Walking Tour of Woodbourne

Come explore a fascinating area with the Jamaica Plain Historical Society. This neighborhood developed from 19th-century summer estates into a model suburban enclave. It contains examples representative of New England architecture with designs by local architects and builders. It also contains an unusual garden city model housing development by the Boston Dwelling House Company which was founded in 1912. Tours last between 60 and 90 minutes and are canceled in case of heavy rain.

Walking Tour of Sumner Hill

Join the JP Historical Society to visit Sumner Hill. 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. 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.

Walking Tour of Monument Square, JP

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 continuous free 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. Tours last between 60 and 90 minutes and are canceled in case of heavy rain.

Walking Tour of Hyde Square

Join the Jamaica Plain Historical Society for this SPANISH LANGUAGE TOUR 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.

Walking Tour of Green Street

Join the Jamaica Plain Historical Society to walk down Green Street. Laid out in 1836, the street played a key role in Jamaica Plain’s development, functioning as a residential, commercial, and transportation conduit in the lives of the district’s residents. Although Green Street was subdivided as early as 1851 for stores, factories and houses, it was not extensively developed until the late 1870s with construction continuing until the early 1900s. The Bowditch School was completed in 1892, and early in the 20th century the United States Post Office moved from its location on Call Street at Woolsey Square to its new location at the corner of Green and Cheshire Streets. JPSH tours last between 60 and 90 minutes and are canceled in case of heavy rain.

Hidden History of Boston Book Talk

Though arguably America's most historic city, Boston also claims its share of little-known events. Our colonial past saw riotous mobs celebrating their hatred of the pope in an annual celebration called Pope's Night; William Monroe Trotter, champion of civil rights at the turn of the last century, published the independent African American newspaper the Boston Guardian; In 1991, a centuries-long turf war played out on the streets of quiet Chinatown, ending in the massacre of five men in a back alley. The cover of the book features Amelia Earhart who got a flying start in Boston. In her new book, author and historian Dina Vargo shines light into the cobwebbed corners of Boston's hidden history. Dina Vargo is a volunteer docent for Boston by Foot, where she developed an interest for writing off-beat walking tours.

William Dawes’ Secret

William Dawes, Jr., is known today only as the other rider who carried news of the British army march to Lexington in April 1775. Like the more famous Paul Revere, Dawes was deeply involved in the Patriot movement for years before and after that date. This talk reveals Dawes the militia organizer, the fashion icon, even the arms smuggler whose secret mission for the Patriots’ Committee of Safety helped bring on the Revolutionary War. The speaker will be J. L. Bell, who is the author of The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War. He maintains the Boston1775.net website, offering daily helpings of history, analysis, and unabashed gossip about Revolutionary New England.

250th Anniversary of the First Church in Jamaica Plain

We are approaching the 250th anniversary of an act of the Massachusetts colonial legislature finalized on May 26, 1773.  The act defined the boundaries of a new standing order parish on the “pond plain in the Jamaica end” of the Town of Roxbury.  These standing order parishes were part of the organization of the colony, providing for the militia as well as taxation used for a meetinghouse and an educated teacher. It can be argued that the founding of the Third Parish of Roxbury (now the First Church in Jamaica Plain) coincides with the beginning of an established Jamaica Plain. George Wardle, historian of the First Church in Jamaica Plain, will tell the tale of Suzanna and Benjamin Pemberton and how they doggedly lead their neighbors in a long process to get permission to carve out a new parish in the middle of Roxbury. They persisted in the quest despite opposition by the two existing parishes (who did not want to give up tax-paying parishioners to another church). It was quite a feat, one that was almost undone in 1786 during the economic struggles that occurred after the American Revolution.

The English Garden: Perfection on Earth – An Evening with Curt DiCamillo

In this lavishly illustrated talk, noted historian Curt DiCamillo will discuss the development of the English landscape tradition and demonstrate why the English garden has often been called Britain’s single most important contribution to world culture. Though the earliest English gardens were planted by Roman conquerors in the 1st century AD, the English garden as we know it today is a designed landscape style that was first developed in early 18th century England as part of the setting surrounding a grand English country house. So successful was this English innovation that it quickly spread throughout Europe, becoming the dominant gardening style, replacing the formalized, symmetrical French style of gardening—itself based on Italian Renaissance examples. Though indebted to the earlier fashions that had reigned supreme for centuries, the newly-developed and uniquely English garden was a stylistic breakthrough, the likes of which had never before been seen in Europe. Often called “educated nature” by its proponents, this innovative English garden style offered an idealized view of nature influenced by the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.

Casey Arborway Tour: Rediscovering the Original Topography of Forst Hills

Join the JP Historical Society and local historian Richard Heath for a walking tour of the imagination. Not one square inch remains of the Forest Hills of forty years ago; the Southwest Corridor and the Casey Arborway obliterated all architectural landmarks from that era. And yet the vista and connection that Frederick Law Olmsted once designed and supervised for the parkway between the Arboretum and Franklin Park (most of which was destroyed in 1952 for the Casey Overpass) have been remade. Our walk will follow Olmsted's plan (and end at the lower busway of Forest Hills Station). The tour will also cover the original transportation patterns which characterized Forest Hills well before Olmsted made his plan, those of the Norfolk & Bristol Turnpike and the Boston & Providence Railroad.