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A New York/Boston feud on Christmas, 1905

Thomas Lawson, a native of Charlestown, was not well liked on Wall Street back in the day. Lawson, who started working as a bank clerk after he ran away from home at 12, became rich as a speculator in copper stocks (some would say swindler), but later tried to reform Wall Street, which, as you can see from this 1905 cover of Puck magazine, did not much appreciate the attention.

Lawson eventually settled in Scituate, where a water tower from his estate, Dreamwold, still stands. In addition to dabbling in copper stocks, he was also a novelist and wrote one of the first books about baseball and was, of course, a die-hard Red Sox fan (after they were started, that is).

Puck cover from the Library of Congress.

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Comments

Wall Streeters, bah, humbug.

Merry Christmas uhubbers!

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Tough to find a sympathetic party in this dispute! FYI that Lawson’s estate was called Dreamwold.

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And, of course, there's a Dreamwold Road in Scituate.

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The Deluge by David Graham Phillips
https://books.google.com/books?id=Zx2ZxPXscIoC&printsec=frontcover#v=two...

Please see also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Graham_Phillips

"Lawson is believed to have been the inspiration for the protagonist of David Graham Phillips' 1905 novel The Deluge." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Lawson_(businessman)

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Lawson had a tower built at his estate on the South Shore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_Tower

He is also the grandfather of Thomas Lawson McCall, legendary governor of Oregon who shepherded many conservation measures into reality - like comprehensive land use planning and controls on sulfur emissions from paper mills. Tom McCall was also the grandson of Massachusetts Governor Samuel McCall, who coordinated relief efforts after the Halifax Explosion.

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