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Boston Women's Heritage Trail
D7: Dress Reform Parlors
and Milliners

Hamilton Place
The short streets running between Tremont and Washington streets - including Hamilton Place, Winter Street, and Temple Place - contained shops for women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many women were successful proprietors of dressmaking and millinery shops, including Irish-born Ellen Hartnett, who rose from being a millinery worker in 1860 to a shop owner with capital 25 years later. In order to secure the best class of customers, some dressmakers, like Josephine McCluskey, took on new names - she became "Miss Delavenue." The area also supported Dress Reform Parlors in the 1880s, where women could be freed from the restrictive fashions of the day. They could purchase or buy patterns for such items as the "emancipation waist."
"If we ask ourselves Why is the subject of dress of such consequence? I think the answer will follow, Because a comparatively unimportant and external thing has come to stand as of the very first importance to the great majority of women ... It was ... painful to hear a devout woman, of years and wide experience say, 'I believe that the majority of women, if entering heaven to-day, would ask, not 'Where is my Lord?' but 'What do they wear there?'" -- Abby May

D8: Abiah Franklin and "Mother Goose"
Granary Burying Ground
Abiah Franklin (1667-1752), mother of Benjamin Franklin, was honored by her famous son when he erected the central high granite obelisk in memory of his parents. She raised 13 children, including Benjamin and Jane Franklin Mecom (see D20) and was called "a discreet and virtuous woman." Tradition states that Elizabeth Foster Vergoose, known as "Mother Goose," is buried here. Widowed, she lived with her eldest daughter and entertained her grandchildren with nursery rhymes. Her son-in-law, printer Thomas Fleet, reportedly published them as Songs for the Nursery or Mother Goose's Melodies.

D9: Edmonia Lewis Studio

Corner of Bromfield and Tremont Streets
(now Suffolk University Law School)

Edmonia Lewis photoThe studio of Edmonia Lewis (1845-c.1909), a member of the colony of women sculptors in Rome gathering around Charlotte Cushman in the mid-19th century (see N7), was located in a former building at this site from 1863-1865. As a child, Lewis, who had both African American and Chippewa ancestry, lived with her Chippewa mother's people. Although she was born free, her favorite subject for her sculpture was freedom from slavery, demonstrated in Forever Free, a sculpture depicting a man and woman breaking their chains, made as a tribute to abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. It is now on display at the Howard University Gallery of Art. Her most popular work was a bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white commander of the African American 54th Massachusetts Infantry during the Civil War. Lewis's identification with her Chippewa heritage caused her also to revere and create a bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of the poem, Hiawatha. The sculpture is now owned by the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.


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