Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the show. This is Martin Willis,
Speaker 1: and a lot of what I do is dovetailed in
Speaker 1: the antiques and arts world is you know, dovetailed with history,
Speaker 1: and so every once in a while i'd like to
Speaker 1: do a podcast on history. I've interviewed a number of
Speaker 1: people on different topics like Thomas Jefferson scholar and people
Speaker 1: like that. If you look on the antiq Auction Forum,
Speaker 1: you'll see all those type of you know, podcasts back then.
Speaker 2: Just a couple of things.
Speaker 1: When I started this podcast, I had Phylliscu with me.
Speaker 1: I was basically mentoring her and she was a lot
Speaker 1: of people. I really liked her. She's very bubbly, very
Speaker 1: full of life, and she's had quite a career path.
Speaker 1: I'm just bringing this up because I want to talk
Speaker 1: about this her now. And she's an auctioneer at Southeby's now.
Speaker 1: When we were working together, you know, I mean I
Speaker 1: told her a bit how to auction, but you know,
Speaker 1: she just had a natural way with it. She's very good.
Speaker 1: So here she is at Sotheby's and she's being really
Speaker 1: celebrated now, which is really nice. She just sold the
Speaker 1: world's most expensive dinosaur for forty four point six million,
Speaker 1: So I'm so glad for Phillis. I've really been very
Speaker 1: happy about her career path. It's had a couple of
Speaker 1: bumps along the way, but you know, she comes She's
Speaker 1: got a great attitude, and I think this is a
Speaker 1: real good proof that she's come out on top.
Speaker 2: Definitely.
Speaker 1: So my guest is Jake Sconiers, and I'm really excited
Speaker 1: to talk about him.
Speaker 2: He as Hub History.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast that talks about Boston. I was born
Speaker 1: in Boston. I've always had a connection there. I love
Speaker 1: the town. It's very interesting and I know a lot
Speaker 1: of people there and it's a really friendly, historic, wonderful town.
Speaker 1: And Jake, I want to welcome you to the show.
Speaker 3: Hey, I appreciate you having me on.
Speaker 1: And you used to be a tour guide in Boston,
Speaker 1: so that that's you really got to know what's going
Speaker 1: on if you're a tour guide.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what came first?
Speaker 1: Did you have they the you don't want to learn
Speaker 1: the history first, and then became a tour guide?
Speaker 2: Is that what it was?
Speaker 4: Well, I'm a transplant to Boston, so I've lived in
Speaker 4: Boston since the late nineties and I feel like because
Speaker 4: I didn't grow up here. I didn't get bored with
Speaker 4: all the places they made you go on a field
Speaker 4: trip in fifth grade, the way a lot of my
Speaker 4: peers now who live here have been. So I still Yeah,
Speaker 4: I moved here as a young adult, and I had
Speaker 4: that sense of wonder and that sense of curiosity about Boston.
Speaker 4: Boston's a terrific say, I love this city again. I've
Speaker 4: been here for over twenty five years now, and so
Speaker 4: I was always a little bit of a history nerd
Speaker 4: growing up. My family. You know, we wouldn't go to
Speaker 4: the land for vacation. We go to Gettysburg, you know.
Speaker 4: So it was I always had that history bug, even.
Speaker 3: As a young kid.
Speaker 4: And then getting here and exploring, I really like to
Speaker 4: soak up a lot of the history. Bust obviously has
Speaker 4: a rich, nearly now four hundred year history. But then
Speaker 4: the sharing that with people came a little bit later.
Speaker 4: Starting around twenty twelve or so, my wife and I
Speaker 4: started a tour company where we created and led four
Speaker 4: or five different tours in different neighborhoods and focuses, and
Speaker 4: so that let me sort of share that excitement, that joy,
Speaker 4: that that love of Boston and its history with people.
Speaker 4: But it took up all our time and didn't really
Speaker 4: we broke even barely.
Speaker 3: In the end.
Speaker 4: So yeah, after a couple of years we got out
Speaker 4: of that.
Speaker 3: I went off.
Speaker 4: I was a doc in a vo volunteer dose int
Speaker 4: at a local history historic site for a summer. And
Speaker 4: then while I was a docent there, I had the
Speaker 4: bright idea. My wife and I were both dough since
Speaker 4: then we were sort of trading, trying to one ofp
Speaker 4: each other with stories. Who had the weirdest, most interesting
Speaker 4: whatever stories from Boston history back and forth across the
Speaker 4: sort of docent bullpen, waiting for the next guests to
Speaker 4: come in. And that's where the idea for our podcast
Speaker 4: was born. So, you know, we were trading all these
Speaker 4: cool stories back and forth. We said we should write
Speaker 4: some of these down. What should we do with this? Oh,
Speaker 4: let's start a podcast. So we started the Hub History
Speaker 4: podcast in twenty sixteen. I'm just working on episode three
Speaker 4: ten at the moment, So a lot of stories have
Speaker 4: been told. There's still lots of stories to tell. Still
Speaker 4: just as excited about Boston history as I ever was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it was funny.
Speaker 1: I have looked for like weird history, you know, where
Speaker 1: are some weird things that have happened in Boston, you know,
Speaker 1: other than this, And so I'd like to, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe touch a little bit on that after. But first
Speaker 1: of all, let's dive right in and talk about this
Speaker 1: very unusual. It sounds, you know, like before we went
Speaker 1: live here, you know, you mentioned that it's kind of
Speaker 1: kind of a joke to some people, but this was
Speaker 1: a serious thing and you know, people were killed and
Speaker 1: who could ever, you know, when I first heard the
Speaker 1: Boston molasses flood, I'm thinking, what and how could that
Speaker 1: be even dangerous? But you know, when you have two
Speaker 1: million gallons over two million gallons, and all of a
Speaker 1: sudden the tank bursts and you're talking thirty five miles
Speaker 1: an hour molasses, everyone thinks of molasses is you know,
Speaker 1: really slow?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 4: I mean, it's an aphorism in the English language, right,
Speaker 4: somebody's moving slower than molasses in January. And this is
Speaker 4: a molasses flood in January in Boston. So it seems
Speaker 4: like again when I was a tour guide, a lot
Speaker 4: of visitors in Boston have heard about the molasses blood.
Speaker 3: They want to know more about it.
Speaker 4: We used to have a North End tour, and people
Speaker 4: would ask about it with that idea of it being
Speaker 4: sort of a punchline, something funny that happened, and you know,
Speaker 4: some of the travel sites and sometimes kids sites sort
Speaker 4: of reinforced that humorous aspect.
Speaker 3: But it was a terrible trap.
Speaker 4: I mean, we had over twenty people killed, at least
Speaker 4: one hundred and fifty injured, some of them grievously injured,
Speaker 4: huge amounts of property damage from the elevated train tracks
Speaker 4: to just buildings scoured off the face of the earth.
Speaker 4: It was really a terrible tragedy. That's only funny because
Speaker 4: it's been over a century.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: So let's let's talk about how well how it happened.
Speaker 1: And you know, generally speaking, I hate to say it,
Speaker 1: but it always trickles back to money, and you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what it was really all about, saving money and
Speaker 1: making money and you know profits.
Speaker 3: And all that.
Speaker 4: Molasses From the very earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
Speaker 4: molasses and the products that you can make from molasses
Speaker 4: were integral to the Boston economy for basically three hundred years,
Speaker 4: from very early in the English settlement of the Sham Peninsula.
Speaker 4: Right up through the Prohibition era, molasses was right at
Speaker 4: the heart of Boston's economy. And that's because of originally
Speaker 4: again sort of you go back far enough, it's because
Speaker 4: of the Triangle trade. You know, we have manufactured goods
Speaker 4: being shipped out of Europe, out of England, traded in
Speaker 4: Africa for people, for enslaved people, their ship to the
Speaker 4: America's north and south, and then that basically produce agricultural products,
Speaker 4: the most important of which for centuries was sugar and
Speaker 4: then sugar. The most stable way to ship sugar around
Speaker 4: is as molasses. It's non perishable at room temperature, so
Speaker 4: it's easy to put it in a cask, put it
Speaker 4: on a ship, and move it around the around the world.
Speaker 4: Here in Boston, we wanted a way into the triangle trade.
Speaker 4: We don't have. You know, some of the some of
Speaker 4: the southern colonies could produce these vast crops of rice
Speaker 4: and things like that that could be food staples for
Speaker 4: those sugar islands and the Caribbean where so much of
Speaker 4: the sugar is produced Boston, I don't know. And you're
Speaker 4: I think New Hampshire based same thing up there. The
Speaker 4: Granite State we grow a lot more stones than we
Speaker 4: do wheat around here. So for us, our entries into
Speaker 4: the triangle trade where salted cod, salt cod could be
Speaker 4: shipped again it was stable at room temperature, It could
Speaker 4: be shipped to the Caribbean.
Speaker 3: It was used to.
Speaker 4: Feed both the enslavers and the enslaved who worked there.
Speaker 4: And then our other big entry into the triangle trade
Speaker 4: was rum because the molasses again sort of stable form
Speaker 4: of sugar could be shipped from the Caribbean to New
Speaker 4: England and then we could then further distill and refine
Speaker 4: it here into rum. There was then sort of a
Speaker 4: globally sought after commodity. It could be shipped back to
Speaker 4: Europe and a lot of it then was shipped to
Speaker 4: Africa and use this currency to enslave more people.
Speaker 3: Honestly, I went and dusted off some of my old notes.
Speaker 4: About rom and Boston just to get some stats. So
Speaker 4: by seventeen seventeen Boston was manufacturing two hundred thousand gallons
Speaker 4: of rom every year.
Speaker 3: That's very early on.
Speaker 4: And by seventeen fifty there were sixty three active distilleries
Speaker 4: in Boston making upwards of seven hundred thousand gallons of
Speaker 4: rom yearly, so this is a very important economic output
Speaker 4: for the city and for the region. There's a consolidation process.
Speaker 4: So by the time the turn of the twentieth century,
Speaker 4: as we get a little closer to the incident we're
Speaker 4: talking about happens, distilling its consolidated. They're really a handful
Speaker 4: of larger distilleries Boston, Cambridge, a few outlying towns, but
Speaker 4: it's still very important into the twentieth century. And the
Speaker 4: molasses disaster happens in January nineteen nineteen, just as we're
Speaker 4: coming out of the First World War.
Speaker 2: Back up just a.
Speaker 1: Little bit because where you were going when you first
Speaker 1: talked about that. But I want to go back to
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy when you're talking about that, and then we'll
Speaker 1: go right back to nineteen nineteen when this happened. But
Speaker 1: I did an auction. It was actually the sign of
Speaker 1: the Declaration. I went through all those ledgers. It was
Speaker 1: really a fascinating auction that was back in nineteen eighty nine.
Speaker 1: But I read so many times I'd read either keg
Speaker 1: or cask, I can't remember the term, but of rum
Speaker 1: and molasses, like over and over again.
Speaker 2: You'd see the purchase of it.
Speaker 1: And you got to realize that back then, in the
Speaker 1: eighteenth century, people were drinking.
Speaker 2: All the time.
Speaker 1: They were drinking alcohol all the time in the morning
Speaker 1: while they were working in the fields. They didn't trust
Speaker 1: drinking water. And if they this is just another little tidbit.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've ever heard about this, but
Speaker 1: if they drank water, if they drank it out of
Speaker 1: a silver cup, a real silver cup, it was much healthier.
Speaker 1: And because it killed a lot of things. Oliver would
Speaker 1: kill a lot of things that were in the water.
Speaker 1: But people got really sick by drinking water, and then
Speaker 1: they drank alcohol and distilled you know alcohol instead.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you go back and look at the
Speaker 4: maps from seventeenth eighteenth well into the nineteenth century, basically
Speaker 4: up through the cholera epidemic of I think the eighteen
Speaker 4: fifties in Boston, privies and wells were right next to
Speaker 4: each other all the time, right, you know, so drinking
Speaker 4: water was not to be trusted.
Speaker 3: People didn't even refer I do a lot.
Speaker 4: I do a lot of reading in the Adams papers,
Speaker 4: John Adams diaries and letters, and you know, he writes
Speaker 4: about cider and porter and beer. But at the time,
Speaker 4: cider and beer weren't even really considered alcohol, you know.
Speaker 3: It was just what you.
Speaker 4: Drank when you weren't trying to get tipsy from the
Speaker 4: rum or whiskey.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, crazy.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I just wanted to touch on that because
Speaker 1: I was always surprised at how much people.
Speaker 2: Drank back then.
Speaker 1: Then there was a temperance movement that came along eighteen forties,
Speaker 1: I think it was or something like that, but I mean,
Speaker 1: still there.
Speaker 2: Was a lot of a lot.
Speaker 1: Of drinking, and a lot of it had to do
Speaker 1: with people worried about drinking water.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I don't think that's really much of a known fact.
Speaker 1: But so we get into the nineteen nineteen and I'm
Speaker 1: trying to remember the year prohibition was, nineteen twenty.
Speaker 2: I can't even remember close.
Speaker 4: Ye, yeah, that is a great fact. So if you
Speaker 4: look at the news coverage from the day after the
Speaker 4: molasses disaster, which was the Believe the disaster. The collapse
Speaker 4: happened on January fifteenth, and so the morning papers the
Speaker 4: next day, I really how people are finding out about
Speaker 4: the molasses flood. The Boston Globe, the Boston Post, all
Speaker 4: the Boston papers above the fold like this carry the
Speaker 4: molasses tank explosion, the disaster overestimate in the coming days,
Speaker 4: the death toll is going to be overestimated and then
Speaker 4: come back down to reality. But below the fold and
Speaker 4: all these papers, the other front page news is the
Speaker 4: race to be the thirty six state to ratify the
Speaker 4: Prohibition Amendment. So actually the day after the molasses disaster,
Speaker 4: Nebraska becomes that thirty six state.
Speaker 3: So the actual the law goes.
Speaker 4: Into effect one year later in nineteen twenty, like you said,
Speaker 4: but sharing the front page with the molasses disaster is
Speaker 4: news about prohibition.
Speaker 3: And then the other.
Speaker 4: Story that a lot of the papers carry is sort
Speaker 4: of fears about a new outbreak of war because there's
Speaker 4: so much just chaos and disorder in post war Europe.
Speaker 1: So there's the anarchy movement to yeah, what when it
Speaker 1: comes to the use of this molasses, wasn't a lot
Speaker 1: of it had to do with something with wartime and.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, So that's that's why it's so appropriate for
Speaker 4: the prohibition and fears of a new war outbreak of
Speaker 4: war to be sharing the front pages. Because US Industrial
Speaker 4: Alcohol Company, which is the sort of umbrella corporation that
Speaker 4: owns the molasses tank that we're talking about. The main
Speaker 4: use wasn't really Roum at that point. The main use
Speaker 4: for the molasses they're importing into Boston is in munitions,
Speaker 4: so it's used as a basically they're refining ethanol, so
Speaker 4: it's used as a solvent, and it's used in manufacturing
Speaker 4: a lot of different explosives. I saw an estimate that
Speaker 4: a sixteen inch naval guns. This is these you know,
Speaker 4: these huge naval cannons in the World War One, sort
Speaker 4: of the peak of the battleship era. They mount these
Speaker 4: enormous naval guns that you know, fire a shell that's
Speaker 4: hundreds of pounds of explosives. But each one of those
Speaker 4: the powder that fires each round. I saw between what
Speaker 4: was actually in the powder and in the manufacturing process
Speaker 4: would be something like sixty gallons of alcohol to fire
Speaker 4: every round from a sixty inch naval gun.
Speaker 3: Wow, huh yeah.
Speaker 4: So it's it's a very valuable commodity still in the
Speaker 4: twentieth century, but for different reasons now because it's such
Speaker 4: an important industrial component.
Speaker 2: Mm hmmm.
Speaker 1: So this first of all, let's talk about the location
Speaker 1: of and why did they pick the North End The
Speaker 1: North End now you think of great Italian food. You know,
Speaker 1: it's the Italian end of Boston. But why would they
Speaker 1: do you know, is it because of a close proximity
Speaker 1: to the harbor where they could get you know, the
Speaker 1: shipments to it, or what was the reason they picked
Speaker 1: this area?
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the tank that I love this this photo
Speaker 4: of the tank you have pulled up. It gives a
Speaker 4: great sense of the scale of it. So it's about
Speaker 4: fifty feet tall, about ninety feet in diameter, and it's
Speaker 4: right on the waterfront. So if you were to look
Speaker 4: through those buildings and through that tank, probably see the
Speaker 4: harbor right behind. I always think of old before all
Speaker 4: the land making that went on in the late nineteenth
Speaker 4: century early twentieth century just sort of expand Boston. If
Speaker 4: you look at an old map of Boston, the Shawmat
Speaker 4: Peninsula where Buston situated, looks kind of like a mitten,
Speaker 4: and the north end is the thumb on the mitten.
Speaker 4: So it's surrounded by water on three sides and wharves
Speaker 4: all around those three sides. The wharves are still there,
Speaker 4: they're just more likely to have condos than sort of
Speaker 4: these big transshipment points.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: But US industrial alcohol builds that tank in nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 4: basically in the ramp up to wartime. It's very hastily built,
Speaker 4: which we can talk about, but it's located such that
Speaker 4: an it's used for basically transshipping, so molasses comes in
Speaker 4: on these giant tanker ships from the Caribbean. The first
Speaker 4: load was I think December thirty first, nineteen fifteen, so
Speaker 4: they just got it completed in time to take this
Speaker 4: seven hundred thousand gallons of Cuban molasses that were incoming
Speaker 4: and then it's it's used it they can then put
Speaker 4: it into uh there's some pipelines for local distilleries. They
Speaker 4: also offloaded into two train cars tanker cars on trains
Speaker 4: from there because there were train spurs coming right up
Speaker 4: to the wharves in most cases. So it's they're not
Speaker 4: really distilling at that location in the North End, but
Speaker 4: they're shipping it out. They're bringing it in on on
Speaker 4: you know, these giant cargo ships and then moving it
Speaker 4: out on train cars and pipelines.
Speaker 2: Hmmm hmm.
Speaker 1: And speaking of that, this is right by you mentioned
Speaker 1: the train trust Soul and was there an active train
Speaker 1: actually yea almost an issue almost a train mishap to.
Speaker 3: There was a a trolley was affected. I get the.
Speaker 4: Impression that it was sort of tilted but not derailed
Speaker 4: or something like that, but I think that was a
Speaker 4: surface trolley. You had several different what do you think
Speaker 4: about the railway. We had the elevated railway that's pictured here,
Speaker 4: that's carrying basically it's passenger travel, but it's up off
Speaker 4: of the street level. It's using steam locomotives. And then
Speaker 4: on a lot of the surface streets you'd have street
Speaker 4: cars which were in the were electrified by that point,
Speaker 4: much smaller sort of local connections. And then there were
Speaker 4: freight railway railroads coming into the wharves also, So yeah,
Speaker 4: so sort of the height of steam and rail travel.
Speaker 4: So yet all the all these different transportation modes coming
Speaker 4: into the North End, between the harbor, the railways, the
Speaker 4: street cars. So the tank again, it sort of looms
Speaker 4: over this area. The the elevated train tracks run right
Speaker 4: down Commercial Street, which is sort of bounding around the
Speaker 4: perimeter of the North End, and the center of the
Speaker 4: North End is sort of a hill. It's a glacial
Speaker 4: deposit of sand, a sort of a sand the hill
Speaker 4: called Copps Hill, where famous burying ground, lots of patriots,
Speaker 4: the Mather family is buried there, lots of lots of
Speaker 4: great tombs to go see there. But right at the
Speaker 4: foot of Cops Hill is Commercial Street and Commercial Street
Speaker 4: and there's elevated train tracks sort of formed the boundary
Speaker 4: between the industrial north end and the waterfront and then
Speaker 4: the more residential North end uphill from the train tracks,
Speaker 4: but they do it intermingle.
Speaker 1: Where the Cotton Mather family was is had anywhere near
Speaker 1: the Revere Homestead or whatever your home.
Speaker 3: Yes, in an area, it's just a few blocks away.
Speaker 4: It's you know, not even probably a six minute walk
Speaker 4: from the from the Revere House, which actually is the
Speaker 4: same site as the Mather House, which is a fun
Speaker 4: little factoid. Not the same structure, but the same site
Speaker 4: where Cotton Mather had his home, facing across North Square
Speaker 4: to the the what at the time was the North
Speaker 4: Meeting House, which was Cotton Mather's church, the Congregational Church,
Speaker 4: Puritan Church, and then just a few blocks away it
Speaker 4: was the Anglican Church where Paul Revere worshiped and as
Speaker 4: a teenager was a bell ringer. How about that, Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So and I was I was there. You probably
Speaker 1: were there too when they opened the time capsule.
Speaker 2: Were you there?
Speaker 3: No? I watched eagerly on TV, but I wasn't actually
Speaker 3: there for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah I was. Yeah, that was fun.
Speaker 1: So let's, uh, let's talk about, first of all, what
Speaker 1: was the purpose of them building that tank and talk
Speaker 1: about how they just you know, raced to get that
Speaker 1: thing done and they didn't They didn't do all the
Speaker 1: things they were supposed to do. There's definitely negligence there.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Again, it was very rushed.
Speaker 4: There was the Again, this industrial alcohol company is seeing
Speaker 4: the writing on the wall that war is coming to Europe,
Speaker 4: so they're anticipating an increased demand for this sort of
Speaker 4: refined ethanol they create out of the molasses that's being
Speaker 4: shipped into Bust. And then they put you would think
Speaker 4: they would put who a structural engineer, an architect, construction manager,
Speaker 4: a somebody experienced in building things in charge of this project,
Speaker 4: but instead the company treasurer is put in charge of
Speaker 4: overseeing the construction of this giant molasses tank capable of
Speaker 4: holding almost three million gallons of molasses, and he cuts
Speaker 4: basically every corner.
Speaker 3: He first of.
Speaker 4: All, he doesn't understand he has no conception of sort
Speaker 4: of the different grades of steel and the uses of
Speaker 4: different grades of steel, and the difference between structural steel,
Speaker 4: and so he's he's just basically again, he's the treasurer.
Speaker 4: He's using the cheapest components, the cheapest materials available. They
Speaker 4: rush through construction. There's no margin of error built in.
Speaker 4: In the many lawsuits that result of this terrible disaster,
Speaker 4: the defense of the plaintiffs, the families of the victims
Speaker 4: hire an MIT engineering professor to sort of do their investigation,
Speaker 4: and he finds that the grade of steel that was
Speaker 4: used in the tank could handle something like sixteen thousand
Speaker 4: pounds per square inch of pressure, but the full tank
Speaker 4: would have exerted something like forty one thousand pounds of pressure.
Speaker 4: And it was customary to build in a margin of
Speaker 4: error of three or four times the expected load. So
Speaker 4: not only yeah, they they would have expected to build
Speaker 4: a tank like that with the capacity of retaining multiple
Speaker 4: times the expected maximum load. And it said they built
Speaker 4: it with steel that was a fraction of the strength
Speaker 4: that was needed. They never tested, they never fill it
Speaker 4: with water or anything. Before the first the first shipment arrives.
Speaker 1: And they were supposed to are they claimed they did right,
Speaker 1: they were supposed to test it.
Speaker 4: It was at least customary. So another thing that comes
Speaker 4: out of this whole case is at the time there
Speaker 4: were some standards in place the Boston. Boston Building Department
Speaker 4: had published standards that you had to meet for certain
Speaker 4: commercial buildings for bridges, but there was no published standard
Speaker 4: for tanks like that for an industrial tank, so they
Speaker 4: were just left of their own devices to build whatever
Speaker 4: they thought suitable. And again, because of the sort of
Speaker 4: mixed nature of the development in the North End along
Speaker 4: Commercial Street, along the elevated tracks, it's a mix of wharves,
Speaker 4: heavy industrial sites, but then there are people's homes mixed
Speaker 4: in throughout, and it's mostly an immigrant community. At the time,
Speaker 4: the early twentieth century, it was just becoming sort of
Speaker 4: the little Italy of Boston that it is today.
Speaker 3: It's been through this.
Speaker 4: Whole series of waves of immigration now obviously starting with
Speaker 4: the you know, the Puritan migration in the sixteen hundreds,
Speaker 4: and then the next big wave is the Irish immigration
Speaker 4: following the Potato family in the eighteen forties. There's in
Speaker 4: the late nineteenth century, there's a wave of mostly Eastern
Speaker 4: European and Russian Jewish immigrants, and then right at the
Speaker 4: turn of the twentieth centuries when this the really the
Speaker 4: big wave of Italian immigration starts. So it's been a
Speaker 4: gateway community for hundreds of years, and it was certainly
Speaker 4: at the turn of the twentieth century. I think if
Speaker 4: you would walk through the streets of the North End
Speaker 4: at the time, you wo had heard a half dozen
Speaker 4: languages being spoken, spelled, all different cuisines, cooking, and every direction.
Speaker 3: So it would have been a really.
Speaker 4: Culturally rich neighborhood, but an economically very not rich neighborhood
Speaker 4: at the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was a lot of poverty, Yeah, from what
Speaker 1: I understand then, Yeah, certainly. So they build this, it's unbelievable.
Speaker 2: And you know, the one thing.
Speaker 4: I say from the I was gonna say, from the
Speaker 4: moment the tank is completed, people are complaining. Okay, they say,
Speaker 4: the first time it's filled, it starts creaking and moaning,
Speaker 4: and so neighbors immediately complain to the company, They say,
Speaker 4: this thing's going to collapse. At least one company employee
Speaker 4: did sort of what we call it a whistleblower today,
Speaker 4: went to the executives and said, this thing ain't right.
Speaker 4: It's not constructed well, and it was very visibly leaking
Speaker 4: all over years ago, probably five years or more ago.
Speaker 4: I did an episode for my podcast, the Hub History
Speaker 4: Podcast about the molasses disaster, and afterwards I had a
Speaker 4: listener right in and say that her mother, so my
Speaker 4: listener's mother would be sent by her mother. So the
Speaker 4: listener's grandmother would send her mother with a ten cup
Speaker 4: to the molasses tank to just hold it up to
Speaker 4: the leaky river holes to get molasses whenever she needed
Speaker 4: it for baking.
Speaker 2: I mean, that's scary right there.
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, I mean, yeah, they tried patching it.
Speaker 4: They tried a few things, and then eventually the solution
Speaker 4: was just to paint the whole thing brown to hide
Speaker 4: how badly it leaked.
Speaker 2: That's what they did.
Speaker 1: That was God was there was it pulling on the
Speaker 1: ground as well, And it seems like that would attract
Speaker 1: like animals, and oh, I'm.
Speaker 4: Sure it was just a buffet for rats. I mean,
Speaker 4: I'm sure there were no fewer rats in Boston in
Speaker 4: nineteen nineteen than there.
Speaker 2: Were four wow. Wow?
Speaker 1: And how many years did this thing hold?
Speaker 4: So it was it was completed at the end of
Speaker 4: nineteen fifteen. Again, it was they were racing the delivery
Speaker 4: that was coming in on New Year's Eve nineteen fifteen,
Speaker 4: and it failed in mid January nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 3: Such, I guess just over three.
Speaker 2: Years right now.
Speaker 1: It's so you think about January when it happened in January,
Speaker 1: when it's receiving a shipment, and it just seems like
Speaker 1: that's so cold, and you think of molasses as moving
Speaker 1: so slow. I mean, I can't even imagine what was
Speaker 1: pumping and how long it would it take to transfer
Speaker 1: from a cargo ship cargo hold to the tank.
Speaker 4: Well, that is an excellent point you raised there, because
Speaker 4: there are a couple of factors at play that may
Speaker 4: have influenced the failure of the tank. First, it was January.
Speaker 4: January fifteenth was an unseasonably warm day. So the day
Speaker 4: before it was in the single digits. I've heard two degrees,
Speaker 4: I've heard five degrees, but it was in the single
Speaker 4: digits at bahrenheit here in Boston. January fifteenth it warmed
Speaker 4: up to the fifties, so it was a sudden warm snap.
Speaker 4: And then they had on the fourteenth received a big
Speaker 4: shipment and the tank was going to be filled more
Speaker 4: full than it ever had been before, which is great.
Speaker 4: But to make the molasses workable as as it's pumped
Speaker 4: out of a ship, there's a like a heating coil.
Speaker 4: I think it was electric heating coil to warm the
Speaker 4: molasses on the ship enough to be a little more
Speaker 4: sol not soluble, but a little less viscus, so to
Speaker 4: be a little easier to work with.
Speaker 3: So then they're there.
Speaker 4: They pumped this vast I don't remember the exact number
Speaker 4: of gallons, but it's probably close to a million gallons
Speaker 4: of heated molasses into the tank.
Speaker 3: So there's a thought that maybe.
Speaker 4: Sort of the thermal expansion of the molasses that was
Speaker 4: already in the tank and sort of the uh, the
Speaker 4: churning as the cold and hot molasses mixed together, there's
Speaker 4: you know, the different levels would turn together that may
Speaker 4: have contributed to the to the collapse. I've heard theories
Speaker 4: about there being a fermentation in the tank, but I
Speaker 4: think experts today would tell you that that probably wasn't
Speaker 4: a factor.
Speaker 1: Well, they probably had some type of vent venting system
Speaker 1: for something like that to protect against something.
Speaker 2: I would imagine they would you, but.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't put anything past us.
Speaker 4: I a at that point given what the lawsuits later
Speaker 4: I uncovered about the.
Speaker 3: Absolute uh absolute negligence that they put into building that tank.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, amazing. So I can't even imagine, you know,
Speaker 1: I forget what water wets per gallon, but you know,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine, you know, glasses really heavy, you know,
Speaker 1: to begin with, So it must must be a tremendous
Speaker 1: amount of weight and in that especially when you get
Speaker 1: down toward the bottom. And it was just a time bomb,
Speaker 1: you know. I mean maybe all those things together, uh
Speaker 1: you know, worked for that particular day, but it was
Speaker 1: going to happen sooner or later. I mean with everything
Speaker 1: you know you've explained, especially about the steel tension and
Speaker 1: you know, being so thin and everything ridiculous, and so
Speaker 1: it was a riveted They riveted the thing together and
Speaker 1: it was actually leaking out the rivets. That alone would
Speaker 1: say that thing's going to burst, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: you would think.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And the company just brushed off complaints from neighbors,
Speaker 4: concerns from employees as long as I mean, I don't
Speaker 4: want to sound like one of the anarchists who would
Speaker 4: be blamed for the disaster later, but I mean it
Speaker 4: was just as long as there are profits to be made.
Speaker 4: They were not hearing any other any arguments to the contrary.
Speaker 1: So would you say that if you know, if you
Speaker 1: were to point a finger at one person the most,
Speaker 1: would it be the person that was in charge of
Speaker 1: the building, the treasurer.
Speaker 4: I mean, either him or whoever decided he should be
Speaker 4: in charge of the project, because it I mean, it
Speaker 4: was just not somebody who was qualified to manage that
Speaker 4: that construction.
Speaker 3: He didn't.
Speaker 4: He just didn't understand the materials, the forces that were
Speaker 4: involved to be able to make competent decisions.
Speaker 1: And I would think that the company that sold him
Speaker 1: the steel, and the workers and everyone would seem to
Speaker 1: know what they're doing, you know, which is really bizarre
Speaker 1: that they would let that go. You know, I mean
Speaker 1: it's not the only tank that was built at the time.
Speaker 1: There were I'm sure there were all kinds of tanks
Speaker 1: in different tanks. But so let's talk about the day
Speaker 1: that happened. Has have you ever heard of any direct
Speaker 1: I mean they are the writings of direct you know,
Speaker 1: eyewitness accounts to what what happened.
Speaker 3: There are a few.
Speaker 4: And there I've mostly gotten this from from news accounts
Speaker 4: at the time.
Speaker 3: So that the one.
Speaker 4: Sor I don't know if you could hear the car
Speaker 4: in the background. The one, the one actual eyewitness to
Speaker 4: the collapse of the tank that I've heard of as
Speaker 4: a Boston police patrolman named Frank McManus, who was on
Speaker 4: a foot patrol and at twelve forty he, like everybody
Speaker 4: else in the North End, heard a tremendous sound, and
Speaker 4: others have described the sound as a machine gun followed
Speaker 4: by a freight train and rivets popping, the rivets letting loose,
Speaker 4: and then the tank collapsing. But Frank McManus, patrolman McManus,
Speaker 4: happened to So today there are fire call boxes and
Speaker 4: a lot of major cities, Boston still has some fire
Speaker 4: call boxes. Mostly what we have is fire telegraphs. But
Speaker 4: at the time there were both police and fire call boxes.
Speaker 4: And he was already on a call box talking to
Speaker 4: his the police station, and just happened to be looking
Speaker 4: and facing the direction of the tank and witnessed the
Speaker 4: tank collapse, and so he immediately sounded the alarm, said,
Speaker 4: you know, send every available ambulance, send every available officer,
Speaker 4: send everybody, because what you then have and you alluded
Speaker 4: to it before is this wave of molasses. And this
Speaker 4: is where the idea that molasses is slow in January
Speaker 4: goes out the window, because there's a wave that's cresting
Speaker 4: fifteen twenty feet tall, moving at thirty five miles an hour.
Speaker 4: And I just looked up for a little bit of fun.
Speaker 4: We just had the Olympics a few weeks ago, and
Speaker 4: unfortunately our American sprinter, Noah Lyles, didn't do so well
Speaker 4: at the Olympics because he apparently was trying to run
Speaker 4: with COVID, which isn't great. But he I think last
Speaker 4: year sometime recently, he set the one hundred meter world record,
Speaker 4: so he's officially the fastest man alive and he can
Speaker 4: top out at about twenty seven miles an hour for
Speaker 4: one hundred meters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you're talking racehorse speed.
Speaker 4: That this molasses is advancing through the neighborhood cuts about
Speaker 4: a half mile swath across the north end, sort of
Speaker 4: a long commercial street on either side of Commercial Street,
Speaker 4: And again, I think the devastation is hard to imagine.
Speaker 4: I'm glad you have the photos to share with the audience,
Speaker 4: the video audience, because it first of all, an any
Speaker 4: wood structures, any stick built houses or stores or buildings
Speaker 4: are just wiped off the face of the earth.
Speaker 1: Well, if you look at this building that's right next
Speaker 1: to the tank right now, you're seeing this Victorian building.
Speaker 2: With this beautiful roof.
Speaker 1: And if you look at this picture, where did I
Speaker 1: just see that? I just saw that. Let me see
Speaker 1: if I can see it again. It showed it right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's right there on the ground.
Speaker 1: The roof of it is just sitting there and the
Speaker 1: whole structure is gone.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: There was a bartender by the name of Martin Cloherty
Speaker 4: who had worked late the night before. So the collapse
Speaker 4: happened to, like I said, twelve forty in the afternoon,
Speaker 4: but being a bartender, was out all night working. He's
Speaker 4: in bed at the time and he wakes up to
Speaker 4: his house being destroyed around him. And I have a
Speaker 4: Q that says I was in bed on the third
Speaker 4: floor of my house when I heard a deep rumble.
Speaker 4: When I awoke, I was in several feet of molasses.
Speaker 4: And so he was in one of these wooden stick
Speaker 4: built houses that was nearby. His house was swept into
Speaker 4: the elevated train tracks and basically just dashed itself to
Speaker 4: pieces against the elevated superstructure of the tracks. He survives
Speaker 4: by crawling back into bed. He pulls his sister up
Speaker 4: onto his bed with him, and the two of them
Speaker 4: basically used the bed as a boat to ride out
Speaker 4: the flood. But then his mother and one of his brothers,
Speaker 4: who were also home in the house at the time,
Speaker 4: they were both killed.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the fire station next door, wasn't that? That was
Speaker 1: I think there was a survivor or two in that,
Speaker 1: but that.
Speaker 4: Was yeah, yeah, there was one. There was only one
Speaker 4: firefighter killed. The firehouse thirty one was literally right next
Speaker 4: door to the molasses tank. So you'd expect the firefighters
Speaker 4: the North End fire station to be the first responders
Speaker 4: to this terrible disaster, but the firehouse has knocked off
Speaker 4: its foundation badly enough that they're trapped inside treading water,
Speaker 4: essentially in the molasses for hours until volunteers neighborhood folks
Speaker 4: can basically cut through enough of the fire station to
Speaker 4: get them out in the time. That takes one of
Speaker 4: the firefighters. I don't remember his name, unfortunately, but one
Speaker 4: of the firefighters just was exhausted and he couldn't swim anymore,
Speaker 4: and he just slip below the surface and drowned.
Speaker 1: Wow, I can't imagine well, I can't imagine a drowning anyway,
Speaker 1: but inasses.
Speaker 4: And molasses sounds just terrible. The first because the firefighters
Speaker 4: are trapped in their own firehouse. The first first responders
Speaker 4: were cadets from the mass Maritime Academy who were on
Speaker 4: a training ship that was moored nearby called the Nantucket,
Speaker 4: and about one hundred and fifteen or one hundred and
Speaker 4: twenty cadets came in and they were the first to
Speaker 4: start sorting through the just terrible destruction that's left behind
Speaker 4: because the molasses once the wave slows down, it's not
Speaker 4: moving at thirty five miles an hour and starts to
Speaker 4: slow down and cool at pools in many places, in
Speaker 4: lakes of molasses that are waste deep around the neighborhood.
Speaker 4: And in the Boston Post the next day they described,
Speaker 4: you'd go in, you know, you have just everybody is
Speaker 4: turning out to try to help in any way they can.
Speaker 4: So you have parents, neighbors, teachers, whoever, trying to find
Speaker 4: their loved ones in this mess. And they say, you'd
Speaker 4: see a form thrashing in the sticky black pool, and
Speaker 4: you wouldn't know whether it was a horse or a
Speaker 4: man until you went and pulled them out and hopefully
Speaker 4: you got there in time, but in a lot of
Speaker 4: cases they didn't. And again, I think the final death
Speaker 4: toll was about twenty one and at least at least
Speaker 4: one hundred fifty people injured. And then I'm told you
Speaker 4: think about nineteen nineteen. My grandparents were alive at the time,
Speaker 4: and horses and mules were still very common in all
Speaker 4: kinds of industries and transportation. So they're just untold animals
Speaker 4: that were drowned in this flood as well.
Speaker 3: Not to mention the rats, yes, yeah we don't cry.
Speaker 3: I shed no tears for the rats.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and you know, you think about how what
Speaker 1: a mess this? I mean, I can't imagine, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, everything is about this as a disaster, But
Speaker 1: then can you imagine the cleanup afterwards and what that?
Speaker 2: How could you clean up something like this? You know
Speaker 2: what I mean?
Speaker 1: Years and years of rain is helpful, right, you know, seasons?
Speaker 4: And yeah, I mean, the the rescue attempts go on
Speaker 4: for I think a couple of days basically where they're
Speaker 4: you know, getting people out of the wreckage still alive.
Speaker 3: For a while, and then the recovery efforts go on.
Speaker 4: For weeks and weeks. I think the last body was
Speaker 4: found in the harbor in April, so that that they
Speaker 4: finally the human toll is dealt with. And then, like
Speaker 4: you say, you have two point three million gallons of
Speaker 4: molasses coating everything in this neighborhood. So they ended up
Speaker 4: pumping seawater, millions and millions of gallons of seawater through
Speaker 4: the streets to the north end to try and flush
Speaker 4: the molasses away. They felt that it worked a little
Speaker 4: better than freshwater, and it's right there, right on the waterfront,
Speaker 4: so why not. And then because of this, then the
Speaker 4: harbor turned brown for months afterwards. There was no sense,
Speaker 4: you know, there's no deer island filtration or anything at
Speaker 4: the time. They're just flushing it all straight into the harbor.
Speaker 4: So I think it was probably a stinking mess of
Speaker 4: a harbor for a few months afterwards.
Speaker 1: I would say, and do you think that a lot
Speaker 1: of the you know, I'm picturing this. I don't know
Speaker 1: if there was a certain direction the molasses win or
Speaker 1: if it just burst at the bottom and wind everywhere.
Speaker 1: But did a lot of it go into the harbor directly,
Speaker 1: do you know.
Speaker 4: I think it must have just from the location of
Speaker 4: the tank. So again, when you think about the north end,
Speaker 4: if any of your listeners are in Boston, it's the
Speaker 4: sight of Langone Park today, so there's some ball fields
Speaker 4: and some botchy courts, and then it's directly abutting the harbor.
Speaker 4: So at least some of it must have gone straight
Speaker 4: into the harbor if it sort of you know, burst
Speaker 4: in all directions the way you'd expect it to. But
Speaker 4: then you know, on the land side it like I say,
Speaker 4: it's just swept away. Any wood building just smashed to toothpicks.
Speaker 3: It was so powerful.
Speaker 4: Some of the photos you showed the elevated tracks, which
Speaker 4: are these enormous steel girders and stele spans or you know,
Speaker 4: iron girders and spans between them. They were twisted in
Speaker 4: some cases, you know, they had to be extensively repaired.
Speaker 4: And then fragments of the tank itself these you know,
Speaker 4: big twisted steel sheets that used to be a molasses
Speaker 4: tank or then driven throughout the town and sort of
Speaker 4: wrapped around train cars and and you know, trucks and
Speaker 4: cars automobiles are buried in the Goo so yeah, the
Speaker 4: cleanup effort had to be just incredible. And that's where
Speaker 4: one of the persistent legends I guess of the molasses
Speaker 4: flood comes from. People say, I will say, disreputable travel
Speaker 4: sites say that even today, on a hot summer's day,
Speaker 4: you can smell molasses throughout the streets to the North End,
Speaker 4: And that's just not true. If you walk in the
Speaker 4: streets in the North End on a hot summer day,
Speaker 4: you're gonna smell rotten dumpster, not molasses. But I do
Speaker 4: think there was some truth. I think for some time afterwards, yeah,
Speaker 4: you would smell molasses because no matter how much sea
Speaker 4: what are you pumped through the streets, people were everything
Speaker 4: you touched afterwards, you would transfer molasses to it. Right,
Speaker 4: So if you were helping with the cleanup and then
Speaker 4: you got on the trolley to go home, you're going
Speaker 4: to track molasses into the trolley, and then you're going
Speaker 4: to track it into your house. And so I do
Speaker 4: think that there was some truth to the legend that
Speaker 4: for some time afterwards Boston smelled like molasses.
Speaker 1: But no more do you think there was ever I mean,
Speaker 1: do you think there was any historical landmarks like homes
Speaker 1: that were lost in that. Are you aware of any
Speaker 1: of them?
Speaker 3: I don't really think so.
Speaker 4: And of course, you know, everything's historic to somebody, and
Speaker 4: people's you know, people's homes are important to them, and
Speaker 4: those were destroyed, and that businesses were destroyed. The fire
Speaker 4: station of police station was badly damaged, but it was
Speaker 4: located in the more industrial part of the North End,
Speaker 4: so a lot of the oldest development would have been
Speaker 4: sort of on the other side of that thumb of
Speaker 4: the mitten I was talking about. The North End was
Speaker 4: the you know, the first part of the Seaman Peninsula
Speaker 4: to have English homes on it when the Puritans moved
Speaker 4: from Charlestown across the Charles River to get better water
Speaker 4: on the North End, but they would mostly settle more
Speaker 4: on the Mill Pond side and the Harbor side, not
Speaker 4: so much on the Charles River side. So a lot
Speaker 4: of the oldest parts of the North End were sort
Speaker 4: of a little further away, a few blocks away. And
Speaker 4: luckily most of that older development was uphill.
Speaker 2: I see, yep.
Speaker 1: I was just trying to pull up a map of
Speaker 1: Boston so I could show the I can't seem to
Speaker 1: get it to download, but anyway, the aftermath of this
Speaker 1: whole thing is just as crazy. I mean, there was
Speaker 1: someone you know that of course the company, they wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to run for their lives and you know, make
Speaker 1: sure they don't go, you know, belly up. So there
Speaker 1: immediately try to come up with the story that it
Speaker 1: was an anarchist.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you can see that on the front page
Speaker 4: you brought up. You can see the language of an explosion,
Speaker 4: because that's what it seemed like to everybody who witnessed it.
Speaker 4: It seemed like an explosion, and the US industrial alcohol
Speaker 4: ran with that. There was this idea that it had
Speaker 4: been anarchists who dynamited the tank, and yes, it well,
Speaker 4: first of all, it's a very convenience scapegoat, but some
Speaker 4: there was some reason to think that could have been
Speaker 4: the case, although there was no direct evidence to prove
Speaker 4: that it was the case.
Speaker 3: That anarchy.
Speaker 4: It was a growing end for a lot of people,
Speaker 4: very attractive political movement in the early part of the
Speaker 4: twentieth century, especially coming from different parts of Europe that
Speaker 4: were still I think about Eastern Europe which was still
Speaker 4: very close to a feudal state under sort of the
Speaker 4: Austro Hungarian Empire. Serfdom was basically still in place. Other
Speaker 4: legally abolished in most places, it was still practiced practically
Speaker 4: in a lot places. So this idea of absolutely egalitarian
Speaker 4: society without nobility, without you know, sort of the structures
Speaker 4: of the state, I can see as a you know,
Speaker 4: a bulgarian surf. Why that was attractive. So it starts,
Speaker 4: you know, right around the turn of the twentieth century,
Speaker 4: spreads across Europe, spreads to the US through migration, and
Speaker 4: there is a lot of in the first couple of
Speaker 4: decades of the twentieth century, there's a lot of political
Speaker 4: violence in the US.
Speaker 2: Committed by mckley.
Speaker 4: Nineteen oh one, McKinley nineteen fourteen, an assassination attempt on
Speaker 4: John Rockefeller in New York. In nineteen sixteen, right in
Speaker 4: the North End, there were a couple of instances. There
Speaker 4: was a protest or a riot depending on which source
Speaker 4: you read in North Square right in front of Paul
Speaker 4: Revere's house, where a policeman was stabbed. And then also
Speaker 4: in nineteen sixteen, a police station in the North End
Speaker 4: was dynamited, focused on off hours, so a lot of
Speaker 4: property damage when nobody was actually injured, right and then
Speaker 4: in that. Yeah, during World War One, anarchists were highly
Speaker 4: opposed to the US entry into World War One. So
Speaker 4: even some of not in the Boston area, but some
Speaker 4: of the other facilities of US industrial alcohol were dynamited,
Speaker 4: I think in the New York area, So there was
Speaker 4: some reason to think it could have been an anarchist attack.
Speaker 4: There was, I mean, I could see why somebody had
Speaker 4: that first instinct, that first reaction, but it turned out
Speaker 4: to not hold water.
Speaker 2: But yeah, there was the invest there was. There was.
Speaker 1: They hired their own investigator that was trying to make
Speaker 1: it look appear that way, And but I think did
Speaker 1: the city of Boston also have their own investigators and
Speaker 1: they saw no signs of any explosion.
Speaker 2: Right off the bat right pretty quickly.
Speaker 4: Well, a lot of the fact finding was done as
Speaker 4: part of this enormous civil lawsuit. So in the wake
Speaker 4: of the collapse, a lot of individual victims and victims
Speaker 4: families filed lawsuits. And then the largest single plaintiff was
Speaker 4: a bust An elevated railway company because their tracks and
Speaker 4: stuff was so badly impacted by the molasses flood. So
Speaker 4: I think there was something in the neighborhood of about
Speaker 4: one hundred and twenty civil suits filed, and they were
Speaker 4: consolidated then into one of the first early really big
Speaker 4: class actions, And so it was brought before the Mass
Speaker 4: Superior Court, and the Superior Court appointed a retired military officer,
Speaker 4: a retired colonel named Hugh Ogden, to be to lead
Speaker 4: the hearings, basically to act as the judge in this
Speaker 4: giant civil case that takes it dragged out for over
Speaker 4: five years. The final judgment wasn't until I think early
Speaker 4: nineteen twenty five. Wow, you know, thousands of exhibits introduced
Speaker 4: into evidence, hundreds or maybe a thousand witnesses gave testimony.
Speaker 4: You had survivors testifying, structural engineers testifying, you had explosive experts,
Speaker 4: you had company employees. And in the end, again thanks
Speaker 4: in part to the independent investigators hired by the plaintiffs
Speaker 4: the plaintiffs' lawyers, it was chalked up to one hundred
Speaker 4: percent negligence. They just it was incorrect materials, incorrect construction,
Speaker 4: didn't uphold design standards for tanks of that that type.
Speaker 4: Just it it was a bad job, badly done.
Speaker 1: And so did anyone ever announce with the I know
Speaker 1: they settled out of court eventually, but did anyone ever
Speaker 1: under stand what the total amount of that settlement was?
Speaker 4: So the figure I've seen is six hundred and twenty
Speaker 4: eight thousand dollars, which I've learned of my eight years
Speaker 4: or so podcasting that converting historical currency to modern is
Speaker 4: a little bit of a fool's air, and my best
Speaker 4: back of the envelope calculation is about eight or ten
Speaker 4: million dollars. But it's so hard to draw parallels.
Speaker 1: And that was split between how many people? Do you know,
Speaker 1: because there were a lot of victims other than the
Speaker 1: ones of the families that died.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I'm not sure how the breakdown would have been
Speaker 4: between individual victims and their families and sort of the
Speaker 4: larger like again bust An Elevated Railway company. I think
Speaker 4: there were Like I said, I think there were about
Speaker 4: one hundred and twenty parties to that lawsuit, so somehow
Speaker 4: it would have been divided up between them, and then
Speaker 4: of course legal fees.
Speaker 3: Lawyers always take a care.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. I wonder if it was a third
Speaker 2: back then.
Speaker 1: Pulled up the old map, n old map to say,
Speaker 1: eighteenth thirty map. Yeah, so where let's see where am
Speaker 1: I looking at there's so many things that could look
Speaker 1: like a mitten.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So this is after a little bit of the nineteenth
Speaker 4: century land making. So the mitten shape is a little
Speaker 4: less pronounced here, largely because there was a mill pond
Speaker 4: between the north end and the west end that was
Speaker 4: filled in right at the turn of the nineteenth century
Speaker 4: to development. But if we look here, the north end
Speaker 4: is sort of the upper right quadrant of that peninsula.
Speaker 3: It sticks out on the red courts.
Speaker 2: It's been red.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let me look, let me look at my other monitor. Oh,
Speaker 3: so the part of the north end is outlined in.
Speaker 2: Blue and oh, okay, got it.
Speaker 3: Yep, I think it's mostly in blue there from what.
Speaker 2: I see it, I see it now.
Speaker 4: And then the tank would have been located sort of
Speaker 4: at the uppermost point of that that part of the peninsula,
Speaker 4: the right where the commercial Street takes a hard southerly
Speaker 4: turn as it comes around the shoreline would have been
Speaker 4: about where the tank.
Speaker 2: Was, I see. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So that's really you know, I mean, this story is
Speaker 1: just unbelievable. And all the people that affected, you know,
Speaker 1: and and like you said, you know, think of all
Speaker 1: the horses and other animals that were killed so many,
Speaker 1: I'm sure probably in the hundreds, but uh so now we're.
Speaker 2: Kind of through that, and I do appreciate that a lot.
Speaker 1: But I want to ask you a couple of other questions,
Speaker 1: and you're you know, you mentioned kind of weird things.
Speaker 2: You know that kind of makes me a little bit.
Speaker 2: So what are.
Speaker 1: Some some of your favorite stories that you have covered
Speaker 1: in Boston, just to you know, a handful of them
Speaker 1: if we could hear some.
Speaker 4: So, okay, let me give you a couple of weird
Speaker 4: stories that I'm fond of.
Speaker 3: Let's see. Well, one one story that I.
Speaker 4: My episode about this was years ago now, and it
Speaker 4: didn't I didn't think as much about it at the time,
Speaker 4: but as I as the time has gone on, it's
Speaker 4: become one of my favorite stories that I told on
Speaker 4: the podcast. Is about the first ever captivated or captive
Speaker 4: whale in the world, which was exhibited on Washington Street
Speaker 4: in Boston's downtown crossing in eighteen sixty, which is way
Speaker 4: earlier than you would think something like that was possible,
Speaker 4: far far before our modern New England aquarium was in
Speaker 4: anybody's eye. There was an inventor by the name of
Speaker 4: James Ambrose cutting He got fairly wealthy from inventing a
Speaker 4: new photographic process, the ambro type.
Speaker 3: He named it after himself, of course, and.
Speaker 4: He was fascinated with aquariums, so it was at the
Speaker 4: time some of the the very earliest aquariums in the
Speaker 4: in the world were developed in London, so you got
Speaker 4: one of the first books about aquariums. He had a
Speaker 4: couple of home aquariums. He said, make a business out
Speaker 4: of this. So he starts this aquarium aquarium. It's you know,
Speaker 4: small tanks, a lot of like turtles and fish and
Speaker 4: things like that, and he gets the idea of you
Speaker 4: know what can really get people in the door is
Speaker 4: a whale, and so he ends up partnering with Amanda
Speaker 4: I think his name was Frank Butler's that last name's
Speaker 4: definitely Butler and P. T.
Speaker 3: Barnum, the greatest showman.
Speaker 4: So Butler brings the aquarium, know how, cutting brings the enthusiasm,
Speaker 4: and then P. T. Barnum brings a lot of cash
Speaker 4: and they end up hiring a whaler. In Canada, he
Speaker 4: said the southernmost range of the bluega whale, So the
Speaker 4: white whale is along the Saint Lawrence River in Canada's
Speaker 4: there's summer feeding grounds. They come into the mouth of
Speaker 4: the Saint Lawrence and they feed on fish runs in
Speaker 4: the summertime. So they build these giant fish weirs. And
Speaker 4: at the time they were building these, of course to
Speaker 4: kill the belugas, to harvest the whale oil, the fat,
Speaker 4: the render and the whale oil. That's a big commercial product.
Speaker 4: And Cutting says to one of these whalers, hey keep one.
Speaker 3: Alive for me. And it actually works.
Speaker 4: Is the amazing thing. They build this giant crate. They
Speaker 4: can put a twenty foot long whale into ship it
Speaker 4: by a rail down the through Portland down to Boston, basically.
Speaker 3: Tip it up.
Speaker 4: The tip this crate up on its side into this
Speaker 4: I think the tank was twenty or thirty feet thirty
Speaker 4: feet in diameter, so the whale barely has room.
Speaker 3: To turn around.
Speaker 4: God and then you can pay your twenty cents and
Speaker 4: go see a captive whale.
Speaker 3: And the show is.
Speaker 4: There's a The handlers basically would chase the whale into
Speaker 4: a corner of the tank, put a harness on it,
Speaker 4: and then the whale would pull this little novelty boat
Speaker 4: in the shape of a nautilus shell with a woman
Speaker 4: standing in it, around and around and around this little
Speaker 4: tank while people you know, clapped and cheered at a
Speaker 4: great time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, bizarre one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's one of my favorites. I like some of
Speaker 4: the weirdo history where because of the location of slaughterhouses
Speaker 4: in Boston, it's now a neighborhood of Boston called Brighton.
Speaker 4: At the time it was an independent town. It's like
Speaker 4: a little wild West. You dig into the history. There
Speaker 4: were you know, cattle drives overland from Vermont from upstate
Speaker 4: New York, from New Hampshire where people would drive cattle
Speaker 4: to market in Boston. So you'd have drovers, cowboys essentially,
Speaker 4: you know, gambling at the Porterhouse hotel in Brighton and
Speaker 4: going to the to the cattle fairs and then you know,
Speaker 4: getting swindled out of their cash and things like that,
Speaker 4: all those good stories. And then they would also have
Speaker 4: turkey drives at Thanksgiving time, so especially from Vermont, they
Speaker 4: would drive these huge flocks of turkeys. They say turkey
Speaker 4: were docile, so you could have just two or three
Speaker 4: people driving a herd of thousands of turkeys overland roosting
Speaker 4: in people's trees. You have these, you know, people complaining
Speaker 4: about all these turkeys coming trying to roost in their
Speaker 4: barns overnight during the turkey drives and like collapsing the
Speaker 4: roof from the weight of hundreds of turkeys.
Speaker 3: Aul on the shed at the same time.
Speaker 4: But they would drive turkeys overland to the markets in Boston.
Speaker 4: In Brighton at the time, I just continued. Obviously, eventually
Speaker 4: railroad comes, they move them by by railcar and things
Speaker 4: like that. So, but into the nineteen fifties there was
Speaker 4: the massive slaughterhouses in Brighton, to the point where the
Speaker 4: Brighton police station used to keep uh special ammo on
Speaker 4: hand for breakaway steers that would rampage through the streets.
Speaker 4: There's in the forties or fifties there was a report
Speaker 4: of a steer goring several construction workers before it could
Speaker 4: be shot by the police and astery.
Speaker 3: But yeah, the I love the idea of the.
Speaker 4: You know, the wild West in Brontain, which is now
Speaker 4: you know, basically known as like a college neighborhood, like
Speaker 4: a college student neighborhood.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1: I was working in an office for a while in
Speaker 1: Woolburn and I went out and saw this. It was
Speaker 1: all grown up along this. I thought it was a
Speaker 1: stream and then looking it was granite lined and it's
Speaker 1: a canal.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, the Middlesex Canal.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Middlesex Canal. That's exactly what it was. And
Speaker 1: you know, you think of all it's such rich history.
Speaker 1: That was all lumber. I believe they floated lumber, you know.
Speaker 4: All kinds of products a lumber, a lot of agricultural
Speaker 4: goods from if you think about it's it's joining the
Speaker 4: Merrimack to bust and so all the products of New Hampshire,
Speaker 4: a lot of a lot of crops, a lot of lumber, livestock.
Speaker 3: It was a huge investment, a huge infrastructure.
Speaker 4: Upgrade, and unfortunately trains were inmitted like the next day,
Speaker 4: so a lot of the investors basically their shirts and
Speaker 4: that and a lot of the course of the Middlesex
Speaker 4: Canal got converted into a railroad right away. But there
Speaker 4: are these great reminiscences. Among other things, it was a
Speaker 4: huge linear skating rink in the winter time, so you
Speaker 4: could you could skate from like Wouburn to bill Ricca
Speaker 4: and back.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, along the Middlesex.
Speaker 4: Canal in the winter. And they were you know, in
Speaker 4: the sort of the mid nineteenth century. I saw several
Speaker 4: published reminiscences of people who are could remember going skating
Speaker 4: on the Middlesex Canal as a just a wee lad
Speaker 4: you know, so wow. I love infrastructure history like that,
Speaker 4: between you know, building Buston's first sanitary sewers too, you know,
Speaker 4: constructing the water supplies for you know, Bustin's always struggled
Speaker 4: to bring enough fresh water for the number of people
Speaker 4: who lived here, so you had wells and springs give
Speaker 4: way to you know, these wooden pipes from Jamaica pond
Speaker 4: into downtown Boston, which if you go to the Boston
Speaker 4: Archaeology Lab, you can still see some of those wooden
Speaker 4: pipes on display or not if you talk to talk
Speaker 4: to the folks, and not really on display, but you
Speaker 4: might be able to talk your way into the back
Speaker 4: room to see them there.
Speaker 3: To then the.
Speaker 4: Constituent Aqueduct with this huge engineering marvel, and then today's
Speaker 4: of course the quabin which provides us the best drinking
Speaker 4: water in America.
Speaker 1: I'm told, well, you know, you think of you think
Speaker 1: of water in populations, you know, all over the country
Speaker 1: and the struggles, and you think of Mholland out in
Speaker 1: California that came up with a two hundred mile aqueduct
Speaker 1: out there, you know, because of Los Angeles kept growing.
Speaker 1: That's always the problem is fresh water, and you know,
Speaker 1: to get fresh water to a place like that, and
Speaker 1: you know, Arizona's in trouble, they have that aqua further,
Speaker 1: it's in trouble, yet they keep growing, you know, and
Speaker 1: that's what we do.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's true.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Well this has been fantastic. I've really enjoyed it
Speaker 2: a lot.
Speaker 1: And uh so it's Hub History and that's a podcast
Speaker 1: you can get anywhere you listen to podcasts, and that's
Speaker 1: basically Boston history and and entertaining as well.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I like to say we go far beyond
Speaker 4: the Freedom Trail. So we tell some of the some
Speaker 4: of the stories you would have learned in you know,
Speaker 4: your middle school history classes. We try and go way
Speaker 4: beyond that too, to tell stories that are unexpected or
Speaker 4: about people who would otherwise be forgotten. So hubhistory dot
Speaker 4: com it's yeah, any place you get your podcasts, and
Speaker 4: we again we try and tell all the stories of
Speaker 4: Boston told over three hundred so far, and we're still going.
Speaker 1: Wow, that's great. All right, Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 1: It's been a real pleasure.
Speaker 3: No, I appreciate it, all.
Speaker 2: Right, Okay, we'll see you next time.
Speaker 1: K