The Simpson Boarding House, 1901–1909: Reflecting the Roosevelt Largesse

In his message of September 8, 1908, to C. F. Weller, Secretary, The President's Homes Commission, President Theodore Roosevelt stated, In a democracy like ours, it is an ill thing for all of us, if any of us suffer from unwholesome surroundings or from lack of opportunity for good home life, good citizenship and useful industry. (Hart 234) And at the Pacific Theological Seminary, spring 1911, he stated, Nothing else takes the place or can take the place of family life, and family life cannot be really happy unless it is based on duty, based on recognition of the great underlying laws of religion and morality, of the great underlying laws of civilization, the laws which if broken mean the dissolution of civilization. (173) President Roosevelt's concern over conditions of housing and confirmation of family life was well founded in the burgeoning cities of his time, bursting with new arrivals of people from afar and people from farms. The boarding house was both praised for its provision of reputable accommodations in a homelike environment and blamed for its allowance of moral erosion in unsupervised settings. The upsurge of preference for lodging, rather than boarding, had begun by the turn of the twentieth century. In his article, "On the Margins: Lodgers and Boarders in Boston, 1860-1900," Mark Peel quotes from sociologist Albert B. Wolfe's The Lodging House Problem in Boston that the late nineteenth-century lodger desired "freedom and a bohemian existence." But, Peel maintains, Boarding continued to provide a familial setting for genteel American sociability. Lodging demanded a different relationship between housekeepers and tenants, one with fewer obligations and less interaction beyond the paying of rent. (823) Albert Wolfe expands this concept in his 1907 article, "The Problem of the Roomer": The boarder sleeps and eats in the same house; the roomer takes his meals at a restaurant...the probabilities are that the rooming house is everywhere displacing the old-time boarding house.... Moreover, lax as were boarding house conventionalities, they afforded far more restraints than can be found in the rooming house. A boarding house without a public parlor would be an anomaly, while a rooming house with one is a rarity. Wolfe laments the departure from the boarding house effecting "the isolation of the individual in the great middle, work-a-day class that fills the rooming houses-an isolation which constitutes a very real social problem" (959). So grave was the awareness of this change of preference that by 1909, the Lodging House Commission of Boston offered seven "proposals for remedies" to ameliorate the conditions of "moral evil" spawned by the rise of rooming houses and lodging houses ("Boston's Lodging House Commission" 738). In her book, Miss Mary Bobo's Boarding House Cookbook, Pat Mitchamore asks the question again in 1994, What was a boarding house? Generally, a large house with room to spare, a home to many. First, however, it served as the home to the persons or family that ran the establishment. Second, it was a source of income.... What did a boarding house provide? In addition to room and board, those who sought shelter in a boarding house were also looking for the creature comforts of home. Traveling businessmen, salesmen, railroad or road workers, vaudeville troupes, bachelors, old maids, and single schoolteachers all needed lodging-and more. Boarding house owners did more than change sheets and cook meals-they provided an extended family. Because all ages of people took room and board, the environment was much like that of a large family sharing one house. Besides the companionship, it afforded security in new surroundings, and it provided a bountiful table with a variety of foods that one person could not achieve. (7) The Bobo boarding house, in Lynchburg, Tennessee, was opened in 1908 and "charged $13.50 per month with two to a room and no private bath" (116). …