“The American holly is quite common here,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “I heard a lark sing, sweet and strong, and heard robins.” Thoreau, a naturalist and philosopher and author of Walden, was describing the rural North End estate of his friend Daniel Ricketson, which eventually became Brooklawn Park. Born in 1813 to Quaker parents, Ricketson was seriously injured in two accidents involving horses, leading to lifelong hip pain and severe headaches. Although he practiced as a lawyer, he dedicated himself to the study of nature and literature. Ricketson purchased the estate in 1851 as a retreat from his main residence, Woodlee, about a mile south on Acushnet Avenue. He named his refuge Brooklawn and surrounded himself with apple orchards, gardens, and grazing cows, and eventually built a farmhouse with wide porches for his family. Ricketson’s first building at Brooklawn was a rustic 12 x 14 foot shack with gingerbread trim, exposed beams on the inside and a small stove for heat. Ricketson called it the “Shanty.” He covered two interior walls with slips of paper on which he wrote ideas and sentences from his favorite authors, some of them his friends, like Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William Ellery Channing, who all visited him at the Shanty. Two years prior to Ricketson’s death in 1896, the city of New Bedford acquired Brooklawn intending to use it as a public park. In 1892, the landscape design firm of Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliott had submitted a plan to construct a chain of public parks in the city linked by a promenade and wide parkway, reasoning that “nothing is so refreshing to the tired townspeople as pure rural landscape.” The parkway would loop around Rodney French Boulevard to Rockdale Avenue, Hathaway Road, and Ashley Boulevard (then called Bowditch Street), ending at Brooklawn. The plan received approval but stalled due to changes in political leadership and a national depression. The city eventually built some of the parks independent of the proposal, including Hazelwood Park, Buttonwood Park, and Brooklawn Park. The city’s mill workers enjoyed Brooklawn Park’s duck pond, sledding hill, and ice skating rink with a warming house designed by New Bedford architect Louis E. Destremps. In 1958, Storyland opened at the park, featuring climbable nursery rhyme scenes, a spouting Moby Dick, and a real F-94 Starfighter jet plane. The city tore down Ricketson’s farmhouse in 1971, and ten years later, it declared the Shanty, which had fallen into disrepair, a nuisance and dismantled it. Persistent rumors claim the Shanty was stored at the city yard, but it has yet to be rediscovered.
]]>Despite the rain, a troupe of bicyclists and mustached men costumed as knights, clowns, pages, and a prince paraded through the streets of Pawtucket. Thousands of people from Rhode Island and the adjoining states thronged the streets. For a week, all of Pawtucket celebrated one hundred years of cotton production with lavish decorations, elaborate parades, and both horseback and bicycle races. One might wonder why bicycles featured so prominently at a festival of cotton, but in Pawtucket, the two have had a long and interconnected history.
Slater Mill, which gained early fame as the first cotton spinning mill in the United States, changed hands many times over the course of the nineteenth century. By 1865, it was owned by the Spencer family of Pawtucket.
Around this time, velocipedes, commonly called “boneshakers” for their rough effect on riders’ bodies, were gaining popularity. These early bicycles, made entirely of wood, were eventually enhanced by the introduction of lightweight metal frames and air-filled tires. These improvements in safety and comfort brought about the American bicycling craze of the 1890s.
Anticipating this fad, Henry L. Spencer opened a bicycle shop on his father’s property in downtown Pawtucket – in a structure adjoining the old Slater Mill building. Spencer did a booming trade, becoming the second proprietor of bicycles within the state. As profits expanded and interest in bicycling increased, he transformed the third floor of Slater Mill into a riding rink and bicycling school where customers could practice the art of riding bicycles in a supervised setting.
Residents of Pawtucket were proud of their unique and varied industrial heritage. Henry L. Spencer, alongside cotton magnates and textile industrialists, was numbered one of Pawtucket’s prominent citizens worthy of mention in an illustrated history of the city published in the 1890s. The varieties of industry undertaken at the old Slater Mill building in less than a century – from cotton spinning to bicycling – were described as the “epitome of the progress of the century.”
When Pawtucket hosted its weeklong celebration to mark its “Cotton Centenary” in 1890, it was no surprise that bicycles featured prominently in the festivities. The centenary featured many contests, including horseracing and a regatta, but the bicycle races, held on the final day of the celebration, were the most popular. Three races took place: an intensive three-mile race that drew participants from around New England, a one-mile race limited to local riders, and a half-mile boys’ race. It is likely that William F. Almy, the triumphant winner of the boys’ race that day, as well as many of the other local contestants, had learned to ride at H.L. Spencer’s Bicycle Rink, a prominent sponsor of the day’s festivities.
Outside of Pawtucket, the bicycling craze had far-reaching effects. By 1896, noted suffragist Susan B. Anthony believed that “the bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world” and a group of cyclists called the League of American Wheelmen quite literally paved the road for the automobile by lobbying for safer streets.
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