Of Rugged Sports and Moorish Samaritans

From Dave "Snooty" Brigham:

As I've said before, I love stumbling across memorials and plaques in my wanderings across Boston. On a walk through Boston Common and the adjacent Public Garden recently (OK, it was over the summer....), I was pleasantly surprised by two such markers, a rather plain one dedicated to the early, blue-blood origins of a classic American sport, and another quite elaborate honor for something that causes "insensibility to pain."

In all caps, this monument on the Common states: "On this field the Oneida Football Club of Boston, the first organized football club in the United States, played against all comers from 1862 to 1865. The Oneida goal was never crossed." Erected in 1925, the stone references a squad of well-to-do young men who organized themselves into what was evidently the perfect football team. How did the team do so well? Because Oneida's leaders, Gat Miller and Cliff Watson, "sat up nights working out the formations and stratagems of play on the field," according to "an historical sketch" written in 1926 by one of the players. "They were pioneers in the art which has now become so complicated and so popular."

Bill Belichick fans, take note. Your man didn't invent maniacal preparation.

With players including Edward Bowditch, John Malcolm Forbes, Robert Means Lawrence, Francis Greenwood Peabody, Winthrop Saltonstall Scudder and Huntington Frothingham Wolcott (!), the Oneida Football Club was made up of the toughest Brahmins money could buy, apparently.

There are some legendary New England surnames among these prep-school grads:

• The Bowditch clan includes Nathaniel (1773-1838), who is considered the father of modern maritime navigation, and his son, Henry, who was president of the American Medical Association in the 1870s. I'm not sure how Edward fits into the family tree.
• "The Forbes family is a wealthy extended American family long prominent in Boston, Massachusetts. The family's fortune originates from trading opium and tea between North America and China in the 19th century plus other investments in the same period," per Wikipedia. The Forbes who played football for Oneida eventually became "a prominent yachtsman and breeder of Standardbred horses," per Wikipedia.
• Robert Means Lawrence was a surgeon whose family lineage includes well-known abolitionists, merchants, philanthropists, educators, politicians and soldiers.
• Francis Greenwood Peabody became a Unitarian minister and was a founder of the Social Museum at Harvard University.
• The Saltonstall clan is as blue-blooded as you find in New England. The family is "notable for having had a family member attend Harvard University from every generation since Nathaniel Saltonstall — later one of the more principled judges at the Salem Witch Trials — graduated in 1659," per Wikipedia.
• Finally, the guy who wins the "What name is better than Thurston Howell III?" award: Huntington Frothingham Wolcott. Unfortunately for old Hunt, he's also the most tragic of the old Oneida squad. Born in 1846 to Cornelia and J.H., the latter who was a textile merchant and mill owner, HFW was a 2nd lieutenant in the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry during the Civil War. He died of fever in 1865 after returning from battle, per this Wolcott family history. The Frothingham family includes politicians, artists, ministers and merchants.

Speaking of prominent Bostonians....

The oldest monument in the Public Garden, erected in 1868, the Ether Monument stands 40 feet tall and features a "medical doctor in medieval Moorish-Spanish robe and turban —representing a Good Samaritan — who holds the drooping body of an almost naked man on his left knee," per Wikipedia. The inscription on this side of the statue reads, in all caps, "To commemorate the discovery that the inhaling of ether causes insensibility to pain. First proved to the world at the Mass. General Hospital in Boston, October A.D. MDCCCXLVI."

The event that is memorialized here is the first public demonstration of ether anesthesia, which was conducted at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846 by Boston dentist William Thomas Green Morton and Doctor John Collins Warren, according to the Friends of the Public Garden web site. "Morton administered the ether, and Warren then removed a tumor from an unconscious patient," per the web site.

To read about another monument on Boston Common, see March 12, 2019, "Step On Up (or Down)."