'Dark Tide' Author Connects Belmont To Molasses Flood

The stately house at 204 Prospect St. in Belmont was nearly 10 miles in distance and a world apart in wealth and privilege from Boston’s poor North End neighborhood devastated by a tsunami of molasses destroying businesses, buildings and homes and killing 21 people and injuring 150 in the winter of 1919.

Yet for Stephen Puleo, author of “Dark Tide, The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919” – who spoke last week to nearly 200 residents at the as part of the town’s One Book One Belmont celebration – the owner of the house on Prospect Street, attorney Damon Hall, is a central character in the story of the flood.

Puleo spoke of a man who brought a class action case for the victims and those injured that led to several groundbreaking legal decisions and practices including the first use of scientific and expert witnesses and a new way of looking at big business and its responsibilities to people they hurt.

Speaking in a friendly, conversational manner to a full house, Puleo gave an overview of the history of the ill-made 50-foot steel tank that held nearly 2.3 million gallons, or the equivalent of 26 million pounds of molasses, built three feet from Commercial Street in the North End.

But rather then simply give a history lesson; Puleo linked a wide range of related events – immigration, anarchists, local politics and the relationship of big business with their actions ­– all seen through the prism of the disaster.

He then described the flood, when the rivets rocketed from the tank, a 35-foot-wall of brown red molasses, buildings smashed and thrown into Boston Harbor (itself stained brown for months) and the weeks of cleaning up with seawater.

Belmont’s Hall leaves his mark on history

But it was the resulting lawsuit – which one of the first and largest class action lawsuits with nearly 150 individuals, mostly poor and working class Italian and Irish immigrants – that brought Belmont’s Hall, “feisty street-fighting type” to represent the plaintiffs before the court appointed master, Judge Hugh Ogden, “another great hero in the case,” said Puleo.

Ogden found in favor of the plaintiffs and Hall won greater settlements from the victims after threatening to take the firm, United States Industrial Alcohol, to court for damages.

After his book summary and before question and answer, Puelo introduced Sandra Sloan, Hall’s granddaughter who spoke how when Hall moved in 1913 after the Prospect Street structure was built, “Belmont was considered to be in the country.”

“It was so far away my grandmother thought you would be robbed coming there,” said Sloan.

She described how her grandfather “loved to argue” and how his minister would come for Sunday dinner and then spend the afternoon in the study “arguing about that Sunday’s sermon” before closing the blinds and curtains so they could play bridge without violating Massachusetts’ strict “blue” laws.

Hall, who served as Belmont’s Town Meeting Moderator, also owned a dog named “Lord Jeffrey” who had a tab with the Belmont Taxi Company; when he was found around town, a tag on his collar told whoever found him to call town cabbie “to have him driven home,” said Sloan.

“Every good book has a theme,” Peleo told Belmont Patch after the get together, the main event in the month-long One Book series coordinated by the library's head reference librarian, Emily Reardon.

“It is about the underdog, poor people, who triumph over business greed. But it goes to more and greater themes; immigration, how we view big business, how people like Hall, who wasn’t like the people he represented, fought for them because it was important to,” he said.