The Simpson Boarding House, 1901–1909: Reflecting the Roosevelt Largesse

Abstract

In his message of September 8, 1908, to C. F. Weller, Secretary, President's Homes Commission, President Theodore Roosevelt stated, In a democracy like ours, it is an ill thing for all of us, if any of us suffer from unwholesome surroundings or from lack of opportunity for good home life, good citizenship and useful industry. (Hart 234) And at Pacific Theological Seminary, spring 1911, he stated, Nothing else takes place or can take place of family life, and family life cannot be really happy unless it is based on duty, based on recognition of great underlying laws of religion and morality, of great underlying laws of civilization, laws which if broken mean dissolution of civilization. (173) President Roosevelt's concern over conditions of housing and confirmation of family life was well founded in burgeoning cities of his time, bursting with new arrivals of people from afar and people from farms. boarding house was both praised for its provision of reputable accommodations in a homelike environment and blamed for its allowance of erosion in unsupervised settings. upsurge of preference for lodging, rather than boarding, had begun by turn of twentieth century. In his article, On Margins: Lodgers and Boarders in Boston, 1860-1900, Mark Peel quotes from sociologist Albert B. Wolfe's Lodging House Problem in Boston that late nineteenth-century lodger desired freedom and a bohemian existence. But, Peel maintains, Boarding continued to provide a familial setting for genteel American sociability. Lodging demanded a different relationship between housekeepers and tenants, one with fewer obligations and less interaction beyond paying of rent. (823) Albert Wolfe expands this concept in his 1907 article, The Problem of Roomer: boarder sleeps and eats in same house; roomer takes his meals at a restaurant...the probabilities are that rooming house is everywhere displacing old-time boarding house.... Moreover, lax as were boarding house conventionalities, they afforded far more restraints than can be found in rooming house. A boarding house without a public parlor would be an anomaly, while a rooming house with one is a rarity. Wolfe laments departure from boarding house effecting the isolation of individual in great middle, work-a-day class that fills rooming houses-an isolation which constitutes a very real social problem (959). So grave was awareness of this change of preference that by 1909, Lodging House of Boston offered seven proposals for remedies to ameliorate conditions of moral evil spawned by rise of rooming houses and lodging houses (Boston's Lodging House Commission 738). In her book, Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House Cookbook, Pat Mitchamore asks question again in 1994, What was a boarding house? Generally, a large house with room to spare, a home to many. First, however, it served as home to persons or family that ran establishment. Second, it was a source of income.... What did a boarding house provide? In addition to room and board, those who sought shelter in a boarding house were also looking for creature comforts of home. Traveling businessmen, salesmen, railroad or road workers, vaudeville troupes, bachelors, old maids, and single schoolteachers all needed lodging-and more. Boarding house owners did more than change sheets and cook meals-they provided an extended family. Because all ages of people took room and board, environment was much like that of a large family sharing one house. Besides companionship, it afforded security in new surroundings, and it provided a bountiful table with a variety of foods that one person could not achieve. (7) Bobo boarding house, in Lynchburg, Tennessee, was opened in 1908 and charged $13.50 per month with two to a room and no private bath (116). …