Downing Street
From Worcester Activist wiki
Henry Harmon Chamberlin once applied for life insurance.
A newly-formed life insurance company turned him down as a bad risk. He had heart trouble, the examining physician said.
This made Chamberlin angry. “I’ll outlive every one of you!” he vowed. He did.
He also became known as “the pioneer of the Worcester dry goods business,” founding one of the city’s largest department stores, Barnard Sumner & Putnam Co.
It began in 1840 as H.H. Chamberlain & Co.; later it was Chamberlin, Barnard & Co., and Barnard & Sumner.
Chamberlin was born in Hardwick on Jan. 7, 1813. In 1822, the father moved to Worcester where he operated a tavern in the Washington Square vicinity.
The son attended Latin grammar school until 1827, then was apprenticed to a country store. In 1835, he opened his own store opposite Mechanics Hall building on Main street.
Retiring from the dry goods business in 1855, he became a large manufacturer of cotton and woolen goods in Oxford during the Civil War. Later he was one of the biggest woolen dealers in the State.
A man of many tastes, Chamberlin left the woolen business and went into real estate on a large scale. His own estate was in South Worcester.
Interested in horticulture, he spent thousands improving his lands.
He brought to Worcester A.J. Downing and Gilbert Vaux, two famous New York landscape gardeners, to improve his property-and in a burst of admiration named a street after Downing.
He also laid out and named Charlotte, Woodland, Maywood, Birch, Hawthorne and Loudon street. Charlotte was his wife’s first name. Woodland and Maywood were full of woods, hence the names. Chamberlin was a bit of a writer himself; named Hawthorne street after the author, whom he admired. Loudon was a great English landscape gardener.
Chamberlin was elected to the State Legislature in 1854; became an alderman in 1872.
He died at 86 on Jan. 11, 1899.
Wrote the Worcester Spy the following day: “He was of a quick and decisive temperament, which never dallied with time or opportunity and ever acted on the spur of the moment with the almost unfailing correctness of premises that usually betrays careful deliberations.”
Downing street-Main street northwest to Park avenue-first appeared in 1857.
The core of this article comes from A History of Your City Streets.
