North Bennet Street Industrial School (Boston, Mass.)

The North Bennet Street Industrial School is located in Boston's North End, long an immigrant neighborhood and since the turn of the century predominantly Italian. In 1879, when No. 39 North Bennet Street housed the Seamen's Friend Society, Mrs. L. E. Caswell rented space there for a sewing room for poor women; a laundry room was added soon after and the establishment called the North Bennet Street Industrial Home. In June 1880 the Home leased the entire building. It gradually added other activities: a cooking school, printing shop, kitchen garden, circulating library, cafe, and others. Probably in 1880, the Home asked Pauline Agassiz (Mrs. Quincy A.) Shaw (1841-1917) to open a day nursery there, as she had elsewhere in Boston; she did so and evidently from then on took an active interest in the Home, so that she has been regarded as the founder of the North Bennet Street Industrial School (NBSIS). In June 1884 the Home's lease expired and Mrs. Shaw and others bought No. 39. During this time the name was changed to its present one. In April 1885 the School was incorporated and the building conveyed to it.

For several decades, beginning in 1885, the School had an arrangement with the Boston School Department under which it taught cooking, sewing, woodworking and other vocational skills to public school pupils; eventually the public schools began teaching these courses themselves, and the School added other trades to its curriculum. NBSIS also has had after-school classes and both day and evening classes for older people, female and male. In addition, the reports do not generally mention staff by name and none of the correspondence has survived. In 1909 Alvin E. Dodd became director; he was succeeded by George Courtright Greener, who had been assistant director. Greener was a potter from Columbus, Ohio, and was evidently responsible for the School's considerable involvement in crafts and other activities geared to interior and garden design. He himself spent several summers in Europe buying antiques for the School's annual sales, and it is clear from the correspondence that he advised wealthy patrons on home design and took a personal interest in repairs and refinishing of items bought at the School or its Industrial Arts Shop. During his term the School twice, once after each world war, undertook the training of veterans at the expense of the federal government, and also the Depression work relief program mentioned above, in which the School arranged for temporary work for the unemployed, much of it repair or maintenance work at the School or at other social agencies. The bulk of the records at the Schlesinger Library dates from Greener's term as director and the ubiquity of his name in the office files indicates the extent to which he personally managed most of the School's affairs. He was succeeded in 1954 by Ernest Jacoby; who had been his assistant since 1947 and who like Greener took a personal interest in all aspects of the School's management.

Other staff members whose names appear with some frequency are Grace Caldwell, director of the day nursery and then of the Play School for Habit Training; Jenny Swartzman, office manager; Elizabeth Lewis, director of vocational guidance; Norman Franzeim, head of Shaw House and the caddy camps; Eva R. Crane, Head Worker of Social Service House.

The School has had a Board of Managers since its incorporation and the Board has always attracted numerous prominent Bostonians, many of them active well beyond attendance at meetings: serving as teachers, club leaders, or home visitors; organizing benefit performances; pricing antiques and managing the sales; chaperoning or hosting children's outings; serving on visiting committees; advising on building or camp repairs, insurance, investments, and other financial matters.

As is to be expected, the clientele of the School, and even most of the teachers and other staff, are usually only indirectly represented (i.e., in the third person rather than the first or second) in the records, unlike the director, department heads, and Board members. Nevertheless, there is considerable information here on immigrant life in the North End, and even some demographic data on family size, health, welfare assistance, employment, and education. Because of the School's pioneering role, the records are useful for studying the history of vocational education (see Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) and early childhood education. The School provides relatively early examples of cooperation between a private agency and branches of local, state and federal governments. Correspondence and other papers about formal (Boston Council of Social Agencies) and informal (Monday Lunch Club) contacts between staff members and their counterparts elsewhere provide at least glimpses of local and national networks among professionals in social work and education. From Executive Committee minutes and the extensive correspondence of the directors with Board members and other benefactors of the School one can get a good deal of information about Boston's elite, their social conscience, and their interactions with other social classes in the city. The changes in trades taught at the School and the success or failure of the industries can be seen as a microcosm of economic and technological, as well as educational, change. And, except for the first three decades or so, there is fairly complete documentation of the administration of the School and its work.