"A Constant Incentive to Patriotic Citizenship": Historic Preservation in Progressive-Era Massachusetts

Abstract

IN 1905 drive to preserve Paul Revere's house set the framework for the founding of New England's foremost historic preservation agency, the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA). Many rallied to the cause, including architects and antiquarians who valued Boston's last example of seventeenth-century construction and patriotic groups, like the Sons of the Revolution, who defended tradition and the civil religion. William Sumner Appleton, Jr. (1875-1947), who would later organize SPNEA in 1910, called on the civic-minded to make the Revere home memorial that would become a constant incentive to patriotic citizenship.' On all counts, the situation was dire for tradition-minded Bostonians. The Revere house, along with other cherished symbols of the Puritan-Yankee past, like the Old North Church and Copp's Hill cemetery, was located in the city's North End. With population density rivaling Calcutta's, the North End held tightly packed, multi-storied lodging houses that adjoined Boston's historic treasures. Samuel Adams Drake, popular antiquarian, voiced the Yankees' disdain for the neighborhood's new residents. Pure air is indeed luxury, he claimed.