(A special thank you to the Oliver Ames High School social studies department, and its chair, Matthew Auger, for researching and finding the images – and to Oliver Ames High School social studies teacher and track & field coach, Michael Darling, for providing research – used in this post.) 

Oakes Ames Memorial Hall is among the grandest and most magnificent properties in America, a place that joins the artistic and creative genius of two luminaries of the Gilded Age: Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886) and Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903).

The hall was commissioned by the children of U.S. Rep. Oakes Ames (1804-1873) to honor their father.

Henry Hobson, or H.H., Richardson, designed the extraordinary building, Richardsonian Romanesque (yes, a school or architecture that Mr. Richardson founded) in style.

Frederick Law Olmsted – also referred to as F.L. Olmsted and F.L.O. – designed the grounds and terraced front steps of the property.

Mr. Richardson, along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan, constitute the “Trinity of American Architecture.”

F.L.O. is widely acknowledged as the “Father of American Landscape Architecture.”

Oakes Ames Memorial Hall (OAMH) is a National Historic Landmark, and is contained within two districts listed on the National Register of Historic Places: the North Easton Historic District and H.H. Richardson Historic District.

Art, architecture, and design enthusiasts from all over the world travel to view in person and photograph OAMH, and other places and structures in the historic districts.

Now, while Oakes Ames Memorial Hall ranks with the most preferred and popular special event and meeting spaces in metropolitan Boston, it has been, since its dedication 1881 – and as the children of Oakes Ames stipulated – also a locus of community and place of civic engagement and activity.

Indeed, for many years – from 1881 through 1960 – on the third floor of OAMH, in the beautifully appointed and detailed Masonic Room, met the Paul Dean Free and Accepted Masons Lodge.

Oakes Ames Memorial Hall Association, the organization that runs and administers the hall, enthusiastically and strongly maintains as fundamental to its mission. upholding the wishes of the children of Congressman Ames that the space be available and open to the community.

Here with Thanksgiving on us, it is timely and appropriate that we look back to a time when Oakes Ames Memorial Hall was the venue for a specific form of fun and civic pride – with that form being the pep rallies held on the eve of Thanksgiving (either day or night), and which rallied Easton townspeople and Oliver Ames High School students and faculty and administrators for Oliver Ames H.S.’s Thanksgiving football game.

From the early 1950s, and until the mid-1970s, when the pep rallies were moved to the OAHS campus, the rallies were held at Oakes Ames Memorial Hall.

The rallies were held at Oakes Ames Memorial Hall when the OA mascot was the Shoveltowner, and later when it was the Tiger, with the switch to the big cat taking place in the mid 1950s.

During the period that the OAMH hosted the rallies, OA played its home football games at Frothingham Park.

And during that period, the OA Thanksgiving foe switched from Randolph H.S. to Sharon H.S.

For a stretch, the pep rallies at Oakes Ames Memorial Hall were a stone’s throw from OA High, as the building which is now the Schoolhouse Apartments was the high school   It was for the 1959-60 school year that OA moved to the building which is now the Easton Middle School.

“It was a lot of fun, those pep rallies,” said Linda (Styren) Fitzgerald (OA ’68), the official Tiger mascot in the OA cheerleading sisterhood. “The cheerleaders would get on a fire truck at the high school, and we would be transported down to Oakes Ames Hall, with the siren sounding.”

A crowd would pack the terraced staircase, and extend down to the street and along the wall in front of the hall.

OA coaches, administrators, players, and Easton dignitaries, with town youth surrounding them, would stand behind a microphone, and beneath Richardson’s arch and at the top of Olmsted’s staircase, and speak inspiring and hopeful words to the assembled.

When held at night, a wide swath of the front of Oakes Ames Memorial Hall was illuminated by spotlight.

Those pep rallied were a civic and community event.

Husband and wife, David and Hazel (Luke) Varella – teachers at OA, and both OA grads – annually hosted post-rally/Thanksgiving eve party that had lobster rolls on the menu.

High school football and local pride and Thanksgiving – and Oakes Ames Memorial Hall being a big part of it all. Just what the children of Congressman Oakes Ames wanted – and no doubt what the congressman himself would have intended.