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The Colonial Society of Massachusetts September Volume XXII, Number Letter from the President Dear Members: HIS HAS BEEN a year of celebration for the TColonial Society. Our th anniversary has been observed in a number of programs. It will culminate in a festive Quasquicentennial Annual Meeting and Dinner at the Harvard Club on Thursday, November , when our Honorary Member, Mary Beth Norton, Mary Don - lon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell Uni - versity and President-Elect of the American Historical Association, will be the principal speaker. A major celebration earlier this year was the launch of our new website that raises the visibility of the Society not only among our members, but in the larger scholarly community. www.colonialsociety.org now makes the Colonial Society’s scholarship fully accessible not merely to our membership, but to a world-wide audience free of charge. All our published volumes, including those out of print, may now be called up on the internet for easy read - ing on a desktop, a laptop, or an I-pad. Every footnote is only a click away. Our entire backlist is searchable by a name, a place, or a word. We are all grateful to our Edi - tor of Publications John Tyler and Chair of our Com - mittee on Publications Kenneth Minkema for bringing A Biographical Sketch of Our Founder: the new website to fruition. Please mark Thursday, November , on your calen - Henry Herbert Edes, - dars for the Society’s Quasquicentennial Annual Meet - ing and Dinner. I encourage all members, near and far, to of the Colonial Society are aware join us for a memorable evening. We are inviting all past Mthat our society’s origins are embedded in the ex - participants in our Graduate Student Forum to be with tremely circumscribed membership policies of the nine - us at this event, so that we can meet and learn from the teenth-century Massachusetts Historical Society. For emerging generation of scholars in early American his - much of its life, the number of members in the MHS was tory. so restricted that Brahmin infighting was intense when - On behalf of the Colonial Society’s Council, I thank ever there was a vacancy; surviving members would you for your continuing interest and participation in the scheme and maneuver with Machiavellian dexterity to life and work of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. advance the cause of their favorite candidates. In , fourteen gentlemen, who had grown tired of waiting for a Sincerely, Donald R. Friary, President call from the Elysian Fields of the MHS, met at the in - The Colonial Society of Massachusetts stigation of Henry Herbert Edes and agreed to found a ticles appeared in the Publications of the Colonial Society of new organization dedicated to research into the history of Massachusetts . the Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, as well as The list of civic organizations to which Edes be - the publication of records and documents pertaining to longed was almost as long as that of his publications: the those two places. And so, the Colonial Society was born. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American In many ways, Edes would have been an ideal mem - Historical Association, the Bostonian Society, the ber of the MHS. He had dedicated every moment of his Bunker Hill Monument Association, the Cambridge leisure time to genealogical and historical research, with Historical Society, the Essex Institute, the Unitarian a list of publications that spilled over several pages. His Historical Society, and the historical societies of Maine, forebears on both sides included passengers aboard the Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. The crowning laurel, Mayflower and his great-great uncle was Benjamin Edes, membership in the Massachusetts Historical Society, did the printer of the Boston Gazette , the principal mouth - not come until , three years before his death. Perhaps piece of the patriot cause in the years leading up to the this last achievement was facilitated by the fact that Har - American Revolution. But he lacked a crucial credential: vard had awarded him an honorary master’s degree in he did not have a Harvard degree. and he had been editor of the Harvard Quinquen - Edes’s father died when he was just two-and-a-half. nial Catalogue since . For much of his early life, he and his mother lived with Edes married Grace Williamson of Boston in , his grandfather in Charlestown and were supported by the daughter of an eminent Boston lawyer, who shared the charitable gifts of his uncles. When the last of his un - his passion for historical research, and they often worked cles died, he was the sole support of his mother and two together long into the night, each the other’s best critic sisters. For the first eighteen years of his career, he and proofreader. They set up housekeeping in Cam - worked for the Everett Mills, but in he became bridge, where their home was renowned for congenial manager and treasurer of the Conveyancers Title Insur - gatherings of Boston and Cambridge intelligentsia, often ance Company of Boston. mixing both young and old. Edes himself was famous for Edes published his first note in the New England putting his guests at ease and drawing out the best in Historic and Genealogical Register at age and became a them conversationally. In the quaint language of an ear - member of the NEHGS that same year. Most of his early lier age, Alfred Johnson wrote, “their generous board left publications concerned the city of his birth: volumes naught to be desired in the way of material things.” A of Charlestown City Records, Wyman’s Genealogies and person of broad culture, Edes loved old operas, often Estates of Charlestown , and The History of the Harvard playing arias he learned by heart for his guests. An assid - Church (Charlestown’s sole Unitarian parish during the uous collector of eighteenth-century prints, he helped to period - ). In , he completed the second vol - found the da Vinci Club of Boston, whose president at ume of the Annals of King’s Chapel from the Puritan Age of one time was Richard Morris Hunt. New England to the Present Day , a work begun by Henry Nearly all Edes’s obituaries comment on his prepos - Wilder Foote. Thereafter, nearly all Edes’s notes and ar - sessing appearance. He was tall, and his wide white Quasquicentennial Annual Meeting and Dinner We encourage all Members and Graduate Forum alumni to gather for a grand celebration of the th anniversary of the society at the Harvard Club, Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts on Thurs - day, November , , : pm . The evening will include our annual meeting, cocktails and dinner, followed by remarks by Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History at Cornell University, and president-elect of the American Historical Association. Invitations will be in the mail in October. If you have any questions please contact Beth Bower at [email protected] or - - . The Colonial Society of Massachusetts moustache contributed to his almost military bearing. He “Although no loss is irreparable,” commented one cut quite a figure on State Street since he persisted in the fellow member at the time of Edes’s death, “few societies correct business attire of his youth long after it was fash - have been as indebted to one person so much as the ionable: a tall silk hat, an immaculate white standing col - Colonial Society to Mr. Edes. From [a] small, but lar, a cutaway coat, pearl gloves, and a cane. well-planned beginning came into being one of the most Edes was the Colonial Society’s first editor, estab - effective historical societies in the country, a society lishing the format of its publications and choosing our whose publications have been models of bookmaking tasteful blue and gold bindings. Even when it was de - and have preserved a mass of valuable material, and cided in that the amount of work involved in the whose influence has been markedly great in stimulating Society’s publications exceeded what a volunteer editor an interest in colonial history.” could accomplish (a development he did not entirely ap - prove of), Edes continued as treasurer and the CSM’s motivating force. According to his memoir in the Amer - ican Antiquarian Society’s Proceedings , “He conducted its Graduate Forum finances, planned its publications, arranged its meetings, and selected its members.” (So, the authoritarian meth - Nine graduate students gathered at the Colonial Soci - ods of Walter Whitehill had ample precedent!) Appar - ety’s Forum to share their research, leading members ently, his operating principle was, as he once remarked to of the Society on explorations of political thought, reli - Alfred Johnson, “Things don’t usually happen of them - gion, nature, and portrait art in early America. Society selves. If you wish events to shape themselves as they Members Jane Kamensky, James F. Cooper, Mary Sarah should, you must see to it that they do.” Bilder, and Thomas Paine moderated the lively panel dis - Perhaps Edes’s most lasting contribution to the So - cussions, and the graduate students and audience were ciety came from his work as treasurer. He foresaw that treated to an insightful closing commentary by Modera - dues alone could not sustain the cost of publications, tor David Hackett Fischer. even in the early days when the Society had no perma - The Graduate Forum is always an opportunity to nent abode with bricks and mortar to maintain. He was learn about new areas of inquiry in early America. This a persuasive solicitor of gifts and bequests, because he year’s Forum also included one participant, Tyler Rotter, rarely asked anything of others that he was not ready to who is studying at the University of Southern Mississippi do himself.

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