“Not Alms but a Friend”: Robert Treat Paine

Born in 1835, the third of nine children of Charles Cushing Paine, a Boston lawyer, and Fanny Cabot Jackson Paine, Robert Treat Paine was a great-grandson of Robert Treat Paine, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Young Robert attended Boston Latin School, as generations of his ancestors going back to “the Signer” had done before him, and Harvard College where his life-long friendship with classmate Phillips Brooks began. Paine studied for a year at Harvard Law School and then read for the law in the office of Richard Henry Dana. “Real estate law,” he said, was his “delight” and he specialized with great success in the development and incorporation of—and investment in—Michigan copper mines and western railroads. Paine married Lydia Williams Lyman in 1862. The newlyweds divided their time between a winter home in Boston, across the street from the house where Lydia had been born at 6 Joy Street, and a summer house at the Vale, the Lyman family estate in Waltham. In 1881, after the death of Lydia’s father, George Williams Lyman, the Paines moved into his house on Joy Street where they raised seven children.

Before he was thirty-five, Robert Treat Paine had already amassed a large personal fortune and from 1869 onward, he began to devote much of his time—and later, nearly all of his energies—to civic reform, charitable work, public welfare, and the Episcopal Church. He helped bring cooperative and workingmen’s banks to Boston and created, through workingmen’s loan and building associations, model housing for “plain people” in Boston and its suburbs. He was the first president of the Associated Charities of Boston and served in that capacity for twenty-five years. Paine believed that true philanthropy was found in friendship and moral guidance for those in need, rather than in material gifts. He took the motto of the British Charity Organization Society, “Not Alms but a Friend,” for the Associated Charities of Boston. He also was an active member of the American Peace Society, and Boston children’s aid and prison reform societies.

Robert Treat Paine and Henry Hobson Richardson

For all of his enthusiasm for public welfare, in no field was Paine more energetic than in his support for the activities of the Episcopal Church. Although raised a Unitarian, he joined Trinity Church in Boston when his college classmate and friend Phillips Brooks became the minister. Paine played a key role in the effort to move Trinity Church from the old city center to Copley Square in the newly-developed Back Bay district of Boston. This plan already was underway when the old Trinity church building was destroyed in the great Boston fire of 1872. Paine raised funds to expand the building site and headed the building committee that selected the young (age thirty-three) and untried architect, H. H. Richardson of the New York firm of Gambrill & Richardson, for the project.

After the completion of Trinity Church, H. H. Richardson moved to Boston and began a solo architectural practice. Among his clients were Robert and Lydia Paine. Working on a wooded landscape in Waltham designed by Frederic Law Olmsted, Richardson planned “Stonehurst,” a reconfigured and expanded out-of-town residence for the Paine family. After Richardson’s early death in 1886, Stonehurst was completed according to his plans by his talented assistants, George F. Shepley, Charles A. Coolidge, and Charles H. Rutan, who continued the firm under their own names. Their later projects included a memorial pulpit in Trinity Church dedicated to Robert Treat Paine by his children in 1916.

The attribution of the Paine bookcase to H. H. Richardson is a matter of family tradition, but it is supported by at least one manuscript record. It is listed in a 1911 inventory of the back parlor of the Paine’s Joy Street home under the cryptic entry: “[1880] Bookcase—‘Rubies’—[H.H.R. 80 Norcross 800]--.75.” “Norcross” may refer to Orlando W. Norcross, Richardson’s “master builder,” or to his firm, Norcross Brothers of Worcester, Massachusetts. The bookcase also appears in a photograph of the interior of 6 Joy Street, the Paine family home from 1881 onward.