Bela Marsh: A Downpayment on 14 Bromfield Street

(Two sewage engineers in a week: first May Benzenberg Mayer's father, and now Bela Marsh's grandson, Francis. What are the odds. George H. Benzenberg was a nationally known "municipal engineer" and the city engineer of Milwaukee; Francis Beal Marsh, the son of Bela's son, Thomas, designed the Baltimore sewer system).

Bela Marsh. I am drawn to him because The Western Star was, I believe, organized with his involvement or equipment in one way or another (its offices were at 25 Bromfield Street), though I can't prove it, and Marsh was dead before TWS saw the light of day. His name appears everywhere in the early records of Modern Spiritualism, but it's only a name, and an address: Cornhill, and then 14 Bromfield Street, both in Boston.

Giles Stebbins wrote, somewhere or other:

Before me lies the Autobiography of Henry C. Wright, a volume of four hundred pages, published in Boston, in 1849, by Bela Marsh -- whose little Cornhill bookstore, in the same room for years with the anti-slavery office, was the place where all sorts of books on unpopular, yet excellent reforms and reformers, could be had, and where Bela Marsh himself, one of the best of men, could always be seen.

(Henry C. Wright was, among other things, the author of The Unwelcome Child, or the Crime of an Undesigned and Undesired Maternity (1858), which Marsh also published, and which secondary sources tell us contained more than round hints on methods of abortion -- though I can't find them in the text.)

Bela Marsh was born, to Lot Marsh (1757-1843) and Lydia French (1761-1843), on or about 20 February 1797, in Massachusetts. He married Mary Beal or Beals (1808?-1878) on 23 February 1827 in Boston (Rev. H. Ballou, Universalist, conducting the ceremony), and they had one child, Thomas (1849--?), who married a Jane Lowry, with whom he had two children: Charlotte and Francis Beal Marsh, the Baltimore sewer system designer.

Bela was, by trade, a book-binder, and his early professional associations were not surprisingly with others in the book trade: printers, in particularly. He and one Nahum Capen dissolved their partnership Marsh & Capen at the end of 1829, and formed a new one two weeks later, adding one Gardner P. Lyon to the partnership, and announcing their intent to enter the book trade directly, having bought the inventory of one Jacob B. Moore, Esq., of Concord. That enterprise was long-lived: a fourth partner, Thomas S. H. Webb, was added, some time in the mid-1830s, but by the early 1840s, the firm was in difficulties: liens were imposed on them, in New York State and in New Hampshire, for unpaid obligations, and the firm (and Bela) disappear from the public records entirely from 1842 to 1844. It's then, in January of 1844, that Bela announces -- in the Boston Liberator, Garrison's paper -- that he's set up shop on his own.

From early 1844 until the end of 1852, Bela -- as a merchant and a citizen -- leads what may be the exemplary progressive life. His featured stock includes: water-cure and hydropathy, "the physiological and phrenological works of Fowler, Graham and others," "the works of Owen, Brisbane, Godwin, Boyle and other," the by-laws of Brook Farm, "a new edition of the History of Women," (by one Lydia M. Child, whom EHB will mine for Art Magic), and other similar materials. He is also becoming a publisher, initially of pamphlets, and organizing or participating in societies: sanitary societies, a society to fund and build a "Female Medical Institute, and in conjunction with it a Maternity Hospital," and many, many, many abolition and fugitive slave meetings, groups and programs.

Aside from his publication of something I really must see -- An Exposition of the Secret Order of the Sons of Temperance, with Facts in Relation to Secret Societies (in 1848), there is nothing in Bela Marsh's life in the public records to indicate a sliver of occultism.

Then, in late 1851, this curious notice appears in the Boston Evening Transcript:

(At least one copy of this early piece of ephemera survives.)

From that point forward, Marsh is as deeply involved in the early growth of Modern Spiritualism as he is in other progressive communities. The Shekinah and New Era are both published out of his shop; he becomes, in 1852, a director of the Boston Spiritual Convention, and the Massachusetts Spiritual Convention, and he begins featuring Spiritualist literature in his advertisements, alongside Freethought and abolitionist material.

(Spear's Messages from the Superior State, another important piece of ephemera, is available from IAPSOP.)

In 1854, Marsh moves from the Cornhill to 9 Franklin Street, and remains there until 1857 or so, when he moves again to 14 Bromfield Street. Meanwhile, Marsh publishes much literature of interest to Spiritualist and occult researchers today, including E. W. Capron and LeRoy Sunderland material, while continuing to promote -- often with more muscle than he applies to Spiritualism -- different material, in particular alternative heathcare, hygiene and dietary regimes. in the late 1850s, he becomes embroiled in the Gibson Smith "Roman catacombs" testament of Jesus Christ hoax (which you can examine for yourself here -- note the Editor's preface by John Bovee Dods) as the publisher of the materials (in conjunction with our friend S. T. Munson of Great Jones Street, NYC), and in 1860 he is a prime mover behind a (failed?) attempt to establish a national Anti-Slavery Party in the US. The public record is quiet about his doings in the 1860s, but he is publishing plenty of progressive and Spiritualist material, as a Google Books search will evidence. He dies in January of 1869, and his death is only sparsely noticed in the Boston papers.

I'm happy to share my notes and clippings with anyone who's got a hankering to look more closely at the life of Bela Marsh -- a significant amplifying node in the social network of Modern Spiritualism -- but the sense I get, following him through the public records, is of a man committed to reform in nearly every dimension that reform was organized during his life, and deeply committed at that. Allowing, at one time, at least five Spiritualist journals to operate out of his offices, he was clearly making market -- as any bookseller and publisher of the time would have done -- but he was also voting with his pocketbook: water cure, female physicians, prison reform, alternative diets, birth control, abolition, and spirit communication. In his catalog, and I think in his mind, these were of a piece, parts of the reformation of a corrupt world.