Citizenship and Governance in a Changing City: Somerville, MA

2. Overview of History, Demographics, and Politics

2 overview of History, Demographics, and Politics Thumbnail History, Population Growth, and Decline Somerville was settled originally in 1630 as part of Boston’s Charlestown. The massachusetts state legislature set Somerville aside as a separate town in 1842, and it formally incorporated as its own city in 1872 (Haskell n.d.; Ueda 1987).1 Somerville reportedly had to thwart annexation by its neighbors to claim its own charter (Haskell n.d.), and locals today like to claim this history as seeding the tenacious fighting spirit still present in the city’s character (Agarwal 2004). more than one person i talked with described local politics with pride and humor as “a blood sport.” Somerville, then, traces its history back nearly four hundred years. in 1630, the first non–Native American resident, John Woolrich, moved from Boston’s Charlestown to become neighbor to American indians who had settled long before in the territory later known as Somerville (Haskell n.d.). in 1631, John Winthrop, the first governor of the Commonwealth of massachusetts , obtained from the Commonwealth a grant of six hundred acres of land to establish his Ten Hills Farm in the Somerville neighborhood still known as Ten Hills, bordering the mystic river (Haskell n.d.). Somerville contains a number of historic revolutionary War sites, including the place where Paul revere passed through the city during his famous ride in 1775, warning of the coming of British soldiers, and the place where a skirmish took place that same day in Union Square (which still goes by that name, and which, as i discuss in Chapter 3, is one of the sites currently 20 Chapter 2 undergoing major redevelopment). During the decades after the revolutionary War, the city began to take shape, changing from a solely rural and pastoral area. Boston’s prominent Yankee families, known as Boston Brahmins, moved to Somerville from Beacon Hill, initially to escape the summer heat and later to distance themselves from the influx of irish immigrants who later came to Somerville. The Brahmins built large summer houses in the city, many of which still stand, although few are the single-family dwellings that were built originally. The first Somerville town meeting took place on April 4, 1842. A high school was erected in 1851. Horses, cars, and street lamps went into service in 1858 and 1859. Sewers were built in 1867. A police court was established in 1872, and a public library opened in 1873 (Haskell n.d.). in three short decades between 1842 and 1870, the city’s population multiplied from one thousand souls to fifteen thousand (Ueda 1987: 8). The 1850s began a time of new ethnic and class tensions as Boston’s irish immigrants began to move to Somerville, then still part of the enclave neighborhood Charlestown. Between 1850 and 1860, immigrants from ireland grew to one-fifth of the city’s population (Ueda 1987: 8, 9), the same proportion of residents with irish origins today. From 1860 to 1870, “the fields and brickyards of Somerville gradually gave way to looming factory buildings and belching smokestacks. The rush of settlement forced the town’s population upward at dizzying speed from 8,025 in 1860 to 14,685 in 1870” (Ueda 1987: 8). By 1870, just around the time Somerville was declaring itself an independent entity from Charlestown, “the social structure was being polarized into a property-owning business class and a property-less working class. . . . At the top of the social ladder were Yankee businessmen. . . . At the bottom were the immigrant irish” (Ueda 1987: 13). The irish entered the very bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, where “meager wages made [them] dependent on [their] children’s employment” (Ueda 1987: 47). The volume and array of employment opportunities drew workers to Somerville during this time (office of Strategic Planning and Community Development [henceforth oSPCD] 2009b: viii). irish men worked in the city’s brickyards, railroad yards, and bleacheries, with their sons alongside them, while mothers and daughters (like irish immigrant women everywhere in the United States) hired out to the city’s Yankee elite families as housekeepers and caretakers of children, the sick, and the elderly. irish working-class wives and mothers, as they did elsewhere, also took in boarders to make ends meet. Tensions were high at times between irish Catholic “papists” and Somerville ’s Protestant upper and working classes, and violence was not unknown. overview of History, Demographics, and Politics...