One woman approached me at a book signing, her eyes brimming with tears. “I am John Callahan’s grandniece,” she said to me with a catch in her voice. Callahan was the forty-three-year-old paver for the City of Boston who died from shock and pneumonia on January 20, 1919, five days after the molasses flood, at the Haymarket Relief Station. On the night of the flood, Callahan’s wife, Kittie, and her cousin Mary Doherty visited him. John Callahan, in terrible pain from a fractured pelvis, asked his wife to leave the room and fetch water to wash molasses from his hair. With his wife out of earshot, John confided to Mary Doherty that he was “sinking fast” but said that he did not want Kittie to know. “We knew he had been killed in the molasses flood, but we never really knew how he died until you wrote this book,” Callahan’s grandniece said. “Now we know about his final hours and we know he was courageous to the end. Thank you.”
There were many others for whom Dark Tide seemed to satisfy a craving to learn more about their ancestors’ role in the molasses flood story. I met the elderly children of Peter Curran, who was caught in the molasses wave as he was delivering hogs to the Commercial Street wharf. Curran suffered broken ribs, a severely bruised thigh, a wrenched back, and “severe nervous shock,” and he was bedridden for a month after the flood. His children, who never knew the full extent of his injuries, told me that their parents applied the monetary settlement from U.S. Industrial Alcohol toward the purchase of their first home, “so at least some good came of the disaster.”
I met others whose ancestors were killed in the tragedy who expressed shock and dismay at the victims’ suffering but also shared their deep gratitude that Dark Tide finally told their relatives’ stories: the grandnephew of Flaminio Gallerani (whose body was fished from the harbor eleven days after the flood), the grandson of the sister of Maria Distasio (the ten-year-old girl who was killed), and the granddaughter of Michael Sinnott (at seventy-six, the oldest person to die in the flood). “It must have been a terrible way to die, especially for an elderly man like him,” Sinnott’s granddaughter said. For others, Dark Tide illuminated the shadowy corners of family history. “My husband and I [just] realized how tragic this accident was,” wrote the wife of the grandson of Patrick Breen, a forty-eight-year-old teamster for the City of Boston Paving Department who was hurled into Boston Harbor by the molasses wave and died four days later from pneumonia and infection. “No one in his family spoke about it much; perhaps because Grandma just wanted it that way….”
This afterword begins with a document written by an unsung hero on the first day of the molasses flood story. While Cam Burnap is not a character in Dark Tide, his family restored his involvement in the flood’s history by preserving his remarkable letter to his mother. It seems appropriate to conclude this account of familial connections at the other end of the spectrum, with the observations of grandchildren of a hero who was an integral part of the book, and whose contributions occur much later in the flood saga: the plaintiffs’ lead attorney, Damon Everett Hall.
I was lucky enough to hear from several of Hall’s grandchildren, who not only offered their opinions on Dark Tide but also added brushstrokes of color and texture to their grandfather’s portrait that only family members can highlight. “You have portrayed our grandfather in a most favorable light,” wrote Martha Hall Bliss Safford, one of Hall’s five grandchildren. “You might want to know a little more about the man called Damon Hall.” She described an educated, family-loving, tough, quick-witted, fair-minded man, the son of a minister, whose influence spanned generations. “In his search for the truth he was honorable, but relentless, exposing the man or woman who wouldn’t tell the truth or covered it up,” Safford wrote to me. “You [describe him as] ‘feisty’—not if it means ‘touchy’ or ‘quarrelsome,’ but its second meaning (American Heritage Dictionary)—‘full of spirit and pluck, frisky and spunky’—that, I certainly would agree with!” Two other grandchildren, Sandra Hall Sampson Sloan and her brother David Synnott Sampson wrote jointly: “Our general feeling about Buba [the nickname Hall’s grandchildren gave him]—as passed down by his wife and our parents—was that he personified the law and all that was good about it. He made it an honorable profession because he was an honorable man who believed deeply in the power of the law to create justice.” He was also a man with a sense of the mischievous when it came to his grandchildren and their friends. “The only time I was aware of his steel-trap legal mind was when he ‘proved’ to a young friend of mine that he hadn’t been born because he couldn’t remember the event!” wrote granddaughter Sara Stedman Russell. “Our young neighbor ran screaming home!”
All of the grandchildren described Hall’s love of family and devotion to his wife, Mimi—their grandmother—as the cornerstone of his character. “[They] lived in a wonderful house in Belmont that overlooked Boston,” wrote Sloan. “It was a wonderful place for children, with a dumbwaiter in the kitchen, an old globe in the den, and lots of hiding places and books. He died in the house, but while he lived, it was the center of his family universe…. He repeatedly stressed to his three daughters—and they to us—the motto that was engraved over the gates of Williams College [Hall’s alma mater]—‘Climb high, climb far, your aim the skies, your goal the stars.’ We have letters from him to us even when we were just infants. He already felt we were important enough…to get our own beautiful letters.” Reliving her own memories, granddaughter Susan Alden lamented: “One of life’s disappointments is that grandchildren don’t know their grandparents when their grandparents are young and in their prime, and grandkids don’t know enough to ask questions about the past.”
The Hall grandchildren had heard of the molasses flood lawsuit, and Dark Tide answered many of their factual questions about the case and their grandfather’s role in achieving justice for the victims. Yet they were most proud that the story portrayed the man as they remembered him. Sandra Hall Sampson Sloan summed up their collective feelings: “Your book offered us a chance to get to know Damon Hall beyond his role to us as a grandfather and to confirm our belief that he did, indeed, fight for the underdog, and was, indeed, one of Boston’s finest lawyers of the era.”
I realized after reading Sloan’s letter that even while Dark Tide helped these descendants fill in the blanks about their family histories, my encounters with them in 2003 and 2004 told me so much more about the real-life characters who were part of this story of nearly a century ago. One of the great thrills about writing and reading history is to feel a direct connection to the past. I am grateful to the relatives of Cam Burnap, John Callahan, Peter Curran, Flaminio Gallerani, Maria Distasio, Michael Sinnott, Patrick Breen, and Damon Everett Hall for sharing their memories and providing me with that connection. They all said Dark Tide did the same for them.
Thus, we have been fortunate enough to forge the strongest bond possible between writer and reader. We have learned from each other.
Stephen Puleo
May 2004
Beacon Press
25 Beacon Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02108-2892
www.beacon.org
Beacon Press books
are published under the auspices of
the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.
© 2003, 2004 by Stephen Puleo
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
08 07 06 05 04 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.
This is a work of nonfiction. All of the characters and events depicted in this book are real.
Text design by Dean Bornstein
Composition by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Puleo, Stephen.
Dark tide : the great Boston molasses flood of 1919 / Stephen Puleo
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and in
dex.
ISBN 0-8070-5020-2 (cloth)
ISBN 0-8070-5021-0 (pbk.)
E-ISBN 978-0-8070-9667-3
1. Boston (Mass.)—History—1865– 2. Floods—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century. 3. Industrial accidents—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century. 4. Molasses industry—Accidents—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century. 5. Alcohol industry—Accidents—Massachusetts—Boston—History—20th century. I. Title.
F73.5.P97 2003
363.11′9664118—dc21
2003010433
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