Longmeadow’s Physician From Kyiv

Jacob Zuslofsky, who became Dr. James Z. Naurison, was an immigrant from Kyiv, Ukraine living much of his life in Longmeadow. He led an exemplary life providing medical care to his community and left a lasting legacy to promote future education of its residents. Dr. Naurison was a prominent Springfield physician who established the Cardiology Department at Mercy Medical Center. Born Jacob Zuslofsky in Kyiv, Ukraine in 1888, he emigrated to Boston, Massachusetts in 1891 along with his parents and two siblings. Two additional siblings were born after the move to Boston.

Naturalization Record for Dr. Naurison

Dr. Naurison graduated from Boston English High School and Tufts Medical School. College premedical education prior to WWI was uncommon. He trained in Internal Medicine in Boston. At some point, he changed his name to James Z. Naurison. He married Helen Granstein from Chicopee in 1908 and eventually opened his medical practice in Springfield in 1910. A home on Roseland Terrace in Longmeadow was built for Dr. Naurison and his wife in 1919 where they raised three sons.

Naurison home on Roseland Terrace

Dr. Naurison did postgraduate training in cardiology at Johns Hopkins University in 1924. He was Jewish and was quite active in the local Jewish community and the Temple Beth El congregation. At this time there was significant antisemitism and Jewish physicians were looked upon as second or third-rate professionals. Local hospitals systematically ostracized them and denied them privileges. Organized medicine ignored them and denied membership. Their patients were primarily the poor and first-generation immigrants. It was against this backdrop that ten Jewish physicians, including Dr. Naurison, organized the Maimonides Medical Club in 1924 named after the preeminent 12th-century Jewish Spanish physician, philosopher and religious scholar, Moses Maimonides. Their mission was to integrate Jewish physicians into the mainstream medical community in Springfield. This goal was eventually achieved and the medical club was active for 90 years, holding its last meeting in October 2014. By the early 1930s, the first Jewish Pediatrician (Dr. Jurist) became an active staff member at Springfield Hospital and a major operation was performed by a Jewish surgeon (Dr. Glickman) at the same institution.

Maimonides Medical Club meeting 1930. Dr. Naurison circled

He was an active Springfield area physician focusing on Cardiology for 60 years retiring in 1970. Dr. Naurison eventually served as the president of the Hampden County Medical Society.

Helen Naurison died at age 75 in 1961 and Dr. Naurison died at 84 years old on October 14, 1972. In his will, he established a $3,000,000 college scholarship fund to provide $150,000 annually to “worthy young men and women from Western Massachusetts, Enfield, and Suffield, Connecticut.” At the time this was the largest scholarship fund in the area’s history and is still in existence.

contributed by Lenny Shaker, Longmeadow Historical Society Board Member

Originally published June 23, 2022

Sources

Springfield Republican

U.S Census

Genealogy Bank

Maimonides Medical Club records

Fire! Fire!

If you were one of the many people who voted at the Community House this week, then you were visiting the site of a significant mid-19th century fire 177 years ago this week. On Friday, June 27, 1845, people received reports about this devastating fire in Longmeadow. The fire started across the street in the chimney of the "large and fine" house of Mr. Roderick Burnham (702 Longmeadow Street). The large wooden structure burned quickly in the high winds and was not saved. A burning ember from that fire blew across the green to the east, igniting the wooden shake roof of the old, grand house built by the Reverend Stephen Williams almost a hundred and thirty years before on what is now the site of the Longmeadow Community House. Volunteers valiantly fought the fire, but the roof and upper part of the Williams' house, now occupied by the late minister's grandson, Col. Samuel Williams, were severely damaged. The fire engines that fought the blaze were identified by the Springfield Republican newspaper account as the "Lion, the Niagra, the Ocean, and the U.S. Armory engine."

Even though both houses were destroyed, much of the contents were saved from the conflagration. Mr. Burnham's property was insured for $2500, but the paper reported "his loss will far exceed that amount, as the house was one of the largest and most expensive in the county." Unfortunately, Col. Williams' house was not insured.

Two volumes of Stephen Williams' diaries, Collection of First Church Longmeadow

We always imagined that many brave people must have dared to enter Williams' burning house, or that the fire was a very slow, indolent fire, because the records in the Historical Society list a large number of items that were saved from the burning structure and brought to the home of the Reverend Richard Salter Storrs several doors to the north. The Reverend Storrs had passed away in 1819, but his widow Sarah Williams Storrs, sister to Col. Samuel Williams, still resided there.

Snowshoes belonging to Stephen Williams

One of the pieces of furniture belonging to Stephen Williams' mother

Clerical collar or Geneva bands, belonging to Stephen Williams

Among the rescued items, according to the Proceedings at the Centennial Celebration of the Incorporation of the Town of Longmeadow, October 17th, 1883 published nearly fifty years after the fire, were "most fortunately the ten manuscript volumes of Dr. Williams' diary covering the entire period of his ministry." Other items included an oak writing table and inkstand, court cupboard, dower chest, old pistol, courting stick, chair, very old highboy (sold at auction in 1916 in two parts), 4 Chippendale chairs, Dutch or Queen Ann chairs, wing chair, old musical instrument, bands worn by Dr. Williams (Geneva bands or clerical collars), snow shoes, a handwoven towel, a collection of original letters, and bonnets. This list was enumerated in the original inventory list of the Society's collection, compiled by Mrs. D. T. Smith in 1930. Many of these items are still in the collection of the Historical Society--alas not the 'very old highboy"! Now you can see why we believe the fire to be a slow one--the hardy rescuers had time to move a house-worth of furniture plus many other treasured items before it was unsafe. More than 60 years after Stephen Williams' death, he was still a revered citizen of Longmeadow, and the relics that remained were considered worthy of saving.

Williams pistol

Williams desk

-contributed by Betsy McKee, Longmeadow Historical Society Board Member

Originally published June 16, 2022

Diggin' in The Meadows

The Silvio O. Conte National Wildlife Refuge, colloquially known as “The Meadows,” is a stretch of meadows and wetlands that dominate the western lowlands of Longmeadow, MA. This area has been the site of human habitation for over 10,000 years and from the late 19th century onwards, it has been the subject of approximately three archaeological digs, which have uncovered many interesting artifacts from Longmeadow’s past.

The first series of excavations started in the spring of 1883 when Frederic Ward Putnam, the “Father of American Archaeology,” was notified by an Agawam farmer named Benjamin Wilson Lord that there were Native American burial sites across the river from where he lived. Per the 1880 census, Lord was a 41-year-old native of East Windsor, Connecticut.

Ceramic rim and body shards recovered by Putnam in 1883.

Credit Peabody Museum at Harvard College

While Putnam only seems to have visited the site once, Lord kept going back through the spring of 1885 and continued to send artifacts and human remains to Putnam at Harvard’s Peabody Museum where he was president. If you are interested in learning more about the artifacts unearthed during these excavations, you can do so by going to https://collections.peabody.harvard.edu/collections and using the advanced search function and searching “Longmeadow”. From there you can learn more about the 35 artifacts that are in the Peabody collection because of Putnam and Lord. In recent years, museums like the Peabody have begun the process of reevaluating their practices of collecting, displaying, and interpreting collections of items such as those from Longmeadow, which include the human remains of indigenous people. For more on their current work see their statement here.

For nearly a century afterward, the Meadows remained untouched by trained archaeologists until 1969 when American International College (AIC) Sociology Professor, Robert Lowrie, led a series of excavations in the then Fannie Stebbins Reservation and Wildlife Refuge looking for Native American artifacts. During these digs, Lowrie was assisted by both students from AIC and members of the Springfield Naturalist Club. They found artifacts such as steatite bowl shards, scrapers, and other tools. He believed that the people who used the tools were from a culture that lived around 1800 BC that was transitioning from a hunter-gatherer mode of living to one based more in horticulture. These digs continued until 1971 and the artifacts are currently in storage at AIC.

Peabody Museum, Harvard

Lowrie inspired an AIC student, Margaret Stoler, to take up her own line of archeological inquiry into the past of the Meadows. Stoler was a History major and Anthropology minor at AIC and was an active member of both the Springfield and Longmeadow Historical Societies. As Longmeadow was preparing for the Bicentennial, Stoler formed an archeological subcommittee of the larger Bicentennial Planning Committee as part of an effort to excavate the remains of some of the original homes of Longmeadow.

When Longmeadow was originally settled, the homes of the settlers were in the Meadows near the Connecticut River and it was only later, after the 1695 flood, that the settlement moved up to where the green is today. By researching old maps and comparing them to more recent maps of the Connecticut River shoreline, town engineer Robert T. Bitters believed he had found the spot where the homesite of one of the earliest English residents, Benjamin Cooley, had been. Stoler and the archeological committee decided to investigate and aimed to try to find the foundation of Cooley’s house. They planned to display any artifacts they found in the Storrs’ house as part of the Bicentennial celebration.

On May 10, 1974, the committee began searching for the foundation of the Cooley house. Later that summer, Stoler reported to The Springfield Republican that her team had made some interesting discoveries. While digging, they unearthed stones that were part of the Old Bay Path cattle trail which ran from Boston to Springfield and then down through Longmeadow to Hartford. Additionally, they found 17th-century brick remnants which were later determined to be part of Cooley’s house. After their bicentennial exposition, the artifacts were remitted to the state for storage and safekeeping.

Stoler with some artifacts from the dig she led. Credit Springfield Republican

Since Stoler’s dig, there have not been any large-scale, organized archaeological excavations in the Meadows. And while a 1988 “Plan for Historic Preservation” commissioned by the Historic District Commission and the Historical Society recommended that there be an archaeological survey conducted of the area, it does not appear that was ever completed. While there are no plans currently, it would be fascinating to know what a new survey by professional archaeologists trained in the latest techniques and having the benefit of the most current technologies might be able to learn and share about the earliest history of communities living and working on the banks of the Connecticut River in what is now known as Longmeadow.

-Contributed by Tim Casey, Longmeadow Historical Society Board Member (Special thanks to Michael Baick for getting me started on the subject and Stebbins Board, Friends of Conte, and the Allen Bird Club for their assistance with my research.)

Originally published June 9, 2022

Sources

Goldapar, Danielle. “Class Notes.” Lucent Magazine 6, no. 1, 2013.

Longmeadow, Massachusetts, Katherine M Greenleese, and Katherine L Kottaridis, Longmeadow Massachusetts: A Plan for Historic Preservation § (1988)

Moriarty, Thomas. “Digging History - Literally.” Springfield Sunday Republican, August 18, 1974.

O’Brien, Ruth. “Digs Lead to the Old Bay Path.” Springfield Sunday Republican, October 12, 1974.

Springfield Sunday Republican, 5 October 1969, "Naturalists Dig into Past at Stebbins Reservation", GenealogyBank.com

Union-News (Springfield, Massachusetts) 18 January 2003, obit for Margaret A. Stoler, GenealogyBank.com

Washington D. C, and Various Persons, 1880 US Census § (1880).