Among the most preferred special event spaces in the Metropolitan Boston area is Oakes Ames Memorial Hall.
Splendid, magnificent, ornate, and brilliant and extraordinary artistry and design manifest, Oakes Ames Memorial Hall attracts architecture and design students and enthusiasts, from the world over, who travel to North Easton Village (located within the incorporated town of Easton) to view and study, to photograph, to draw, and to write about, the Hall.
It is surely an exceptional property, Oakes Ames Memorial Hall – with the building designed by Henry Hobson Richardson, who along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, constitute the “Trinity of American Architects” – and with the grounds planned by Frederick Law Olmsted, widely acclaimed as the “Father of American Landscape Architecture.”
Of course, thanks to the beneficence of the Ames family – American industrialists, political leaders, and philanthropists, whose primary home in America was Easton – the town contains a trove of the work of Gilded Age artistic and design genius that rivals any comparable size village in the New World.
That trove includes the designs of Mr. Richardson, Mr. Olmsted, Stanford White, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John LaFarge, and Andrew Jackson Downing.
As for the work of H.H. Richardson, North Easton Village, with five Richardson buildings, holds close to 10 percent of all Richardson buildings in the world.
Those buildings – located within the H.H. Richardson Historic District, an area listed in the National Register of Historic Places – are Oakes Ames Memorial Hall, Ames Free Library, Old Colony Railroad Station, Ames Gate Lodge, and the F.L. Ames Gardener’s Cottage.
The H.H. Richardson Historic District is contained within the North Easton Historic District, which is also listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The man for whom the Hall is named was born in Easton in 1804.
Oakes Ames, along with his brother, Oliver Ames, Jr., went in the shovel and tool making business, started by their father, Oliver Ames Sr.
Oakes and Oliver built on and continued the success of their father’s enterprise, and created Oliver Ames & Sons.
Oakes Ames served in the U.S. House of Representatives, from the Second Massachusetts District, from 1863-1873. He was a member of the Committee on Railroads, and an early investor in the transcontinental railroad.
In 1864, a town in Iowa – a station stop for a section of the transcontinental railroad, the Cedar Rapids and Missouri Railroad – was named for Oakes Ames.
President Abraham Lincoln asked Representative Ames to take over administration of the slow-moving construction of the Union Pacific portion of the transcontinental railroad.
“Ames, you take hold of this,” President Lincoln said to Representative Ames, early in 1865. “The road must be built, and you are the man to do it. Take hold of it yourself. By building the Union Pacific, you will be the remembered man of your generation.”
Oakes Ames took hold of the project. His brother, Oliver, also played an important role. Yet it would be Oakes Ames who would be the single most influential person in the successful construction of the Union Pacific Railroad.
Oakes Ames died in 1873, while still serving in office.
In the late 1870s, Oakes Ames’s children, Oakes Angier Ames (1829-1899) and Oliver Ames (1831-1895), commissioned H.H. Richardson to design a building that would be a memorial to their father. F.L. Olmsted was signed in to plan the grounds.
Construction on Oakes Ames Memorial Hall began in 1879 and completed in 1881.
Dedication ceremonies for the Hall were held on November 17, 1881. Dignitaries and elected officials attending, included Massachusetts governor John Davis Long, and Former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives James G. Blaine.
Delivering an address at the dedication was the distinguished author, historian, and minister Edward Everett Hale – a man’s whose name is haunting to students of history and oratory, in that he was the nephew of Edward Everett, the political leader, diplomat, and educator whose speech at the dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery at Gettysburg preceded a speech by President Lincoln.
In 1883, a biography of Oakes Ames was published by Riverside Press in Cambridge, MA. Curiously, unknown is the author of the biography, originally produced in hardcover, and titled, Oakes Ames: A Memoir, With an Account of the Dedication of the Oakes Ames Memorial Hall at North Easton, MA, November 17, 1881.
Here is an excerpt from the section of the book that discussed the dedication of the Hall:
“To the filial devotion of the sons of the late Oakes Ames is due to the erection of the visible testimonial to their honored father’s legacy, which stands in bold relief upon its base of solid rock in North Easton. It contains, in the public uses for which it was constructed, the living germ which will secure for its expression the perpetuity to which all its architectural effects are directed. A Monument to the First Citizen of the town, it stands in the daily sight of his fellow citizens, and is virtually open at all times for their occupancy and service.
“The structure at once impresses the eye of the beholder with a sense of grandeur and beauty in harmonious combination. It is most significantly placed on the edge of a ledge of native rock, which presents on the side a bold and rugged face, and stands at a high elevation above the road and but a little distance from it. So commanding is the natural position and so imposing is its structure, it has been well compared in its external effect to an ancient castle.”
Please click here to be taken to an online edition of the full text of the book.
Oakes Ames built, established, and left to posterity an extraordinary and great legacy.
Oakes Ames Memorial Hall is a monument fitting of the man.
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Oakes Ames’s sons nobly continued their father’s legacy. They led in recruiting H.H. Richardson and F.L. Olmsted to design other properties in the community.
Each became a partner in the family’s tool making enterprise.
Oliver served as governor of Massachusetts from 1887 to 1890. He donated the money to build a public high school building in Easton, the building that is now the School House Apartment on Lincoln Street in North Easton. The high school was named for Governor Ames.
Students from Easton still attend Oliver Ames High School.