Boston

My Virginian ancestry is a fact over which I harbor little obsession, likely because my formative years were spent in New England. I attended grade school in communities like Chelmsford, Massachusetts and Nashua, New Hampshire, the Granite State. I ate ice cream as New Englanders are fond of doing: standing outside, in winter. Most people I know would be surprised to learn I could hold my own on the ski slopes.

And I attended my first baseball game at Fenway Park, instantly becoming a long-suffering addict—no johnny-come-lately citizen of Red Sox Nation am I. Tortured by Joe Morgan, Bucky “Bleeping” Dent, and Mookie Wilson, I have more than paid my dues. If they were fans, my ancestors would have had an easier time rooting for the Red Sox, founded in 1901 and champions in 1903, long before the Curse of the Bambino. We’re not sure when the Cromar family left Boston, but it may have been as late as 1912, so perhaps they even got to a game at the newly opened Fenway Park.

1 | The Huntington Avenue American League Baseball Grounds, the first home of the Red Sox, during the 1903 World Series. | Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
2 | Fenway Park in 1914 during the World Series. | Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

Retracing the steps of my ancestors

After growing up in New England and pinging back to the South where I attended college, I felt an inevitable draw to pong back north and start a career in Boston. Indulging in those impulses of young adulthood, I was unaware how accurately I was rewinding the tape of my great-grandparents’ history. Living along the Emerald Necklace, first in the Fenway and later in Jamaica Plain, I shadowed their lives in next-door Roxbury Crossing, Mission Hill, and Dorchester, neighborhoods where they raised the family that included my grandfather Charles.

Perhaps my later discovery of a New England sojourn by Scottish ancestors has offered a small measure of deliverance from vexing skeletons in the closet of a Southern pedigree—Jamestownian predation, slaveholding exploitation, Confederate sedition. Perhaps not. The recent experience of our country demonstrates that we collectively ignore what we have not yet reconciled at our peril. But I digress.

Theodore blazes the trail …

Theodore James Cromar, whom we met in an earlier post, logged two years of itinerant, journeyman stonemasonry after his American debut in 1891. He seemed to know precisely where he was bound upon arrival, because he did not tarry long in New York—records put him in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont as past residences prior to naturalization. This path was well-worn by other Aberdeenshire granite men before him, so we can assume Thuddie, as he was known, networked his way to these New World bastions of the granite trade.

It is not an uncommon immigrant experience to work hard, live frugally, and send money home, so it’s not difficult to imagine this was the strategy he and Christiana Berry Robb devised to afford her passage to the New World two years later.

… Christiana follows

We cannot pinpoint the exact timing and route of her journey with evidence, but if their American wedding is any clue, she likely traveled the same path as Thuddie: a steerage passenger to New York in spring or early summer of 1893, a year confirmed by later census records, and from there north. A landing in Boston itself would certainly not be out of the question, though the new facility at Ellis Island was a far larger and busier immigration processing facility than Boston had at the time. However they were reunited, Thuddie and Teenie were officially married in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 1, 1893, at the respective ages of 24 and 25.

A logical home base

A stonemason, of course, has to go where the work is, and Boston appears to have been a logical home base since the family’s geographic location remained unusually stable for a head of household holding down a typically itinerant occupation. This could be explained by no shortage of employment opportunity in Boston’s growing infrastructure, from granite curbing to grave monuments. Given the documentation of his later career, however, we have reason to believe that Thuddie was already on his way to being the kind of fine craftsman, with precision of hand and an artist’s eye, sought after in an architectural context.

We don’t have a confirmed record of his activity at any Boston construction sites or local quarries that produced notable granites like Milford pink, Fall River, and Quincy. Nevertheless, history records a prodigious amount of architectural activity in the period from 1891 onward that could keep food on a stonemason’s table. Many of these sites were within walking distance of the homes rented by the family, while others were accessible using the new MBTA subway and elevated lines close by:

Boston construction at the turn of the century

• Suffolk County Courthouse, 1893
• North Union Station, 1894
• First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1894
• Massachusetts State House expansion, 1895
• Boston Public Library McKim Building, 1895
• Armory of the First Corps of Cadets, 1897
• South Station, 1899
• Saint Leonard’s Church, 1899
• Symphony Hall, 1900
• Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1901
• Jordan Hall, 1903
• Westland Gate, 1905
• First Church of Christ, Scientist, Mother Church Extension, 1906
• Longfellow Bridge granite piers, 1907
• Museum of Fine Arts granite facade, 1909
• Boston Arena, 1910
• Copley Plaza Hotel, stone base, 1912

1 | The first subway car to be driven in regular traffic in the Boston subway system on September 1, 1897. Public transit could have made travel to construction sites simpler for Thuddie. | Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
2 | Boston Public Library McKim building under construction circa library | Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collections Online, CC BY-NC-ND
3 | Mother Church Extension construction, 1906 | Longyear Museum website, no known restrictions
4 | Masons moving stonework into place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, circa 1900. | Screen capture from Boston Landmarks Commission Study Report, no known restrictions

Smith Street

Beyond local work opportunities, Boston afforded access to a transportation network that could get Thuddie to building sites, quarries, and granite works in the region. We’ll see a couple of records of this below, but a clue as to the potential frequency of Thuddie’s itinerant work may lie in the birth record in the family. Scottish households tended to be large, extended affairs, with a new arrival every year or so being not uncommon. Though a large brood may have been inhibited for an immigrant household without an extended family of relatives to help with child-rearing, gaps between births could correspond to time away from home for a breadwinner. Thuddie and Teenie had their first three children spread over six years when the family resided at 22 Smith Street in the Mission Hill neighborhood.

The family may have outgrown the home at 22 Smith Street with the arrival of a third child, or perhaps they needed larger accommodations because of a somewhat surprising family reunion in the year previous to that: records indicate that Ann George, who had left Thuddie in the care of extended family decades before, emigrated to America in 1899 from Scotland under the name Annie Cromar. Her presence in the Smith Street home is documented in the 1900 Census. One way or another, it was getting crowded in the triple decker flat, so it’s reasonable to speculate that they moved to their next residence well before official records offer proof.

Warner Street

We don’t discover where that might have been until the final member of the family shows up in the person of my grandfather, Charles Robb Cromar, born on October 24, 1907. His birth certificate reveals the family had moved south to Dorchester, at 15 Warner Street.

1 | 15 Warner Street, centered in this view, as seen in the Dorchester Bromley Atlas of 1904. Horatio Adams owned property and could have been the landlord. The property was near Harvard Street Station in the center of Dorchester.
2 | Again with Warner Street centered, this time in the Walker Litho Map of 1908. The proximity of Franklin Park probably helped relieve some claustrophobia for the growing Cromar family.
All map screen captures taken at Mapjunction.com via Boston Planning & Development Agency

Neigborhood amenities

The duplex at Warner Street had 3 floors, and though 7 people under one roof was tight, it was able to handle the new arrivals. On those days when it could not, Dorchester offered many amenities that could relieve the family, all minutes away by foot: public transit access to the city, a commercial district in Dorchester Center, and a jewel in the Emerald necklace, Franklin Park, for some much-needed time with nature.

1 | Harvard Street Station as it appeared in January 1903, just a block away from the Cromars 4 years later on Warner Street | Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
2 | A scene from Franklin Park, about a 15 minute walk from Warner Street | Boston Public Library Flickr Photostream CC-NC-ND

A sojourn in Augusta, Maine

Around this time we start to get a better picture of the family dynamic, and perhaps an insight into the reuniting of Thuddie with his mother: the Cromars needed domestic help, and Ann may have been struggling with employment as an older, independent matron in Scotland. As a fine architectural craftsman, Thuddie began to take on more sophisticated work that possibly took him away from home for longer periods of time. We see evidence of this in a record-keeping oddity in the 1910 Census. In that count, we find Thuddie recorded as living as a lodger in the home of Edward L. Gilbert at 171 State Street in Augusta, Maine. What happened to the rest of the Cromar family? Had Thuddie abandoned home?

It turns out his sojourn in Augusta is coincidental with a major remodeling and expansion of the Maine Capitol Building that is documented from 1909 through 1910.

Major remodeling and enlargement of the Capitol during 1909-1910 established the present day appearance of the building based on designs by G. Henri Desmond.  The original front of the building was preserved,  as the length of the building was doubled to three hundred feet by extending the north and south wings.  A dome, rising to a height of one  hundred and eighty-five feet, was built to replace the original cupola.

About the State House, Maine State Legislature

It’s not difficult to connect this work with Thuddie’s presence in town, and in fact we see the address, 171 State Street, is literally a block away from the work site. It was impractical for him to commute back and forth from Boston to Augusta, so he was living there to work while the rest of the family stayed in Boston. This was possibly a common scenario throughout Thuddie’s working life as a mason.

Millet Street anomalies

The 1910 Census gets even stranger, though. While we see a record of Thuddie in Augusta that year, we also see him counted with his family in Boston, so there’s been an error of double-counting the head of the Cromar household. We find other surprises: for example, the family has moved since 1907 to 230 Millet Street, a ten minute walk away from Warner Street and still in Dorchester Center. Possibly this gave the family a bit of breathing room after Charles’ birth, or perhaps there were landlord-tenant issues. But none of this is more surprising than the fact that, on maps both current and historic, 230 Millet Street does not exist!

1 | A wide map view shows proximity of Warner and Millet Streets, just minutes apart on foot. Warner is west of the rail line, in blue, and Millet is to the east.
2 | Medium scale, with Millet Street centered, shows the block bound by Park to the north, Spencer to the east, Wheatland to the south, and Norwell to the west.
3 | Close-up reveals Boston’s idiosyncratic numbering system. Norwell is in the 230s on either side of Park Street, while Millet is in the 50s and 60s.
All map screen captures taken at Mapjunction.com via Boston Planning & Development Agency

Even primary sources get it wrong sometimes

The mystery of Millet Street demonstrates that even primary sources must be viewed through a skeptical lens. By digging around the record of this fictional address, we can create a reasonable hypothesis. In those days, a census taker would walk house by house, block by block, and record data in the order in which it was encountered, so on a record like this we can identify records belonging to other streets adjacent to the Cromar record. We can practically re-create the path walked by the census taker this way.

The block being worked at this time contained Park, Spencer, and Wheatland Streets. Spencer, running parallel to Millet, offers no clues about the numbering anomaly, but Norwell, parallel to the west and showing up earlier in the data-recording of that day, is numbered around 230 at the intersection with Park. It would seem our census taker, fed up with Boston’s house-numbering non-system, had by accident or design transposed Norwell’s numbering to Millet. If this theory is correct, I identify the actual address as 54 or 66 Millet Street, either just to the north or south of Park Street.

A move south

After these 1910 insights and anomalies, the trail grows stale, and we don’t see any signs of the Cromar family until we discover Ann George has passed away in Washington, D.C., on February 24, 1913. According to Glenwood Cemetery records, her address at time of death was 527 Irving Street, Northeast.

Irving Street, Washington, DC

Irving is a quiet street, tucked into a corner between the Old Soldier’s home to the west, and a reservoir and the Howard University campus to the south. It would have been extremely unlikely that Ann George, an elderly non-naturalized immigrant, would have moved to Washington on her own. More likely she resided with family. In 1913, it’s not plausible that the oldest sibling, 18-year-old Anne Christine, would have moved independently to the nation’s capitol and started a household, though she (in 1921) and sister Marion (in 1915) marry into families in the region, as we’ll see.

The most likely scenario is that the entire family had moved to D.C. to follow Thuddie’s work. There was not a copious amount of stonemasonry going on in the city at that time, though there were some major projects. That said, while the National Museum of Natural History completed construction in 1911, and work on the National Cathedral had begun in 1907, we can’t confirm Thuddie’s presence at any architectural site in the area. But a tempting opportunity must have come along, because a move from Boston to Washington is quite an undertaking for anyone, much less a large, working-class household.

1 | 527 Irving Street NW, Washington is the yellow structure near the center of the image. | Baist’s real estate atlas of surveys of Washington, District of Columbia : complete in four volumes, 1913 | Library of Congress
2 | Irving Street is the yellow street just above the reservoir north of Howard University, ending at the Soldier’s Home. Baist’s real estate atlas, 1913 | Library of Congress
3 | Greenwood Cemetery at right, Irving Street at upper center left. | Screen capture from Google Maps

Daughters’ marriages

Deeper roots in the area are established by the marriage of 18-year-old Marion Robb Cromar to Stanley Griffith Herr on August 18, 1915, in Washington, D.C. The couple makes their home at 1910 Hamlin Street, Northeast, and have a granddaughter for Thuddie and Teenie named Gene in 1917. Later, on August 27, 1921, Anne Christine Cromar married Clarence Oden Newton in D.C., and they resided in nearby Maryland. It’s possible that Anne, who by 1915 was 20 years old, had stayed in the city to seek her fortune while the Thuddie, Teenie, Theodore Robb, and Charles Robb moved on for employment.

We know the times in the second half of the Teens were turbulent. World War I was raging and the 1918 flu pandemic created a chaos we are now all too familiar with from our recent COVID nightmare. In 1917, the Cromar sons were 17 and 10 respectively, and Theodore Robb would not have been of a practical age to serve in the War before it concluded on November 11, 1918, nor would his father, now well over the age of 35. Instead, we find the family developing a relationship with Richmond, Virginia.

Broad Street Station, Richmond VA

According to our family oral history, Thuddie was a stonemason for the city’s Broad Street Station, constructed between 1917 and 1919. A formal record for this employment or a place of residence is still awaiting discovery, but of course the circumstantial proof exists in my grandfather’s continued residence in Richmond throughout the remainder of his life.

Richmond’s Broad Street Station ranks among the Commonwealth’s most distinguished and ambitious works of architecture. The design for this monumental edifice was provided by John Russell Pope (1874-1937), one of the most prominent architects of his day, whose work includes the designs for such nationally famous landmarks as the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art. Completed in 1919, after a construction period of two years, Broad Street Station was among the last of the great rail terminals to be built in what has been termed the “Golden Age of Railroads.”

National Register of Historic Places, statement of significance

1 | Construction view, circa 1918 | Style Weekly, photo by J. Charles Heller
2 | View from train yard, 1926 | RVA Hub, unknown photographer
3 | View of interior masonry details | Bluffton University, unknown photographer and date
4 | Contemporary exterior, repurposed as the Richmond Science Museum | Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA

To Annapolis

By the time Broad Street Station was completed in 1919, Thuddie was 51 years old, and had been a mason since his apprenticeship days in Scotland, more than 35 years in the trade. Teenie had been a housewife throughout their marriage. Their nest was slowly but surely emptying. We don’t see the entire family tarry long in Richmond, and by 1920 we have census proof that they are located at 181 West Street in Annapolis, Maryland, a short distance east of Washington, where we know the Cromar sisters have been.

1 | 181 West Street is in section 15 in the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Annapolis, circa 1921 | Library of Congress
2 | 181 West is seen at center toward right, the squarish structure, from the Sanborn map | RLibrary of Congress
3 | Up West Street toward the town center is Church Circle. This street scene is Main Street, similar in character to West, taken between 1910 and 1920. | Maryland State Archives

This compact capitol city of Maryland has a red-brick aesthetic, with the exception of the Naval Academy, so it’s a funny town for a stonemason’s residence without an occupational agenda. No significant construction is mentioned in the 1920s for Annapolis. Was this a good base from which to reach Washington, Richmond, and Baltimore for work? Did the harsh working life of stonemasonry force an early retirement? Perhaps some familial roots by marriage made this a logical choice. Anne Christine’s betrothed, Clarence, was living with his family in Annapolis in 1920, and Stanley Herr, Marion’s husband, was also a Marylander, although by way of nearby Montgomery and Prince George’s counties.

Another Census mystery solved

Whatever the reason, we find something puzzling in the Census of 1920: Theodore Robb is living at home working as a machinist in an Annapolis shipyard, but 13 year old Charles Robb is not recorded with them. Where is he? We know familial adjacencies are recorded in future records. For example, we’re aware that Theodore Robb in 1930 lives at 2809 Montrose Avenue, near Battery Park in Richmond. Charles Robb lives in 1930 at 507 North Boulevard, now known as Arthur Ashe Boulevard, close to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the infamous Confederate memorials of Monument Avenue. The brothers are a 15 minute drive from one another at that time, and there’s nothing in the family history to suggest any kind of estrangement.

Where did young Charles go?

There is a theory that can explain why Charles has gone missing in the Annapolis census. In 1920, Teenie took a journey back to Scotland, and while the two Theodores were busy with their occupations, there was no one at home to care for a youngster. Charles must have been left under the care of someone for the duration of Teenie’s long journey, and the identity of the family to which he was entrusted remains speculative. Candidates certainly include a sister, Marion or Anne, in D.C., though we don’t see evidence of Charles in the census for either of their households. Perhaps an unrecorded family friend in Annapolis or Richmond was his caretaker.

The passport application submitted on February 21 for Teenie’s voyage is rich with information in between the lines, a testament to what can be sleuthed from the simple act of form-filling we so take for granted. Here, for example, we have a document that verifies Teenie’s nickname as apt. She measures up at 5 feet 0 inches, as compared to Thuddie’s 6-foot 2-inch stonemason’s frame! We also confirm that Washington was in fact a residence along with Boston before that and Annapolis afterward, but Richmond merits no comment. Was the family actually based in Annapolis the whole time Thuddie labored on Broad Street Station?

A return to Scotland

As she describes the proposed journey, we learn she intends to be away for 3 months, precipitating the need for child care for her youngest. Her justifications have strike-throughs, as if she is debating the degree of candor necessary to divulge private matters to a bureaucracy. We learn from these scratchings that there’s legal work to tender: her father Charles Robb had passed in 1913, and her mother Ann Spence in 1919, as well as her brother Charles Robb, Jr., possibly in January of 1920, so there is an estate to settle due to deaths in the family. We also discover that the sister she wishes to visit, Mary Ann Robb, is suffering from some kind of illness (though not apparently a fatal one), because we can detect the word “sick,” aggressively but not totally eradicated.

Teenie travels from New York to Liverpool on the Columbia starting on April 17, 1920, according to her passport application, and a passenger manifest records her return to New York from Liverpool via the Aquitania on July 24. The voyages were quite an improvement over the immigration steerage class, as these were newer ships and the designs for Second and Third Class remediated the discomforts of her first trans-Atlantic voyage. We have reason to believe this was a solo journey: trans-Atlantic travel was still expensive, and Thuddie does not appear on a passenger manifest with his wife.

1 | Souvenir card for S. S. Columbia | Ships Nostalgia, no known restrictions
2 | Poster featuring a cross section of the R. M. S. Aquitania | Wikimedia Commons, Public domain

The 1920s

The Roaring Twenties appear to be quiet for Thuddie and Teenie after her trip to Scotland. It was a decade filled with weddings, starting with the aforementioned union of Anne Christine with Clarence Newton in 1921. Theodore Robb marries Mary Bryant Wilson in Petersburg, just south of Richmond, on June 2, 1922. Charles Robb is wed to my grandmother, Helen Hawkins, in Richmond on July 20, 1928.

Sadly, Theodore James Cromar did not live long enough to see all of his grandchildren born. He died on March 17, 1930, in Anne Arundel, Maryland, when he was 61 years old.

Life after Thuddie

Teenie, an independent Scottish spirit, stays in Annapolis but moves to 115 Main Street, called High Street in the 1930 Census. She lives long enough to see all her grandchildren enter the world, along with several great-grandchildren, including myself, though as an infant I retain no memory.

At the time of her passing, it appears she may have lost some of her independence, as the Maryland archive indicates the location of death as “Montg.” This is presumably Montgomery county, and Annapolis is of course in Anne Arundel. If this is correct, she most likely was spending her last days with daughter Marion or Anne and family.

Christiana Barry Robb died on December 25, 1960, in Maryland when she was 93 years old. She was buried along with Theodore at Cedar Bluff.

Thuddie and Teenie were an adventurous, spirited, and creative couple who passed many of these traits on to their offspring.

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More on the Granite Men

To find out more about Aberdeenshire granite men and their migrations, I recommend the following for further reading:

• Two granite men… 100 years apart – History Scotland blog
• Migrant Granite Workers – The Doric Columns
• Granite Masons – The Doric Columns
• The Granite Industry – The Doric Columns
• Transient trademen: Aberdeen emigrants and the development of the American granite industry
• Artisans and Craft Production in Nineteenth-Century Scotland
• Our Aberdeen: Granite slab skilful sign of the times
• Lenathehyena’s Blog – posts tagged “granite”
• The Granite Men: A History of the Granite Industries of Aberdeen and North East Scotland by Jim Fiddes