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.

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