Melrose Historical Commission

We are so excited to announce a new annual award established to recognize an individual who has demonstrated a commitment to the celebration and preservation of Melrose history. The city’s inaugural Mary Stetson Clarke Historical Recognition Award was given to local historian Scott Macaulay, owner and curator of an enormous collection of Melrose history, which includes artifacts, maps, books, photographs, and other ephemera.

Macaulay, a well-known resident in the city, is widely respected beyond his 102 Tremont Street House of Vacuum Cleaners repair company. To all who are interested, Macaulay freely shares his vast and extensive knowledge of Melrose history. His passion and commitment to preserving Melrose history started while he served on the Melrose Historical Society in 1976 as an eager teenage student.

MHC member Shane Egan said, “Honoring such an incredibly committed historian and researcher in this way is an important step in preserving and sharing the city’s rich and remarkable history. Much of the work Scott does to celebrate our incredible history can be traced directly back to the work begun by Mary Stetson Clarke.”

Macaulay is also MHC’s point person for any historical questions received from curious minds that they may be unable to answer. Macaulay always enjoys answering these inquiries because of his genuine interest in helping other Melrosians.

Today, his property houses several historic building replicas that Macaulay built himself to create a unique “Melrose Museum,” where he displays his vast collection of artifacts. Melrose residents are always encouraged and welcome to visit Macaulay’s museum during regular business hours. During their visit, Melrose residents are offered the opportunity to research the history of their own homes using his vast collection of maps and books. As a further example of his selflessness, Macaulay also gives back by generously providing Thanksgiving meals to locals seeking community on the holiday.

MHC created this award to establish and encourage standards of excellence in the collection, preservation, and interpretation of local history to make the past more meaningful and accessible to all people.

This past weekend, the Melrose Historical Commission hosted a very special RESEARCH YOUR HOME NIGHT at the Mt. Hood Clubhouse. 75 incredibly patient attendees had been on a waitlist for this popular annual event for over a YEAR, and this evening was created especially for them in gratitude for their patience.

Interested in learning more about your property’s history? Shoot us a message and we’ll keep your name on file for our next research event, which will be scheduled soon!

As always, we are so grateful for our local historians who generously donate their time and resources to help our community explore their roots, specifically Scott Macaulay and MPL’s Local History Librarian Shelley O’Brien. ♥️

Come visit us at the Victorian Fair today! We’re right in front of Anytime Fitness… we have an architectural scavenger hunt, marshmallows to treat you with, and a great new community program to tell you all about!

Be sure to come visit us at our booth by Giacomo’s this Sunday, rain or shine! We will have a scavenger hunt (with a prize raffle for all completed entries!), some treats for your little ones, and news to share about a community project we have been working on for the past year!

Can’t wait to see you and celebrate everything past and present that has made Melrose such a wonderful place to live.

In addition to helping us out here at the Historical Commission with research while also operating the House of Vacuum Cleaners on Tremont St, Scott Macaulay is also known for his kindness and generosity.

Here he is featured in a Melrose Observer article back in 1989! He continues to provide a free Thanksgiving dinner for anyone who wants it year after year. We are grateful this year and every year for his support of not only our Commission’s mission, but also his unwavering support for our community.

Scott, you are an incredible citizen of Melrose!

Check out our local headline news from Melrose Weekly News! Take a read and learn a little bit about our town's origins and our Commission's mission.

MHC celebrates 50 years with vintage posters | Local Headline News MHC celebrates 50 years with vintage posters Posted by jkeating624 | Nov 17, 2023 | Front Page, Local Headline News, Melrose News, Melrose Weekly News, MWN Featured | 0 | THIS BLACK AND WHITE PHOTO shows the Stearns & Hill drug store. (Courtesy Photo)   By GAIL LOWE MELROSE—In celebration of its ...

Happy 50th Anniversary to us! To celebrate, we’ve partnered with over 30 businesses throughout the city to display photos in their front windows of how their business has looked over the past several decades. Here’s just a few examples that can be spotted throughout the city. Can you find all all 34 of them?

PICS 1 & 2: Whittemore’s Hardware circa 1950s, which now houses town-favorite Buckalew's General Store

PICS 3 & 4: Melrose Theatre on March 23rd, 1947 and today, which is now Eastern Bank

PICS 5 & 6: Knights of Columbus in the 1960s and today

PICS 7 & 8: Golden Gate Restaurant on March 7th, 1974, which is now home to Ana Donohue Interiors

PICS 9 & 10: Stearns & Hill Drugstore circa 1950s, which now homes Rising Eagle Publick House

50 years ago, the Melrose Historical Commission was born! To celebrate, we’ve partnered with over 30 businesses throughout the city to display photos in their front windows of how their business has looked over the past several decades. Here’s just a few examples that can be spotted throughout the city. Can you find all all 34 of them?

PICS 1 & 2: Melrose Donut Shop (circa early 1970s), which is now Mexico Lindo, Melrose, MA

PICS 3 & 4: Main Street circa 1940s, which now houses Waggery on Main and Hugo's Melrose Appliance

PICS 5 & 6: CVS on October 13th, 1975 and today

PICS 7 & 8: The Ahern Building in April, 1975, which is now the station for MMTV - Melrose Massachusetts Television

PICS 9 & 10: Melrose House of Pizza on October 14th, 1974 and today, which is still Melrose House of Pizza, as well as Get In Shape For Women - Melrose and Melrose Pampered Nails & Spa

How many of our 50th Anniversary Photos did you spot in store windows around Main Street at yesterday’s trick-or-treat event? We’ve partnered with over 30 businesses throughout the city to display photos in their front windows of how their business has looked over the past several decades. Here’s just a few examples that can be spotted throughout the city. Can you find all all 34 of them?

PICS 1 & 2: Corner of W. Foster & Main Streets (circa 1940s) and today, which is now Lilah-Rose (photo sponsored by Lilah-Rose)

PICS 3 & 4: Essex Street (pictured here on March 3rd, 1948), which now houses The Pristine Pet and Jackson Cleaners

PICS 5 & 6: Corner of Upham & Main Streets (circa 1940s), which looks very different today as Affairs To Remember (photo sponsored by Affairs to Remember)

PICS 7 & 8: Essex Street (pictured on May 11th, 1975), which now houses Wood and Fire Neapolitan Pizzeria 35 Essex Street, Melrose

PICS 9 & 10: Smith Brothers Garage (pictured here on March 23rd, 1947), now home to Halo Studio(photo sponsored by Halo Studio)

Check out our interview on MMTV - Melrose Massachusetts Television’s feature Let's Talk Melrose, Melrose, where Commission members Shane Egan and Tom Champoux discuss our 50th anniversary photo project!!!

More then-and-now photos to help celebrate our 50th anniversary as a Commission! We’ve partnered with over 30 businesses throughout the city to display photos in their front windows of how their business has looked over the past several decades. Here’s just a few examples that can be spotted throughout the city. Can you find all all 34 of them?

PICS 1 & 2: Stop & Shop once held a much smaller footprint on Main St (pictured here February 2nd, 1947), which now houses Anytime Fitness and the sorely missed former Bitty & Beau’s coffee shop

PICS 3 & 4: Tower’s Plaza (circa 1970s) and today, which now features Whole Foods, CVS, Liberty Bell Roast Beef and Seafood, and Kennedys ice cream bar (photo sponsored by Kennedy’s Ice Cream Bar)

PICS 5 & 6: Flax Block (pictured here on November 10th, 1946), which now houses multiple businesses such as Petrone's Pizza, Anna's Nails Melrose, Red Rose Chinese Food, Klippings Salon, CAI Lash•brow, Barbers Den, and Twelfth House Studio. (photo sponsored by The Barber’s Den)

PICS 7 & 8: Melrose Hardware (pictured here on February 26th, 1974), now home to The Kitchen (photo sponsored by The Kitchen)

PICS 9 & 10: The Lamplighter block (circa early 1970s), which now houses Main Street Massage, Colette Bakery, and Melrose Nails Salon (photo sponsored by Colette Bakery)

Did you know that the Melrose Historical Commission was founded 50 years ago this October? To celebrate, we’ve partnered with over 30 businesses throughout the city to display photos in their front windows of how their business has looked over the past several decades. Some photos even date back to the 1890s! Here’s just a few examples that can be spotted throughout the city. Can you find all all 34 of them?

PICS 2-4: The YMCA circa 1890s and today (sponsored by YMCA of Metro North)

PICS 5-7: Perella Jewlers, March 22nd, 1946 and today (sponsored by Perella Jewelers)

PICS 8-10: Lisa’s Family Pizzeria, February 15th, 1971 and today

Meet us at the Center Stage this weekend (Sunday 9/10 @ 2pm-ish) to hear all about who we are and why we do what we do!

Today we’re resharing a post from last year:

Each Thanksgiving morning, Boston news channels spend a few moments broadcasting images from Plymouth of the solemn procession of Native American groups marking the Day of Mourning. These images provoke reactions ranging from sympathy to hostility. What exactly is going on here, and how does it relate to the history of Melrose?

We might begin, not in 1620, but in 1738. In that year, a teenager named Jonathan Green who farmed his family’s lands straddling the North Malden-Stoneham border wrote in his diary:

October 18 began to garther corn
13 Ended husken
26 made sider
November 23 thanksgiving day
25 Raised our corn houses at ye south end of ye old shop

This is the first record of Thanksgiving on Melrose territory, and it was on the fourth Thursday of November. This harvest celebration was one of two types of “Thanksgiving” that young Green would have known. A “Thanksgiving” might also be declared by the town or the colony to honor an event of good fortune, as when on August 27, 1743 Green wrote “Thanksgiving day at Malden on ye account of ye departure of ye worms yt eat ye grass.”

When President Lincoln declared a permanent, federal Thanksgiving holiday in 1863, he combined these two senses. This Thanksgiving would mark the end of the harvest, and would also give thanks for the victory at Gettysburg, the turning point in the war to end slavery.

Neither of these senses had anything to do with the Pilgrims, because that narrative was in its infancy. In 1893, Melrose Mayor Levi Gould, reflecting on the deeds by which the Massachusett people had signed over the land that became Melrose, wrote “It was a gracious act to pay…. this miserable pittance for this enormous territory, when we consider that our Puritan fathers generally laid their hands on whatever they pleased and took it anyhow, right or wrong. Is it to be wondered that [the Native man] resisted the advance of the white man, step by step, until driven from his hunting-ground to perish by starvation, disease, or the sword?”

Those who march in the Day of Mourning honor the suffering and celebrate the continuing resistance of Native people that Levi Gould wrote about over a century ago. In between Gould’s time and ours, a Thanksgiving mythology was invented that obscured both the true origins of the holiday and the violence done to Native peoples by the early settlers.

But it is possible to celebrate Thanksgiving without that baggage. You can talk to your families about boys and girls like Jonathan Green harvesting the corn in early Melrose, about Melrose soldiers who fought at Gettysburg, and of how more recent traditions make this a day of mourning for the indigenous community. And you can listen to Native voices, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrXXA2SaiAs

By 1907, textbook publisher Frank Sherman had been living in Melrose with his wife Grace for five years, had paid his taxes to the city, had enrolled four of his six young sons in the Melrose schools, and felt committed enough to his new home to run for ward one alderman. He won his race and was ready to be seated when a disqualifying discrepancy emerged: he did not actually live in Melrose.

The official state survey of Sherman’s property at 34 Renwick Road had placed it south of the Melrose-Wakefield border. Following the election, Mayor Eugene Moore had ordered the city to conduct a new survey of the border, which found that Sherman’s house lay 30 feet to the north. Sherman appealed his case to the state legislature, which ordered yet another survey. It confirmed the city’s findings. Sherman then appealed to the town meeting of Wakefield to allow his property to be annexed by Melrose, but they unanimously declined.

Sherman, who had been attending aldermanic meetings for three months while the case was adjudicated, reluctantly relinquished his seat but stubbornly vowed to fight on in the only way that he could, by selling his house and moving into Melrose. By 1909 he had moved to 11 Warwick Road, where he once again ran for ward one alderman and won. Over the next thirty years, Sherman would move four more times to new houses in Melrose, run successfully for school committee, and serve as the chairman of the board of assessors.

His six sons inherited their father’s fighting disposition, dedication to service, and willingness to move, as they each enlisted in branches of the US military, all serving as officers as World War II began. The most distinguished of these would be Frank’s second son, Forrest Percival Sherman.

Forrest graduated from Melrose High School in 1913, attended MIT for a year, and then transferred to the Naval Academy where he graduated second in his class. After service in World War I, he spent twenty years in the US Navy in a diverse array of roles, serving on ships of various classes, training as an aviator, and teaching at the Naval Academy. In 1941 he served in the office of the Chief of Naval Operations and was one of the architects of the US military preparation plan for the probable outbreak of war in the Pacific.

On September 15, 1942, Sherman was captain of the aircraft carrier USS Wasp when it was sunk by J*panese torpedoes. Thanks to his coolheaded command and deft maneuvering of the sinking vessel, he saved the lives of over 150 US servicemen, for which he was awarded the Navy Cross.

Sherman was promoted to Deputy Chief of Staff to Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and was with him when the J*panese surrendered in September of 1945. Just a few months before, he had been informed that his father had died in Melrose, but duty had compelled him to remain at the front.

Following the war, Sherman was promoted to the rank of Admiral, serving as Chief of Naval Operations. He died unexpectedly in 1951 at the age of 54 following a heart attack. His memorial service was celebrated at Memorial Hall.

Forrest P. Sherman’s fight for his country, along with that of his five brothers, is a proud legacy of military service for the city of Melrose. Yet it would not be Melrose’s story to tell were it not for their father Frank’s determined fight to serve the city he loved back in 1907.

On the day after Christmas in 1907, a child passing by a pigsty on Swains Pond Avenue heard a plaintive cry. Following the sound, she found the nearly frozen body of Charles F. Powell, a British poet who had once performed for royalty, now dying among the swine. Rescued and brought to Melrose Hospital, he died a few hours later. His improbable life story, printed in the Boston newspapers over the next several days, read like something out of Greek tragedy. If there is a restless spirit wandering the woods of Melrose, it might well be his.

Most accounts agree that Powell had been living in a hut in the Melrose woods near Swains Pond for at least a year or two before he died. According to the Boston Globe, in April of 1902 he had been arrested for assaulting a woman who had wandered too close to his hut on Mt. Ephraim, the high point of Pine Banks Park, suggesting that his stay in Melrose may have begun at an earlier date. The accounts say that he had a dreadful appearance from long exposure to the elements, but that he got along well with some residents living near Swains Pond, particularly the Beckford family. Following his death, it was the Beckfords who provided many of the details of his life.

Powell said that he had been born in 1850 in Plymouth, England to a prosperous perfumer. As a child he was sent to study at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he sang in the choir while the future King Edward VII was a student there. He later graduated from a university in Germany.

It was when he returned from Germany that his troubles began. His mother had died, and his father had married a new wife whom he loathed. Quarreling with his father, Powell struck him down. Filled with shame and self-loathing, he boarded a ship for America and vowed to wander the earth. Over the years he spent time in Montreal, Toronto, and Maine, eventually making his way to Melrose, where he decided to serve a self-imposed penance for his sins by living a solitary life in the woods, a lifestyle that killed him.

It was a fantastic story, but was it all true? Thanks to searchable genealogy databases, we can now answer that question in the affirmative. Powell was indeed born to a perfumer in Plymouth in 1850, and at the time of the 1861 census, he was living as a boarder in Oxford, just when Edward VII was studying there. He largely disappeared from the documentary record after he reached adulthood, but that would be expected given his itinerant lifestyle. In 1881 he married a woman named Etta Brooks in Maine but separated just a few weeks later after Etta alleged “intoxication and cruel and abusive treatment.”

Shortly before his death, Powell told the Beckfords that he had buried a trunk full of his poetry and other personal effects under a flat rock near his hut. To this day, it has never been found. Powell was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Wyoming Cemetery, just down the hill from where he once lived in his hut. Go looking for his hidden chest if you will, and if you believe in ghosts, you can also look for a forlorn soul that spent its last years wandering Melrose, and may wander it still.

One day in 1909, a twelve-year-old Melrose boy was walking from his home near the Common to his piano lesson when he heard noises emanating from a strange wire structure on the roof of a nearby house. Filled with overwhelming curiosity, he knocked on the door to learn more. The young man who answered his knock invited him in and showed him an assembly of copper wire wound around cylinders, photographic plates, and tin sheets, and explained how together they made up a transmitter and a receiver that allowed him to use morse code to communicate invisibly with another house in Melrose. Decades later, that curious boy, Lawrence A. Hyland, wrote of how “That day in 1909 was, for me, the beginning,” a chance childhood encounter that would set him on a path that would in time take his scientific interests all the way to the moon.

Hyland had been born in Nova Scotia in 1897. In 1899, his family moved to Massachusetts, and when he was in fifth grade they moved into 346 East Foster Street; the family then briefly moved to 177 First Street before moving back to their first Melrose address. Hyland attended the Mary Livermore School and then matriculated at Melrose High School, now the Coolidge Apartments at 585 Main Street.

Melrose High School gave Hyland his intellectual foundation. He was both a debating champion and the president of his senior class. While he did not graduate near the top of his class, he followed his own eccentric academic path that catered to his scientific interests, convincing one of his teachers to offer him a non-credit course in steam engineering.

“Most important,” Hyland later recalled, was that he persuaded the building engineer to allow him to come in at four o’clock every winter morning to stoke the fires and release the steam for the high school’s heating system. Hyland reminisced how “When the fireman drank too much, I operated the school’s whole heating system until the chief engineer arrived.”

By the time he graduated from Melrose High School, Hyland had demonstrated an aptitude for hands-on engineering and a charismatic and persuasive personality. Nonetheless, when he applied to college engineering programs, he was rejected. He attended a law course at Boston University for a year but flunked out. He held a series of odd jobs and never returned to complete a college degree.

In 1917, Hyland enlisted in the US Army, serving on the front in France, where he had a chance to apply his knowledge of radio and telegraphy. After the war, he transferred to the US Navy, and in 1926 secured a commission as a radio engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory. Here he became one of the key figures in the development of American radar technology. Through his work, the US Navy gained the ability to track the approach of incoming aircraft, a key tactical advantage that would prove critical to American success in the Pacific theatre in World War II.

By the time the war began, Hyland had left the Navy to work full-time in private sector military technology research. In 1932 he founded the Radio Research Company, which would later be absorbed by the Bendix Corporation. Between the early 1930s and the end of World War II, Hyland filed over 40 patents in the fields of radio, radar, aircraft ignition systems, and guided missile technology.

In 1956, Hyland was invited by Howard Hughes to take the helm at his struggling Hughes Aircraft Company. Under Hyland’s stewardship, Hughes Aircraft would become one of the major US military contractors, designing communications systems, fighter jets, rockets, ICBMs, and satellites. In 1967, the company developed the Surveyor 1 lunar lander for NASA, the first spacecraft to land on the moon.

When Hyland died in 1989, he was a venerated figure in the engineering world, directing a multibillion-dollar corporation that had launched the careers of thousands of scientists over the course of decades, creating technologies that had helped to make the United States a global superpower.

It was an illustrious career that had begun through a chance encounter with an unusual noise on an ordinary day in Melrose.

In this virtual space, the Melrose Historical Commission has sought to tell stories about Melrose’s past using words and images found in the archives. For the next few weeks, Melrosians have a unique opportunity to see stories of our city’s history told through the visual arts. We encourage all of our readers to go and see Melrose artist stevealdeusart’s show at Follow Your Art Community Studios at 647 Main Street, now on display through November 11th.

Steve’s show is a historical event in its own right. While Melrose has boasted a number of talented artists over the years, this is the first time that a Melrose artist has produced a series of works which takes our local history as its theme. Moreover, those Melrosians who have interpreted the history of this place have uniformly been white and have usually placed white people in the center of their narratives; as an artist of color telling the stories of Melrose’s people of color, Steve’s art offers a new lens through which to see our collective past.

In some cases, Steve was able to take inspiration from photographs we have shared in this space, transforming grainy, low-resolution black and white images into strikingly bold visions that leave a visceral impact on the viewer. We share three side-by-side examples of those transformations here. When you visit the show, you will find QR codes next to each work that will connect you to relevant Historical Commission blog posts on their subject matter.

We congratulate Steve and Follow Your Art Community Studios for mounting this thought-provoking exploration of the past. We can only hope that it will inspire the diverse denizens of our community to create their own new interpretations of Melrose history.

For well over a century, Melrose High School has sponsored a diverse array of extracurricular activities. Perhaps the most controversial was the Smoking Committee, which formed in the fall of 1974 and was dedicated to providing a clean and orderly environment in which students could smoke to***co during school hours.

The previous five years had seen a great shift in the culture of the Melrose schools that reflected broader changes in American culture. Gone was the strict dress code mandating a tie and jacket for boys and skirts for girls. A top-down, disciplinarian model of school governance gave way to a system where student input was integrated into at least some school policy decisions.

These changes spoke to new ideals but were also pragmatic concessions in a power struggle between youth and adults. In the early 1970s, there were more teenagers living in Melrose than there ever had been before, and this late baby boom generation showed a greater proclivity for violence and vandalism than any that had come before them.

From the orderly perspective of 2022, the path of destruction taken by Melrose’s youth in that era is shocking. In the single month of May 1974, vandals at the high school destroyed toilets, drinking fountains, fire extinguishers, lights, and windows at the cost of over $1000 ($6000, adjusted for inflation). The school facilities staff replaced over 60 glass lights with plastic ones in hopes of reducing future damages.

The high school was not the only site of vandalism. In separate incidents, student arsonists tried to burn down both the Roosevelt and Winthrop schools, resulting in fire damage to both. Altogether, the Melrose Schools paid out $15000 ($90,000) to pay for student destruction of property during the 1973-1974 school year.

In this environment, faculty often felt powerless over their charges, who could be contemptuous of adult authority. In May 1974, Melrose police attempting to aid a drunk teenage driver who had crashed his car were assaulted by a group of Melrose youth. In October of that year, students “mauled” police who were trying to break up an alcohol-fueled party at Ell Pond, resulting in broken teeth for one officer.

The Melrose School Committee’s decision of May 1974 to institute a smoking policy and approve a smoking committee at Melrose High School must be understood in light of this generally chaotic environment. The major motivation for those who voted “yes” was to take the activity that had resulted in broken toilets and graffiti-lined stalls out of the bathrooms and into the open.

It was a contentious vote. School Committee chairman Dr. Robert Soule said “As a physician, I cannot in good conscience condone smoking.” David Guthro echoed the sentiment, calling the policy “a grave error,” noting that younger non-smokers would see older children smoking “in an area we approved,” and would emulate them. Ernest Murphy voiced frustration with the high school administration, saying "it is a sad commentary on the administration of the high school that they can’t enforce this [non-smoking] rule.”

In November 1974, the high school administration presented their findings after two months of experience with the new policy, and declared it a complete success, reporting that vandalism was down, air quality in the bathrooms had improved, and that “student cooperation has been excellent.” Murphy quipped that the report “reads like a press release from the American To***co Company.”

Despite those reservations, the school’s smoking policy remained in place. The smoking areas would be banned at the start of the 1992-1993 school year, eighteen years after they had first been instituted.

World War II was a terrible trial for all the people of Melrose, but the city’s Jewish community faced additional anxieties that their gentile neighbors were spared. They worried about the fate of European relatives who had been shipped off to the concentration camps, fearing the worst. And in November 1943, some wondered whether the lethal anti-Semitism that had decimated the Jews of Europe might have taken root in Melrose, as neighbors woke one morning to discover twenty headstones toppled in the Netherlands Jewish Cemetery on Linwood Avenue.

Jews had been living here since the 1890s but had faced persistent social barriers to full assimilation in Melrose society. In 1903, speaking on “The Jew as a Factor in Civilization,” the Rev. Thomas J. Horner of the Melrose Unitarian church wrote “The Jew is not popular in this country, never has been, and perhaps never will be. He is more or less shunned in the business world and in the social world, but nevertheless is a good citizen, is never an object of charity, and never gets in jail.” By 1940, Malden was home to five synagogues and thousands of Jews; across the border in Melrose, Jews numbered a few dozen and had just started renting space for a new Jewish Community Center.

On the day the headstones were toppled at the Netherlands Cemetery, Melrose’s mayor was Carl Raymond, a lifelong government bureaucrat whose acumen in accounting had taken him from pageboy to Massachusetts State Budget Commissioner. In a time of war, it would have been easy for him to ignore the desecration of Netherlands Cemetery; indeed, the Melrose Free Press had not even bothered to cover the story. In a rare act of political courage, he instead publicly called for Christians in Melrose to take collective responsibility for anti-Semitism in the city and atone for it.

Mayor Raymond sought advice from Victor Friend. Co-owner of the Friends Brothers Baked Beans Company, Friend was one of the wealthiest people in Melrose and arguably its most respected citizen. Guided by his deep Universalist faith, in 1937 Friend had been a founder of the Massachusetts Committee of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, an ecumenical organization that worked for solidarity and friendship among religions.

At a time when budgets were already strained by the war, Friend and Mayor Raymond convinced Catholics and Protestants in Melrose to raise money to repair and replace all of the headstones broken in the cemetery. As Friend put it, they wished to “make some reparation for the sins of those who have been guilty of un-American and un-Christian conduct.” The trustees of the cemetery responded that “Ordinarily we would hesitate to accept your offer, but we appreciate greatly the fine Christian spirit in which it is made and we accept, knowing it will do much to speed the spirit of good will and brotherly love among the various religious groups in our community.”

News of Melrose’s act of atonement spread far and wide. The Jewish Advocate newspaper sent Mayor Raymond a carnation, their award for service to the Jewish community. The Boston Globe ran an editorial praising Raymond. Walter Winchell, the syndicated Hearst columnist, wrote a column about the incident that was carried in newspapers across the United States. The news even traveled across the Atlantic, appearing in the London Chronicle, a Jewish newspaper.

But one newspaper was distinctly unimpressed. The Melrose Free Press editorialized “….the columnists and sensation writers are having a holiday regarding Boston, most overemphasizing the Jewish question. We believe the Jewish cause is being done a great disservice by associating the damage at the local Jewish cemetery with anti-Semitism…. The fact is that the war, with its cheering for the bombing of German cities, the invasion of Italy, and the sinking and destruction of J*p warships, brings out an aggressive streak in the youth of today and a disregard of things formerly thought inviolate.”

Anti-Semitism, of course, has never been extirpated in Melrose; Netherlands Cemetery was most recently vandalized in 2017. Nonetheless, Mayor Raymond’s public act of atonement in 1943 marked a turning point in Melrose’s relationship to its Jewish community, as anti-Semitism was firmly linked with Na**sm and thereby with threats to American democracy. In the words of Victor Friend, it marked “the determination of the citizens of Melrose to continue to dwell together in amity and crush every malicious attempt to disturb the harmony existing between man and man, between citizen and citizen.”

May such determination persist.