Eagle Feathers #174 – Teele Square

By Bob (Monty) Doherty

In 1836 Jonathan W. Teele, who was a participant in the battle of Lexington and a five-year veteran of the Revolutionary War, built the Teele House. It was a travelers’ roadhouse at the corner of Broadway and Curtis Street. His family eventually acquired and built upon much of the Clarendon Hill land between Professors Row and the Cambridge line.

It wasn’t until after the Civil War that Somerville began to enjoy its western roots in this area. Beginning in 1867, the three-way junction between Arlington, Cambridge, and Medford grew rapidly. The extension of Holland Street from Davis Square to the intersection of Broadway and Curtis Street created Teele Square.

Jonathan’s son, Samuel, was the pillar of the expanded Teele family. He was educated at the Russell District School in Charlestown and The Warren Academy in Woburn, a preparatory school for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other technical schools. He was described as a yeoman in Somerville’s first directory of 1851, Names Of The Heads Of Families. Yeoman was one of a class of farmers, the next grade below gentleman. For all his life, Samuel was a gardener on the over eighty-two-acre homestead that he had inherited from his father.

Somerville was a teenager of only nineteen when the Civil War broke out, but as the last daughter of Charlestown, her patriotism ran much deeper than her years. At Camp Cameron on Clarendon Hill, thousands of troops trained for the war. Many a recruit raided neighboring gardens and orchids, including Teele’s Farm. These raids were patriotically overlooked for the northern cause. After the Union was saved, the city memorialized the area with street signs paying tribute to Army and Navy heroes and battles won. At the same time, neighboring West Cambridge, as it was then called, changed its name to Arlington in honor of the nation’s Civil War losses.

If the Teeles visited today’s Clarendon Hill and its environs, I am sure they would be proud that their lives and labors are still honored at its heart. The market garden families, the gentlemen farmers and their family names have not been forgotten.