While browsing through playing card patents I came across one that got my attention by a person from Boston in 1873. Here is the page from the patent....................
Who was this H. Billings? Well the next page revealed that his name was Hammatt Billings. With an interesting name like that I had to research this gentleman. Was he into fortune telling? Was he just an "average joe" that decided to design a deck of cards? What kind of background did he have? Boy, I was in for some surprises. Read on to see what I found out about Mr. Billings.
First of all, he was born Charles Howland Hammatt Billings in 1818 in Milton, Massachusetts, now a suburb of Boston. The Billings had been in Milton for several generations and had a tavern there on the old Taunton Road not far from Great Blue Hill.
The Billings Public House and Tavern
Soon after his birth the family moved into Boston while his father would commute to Milton to run the tavern. The Billings lived in the area (enclosed in the black outline) close to the West End.
This location was very fortuitous for Charles. He was very close to the recently built Mayhew School on Hawkins Street. People in the West End had petitioned the city for a writing and grammar school in their area in 1803 and got one. Then in 1821 one of the first high schools in the country was also built nearby. This school was called the English Classical High School but was later known as East High School. Charles attended both. After high school at age 17 he apprenticed as an architect. Two years later, in 1837, he joined the architectural firm of A. B. Young. Mr. Young had just finished designing and building Vermont's second State House.
Vermont's 2nd State House Would Burndown In 1857
A. B. (Ammi Burnham) Young's commissions transitioned from the Greek Revival to the Neo- Renaissance styles. His design of the second Vermont State House brought him fame and success, which eventually led him to become the first Supervising Architect of the U.S. Treasury Department building. As the federal architect, he was responsible for creating across the United States numerous custom houses, post offices, courthouses and hospitals, many of which are today on the National Register.
While working for Young he was also learning a new skill, wood engraving, with Abel Bowen. Bowen was an engraver, publisher, and author in Boston between 1812 and 1850. In the 1830s Bowen and others formed the Boston Bewick Company, which published the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge. Bowen also taught other future famous artists Joseph Andrews, George Loring Brown, B. F. Childs, William Croome, Nathaniel Dearborn, G. Thomas Devereaux, Alonzo Hartwell, Samuel Smith Kilburn, and Richard P. Mallory.
After working for Young for five years Charles left and started his own architectural office in Boston in 1842 under the name of Hammatt Billings. He mainly just did design work until his younger brother Joseph, also an architect, joined him in 1846.
After working for Young for five years Charles left and started his own architectural office in Boston in 1842 under the name of Hammatt Billings. He mainly just did design work until his younger brother Joseph, also an architect, joined him in 1846.
Hammatt's first commission was for a new building in downtown Boston. It was called the Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts and was a theatre, wax museum, natural history museum, zoo, and an art museum.
An advertisement of 1850 described the museum's key attractions:
"The museum is the largest, most valuable, and best arranged in the United States. It comprises no less than seven different museums, to which has been added the present year, besides the constant daily accumulation of articles, one half of the celebrated Peale's Philadelphia Museum, swelling the already immense collection to upwards of half a million articles, the greatest amount of objects of interest to be found together at any one place in America; and an entirely new hall of wax statuary.... and the immense collection of birds, beasts, fish, insects and reptiles;... paintings, engravings and statuary; ... Egyptian mummies, ... family of Peruvian mummies; the duck-billed platypus;... the curious half-fish, half-human Fejee Mermaid;... elephants and ourang-outangs..."[
Theatrical performances began in 1843. Through the years, notable performers included both Edwin Booth and his soon to be infamous brother John Wilkes Booth,
About 1847 Billings began his long and prolific activity as an illustrator of books and magazines. Among the dozens of books he illustrated were Whittier’s Poems (1850), Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), Tennyson’s Poems (1866), and Dickens’s A Child’s Dream of a Star (1871).
One of Hammatt Billing's Engravings From "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
In 1849 Hammatt married a 22 year old widow named Phebe Ann (nee Warren) Ellinwood. She had been married at age 16 to Addison Ellinwood (age 23) and widowed a year later.
When Gleason’s Pictorial was established in Boston in 1851, Hammatt found a ready market for his illustrations. He put his hand to all kinds of scenes for this pictorial-topical, architectural and fanciful magazine and earned the respect of M. M. Ballou, the editor and later proprietor of the magazine.
The January 1856 Issue With Two of Hammatt Billing's Engravings
Early in 1855 the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth advertised a competition for the design of a Forefathers monument, and in due course the trustees selected a design by “two Hungarian gentleman of New York, Messrs. Zucker and Asboth.“ The Society intended to proceed to erect the monument at its own expense. However, in April or May, 1855, Hammatt Billings proposed a plan by which he would raise the money himself, indemnifying the Society against loss, if the trustees would accept his own design.
This design was a colossal composition 153 feet high--comprising a figure of Faith 70 feet high on an 83-foot-high pedestal, projecting from the base of which were four buttresses supporting 40 foot figures of Law, Morality, Education, and Freedom. The trustees, shrewd businessmen, were suitably impressed.
The cornerstone was finally laid in 1859. During the Civil War rising costs from inflation delayed work on the monument. Billings then organized a nationwide fund-raising campaign, offering a 20-inch-high bronze model of the monument to $100 ($2,000 today) subscribers, a 30-inch bronze and silver model to $500 ($10,000) subscribers, and a “splendid” 36-inch model to $1,000 ($20,000) subscribers.
The increasing inflation in the years after the war would then force him to propose halving the size of the monument, making it only 81 feet high (a 36-foot figure of Faith on a 45-foot pedestal, with subsidiary figures).
Due to various other delays the monument was not finished until 1899.
In 1859, the Pilgrim Society also began building a Victorian canopy designed by Hammett Billings at the wharf over the portion of the famous "Plymouth Rock" of 1620 there, which was completed in 1867. The canopy has since been replaced
In 1862 Hammatt, then designed the Tremont Street Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston, which is still in use. When he was asked to draw a design for the exterior of that church, he walked to the spot to see the shape of the lot. Standing on the corner, he drew upon a piece of paper, resting on his hat, the outline of the structure, to which he subsequently added a few slight embellishments. It was the work of a few minutes.
During 1865 Billings travelled to Europe. He spent almost a year there sketching, painting and doing illustrations for other bookmakers. (Present-day collectors of his work are still trying to identify his work there from this period.)
In addition to his work as an architect, illustrator, and designer, Billings painted in oils and watercolors and executed pen and ink drawings that were widely applauded and collectible. Many of which have been lost.
Billings’s career as a designer included such miscellaneous commissions as a proposal for laying out the Public Garden in Boston, the emblematic fireworks for the Fourth of July celebration on Boston Common in 1853, relief sculpture and statuary for the exterior of commercial buildings, the granite obelisk in Concord Square commemorating the Civil War dead, the attractive pedestal for Ball’s statue of Washington in the Public Garden and a number of private monuments in Boston area cemeteries.
Another lasting Billings design is the baroque walnut case for the Great Organ in the Boston Music Hall (installed in 1863). The Great Organ was sold in 1884, stored, then sold again in 1897 to E. F. Searles of Methuen, Massachusetts, who built a hall for it and rededicated it with a concert on December 9, 1909.~~ Still in its original case, the organ continues in use today.
1871 Hammatt Billings’s largest architectural commission was the first building at Wellesley College, in whose 6oo-odd rooms the entire faculty and student body lived and worked for many years. Called College Hall, it was located on a rise overlooking Lake Waban, where Tower Hall is situated today.
College Hall Exterior and Interior
In 1873 Hammatt created something completely different. This was his fortune telling cards that started all this research. Even though the patent states 1873 the idea started in 1872. Making it, according to the Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards, the second American made fortune telling card deck. The book describes it as............
FT21 CABALISTIC PLAYING CARDS, Albert Mudge & Son, Printers, 34 School Street, Boston, MA, 1872. A wonderful deck with single ended colored courts and fortunes printed in all the margins. There are 52 cards and four fate cards, no joker being issued with this deck. There is an accompanying Cabalistic booklet.
There is a slight mistake here. The name should be ALFRED and not ALBERT. There were three generations of Alfred Mudges in the company over a 50 year span.
Interestingly Mudge copyrighted a 15 page instruction book for fortune telling in 1872 and Billings didn't attempt to patent his playing card design and instructions on how to use the cards until January 1873. The patent wasn't accepted until August.
Was he inspired or hired by Mudge?
The cards first appeared for sale in Boston newspapers in December 1873.
In November 1874 he was in New York City visiting his brother. After not feeling well for the past month he was finally put on bed rest. After his health declined for the next ten days he passed away. The cause was never disclosed in the newspapers. (New York City death certificates were not a legal requirement at that time)
Hammatt Billings was buried in the family plot in Milton, Massachusetts. His marker is rather plain compared to his wife's. They had no children.
THINGS OF INTEREST
Wellesly College has a collection of some of Hammatt"s work. One item is a sketch book. Here are some pages from it you might find interesting.
Wellesly College has a collection of some of Hammatt"s work. One item is a sketch book. Here are some pages from it you might find interesting.