A path to the past

A quaint little village made by Oliver Ames

August 17, 2003|Chet Raymo, Globe Correspondent

Editor's Note: For almost 40 years, Chet Raymo has walked a one-mile path from his home in North Easton to Stonehill College, where he teaches physics and astronomy. The following is an except from Raymo's new book, "The Path: A One-mile Walk Through the Universe" (Walker, 2003).

NORTH EASTON -- In 1850 the great impresario P.T. Barnum brought to the United States a young coloratura soprano who had already captured the affections of Europe. Her name was Jenny Lind, and she became America's first pop star. For two years, she entranced audiences up and down the Eastern Seaboard with a voice that was said to be divine -- although Barnum's hype may have been as much a part of Lind's success as her talent. In the wake of her visit, and for decades afterward, schools, streets, public buildings, even towns were named for the "Swedish Nightingale."

Swedish immigrants made up a substantial part of the work force at the Ames Shovel Co. of North Easton, 20 miles south of Boston. By the 1870s the company and the village were at the height of their prosperity; it is said that three-fifths of all the shovels manufactured in the world at that time were made in the Ames factories. New streets were laid out to accommodate the village's growing population. One of these was home to families named Swanson, Lonn, Anderson, and Lindquist. Not surprisingly, this street was christened for the most famous Swede of all.

My walk to work each day starts along Jenny Lind Street; it is the first part of the path. The houses on the street are typical late-19th-century mill-town housing: two-story, front-gabled, timber-frame-and-clapboard construction. Many of the houses have modern additions at the sides or back, and perhaps a tacked-on porch, but it takes little imagination to see these structures as they must have looked in the 1870s and 1880s, as they went up one by one according to a standard plan in the mind of a local master carpenter. With my wife, I raised four children in one of these houses, just around the corner from Jenny Lind Street. Even in the second half of the 20th century it provided comfortable accommodation for the six of us. These sturdy homes must have seemed luxurious to the Ames factory workers who woke a half-hour before dawn, when the village wake-up bell was rung, who spent 10 to 12 hours a day making shovels, and who undoubtedly collapsed exhausted into bed not long after the curfew bell was rung at 9 p.m.