The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth-Century America

2 Keeping House

chapter two Keeping House TO LET—A pleasant, furnished Lodging Room for gentlemen, in a private family at No. 6 Waverly place, within seven minutes walk of State st. References exchanged. Boston Evening Transcript, June 13, 1863 Make no mistake. Susan Brown Forbes did not keep a boardinghouse. As the advertisement she placed in the Transcript made clear, she offered rooms in a “private family.” Forbes defined family generously; she regularly entertained eight to ten lodgers at No. 6 Waverly Place, a house she and her husband had rented with the specific intention of taking in boarders. If her description seems less than accurate by the standards of the early twenty-first century, calling her abode a private family made sense to Forbes. “Private” residences required no licenses.1 But the benefits of keeping a private family went beyond the practical . For one thing it distinguished the respectable household in Boston’s largely Yankee eighth ward from what she would have considered the disreputable lodgings frequented by working-class and immigrant boarders. For another, it masked the economic relations that lay within, symbolically eclipsing No. 6’s attachments to the commercial marketplace. Forbes was simply relying on common terminology when she composed the text of her ad; she probably gave these matters little conscious thought. After all, she was busy keeping house. Hovering somewhere between the most genteel quarters and the mechanic and “emigrant” boardinghouses that sheltered Boston’s expanding working class, No. 6 would have been termed a second-, possibly even a third-rate establishment in nineteenth-century parlance. Situated in a respectable but not quite fashionable neighborhood in the South End, No. 6 was within walking distance of the city’s commercial downtown, a location that made it popular with clerks. No. 6 was convenient, then, but it boasted little of the cachet traded on by Miss Lavina Williams and her three unmarried sisters, propri- etors of a genteel boardinghouse in Bowdoin Square to the northwest. Given that Forbes made do with one servant to the Williams’s two, her “private family ” would have offered comparatively few amenities, mirrored, perhaps, most clearly in the subtle distinctions between the two establishments’ clientele. Both housed the white-collar middle classes. But No. 6 catered primarily to young salesmen and clerks, and the historic house in Bowdoin Square, which had once belonged to Harrison Gray Otis, to older, more established functionaries and merchants.2 Like Forbes, Louisa Morrill, a forty-year-old spinster in the year Forbes placed her ad, hailed from New Hampshire. But the successive boardinghouses she kept on Meridian Street, Leverett Street, and Crescent Place sheltered rougher crowds. Her boarders—a cosmopolitan mix of native New Englanders , Canadians, Europeans, and a sole African American—were mostly people who never would have crossed Forbes’s or the Williams’s thresholds: street vendors, printers, brush makers, seamen, liquor sellers, leather cutters, tailors , and tailoresses.3 Even less likely to be found at Waverly Place or Bowdoin Square—except in the capacity of servants—were the laborers, teamsters , and washerwoman who resided at the widow Bridget Curtain’s boardinghouse in the city’s heavily Irish seventh ward.4 To the north, on the lower slopes of Beacon Hill lived the majority of Boston’s black community. There, Harriet Hayden, the wife of a prominent African American abolitionist , kept (with the help of an Irish domestic) eight boarders, all of them black and, except for a married couple, all of them men.5 Like boardinghouse keepers everywhere, Forbes, Williams, Morrill, Curtain , and Hayden inhabited different social worlds whose distinctions were reinforced by geography, though the actual physical distances between them were small. Nor did they necessarily have the same relation to the marketplace . Some took up boarding as a means of supplementing family incomes; others depended on it entirely. Some thought of themselves as boardinghouse keepers, others merely as “keeping house”—or like Forbes, as presiding over “private families.” But all were in the business of boarding, providing food, lodging, and housekeeping services in exchange for cash. As a result, all trod treacherous cultural terrain. They kept houses in an era that glorified homes. Getting Boarders Most people who kept boarders never listed themselves in business directories or travelers’ guides. They resorted to newspaper advertisements only Keeping House  rarely; Forbes seems to have done so exactly once. They relied instead on circles of acquaintance—several veterans of...