Marlborough Street

The current five-story apartment building at number six stands on the site where a four-story house once stood. It is part of a long row of similar residential facades, but the owners of such houses sometimes set aside rooms for school lessons, offices, and club meetings. Students, female teachers, and neighbors gathered inside, though from the street this row of houses looks almost uniform. Only the old number above the entrance recalls the former building.

The name Marlborough appeared in Boston before this street did. Since seventeen oh eight, it had been the name of a stretch of road in the old center, honoring John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, commander of British forces in the War of the Spanish Succession. After his victory over the French army at Blenheim, the title was known throughout the English-speaking world. In eighteen twenty-four, that stretch was incorporated into Washington Street. When planners laid out the streets of Back Bay on the plan of eighteen fifty-six, they restored the vanished name here.

From the outside, Marlborough Street looks like a residential row. Yet in several such houses, owners opened schools, offices, and clubs. At number six, Pauline Agassiz Shaw, an education reformer, tried out a teaching method she intended to pass on to city schools.

Shaw could finance the experiment herself. Her family fortune came from a copper company run by her husband, one of Boston's wealthiest entrepreneurs. In eighteen eighty-two, Pauline Shaw bought a four-story house on Marlborough Street and set up a day school there for her children and the children of neighbors. Boys and girls studied together in every class—for a private Boston school of that time, this was a bold arrangement.

Money solved only half the problem. New kindergartens required trained teachers. By eighteen eighty-seven, Shaw had opened a training course in this house and entrusted it to Laura Fisher, an instructor who was to prepare women to work with preschool children.

At the same time, Shaw supported free kindergartens in different Boston neighborhoods: she paid salaries, bought materials, and paid for premises. From eighteen eighty-two to eighteen eighty-nine, she supported thirty-one institutions and spent more than two hundred thousand dollars. In eighteen eighty-eight, Shaw persuaded the city school committee to test the results. After the test, the city took over fourteen of her kindergartens and began funding them from its budget.

Laura Fisher moved the training of kindergarten teachers from the house on Marlborough Street to the Boston Normal School—the name then used for a teachers' college. In eighteen ninety-four, the school committee appointed her the city's first director of kindergartens. She held the position for twelve years, then returned to the same street and opened her own school for kindergarten teachers at number two hundred ninety-two.

The old house at number six was demolished in nineteen twenty-four. A five-story apartment building was constructed on its site, and it stands here now. Nothing remains of Pauline Shaw's classrooms; only the old number above the entrance marks their exact location.