Hello, and welcome to the show. This is Martin Willis, and a lot of what I do is dovetailed in the antiques and arts world is you know, dovetailed with history, and so every once in a while i'd like to do a podcast on history. I've interviewed a number of people on different topics like Thomas Jefferson scholar and people like that. If you look on the antiq Auction Forum, you'll see all those type of you know, podcasts back then.
Just a couple of things.
When I started this podcast, I had Phylliscu with me. I was basically mentoring her and she was a lot of people. I really liked her. She's very bubbly, very full of life, and she's had quite a career path. I'm just bringing this up because I want to talk about this her now. And she's an auctioneer at Southeby's now. When we were working together, you know, I mean I told her a bit how to auction, but you know, she just had a natural way with it. She's very good.
So here she is at Sotheby's and she's being really celebrated now, which is really nice. She just sold the world's most expensive dinosaur for forty four point six million, So I'm so glad for Phillis. I've really been very happy about her career path. It's had a couple of bumps along the way, but you know, she comes She's got a great attitude, and I think this is a real good proof that she's come out on top.
Definitely.
So my guest is Jake Sconiers, and I'm really excited to talk about him.
He as Hub History.
It's a podcast that talks about Boston. I was born in Boston. I've always had a connection there. I love the town. It's very interesting and I know a lot of people there and it's a really friendly, historic, wonderful town. And Jake, I want to welcome you to the show.
Hey, I appreciate you having me on.
And you used to be a tour guide in Boston, so that that's you really got to know what's going on if you're a tour guide.
Yeah, what came first?
Did you have they the you don't want to learn the history first, and then became a tour guide?
Is that what it was?
Well, I'm a transplant to Boston, so I've lived in Boston since the late nineties and I feel like because I didn't grow up here. I didn't get bored with all the places they made you go on a field trip in fifth grade, the way a lot of my peers now who live here have been. So I still Yeah, I moved here as a young adult, and I had that sense of wonder and that sense of curiosity about Boston.
Boston's a terrific say, I love this city again. I've been here for over twenty five years now, and so I was always a little bit of a history nerd growing up. My family. You know, we wouldn't go to the land for vacation. We go to Gettysburg, you know. So it was I always had that history bug, even.
As a young kid.
And then getting here and exploring, I really like to soak up a lot of the history. Bust obviously has a rich, nearly now four hundred year history. But then the sharing that with people came a little bit later. Starting around twenty twelve or so, my wife and I started a tour company where we created and led four or five different tours in different neighborhoods and focuses, and so that let me sort of share that excitement, that joy, that that love of Boston and its history with people.
But it took up all our time and didn't really we broke even barely.
In the end.
So yeah, after a couple of years we got out of that.
I went off.
I was a doc in a vo volunteer dose int at a local history historic site for a summer. And then while I was a docent there, I had the bright idea. My wife and I were both dough since then we were sort of trading, trying to one ofp each other with stories. Who had the weirdest, most interesting whatever stories from Boston history back and forth across the sort of docent bullpen, waiting for the next guests to come in. And that's where the idea for our podcast
was born. So, you know, we were trading all these cool stories back and forth. We said we should write some of these down. What should we do with this? Oh, let's start a podcast. So we started the Hub History podcast in twenty sixteen. I'm just working on episode three ten at the moment, So a lot of stories have been told. There's still lots of stories to tell. Still just as excited about Boston history as I ever was.
Yeah, you know, it was funny.
I have looked for like weird history, you know, where are some weird things that have happened in Boston, you know, other than this, And so I'd like to, you know, maybe touch a little bit on that after. But first of all, let's dive right in and talk about this
very unusual. It sounds, you know, like before we went live here, you know, you mentioned that it's kind of kind of a joke to some people, but this was a serious thing and you know, people were killed and who could ever, you know, when I first heard the Boston molasses flood, I'm thinking, what and how could that
be even dangerous? But you know, when you have two million gallons over two million gallons, and all of a sudden the tank bursts and you're talking thirty five miles an hour molasses, everyone thinks of molasses is you know, really slow?
Right?
I mean, it's an aphorism in the English language, right, somebody's moving slower than molasses in January. And this is a molasses flood in January in Boston. So it seems like again when I was a tour guide, a lot of visitors in Boston have heard about the molasses blood.
They want to know more about it.
We used to have a North End tour, and people would ask about it with that idea of it being sort of a punchline, something funny that happened, and you know, some of the travel sites and sometimes kids sites sort of reinforced that humorous aspect.
But it was a terrible trap.
I mean, we had over twenty people killed, at least one hundred and fifty injured, some of them grievously injured, huge amounts of property damage from the elevated train tracks to just buildings scoured off the face of the earth. It was really a terrible tragedy. That's only funny because it's been over a century.
Yeah, yeah, and you know what I mean.
So let's let's talk about how well how it happened. And you know, generally speaking, I hate to say it, but it always trickles back to money, and you know, yeah, that's what it was really all about, saving money and making money and you know profits.
And all that.
Molasses From the very earliest days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, molasses and the products that you can make from molasses were integral to the Boston economy for basically three hundred years, from very early in the English settlement of the Sham Peninsula. Right up through the Prohibition era, molasses was right at the heart of Boston's economy. And that's because of originally again sort of you go back far enough, it's because
of the Triangle trade. You know, we have manufactured goods being shipped out of Europe, out of England, traded in Africa for people, for enslaved people, their ship to the America's north and south, and then that basically produce agricultural products, the most important of which for centuries was sugar and then sugar. The most stable way to ship sugar around
is as molasses. It's non perishable at room temperature, so it's easy to put it in a cask, put it on a ship, and move it around the around the world. Here in Boston, we wanted a way into the triangle trade. We don't have. You know, some of the some of the southern colonies could produce these vast crops of rice and things like that that could be food staples for those sugar islands and the Caribbean where so much of the sugar is produced Boston, I don't know. And you're
I think New Hampshire based same thing up there. The Granite State we grow a lot more stones than we do wheat around here. So for us, our entries into the triangle trade where salted cod, salt cod could be shipped again it was stable at room temperature, It could be shipped to the Caribbean.
It was used to.
Feed both the enslavers and the enslaved who worked there. And then our other big entry into the triangle trade was rum because the molasses again sort of stable form of sugar could be shipped from the Caribbean to New England and then we could then further distill and refine it here into rum. There was then sort of a globally sought after commodity. It could be shipped back to Europe and a lot of it then was shipped to Africa and use this currency to enslave more people.
Honestly, I went and dusted off some of my old notes.
About rom and Boston just to get some stats. So by seventeen seventeen Boston was manufacturing two hundred thousand gallons of rom every year.
That's very early on.
And by seventeen fifty there were sixty three active distilleries in Boston making upwards of seven hundred thousand gallons of rom yearly, so this is a very important economic output for the city and for the region. There's a consolidation process. So by the time the turn of the twentieth century, as we get a little closer to the incident we're talking about happens, distilling its consolidated. They're really a handful of larger distilleries Boston, Cambridge, a few outlying towns, but
it's still very important into the twentieth century. And the molasses disaster happens in January nineteen nineteen, just as we're coming out of the First World War.
Back up just a.
Little bit because where you were going when you first talked about that. But I want to go back to seventeen seventy when you're talking about that, and then we'll go right back to nineteen nineteen when this happened. But I did an auction. It was actually the sign of the Declaration. I went through all those ledgers. It was really a fascinating auction that was back in nineteen eighty nine.
But I read so many times I'd read either keg or cask, I can't remember the term, but of rum and molasses, like over and over again.
You'd see the purchase of it.
And you got to realize that back then, in the eighteenth century, people were drinking.
All the time.
They were drinking alcohol all the time in the morning while they were working in the fields. They didn't trust drinking water. And if they this is just another little tidbit. I don't know if you've ever heard about this, but if they drank water, if they drank it out of a silver cup, a real silver cup, it was much healthier. And because it killed a lot of things. Oliver would kill a lot of things that were in the water.
But people got really sick by drinking water, and then they drank alcohol and distilled you know alcohol instead.
Yeah.
I mean, if you go back and look at the maps from seventeenth eighteenth well into the nineteenth century, basically up through the cholera epidemic of I think the eighteen fifties in Boston, privies and wells were right next to each other all the time, right, you know, so drinking water was not to be trusted.
People didn't even refer I do a lot.
I do a lot of reading in the Adams papers, John Adams diaries and letters, and you know, he writes about cider and porter and beer. But at the time, cider and beer weren't even really considered alcohol, you know.
It was just what you.
Drank when you weren't trying to get tipsy from the rum or whiskey.
Yeah, yeah, crazy.
So yeah, I just wanted to touch on that because I was always surprised at how much people.
Drank back then.
Then there was a temperance movement that came along eighteen forties, I think it was or something like that, but I mean, still there.
Was a lot of a lot.
Of drinking, and a lot of it had to do with people worried about drinking water.
You know.
I don't think that's really much of a known fact. But so we get into the nineteen nineteen and I'm trying to remember the year prohibition was, nineteen twenty.
I can't even remember close.
Ye, yeah, that is a great fact. So if you look at the news coverage from the day after the molasses disaster, which was the Believe the disaster. The collapse happened on January fifteenth, and so the morning papers the next day, I really how people are finding out about
the molasses flood. The Boston Globe, the Boston Post, all the Boston papers above the fold like this carry the molasses tank explosion, the disaster overestimate in the coming days, the death toll is going to be overestimated and then come back down to reality. But below the fold and all these papers, the other front page news is the race to be the thirty six state to ratify the Prohibition Amendment. So actually the day after the molasses disaster, Nebraska becomes that thirty six state.
So the actual the law goes.
Into effect one year later in nineteen twenty, like you said, but sharing the front page with the molasses disaster is news about prohibition.
And then the other.
Story that a lot of the papers carry is sort of fears about a new outbreak of war because there's so much just chaos and disorder in post war Europe.
So there's the anarchy movement to yeah, what when it comes to the use of this molasses, wasn't a lot of it had to do with something with wartime and.
Yeah, yeah, So that's that's why it's so appropriate for the prohibition and fears of a new war outbreak of war to be sharing the front pages. Because US Industrial Alcohol Company, which is the sort of umbrella corporation that owns the molasses tank that we're talking about. The main
use wasn't really Roum at that point. The main use for the molasses they're importing into Boston is in munitions, so it's used as a basically they're refining ethanol, so it's used as a solvent, and it's used in manufacturing a lot of different explosives. I saw an estimate that a sixteen inch naval guns. This is these you know, these huge naval cannons in the World War One, sort of the peak of the battleship era. They mount these enormous naval guns that you know, fire a shell that's
hundreds of pounds of explosives. But each one of those the powder that fires each round. I saw between what was actually in the powder and in the manufacturing process would be something like sixty gallons of alcohol to fire every round from a sixty inch naval gun.
Wow, huh yeah.
So it's it's a very valuable commodity still in the twentieth century, but for different reasons now because it's such an important industrial component.
Mm hmmm.
So this first of all, let's talk about the location of and why did they pick the North End The North End now you think of great Italian food. You know, it's the Italian end of Boston. But why would they do you know, is it because of a close proximity to the harbor where they could get you know, the shipments to it, or what was the reason they picked this area?
Yeah, So the tank that I love this this photo of the tank you have pulled up. It gives a great sense of the scale of it. So it's about fifty feet tall, about ninety feet in diameter, and it's right on the waterfront. So if you were to look through those buildings and through that tank, probably see the harbor right behind. I always think of old before all the land making that went on in the late nineteenth
century early twentieth century just sort of expand Boston. If you look at an old map of Boston, the Shawmat Peninsula where Buston situated, looks kind of like a mitten, and the north end is the thumb on the mitten. So it's surrounded by water on three sides and wharves all around those three sides. The wharves are still there, they're just more likely to have condos than sort of these big transshipment points.
Now.
But US industrial alcohol builds that tank in nineteen fifteen, basically in the ramp up to wartime. It's very hastily built, which we can talk about, but it's located such that an it's used for basically transshipping, so molasses comes in
on these giant tanker ships from the Caribbean. The first load was I think December thirty first, nineteen fifteen, so they just got it completed in time to take this seven hundred thousand gallons of Cuban molasses that were incoming and then it's it's used it they can then put it into uh there's some pipelines for local distilleries. They also offloaded into two train cars tanker cars on trains from there because there were train spurs coming right up
to the wharves in most cases. So it's they're not really distilling at that location in the North End, but they're shipping it out. They're bringing it in on on you know, these giant cargo ships and then moving it out on train cars and pipelines.
Hmmm hmm.
And speaking of that, this is right by you mentioned the train trust Soul and was there an active train actually yea almost an issue almost a train mishap to.
There was a a trolley was affected. I get the.
Impression that it was sort of tilted but not derailed or something like that, but I think that was a surface trolley. You had several different what do you think about the railway. We had the elevated railway that's pictured here, that's carrying basically it's passenger travel, but it's up off of the street level. It's using steam locomotives. And then on a lot of the surface streets you'd have street cars which were in the were electrified by that point,
much smaller sort of local connections. And then there were freight railway railroads coming into the wharves also, So yeah, so sort of the height of steam and rail travel. So yet all the all these different transportation modes coming into the North End, between the harbor, the railways, the street cars. So the tank again, it sort of looms
over this area. The the elevated train tracks run right down Commercial Street, which is sort of bounding around the perimeter of the North End, and the center of the North End is sort of a hill. It's a glacial deposit of sand, a sort of a sand the hill called Copps Hill, where famous burying ground, lots of patriots, the Mather family is buried there, lots of lots of
great tombs to go see there. But right at the foot of Cops Hill is Commercial Street and Commercial Street and there's elevated train tracks sort of formed the boundary between the industrial north end and the waterfront and then the more residential North end uphill from the train tracks, but they do it intermingle.
Where the Cotton Mather family was is had anywhere near the Revere Homestead or whatever your home.
Yes, in an area, it's just a few blocks away.
It's you know, not even probably a six minute walk from the from the Revere House, which actually is the same site as the Mather House, which is a fun little factoid. Not the same structure, but the same site where Cotton Mather had his home, facing across North Square to the the what at the time was the North Meeting House, which was Cotton Mather's church, the Congregational Church, Puritan Church, and then just a few blocks away it was the Anglican Church where Paul Revere worshiped and as
a teenager was a bell ringer. How about that, Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Yeah, So and I was I was there. You probably were there too when they opened the time capsule.
Were you there?
No? I watched eagerly on TV, but I wasn't actually there for it.
Yeah I was. Yeah, that was fun.
So let's, uh, let's talk about, first of all, what was the purpose of them building that tank and talk about how they just you know, raced to get that thing done and they didn't They didn't do all the things they were supposed to do. There's definitely negligence there.
Yeah. Again, it was very rushed.
There was the Again, this industrial alcohol company is seeing the writing on the wall that war is coming to Europe, so they're anticipating an increased demand for this sort of refined ethanol they create out of the molasses that's being
shipped into Bust. And then they put you would think they would put who a structural engineer, an architect, construction manager, a somebody experienced in building things in charge of this project, but instead the company treasurer is put in charge of overseeing the construction of this giant molasses tank capable of holding almost three million gallons of molasses, and he cuts basically every corner.
He first of.
All, he doesn't understand he has no conception of sort of the different grades of steel and the uses of different grades of steel, and the difference between structural steel, and so he's he's just basically again, he's the treasurer. He's using the cheapest components, the cheapest materials available. They rush through construction. There's no margin of error built in.
In the many lawsuits that result of this terrible disaster, the defense of the plaintiffs, the families of the victims hire an MIT engineering professor to sort of do their investigation, and he finds that the grade of steel that was used in the tank could handle something like sixteen thousand pounds per square inch of pressure, but the full tank would have exerted something like forty one thousand pounds of pressure. And it was customary to build in a margin of
error of three or four times the expected load. So not only yeah, they they would have expected to build a tank like that with the capacity of retaining multiple times the expected maximum load. And it said they built it with steel that was a fraction of the strength that was needed. They never tested, they never fill it with water or anything. Before the first the first shipment arrives.
And they were supposed to are they claimed they did right, they were supposed to test it.
It was at least customary. So another thing that comes out of this whole case is at the time there were some standards in place the Boston. Boston Building Department had published standards that you had to meet for certain commercial buildings for bridges, but there was no published standard for tanks like that for an industrial tank, so they were just left of their own devices to build whatever
they thought suitable. And again, because of the sort of mixed nature of the development in the North End along Commercial Street, along the elevated tracks, it's a mix of wharves, heavy industrial sites, but then there are people's homes mixed in throughout, and it's mostly an immigrant community. At the time, the early twentieth century, it was just becoming sort of the little Italy of Boston that it is today.
It's been through this.
Whole series of waves of immigration now obviously starting with the you know, the Puritan migration in the sixteen hundreds, and then the next big wave is the Irish immigration following the Potato family in the eighteen forties. There's in the late nineteenth century, there's a wave of mostly Eastern European and Russian Jewish immigrants, and then right at the turn of the twentieth centuries when this the really the
big wave of Italian immigration starts. So it's been a gateway community for hundreds of years, and it was certainly at the turn of the twentieth century. I think if you would walk through the streets of the North End at the time, you wo had heard a half dozen languages being spoken, spelled, all different cuisines, cooking, and every direction.
So it would have been a really.
Culturally rich neighborhood, but an economically very not rich neighborhood at the time.
Yeah, there was a lot of poverty, Yeah, from what I understand then, Yeah, certainly. So they build this, it's unbelievable.
And you know, the one thing.
I say from the I was gonna say, from the moment the tank is completed, people are complaining. Okay, they say, the first time it's filled, it starts creaking and moaning, and so neighbors immediately complain to the company, They say, this thing's going to collapse. At least one company employee did sort of what we call it a whistleblower today, went to the executives and said, this thing ain't right.
It's not constructed well, and it was very visibly leaking all over years ago, probably five years or more ago. I did an episode for my podcast, the Hub History Podcast about the molasses disaster, and afterwards I had a listener right in and say that her mother, so my listener's mother would be sent by her mother. So the listener's grandmother would send her mother with a ten cup to the molasses tank to just hold it up to the leaky river holes to get molasses whenever she needed it for baking.
I mean, that's scary right there.
I mean, you know, I mean, yeah, they tried patching it.
They tried a few things, and then eventually the solution was just to paint the whole thing brown to hide how badly it leaked.
That's what they did.
That was God was there was it pulling on the ground as well, And it seems like that would attract like animals, and oh, I'm.
Sure it was just a buffet for rats. I mean, I'm sure there were no fewer rats in Boston in nineteen nineteen than there.
Were four wow. Wow?
And how many years did this thing hold?
So it was it was completed at the end of nineteen fifteen. Again, it was they were racing the delivery that was coming in on New Year's Eve nineteen fifteen, and it failed in mid January nineteen nineteen.
Such, I guess just over three.
Years right now.
It's so you think about January when it happened in January, when it's receiving a shipment, and it just seems like that's so cold, and you think of molasses as moving so slow. I mean, I can't even imagine what was pumping and how long it would it take to transfer from a cargo ship cargo hold to the tank.
Well, that is an excellent point you raised there, because there are a couple of factors at play that may have influenced the failure of the tank. First, it was January. January fifteenth was an unseasonably warm day. So the day before it was in the single digits. I've heard two degrees, I've heard five degrees, but it was in the single digits at bahrenheit here in Boston. January fifteenth it warmed up to the fifties, so it was a sudden warm snap.
And then they had on the fourteenth received a big shipment and the tank was going to be filled more full than it ever had been before, which is great. But to make the molasses workable as as it's pumped out of a ship, there's a like a heating coil. I think it was electric heating coil to warm the molasses on the ship enough to be a little more sol not soluble, but a little less viscus, so to be a little easier to work with.
So then they're there.
They pumped this vast I don't remember the exact number of gallons, but it's probably close to a million gallons of heated molasses into the tank.
So there's a thought that maybe.
Sort of the thermal expansion of the molasses that was already in the tank and sort of the uh, the churning as the cold and hot molasses mixed together, there's you know, the different levels would turn together that may have contributed to the to the collapse. I've heard theories about there being a fermentation in the tank, but I think experts today would tell you that that probably wasn't a factor.
Well, they probably had some type of vent venting system for something like that to protect against something.
I would imagine they would you, but.
I wouldn't put anything past us.
I a at that point given what the lawsuits later I uncovered about the.
Absolute uh absolute negligence that they put into building that tank.
Yeah, yeah, amazing. So I can't even imagine, you know, I forget what water wets per gallon, but you know, I can't imagine, you know, glasses really heavy, you know, to begin with, So it must must be a tremendous amount of weight and in that especially when you get down toward the bottom. And it was just a time bomb, you know. I mean maybe all those things together, uh you know, worked for that particular day, but it was
going to happen sooner or later. I mean with everything you know you've explained, especially about the steel tension and you know, being so thin and everything ridiculous, and so it was a riveted They riveted the thing together and it was actually leaking out the rivets. That alone would say that thing's going to burst, you know, I mean, you would think.
Yeah, And the company just brushed off complaints from neighbors, concerns from employees as long as I mean, I don't want to sound like one of the anarchists who would be blamed for the disaster later, but I mean it was just as long as there are profits to be made. They were not hearing any other any arguments to the contrary.
So would you say that if you know, if you were to point a finger at one person the most, would it be the person that was in charge of the building, the treasurer.
I mean, either him or whoever decided he should be in charge of the project, because it I mean, it was just not somebody who was qualified to manage that that construction.
He didn't.
He just didn't understand the materials, the forces that were involved to be able to make competent decisions.
And I would think that the company that sold him the steel, and the workers and everyone would seem to know what they're doing, you know, which is really bizarre that they would let that go. You know, I mean it's not the only tank that was built at the time. There were I'm sure there were all kinds of tanks in different tanks. But so let's talk about the day
that happened. Has have you ever heard of any direct I mean they are the writings of direct you know, eyewitness accounts to what what happened.
There are a few.
And there I've mostly gotten this from from news accounts at the time.
So that the one.
Sor I don't know if you could hear the car in the background. The one, the one actual eyewitness to the collapse of the tank that I've heard of as a Boston police patrolman named Frank McManus, who was on a foot patrol and at twelve forty he, like everybody else in the North End, heard a tremendous sound, and others have described the sound as a machine gun followed by a freight train and rivets popping, the rivets letting loose,
and then the tank collapsing. But Frank McManus, patrolman McManus, happened to So today there are fire call boxes and a lot of major cities, Boston still has some fire call boxes. Mostly what we have is fire telegraphs. But at the time there were both police and fire call boxes.
And he was already on a call box talking to his the police station, and just happened to be looking and facing the direction of the tank and witnessed the tank collapse, and so he immediately sounded the alarm, said, you know, send every available ambulance, send every available officer, send everybody, because what you then have and you alluded
to it before is this wave of molasses. And this is where the idea that molasses is slow in January goes out the window, because there's a wave that's cresting fifteen twenty feet tall, moving at thirty five miles an hour. And I just looked up for a little bit of fun. We just had the Olympics a few weeks ago, and unfortunately our American sprinter, Noah Lyles, didn't do so well at the Olympics because he apparently was trying to run
with COVID, which isn't great. But he I think last year sometime recently, he set the one hundred meter world record, so he's officially the fastest man alive and he can top out at about twenty seven miles an hour for one hundred meters.
Yeah, so you're talking racehorse speed.
That this molasses is advancing through the neighborhood cuts about a half mile swath across the north end, sort of a long commercial street on either side of Commercial Street, And again, I think the devastation is hard to imagine. I'm glad you have the photos to share with the audience, the video audience, because it first of all, an any wood structures, any stick built houses or stores or buildings are just wiped off the face of the earth.
Well, if you look at this building that's right next to the tank right now, you're seeing this Victorian building.
With this beautiful roof.
And if you look at this picture, where did I just see that? I just saw that. Let me see if I can see it again. It showed it right.
Yeah, it's right there on the ground.
The roof of it is just sitting there and the whole structure is gone.
Yeah.
There was a bartender by the name of Martin Cloherty who had worked late the night before. So the collapse happened to, like I said, twelve forty in the afternoon, but being a bartender, was out all night working. He's in bed at the time and he wakes up to his house being destroyed around him. And I have a Q that says I was in bed on the third floor of my house when I heard a deep rumble. When I awoke, I was in several feet of molasses. And so he was in one of these wooden stick
built houses that was nearby. His house was swept into the elevated train tracks and basically just dashed itself to pieces against the elevated superstructure of the tracks. He survives by crawling back into bed. He pulls his sister up onto his bed with him, and the two of them basically used the bed as a boat to ride out the flood. But then his mother and one of his brothers, who were also home in the house at the time, they were both killed.
Wow.
Yeah, the fire station next door, wasn't that? That was I think there was a survivor or two in that, but that.
Was yeah, yeah, there was one. There was only one firefighter killed. The firehouse thirty one was literally right next door to the molasses tank. So you'd expect the firefighters the North End fire station to be the first responders to this terrible disaster, but the firehouse has knocked off its foundation badly enough that they're trapped inside treading water, essentially in the molasses for hours until volunteers neighborhood folks can basically cut through enough of the fire station to
get them out in the time. That takes one of the firefighters. I don't remember his name, unfortunately, but one of the firefighters just was exhausted and he couldn't swim anymore, and he just slip below the surface and drowned.
Wow, I can't imagine well, I can't imagine a drowning anyway, but inasses.
And molasses sounds just terrible. The first because the firefighters
are trapped in their own firehouse. The first first responders were cadets from the mass Maritime Academy who were on a training ship that was moored nearby called the Nantucket, and about one hundred and fifteen or one hundred and twenty cadets came in and they were the first to start sorting through the just terrible destruction that's left behind because the molasses once the wave slows down, it's not moving at thirty five miles an hour and starts to
slow down and cool at pools in many places, in lakes of molasses that are waste deep around the neighborhood. And in the Boston Post the next day they described, you'd go in, you know, you have just everybody is turning out to try to help in any way they can. So you have parents, neighbors, teachers, whoever, trying to find
their loved ones in this mess. And they say, you'd see a form thrashing in the sticky black pool, and you wouldn't know whether it was a horse or a man until you went and pulled them out and hopefully you got there in time, but in a lot of cases they didn't. And again, I think the final death toll was about twenty one and at least at least one hundred fifty people injured. And then I'm told you
think about nineteen nineteen. My grandparents were alive at the time, and horses and mules were still very common in all kinds of industries and transportation. So they're just untold animals that were drowned in this flood as well.
Not to mention the rats, yes, yeah we don't cry. I shed no tears for the rats.
But yeah, and you know, you think about how what a mess this? I mean, I can't imagine, you know, I mean, everything is about this as a disaster, But then can you imagine the cleanup afterwards and what that?
How could you clean up something like this? You know what I mean?
Years and years of rain is helpful, right, you know, seasons?
And yeah, I mean, the the rescue attempts go on for I think a couple of days basically where they're you know, getting people out of the wreckage still alive.
For a while, and then the recovery efforts go on.
For weeks and weeks. I think the last body was found in the harbor in April, so that that they finally the human toll is dealt with. And then, like you say, you have two point three million gallons of molasses coating everything in this neighborhood. So they ended up pumping seawater, millions and millions of gallons of seawater through the streets to the north end to try and flush
the molasses away. They felt that it worked a little better than freshwater, and it's right there, right on the waterfront, so why not. And then because of this, then the harbor turned brown for months afterwards. There was no sense, you know, there's no deer island filtration or anything at the time. They're just flushing it all straight into the harbor. So I think it was probably a stinking mess of a harbor for a few months afterwards.
I would say, and do you think that a lot of the you know, I'm picturing this. I don't know if there was a certain direction the molasses win or if it just burst at the bottom and wind everywhere. But did a lot of it go into the harbor directly, do you know.
I think it must have just from the location of the tank. So again, when you think about the north end, if any of your listeners are in Boston, it's the sight of Langone Park today, so there's some ball fields and some botchy courts, and then it's directly abutting the harbor. So at least some of it must have gone straight into the harbor if it sort of you know, burst in all directions the way you'd expect it to. But then you know, on the land side it like I say,
it's just swept away. Any wood building just smashed to toothpicks.
It was so powerful.
Some of the photos you showed the elevated tracks, which are these enormous steel girders and stele spans or you know, iron girders and spans between them. They were twisted in some cases, you know, they had to be extensively repaired. And then fragments of the tank itself these you know, big twisted steel sheets that used to be a molasses tank or then driven throughout the town and sort of wrapped around train cars and and you know, trucks and cars automobiles are buried in the Goo so yeah, the
cleanup effort had to be just incredible. And that's where one of the persistent legends I guess of the molasses flood comes from. People say, I will say, disreputable travel sites say that even today, on a hot summer's day, you can smell molasses throughout the streets to the North End, And that's just not true. If you walk in the streets in the North End on a hot summer day, you're gonna smell rotten dumpster, not molasses. But I do
think there was some truth. I think for some time afterwards, yeah, you would smell molasses because no matter how much sea what are you pumped through the streets, people were everything you touched afterwards, you would transfer molasses to it. Right, So if you were helping with the cleanup and then you got on the trolley to go home, you're going to track molasses into the trolley, and then you're going
to track it into your house. And so I do think that there was some truth to the legend that for some time afterwards Boston smelled like molasses.
But no more do you think there was ever I mean, do you think there was any historical landmarks like homes that were lost in that. Are you aware of any of them?
I don't really think so.
And of course, you know, everything's historic to somebody, and people's you know, people's homes are important to them, and those were destroyed, and that businesses were destroyed. The fire station of police station was badly damaged, but it was located in the more industrial part of the North End, so a lot of the oldest development would have been sort of on the other side of that thumb of
the mitten I was talking about. The North End was the you know, the first part of the Seaman Peninsula to have English homes on it when the Puritans moved from Charlestown across the Charles River to get better water on the North End, but they would mostly settle more on the Mill Pond side and the Harbor side, not so much on the Charles River side. So a lot of the oldest parts of the North End were sort
of a little further away, a few blocks away. And luckily most of that older development was uphill.
I see, yep.
I was just trying to pull up a map of Boston so I could show the I can't seem to get it to download, but anyway, the aftermath of this whole thing is just as crazy. I mean, there was someone you know that of course the company, they wouldn't want to run for their lives and you know, make sure they don't go, you know, belly up. So there immediately try to come up with the story that it was an anarchist.
Yeah, and you can see that on the front page you brought up. You can see the language of an explosion, because that's what it seemed like to everybody who witnessed it. It seemed like an explosion, and the US industrial alcohol
ran with that. There was this idea that it had been anarchists who dynamited the tank, and yes, it well, first of all, it's a very convenience scapegoat, but some there was some reason to think that could have been the case, although there was no direct evidence to prove that it was the case.
That anarchy.
It was a growing end for a lot of people, very attractive political movement in the early part of the twentieth century, especially coming from different parts of Europe that were still I think about Eastern Europe which was still very close to a feudal state under sort of the Austro Hungarian Empire. Serfdom was basically still in place. Other legally abolished in most places, it was still practiced practically
in a lot places. So this idea of absolutely egalitarian society without nobility, without you know, sort of the structures of the state, I can see as a you know, a bulgarian surf. Why that was attractive. So it starts, you know, right around the turn of the twentieth century, spreads across Europe, spreads to the US through migration, and there is a lot of in the first couple of decades of the twentieth century, there's a lot of political violence in the US.
Committed by mckley.
Nineteen oh one, McKinley nineteen fourteen, an assassination attempt on John Rockefeller in New York. In nineteen sixteen, right in the North End, there were a couple of instances. There was a protest or a riot depending on which source you read in North Square right in front of Paul
Revere's house, where a policeman was stabbed. And then also in nineteen sixteen, a police station in the North End was dynamited, focused on off hours, so a lot of property damage when nobody was actually injured, right and then in that. Yeah, during World War One, anarchists were highly
opposed to the US entry into World War One. So even some of not in the Boston area, but some of the other facilities of US industrial alcohol were dynamited, I think in the New York area, So there was some reason to think it could have been an anarchist attack. There was, I mean, I could see why somebody had that first instinct, that first reaction, but it turned out to not hold water.
But yeah, there was the invest there was. There was.
They hired their own investigator that was trying to make it look appear that way, And but I think did the city of Boston also have their own investigators and they saw no signs of any explosion.
Right off the bat right pretty quickly.
Well, a lot of the fact finding was done as part of this enormous civil lawsuit. So in the wake of the collapse, a lot of individual victims and victims families filed lawsuits. And then the largest single plaintiff was a bust An elevated railway company because their tracks and
stuff was so badly impacted by the molasses flood. So I think there was something in the neighborhood of about one hundred and twenty civil suits filed, and they were consolidated then into one of the first early really big class actions, And so it was brought before the Mass Superior Court, and the Superior Court appointed a retired military officer, a retired colonel named Hugh Ogden, to be to lead the hearings, basically to act as the judge in this
giant civil case that takes it dragged out for over five years. The final judgment wasn't until I think early nineteen twenty five. Wow, you know, thousands of exhibits introduced into evidence, hundreds or maybe a thousand witnesses gave testimony. You had survivors testifying, structural engineers testifying, you had explosive experts,
you had company employees. And in the end, again thanks in part to the independent investigators hired by the plaintiffs the plaintiffs' lawyers, it was chalked up to one hundred percent negligence. They just it was incorrect materials, incorrect construction, didn't uphold design standards for tanks of that that type. Just it it was a bad job, badly done.
And so did anyone ever announce with the I know they settled out of court eventually, but did anyone ever under stand what the total amount of that settlement was?
So the figure I've seen is six hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars, which I've learned of my eight years or so podcasting that converting historical currency to modern is a little bit of a fool's air, and my best back of the envelope calculation is about eight or ten million dollars. But it's so hard to draw parallels.
And that was split between how many people? Do you know, because there were a lot of victims other than the ones of the families that died.
Yeah, I'm not sure how the breakdown would have been between individual victims and their families and sort of the larger like again bust An Elevated Railway company. I think there were Like I said, I think there were about one hundred and twenty parties to that lawsuit, so somehow it would have been divided up between them, and then of course legal fees.
Lawyers always take a care.
Yeah, that's right. I wonder if it was a third back then.
Pulled up the old map, n old map to say, eighteenth thirty map. Yeah, so where let's see where am I looking at there's so many things that could look like a mitten.
Yeah.
So this is after a little bit of the nineteenth century land making. So the mitten shape is a little less pronounced here, largely because there was a mill pond between the north end and the west end that was filled in right at the turn of the nineteenth century to development. But if we look here, the north end is sort of the upper right quadrant of that peninsula.
It sticks out on the red courts.
It's been red.
Yeah, let me look, let me look at my other monitor. Oh, so the part of the north end is outlined in.
Blue and oh, okay, got it.
Yep, I think it's mostly in blue there from what.
I see it, I see it now.
And then the tank would have been located sort of at the uppermost point of that that part of the peninsula, the right where the commercial Street takes a hard southerly turn as it comes around the shoreline would have been about where the tank.
Was, I see. Yeah.
So that's really you know, I mean, this story is just unbelievable. And all the people that affected, you know, and and like you said, you know, think of all the horses and other animals that were killed so many, I'm sure probably in the hundreds, but uh so now we're.
Kind of through that, and I do appreciate that a lot.
But I want to ask you a couple of other questions, and you're you know, you mentioned kind of weird things.
You know that kind of makes me a little bit. So what are.
Some some of your favorite stories that you have covered in Boston, just to you know, a handful of them if we could hear some.
So, okay, let me give you a couple of weird stories that I'm fond of.
Let's see. Well, one one story that I.
My episode about this was years ago now, and it didn't I didn't think as much about it at the time, but as I as the time has gone on, it's become one of my favorite stories that I told on the podcast. Is about the first ever captivated or captive whale in the world, which was exhibited on Washington Street in Boston's downtown crossing in eighteen sixty, which is way earlier than you would think something like that was possible, far far before our modern New England aquarium was in
anybody's eye. There was an inventor by the name of James Ambrose cutting He got fairly wealthy from inventing a new photographic process, the ambro type.
He named it after himself, of course, and.
He was fascinated with aquariums, so it was at the time some of the the very earliest aquariums in the in the world were developed in London, so you got one of the first books about aquariums. He had a couple of home aquariums. He said, make a business out
of this. So he starts this aquarium aquarium. It's you know, small tanks, a lot of like turtles and fish and things like that, and he gets the idea of you know what can really get people in the door is a whale, and so he ends up partnering with Amanda I think his name was Frank Butler's that last name's definitely Butler and P. T.
Barnum, the greatest showman.
So Butler brings the aquarium, know how, cutting brings the enthusiasm, and then P. T. Barnum brings a lot of cash and they end up hiring a whaler. In Canada, he said the southernmost range of the bluega whale, So the white whale is along the Saint Lawrence River in Canada's there's summer feeding grounds. They come into the mouth of the Saint Lawrence and they feed on fish runs in
the summertime. So they build these giant fish weirs. And at the time they were building these, of course to kill the belugas, to harvest the whale oil, the fat, the render and the whale oil. That's a big commercial product. And Cutting says to one of these whalers, hey keep one.
Alive for me. And it actually works.
Is the amazing thing. They build this giant crate. They can put a twenty foot long whale into ship it by a rail down the through Portland down to Boston, basically.
Tip it up.
The tip this crate up on its side into this I think the tank was twenty or thirty feet thirty feet in diameter, so the whale barely has room.
To turn around.
God and then you can pay your twenty cents and go see a captive whale.
And the show is.
There's a The handlers basically would chase the whale into a corner of the tank, put a harness on it, and then the whale would pull this little novelty boat in the shape of a nautilus shell with a woman standing in it, around and around and around this little tank while people you know, clapped and cheered at a great time.
Yeah, bizarre one.
Yeah, that's one of my favorites. I like some of the weirdo history where because of the location of slaughterhouses in Boston, it's now a neighborhood of Boston called Brighton. At the time it was an independent town. It's like a little wild West. You dig into the history. There were you know, cattle drives overland from Vermont from upstate New York, from New Hampshire where people would drive cattle
to market in Boston. So you'd have drovers, cowboys essentially, you know, gambling at the Porterhouse hotel in Brighton and going to the to the cattle fairs and then you know, getting swindled out of their cash and things like that, all those good stories. And then they would also have turkey drives at Thanksgiving time, so especially from Vermont, they
would drive these huge flocks of turkeys. They say turkey were docile, so you could have just two or three people driving a herd of thousands of turkeys overland roosting in people's trees. You have these, you know, people complaining about all these turkeys coming trying to roost in their barns overnight during the turkey drives and like collapsing the roof from the weight of hundreds of turkeys.
Aul on the shed at the same time.
But they would drive turkeys overland to the markets in Boston. In Brighton at the time, I just continued. Obviously, eventually railroad comes, they move them by by railcar and things like that. So, but into the nineteen fifties there was the massive slaughterhouses in Brighton, to the point where the Brighton police station used to keep uh special ammo on hand for breakaway steers that would rampage through the streets.
There's in the forties or fifties there was a report of a steer goring several construction workers before it could be shot by the police and astery.
But yeah, the I love the idea of the.
You know, the wild West in Brontain, which is now you know, basically known as like a college neighborhood, like a college student neighborhood.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I was working in an office for a while in Woolburn and I went out and saw this. It was all grown up along this. I thought it was a stream and then looking it was granite lined and it's a canal.
Yeah, yeah, the Middlesex Canal.
Yeah, the Middlesex Canal. That's exactly what it was. And you know, you think of all it's such rich history. That was all lumber. I believe they floated lumber, you know.
All kinds of products a lumber, a lot of agricultural goods from if you think about it's it's joining the Merrimack to bust and so all the products of New Hampshire, a lot of a lot of crops, a lot of lumber, livestock.
It was a huge investment, a huge infrastructure.
Upgrade, and unfortunately trains were inmitted like the next day, so a lot of the investors basically their shirts and that and a lot of the course of the Middlesex Canal got converted into a railroad right away. But there are these great reminiscences. Among other things, it was a huge linear skating rink in the winter time, so you could you could skate from like Wouburn to bill Ricca and back.
Oh my god, along the Middlesex.
Canal in the winter. And they were you know, in the sort of the mid nineteenth century. I saw several published reminiscences of people who are could remember going skating on the Middlesex Canal as a just a wee lad
you know, so wow. I love infrastructure history like that, between you know, building Buston's first sanitary sewers too, you know, constructing the water supplies for you know, Bustin's always struggled to bring enough fresh water for the number of people who lived here, so you had wells and springs give way to you know, these wooden pipes from Jamaica pond into downtown Boston, which if you go to the Boston Archaeology Lab, you can still see some of those wooden
pipes on display or not if you talk to talk to the folks, and not really on display, but you might be able to talk your way into the back room to see them there.
To then the.
Constituent Aqueduct with this huge engineering marvel, and then today's of course the quabin which provides us the best drinking water in America.
I'm told, well, you know, you think of you think of water in populations, you know, all over the country and the struggles, and you think of Mholland out in California that came up with a two hundred mile aqueduct out there, you know, because of Los Angeles kept growing.
That's always the problem is fresh water, and you know, to get fresh water to a place like that, and you know, Arizona's in trouble, they have that aqua further, it's in trouble, yet they keep growing, you know, and that's what we do.
Yeah, it's true.
Yeah, Well this has been fantastic. I've really enjoyed it a lot.
And uh so it's Hub History and that's a podcast you can get anywhere you listen to podcasts, and that's basically Boston history and and entertaining as well.
So yeah, I like to say we go far beyond the Freedom Trail. So we tell some of the some of the stories you would have learned in you know, your middle school history classes. We try and go way beyond that too, to tell stories that are unexpected or about people who would otherwise be forgotten. So hubhistory dot com it's yeah, any place you get your podcasts, and we again we try and tell all the stories of Boston told over three hundred so far, and we're still going.
Wow, that's great. All right, Well, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure.
No, I appreciate it, all.
Right, Okay, we'll see you next time.
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