Month: October 2011

Old South Meeting House raises Revere bell

Modern(ish), Museums

The 210-year-old bronze bell cast by Revere & Sons purchased this summer from the First Baptist Church of Westborough was raised into the steeple of Boston’s Old South Meeting House on Sunday.

Mayor Thomas Menino struck the bell with a gavel, then before a cheering crowd, a crane slowly hoisted the 876-pound bell nearly 200 feet to a waiting inanimate iron rods extending from the bell tower. The rods were then drawn into the steeple sliding the bell into the clock tower. As soon the clock mechanism was stopped momentarily so it could be connected to the bell ringing mechanism, handbell choir Back Bay Ringers played “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and church bells all over Boston rang in unison welcoming the oldest Paul Revere bell on the Freedom Trail. (Not even the bell at the Paul Revere House is older; it was built in 1804.)

Other than the ceremonial gaveling, however, the Revere bell has not been rung yet. The striking mechanism needs a couple of weeks more work before the bell can peal once again. The bell itself, despite its age and an incident in 1938 when it was torn out of the Westborough steeple into a cemetery by a hurricane, is in excellent condition. Its wooden elements — the yoke and frame on which it rests and the bell wheel — needed far more attention than the bell itself. The yoke and frame are original and so were carefully restored.

The bell wheel had been hastily constructed after that 1938 hurricane. It was neither functional nor historical, so the Old South Meeting House enlisted the aid of Jeff D. Makholm, an economist who in his spare time loves building boats and recreating historical carpentry. Makholm had built a bell wheel for the Old South Church, so he had specific relevant experience. He used 19th century architectural drawings to recreate the wheel as it would have been out of quarter-sawn white oak with gold leaf accents.

The Old South Meeting House, famous as the place where the Boston Tea Party was launched in 1773, has not had a bell in the tower since 1876. Officials weren’t even sure the bell would ring properly given how much vertical real estate has grown around the small colonial building since then. Architect and historical preservationist Wendall Kalsow enlisted the aid of professional acoustician Lincoln B. Berry to determine whether the bell could actually be heard in the downtown Boston of today.

As good luck would have it, downtown Boston of today has even better bell acoustics than it had in 1801 when the bell was first cast.

Surrounding the steeple are tall buildings with reflective windows that cause the peal of a bell to bounce back toward its source. Instead of hearing one ring coming from the steeple, bystanders will find themselves enveloped by a cascade of bells coming from many directions.

A downtown pedestrian in 2011 would probably have a better listening experience than a colonial Bostonian as tones of C-sharp, E, and A tumble down the walls of neighboring skyscrapers.

“It’s kind of like a concert hall,” Berry said. “The tower’s proximity to various buildings is going to produce a nice ripple of reflection, and it will add some grandeur to the overall character of the sound.”

I can’t wait to hear it. Until then, here’s some video of the bell’s dramatic slow lift to the steeple.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JfWoCDfyXU&w=430]

Coat of arms saved from 1849 Montreal Parliament fire found

Modern(ish), Museums, Treasures

For five short years, between 1844 and 1849, Montreal was the capital of the Province of Canada. The Crown provinces of Upper Canada (English-speaking Ontario) and Lower Canada (French-speaking Quebec) were united in 1841 and three years later the capital was moved from Kingston, Ontario to newly renovated buildings in St. Anne’s Market in Montreal.

The Burning of the Parliament Building in Montreal, by Joseph Légaré, ca. 1849These were not easy days for our neighbors to the north. The repeal of the Corn Laws, protectionist legislation which had privileged Canadian exports by applying lower tariffs, in 1846 had left the Canadian economy reeling. With bankruptcies and defaults on the rise, Parliament passed a law indemnifying certain Lower Canadians who had lost property during the Rebellions of 1837-1838, aka the Patriots’ War, uprisings against the Crown that sought political reforms. Similar laws had been passed in aid of Upper Canadians, but the rebellion was so identified with French Lower Canada that Anglophones considered the new indemnity act the government “paying the rebels.”

In early 1849, the bill left committee and debate began. The English-language press was almost uniformly opposed to the bill (only one small daily published by a cabinet member supported it), just as the Francophone press uniformly supported it. The bill was amended to ensure that nobody convicted of treason during the rebellion would be reimbursed for their losses, but that did not satisfy its increasingly rabid opponents. The Rebellion Losses Bill passed both Houses of the Provincial Parliament on March 9.

All that was left was for the Provincial Governor, Lord Elgin, son of the Parthenon chiseler, to sign the bill. That wasn’t a foregone conclusion. Elgin was not a fan of the bill. Still, the bill had passed with solid majorities in both houses from Upper and Lower Canada delegates, and the Whig government of Lord John Russell in London supported it, so in the end Lord Elgin signed it into law on April 25, 1849.

When he left the Parliament building at 6:00 PM, he was greeted by a throng of irate Anglos. They pelted his person and then his carriage with rotten fruit and rocks, forcing him to flee at a gallop. A meeting was called for later in the evening supported by an incredibly incendiary Extra edition of the Montreal Gazette.

When Lord Elgin — he no longer deserves the name of Excellency — made his appearance on the street to retire from the Council Chamber, he was received by the crowd with hisses, hootings, and groans. He was pelted with rotten eggs; he and his aide-de-camps were splashed with the savory liquor; and the whole carriage covered with the nasty contents of the eggs and with mud. When the eggs were exhausted stones were made use of to salute the departing carriage, and he was driven off at a rapid gallop amidst the hootings and curses of his countrymen.

The End has begun.

Anglo-Saxons! you must live for the future. Your blood and race will now be supreme, if true to yourselves. You will be English “at the expense of not being British.” To whom and what, is your allegiance now? Answer each man for himself.

The puppet in the pageant must be recalled, or driven away by the universal contempt of the people.

In the language of William the Fourth, “Canada is lost, and given away.”

A Mass Meeting will be held on the Place d’Armes this evening at 8 o’clock. Anglo-Saxons to the struggle, now is your time.

Almost 2000 men went to that meeting. At first they worked on a petition to Queen Victoria demanding Elgin be recalled. Then the petition was set alight and the meeting became a mob that descended upon the Parliament building. The House was actually still in session, working late on a question of establishing an appeals court, when the crowd descended hollering imprecations, throwing stones and finally, setting the building on fire. The last entry for the day and the new entry for the next in the Journals of the Legislative Assembly put it succinctly:

Journal of Legislative Assembly Province Canada for April 25, 1849, and April 26

The Parliament building was a total loss, including the libraries and archives of Upper and Lower Canada which had been consolidated after Union. Two hundred books out of 23,000 were saved, as well as a portrait of Queen Victoria. The gilded pine Royal coat of arms which hung above the Speaker’s chair was presumed destroyed.

Robert Kaplan with coat of armsA hundred and thirty-plus years later, former Toronto MP and Canadian Solicitor-General Robert Kaplan was browsing a flea market in New York state when he found a gilded pine Royal coat of arms that looked a little worse for wear. The vendor told him it was the very same coat of arms that had once hung in the Parliament building when it succumbed to riotous flame in 1849. There were burn marks on the back and missing parts that suggested the story could be true, but Kaplan didn’t explore the connection to see if the artifact was authentic. Instead, he paid the Quebecois dealer $300 and hung the coat of arms above the piano in his New York apartment. He also touched up some of the gilding and let his kids color it with crayons.

There it remained until last year when Kaplan read that the Pointe à Callière Museum was expanding its excavation of the Place D’Youville Ouest, the site of the former Parliament building, looking for surviving artifacts. He wrote to the museum telling them about his flea market find and offering to donate the piece if they could confirm its authenticity. They could.

Royal coat of arms from Montreal Parliament buildingOn Friday, a beaming Francine Lelièvre, the museum’s director, made it official: The coat of arms is indeed the one that hung above the Speaker’s chair when an enraged mob torched the Parliament building on April 25, 1849, she said at a press conference where she and Kaplan unveiled the donation.

Visible damage, like the lion’s and unicorn’s missing heads, testify to the violence that laid waste to the building and a library containing government archives dating back to New France.

“A man sat on the Speaker’s chair, proclaimed the Assembly dissolved, and tore off and broke the coat of arms that crowned the podium and chair,” wrote a witness, Amédée Papineau, the son of Patriote leader Louis-Joseph Papineau.

Kaplan is sorry to see it go, but delighted to see it take its proper place in the history of Montreal and of Canada. He played an instrumental role simply by being the person who stumbled on it in New York. How many other people shopping the flea market that day would have even had occasion to realize and embrace its historical importance?

The Pointe à Callière Museum plans to construct an elaborate archaeological complex covering nine historical sites including the burned Parliament location, which will display some of the 50,000 artifacts from different periods found during the excavation while also preserving and displaying the remains of area historical buildings. The sites will be linked to each other by the William Collector Sewer, an underground tunnel 400 meters (1213 feet) long which is yes, a historical sewer, and which will combine exhibition space with a no-traffic, no-inclement weather, pedestrian-only look at the bowels of Montreal. For more about this fascinating project, see the Pointe à Callière website.

Hume’s Edinburgh mausoleum restored

Modern(ish)

When Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume died in 1776, his friend, famous architect Robert Adam, designed a mausoleum for him in the Old Calton Burying Ground in Edinburgh in keeping with Hume’s last wishes. Shortly before his death, Hume had written in his will: “I also ordain that, if I shall dye any where in Scotland, I shall be bury’d in a private manner in the Gallon Church Yard [aka Calton graveyard], the South Side of it, and a Monument be built over my Body at an Expence not exceeding a hundred Pounds, with an Inscription containing only my Name with the Year of my Birth and Death, leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest.”

His request would be fulfilled, although later additions and alterations would mar the dignified simplicity of Hume’s vision. Before his monument could be built, however, the great Skeptic and Empiricist, had to be buried in the plot he had secured for himself in Calton. The placid, even cheerful death (here’s how economist and friend Adam Smith described Hume’s final days in a letter to Hume’s literary executor, William Strahan) of so prominent an irreligious figure drew a great deal of public attention. Crowds assembled outside his house waiting to hear if he would change his mind about the improbability of an afterlife once death came a-knockin’.

After his burial, his friends stood guard at the grave site, pistols cocked and torches aloft, for eight days and nights to ensure Hume’s grave would not be desecrated or interfered with. It’s said that some of the curious hid behind gravestones to see if the Devil himself would come and spirit away the man James Boswell dubbed “the Great Infidel.” (Boswell, famous biographer of Samuel Johnson, had spoken to Hume just over a month before his death and had been shocked by his equanimity. Johnson insisted to Boswell that Hume must have been faking it. Boswell got drunk and had sex with a number of prostitutes, as was his wont when under stress. A lot of people were deeply invested in how Hume reacted to his impending death.)

By 1778, Adam’s vision of Roman-inspired cylindrical mausoleum much like those found on the Appia Antica, complete with pre-fab decay, had been construction over Hume’s burial spot and an adjacent lot bought by the philosopher’s brother John. Robert Adam used unpolished masonry and rough ashlar to convey the impression of classical antiquity. Over the doorway was the simple inscription Hume had requested: “DAVID HUME, NATUS APRIL. 26. 1711. OBIIT AUGUST 25. 1776” At some point before 1813, for reasons lost in the mists of time, someone replaced the Latin “NATUS” with “BORN” and “OBIIT” with “DIED.”

After that, some more wording was added even less in keeping with Hume’s vision. Hume’s nephew, a famous jurist also named David Hume, erected a memorial to his wife Jane Alder after her death in 1816. Her name was inscribed on funerary urn in a niche about the door and captioned with:

“Behold I come quickly
Thanks be to GOD which
giveth us the victory, through
our LORD JESUS CHRIST.”

Somewhere between then and 1820 yet another inscription was added just below the tablet, this one noting that the tomb was “Erected in Memory of Him/ in 1778” because by then the mausoleum had become something of a family vault, so its original purpose needed reiterating. During the mid-19th century, a metalwork cross was erected on a plinth above the keystone. The date 1841 is inscribed on it, perhaps indicating when the cross was added, perhaps in memoriam of Hume’s nephew David who had died in 1838. The cross was gone by the 1880s.

With Adam’s incorporating decay into the original design, plus all the later activity, plus the passage of time, Hume’s mausoleum was in dire need of cleaning and maintenance. The City of Edinburgh Council and Edinburgh World Heritage, plus a of private donors, pulled together to sponsor a proper conservation of the mausoleum this year, the 300th anniversary of Hume’s birth.

Conservators focused on clearing vegetation and mortar pointing to replace crumbling mortar with fresh, durable lime. Particular attention was paid to the decorative elements on the cornice, architrave, and frieze around the top of the structure.

A spokesman for Edinburgh World Heritage said: “The Hume mausoleum is of great importance to the city and Scotland. Designed by the famous architect Robert Adam to commemorate the nation’s foremost philosopher, it neatly encapsulates Edinburgh’s history as a city at the heart of the Enlightenment. This sort of conservation work is essential to keep the building in good order for the future, and to encourage more people to appreciate the value of the city’s historic graveyards.”

This was accomplished for the bargain price of £5,000 ($7864). Spend a little now so you don’t have to spend a lot later.

Rare, maybe royal, Egyptian coffin found in Torquay

Ancient, Museums, Treasures

University of Bristol Egyptologist Aidan Dodson was working on an ambitiously tedious project to catalogue every Egyptian sarcophagus in English and Welsh provincial museums when he discovered that a coffin on display in Torquay Museum was of exceptional quality, extremely rare and far older than the museum had realized. Dodson puts the age of the coffin to somewhere between the reign of 18th Dynasty pharaohs Ahmose I and the early reign of Thutmose III, ie, somewhere between 1525 and 1470 B.C. The museum estimated it dated to 700 B.C.

The child’s sarcophagus, just under 4 feet in length, was cut from a single block of cedar wood then covered in plaster-impregnated linen. The linen was painted white and the face red (indicating that the mummy within was male). The eyes are inlaid volcanic glass and limestone mounted in bronze. The design is so rare there is only one other similar example in the UK. Not even the British Museum has a coffin like this one, notes Torquay Museum curator Barry Chandler, bursting with glee.

It was the quality of the inlaid eyes, the depth of detail in the realistically modelled knees that first caught Dr. Dodson’s eye. That kind of ornamentation was reserved for extremely high ranking personages like royalty or government ministers. For it to be found on a child’s coffin underscores how important the family must have been.

Unfortunately we don’t know who that family was because the names of the child and his parents have been scratched out. The mummy inside is a thousand years younger than the coffin, so the names were probably erased when the new occupant was installed. The 2,500-year-old mummified boy within, wrapped in linen and a beaded net with figures of deities attached to it to protect the organs of the boy for the afterlife, was given a CT scan at Torbay Hospital in 2006. They found that the boy was three or four years old when he died, but could not determine the cause of death. We don’t know his name either, but the museum has dubbed him Psamtek.

The coffin and Psamtek were donated to the museum in 1956 by Lady Winaretta Leeds, scion of the Singer sewing machine dynasty and committed amateur Egyptologist. She traveled extensively in the Middle East, and is thought to have acquired the coffin in the 1920s. The child’s coffin and mummy were in storage for decades until they became the stars of the newly refurbished museum in 2007. Psamtek in particular drew crowds because he is the only human mummy currently on display in the UK. Now his coffin can finally compete.

Almost intact young Therapod fossil found in Bavaria

Ancient

Paleontologists in Kelheim, Bavaria, have discovered the fossil of a young dinosaur that is 98% intact, including some remains of skin and hair. This makes young Otto, as the fellow has been dubbed, the most intact dinosaur skeleton ever found in Europe. The exact species has yet to be identified, but it belongs to the theropod suborder, a group of mainly flesh eaters whose most famous member is Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The fossil, named Otto by the paleontological team, is approximately 135 million years old. It was discovered between one and two years ago on a riverbank but the find was not announced until last Sunday to ensure the excavators would not be interfered with. The find site is still being kept secret, as is the name of the landowner who is now the proud papa of a bouncing baby theropod.

Oliver Rauhut, curator of the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology and Geology in Munich, says it’s “probably the most significant new theropod fossil archosaurs from German soil since the discoveries of the ancient bird Archaeopteryx.”

Though the 72-centimeter juvenile dinosaur is preserved in stone, a number of anatomical details remain. “The best-preserved Tyrannosaurus we have are about 80 percent preserved, and that is already terrific,” said Rauhut, comparing the two theropods, which are among the rarest dinosaur fossils.

Most of the fossils in this group exist in only fragments, said Dan Ravasz, spokesman for the upcoming mineral exhibition, The Munich Show, a trade fair dedicated to minerals, germs, jewellery and fossils that runs for four days starting on Oct. 27.

The experts aren’t certain just how old the dinosaur was when it died, though they estimate that a freshly hatched Tyrannosaurus would have been about the same size. They were able to determine that the specimen is young by measuring the size of its skull, body proportions and the bone surface. Learning more about young dinosaurs is important for scientists to understand more about their evolutionary process.

The German government has declared Otto a German cultural asset. That designation lowers its market value considerably by ensuring that it cannot leave the country. It will be on display for the full four days of The Munich Show, but after that its fate is uncertain. It appears that a permanent loan is being set up between the owner and the government so that Otto can go on display in a German museum.