The Hotel Milton was a famous inn that was actually on
the Dorchester side of the Neponset River, the present site of the Walter
Baker Administration Building that is being renovated for artist lofts,
but named for our town. Opened in 1840 by Minot Thayer, a noted innkeeper
who had once kept a tavern on Adams Street in Dorchester Lower Mills, now
the site of Dunkin' Donuts, and known for many years as Thayer's Hotel,
which soon proved to be a popular stop with travelers either coming from
or going to Boston along the "King's Highway," or present day Adams Street.
A substantial three-story Greek Revival hotel, there was a two-storied
front porch with Doric columns supporting an overhanging roof. Here in
1840, it is recorded, was said the first Roman Catholic mass in either
Dorchester or Milton for the large number of Catholic factory and granite
industry workers, and was on occasion continued until 1863 when St. Gregory
the Great was consecrated on Dorchester Avenue. By 1871, Thayer's Hotel
was operated by William B. Brown, an employee of the Thayer Family, who
was quite an enterprising innkeeper. It was said in the "Saturday Evening
Express," that his neighbors had accused him of snaring pigeons, which
led to this ditty:
" There was a hotel man named Brown, Whose house was the talk of the town, He found be was able To set a good table So long as the pigeons flew down!"
Well, Thayer's Hotel did not share in the same comfortable carriage
trade that patronized the Milton Hill House, but it still provided meals,
libations and a comfortable stop for travelers.
Seen in the accompanying photograph, kindly loaned by Anne Thompson,
is the Tally Ho rented by John Talbot from Henry Crane & Son's "Lower
Mills Stables" on "Derby Day" in 1909 stopped in front of the Hotel Milton
on Adams Street while being photographed by Frizzell, the village photographer.
Mr. Talbot was proprietor of Talbot's Grocery Store at 1157 Washington
Street in the Lower Mills, which had traded since 1815 in as much alcohol
as it did in groceries, and a real estate agent with offices at 85 Water
Street in Boston. An avid horseman who later lived at 21 Canton Avenue
(now De Wolfe Realty Company), he often raced his trotting horses in the
Dorchester Gentlemen's Driving Club and at the Readville Race Track in
Hyde Park, which was laid out on the former Civil War Camp Meigs, named
for Brigadier General Montgomery Cunningham Meigs (1816-1892), "soldier,
engineer, architect, scientist, patriot." This Tally Ho, amply filled with
Mr. Talbot and eight of his friends, was pulled by a "four- in-hand," which
was often unmanageable by inexperienced drivers. On Thanksgiving Day in
1908, Dorothy Forbes of Milton Hill recounted that Mr. Talbot's four-in-hand
was "going down Milton Hill [where] one horse, much against the instinct
of the other three, decided to run away. While still in the minority the
Walter Baker factory whistle blew just as they went by, which started the
other three horses at full speed. The fact that many of us on horseback,
or in horse-drawn vehicles, chased the coach as best we could, kept this
fair going the rounds of the town until the four-in-hand, both horses and
those a-top the coach, were in a white lather."
Walter Baker & Company, then owned by the Forbes Syndicate and headed
by J. Murray Forbes (1845-1937), purchased the somewhat decrepit Hotel
Milton in 1906 from A. Lizzie Mann, which had Cohen Brothers' Tailor Shop,
Littlefield's Wallpapers & Steam Matting, W.F. Goward Dry Goods Store,
Anton Gramer Furniture Store and let rooms above, after which it was demolished.
In 1919, the company commissioned Milton architect George F. Shepard, Jr.
(1865-1955) a partner of Frederick Baldwin Stearns in the Boston architectural
firm of Shepard & Stearns, to erect their new brick and limestone office
building, to which their business and mill offices were moved upon its
completion in 1920.
