Massachusetts

Cotting School details the interesting history of this national leader in serving children with a broad spectrum of disabilities.

In 1893, two pioneering orthopedic surgeons, Dr. Augustus Thorndike and Dr. Edward Bradford, saw the need to educate children whose physical challenges prevented them from attending school. As an experiment, they founded the Industrial School for Crippled and Deformed Children in Boston. Modeled after 19th-century European institutions, the school was America's first for children with physical disabilities. Early classes were held in a church basement where Mary Perry volunteered to teach seven students. Tuition, a hot meal, and transportation in a horse-drawn carriage were free. Thanks to the leadership of the two doctors and board chairman Francis Joy Cotting, within 10 years the school was housed in an impressive, debt-free brick building. Renamed the Cotting School, the school is now located in Lexington and serves 130 day students from 74 communities. Staffed with highly skilled special education teachers; nurses; physical, occupational, and communication therapists; and dental and vision specialists, Cotting is a national leader in serving children with a broad spectrum of learning and communication disabilities, physical challenges, and complex medical conditions.

Lake Boon is a beautiful 65-acre lake located west of Boston. Beginning in the 1920s, its accessibility from Boston and western suburbs via two railroads made it a popular vacation spot. Attracted by its natural beauty, a lively and decorous summer community grew and returned year after year to enjoy boating, bathing, fishing, and many other activities. Photographers were also attracted to the lake, and many of their images became postcards used by the lake residents and visitors to send to friends and relatives. Through vintage postcards, Lake Boon is a visual journey around the lake as it looked in the early 1900s.

Lincoln was founded in 1754, when colonists in Concord and parts of Lexington and Weston joined together to form a new town. Judge Chambers Russell, Concord's representative to the General Court, christened the town Lincoln after his beloved family home of Lincolnshire, England. Shown in this pictorial of more than two hundred never-before-published photographs culled from historic archives and family collections, Lincoln evolves from its early days as a thriving agricultural community, through gentrification into country estates owned by wealthy Bostonians, to its present status as a pioneer in open-space preservation and conservation. Lincoln is a treasure trove for longtime residents and visitors alike who want to experience a New England town restore, recycle, and reinvent itself.

From the 1890s through the 1920s, the postcard was an extraordinarily popular means of communication, and many of the postcards produced during this "golden age" can today be considered works of art. Postcard photographers traveled the length and breadth of the nation snapping photographs of busy street scenes, documenting local landmarks, and assembling crowds of local children only too happy to pose for a picture. These images, printed as postcards and sold in stores across the country, survive as telling reminders of an important era in America's history. This fascinating new history of Lynn, Massachusetts, showcases more than two hundred of the best vintage postcards available. Drawn largely from the extensive archives of the Lynn Historical Society, the images in this informative volume take the reader on a tour of Lynn's beaches and parks, streets and squares, churches and schools, even into the sky for some intriguing bird's eye views, giving a glimpse of everything an earlier generation loved about Lynn.

Pirates? A disappearing island? A brand-new technology that would change the world? It isn't science-fiction, this is the history of Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and its neighbor, Billingsgate Island.

Originally settled by Europeans in the 1650s as Billingsgate, Wellfleet became a town with an important, if overlooked history, located between the "tip'? and the "elbow'? of Cape Cod. Today, the town may be famous for its oysters, but there is so much more to this small town than what may be immediately apparent. In 1717, the pirate "Black Sam'? Bellamy was sailing his ship nearby when it crashed, sending 4 tons of gold and silver, as well as 143 men, to a watery grave-- the shipwreck was discovered in 1984, the first of only two confirmed pirate shipwrecks ever recovered. By the time of the American Revolution, Wellfleet was well-known not just for their oysters, but their success in the whaling industry. As whaling declined in the late 19th century, it wasn't long before the spotlight once again shone on Wellfleet with Guglielmo Marconi built America's first transatlantic radio transmitter on the coastal bluff of South Wellfleet. Perhaps the most interesting story about Wellfleet isn't about Wellfleet at all, but Billingsgate Island. Generations lived there and built homes, wharves, a school, a lighthouse, and even founded a baseball team. By 1922, the sea swallowed this Wellfleet island, leaving nothing but a brick-strewn shoal, visible only at low tide. Sometimes called the "Atlantis of Cape Cod,'? locals can still access the island by boat on the occasions the tide leaves the land exposed, a perfect spot for picnics or shellfishing.

The Marion Art Center was founded in 1957 by a group of amateur actors and members of St. Gabriel's Episcopal Church in Marion. The minister, John Albert, was very interested in the theater, and he organized and directed several plays put on by young members of his church who called themselves the Hornblowers. The group performed multiple plays as fundraisers for the church before they began renting the Universalist church in Marion in 1957. Today the art center owns the church building and continues, among other things, to produce plays and sponsor art exhibits in its Cecil Clark Davis Gallery. Marion Art Center documents the rich history of the center that became an active and vital part of the community.

The storied history of Harvard University football can be traced back to the very roots of the collegiate game in America. Harvard's athletic contest with McGill University in 1874 marked the inception of the modern game for the Crimson. The club from Cambridge then went on to become one of the dominant football programs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, winning seven national championships between 1890 and 1919, culminating with its Rose Bowl victory over Oregon in January 1920. Since 1956, the team has been a
perennial contender in the Ivy League. Images of Sports: Harvard Football captures all the drama and excitement of the pioneering football program's legacy. Included are the exploits of Charlie Brickley in the 1910s and Barry Wood in the 1930s; the school's first Ivy League title in 1961 and the 29-29 "victory" over Yale in the most famous of all one hundred eighteen riveting match-ups. The captivating images included in Harvard Football detail these accounts up to the Crimson's 2001 run to perfection, a 9-0-0 record, marking the first undefeated, untied season in eighty-eight years.

Originally part of Springfield's outward commons, Hampden was called Wilbraham and then South Wilbraham until it was incorporated as Hampden in 1878. Its main street parallels the peaceful Scantic River, surrounded by mountains that lend a sense of mystery to this lovely New England village. By harnessing the Scantic's energy, this farming community became a booming mill town in the 1800s. When plans to build a railroad for transporting products from mills and quarries failed, industry collapsed. The town reverted back to farming and later became a bedroom community.

Hampden brings readers back to the days when world-renowned Thornton W. Burgess wrote his Peter Rabbit books beside Laughing Brook and when Maude Tait, pioneer aviatrix whose speed record beat Amelia Earhart's, taught school in Hampden. The book tells the exciting stories of the people and places that formed the town, such as the early workers, businessmen, preachers, and teachers. Included in Hampden are early photographs of parades and plays, picnics and personalities, and the way of life before the advent of modern transportation, communication, and manner of business.