Tag Archives: Boston history

Legacy of Care: The History of the Boston Female Asylum

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Author: Amanda McKay, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the English MA program at UMass Boston

As the 1800s streets of Boston were bustling with carriages, a group of women were plotting a new development: a home for young girls. The first of its kind, the Boston Female Asylum catered to young girls who were orphaned and destitute. The asylum was a major advancement for both women and children. Over the years, the asylum evolved to include more care options, influencing the modern day foster care system. By the turn of the next century, the organization was offering counseling and placement services for young girls. In 1923, the organization merged with the Boston Children’s Aid Society, forming the Children’s Aid Association.

Portrait of Mrs. Hannah Stillman, founder of the Boston Female Asylum

The organization’s early years garnered a lot of attention and support from notable local figures such as Abigail Adams. The Boston Female Asylum Records collection within Healey Library encompasses vital historical documents such as minutes, face sheets, and various publications. Dating back to the early 1800s, the collection shows the evolution of the organization. The most notable documents are the yearly reports and by-laws, rules, and regulations publications, clearly noting changes and developments within the organization. The improvements are evident in the resources provided. The 1898 Bylaws, Rules, and Regulations publication highlights that,

Between the age of twelve and fourteen years the girls are sent to families, living usually in the country or small towns, chosen by the Managers from many applications; the intention being to give them opportunities for further schooling and training in housework, and to have them treated as members of said families, from whom they are to receive the sum of $50; $20 of it on reaching the age of seventeen and $30 at eighteen.

Cover of 1898 Boston Female Asylum By-laws, Rules, and Regulations

Interestingly, later publications, such as the 1852 Report for the fifty-second anniversary of the Boston Female Asylum has no mention of the girls being sent anywhere to work. The growth and progress of the institution is shown by this partnership with community members. Not only were people of the community supporting the Boston Female Asylum, but they were active members, fiscally and physically. By sending in donations and allowing girls to work in their home for a wage, the Boston Female Asylum not only provided safe housing and conditions for young girls but also gave them an opportunity to work and become independent when needed. Today, the effects of the work that was done at the Boston Female Asylum is not lost. Going through various mergers in its history, the organization is now known as The Home for Little Wanderers. The roots of the Home are not just with the Boston Female Asylum, but various other institutions such as Boston Children’s Services, the New England Home for Little Wanderers, Parents’ and Children’s Services, Charles River Health Management, and Wediko Children’s Services. Serving Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and New York, the Home provides community-based services for young people under the age of 26 who need emotional, social, educational, and physical support.

Cover of Report for the fifty-second anniversary of the Boston Female Asylum, 1852

References

Boston Female Asylum. Boston Female Asylum. Historical Account. By-laws, Rules and Regulations. Boston: Beacon Press, 1898. https://archive.org/details/bostonfemaleasyl00bost_3/mode/2up.

Boston Female Asylum. Report for the Fifty-Second Anniversary of the Boston Female Asylum. Boston: n.p., 1852. https://archive.org/details/bostonfemaleasyl00bost_3/mode/2up.

Boston Female Asylum records, SC-0003. University Archives and Special Collections, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston. Accessed July 11, 2025. https://archives.umb.edu/repositories/2/resources/197.

Davainis, Dava. “Boston Female Asylum: Records of Benevolence.” State Library of Massachusetts. December 16, 2019. https://mastatelibrary.blogspot.com/2019/12/boston-female-asylum-records-of.html.

The Home for Little Wanderers. “About Us.” Accessed June 27, 2025. https://www.thehome.org/about-us/our-history.

“Boston’s Little Syria” exhibition on display in Grossmann Gallery

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Author: Sabrina Valentino, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the Public History MA Program, UMass Boston

Boston’s Little Syria, an exhibition currently on view in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library, takes viewers on a journey through Boston’s little-known first Arab neighborhood. Located in what is now Chinatown and the South End, Little Syria became home to immigrants fleeing blight and violence in Ottoman-controlled Syria and Mount Lebanon. The exhibition will be open through May 31, 2024. 

The Boston’s Little Syria exhibition uses property maps, photographs, interviews, and memoirs of Syrian and Lebanese Americans who lived in this neighborhood to build a map of the creation and eventual migration of Little Syria, blending the history of the modern Middle East and Boston’s urban history. The items on display not only tell individual stories of the lives of immigrants, but also shed light on a rich cultural center in Boston that has been pushed aside and largely forgotten. 

In the 1880s, immigrants from Ottoman-controlled Greater Syria chose to leave their homes to escape war, famine, and the collapse of the silk industry, leading many to build new homes in Massachusetts. Starting in what is now Ping On Alley, the community grew and created a thriving life for themselves, reaching 40,000 people expanding south down Shawmut Avenue by the 1930s. However, despite the community’s growth and success, the residents of Little Syria faced hardships such as being denied citizenship status, and eventually began to relocate due to the Boston Redevelopment Authority uprooting urban blocks. 

Syrians sitting on a front step on Hudson Street, black and white photograph, photographer unknown, 1909. Courtesy of the Trustees of Boston Public Library.

The exhibition originated from a larger project that began with walking tours in 2022, and eventually grew to include an interactive digital map and a bilingual article published in the online journal Al-Jumhuriya as well as exhibitions at both MIT’s Rotch Library (2022-2023) and the Massachusetts Historical Society (2023). 

The exhibition is curated by Lydia Harrington and Chloe Bordewich. Lydia Harrington received her PhD in Art and Architectural History from Boston University in 2022 and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT in 2022-2023. She is currently the Senior Curator at The Syria Museum, which is one of the sponsors of this exhibition. Chloe Bordewich is a postdoctoral fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute and Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto and  received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 2022.

Boston’s Little Syria is sponsored by the Syrian American Council, the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library, and the University of Massachusetts Boston.

For additional information on Boston’s Little Syria, visit bostonlittlesyria.org.

The Grossmann Gallery is open during Healey Library hours.

University Archives and Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives and Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives and Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.

Black History Month: Massachusetts Hip-Hop, Lecco’s Lemma, and Dance Slam

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Author: Kayla Allen, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the History MA Program at UMass Boston

Happy Black History Month! Black History Month is celebrated during the month of February every year as a way of celebrating important people and events from across the African diaspora. Here at UMass Boston, we have many collections about the Black history of Boston and our campus. Over the course of the month, we will be highlighting some of these collections and stories.

Photograph of cassette tape with Lecco's Lemma written on it in marker

Cassette recording of Magnus Johnstone’s Lecco’s Lemma radio show from August 8, 1987

One of our most significant digital collections is the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive. This archive is mostly made up of digitized audiocassettes from the Magnus Johnstone and Willie Alexander: Lecco’s Lemma collection, though there are a number of materials currently being processed, including recordings, photographs, videos, and interviews. The first set of audiocassettes in the Lecco’s Lemma collection, originally held by Magnus Johnstone, was donated to us by UMass Boston professor Pacey Foster in 2015. The second set was donated by Willie Alexander in 2016. These audiocassettes feature mixtapes and recordings of the Lecco’s Lemma radio program, a show that ran from 1985-1988 first on MIT’s WMBR (88.1 FM) and later on Boston College’s WZBC (90.3 FM).

Image of the side of a cassette tape with writing in marker

Cassette recording of Magnus Johnstone’s Lecco’s Lemma radio show from March 8, 1986

Untitled 3 track recording by C.O.D. Crew, undated
Untitled recording by the Unique Force, undated

Lecco’s Lemma was hosted by Magnus Johnstone and featured music that wasn’t usually played by mainstream radio stations at the time. This included new, interesting, and undiscovered artists, rap music, and local groups. Johnstone would accept demos from Boston-area artists and play them on air. He would even ask these groups to play live performances on his show.

Introducing M.C. Keithy E. and the Gang-Starr Crew, 1986
Untitled recording by Keith E. and the Gangstarr Crew, 1986

Over the three years he taped, Johnstone collected about 300 mixtapes from local artists, which are now part of our collection. The rest of the audiocassettes in the collection are recordings of the actual Lecco’s Lemma shows, taped by Boston’s “Godfather of Punk,” Willie “Loco” Alexander, on his home boombox. These tapes include ephemera like j-cards, notes, photographs, and lists of artists and songs.

Untitled recording by Fun City Crew, undated
Untitled recording by Fun City Crew, undated

The online collection of the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive also includes a video recording of “Boston’s first black dance-music-video television show,” Dance Slam, from the Tony Rose and Yvonne Rose collection. We are currently building the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive and welcome donations from graffiti artists, producers, promoters, musicians, DJs, break-dancers, and fans so we can further document and preserve the vibrant hip-hop culture of our area. If you have original and unique materials related to hip-hop in Boston and Massachusetts that you think should become part of the Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive, you can contact one of our archivists by emailing library.archives@umb.edu.

To see more from our Massachusetts Hip-Hop Archive and listen to Johnstone’s and Alexander’s tapes, check out our digital collection. If you’d like to learn more about Magnus Johnstone, Willie Alexander, and Lecco’s Lemma, be sure to look at their collection’s finding aid.

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston was established in 1981 as a repository to collect archival material in subject areas of interest to the university, as well as the records of the university itself. The mission and history of UMass Boston guide the collection policies of University Archives & Special Collections, with the university’s urban mission and strong support of community service reflected in the records of and related to urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, war and social consequence, and local history related to neighboring communities. To learn more, visit blogs.umb.edu/archives.

Black History Month: Robert C. Hayden Oral History Collection

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Author: Maci Mark, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the Public History MA Program at UMass Boston

Happy Black History Month! Black History Month is celebrated during the month of February every year as a way of celebrating important people and events from across the African diaspora. Here at UMass Boston, we have many collections about the Black history of Boston and our campus. Over the course of the month, we will be highlighting some of these collections and stories.

Image of a white sheet of paper with typed text on it. It is a transcription of Robert C Hayden’s interview with Adolphus Bollock.

Transcript of an interview with Adolphus G. Bullock, circa 1988-1989

The Robert C. Hayden: Transcripts of Oral History Interviews with Boston African American Railroad Workers collection highlights some unique Boston history. This collection is made up of 27 oral histories that Robert C. Hayden conducted with retired Boston African American railroad workers. These oral histories show the livelihoods of these men and women who worked on the railroads, the opportunities the work gave them, and what their lives looked like in the 1920s/1930s as Black people in Boston.

In the 1920s/1930s Boston was an important destination for African Americans moving northward from the South. This move was part of the Great Migration and spanned from just after the Civil War all the way through the 1970s. Boston provided employment opportunities, one of them being working on the railroads. The railroad positions were good jobs at the time, as Adolphus Bollock, one of the interviewed railroad workers, discussed how they paid more than the Post Office.

These oral histories were originally conducted as research to support an exhibit being done by Robert C. Hayden and James Green for the Back Bay MBTA Station about A. Philip Randolph and Boston’s African-American Railroad Workers: A Public History Commemoration, Knights of the Rail. The interviews capture the lived experiences of Boston’s African American railroad workers that extend beyond just the railway.

Image of the “Knights of the Rail” exhibit program which depicts photos of railway workers, Phillip Pullman, and more overlaid over text.

A guide to “Knights of the Rail,” an exhibit about A. Philip Randolph and Boston’s African-American railroad workers, 1991

Robert C. Hayden (who recently passed away on January 23, 2022) was one of the most prominent scholars of his time, focusing on the history of Black Bostonians. He worked with UMass Boston professor James Green to develop a permanent exhibit for the Back Bay MBTA Station featuring the African American railroad workers who started the Pullman Union, the first Black union of its kind. These interviews were conducted by Hayden over a two-year time period. James Green was the Head of the History Department at UMass Boston and donated this collection to University Archives and Special Collections in 1992.

To read the transcripts of these oral histories the best place to start is with the finding aid, or you may search for the collection within our Oral History Collections. All the oral histories within the collection have been transcribed and are available as PDFs. 

For more information, please email library.archives@umb.edu.

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston was established in 1981 as a repository to collect archival material in subject areas of interest to the university, as well as the records of the university itself. The mission and history of UMass Boston guide the collection policies of University Archives & Special Collections, with the university’s urban mission and strong support of community service reflected in the records of and related to urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, war and social consequence, and local history related to neighboring communities. To learn more, visit blogs.umb.edu/archives.

In the Archives: A Peek Beneath Boston

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Black-and-white photo of workers standing inside Sumner Tunnel

“Shield in Final Position.” Here is the Sumner Tunnel tunneling shield in its final position after breaching the Boston Vent Shaft. Presumably, that means it was all set and ready to start digging under Boston Harbor. These men were standing at the back of the shield. You can see how the tunnel was constructed behind it as the shield moved on.

Author: Kayla Allen, Archives Assistant and graduate student in the History MA Program at UMass Boston

Our Sumner Tunnel collection consists of a fascinating set of photographs and papers. It doesn’t only offer us information about the Sumner Tunnel. It gives us a visual understanding of underground and submarine construction work. It shows us the economics and geography considered in the 1930s improvement of Haymarket Square. It lets us peek at the architecture of Boston at the beginning of the twentieth century. Many of these compelling photographs show us extant and extinct buildings, ranging in location from Haymarket Square up to Clark Street. Other photographs give evidence of the different kinds of supports that buildings and streets needed while the tunnel was being constructed beneath them. Still more show Boston’s streets with a bird’s eye view.

My favorite pieces of the collection show the construction of the tunnel and buildings related to its use. When I started writing this blog post, I had no clue how underwater tunnels were created. Through research, I learned that the Sumner Tunnel was created with something called a tunneling shield. This is a cylindrical piece of machinery inspired by a type of boring worm. Mechanical constructions push the large tube through dirt, soil, or sand and create a pathway. Workers mine the dirt that comes in from the holes in the flat shield at the front of the tube and place supporting structures in the tunnel behind the tube as it moves. Compressed air at the front of the tunneling shield helps to make sure that the tunnel doesn’t collapse (1). With our photograph collection, we get a strong idea of how this worked for the creation of the Sumner Tunnel. We’ve included some photographs of the Sumner tunneling shield at the end of this post.

I was also intrigued by the photographs of the construction of above-ground buildings. Our collection shows the origins of the Traffic Tunnel Administration Building at the very end of the tunnel (where they originally started digging) and the North End Sumner Tunnel Ventilation Building between Clark and Fleet Street. The photographs show the process of constructing the Administration Building and give us a peek at the tunnel’s exit. They also show the tunneling shield entering into a large rectangular concrete vent. After the shield moved on towards the Harbor, workers built a structure over that vent that pumps poisonous air out of the tunnel and fresh air in. This building is still in use today, and you can see it as you walk along North Street. 

Be sure to check out the collection and its finding aid. I’m sure that they will inspire you to learn a little bit more about our incredible city! If you’d like to learn more about the Sumner Tunnel as it is today and its upcoming centennial restoration project, click here.

“Administration Building – North St.” This is the completed Traffic Tunnel Administration Building! It looks almost exactly the same today as it did then. If you look to the left of the building, you can see the portal to the Sumner Tunnel under the North Bennet Street School.
“Administration Building at Tunnel Portal North St.” This photograph is a close-up of the side of the Admin Building and the exit of the Sumner Tunnel. At the time this picture was taken, the tunneling shield would have been well on its way toward Boston Harbor, if not already beneath it.
“Shield at Boston Vent Shaft (July 20).” This photograph is of the interior of the Boston Vent Shaft before it became the North End Sumner Tunnel Ventilation Building. The tunneling shield had just breached the vent the day before. From here, workers would clean out all of the dirt and then set up the shield again for its long journey under Boston Harbor.
“Shield at Boston Vent Shaft (July 19).” In this photograph, you can see the front of the tunneling shield as it first came into the Boston Vent Shaft. The shield pushed all of this dirt into the shaft as it moved. The workers poked out at the top of the pile of dirt. They must have been happy to see the light at the end of their long tunnel and get some fresh air!
“Gen. View at Boston Vent Shaft.” This is an above-ground shot of the Boston Vent Shaft that we just peeked into. Construction workers used it as the foundation for the later North End Sumner Tunnel Ventilation Building.
“330 North St. – braced.” This photograph shows 330 North St. This building was and is right next to the vent shaft, now the North End Sumner Tunnel Ventilation Building. You can see how workers braced the building with wood to keep it structurally sound while the tunneling shield moved beneath it.

All images shared here are courtesy of the University Archives and Special Collections Department, Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston: Sumner Tunnel (Boston): construction photographs.

References

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Tunneling shield.” Encyclopedia Britannica, May 11, 2011. https://www.britannica.com/technology/tunneling-shield.