Framingham History Center Blog

Once or twice a year we have a program called “Street Smarts”, where we focus on the history of a certain part of town.  On Sunday we held a Street Smarts presentation about the neighborhood around the Women’s Reformatory.

You may not think “Women’s Reformatory” and “neighborhood” would go together but it actually was the case at one time.  Framingham residents Ellen Walker and Martin Mulvey grew up on the prison grounds because their parents worked at the prison and they shared their surprisingly fond childhood memories.

Our fabulous volunteer, Ronnie Cronin, who clocked many hours of research and is also a childhood friend of Ellen Walker, started off the presentation with a brief history of how the The Sherborn Massachusetts Reformatory Prison for Women became the Framingham Women’s Reformatory (dropping “prison” from the title).

Ellen and Martin then spoke about what their childhood was like with acres of fields used by the reformatory  for their own vegetable gardens and livestock.  Martin remembered realizing why the fence was so much higher around the field with the bull in it  (there to “service” the female cows) after he hopped over it.  He also recalled playing in the giant bales of hay and eating all the strawberries he and his friends wanted while on the way to the apple orchards.   Ellen told us about playing inside the prison with the superintendent’s niece and interacting with the inmates, who were never referred to as prisoners during their “temporary stay”.  She was even in a play with the inmates and recalled how lovely and lady-like they all were.  She never had a bad experience with anyone inside the reformatory.  Below is a photo of Ellen in a prison production of an unknown play.

What I found most interesting was hearing about the Superintendent, Miriam Van Waters who sounded like a remarkable woman. She was a pioneer in criminal rehabilitation.  She cared deeply about the inmates, the staff working at the Reformatory and their families.
Below is a photo of Miriam Van Waters and Eleanor Roosevelt during Mrs. Roosevelt’s visit to the Reformatory.

It was such an interesting program and I really felt enlightened by Ellen and Martin’s stories.  A big thank you to them and everyone who attended and shared their memories as well.

Michelle McElroy
Operations Manager

Welcome to our first Framingham History Center blog post. There has been so much going on around here that this will serve as a bit of a catch up.  First – I’d like to thank the McCarthy School students who performed as part of our Very Victorian Christmas program in December.  Their singing and dancing was fantastic and brought the most important ingredient of the season to our program – children.  It was wonderful having the students and their parents at the Village Hall and the whole McCarthy School community should be proud.  Thank you.

Our Shopper’s World Roundtable drew close to 100 people – all eager to share their memories, Jordan Marsh blueberry muffins, and some great information about the iconic mall.


Ruth Colson and Dorothy Yetsina reminisced about working at Jordan Marsh for over 30 years and what a great employer it was.  They told us about their group of former employees – The Jordaneers - and how they have an annual reunion.  They were actually meeting for lunch on the day of the roundtable.

Bruce Leish read excerpts from “The Day it Rained Fish” (1978) by Sidney Shurcliff – the landscape architect for SW.  Apparently opening year (1951) had a few rough spots.  In a cost cutting measure, the necessary gravel and hardtop for the parking area was cut in half and by April of that year unsuspecting shoppers came back to find their cars “mired to the hubcaps!”  Who knew that the first mall east of the Mississippi was originally slated for Peabody but the developer, Huston Rawls, could not secure the zoning change necessary for its construction.  In Framingham – a better location – the ‘“promotion” of a zoning change had been so carefully advanced by Huston that the desired change had been actually adopted.”  To view an excerpt from Shurcliff’s book discussing the original design of SW, click here.

Elbert Tuttle spoke about his father representing the downtown merchants who were worried that SW would draw customers away from their shops while on the other side of the political spectrum, Julian Hargraves’ father represented Huston Rawls and knew him quite well.  Julian spoke about going to see the prototype for SW in Washington state with his father before the much larger SW was built.

Did you know that on George Washington’s birthday, Shopper’s World gave out cherry tree seedlings free of charge?  Perhaps this is why Framingham is abloom with cherry blossoms each spring.  If anyone knows of a tree that survived from an SW seedling, I’d love to know.

We will have a full Shopper’s World exhibition this summer once the windows are completed at the Edgell Library and would love to hear from you if you have other stories, memorabilia, etc.

That’s all for now,

Annie Murphy
Executive Director