Wesson's Home Becomes a Hospital

 

The home in the foreground of this postcard belonged to inventor and firearms designer Daniel Baird Wesson of Springfield, Massachusetts.  With Horace Smith, Mr. Wesson formed both the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and Smith & Wesson firearms manufacturing companies.  

The house at 132 High Street, Springfield, was donated by Mr. Wesson in 1906, in memory of his late wife, to become the Hampden Homeopathic Hospital.  It became Wesson Memorial Hospital later that year when Wesson himself passed on.  It was a 30-bed facility, but Wesson Hospital enlarged with a further endowment from his estate to build a new 100-bed unit at 140 High Street, as well as a new 25-bed maternity hospital in 1908.

The old Wesson home that served as the original Wesson Memorial Hospital no longer stands, and what became Wesson Women's eventually merged with Springfield Hospital and became Baystate Medical Center.

The penny-postcard was published by George S. Graves of Springfield, Mass.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts - A Northern Factory Town's Perspective on the Civil War;   Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts;   States of Mind: New England; as well as books on classic films and several novels. Her latest book is Christmas in Classic Films. TO JOIN HER READERS' GROUP - follow this link for a free book as a thank-you for joining.

Pecousic Villa - Springfield, Massachusetts

The home of inventor and industrialist Everett Hosmer Barney (1835-1916) - probably most famous for two things: inventing the clamp-on ice skate, and for the donation of 178 acres of his extensive estate to be added to Forest Park in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts.

This Victorian mansion was built in 1890 and had a commanding view of the Connecticut River Valley.  It was called Pecousic Villa.  It was razed during the construction of I-91.  The carriage house, now a restaurant and banquet hall, and the family mausoleum, remain.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Comedy and Tragedy on the Mountain: 70 Years of Summer Theatre on Mt. Tom, Holyoke, Massachusetts; States of Mind: New England (collected essays from this blog); The Ames Manufacturing Company of Chicopee, Massachusetts; and Beside the Still Waters - a novel on the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir.

 

Gee Bee Christmas Ornament

This Christmas, Hallmark offers a new ornament for aviation buffs and fans of New England history.  Here is the new addition to the Skys the Limit series of ornaments, the Gee Bee Super 1931 Sportster Model Z.

Aircraft pioneers the Granville Brothers established their fledging aircraft factory in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1929, turning an old farmer's field into a ramshackle airport near Liberty Street and St. James Avenue.  Here they designed, built, and tested their remarkable planes, which broke speed records.

We'll have more on the Granville Brothers and their Gee Bee planes later on in the New Year, but for now, this flashy little tree ornament is a splendid souvenir of days gone by.  It measures 3 and 3/8 inches wide wingspan, 2 inches long, and 1 inch high.  It is a replica of the "City of Springfield" plane, the city's pride and namesake.

Have a look here at Hallmark's website for more information. 

For a little more background on the Gee Bee, in a different way of telling it, here's my one-act play on the Granville Brothers and their airplane factory written as part of a project to educate Springfield school children on their city's history.  It's called Soaring in the City of Springfield.

Breck's Shampoo

(A World War I-era advertisement in a Springfield, Mass. theater program.)

An earlier version of the following post was previously published in History Magazine (July 2006).

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There was a time when a Massachusetts firefighter learned firsthand the axiom, “necessity is the mother of invention”. It served John H. Breck well, though not in the manner he intended, when he developed his Breck Shampoo.

Born in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 1877, Breck was only 14 years old when he started work in one of Holyoke's factories. When he was about 19, Breck's family moved across the Connecticut River to Chicopee, where he joined the fire department. At the age of 21, he was reported to have been the youngest fire captain in the country.

It was about this time that Breck began studying chemistry in his off hours under an Amherst professor, which led to Breck developing a formula for shampoo. He was really searching for a scalp treatment for himself. Still in his 20s, Breck was going bald.

The first commercial shampoos had been developed some 10 to 15 years earlier in Europe, but they had not gained much popularity in North America. Washing hair, when it was done at all, was usually accomplished with a bar of gray-colored soap. This soap was obtained from the wandering neighborhood soap-and-bone man. This fellow went door to door for bones, to which the women of the neighborhood responded with their saved meat bones to trade for hunks of soap, which was produced by local rendering companies. The animal fat was treated with an alkali, and presto, gray soap. Some people, especially in rural communities, continued to make their own soap at home.

The soap was used on dishes, the floors, the dog, and humans, including their hair. Breck blamed in this soap for his hair loss.

In 1908, John H. Breck decided to give up firefighting, and opened an office in Springfield, Massachusetts. As a “hair specialist”, he began with three employees, and by 1920, local hairdressers began using his preparations in their salons.

When Breck's pH-balanced liquid soap shampoo was marketed, it was one of the very first in the US, and it revolutionized the cosmetics industry. By 1929, the company was incorporated as John H. Breck, Inc. The business grew rapidly in the 1940s and 1950s as hair care products became a major industry, and went on to gross millions of dollars in more than 70 countries.

Breck still went bald, though. One presumes that his success made him rich enough not to mind.

Remember the "Breck Girls"? Know any? Let us know.

For more on the Breck Girls Collection of artwork at the Smithsonian Institution, see this website.

Mary Had a Little Lamb - Edison's Greatest Hits

Last month two men were charged with setting a series of fires, including destroying by fire the birthplace of Mary Elizabeth Sawyer in the Massachusetts town of Sterling.

The house had been vacant, and most people have not ever heard of Mary Elizabeth Sawyer anyway, including probably these two alleged arsonists. But, any claim to fame is still a claim to fame, and you never know what’s going to make you famous in the sweeping eyes of history. Another lady named Sarah Josepha Hale, responsible for, among many contributions to 19th Century America, editing the venerable magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, published a poem in 1830 about Mary Elizabeth Sawyer. It went like this:

Mary had a little lamb.
Its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go.

You may have learned every verse in the old nursery rhyme as a child, but the claim to fame for Mary, who reportedly in real life did bring a lamb to school one day, causing a bit of a ruckus, is that this poem was the first ever sound recording made. When testing his new phonograph in 1877, inventor Thomas Edison recited the poem into his machine, which was etched into a tinfoil cylinder.

In August of 1927, to celebrate 50 years of the phonograph, Edison re-enacted this moment for the Fox Movietone newsreel cameras, and recited the poem, recording it again.

It may have not made the top of the charts, but then, maybe it did. There wasn’t a whole lot else you could download onto your MP3 in 1877.