Jackson Square: The Origin of the Name
STONY BROOK divided Roxbury into east and west for over 250 years. During that time the principle highway between the business and civic district of Dudley Square and the village center of Jamaica Plain was Centre Street. Since at least 1662 Centre St crossed Stony Brook over a wooden plank bridge near Heath Lane (a cart path to the Heath Farm; in 1825 it became Heath Street). That junction was called Central Bridge but most people until the turn of the 20th century called it Hog’s Bridge.[i]
That intersection is today known as Jackson Square, a familiar crossroads at Columbus Ave. and Centre Street, but no public record has been found to determine who the Square was named after. Hog’s Bridge was used up to end of the 19th century so it is a 20th century appellation.
It may be that the Square was named for General Henry Jackson, one of the three Revolutionary War military leaders from Boston[ii]. General William Heath defended Roxbury during the Siege of Boston and afterwards was ordered to the strategic Hudson River command after Benedict Arnold defected to guard that crucial waterway from 1777 to 1783. Heath Square at the nearby junction of Heath St and Parker Street is named after the general on land he once owned. General Joseph Warren was killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. A statue of him stood at Warren and Regent Streets for 62 years[iii]. So it would seem appropriate that when Columbus Avenue was extended to Franklin Park in 1895 that the new crossroad would be named after General Henry Jackson.
II.
Henry Jackson. Courtesy of New England Historic Genealogical Society. Engraved from a pastel drawing done in 1777. Appeared in the April 1892 edition of New England Historical and Genealogical Register.
HENRY JACKSON was born a British subject and died an American citizen.[iv] His life was in two parts: soldier and civic leader who participated in the rebuilding of Boston after the war. Jackson was born on Oct 19. 1747. His father Joseph was a distiller and his home was more than likely on Essex Street. The center of the distillery business in 18th century Boston was at Essex and South Streets. In 1794 there were thirty distilleries on Essex and South Streets. Ships tied up at the South Street wharf to unload grain and barrels of West Indian molasses.[v] Henry Knox’s father William mastered one of those ships. Henry Knox was Jackson’s lifelong friend. Knox was born 1750; his house was on Sea Street (today Atlantic Avenue) at the foot of Essex directly overlooking the South Bay[vi].
Jackson’s father was a life- long military man. In 1738 Joseph joined the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in which he served until the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. (He was on duty with William Heath of Roxbury who joined the Ancients at the age of 17 in 1754). Joseph died at the age of 84 in 1790. The Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company gave him a military funeral; he was buried at Kings Chapel burial ground.
Henry Jackson was an officer in the First Corp Cadets. The First Corps of Cadets was formed in 1741 as bodyguards for the Royal Governor (the first was Gov William Shirley). After the tumult and in the vacuum of the British evacuation, Jackson reorganized the remaining members and recruited other soldiers to form the 16th Massachusetts Regiment called the Boston Regiment in May of 1777. He was appointed colonel of the regiment and ordered by General Washington to join his army outside Philadelphia. The Boston Regiment fought in the battle of Monmouth (1778), Quaker Hill, RI (1778) and Springfield NJ in 1780. The Regiment was at Yorktown and then joined General Henry Knox in recovering New York City from British occupation after the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Jackson retired from active duty when the Continental Army was dissolved on June 29, 1784.
In June of 1783 at Newburgh New York he was among the group of army officers including Major General Heath to form the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati; he was treasurer of it until his death. Criticized by some in the young nation as a new aristocracy in America, the Society was largely fraternal and benevolent in helping veterans and their families.
In the summer of 1784 Jackson, a lifelong bachelor, returned to Boston to stay at Mrs. Hatch’s fashionable boarding house at Common (Tremont) and Winter Streets, then a fairly rural part of the city opposite the Boston Common. He was called back into active duty in 1786 to suppress Shays Rebellion, a revolt by farmers, mechanics and small landowners hard hit by post war financial difficulties who sought state assistance for their debts. Jackson found the task unpleasant, had difficulty raising troops but considered the rebellion a noisy mob. After the revolt was quelled, came home and hung up his uniform. Jackson seemed to have played no active or ceremonial role in the celebrations of George Washington’s triumphant Boston visit from October 24 through October 28, 1789.[vii] He and Generals Knox and Heath were certainly at the great banquet held at Faneuil Hall on the Washington’s last night in the city. Washington stayed at Mrs. Ingersol’s boarding house at Common and Court Street a few short blocks from Jackson’s rooms; it could very well have been that he and his friend Henry Knox paid a quiet visit with their former commanding officer.
After the war Jackson managed the business and financial affairs of his close friend Henry Knox[viii] whom President Washington appointed as the first Secretary of War in 1785. This included lumber and shipping businesses but mainly the construction of Montpelier Knox’s’ grand hilltop mansion at Thomaston, Maine. In 1794 Congress authorized construction of six new frigates and Secretary of War Knox directed that Henry Jackson be appointed the government’s agent for the construction of the Constitution at Hartt’s Shipyard in Charlestown. Working with Edmund Hartt Jackson approved and signed off on all payments that totaled $302,000. The oak for the famed iron side hull came from Georgia and the masts from Windsor, Maine just east of Augusta. The ship was launched on Oct 27, 1797.
III.
Henry Jackson’s closest personal and professional relationship after the war until the end of his life was with the fascinating family of James and Hepzibah Swan.[ix]
Born Hepzibah Clarke in 1757 her father was a prosperous merchant. In spring of 1776 during the siege of Boston when many families fled the city[x], Henry Jackson and Henry Knox lived at her home on Rawson’s Lane (Bromfield Street) before both went off to the front lines: Knox directed construction of battlements and breastworks at Roxbury defended by General Heath’s troops before going on to become artillery commander of the Continental Army. Jackson raised a regiment that he commanded for the duration of the war.
In 1775 Hepzibah Clarke married James Swan one of the most colorful rogues of wartime and postwar Boston. Swan was born in Scotland and arrived in Boston in 1765 at the age of 34 and became friends with Henry Knox. Active with the Sons of Liberty he participated in the Boson Tea Party and served in the artillery with Knox when the British were driven out of Boston. During the war he took over government positions vacated by the British; he was secretary of the board of war for Massachusetts, adjutant general and legislator. With his wife’s wealth he bought the confiscated house and grounds of Stephen Greenleaf the last Royal High Sheriff on Common Street between West and Winter Streets. (On April 30, 1779 The General court passed the Conspiracy and Confiscation Act in which all property of “certain notorious conspirators” was seized and sold to benefit the Commonwealth. The Act listed each one by name.) Three daughters were born to the Swans between 1777 and 1782 and in 1783 a son was born. Swan was allegedly a privateer during the war; ship owners and masters authorized by Congress to harass, seize and profit from the captured cargo of British supply ships on the high seas.
Swan squandered his wife’s wealth from gambling and poor land investments and in 1788 he went to France to rebuild his fortune. Hepzibah and James Swan were both pro French; Mrs. Swan in particular was a devout Francophile all her life. During the war and they entertained French naval officers stationed at Newport who brought their ships to Boston for repair, refitting and supplies. It was these French officers, often noblemen, whom James Swan asked for assistance and political access in Paris. A remarkable financier, he reorganized French debt after the collapse of the monarchy and set up a lucrative trading company to purchase food, munitions and merchandise in America. His trusted American agent in Boston was Henry Jackson. Swan made a huge fortune and returned triumphantly to America in 1795. He landed at Philadelphia and was joined by Hepzibah who arranged to have his portrait painted by her new protégé Gilbert Stuart.
On his return to Boston James Swan sought to impress the merchant oligarchy by building a grand countryseat on Dudley Street in Dorchester not far from Royal Governor Shirley’s mansion. Swan had purchased the land in 1781 when he was adjutant general of the Commonwealth. It was a 60-acre estate with a house near the road that the State of Massachusetts had confiscated from Loyalist Nathaniel Hatch. Hatch and 1000 other Tories had fled with the British army to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1776. The house and land was confiscated under the enabling legislation of 1779 and Swan bought the property for 18,000 pounds. Planned in large part in the French style by Mrs. Swan, she consulted with another protégé the architect Charles Bulfinch who is given attribution for the design of the most remarkable house of its time in the region. The mansion was set on a high earth berm facing east across Dorchester Bay. Completed in 1796, its signature architectural feature was a two story circular drawing room 32 feet in circumference with a domed ceiling. The bow was pulled out from two traditional Federal style wings and surrounded by a colonnade. Everyone called it the Round House and Mrs. Swan filled it with French furnishings; much of it appropriated by the republican French government from royal palaces and sold to Swan’s import company.[xi]
James Swan didn’t live in his great house long. His marriage was deteriorating (even the cosmopolitan Hepzibah Swan was tired of his infidelities), his fortune reduced and his merchant company was in trouble; in he returned to France in 1798 to rebuild his company and restore his finances. He never returned. Arrested in 1808 for non-payment of debts to his principle investor, he spent the remainder of his life in a very comfortable Paris prison. Almost under house arrest, James Swan was in no hurry to return home to the aristocratic Hepzibah and prison kept him away from creditors. He lived well, ate well and entertained the ladies in style for the next 22 years. The Marquis de Lafayette, however, refused to visit him. One wonders about the conversation he had with Mrs. Swan when he called on her at Dorchester in 1825. James Swan was freed in 1830 after a change in government but he was disoriented and apparently unable to adjust. He died in a Paris street a year later.
Henry Jackson was Mrs. Swan’s closest friend and confidant after 1798. His boarding house was a block away from Mrs. Swan’s house but he was one of the family there and at the Dorchester mansion. After 1798 Mrs. Swan settled into a luxurious and cosmopolitan life of the Boston merchant and political elite in which she played a prominent role for the rest of her life; leaving her city address for her country home in Dorchester on May 1st. Even before James Swan returned to Paris, Jackson was handling her business and financial affairs, something she could not depend on her husband to do.
Acting on behalf of the Swan family, in 1795, Jackson bought the town granary at Park St and Common Street from the town of Boston for $8366. Mrs. Swan deeded the land to her daughters who sold the corner lot to the Trustees of the Park St. Church in 1809.[xii]
Mrs. Swan bought out two of the original investors in the largest and most far reaching real estate venture in postwar Boston when she became the only female member of the four person Mt Vernon Proprietors that acquired the John Singleton Copley pasture in 1796. It was subdivided into townhouse lots that became very valuable when the State House opened in 1798. Mrs. Swan built three houses on the land for her daughters at 13, 15 + 17 Chestnut Street (built in 1805 and 1807) and her own townhouse at 16 Chestnut Street in 1817. Jackson assessed the property and handled all financial transactions on all four homes each designed by Charles Bulfinch, who seemed now to be among the members of her salon.
Jackson managed the household affairs as well. He was very close to the daughters. He organized and managed the marriage of oldest daughter Hepzibah to Dr. John Howard in 1800 and in 1802 the wedding of Sarah Swan to William Sullivan. Mrs. Swan disapproved of her middle daughters fiancé John Turner Sargent (of the Roxbury Sargents; Lucious Manlius Sargent was his brother). Yet despite that Christiana –obviously as strong willed as her mother- married him anyway in 1806 and Mrs. Swan built them a townhouse on Chestnut Street. (John and Christiana named their second son Henry Jackson Sargent,)
Her son James Keadie Swan married Caroline Knox, the daughter of Henry Knox, in 1808. At the time of the wedding Mrs. Swan commissioned Gilbert Stuart to paint a portrait of her son and also of herself. [xiii]
Henry Jackson was also involved in three major post war civic improvement projects. Jackson was one of six members of the West Boston Bridge Proprietors incorporated by Governor Hancock in 1792 and authorized to collect tolls for 40 years. It was completed in 1793 (replaced by the Longfellow Bridge).
In 1791 no doubt at the urging of Mrs. Swan, Jackson and others helped pass legislation which repealed the 1750 law against theater performances. Roxbury state senator William Heath was probably helpful. Jackson was trustee of the Boston Theatre – Boston’s first - designed by Charles Bulfinch at the corner Federal and Franklin Street that opened in 1793.
The third was the huge India Wharf project begun in 1803 Jackson. Henry Knox and other investors organized to replace the ramshackle jumble of wooden wharf buildings built on the old dock. Planned by the incorporators to make Boston a competitive international port, the long granite warehouse was designed by Charles Bulfinch with tall gable front entrance facing the city. The wharf was built in 1804 and the brick warehouse with 32 stores opened in 1808.[xiv]
Henry Knox traveled frequently to Boston with his wife Lucy and their daughter Caroline (Swan) Knox to visit Mrs., Swan. March 1805 marked the 30th anniversary of the British surrender of Boston made possible by the artillery brought down from Fort Ticonderoga by General Knox’s troops that he strategically placed on hilltops facing the city. There were certainly festivities and dinners at which Knox and his old friend Henry Jackson participated. In 1805, probably at this time, Mrs. Swan commissioned two portraits from Gilbert Stuart of Henry Knox and Henry Jackson. Two portraits could not be more different.[xv]Knox is in full uniform (which suggests he was at the Evacuation Day program) his right hand resting on the barrel of a canon with the smoke of battle behind him. He looks confident but not smug. Jackson is painted more intimately in business suit and ruffled collar. He is painted closer to the frame and his head is cocked back with a slight smile. It’s the face of a kind man.[xvi] Completed in 1806 they joined the earlier Stuart paintings of James and Hepzibah in her drawing room[xvii].
This was probably the last time the two old friends saw each other. Knox died the next year and Henry Jackson died suddenly on January 7, 1809. A notice went out that day from the Society of the Cincinnati which notified members of the death of their
“brother and friend”. Unlike his father, he was not given a military funeral[xviii]; a service was held at his boarding house. Mrs. Swan was in shock. He loyal friend was gone. The one who never fawned over her but treated her like anyone else. The imperious grande dame of wealth, fine tastes and love of French culture respected the old bachelor because he provided the stability and companionship that James Swan forfeited.
Henry Jackson’s obelisk at the Swan lot Forest Hills Cemetery. Photo by Richard Heath
Hepzibah Swan had General Jackson interred in a tomb she built in her back garden. The tomb was raised on an earth berm surrounded by a hedge of lilacs and surmounted by an obelisk of blue marble probably quarried and made in Italy. On it was carved “Henry Jackson. Soldier, Patriot, Friend’. [xix] A lane of lilacs led from the house to the tomb that Mrs. Swan often visited and pointed out to guests. One of them was the Marquis de Lafayette in June of 1825 on his triumphal visit to Boston, for the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill. He visited Mrs. Swan on his way to Quincy to see John Adams. The Marquis and Mrs. Swan talked in French for over an hour and no doubt Mrs. Swan walked him out to look at the tomb of Revolutionary War General Henry Jackson.
Hepzibah Swan died two months later probably of cholera on August 14, 1825. She was buried in General Jackson’s tomb. [xx] The house and grounds were left to Christiana Sargent who lived there until her death in 1867 at the age of 89.
Hog’s Bridge in 1873. Atlas of the County of Suffolk Vol 2. G, M, Hopkins, Philadelphia 1873
The neighborhood then was changing. Howard Avenue was built through the property in 1869 and in 1872 the owners subdivided it again and Harlow Street was built through the garden. It was at that time that the Swan-Sargent family -probably John T. Sargent- had the grave removed to Forest Hills Cemetery. On Oct 21, 1872 the remains of General Henry Jackson, Hepzibah Swan, John T Sargent, Christiana Sargent and Mary Cochran were transferred to a lot on Lilac Path at Forest Hills Cemetery. In the center of the lot on the edge of the earth terrace was placed the blue marble obelisk dedicated to General Jackson.[xxi]
The great country house was torn down in 1891 and the two-acre site sat vacant for almost fifty years until the Boston Parks Dept built the Mary Hannon Playground on the land in 1945.
At the time of General Jackson’s death, Hog’s Bridge was the site of Samuel Heath’s tannery established about 1760 adjacent o the farm of his bother William Heath. The Heath tannery was an extension of industry in the Stony brook Valley centered at Pierpont’s Village (Roxbury crossing). Heath’s Tannery was bought and expanded to become the Guild & White Tannery that opened in 1847. It specialized in calfskin gloves and tanned about 10,000 skins annually. Guild and White was located on the right of way of the Boston + Providence Railroad, a 40 mile passenger train route that opened on June 11, 1834 from Park Square through Pierpont’s Village and Hog’s Bridge to the seacoast city of Providence. Rhode Island. The railroad extended straight across the mudflats and marshes of the Back Bay on an earth and wood causeway; in 1850 a stop was added at Pierpont’s Village. The biggest change came in 1866 when freight service was added on additional track. Heath Street Station was added about this time. Also a second bridge was built to carry Centre Street over the railroad. An incline was graded and a wooden bridge carried wagons and carriages to and from Jamaica Plain.
In 1872 Hog’s Bridge was a busy crossroads in which was nestled a business district of wood frame and occasional brick buildings of shopkeepers, blacksmiths and mechanics servicing the tan yard, breweries and the railroad; meandering through was Stony Brook – by then contained in a stone channel- crossed by a wooden bridge at Centre and Heath Streets.
The New York New Haven and Hartford Railroad announced in 1893 its plan to eliminate the many unsafe grade crossings in the Stony Brook Valley. Beginning at Cumberland Street in the South End and extending four miles to Forest Hills a massive stone viaduct would carry passenger and freights trains over busy cross-town roads. Hundreds of wooden bridges over Stony Brook (many through factories) would be taken down and the entire length of Stony Brook placed in a brick culvert. The $3 million project was the largest public works project ever seen in Roxbury; it coincided with the control of both Stony Brook and Muddy River in the just completed new park called the Back Bay Fens. The project included eight new bridges and the construction of new passenger stations designed by Samuel Shaw chief engineer of the Old Colony Railroad the owner of that portion of the NYNH &H[xxii].
Work began in May of 1895.[xxiii] A gravel berm was laid across the old right of way supported by granite walls twenty feet high built to create a multi track viaduct that rose gently at Cumberland Street adjacent to the baseball grounds (near present-day Carter Playground) to Forest Hills. Centre Street was widened to eighty feet and depressed nineteen feet in grade to run under an iron plate bridge about one hundred feet long including abutments. New electric car tracks were also built on a reconfigured Centre Street as it dropped down the Fort Hill slope. A fifty-foot iron plate bridge was over Heath Street that included in- bound and outbound passenger waiting rooms. By the end of 1897 a solid wall of masonry twenty feet high carrying passenger and freight trains extended across the Stony Brook Valley floor[xxiv].
Hog’s Bridge in 1890. Atlas of the City Of Boston Proper and Roxbury GW Bromley, Philadelphia 1890.
This was not the only change for Hog’s Bridge. In 1894 the State legislature established the Boston Board of Street Commissioners and also passed the Special Legislation Act for Great Avenues designed to extend roads out to the new districts of Boston. That bill authorized the extension of Columbus Avenue from Northampton Street to Franklin Park. Three hundred men were put to work to take down existing structures and build the Avenue that included electric streetcar tracks. Completed at the end of 1895, the new Columbus Avenue created a great X street pattern as old Centre Street crossed at an angle with the new boulevard. Columbus Avenue was built concurrently with the railroad viaduct. Centre Street was straightened and traffic went in a direct line to the underpass. It was now possible to drive – or take an electric car - from the old Park Square railroad station on a straight and smooth avenue to Egleston Square and Franklin Park.
Great improvements were also taking place at the other end of Columbus Avenue in the 1890’s. On October 19, 1891 Lt Col. Thomas Edmunds, commanding officer of the First Corps of Cadets laid the cornerstone for their great new armory at Columbus Ave. and Ferdinand St (later extended and named Arlington Street)[xxv]. It was the 150th anniversary of the fabled First Corp of Cadets that moved into its new armory in February and March 1897.
Josiah Quincy was mayor of the city, the third Josiah Quincy to hold that office in the 19th century. His grandfather had built Quincy Market in 1826 and his father opened the city to Cochituate water with a groundbreaking in 1846. He himself would cut the ribbon for the great South Station from which trains rolled over the Roxbury viaduct across Centre Street on its way to New York City.
It may have been that Lt Col Edmunds had a word with Mayor Quincy as the cadets hung up the pastel drawing of General Jackson done in 1777 in their new head house library. General Jackson was the man who reorganized the First Corp of Cadets in the turmoil of the British Evacuation and he commanded it as an effective fighting force for the duration of the conflict. Mayor Quincy would have been interested. His grandfather, the first Mayor Quincy (born in 1772), was an attorney and state legislator before becoming a Congressman in 1805, so he knew General Jackson.
Lt Col Edmunds may have gone on to note that 1897 was the 150th anniversary of the birth of General Jackson. The intersection created by the new Columbus Avenue might be named Jackson Square in his honor; after all the great investment it certainly deserved a better name than Hog’s Bridge. It was also near General Heath Square. Mayor Quincy may have agreed.
Richard Heath October 10, 2011
Jackson Square in 1978.
Jackson Square Centre St. bridge circa 1960. Courtesy of the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation
Notes:
[i] It got its name from an incident that occurred about 1750. A farm girl found her way blocked at the bridge by a drove of pigs. When the herdsman refused to let her pass, she picked up and tossed one of the pigs into Stony Brook and threatened to heave in another unless she was allowed to pass. Drake, Francis A. The Town of Roxbury. Page 386.
[ii] General Henry Knox was born in Boston, but he and his wife were far more invested in his huge land holdings and great mansion in Maine, which was part of Massachusetts until 1820
[iii] Paul Barrett sculptor. Dedicated June 17, 1904. Temporarily removed for street widening in 1966, it was taken by the Roxbury Latin School, of which Warren was an alumnus, in 1969.
[iv] For Jackson’s biography see.
1.“ The Swan Commissions” by Eleanor Pearson DeLorme, Winterthur Portfolio Vol 14, No 4, Winter 1979. Pg 389.
2. Drake, Francis A., Memorials of the Society of the Cincinnati of Massachusetts, Boston, 1873. page 360. (General William Heath biography page 329.)/
3. New England Historic and Genealogical Register, “Henry Jackson”. April 1892 page 111.
[v] Is it just a coincidence that Hogs Bridge was the center of the Boston brewery business?
[vi] Drake, Memorials of the Cincinnati, page 91.
[vii] Two sources consulted each with detailed descriptions of the four-day event make no reference to General Jackson or Major General Heath. Both veteran officers apparently passed on the honors to younger active duty officers: The Massachusetts Centinel. October 28, 1789. “Some recollections of George Washington’s Visit to Boston” by General William H. Sumner. New England Historic + Genealogical Register, April 1860.
[viii] Knox named his son born in 1780 Henry Jackson Knox and all his life Jackson was close to the boy.
[ix] “The Swan Commissions” By Eleanor Pearson DeLorme, Winterthur Portfolio, Vol 14, No 4. Winter 1979. The Downcast Dilettante blog. “Obelisks, Regrets, Debts, Swans, Bulfinch…” June 4, 2011.
[x] The father and mother in law of Henry Knox were among the Loyalists who took British ships to Halifax that month and then to England. Knox acquired for a nominal sum huge tracts of land owned by the Fluckers in coastal Maine that had been confiscated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Not for nothing was the Revolutionary War called the first American Civil War. “The fact is that, as far as the Americans were in it, the war of the revolution was a civil war.” The Loyalists of Massachusetts, James H Stark, Boston, 1910. Pg 61. + Pg 403.
[xi] For details on the furnishings, many of which are in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, see de Lorme. Page 374. For the house, the definitive source is Kirker, Harold. The Architecture of Charles Bulfinch, Harvard University Press. 1969. Pages 128-131. Bulfinch had just completed plans for Montpelier the great house for Henry Knox at Thomaston, Maine
[xii] Lawrence, Robert M, Old Park Street and Its vicinity, HMCo, Boston, 1922. page 115.
[xiii] For Hepzibahs portrait with detailed commentary see de Lorme page 370. James Keadie’s portrait is on page 378. Both Hepzibah’s portrait and James Swan’s were given to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by her great granddaughter in 1927. The Henry Knox House, Thomaston, Maine, owns James Keadie Swan’s portrait.
[xiv] Henry Knox did not live to see it completed. He died in 1806. Half of the wharf was destroyed for the widening of Atlantic Avenue in 1869 and the remainder was razed in 1962. The Aquarium was built on the 1804 wharf in 1969
[xv]The famous Henry Knox portrait is illustrated in deLorme page 38. It is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Henry Jackson portrait is shown on page 388. It is privately owned.
[xvi] Writing in 1876 Francis S Drake described Jackson as “a large man full of wit and gallantry. a gentleman.”
[xvii] Did she hang them at her Chestnut Street home and then take them with her to Dorchester? More than likely. The Henry Knox painting was given to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by the City of Boston in 1876.
[xviii] The answer might lie in the Stuart painting: Henry Jackson had hung up his uniform with the epaulets, gold braid and stripes over 20 earlier. He died as Mr. Jackson and as Mr. Jackson he was paid respects.
[xix] It may have looked somewhat like the John Codman tomb at the Dorchester Second Church Cemetery at Codman Square. It’s a brick vault crowned with earth from the excavation with a dressed stone front and an arch door to the interior crypt. This was built about 1847,
[xx] She joined her son in law John Turner Sargent. When he died in 1813, she had him buried in the Jackson tomb.
[xxi] Files of Forest Hills Cemetery. Thank you to Elise Ciregna for her help and the site visit. There are five graves on the lot today. The first one has General Jackson, Hepzibah Swan and Mary Cochran. Mary Cochran – who was perhaps a house servant to Mrs. Swan -died at the age of 91 in 1830. The engraved inscriptions on the obelisk are eroded away and difficult to read.
-Orcutt, Dana. Good Old Dorchester, Cambridge, 1894. Page 398, Also pg 397. For a photo of the house taken just before demolition see page 25.
-See also Find a Grave .Com; Forest Hills Cemetery: Henry Jackson. Created by Jen Smoots. The biography is by Bill McKern. Included is an engraving of the 1777 pastel drawing of Colonel Jackson when he commanded the Boston Regiment reproduced in the April 1892 NEHGR biography.
Also see de Lorme page 390 for the illustration of the original pastel drawing held at the first Corp Cadets Museum.
All three Boston Revolutionary War leaders were removed to Forest Hills Cemetery General Warren was removed from a crypt at St Paul’s Church to the family tomb in 1855. General Heath was taken from the family tomb at the Heath farm a placed beneath a splendid pink granite monument at Eliot Hill in 1860.
[xxii] A considerable amount of property was taken for this project including the Heath Street freight yard that was given up for the new Heath Street Station and bridge. To satisfy the brewers who had long received grain shipments there, a new one was regraded at Lamartine and Centre Street.
[xxiii] For stories on construction see:
Boston Globe July 7, 1893.
Boston Globe July 10, 1895.
Boston Herald, March 22, 1896.
The Herald noted that the work was done largely by Italian laborers but had to be replaced in the cold winter months by French Canadians.
[xxiv] Train service was never discontinued for the three years of construction. A two track right of way was laid parallel to the construction site for passenger service
[xxv] Boston Globe Oct 10, 1891. The Armory was designed by William G. Preston.