Site of Horticultural Hall

Bromley map of Boston and Roxbury, 1895.

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library

Quick Facts

Location:

100-102 Tremont Street

Significance:

Site of Horticultural Hall

OPEN TO PUBLIC:

No

MANAGED BY:

Private Building

Now demolished, the old Horticultural Hall served as an event space for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society. In 1864, the Horticultural Society moved to this new Hall on Tremont Street, which had an exterior of decorated columns and Greco-Roman statues.¹ Horticultural Hall became a space for the community, as described in King’s Handbook of Boston:

The ground-floor is occupied by stores; the second story by the Library Room of the society and a hall for the weekly exhibitions; and the upper story by a large and elegant hall used in addition to the lower hall at the annual and other important exhibitions. Both of these halls are often used for concerts and the better class of entertainments.²

Horticultural Hall served as the location for the first meetings of both the New England Woman Suffrage Association (NEWSA) in 1868 and the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association (MWSA) in 1870. Writing of the organizing convention of the MWSA, suffragist Henry Blackwell remarked, "From first to last, the Convention was a success. With such weight of character and variety of talent enlisted in its support, Woman Suffrage in Massachusetts is destined to speedy triumph."³ Suffragists continued to use Horticultural Hall for a variety of other meetings and events in the first decades of the movement.

Horticultural Hall, ca. 1870-1889. (Credit: Boston Public Library.)

Footnotes:

1. "History,” The Massachusetts Horticultural Society, accessed February 2021, http://masshort.org/History/.
2. Moses King, King’s Handbook of Boston, (Cambridge, MA: Moses King, 1881), accessed February 2021, https://books.google.com/books?id=QqxfEZuCf3kC.
3. Harriet Hanson Robinson, Massachusetts In the Woman Suffrage Movement: A General; Political, Legal And Legislative History From 1774 to 1881 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1881); “Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Convetion,” The Woman’s Journal, February 5, 1870, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Harvard University, https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:48852545$37i.