Walking Tour of Sumner Hill

Join the Jamaica Plain Historical Society on a tour of this lovely area of JP. Developed as a suburb by General William Hyslop Sumner in the mid-nineteenth century, this National Historic District includes one of the finest collections of Victorian houses in the area. The tour includes the ancestral home of the Dole Pineapple Company founder as well as the homes of progressives who were active as abolitionists and women suffragists. Please note: tours will be given based on the current COVID 19 directives from the City of Boston and the Commonwealth. Please wear a mask and follow all required actions.

Walking Tour of Monument Square

Join the Jamaica Plain Historical Society to tour a residential area that includes a National Historic District. View architecture that spans three centuries; the oldest community theater company in the United States; and an elegant 18th-century mansion that once served as the country’s first military hospital. Learn about the monument that commemorates fallen Civil War soldiers from West Roxbury and about Pauline Agassiz Shaw who established the class that became the model for free, public kindergarten education. We will visit a house dating to 1716 that once served as a tavern, the Eliot School dating back to 1689, the home of the first woman to graduate from MIT and the First Church Burial Ground. Please note: tours will be given based on the current COVID 19 directives from the City of Boston and the Commonwealth.

Walking Tour of Hyde Square

Join the JP Historical Society to learn about 1840s Hyde Square when German and Irish immigrants transformed the neighborhood with their businesses, schools, and institutions. See how in the early 1960s, Hyde Square changed again when Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican immigrants transformed it into Boston’s first predominantly Hispanic neighborhood. This tour also takes us to the home of Maud Cuney Hare, a prominent music historian and one of only two black women students at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1890. You will also learn about the property currently housing the MSPCA’s Angell Animal Medical Center which was once a site of the Perkins School for the Blind. The tour will also walk through the Sunnyside neighborhood, the site of homes built by philanthropist Robert Treat Paine from 1889 to 1899 as a “worker’s utopia” for working families.

Postponed: Tastings & Tales – Remarkable Women of JP

This event has been postponed. Boston By Foot cancelled everything through March and the JP Historical Society is working on a new date. 

Just in time for Women’s History Month, we’ve got stories of local women who’ve stood by their ideals, fought for change and overcame societal boundaries to achieve and exceed in outstanding ways. Jamaica Plain has been home to a wealth of women who have achieved remarkable heights throughout Boston’s history. Socialists, abolitionists, Nobel Prize winners, literary luminaries – there are no shortage of stories of remarkable women to share and toast with a fine Sam Adams brew in hand. Guides from Boston By Foot will tell you the stories of these women while the staff from Samuel Adams pairs them with a flight of beers.

Postponed: The China Trade

This event has been postponed. The Arnold Arboretum has cancelled all events through April. A new date for this event is being rescheduled for the fall. At a moment when our country seems especially divided, Prof. Dane Morrison of Salem State University will discuss how Americans forged a national identity after the War of Independence. After breaking free from British rule, American identity had more to do with sailing to the East than trekking into the West.  Private  journals, letters, ships’ logs, memoirs, and newspaper accounts help trace America’s earliest encounters on a global stage. This talk will particularly focus on the travels of the Forbes family, from Jamaica Plain to China.

Postponed: The Remarkable Photos of Leon Abdalian

This event has been postponed. Boston Public Library has cancelled all events through April. This event will be rescheduled for the fall. The photographer Leon Hampartzoum Abdalian was born in 1884 in what was Cilician Armenia, then located in the Ottoman Empire (now modern Turkey). He migrated with his family to the United States in April of 1896 and they eventually settled in Jamaica Plain.  It is believed that he was largely self-taught as a photographer.

Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II

Join us at the Hunnewell Building at the Arnold Arboretum for a talk by Judith Sumner, PhD,  botanist, and author of Plants Go to War - the first botanical history of World War II. As the first botanical history of World War II, Plants Go to War examines military history from the perspective of plant science. From victory gardens to drugs, timber, rubber, and fibers, plants supplied materials with key roles in victory. Author and botanist Judith Sumner will speak of the many plants that were incorporated into wartime safety materials, diet and rations, and even bombers. Free, but registration requested
Register at my.arboretum.harvard.edu or call 617-384-5277.

Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

William Bryant Logan, Certified Arborist, Founder and President of Urban Arborists, Inc., and Author

Thursday, June 27, 6:30–7:45pm
Arnold Arboretum, Hunnewell Building

When his company was asked to pollard trees in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, William Bryant Logan was stymied. This prompted him to research and learn this ancient way of pruning that prompts thick nests of sprouts to form on major branches. The irony here is that pollarding (and the similar practice of coppicing) had been the preeminent way in which humans had tended trees–from the last ice age to the Industrial Revolution. What would have seemed the most mundane of tasks to a villager in the Middle Ages had slipped from use, and even memory, in the twenty first century. Hear Logan speak of the many ways in which these lost ancient arts (including pruning, hazel creating living hedges, growing oak for ships) created and supported human cultures all over the world and how we once lived closely as partners with trees, as we can only hope to do again.

Walking Tour of Jamaica Pond

Walk around the Jamaica Pond with the JP Historical Society. Once a district that only included the houses of Boston’s elite, the Pond later was put to industrial use as tons of ice were harvested there each winter. Learn about the movers and shakers such as Francis Parkman and James Michael Curley who made their homes on the Pond’s shores. Discover how the Pond was transformed from private estates and warehouses into the parkland we know today. Tour lasts 90 minutes and will be canceled in case of heavy rain.

Walking Tour of Stony Brook

Join the JP Historical Society to explore a fascinating industrial area at the geographic heart of Boston that includes 19th-century tannery and brewery buildings, the homes of early German settlers, and today’s Boston Beer Company, the brewers of Samuel Adams. In the 1970s, a coalition of community groups joined together to block construction of the Southwest Expressway through Jamaica Plain and other Boston neighborhoods. Today, the Southwest Corridor Park that runs through the Stony Brook neighborhood stands as a testament to the power of community activism. Tours last between 60 and 90 minutes and are canceled in case of heavy rain. No reservations are required, just meet the guide at the location listed.