Boss Lady

My mother has a large coffee cup in Tyringham emblazoned “BOSS LADY”. My younger sister Kate refers to herself as a B.L.I.T. (Boss Lady in Training). Every Mrs. Perkins I’ve ever known, especially my own wife Cathy, has had a “take charge” personality.

The original “Boss Lady” was Elizabeth Peck Perkins. Elizabeth was 18, the daughter of a successful fur trader, when she married James Perkins, an employee of her father’s counting-house, in Boston in 1754.

James became a general store merchant, and the family lived on King Street. James was a good friend of Paul Revere, and was said to have once bested him in a horse race. Daughter Elizabeth was born in 1756 and Ann in 1759. Their first son James was born in 1761, followed by Thomas (1764) and Samuel (1767). Following the imposition of the Stamp Act in 1765, as unrest grew in the colonies, English Redcoats were garrisoned right in Boston. Young son Jim gathered a troop of his playfellows, and drilled with soldier-like precision in front of the “Lobsterbacks,” but the play suddenly became deadly and real on a cold March morning in 1770 when nine-year-old Jim and his younger brother Tom were woken to view the blood frozen on the street, and the shot-ridden bodies laid out in their neighbors’ houses, from the shootings now known as the Boston Massacre.

The family continued to grow. Esther was born in 1771, and Margaret in 1773, but thirty-seven year old Elizabeth was suddenly left with three small sons and five daughters when her relatively young husband James died in 1773. Elizabeth did not shrink in the face of adversity; with “firmness and ability” she took over the family business, and sold groceries, chinaware, glass, and wine.

The family evacuated Boston just before the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775 for Barnstable on the Cape. Following the British evacuation the next spring, they returned to Boston, but then Elizabeth’s father died in 1777, and her mother a little over a year later. Elizabeth was alone with her children. She was the sole surviving child however, and came into an inheritance of Boston commercial real estate which yielded a modest income.

Elizabeth wanted her sons to get a college education, but “the circumstances of the time” dictated that they enter the world of commerce. She reopened her business, and took over her husband’s partnerships with other merchants. She became part owner of the ship the “Beaver” and was soon receiving letters from Holland addressed to Mr. Elizabeth Perkins, or Captain Perkins. She was successful enough to be able to subscribe $1,000 for the Continental Army in 1780.

She thought independently; she was sympathetic to Universalist doctrines, refused to believe in damnation, and was accepting of a variety of religions. She contributed to Jean de Cheverus, the first Roman Catholic bishop in Boston, for his work among the poor, and she offered him the use of a building on School Street in which he could conduct services. Deeply concerned with the mental illness she saw about her, she helped found the Boston Female Asylum and served the asylum as a director.

Her children did well. The boys went into business. Jim began in business about 1782, at Cape François on the island of Santo Domingo (Haiti), and his brothers Tom and Sam joined him as soon as they came of age. Elizabeth married Russell Sturgis, a fur merchant; Ann married Robert Cushing, Captain of the Beaver; Mary married Benjamin Abbot, headmaster of Exeter Academy; Esther married Thomas Doubleday, and after he died, Josiah Sturgis (Russell’s brother), and Margaret married Ralph Bennet Forbes who entered the Perkins family business.

A granddaughter remembered, “they called her “Madame Perkins” and she seemed rather awful to us. Mother spoke of her, even to the servants, as “the old lady” . . . But she was a remarkable woman, very dignified, and of great strength of character. “

Elizabeth Peck Perkins, “Madame Perkins”, owned a considerable amount of real estate in the Boston business district throughout her life. She became very wealthy, but continued to live with the simplicity of a single mother raising eight children. She wore plain dresses of brown calico in the morning and did most of her own housework, and then changed to brown silk for the afternoon, when civic leaders came to call, looking for financial assistance with another charitable endeavor.

After several years of declining health, she died in 1807, but “something of her remarkable character seems, indeed, to have passed down through successive generations of descendents who to the present day are numbered among the business, political, and civic leaders of Massachusetts.