the one-story wing in the back of the house, and a two-story wing here on the north side of the house. The house was owned by Josiah Cooley and his descendants for over a century, and subsequent owners included the Emerson family, who lived here from 1872 to 1943.

Also visible in these two photos is the David Hale House, which stands in the distance on the left side of the scene. It was built sometime around the mid-19th century at the southwest corner of Longmeadow Street and Emerson Road, and it features Greek Revival style architecture, which was typical for this period. It was originally owned by David Hale, but after his death in 1865 it was sold to Michael Kinney, whose family lived here into the early 20th century.

Today, this scene is not significantly different from when the top photo was taken a century ago. Both houses are still standing, although the Hale house is now part of the campus of Bay Path University. The Cooley house was also part of Bay Path for a time, although the school recently sold the property and it is once again a private residence.

Longmeadow Street and Bliss Road, Longmeadow, Massachusetts

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The view looking east toward the corner of Longmeadow Street and Bliss Road in Longmeadow, around 1910. Image photographed by Paesiello Emerson, courtesy of the Longmeadow Historical Society.

The same view in 2024:

These two photos show a view from the same vantage point as the ones in the previous post, just angled farther to the right. The photographer of the 1910 image, Paesiello Emerson, took the photo from the second-floor bedroom on the southeast corner of his house, at the corner of Longmeadow Street and Emerson Road. His image shows a changing landscape in Longmeadow, with an older farmhouse in the foreground and newer suburban homes in the background.

The house in the center of the top photo was apparently built sometime around the late 18th or early 19th centuries. It stood at the northeast corner of Longmeadow Street and Bliss Road, and the 1830 town map shows that it was owned by Samuel Stebbins. By the 1850s, it was owned by Sylvester Bliss, a farmer who lived here with his wife Nancy. They had four children: Hannah, Marilla, James, and Harriet. All four were living here with their parents during the 1880 census, and Bliss also employed two boys who lived and worked here. His property included about 30 acres that extended westward along the north side of Bliss Road as far as modern-day Laurel Street.

Sylvester Bliss died in 1887, and Nancy died a decade later. The top photo was taken around 1910, and the Bliss family still owned the property at this time, although they rented it to Clifford S. Kempton, a poultry farmer who was originally from Pennsylvania. During the 1910 census he was 53 years old, and he was living here with his wife Clara, their three children, and Clara’s brother Charles Breck. Their household also included 16-year-old Pearl Murphy, a Black domestic servant who was from North Carolina.

In 1913, the Bliss family sold this property to real estate developer Edwin H. Robbins. The land was then subdivided and new streets were laid out, including Belleclaire Avenue and Westmoreland Avenue. Most of the land was redeveloped with new single-family homes, but the spot here at the corner of Longmeadow Street and Bliss Road became the site of a commercial building known as the Colonnade. Rather than demolishing the old Bliss house, it was moved around the corner to a new lot on Bliss Road around 1914. However, it was destroyed by a fire just two years later. According to contemporary newspaper accounts, the fire was probably caused by defective wiring.

The Colonnade featured a variety of businesses, and early tenants included a drugstore, a grocery store, a meat market, a tailor, a shoemaker, and an automobile garage. It is still standing today, and it is visible in the center of the second photo, although its exterior has been heavily altered over the years. Aside from the construction of the Colonnade, other changes from the top photo include the demolition of the houses on the right side of Bliss Road, which can be seen in the distance on the right side of the top photo. This area on Bliss Road is now occupied by St. Mary’s Church and St. Mary’s Academy, which is partially visible on the far right side.

Longmeadow Street and Belleclaire Avenue, Longmeadow, Massachusetts

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The view looking east toward the corner of Longmeadow Street and Belleclaire Avenue in Longmeadow, in January 1916. Image photographed by Paesiello Emerson, courtesy of the Longmeadow Historical Society.

The scene in 2024:

These two photos were taken from the southeast bedroom on the second floor of the Josiah Cooley House. Built around 1760, this house stands at the corner of Longmeadow Street and Emerson Road, and during the early 20th century it was the home of Paesiello Emerson, an amateur photographer who used his camera to document life in Longmeadow.

The top photo shows some of the changes that were happening here in Longmeadow during this period. For much of its history, the town was relatively small. Most of the homes were located along Longmeadow Street, with long house lots that extended to the east and west of the street. There was minimal commercial or industrial development, and the town’s economy relied primarily on farming.

By 1900, the town had a population of just 811, but this would soon change due to the growth of Springfield, which is directly to the north of Longmeadow. A trolley line was built through the town, linking it to Springfield and also to Hartford, and it made it easy for residents to live in the town and commute into the city for work.

Over the next few decades, many of the old house lots were subdivided and developed with single-family homes. This included the land at the northeast corner of Longmeadow Street and Bliss Road, which had long been owned by the Bliss family. Around 1913, the Bliss family sold this land to Edwin H. Robbins, a real estate developer who named the subdivision “Brookline.” This was part of a strategy to market Longmeadow as Springfield’s equivalent to Brookline, which is an affluent suburb of Boston.

The Brookline subdivision consisted of homes along the north side of Bliss Road and east side of Longmeadow Street, along with the development of several new streets. Belleclaire Avenue and Westmoreland Avenue were laid out east to west, running parallel to Bliss Road. These streets were intersected by Dayton Street (later named Cross Street), Rosemore Street, and Lorenz Street, which ran north to south. From this view, Belleclaire Avenue is near the center of the photo, with Westmoreland Avenue farther in the distance on the left side.

Aside from naming it “Brookline,” Robbins also promoted this subdivision through regular advertisements in local newspapers. One such advertisement, published in the May 4, 1913 Springfield Republican, encouraged Springfield residents to move to Longmeadow, specifically to Brookline. He wrote:

You have thought that you would like to live in Longmeadow.

The reasons you had were these:

You would have every advantage you have in Springfield. Emphasis on the “every.”

You would have, in addition, all the delights of the country. These are:

  1. The pure country air, perfumed by the flowers and made vocal by the birds. Did you ever hear the birds’ May Festival?
  2. The absence of the many hideous sights and smells of the city, as well as the profanities and vulgarities you cannot help hearing.
  3. The closeness of the ties of friendships impossible anywhere but in a small community of congenial people. This is not obvious to a city dweller, but is a very real fact to the resident of a village community.

Think what these three advantages mean to growing children. You bring them up physically and morally clean, and you store their hearts with happy memories they will cherish in the strenuous days to come.

Your desire to live in Longmeadow is a true instinct. Follow it.

As to what “Brookline” is and will be, I want to say:—

1st. It has a beautiful location at the corner of Bliss Road, with a frontage of over 700 feet on Longmeadow Street, down to the Town House. It is level and high and perfectly dry, with a fine sand subsoil, and in no part underlaid with clay.

I am going to put in water, sewer, gas, electric lights. Trees now set out in the tree belts, and adequate cement sidewalks. The houses will be 100 feet apart across the streets, and I have restricted it so highly that I GUARANTEE YOU DESIRABLE NEIGHBORS, no matter how high your station in life may be.

I pledge my word to make “Brookline” the highest class development in Longmeadow. My word is good, and has been proved in my former developments, which I invite you to inspect.

Not only do I pledge my word, but I am hard at work to show the goods.

Come down and see what I am doing, as an indication of what I shall do.

BROOKLINE is where you bought melons of Mr. Kempton last year.

As indicated in the advertisement, Robbins placed deed restrictions on the lots, which were set to terminate in 1935. Some of these restrictions were fairly standard physical requirements, including setting standards for setbacks, minimum construction costs, and exterior materials. However, as implied by his guarantee of “desirable neighbors,” he also included racial and ethnic restrictions on the lots that he sold. These deeds stated that “said lot shall not be resold to a colored person a Polander or an Italian.” This was not an uncommon practice during the early 20th century, and it contributed to racial disparities between the predominantly white, high-income suburbs and the much more diverse, lower-income cities. The deed restrictions for this particular subdivision expired in 1935, but racially-based restrictions continued to be used elsewhere until 1948, when the Shelley v. Kraemer Supreme Court case ruled that they were unenforceable.

The top photo was taken in January 1916, during the early years of the subdivision’s development. Some of the houses were already built, and at least one or two on Westmoreland Avenue were under construction at the time. The photo was taken by Paesiello Emerson, from a second-floor bedroom at his house. This was one of the many photos that he took in Longmeadow during the first few decades of the 20th century, many of which showed the evolving landscape as the town evolved from an agricultural community to an affluent residential suburb.

Today, more than a century after Paesiello Emerson took the top photo, the view from the bedroom window shows a scene that is more developed, yet still recognizable from the top photo. The subdivision has long since been built out, and Belleclaire and Westmoreland Avenues are lined with early 20th century homes. Other than these houses, the only significant change in this scene is on the right side, where a small commercial property now stands at the corner of Longmeadow Street and Bliss Road. This was also constructed during the early 20th century development of the area, and it now includes a variety of commercial tenants, including a gas station and auto repair shop.

Laundry Wagon, Longmeadow, Massachusetts

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A horse-drawn wagon for Scott’s Laundry, seen on Emerson Road near the corner of Longmeadow Street in Longmeadow, Massachusetts in 1914. Image courtesy of the Longmeadow Historical Society, Paesiello Emerson Collection.

The same scene in 2023:

These two photos were taken from near the same spot as the ones in the previous post, but just a little farther to the east. But, unlike the older image in that post, the main subject of the 1914 photo here is not the house, but rather the people and the wagon in the foreground. The wagon bears the name of L. Dorenbaum, who was an agent for Scott’s Laundry, and the image shows a man, presumably Dorenbaum, standing next to the horse, with a young woman seated in the carriage.

Louis Dorenbaum was born in Russia in 1878. He was Jewish, and he came to America as a child in 1887, likely to escape the antisemitic pogroms that were happening in Russia at the time. He lived in Springfield’s Forest Park neighborhood, which had a large Jewish population at the turn of the 20th century, and by the time the top photo was taken he was about 36 years old and was living at 810 Belmont Avenue in Springfield, along with his wife Agnes and their children Myron, Pauline, and Blanche. It seems unclear if the person in the carriage was a relative, but she seems too young to have been Agnes (who was 31 at the time), but too old to have been either of his daughters (who were 8 and 6).

The photo shows Dorenbaum’s laundry wagon in Longmeadow, on Emerson Road (or Depot Road, as it was known at the time) near the corner of Longmeadow Street. The house in the background is the Josiah Cooley house, which was built around 1760 and is described in more detail in an earlier post. The photographer, Paesiello Emerson, lived in this house with his half siblings Annie and Henry Emerson, and the house was often a subject of his photos. This photo is somewhat unusual for him, though, because he typically did not photograph people, instead preferring buildings, trees, and landscapes. It’s hard to say why Emerson chose to take this photo. It is possible that he knew Dorenbaum, but it also seems possible that he may have wanted to capture this image of a more of transportation that, by 1914, was rapidly vanishing in favor of motor vehicles.

Louis Dorenbaum lived in Springfield until the early 1940s. The 1940 census shows him at a house on Blodgett Street, and his occupation was listed as delivery driver for a laundry, although he was probably no longer using horse-drawn wagons by that point. He later moved to Milton, where his son Myron was working as a dentist. Louis died there in 1947, at the age of  70.

Today, the house that Dorenbaum posed in front of in the top photo is still standing. It has seen some changes over the years, including the removal of the so-called “coffin door” that is partially visible on the south side of the house behind the horse’s head in the top photo. Overall, though, it has remained well preserved in its historic appearance, and it is one of the oldest surviving homes in Longmeadow.

Josiah Cooley House, Longmeadow, Massachusetts (5)

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The house at the corner of Longmeadow and Emerson Streets in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1917. Image courtesy of the Longmeadow Historical Society, Paesiello Emerson Collection.

The house in 2023:

This house has been featured in previous posts, and there are many early 20th century images of it thanks to Paesiello Emerson, an amateur photographer who lived here during that period. As explained in more detail in an earlier post, the house is believed to have been built around 1760 as the home of Josiah and Experience Cooley. An earlier house, belonging to Josiah’s father Eliakim, had stood here on this same spot earlier in the 18th century, and it is possible that the current house may have been built in part on the foundation of Eliakim’s house.

These two photos show the view of the back of the house from the southwest, on what is now Emerson Road. From this angle, the house would have looked very different when it was initially constructed. It was built as a saltbox, with a second floor on the front part of the house and a long sloping roof here on the back of the house. However, when Josiah and Experience’s granddaughter Lucy Colton inherited the house in the late 1820s, she modernized and expanded the house.

Some of this work included raising the roof to create a full second story, along with additions on the north and west sides of the house. The two-story northern addition, which is visible in the distance on the far side of the house, included living space for Lucy’s son Luther Woolworth Colton and his newlywed wife Abigail. The western addition, shown on the left side of these photos, was one story in height, and it appears to have been used for storage and workshop space, rather than as living space

Aside from these structural changes, Lucy also made some interior and exterior design changes, in keeping with early 19th century trends. On the exterior, this included removing the original 12-over-12 windows from the front of the house and replacing them with new 6-over-6 windows. However, rather than discarding the old windows, they were installed here on the back part of the house and in the back addition, likely because they would not be as visible from the street.

The house would remain in the Cooley-Colton family for several more decades, but in 1869 Lucy’s son Josiah Cooley Colton sold the house and 20 acres of land to Bradford W. Palmer for $4,500. The Palmer family, however, would only stay here for a few years before selling it to William G. Emerson, a carpenter who was originally from eastern Massachusetts. His family included his wife Lovina and their children William, Annie, and Henry. The elder William died in 1887, Lovina died in 1897, and at some point the younger William moved into a house of his own in Longmeadow, but Annie and Henry would live here for their entire lives.

Neither Annie nor Henry ever married, but in 1907 they were joined here by their older half brother Paesiello Emerson. He was a widower in his mid-70s, and he had worked for much of his life as a boot maker. However, when he was in his 70s he took up photography as a hobby. He tended to prefer photographing landscapes and old buildings, and he captured several thousand images, including many here in Longmeadow. He continued his photography into his 90s, creating a valuable photographic archive of the town’s early 20th century development.

Paesiello Emerson died here in the house in 1927 at the age of 95. At some point in the 1920s, William Emerson also returned to live here, and he died in the house in 1930 at the age of 81. The two younger siblings, Annie and Henry, remained here until their deaths in 1941 and 1943, at the age of 81 and 77 respectively. Henry was a farmer who grew raspberries and asparagus here, along with raising poultry. Annie was a teacher, but she was also the town historian. She conducted extensive research on the historic homes in Longmeadow, including her own, and much of the information about this house is based on her notes.

The house was sold by the Emerson heirs after Henry’s death in 1943, and subsequent owners did some restoration work as well as modernization of the house. Here on the back part of the house, this included adding an enclosed porch to the back of the house and adding an open porch to the back addition. The garage was also extended outward by a few feet to accommodate cars, and a second garage door was added. Other changes, which are hard to notice from this particular angle, included removing the “coffin door” from the south side of the house, and adding another second-story window to the back of the house. The latter was evidently done in the late 1940s, when two new bathrooms were installed in the back part of the second floor.

Overall, though, the appearance of the house is not drastically different from its appearance in 1917 when Paesiello Emerson took the top photo. Aside from the porches and the small addition to the garage, the overall form of the house has not changed. It retains its chimneys, including the large central chimney, and most of the windows appear to either be original or, in the case of the 6-over-6 windows, date to the late 1820s renovation. Many of the 12-over-12 windows can still be found in the back part of the house, and are likely the same ones that had once been installed on the front part of the house in the mid-1700s.

Colonial Inn, Concord, Massachusetts (2)

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The Colonial Inn at Monument Square in Concord, around 1910-1920. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

The scene in 2023:

As explained in more detail in an earlier post, the Colonial Inn is a historic hotel that stands at the northern end of Monument Square in the center of Concord. It was built over the span of many years, with the earliest section in the distance on the far right side of the scene. It was built around 1716, and was originally owned by James Minot Jr. , and subsequent owners included Dr. Timothy Minot, Ammi White, and John Thoreau, the grandfather of Transcendentalist author Henry David Thoreau. Henry himself also lived here for a few years as a teenager, from 1835 to 1837.

The central section of the hotel, which has the row of five windows behind the “Colonial Inn” sign in the bottom photo, was built later in the 18th century, but was originally only one story in height. It was used as a store, and it was one of the places in Concord where colonists stored munitions in advance of the Battle of Concord on April 19, 1775. This section of the property was sold to John White in 1789, and second story was added around 1800.

The section of the building on the left side was constructed around 1812-1820 as the home of John White, who later sold the left and central sections to Daniel Shattuck in 1821. Shattuck then purchased the section on the right side from the Thoreau family in 1839, putting all three buildings under the same ownership for the first time. He lived here until his death in 1867, but shortly before he died he gave the entire property to his daughter, Frances Surette. It was apparently in the 1860s, probably during her ownership, that the section on the right was altered with a Mansard roof. Frances’s husband, Louis Surette, was a dry goods merchant, and they also operated a boarding house here, which they named the Thoreau House.

In 1889, the central and right-hand sections were sold to John Maynard Keyes, who opened a hotel here. He later acquired the section on the left in 1897, and named the hotel the Colonial Inn. The top photo was taken soon after, probably sometime in the 1910s, and it shows the building from the southwest, at the corner of Monument Square and Lowell Road.

More than a century later, the building has undergone additional changes. Most significantly, this has included the addition of a large wing on the back of the hotel, which was added in 1960. Otherwise, though, the historic portion of the building remains much the same as it did in the early 20th century, and it remains in use as a hotel while also standing as an important historic landmark in downtown Concord.