Solomon H. Sylvester

One of the more prolific local issuers of advertising trade cards during the Victorian era was Solomon H. Sylvester.  Originally a barber and hairdresser in the 1850s (during which time he is noted as the inventor of the intriguingly-named "Golden Lutricon" for hair), Sylvester later in the 1860s and 1870s retailed gold and silver goods, pictures, frames and brackets from his store which stood on the site of 19-21 Center Street. 

Sylvester worked as, among other things, a taxidermist and even wrote a popular manual on the subject.  (It went through at least three editions). In this line of work, Sylvester seems to have done a wide business, including work for naturalist John Whipple Potter Jenks of Peirce Academy in Middleborough.  Many of Sylvester's specimens were featured as an attraction in his Center Street shop window, and undoubtedly through these displays many Middleborough residents were treated to the sight of animals otherwise unseen by Victorians.  In April, 1867, it was reported that “Mr. S. H. Sylvester has just stuffed a gorilla for the menagerie at Boston. The owners valued it when alive at $1000”.  The winter of 1868-69 saw Sylvester stuff "five beautiful specimens of American eagles" and "several splendid 'bucks'", while in August, 1869, Sylvester was displaying in his shop window an African leopard which he had mounted for Munroe & Andrews, Taunton shoe dealers.

In 1873, Sylvester was engaged at making improvements to the inside of his shop of which the Middleboro Gazette wrote that there is “no prettier store in town than Sylvester’s.”  Soon afterwards, Sylvester turned his attention to the exterior of the store and “propose[d] to concrete the sidewalk in front of his place of business”, prompting the Gazette to ask, “Why won’t some of his neighbors become public spirited?”

Perhaps most importantly for posterity, Sylvester published a number of stereoscopic cards, several of which feature Middleborough in the late 1800s and provide an important visual record of the community at that time. Fortunately, numerous trade cards stamped with Sylvester's name and business survive to remind us of his eclectic business enterprises. Here, a seasonally-appropriate trade card features a wind-blasted mail delivery boy during a winter storm.


Sources:
Middleboro Gazette, April 6, 1867; "What the Gazette Was Saying Fifty Years Ago", March 30, 1923; ibid., July 13, 1923.
Old Colony Memorial [Plymouth], "Middleboro.", February 19, 1869, page 2; ibid., August 13, 1869, page 3.
Republican Standard [New Bedford], April 18, 1867, page 6.
Sylvester, S. H.  The Taxidermist's Manual.  3rd ed.  Middleboro, MA: S. H. Sylvester, 1865.

A Visit to Zerviah Gould Mitchell, 1891

Zerviah Gould Mitchell, photograph,

late 19th century

In the final years of her life, Zerviah Gould Mitchell was recognized for her contributions towards advancing the cause of Native peoples in Massachusetts.  Residing with her daughters Teweeleema and Wootonekanuske (Melinda and Charlotte Mitchell) at Betty's Neck in Lakeville, the elderly Mrs. Mitchell attracted numerous visits from journalists, authors, artists and photographers keen to document what they termed the "last of the Wampanoags".  Among them was Walter Gilman Page who arrived in Lakeville in 1890 to paint Mrs. Mitchell's portrait and who penned the following account which appeared the following year in New England Magazine.

Few people are aware that there dwells within the borders of the old Bay State a lineal descendant of the great and good Massasoit, and the last of the Wampanoags. Sharing the growing interest in all that pertains to the early history of Massachusetts, as well as being desirous to gratify my own curiosity, I was recently led to take a trip to Lakeville, Mass., the home of Mrs. Zerviah Gould Mitchell, the last of her race and family, in order that I might paint her portrait. I found Lakeville to be a quiet, staid township, with homesteads occupied by people descended from good old Puritan stock, still clinging to the abodes of their ancestors in spite of the temptations of the West, or the great cities of the East. The place is beautifully situated, and it abounds in Indian legends and Indian battle grounds. The road by the village skirts the shores of Lake Assawamsett, as picturesque as its name. At a distance of five miles or thereabouts from the village, one leaves the main road and turns off into a lovely winding woodland lane, by a rippling brook, and further on an old dilapidated sawmill. A mile or so, and a sudden bend brings you to the cottage door, where Mrs. Mitchell accords you a pleasant welcome. The rough habitation is most picturesquely situated; they seem to possess an intuitive sense for such things, these people, east or west. From the doorway you look out over a field of waving corn; beyond that the line of the woods; and if the trees did not grow so thickly, you might catch glimpses of the placid bosom of the lake. Nothing disturbs the profound stillness which reigns about, save the cry of the blue-jay or the distant tinkle of a cow bell. From time immemorial have the Wampanoag tribe dwelt here on the Assawamsett Neck, though but for an act of Governor Winslow they might have been wanderers on the face of the earth; for it was he who ordered that the Neck should be a reservation for the Wampanoags, they and their descendants, forever.

I had some doubts as to the success of my request, but Mrs. Mitchell granted a ready acquiescence; the fact of her having been photographed several times had doubtless somewhat paved the way for me. Hers is a strong face, somewhat masculine, but full of intelligence, lighting up in conversation, particularly if relating some of her wrongs at the hands of the pale-faces. I passed a half hour in agreeable that, taking mental notes the while of my surroundings. The room was evidently a place where one could eat, drink and be merry; since it was kitchen, dining-room, and containing a piano, which was certainly a surprise could, I suppose, be called a music-room. A door leads to an L containing the sleeping-rooms, one on the ground floor, in which I painted the portrait, and the other above, reached by means of a Jacobs ladder~ as Mrs. Mitchell facetiously termed it. All arrangements were happily made for sittings, and I was to begin the following morning, much to my gratification. The next day, instead of driving, I took a boat and rowed to the Indian shore, as the residents called the narrow strip of beach, from whence a path leads up to the Indian encampment. Not being familiar with the locality, I spent considerable time in seeking a landing-place, but my opportunities for enjoying the lovely panorama which the shores of the lake present were thereby increased. I was finally obliged to invade a camp of pale-faces, and inquire my way of a young and pretty girl. The Indian matron was awaiting my arrival, and the pose was soon selected and work commenced. As we grew better acquainted, many were the legends and tales of both Indians and whites, all of them most interesting, which she related to me, the while holding her position with remarkable steadiness.

Mrs. Mitchell was born July 24, 1807, and her parents were Brister Gould and Phebe Wamsley. Her mother was daughter of Wamsley and Lydia Tuspaquin; Lydia descended from Benjamin Tuspaquin, son of Benjamin Tuspaquin, or otherwise called the Black Sachem and one of King Philips most able generals. He married Amie, whose Indian name is lost to us, youngest daughter of Massasoit, chief of the powerful Wampanoags. Thus Mrs. Mitchell is the great-great-great grand-daughter of Massasoit. She is also descended from John Sassamon, the well known Christian Indian, who became a preacher to the Indians, under John Eliot. Having warned the Puritans of King Philips designs upon them, he was soon after murdered by his countrymen for his treachery to their cause.

Educated in the public schools of Abington, and afterwards at a private school in Boston, in which city she has also taught a private school, Mrs. Mitchell fully demonstrates in her own person the educational possibilities of the Indian. Her memory is remarkably clear upon This genealogy is carefully and fully traced in a work by Gen. E. W. Peirce, entitled, Indian History, Biography and Genealogy, pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit, of the Wampanoag Tribe, and his Descendants. This work was published by Mrs. Mitchell in 1878, at North Abington, Mass., and contains a preface written by her, the incidents of her schooldays; as in fact it is upon all the events of her life. At the age of seventeen she married Thomas C. Mitchell, by whom she had eleven children, five of whom are still living. Two of her daughters live with their mother, supporting themselves by selling their farm produce, making baskets, moccasins and so forth. Another daughter lives in Ipswich, Mass., and the only surviving son works in a shoe shop in Abington. Mr. Mitchell died in East Fall River in 1859. Mrs. Mitchells eyesight is more remarkable than her memory, for she reads and writes without the aid of her glasses, and I have in my possession her signature, written in a clear, legible hand.

I was sorry indeed to part from this romantic environment; for what could be more charming than this quiet spot in the midst of such natural surroundings, listening to the tales of bygone days when Puritan and Wampanoag struggled for supremacy? Before I left Lakeville, I visited the old Indian burying-ground; but it is now difficult to recognize it as such, since all the stones have suffered mutilation at vandal hands. Even the Indians graves are not respected, and she who remains is but a solitary figure amidst the rush of invasion, the only type of a race which has now almost vanished from New England.

Source:

Walter Gilman Page, New England Magazine, “A Descendant of Massasoit”.  January 1891, 642-644.

Zerviah Gould Mitchell

Zerviah Gould Mitchell, engraving, from

Ebenezer W. Peirce, Indian

History; Biography and Genealogy,

Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit

of the Wampanoag Tribe, and His

Descendants (North Abington, MA: Zerviah

Gould Mitchell, 1878), frontispiece.

Native American Zerviah Gould Mitchell (1807-98), a direct descendant of the Great Sachem Massasoit who in the last years of her life resided at Betty’s Neck in Lakeville, deeply felt the injustice to which Native peoples in Massachusetts were subjected, and this resentment instilled within her a resolute, even defiant, attitude towards racial injustice and its perpetrators.

As an educated and intelligent woman, Mrs. Mitchell must have regarded with deep irony the circumstance of mid-19th century radical abolitionists agitating for an end to slavery and the enfranchisement of African-Americans nationwide, while Native Americans in the Commonwealth remained barred from equal citizenship because of their race.

Since the end of King Philip's War (1675-76), Massachusetts Natives had been treated as wards of the Commonwealth which appointed guardians to oversee Native affairs. Despite a somewhat nebulous paternalistic social welfare component to the state's guardianship, the system, nonetheless, effectively deprived Natives of the civil liberties freely enjoyed by the white populace.

Mrs. Mitchell first challenged the Commonwealth's system of institutionalized racism when, in 1857, she sought to have the guardianship removed from four lots of land she claimed in the Troy (Fall River) Indian Reservation, and payment for the timber removed by the guardian of the Fall River Indians, Benjamin F. Winslow.

Winslow was an opponent of Native equality, opining in 1848 that Natives "would receive no benefit from the privilege of citizenship, if conferred upon them." In Mrs. Mitchell, he found a formidable foe. The Commonwealth's Commissioner of Indians, John Milton Earle, apparently impressed by Mrs. Mitchell’s intelligence and determined demeanor, would write of her in 1861: "She is a capable energetic woman, a member in good standing of a Christian Church, and is represented to be entirely competent to the management of her own affairs. She neither desires nor needs the Guardianship under which the Indians are placed."

Between 1857 and 1861, Mrs. Mitchell sought to undermine the guardianship system, and while the Commonwealth early on recognized and upheld her claims to the Fall River property, it was more difficult to get Winslow to comply.

Many at that time (and some even as late as 1930) characterized Mrs. Mitchell's case as one motivated by purely pecuniary concerns. Fellow Natives on the Fall River Reservation resented her claim to a full eighth of the entire reservation, and were disturbed that she "had taken liberties not heretofore allowed or claimed by any other member of the tribe." The ensuing hostility which was directed towards her was probably not discouraged by Winslow. Little did the Fall River Natives recognize in her legal charges a critique of the Commonwealth's guardianship system, nor did they comprehend that it was to be part of the ultimate undoing of that system, an outcome which would be realized within a decade.

In 1869, the guardianship of the Massachusetts Natives was finally removed by "An Act to Enfranchise the Indians of the Commonwealth," by which the state's Natives were accorded the same rights and privileges as her white citizens.

But though, through this Act, Massachusetts Natives may have gained equality before the law, they did not gain equality in the eyes of all of the Commonwealth's citizens, a cause for which Mrs. Mitchell would continue to struggle for the remaining years of her life.

In 1878, she published her Indian History; Biography and Genealogy, Pertaining to the Good Sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag Tribe, and His Descendants, authored by Ebenezer W. Peirce. With this work, Mrs. Mitchell was able to strike yet another blow in the cause of racial equality. Depicting her Native ancestors as men and women of dignity, honor and integrity, in sharp contrast to long-held negative stereotypes of Native peoples, Mrs. Mitchell was successful prompting a reconsideration of Wampanoag history and a thoughtful reevaluation by introspective whites of their previous conceptions of Native peoples and Native history.

Writing in the preface to the work, Mrs. Mitchell stated - "Before going to my grave I have thought it proper to be heard in behalf of my oppressed countrymen, and I now, through the medium of the printing press, and in book form, speak to the understanding and sense of justice of the reading public." To the end of her life, her nemesis would be social injustice and racial inequality.

Armenian Relief, 1916

"You Won't Let Me Starve, Will

You?", Poster, American Committee

for Armenian and Syrian Relief, early

20th century.

Posters such as this raised

awareness of the plight of Turkish

Armenians during the years of the

Armenian genocide.  Both Middle-

borough's Armenian and non-

Armenian communities engaged in

relief efforts designed to reduce the

suffering inflicted upon Armenians in

what is considered by many as the

first genocide of the twentieth

century.

Perhaps no local ethnic group of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed such collective horrors or suffered so grievously as the Armenians.

Following abortive attempts to establish territorial autonomy for themselves within Ottoman Turkey in the early 1890s, Armenians were retaliated against through a wave of Turkish and Kurdish atrocities which was unleashed between 1894 and 1896. Encouraged by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, the widespread violence prompted Armenians to begin emigrating en masse. Among the first Armenians to seek refuge in Middleborough were Michael Krikorian, who arrived in 1892, and Garabed Kayajan, who arrived about the same time, both escaping the worst violence. Others would soon follow.

The arrival of additional Armenians seeking refuge from the Hamidian massacres being perpetrated in Turkey fueled the local Armenian community’s lingering distrust and fear of the Turkish government and its intentions towards the Armenian minority both within and outside Turkey. In 1897, ten Armenian operatives of the Leonard & Barrows shoe plant on Center Street quit the manufactory, alleging that a fellow employee was a Turkish government agent, an indication of just how deeply-rooted were anti-Turkish fears within the local Armenian community.

Taking employment in the town’s several shoe factories, local Armenians organized both politically and socially, establishing the Armenian National Union of Middleboro to address and meet the needs of their small, but growing, community, and assisting newly-arrived immigrants in learning English. Many Armenian immigrants were desperate to learn the language, and advertisements in the local newspapers conveyed their sense of urgency.

Wanted. - Board and room for two young men, where they may have an opportunity to learn and talk the English language, with the family. Will pay liberal charges for board and room. Address P. O. Box 199, Middleboro.

Situation Wanted. - Young Armenian, good, clean, smart fellow, desires position, where he can learn American language, will work for board. Vagim Tatulian. 8 Frank Street.

The creation of a stable, though small Armenian community in Middleborough encouraged others to seek refuge in town from the continuing violence back in Turkey. In 1910, when a number of new Armenian immigrants to Middleborough were interviewed by a Middleboro Gazette correspondent, they revealed that their motive in leaving Turkey was “to pass the rest of their lives here away from the danger of Turkish massacres.”

Indicative of the growing assimilation of the local Armenians into the community, as well as the esteem in which they were held, was Middleborough's response to renewed violence against Armenians in Ottoman Turkey beginning in 1915.

Though the Turkish government today denies that the systematic mass deportations and atrocities of 1915-23 constitute genocide and states they were the unintended consequence of civil war, Middleborough’s Armenian community at the time, then numbering about 100 souls, had little doubt (then or since) that the events transpiring in Turkey were the results of a concerted, deliberate and orchestrated government policy to eliminate Armenians within the Ottoman Empire.

As Turkish actions against the Armenians grew in scope and severity in 1915, news regarding the deteriorating situation filtered back to Armenian-American communities like those in Middleborough and local Armenian-born residents formed relief committees in an effort to ameliorate the worst excesses of the Turkish government. In the latter half of 1915, the Armenian Relief Fund solicited local Armenians to contribute to relief efforts in their native land. The response was overwhelming for such a relatively small community composed of manual laborers who earned low wages and had little money to contribute. “…A romance, a wonderful financial sacrifice when compared with the number of earners and their modest earnings”, wrote the Middleboro Gazette of the Armenian community’s efforts.

For Middleborough’s non-Armenian community, news of the atrocities of mass killings and forced deportations occurring in Turkey were brought to the fore by reputable newspapers and journals, including the New York Times, throughout 1915 and 1916. More locally, the Gazette carried a news item in early 1916 that focused upon the famine conditions prevailing in Turkish Armenia and reported that “conditions in many quarters are so distressing that the Armenians are forced to eat grass. They are dying by hundreds for want of food!” Undoubtedly, the local shoe plants where the majority of the Armenian community was engaged in employment became centers for the dissemination of information regarding the genocide.

As a result of a growing local consciousness, in May, 1916, Middleborough’s non-Armenian community established the Middleborough Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, an organization composed of leading residents and dedicated to raising funds for relief efforts. Among the representatives were Town Clerk A. A. Thomas, Alvin C. Howes and several local pastors. Representing the Armenian shoe workers were Superintendent Kennedy of the George E. Keith shoe manufactory on Sumner Avenue and Sylvanus L. Brett of the Boot & Shoe Workers’ Union.

Leonard & Barrows Shoe Manufactory, Center

and Pearl Streets, Middleborough, MA,

picture postcard, A. S. Burbank Co., c. 1910

The local shoe industry was the largest

employer of members of the local Armenian

community.  Consequently, it was in factories

such as Leonard & Barrows that much

information about the situation in Turkey was

shared and relief efforts were initiated.

The Gazette made an eloquent appeal for funds for Armenian relief, and termed the Armenians the “constant martyrs of the century … who have suffered all out of proportion to any relation to the great European powers at war”. The newspaper emphatically committed both itself and the community to the cause, boldly declaring “Middleboro will help – and you are a Middleboroean!” Tuesday, June 6 was set aside as the day for local residents to give, with the preceding Sunday designated as a day for collections by local churches, Sunday schools and brotherhoods. "Thirty societies responded and it was splendidly representative of Middleboro's best interest in these people who have suffered massacre, pillage, starvation, outrage, in whole families and villages, 750,000 having perished since the great war began."

Though the success of the local Armenian relief movement in 1916 undoubtedly helped reduce the suffering of Armenians in Turkey, ultimately it failed to bring about an end to the genocide. Consequently, many Armenian-Americans would be moved to adopt a more aggressive approach towards this end. On August 3, 1917, following American entry into World War I, a number of local Armenian men including Haroutune Haroutunian, Sarkis K. Afarian, Madirus Gochgarian, Dicran Baghdelian and Mihran Piranian, enlisted in the French Army Legion d'Orient, anxious to serve in the front lines against Germany’s Turkish ally and avenge the Armenian genocide. The Legion, created in November 1916, included some 2,000 Armenian-Americans, most with the same goal.

In 1918, Haroutunian wrote his brother John in Middleborough: "We are ready to attack the Turkish army by orders from Gen. Allenby. We are very happy at the present time because we are seeing the surrender of our enemy from our motherland." Haroutunian gave voice to not only the local Armenian community’s willingness to sacrifice but its desire for justice relative to the genocide when he wrote Lorenzo Wood on March 16, 1918, that “for humanity and justice, we will be ready for all happenings…”

It is estimated that between 800,000 and 1,500,000 Armenians perished during the Armenian genocide.

Pratt's Skating Pond, 1936-41

Pratt Farm Skating Pond, photograph, c. 1940

The view from East Main Street depicts the
skating pond created on the Pratt Farm by the

damming of Stony Brook in 1936.

Over sixty years ago, a small corner of the Pratt Farm on East Main Street in Middleborough developed as a local Depression-era winter sports venue, a circumstance made possible through the generosity of Ernest S. Pratt.

Though owned by Pratt, the site was, for a number of years (1936-41), under the care of the Middleboro Skating Club, an organization formed to foster winter sports locally. While the club was extremely popular at the time, memories of it and cold winter evenings spent skating under a mantle of stars, while recorded music permeated the crisp air, are rapidly fading.

It seems appropriate that this corner of the Pratt Farm became a popular locale for winter sports. Pratt's sister, Louise Pratt, owned the first pair of skis in Middleborough which she used on the relatively tame slopes of nearby Pratt Hill. In 1936, Ernest Pratt, at the instigation of several local skaters including my grandfather Jim Maddigan, acquired a parcel of land adjoining the Pratt Farm on East Main Street for the use of local skaters. The Middleboro Gazette applauded Pratt's civic-mindedness and noted that "sincere appreciation has been voiced by local skaters for Mr. Pratt's generosity in providing this new location for with the exception of the river, which is rarely safe, and the ice ponds there are few opportunities to enjoy the sport."

Despite Pratt's altruism, there was probably a more pragmatic reason behind his offer: keeping bothersome skaters off his ice ponds. Ice was big business for Pratt. "For more than forty years the principal crop [of the farm] was ice," recalled Pratt's wife Rose Standish Pratt years later. Skaters who therefore used Pratt's ice ponds during harvest were frequently an annoyance and, often, a liability for the business. My grandfather, nearly a lifelong resident of the Star Mills section of Middleborough and a one-time employee of Pratt's, explained: "There were areas established by Mr. Pratt that were off limits for skaters prior to and during the harvesting of ice. Some of the youngsters used stones for their hockey goal markers, and stones for hockey pucks. Many times these would be left on the ice and become frozen in. On occasions, rain or melting snow caused water to collect on the ice surface, freezing and completely covering and hiding any stones that were left there following their games. An object of this nature, buried in the ice, was a real hazard and could completely ruin the blade of the motorized saw used to mark the ice during harvesting." Consequently, continued my grandfather, when "one winter, in the mid-1930s, a group of skaters approached Ernest Pratt in hopes that he might consent to the installation of a small dam across the brook near East Main Street ... to create a skating pond, he readily accepted our proposal, probably under the impression that this location would keep most of the skaters off the ice pond." The site selected for the new skating pond was an area three hundred yards long by fifty yards wide located along Stony Brook which drained Pratt's newest ice ponds and flowed underneath East Main Street at the foot of Pratt's Hill.

To foster winter sports at the site and to take formal charge of Pratt's skating pond, the Middleboro Community Skating Club was formed in late 1936, in the South Main Street barbershop of Alfred Hodder and Ela Anderson. Officers of the club elected at this meeting included Hodder as president; Coach Henry Battis of Middleborough Memorial High School as vice-president; Adnah Harlow, secretary; and Dalton Penniman, treasurer. A fourteen person membership committee was also named, and Joseph Miskinis was charged with care of the new rink. (Harold Wood would later have care of the ice). Gazette editor and publisher, Lorenzo Wood, was appointed the club's publicity agent. To formalize the arrangement, "use of the small pond was granted by Ernest Pratt, for a nominal fee - only enough to protect him and make it legal."

Map Showing the Location of Pratt's Skating

Pond, USGS map, Bridgewater, Mass., 1940.

The present boundaries of the Pratt Farm

Conservation Area are overlaid in green.

The stated purpose of the Middleboro Skating Club was to oversee "centralizing Middleboro winter sports," primarily in the interest of the community's children. Some club members "were interested in skiing, some in tobogganing, some in fancy skating, others in hockey. [Nonetheless], all were aware of the benefits both young and old might derive from an organized winter sports center." For five years, the Middleboro Skating Club would avidly pursue the goal of encouraging winter sports, and the club would become, at one point, the most popular in Middleborough, bragging that it had more members than any other in town.

Ironically, creation of the club and the new skating pond failed to keep skaters from Pratt's ice ponds as intended. "I remember," recalled my grandfather, "one incident that took place during the skating season in the late thirties. A group of young people, mostly in their early twenties, arranged for a skating party, the girls bringing the hot dogs and rolls and the male members providing the fire for cooking, also the gathering of the forked sticks to be used for roasting the 'delicacies.' During the course of the evening, and following trips to the fire to warm up and partake in some refreshments, the skaters organized groups to skate together and play 'snap-the-whip.' This consisted of perhaps ten or twelve people, sometimes more, in a row holding hand, and skating down the ice, and on a given signal the so-called leader, usually a good skater, stopped and snapped the long line down the ice in a circular course. The skaters near the end of the line travelled at a good speed. On one occasion four of the group plunged into the open water created by the cutting of the ice during the day. They were in an area where the water was only about three or four feet deep, but very, very cold. They were assisted back onto the ice, loaded into two cars and transported to my house where my wife and I provided dry clothes and a hot drink. Needless to say we were very particular about choosing an area to perform our stunts after this experience."

Following its November, 1936, organization, the Middleboro Skating Club grew rapidly, embarking upon fairly ambitious plans to erect a heated shelter at Pratt's skating pond and light the pond for night skating (all to be financed through expected memberships in the new club), and promoting the growth of ice hockey locally, through the formation of an adult team and sponsorship of a four-team youth league.

Within two weeks of its foundation, the skating club boasted a membership of four hundred, and had commenced upon its construction projects. Nearly completed by Christmas, 1936, the club's furnished skating shelter was opened to members by the end of January, 1937.

Jim Maddigan, a member of the skating club, left a description of the completed shelter: "The clubhouse provided a dry, warm area to change from street shoes to shoe skates, as well as a place to warm up cold hands and feet. Heat was generated by a wood stove near the center of the approximately 16 by 24 foot structure. Seating was provided by wooden benches on three sides of the building. At one end a small area was built to accommodate a portable electric stove where hot dogs and hamburgs were prepared and sold. There, also, was located a candy and soda concession." A loudspeaker broadcast records played in the clubhouse so that skaters might enjoy the music.

Despite this propitious start, there were some early criticisms of the club centering upon the surface area of the proposed skating rink. In response, the Gazette wrote: "To those who are of the opinion that the skating surface is limited on this new pond it is pointed out that there are approximately two acres now covered and that with any larger area it would be impossible to keep the ice in first class condition. Snow must be removed from time to time and the skating surface renewed occasionally by additional flooding." Nevertheless, the club decided to extend the skating surface an additional one hundred feet because of the increasing number of members - five hundred by mid-December, 1936.

The debate over the expanse of the proposed skating surface was immaterial, at least during the first season. The winter of 1936-37 was among the mildest then on record and the skating pond never froze. The skating club's publicity agent, Lorenzo Wood, noted the remarkable progress the club had made since its inception, but wrote at the end of January, 1937, that "there still remains but one item - ice - to put the club into action."

While the lack of ice certainly precluded skating on the pond, so too did construction problems with the dam built to impound the waters of Stony Brook. It washed out three times during the first winter, establishing itself as a chronic headache for the club.

By the second season, however, the problematic issues of 1936-37 had been successfully addressed by the skating club and large numbers of skaters began enjoying the rink in January, 1938. To publicize conditions at the rink, notices detailing prevailing ice conditions were posted at Hodder and Anderson's barbershop on South Main Street, as well as at other prominent locations in town.

One of the most promising developments of the Middleboro Skating Club was its support for the growth in local interest in ice hockey. Among the club's first events was a hockey game between club members and a team at East Bridgewater on December 8, 1936. Early attempts to formally establish a hockey team by the club, however, were frustrated by the mild winter of 1936-37.

Nonetheless, ice hockey proved popular on Pratt's skating pond, so much so that there was some concern it might interfere with the more family-oriented activities at the site. My grandfather recalled "a strict rule that there would be no hockey playing, or wild antics, in the area where the small ones were skating, or learning to skate." The Gazette, too, cautioned skaters "to avoid unnecessary roughness in order that mishaps may be kept at a minimum."

"Grandpa's Skates", photograph by David

DeHoey, January 15, 2010, used under a

Creative Commons license.

With the growing appeal of ice hockey, the Middleboro Skating Club's activities during the winter of 1938-39 not surprisingly focused upon the construction of a hockey rink at East Main Street. Sufficient funds were raised during 1939 to allow for the building of a rink on the upper end of the pond in December 1939, and January, 1940. The cost was $74.59 for lumber and nails. "Boards around the ends at the goals were installed, as well as goal cages. This helped to keep the hockey pucks confined to the playing area and also protected others skating on the pond." The natural amphitheater like surroundings provided seating for spectators.

As part of its support for ice hockey, the skating club formed its own team which played opponents from Plymouth, Taunton, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, New Bedford and elsewhere. My grandfather, himself a member of the team, recalled one particular highlight. "On one occasion, members of the Rhode Island Reds, a farm team of the Bruins, came to Middleborough to play and have a practice session. They were good; rough and very fast. But we made an impression because some of the members did return to get a good workout." A four team youth hockey league was also sponsored, "giving the younger boys a chance to play."

During the first months of 1940, a fortuitously prolonged cold spell further facilitated the local development of ice hockey. "In other seasons when a game was scheduled, it depended entirely on the condition of the ice. A few seasons ago, it was almost impossible to get in a match, because of abnormal weather conditions."

John Sweeney, sports columnist for the Gazette, noted hockey's growing local appeal. "Hockey is forging to the front hereabouts," he wrote, adding somewhat over-optimistically that "hockey might conceivably edge out basketball as 'the' winter sport in this section."

Despite the burgeoning local appeal of both ice skating and hockey fostered during the late 1930s and early 1940s by the Middleboro Skating Club, the club would disband in April, 1941, just four and a half years following its organization.

Ironically, the club's difficulties were not financial. Upon its organization in November, 1936, the club had adopted a "pay as you go policy", paying for the construction of its facilities as they were built or expanded in order to avoid accruing indebtedness. Decidedly, this decision had made funds tight, so much so that in December, 1936, the Gazette was urging residents to join the club as "whatever funds have been taken in have already been used." To further finance its activities and facilities at Pratt's skating pond on East Main Street, as well as to fund the construction of the hockey rink and a proposed toboggan slide on Pratt's Hill, the skating club initiated an annual Tag Day appeal in 1938. The community was urged to generously support each year's appeal in the interests of the youngsters and families for which the club primarily had been founded.

Ultimately, with membership fees, dues and tag day funds, the skating club was able to maintain a sound fiscal footing (as revealed by its treasurer's report for the 1939-40 season), and cover its expenses, the largest of which, annually, were for custodial wages and snow removal.

However, the increase in membership in the skating club -necessary for the sake of financial solvency - brought with it "a decrease in those individuals willing to share in the responsibility of keeping things going." Progress made by the club in repairing the dam, improving the clubhouse, constructing the ice hockey rink, and purchasing snow removal and ice resurfacing equipment in the 1930s "was accompanied by an increasing lack of interest on the part of the leaders until only a few were left to share the responsibilities."

The club leadership struggled on through the winter of 1940-41 in hopes of attracting new leaders to further local winter sports. "It seemed inadvisable under these conditions to continue ..., but with a knowledge of the disappointment this would cause and the hope that the unexpected might turn up these few individuals decided to give it one more try."

In retrospect, it was the wrong decision. "The results were even more disastrous than anticipated. So bad in fact that continuation under the same conditions will be impossible." On April 7, 1941, with no prospective leaders forthcoming and the club's monthly expenses mounting, the Middleboro Skating Club met once more at Hodder and Anderson's barbershop, this time to formally disband. "In disbanding the officers want the public to know that the decision arrived at was anything but instantaneous. For two years, in addition to other duties at the rink, they have been trying to get other individuals or organizations interested but with very little success."

Stony Brook, Pratt Farm, Middleborough,

MA, photograph by Mike Maddigan,

December 27, 2004

Pratt's Skating Pond stood downstream on

Stony Brook, pictured here at Stony Brook

Road on the Pratt Farm.  Since its

abandonment in the mid-20th century, the

skating pond site has returned to forest.

Because the original constitution of the skating club had indicated that in the event of such a dissolution, the club's property would be turned over to another town organization, and as it had been established primarily for the benefit of the youth of Middleborough, the skating club, in one of its final acts, moved to donate the East Main Street clubhouse to the Middleborough Memorial High School. "It is hoped that the clubhouse can be moved to the high school football field where it will be protected by the fence, to a large extent, from vandalism. It also will be in the proper spot to be used once again as a skating clubhouse, if it ever becomes possible for the original plan of a skating rink at the playground to go through." (Not until 1961 would such a rink be constructed).

Despite the disbandment of the Middleboro Skating Club after only five years in existence, interest in skating and ice hockey remained high, and a number of attempts were made during the 1940s to recreate the success of the skating club. In late 1943, the Middleborough Board of Selectmen accepted an offer of Paul Silva to use his Carpenter Street cranberry bog as a public skating rink. The following year, selectman Benjamin J. Bump proposed spraying and flooding either the tennis courts or former football field at the Peirce Playground for use as a skating rink, a technique he had witnessed at Milton Academy. Soon afterwards, in November, 1944, the Kiwanis Club was granted permission to try to flood the old football field. It was a failure.

In January, 1946, the Kiwanis Club, largely through the prodding of the Middleboro Skating Club's former president, Alfred Hodder, revived ice skating at the old East Main Street rink, reinstalling lights for night time skating. Hockey was once more played, this time "with teams comprising in large part returned service men."

Ice skating would continue for a few years at the former Middleboro Skating Club rink before other pursuits attracted skaters elsewhere. The site was abandoned and decayed, returning to forest, and memories of soft winter evenings spent gliding across the ice at the Pratt Farm have faded.

Pratt Farm

Stony Brook Road and Dam, Pratt Farm,

Middleborough, MA,

photograph by Mike Maddigan, December 27, 2004

Bellicose Bumpkin recently posted on his own blog an item recounting his self-described inelegant return to the world of cross-country skiing at the Pratt Farm on East Main Street after many years off skis. Athletic grace notwithstanding, as Bumpkin indicates, the farm offers residents a wonderful location for the pursuit of winter sports such as cross-country-skiing, snowshoeing and sledding, and his post has prompted one of his respondents, Judy Bigelow-Costa, to urge that future uses for the farm be considered. A number of possible uses which would take advantage of the farm’s expansive natural setting and provide recreational opportunities are suggested on Bumpkin’s site.

Not to be forgotten, however, are the educational uses to which the farm with its rich variety of flora and fauna might be put, including providing a deeper understanding of the area’s natural history and environmental changes (such as forest succession) over time.

In 1881, Paul Chadbourne, president of Williams College, entreated Massachusetts farmers to consider the educational value of the commonwealth’s farms.

It is superfluous, perhaps, for me to say more about the education of your children; but let me beseech you not to educate off the farm. After the simplest rudiments of reading, spelling, and arithmetic, and even with those, see that your children are taught to study nature, to delight in plants and animals and stones and chemical changes, - all the things that daily meet them on the farm…. The farm furnishes the whole range of plants and animal life upon which one can spend a lifetime of study.

Chadbourne’s appeal is no less meaningful one hundred and thirty years later.

In addition to being an instrument for a more meaningful understanding of local natural history, the Pratt Farm encompasses within its boundaries the capacity to provide insight into Middleborough’s cultural history, particularly in regards to pre-contact era Native American history and the town’s agricultural development over a two hundred year period from the mid-eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century.  What truly makes the Pratt Farm an invaluable community resource is this precise conjunction of natural and cultural history, with recreational and conservation uses.

"A Big Thing on Ice", 1880

Wooden Ice Skates, 19th century

These wooden skates were typical of those

used in the mid and late-19th century, and were

secured to the wearer's boots by means of

leather straps and metal buckles.

Featured at Classic Collectibles.

Historically, early winter witnessed the start of the skating season in Middleorough and Lakeville, the Nemasket River and the towns' numerous lakes and ponds providing perfect venues for the sport.  One unique way in which New Year's Day, 1880 was celebrated was with a competition on Lake Assawompsett between two local contestants.

There is to be a novel contest at Middleboro on New Year's day; in fact "a big thing on ice."  Charles Pierce of Bridgewater and J. S. Alden of Middleboro, are to skate on Assawampsett Lake, the best skater to be awarded a purse of twenty-five dollars, which is in the hands of responsible parties.

Sadly, there appears to be no other record of the contest, nor of its outcome and which contestant took home the considerable prize.

Source:Old Colony Memorial, "County and Elsewhere", December 11, 1879