The breakaway faction and the new members made a scene at the next general meeting of Company Eight and threatened Sears and those loyal to him. Chief Engineer Amory intervened, using the authority of the city government to expel the new members. Sears had come full circle: Officials now recognized that he had built something that was worth protecting. The coup attempt ultimately failed, but with every step Sears took, he felt his company grow more brittle.
1833
When Eben Sears told his brother that he wanted out of Company Eight, the writing was on the engine-house wall: Sears’s experiment was coming to an end. Over the course of a few months, between January and May 1833, Sears watched the pile of returned badges grow as men resigned in the face of harassment and obstructions—their furniture vanishing, the rival companies breathing down their necks, the mutineers and ex-members trying to gain control, the government officials flip-flopping about regulating the department or loosening the reins, and George Veazie’s embarrassing conviction.
Even Sears grew exhausted from the disruption and disappointment. He craved a settled life. On January 24, 1833, he had married Mary Eastabrooks Crease, the younger sister of Eben’s wife, Eliza. He had a new project to throw himself into: starting a family.
Sears’s Company Eight finally disbanded altogether in the early summer of 1833. The engine was taken over by a new group that included former members—as well as key alumni of archrival Company Twelve, whose ambitious assistant foreman, Joseph Drew, became the new captain of Eight. The tablet admonishing “No drinking of liquor” was probably the first thing to come down as Eight returned to its old habits. Almost immediately, the new Eight challenged Company Thirteen to a public competition between their engines in the Boston Common on July 4. Company Thirteen, likely the most sympathetic among the other fire crews to Sears’s reform push, declined the challenge, citing its experience of the “evil arising out of such meetings.”
Six months later, the old Franklin Schoolhouse caught fire, incurring thousands of dollars’ worth of damage. The incident came only a few months after the new officers of Company Eight petitioned the city for upgrades to the engine house. Whether the fire was a message to the slow-moving government bureaucracy to comply with their demands, an arson committed by a rival company, or an accidental fire that started in the building’s furnace (as the Boston Post reported), it remained a startling image: the epicenter of Sears’s reform movement, engulfed in flames. To add insult to injury, a thief braved the fire in order to steal a writing desk and some ammunition.
Misfortune followed Sears, too, after his departure from Company Eight. His and Mary’s first child, Willard, died at birth in the fall of 1833, exactly two years to the day after his niece Eliza died. Two years later, Mary died during the birth of a second son, Samuel—who also died—barely two and a half years after she and Sears had married.
After the loss of his family, Sears threw himself into his business dealings and social causes with even greater ardor. He bought Boston’s Marlboro Hotel, which had been famous for its tavern at the terminal of a stagecoach line. Sears did what only Sears would even try to do, turning an establishment known for raucous drinking into a temperance hotel. It was not only a complete break with the Marlboro’s history but an entirely new concept: There was no drinking, smoking, or profanity permitted. The landlord said grace before meals, and a Bible passage was read and hymns sung in the lobby twice a day. The transformation proved unexpectedly savvy from a business standpoint. The Marlboro soon became the go-to accommodation for the many devout Christians who passed through Boston.
When no venue in Boston would lease a room to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society for its annual meeting, Sears had his employees put in studwork and platforms in the hotel stable and provided seating for the audience. He soon razed the stable and replaced it with a chapel, where hotel guests were expected to attend services and which Sears leased out for meetings and lectures.
Some of these events were abolitionist or otherwise related to Sears’s personal crusades, but giving a platform to speakers whom nobody else would host became its own cause. The devout Christian Sears liked to say that, given the opportunity, he would welcome Abner Kneeland, the radical preacher who declared churchgoers’ traditional view of God “a chimera of their imagination” and was about to become the last person in America convicted of blasphemy. In addition to political reformers and advocates, the chapel played an important role in literary and cultural history; it was the first venue for the Lowell Lectures, a famed speaking series that brought James Russell Lowell, Louis Agassiz, and William James to the Marlboro.
The city marshal of Boston—a forerunner to police chief, which the city did not yet have—warned Sears in the spring of 1837 not to allow Sylvester Graham to hold a meeting at the Marlboro chapel for a women’s group. Graham was controversial for advocating vegetarianism and a new kind of flour that would later give rise to the graham cracker. A mob of bakers and brewers had already prevented Graham from delivering his lecture once, at Amory Hall on Washington Street, a block away from the Common, by threatening a riot. “I am in favor of freedom of speech,” Sears said to the city marshal. “If the time has come to decide the question whether that freedom can be maintained, I am as ready to meet it on the subject of Grahamism as on any other reform.”
“We can do nothing to stop a mob,” the marshal said. “Your building will most likely be torn down.”
“Let it be done,” Sears replied. He was not particularly interested in Graham’s diet. With typical grandiosity, he assured the marshal that he was ready to offer himself “as a sacrifice on the altar of freedom.”
Boston’s new mayor, Samuel Atkins Eliot, reiterated the city marshal’s warnings and again urged Sears to cancel the lecture. “Our police is nothing, nor can we depend upon the military.”
“It is said by some that public opinion is human omnipotence,” Sears told Eliot. “But when it is going wrong, it should be made right.” To Sears, giving in to what he called “mobocracy”—rule by those who seemed most dangerous—would flip the correct social order of things, allowing the powerful to deprive the downtrodden of their rights on a whim and, conversely, permitting the poor to demand that those who had earned wealth and power yield it.
The mob descended on the Marlboro as predicted. Sears had been directing one of his construction crews to pull down some plaster for a repair project, and knowing that he would have no protection from city officials, he told his workmen to place the stripped plaster and some chemical lime near the windows. When Sears could not persuade the anti-Graham mob to go away peacefully, he went back inside the hotel, climbed to an upper floor, and gave a signal, at which point he and the workers shoveled the mixture of mortar and lime into the air. The cloud of noxious dust temporarily blinded the crowd, and it dispersed without causing further trouble. Sears’s heady days with the fire department had taught him that however lofty his ideals, brawlers were to be met on their own terms.
A few weeks after his victory over the rioters, Sears, now 33, took a trip to New York and married for the second time, to a 23-year-old Vermont antislavery activist named Susan Hatch. It was during this stage of his renewed domestic contentment, four years since his brief career as a fireman, that Sears returned to their home near the entrance to the Boston Common one afternoon to find a group of unexpected visitors waiting for him.
1837
Sitting in the Searses’ parlor were representatives from eight of Boston’s fire-insurance companies. While the fear of fire had for years been a boon to the city’s insurance industry, the worsening performance of the city’s firefighters meant the firms regularly paid out big settlements. The city had been forced to disband or accept resignations from six more fire companies for misconduct. The latest delinquent edition of Company Eight had just abandoned its engine in angry protest against another new city ordinance. The successes and ambitions of Sears’s squad might have been short-lived, but they had not been for
gotten.
“Mr. Sears,” pleaded one of his guests. “The city government is helpless, and what are we to do?”
Sears wasn’t eager to relive the ignominious end of his Company Eight experiment. “Really, gentlemen,” he said, “I have no advice to offer.”
“Mr. Sears, we have organized an impromptu company and have taken one of the engines. We are trying to do something so that the city may not be entirely unprotected. We want you to come and help us out of difficulty.”
Sears sensed an opportunity, though it was not the one the visitors had in mind. He agreed to take the Boston Brahmins (as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes years later would famously brand the city’s elite) out to the Common and train them in basic firefighting techniques. In the new company were leaders in various fields in Boston, including George Hayward, a prominent surgeon who lived in Beacon Hill, and Deacon Charles Scudder. It was surreal for Sears to once again be called captain, to pull on a fire cap and adjust it over his now receding widow’s peak.
Sears had brought along some of the members of his old team of firemen, who put the blue bloods through the ringer. “Man the hose!” yelled one of his assistants as the aspiring volunteers tried haplessly to screw the sludge-filled segments together. “Get down on your knees, take that hose between your legs, pinch it between your knees and get it together.” With a crowd gathered, the aristocratic executives in fine coats and neckcloths sprayed themselves with water and grease as they tried shooting water up a flagpole, a scene memorialized with glee by a local cartoonist.
“Gentlemen,” Sears told them when it was over, “I will have nothing to do with a volunteer fire department. I will not do anything unless you organize a paid force.” He had made his point. Instead of a new fire company, a committee was put together to pressure the mayor and the city council to consider Sears’s idea.
Momentum slowly began to pick up. Then, a few months into the campaign, a group of fire companies got into an altercation with a large Irish funeral procession—it started with an apparently accidental collision between a fireman and a funeral-goer—that turned into a nearly citywide brawl. The fight, which came to be known as the Great Broad Street Riot, was brutal and bloody, though somehow no one was killed. It was one of the ugliest incidents the fire department had ever been involved in, and Company Eight was right in the middle of it.
Between the political pressure and the riot, Mayor Eliot and the City Council were compelled to act. They passed legislation reorganizing the entire department, replacing the volunteer system with a paid (though not yet full-time) professional force. This experiment created the first professional fire department in the country. People joked that only free blacks and the Irish would make up the companies—the implication being that no one else would be low enough on the professional ladder to consider being a fireman a paid occupation. But the new Boston model would be followed in every city in the United States. Sears’s Company Eight, as one newspaper put it later, had been “the entering wedge that finally split, and broke up the existing system.”
Epilogue
The men who had come together to join and challenge Sears’s Company Eight went their separate ways over the years. William Willet, who had commanded Engine Eight in the days when it refused to accept Quincy’s implementation of a board of engineers, joined the board himself shortly after the company’s disbandment. Eben and Eliza’s family continued to expand, adding four more children in the years after little Eliza’s death, and Eben had more time for his busy household; he was still involved in some of his younger brother’s construction projects but was content to let Sears tackle the most ambitious ones without him. Sears and his second wife had no children, but he remained close throughout his life with his nieces and nephews. One of the ringleaders of the attempted takeover of Company Eight in 1832, carpenter William Weston, died a few years later at 29, from heavy drinking, while Joseph Drew, who inherited Sears’s captain’s badge, had to testify his way out of a scandal when caught at the scene of the burning of a Catholic convent.
George Veazie, whose arrest for counterfeiting helped push Sears’s project off the rails, received a pardon more than halfway into his four-year sentence. His family had petitioned the governor on the basis of Julia Veazie’s poor health, and the fact that Veazie’s father had died shortly after Veazie’s conviction, leaving his younger children in precarious positions. Veazie’s uncle promised that his nephew would “live in future an exemplary and honest life” and be “a useful and industrious citizen.” In 1843, Veazie reportedly went west to follow the gold rush, only to return to Quincy defeated, unsuccessful at another shortcut to wealth.
Sears accumulated more businesses and causes, always happy to defy the conventional wisdom of the establishment. He helped to charter the Female Medical College in Boston, with a mission to train women doctors, to make childbirth safer—a legacy of his sorrow over losing his first wife and sons. He was also a patron and original board member of a new evangelical Christian college in Ohio called Oberlin, one of the first colleges to be coeducational and to admit African-American students. He helped guide the formation of the Northern Pacific Railroad and built some of the first major buildings in San Francisco (later destroyed, ironically, by fire).
He also kept his promise to the executives who had visited his home that if Boston’s fire department was professionalized, he would be involved. With the new department in place, Sears helped restructure Company Nine, known as Despatch. Sears was briefly a member, and he brought in Jonas Fitch, a trusted employee at his construction company, as the captain.
With the revamped department in place, Boston developed a kind of nostalgic curiosity about the freewheeling days of the volunteer department. Stories of Sears’s exploits as the head of Company Eight were passed down within his family and among his contemporaries at the fire company. But aside from a few obscure newspaper articles, his legacy was never preserved, and he appears to have been forgotten long ago. With all the literati and reporters he encountered, Sears could have ensured that a definitive chronicle was written, but that wouldn’t fit the style of a “true-hearted mechanic,” as the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator called him.
Besides, Sears preferred looking forward to looking back. Once the fire department was in place, he added another title to his résumé, taking advantage of the safer new order he’d helped forge. He started his own fire-insurance company and installed himself as its president.
A Note on Sources
The most recent mention I can find of Willard Sears’s Company Eight is a three-sentence summary in a 1967 book about the Boston police by Roger Lane called Policing the City. Earlier, in addition to references to his time in the fire department in obituaries of Sears in 1890, there was an article in the Boston Herald in 1884, for which at least one former member (and, I suspect, Sears) shared memories of Company Eight with an unnamed journalist. But because the records of the Boston Fire Department from the 1830s are so fragmented, the full story has never been told.
I pieced together that story from what survives of the early fire department records, including correspondence, membership lists, city council communications, broadsides, fire-company constitutions and bylaws, and the minutes of meetings of Company Thirteen and Company Six, the only ones I have found that survived from the years Sears was involved in Company Eight. I also reviewed many Boston newspapers from the time. There was indispensable material in the Boston City Archives, the Bostonian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Boston Public Library Special Collections, where Kimberly Reynolds was a great help. Elizabeth Bouvier of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court archives and the staff of the State Archives of Massachusetts helped me unearth the material about George Veazie’s arrest and trial.
Secondary sources contextualized Sears’s fire-company experiment, including Samuel Pearce May’s The Descendants of Richard Sares (Sears) of Yarmouth, Mass., 1638 – 1888, Josiah Quincy’s A Munic
ipal History of the Town and City of Boston, Edmund Quincy’s Life of Josiah Quincy, Arthur Wellington Brayley’s A Complete History of the Boston Fire Department, Amy Greenberg’s Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City, Robert S. Holzman’s Romance of Firefighting, Stephanie Schorow’s Boston on Fire: A History of Fires and Firefighting in Boston, Mark Tebeau’s Eating Smoke: Fire in Urban America 1800–1950, and the Bostonian Society’s collection guide prepared by Phil Hunt. I also consulted Daniel Cohen’s enlightening “Passing the Torch: Boston Firemen, ‘Tea Party’ Patriots, and the Burning of the Charlestown Convent,” from the Journal of the Early Republic, and I benefited from personal correspondence with Cohen, James Teed of the Boston Fire Historical Society, and Eben Sears’s descendants Willard May, Susan May, and Wendy Eakin.
On an unexpected personal note, at the time I was finishing my work on this article, my wife was finishing research on the Cape Cod side of her family and found that she descends from Richard Sears, placing her and my children—and, less directly, me—in the same family tree as Willard Sears.
Credits
Company Eight, by Matthew Pearl, is Issue No. 44 of The Atavist,
published December 2014.
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