Another City upon a Hill: A New England Memoir

Epilogue

[193] [ Epilogue ] I had never visited the Fall River Historical Society, except to drop in to its Museum Shop to buy works of local history as I mused over writing this memoir. Such societies are important custodians of history, interpreters of the local past to adult visitors and school groups. I wanted to know if the Fall River Historical Society offered a prospect of the city’s history from above or below the hill or from some vantage point in between. After all, academics and especially local organizations such as New Bedford’s Spinner Publications have been documenting the non-Yankee history of southeastern New England for more than two decades. A few years ago, Dorothy and I visited the Historical Society on a hot, humid mid-July day. It was the kind of weather that might have raised the spirits of mill owners and managers. The humidity would have reduced thread breakage and boosted the production of cotton cloth. The Historical Society is located in the Highlands, in a former mansion on Rock Street. When we toured the building, a window was open on the second floor, the location of the bedrooms. Even on a still, stifling July day, a breeze swept up from the Taunton River and Mt. Hope Bay. It rustled the long, heavy Victorian drapes, giving one a sense of the benefits of living on Fall River’s summit during the summer. The former mansion was built of Fall River granite in 1843. It was located below the hill on Columbia Street in what is now designated as a cultural district in Fall River’s oldest Portuguese enclave. In 1870, the second well-to-do owner of the mansion decided it belonged in the Highlands. He dismantled the building, loaded its granite onto oxcarts, and transported the blocks a mile uphill to its present site on what had been Fall River’s Easy Street. He rebuilt, expanded, and updated the mansion in high Victorian style. David Brayton, the brother of Mary B. Durfee Young, later acquired the mansion. He was the agent of the Durfee Mills and the owner of a country estate on the shores of Mt. Hope Bay in Somerset, where I worked in the Brayton Point Power plant in the summer of 1963. The mansion remained in the Brayton family until 1937. By then Fall River’s textile empire had cratered and much of the remaining trust fund Another City upon a Hill [194] money had fled the city. The mansion was handed over to the Historical Society and became its headquarters. The society’s colorful brochure plotted the narrative of Fall River’s history that we were about to hear on our hourlong tour. The first page featured the Fall River Line Pier, two of its magnificent steamships, and a well-dressed couple leaning over a rail on deck. Below this historic scene there was a photograph of Lizzie Borden as she appeared at the time of her trial. She had an axe superimposed across her chest. Inside the brochure was a large staged picture of Victorian-era high tea in the mansion’s opulent music room. A sample of the society’s art collection followed, along with more Lizzie memorabilia, including a photograph of her father’s shattered skull. Without a cushy endowment, the society obviously capitalizes on the principal historical asset at hand to underwrite a chunk of its budget. Lizzie Borden temporarily diverts visitors headed for the Cape, Newport, or Plymouth. For the price of admission, the society tosses in a taste of Spindle City’s history from the perspective of the Victorian-era Highlands. As the brochure put it, the mansion “will give you an intimate feeling of the lifestyle of an affluent family in nineteenth-century Fall River.” A nice seventyish lady who was a native of the city served as the tour guide for Dorothy and me. She began with the music room, described its historical furnishings, and talked about the ritual of high tea. She made the first of her two comments during the tour that revealed a trace of class consciousness. “I’m English and Scotch,” she announced. “We had tea all the time. Tea was just tea. I don’t know what all the fuss was about.” We moved on to the dining room. Historic paintings hung on walls throughout the mansion. One was a large portrait of Matthew Chaloner Durfee (M. C. D.) Borden on the first floor. The tour guide seemed...