Continue along to the bench that has a very small plaque on the ground to the right of it. It's a challenge to find!
Emily Greene Balch was a professor of economics, an ardent pacifist and a Nobel Peace Prize winner. She was born in Jamaica Plain in 1867, graduated in the first class at Bryn Mawr College in 1889 and received the Nobel in 1946 for her work with the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Emily helped to found the Woman’s Peace Party in 1915, which eventually took the name of the WILPF in 1919. She was only the second American woman to win the prize. Her family's home was at 130 Prince Street (a bigger plaque is on that house).
Emily Greene Balch helped found the first settlement house in Boston, Dennison House. Then she taught at Wellesley College for twenty years, teaching economics with a progressive perspective including the writings of Karl Marx. Balch also focused on immigration issues. The outbreak of World War I saw Emily getting heavily involved in international women’s and pacifist organizations. Balch was quickly considered too radical by the College. She was dismissed in 1919, became a President of WILPF and spent the rest of her life working for peace. She died in 1961 at the age of 94 and is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery.
The area rising up beyond the Pond here is now called Moss Hill. It’s the area where Mayor Curley relocated to after vacating 350 Jamaicaway. At the top of the hill was a compound owned by the Bowditch family. The hill was generally known as Bowditch Hill from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The Bowditches were an old Salem family. Their best known member, who lived well before their migration south, was Nathaniel Bowditch. He was an astronomer, mathematician and navigator. He only had formal schooling until age 10 and was largely self-educated. Later, during his years at sea, he began working on The New American Practical Navigator, the first complete and accurate handbook of navigation tables. The Practical Navigator was published in 1802. It is still in print, and in use, over two centuries later. Tradition has it that no sailor left port without a Bible, a chest of clothes, a mother's blessing, and his copy of Bowditch. Nathaniel’s second son, Jonathan Ingersoll Bowditch purchased land in Jamaica Plain in 1859 and brought the family to Moss Hill. They would eventually occupy several large houses. His son, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch (grandson of the great navigator) a doctor who was greatly interested in housing reform in the late nineteenth century (developments on those lines are featured on our Hyde Square and Woodbourne tours).