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INVENTORY FORM B CONTINUATION SHEET LEXINGTON 72 LOWELL ST. MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL COMMISSION Area(s) Form No. 220 MORRISSEY BOULEVARD, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS 02125 Continuation sheet 5 LEX.658 immigrant domestic and two farm workers, one born in Ireland and the other in Nova Scotia. By 1855 both sons Reuben and Josiah had become milkmen, and there were seven others in the household—a female domestic and six male farm laborers, four of them born in Ireland. In 1854 Reuben W. Reed married Georgianna Ferrin of Charlestown, and two years later Josiah Haskell Reed married Clara Rebecca Gates of Ashby. Oddly, their father’s household in 1860 included Josiah H., his brother’s wife Georgianna, and her daughters Emma and Mary but not Josiah’s wife nor his brother Reuben. Also listed there were two female domestic servants and six farm workers, five of them born in Ireland and one of them fourteen years old. It is possible that the man listed as Josiah was actually his brother Reuben, for according to historian William Richard Cutter, Josiah, when he came of age, “took over the milk route that his father had established in the adjacent town of Charlestown, now in Boston. He carried on this milk business for a period of twenty-five years.” The 1860 agricultural census lists Reuben Reed with 95 improved and 30 unimproved acres and 25 dairy cows; only Nathaniel Pierce, with 30 cows, had more in Lexington. Reed produced $1500 in milk and $500 in market garden products the year before. Reuben Reed died intestate in March 1864, and neither a probate record nor a deed document a transfer of the Lowell Street farm to either of his sons. In 1865 Reuben W. and his brother Josiah H. were listed in consecutive households. Josiah H. (often J. Haskell) lived with his wife Clara and their young children Frank Haskell (born 1863), Alice Gates (1865), and Mary Willard (1869) as well as a domestic and two farm workers. In 1870, however, the brothers were sharing the 72 Lowell Street house. Reuben W. is shown as farming and owning the property, valued at $20,000, while Josiah H. had $4500 in personal estate and was working as a milkman. According to Cutter, Josiah had sold his milk business in 1870 “and returned to the old homestead in Lexington, of which he and his brother became the owners at the death of his father in 1864.” Cutter stated that J. Haskell built a house “opposite the homestead and made his home there until 1882, when he sold it to William E. Litchfield. . . . At that time Josiah bought out the interests of his brother, Reuben W. Reed, and went to live in the homestead and began market gardening, in which he was successfully occupied to the time of his death.” The 1875 Lexington map shows Reuben in the 72 Lowell Street house and Josiah in his new house, 51 Lowell Street, just to the south on the east side of the street. The 1880 census shows the brothers in consecutive households; J. Haskell Reed was listed in the census as a farmer and lived in the east-side house with his family, his mother-in-law Clarissa Gates, and a domestic servant; Reuben was at 72 Lowell Street, a butter dealer, and living with his family and two female domestic servants. By 1889 the Lexington map attaches Litchfield’s name to the east-side house and J. H. Reed’s to 72 Lowell Street. By 1881 Reuben W. Reed and his family had moved to Brighton, and they sold their half of the homestead, in three parcels, to his brother J. Haskell for $7,000.4 Clara Gates Reed died in 1884, and her husband Josiah Haskell Reed died in March 1890 after he was injured in a fall. Son Frank H., who had begun his career as a salesman for a Boston tailoring firm, came back to Lexington after his father’s death. In 1890 his sisters Alice and Mary together sold their two-thirds share in their father’s homestead farm “excepting the mansion house and lot situated on both sides of Lowell Street” to their brother and held a $7400 mortgage for him. In 1893 he married Gertrude Read Fobes of Somerville, and by 1900 Frank Reed was a dairy farmer at 72 Lowell Street and living with his wife, their children Haskell, Malcolm, and Kendall, and sisters Alice and Mary. In 1902 his sisters both sold their rest of their share in the farm to Frank.5 By 1908, Cutter noted, Reed had 75 acres and 35 cows “in a model dairy.” In 1910 Frank Reed was described as a dairy farmer, and the Lowell Street household included his wife, three sons, his wife’s parents, a domestic servant, and two farm workers. Son Haskell, born in 1894, married Vivien Barnard Vickery of Lexington in 1914, and by 1920 the couple and their young sons Haskell Willard and Lawrence were living with Frank H. and Gertrude Reed at 72 Lowell Street. 4 Reuben W. and Georgie A. Reed, Brighton, to J. Haskell Reed, Lexington, 24 September 1881, MSD 1582:27. In December 1878 Reuben had sold his half to his brother for $10,000, and J. Haskell had transferred it for the same price on the same day to Reuben’s wife; the transfer may have effectively been a mortgage. See MSD 1497:424 and 425. In 1880 Reuben W. Reed was part of the first Reed and Hobbs, which ran Waverley Butter Company in Boston. The 1885 Boston directory lists Reuben W. Reed as superintendent of Commercial Manufacturing Company, which made oleomargarine, stearine, and glycerin and had been organized in 1880 with Reed as one of the incorporators (Boston Daily Advertiser, 22 September 1880). In 1898 he was president of Standard Lubrication Company at the Brighton Abattoir and superintendent of Leonard and Bird Oil Company. He died in Orwell VT in July 1900, though he is listed in the 1902 Boston directory. 5 Alice G. Reed and Mary W. Reed to Frank H. Reed, 1 April 1890, MSD 1973:201; Alice G. Reed, Lexington, and Mary G. Miller, Newton, to Frank H. Reed, 3 October 1902, MSD 2995:352. Alice left Lexington by 1904 for Plainfield, New Jersey, where she lived with a cousin until she died in 1924. Mary married Edward Furber Miller (1866-1933), a professor and later head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1900. The couple lived in Newton, and Mary was still living there in 1940.