April 1, 2023
The last weekend in April will be Medfield History Weekend, thanks to the efforts of Chris McCue Potts.
During that time, many of Medfield’s historic sites will be open. We hope people will come to visit the historical society building at 6 Pleasant Street, right behind the library.
Medfield split off from Dedham and was incorporated as the 43rd town in Massachusetts in 1651. For a town of only 13,000 people, it has an astonishingly rich history.
There will be volunteer tour guides to show visitors around. Some of these tour guides are rookies on the job, so we’ve created this script for them to follow. At the risk of spoiling your surprise – but to help you understand what you’re looking at, here’s a preview:
Script for Visitors to the Society
Hello! Welcome to the Medfield Historical Society! This building is 100 years old and used to be the Medfield Cooperative Bank – the decal is still on the door, and bank vault is [point to it] right there.
Founded in 1891, this is one of the oldest historical societies in Massachusetts. We publish a monthly online newsletter, The Portal, and we hold five presentation meetings a year on the first Mondays of October, November, February, March, and April.
I hope you’ll consider joining and participating.
I think you’ll find that for a town of 13,000 people, Medfield has an amazingly rich history. Medfield was originally part of Dedham, and it was incorporated as a separate town in 1651.
Is this your first visit? What can we do for you?
More than anything else, people come in here to find information about their older house or their family.
As you can imagine, those file cabinets are packed with, in some cases, centuries of family information. Are you looking for any family information?
These 20 loose-leaf binders on top of the file cabinets have information about houses, some of which date back to the 17th century. In many cases, we’ve used what we call Form B from the Massachusetts Historical Commission – it guides researchers in gathering the most important information about a house. If your house is over 100 years old, we may have some information about it.
The black lateral file cabinets contain Medfield photos taken over the past 150 years.
Looking Around…
Lowell Mason (bust and photo)
Medfield’s most famous and illustrious native son is Lowell Mason, who lived from 1792 to 1872. He was a musician, composer, and above all, a music educator. As a teenager, he was the music director at First Parish Church, at 26 North Street, which is still used as the Unitarian church. That building is one of properties in town on the National Register of Historic Places.
Mason played a variety of musical instruments – that’s his piano, made about 1850. It’s not in playable condition, and even if it were restored, it would still be at best a mediocre piano.
Mason liked to sing, and he really liked to teach kids and others to sing. But when he was young, there was no public school music education – it was all by private tutors. As an adult, he worked as a banker, but he studied music, taught music, and wrote nearly 2,000 hymns. Over 1 million of his music books were sold during his lifetime!
In the 1830s he developed a music curriculum which was adopted by the Boston school committee. He also was president of the Handel and Haydn Society and cofounder of the Boston Academy of Music.
Our president likes to tell the story about a young Medfield woman who a few years ago brought her fiancé from Maryland to the society. When he walked in the door, he said, “I didn’t know Lowell Mason was from Medfield! I’m a music teacher and a member of the National Association for Music Education. Its highest honor is to be named a Lowell Mason Fellow.”
Hannah Adams (picture on file cabinet)
Hannah Adams (1755-1831) was born in Medfield. Hers is the red house still standing on Elm Street next to the Wheelock School.
Largely self-taught, she was the first woman in the colonies to earn a living as an author, writing books about religions. We have a few copies in the safe here at the society. Unlike most previous writers, she did her research by consulting with practitioners of the subject religions.
Hannah Adams faced challenges as a woman author. When she published her first book, her printer cheated her out of most of the money due her. She sued under the newly passed Massachusetts copyright laws and recovered some of what was owed. She continued to lobby for the passage of the first U.S. copyright laws, signed by President Washington in 1790.
In 1799 Adams published A Summary History of New-England. Several years later a similar work was published by the first American geographer, Rev. Jedidiah Morse. It was so very similar that Adams sued. She and Morse became involved in a ten-year legal battle. It appeared that despite the evidence supporting her, she lost because she was a woman and he was a male minister.
Morse, by the way, was the father of Samuel F. B. Morse, a noted artist who is credited with inventing the telegraph. But in 2016 two Medfield High School students researched and concluded that while Morse took the credit, his colleague Alfred Vail did most of the work.
Though Hannah Adams was a modest, shy person who never married and hardly traveled, she had a broad circle of friends and supporters in the Boston area. At her death in 1831, as the first female professional writer, she was one of the most famous women in America.
Hannah Adams was one of the very first people to be buried in the Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Charles Martin Loeffler (bust and photo)
Born in Germany in 1861, in his lifetime Loeffler achieved fame as a violinist and composer; when he died in Medfield in 1935 he was widely regarded as “the dean of American composers.” He lived on South Street in a house which burned down, but his music studio across the street at 274 South stands as private home.
In Berlin he studied violin with Joseph Joachim, who was one of greatest violinists of his time and a close friend of Johannes Brahms. At age 21 Loeffler emigrated to the United States, armed with a letter of introduction from Joachim. The next year he joined the new Boston Symphony Orchestra as assistant concertmaster. He wrote a lot of music which the BSO and other orchestras performed then…and occasionally perform now.
The Medfield library has a few CDs of Loeffler’s music, which reminds some people of Brahms and Debussy.
Loeffler retired from the BSO at age 42. Two years later bought his house in Medfield, where he taught, composed, and lived the life of a gentleman farmer. Over his lifetime he developed friendships with many famous musicians – Fauré, Busoni, and George Gershwin…artists – John Singer Sargent (who painted his portrait) and Dennis Miller Bunker…and art patrons – Isabella Stewart Gardner and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge.
William S. Tilden (picture over bookcase)
William S. Tilden (1830-1912) was a lifelong Medfield resident, where he taught music and played for decades as organist at the Baptist Church. He was also the first president of the Medfield Historical Society and the author of our bible, the History of Medfield 1650-1886.
Around the Building
Front Room
Clocks – The Morse clock by the entrance is about 200 years old and almost works. The clock on the shelf over the book cabinet is probably 100 years old; it was in the selectmen’s office in town hall.
The partner’s desk belonged to E.V. Mitchell, who owned the hat factory that is now the site of the Montrose School. The factory employed over 1,000 people at certain times of the year, and Mitchell called the shots in Medfield, but he also used his money for many good public purposes. One of his business associates, Granville Dailey, gave the town its wonderful library building in 1917.
Mitchell lived in a mansion that is now the site of the post office. This round table, with its chairs, was in his dining room; with its many leaves, it could seat 20. Mitchell liked to party.
The display case on the desk contains some hats that came from the hat factory and a picture of the “colonel.”
The portrait of Jack the Dog hangs behind the door. If it looks familiar, it’s because a copy of it was displayed on the traffic signal control box in front of the Bank of America across the street. Unfortunately, the box was destroyed in a traffic accident, and there’s no picture on the replacement. Jack was owned by Dr. Arthur Mitchell, who bought the first car in Medfield in 1903 and who lived in the building on Main Street that now houses the Butterfly Shop.
Here’s the story: one spring day, after a heavy rain, Mitchell took Jack for a walk down Causeway Street. The street was flooded. Mitchell fell in the river. Jack jumped into the water, and Mitchell grabbed onto Jack and made it to shore. Mitchell credited Jack with savings his life and commissioned J.A.S. Monks, a prominent Medfield artist to paint his portrait. Note that Jack’s collar is in the little case on the radiator. Jack and Dr. Mitchell are buried side by side in a Maine cemetery.
The Harding Post Office was at the intersection of Harding Street and Hospital Road. In much of the 20th century, Harding (aka Medfield 02042) was a thriving suburb where many employees and others associated with the hospital lived.
Point out books, maps, and other items for sale.
Vault Area
Note the maps on the walls, before and after the railroads came in the mid-19th century.
In addition to quilts and wedding dresses, the vault houses significant old documents and artifacts and the society’s collection of antique weapons, including Turner’s 16th century musket (perhaps the oldest long gun in the western hemisphere) and Captain Richard Derby’s pistol that his admiring men presented to him two weeks before he was killed in the Civil War.
Back Room
Display case has hats – from about 1800 to June 15, 1956, Medfield was a leading center for straw hat manufacturing; the factory was closed abruptly when the owner, Arnold Tofias, got into a dispute with the union. Large picture of Searle and Dailey Straw Works.
Medfield Junction was the railroad station near the intersection of Adams and West Mill Streets.
The display cabinet has a wide variety of small artifacts from the 19th and 20th centuries
Basement
Careful on the stairs! Much of the society’s framed artwork is hanging on a swinging display contraption. High school yearbooks going back to the 1920s. Artifacts on shelves, approximately in alphabetical order. Seldom-opened books of old town records.
FOR MORE INFORMATION –
See Saturday Morning Survival Guide in curators’ handbook.