Reed’s Overbrook

Long before Overbrook had a name, the brook that now feeds Reed’s Pond ran from Nonesuch Pond toward Morse’s Pond through farmland on the Wellesley–Natick border. In 1661 Edward Hawes was granted land “on the brook connecting Nonesuch with Morse’s pond,” and at an early date built a saw and grist mill there “on the present site of Mr. Frederick Reed’s dam.” By 1771 the mill was being run by Moses Loker of Weston. That history comes from a 1908 Townsman series on “The Fells in 1830,” written while Reed’s dam was still new.

The 1897 town atlas shows the land a year before Reed arrived: no pond, just the brook winding through an open strip north of Worcester Street, beside about 36 acres held by the Stevens family (H. J. and Abel F. Stevens). In March 1898 Reed bought the Stevens heirs’ interests in an eight-acre lot there, the start of an estate that grew by later purchases to something like 70 acres or more.

The Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board was buying land along the same corridor for the new Boston water system, and in November 1905 it deeded a parcel to Reed with easements reserved. The 1906 Boston Post credited “the famous Olmstead family” with laying out Reed’s grounds. No Olmsted job for Reed appears in the firm’s records, though the firm did work in Wellesley for the Water Board (1899–1906) and on the Worcester Street widening (1902), so the claim remains unconfirmed.

The Norfolk County deed index traces how the estate was assembled. Reed bought from the Stevens heirs in March 1898 (Books 809, p. 478, and 811, p. 323) and mortgaged to the Natick Five Cents Savings Bank that July. He then added parcels from the Waban Rose Conservatories (1902 and 1904), from Abel F. Stevens and others (1903 and 1912) and from Welthea A. Stevens (1911), and in November 1905 took land from Henry H. Sprague and others, the Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Board (Book 1013, p. 57). In October 1910, months after his mother’s death, he and his sister Alice Reed Dresser exchanged deeds, apparently settling her share of the family property. After Reed left for California the records follow the plan: a 1913 petition to partition land, powers of attorney to local agents (Frank E. Downs in June 1914 and Henry C. Mulligan in 1917), Land Court decrees of 1915 registering the subdivision (one naming an Upson Road, after Mrs. Reed’s family), lot deeds from 1915 into the 1920s, a 1931 deed bringing the house lot back into his name, and in 1932–33 state takings and a deed to the Commonwealth for the widening of Worcester Street.

Frederick Reed was born in Berlin, Wisconsin, on 29 August 1858, the son of Elliott Reed and Betsey Hascall (Gregory) Reed. He grew up in Chicago, went to the Englewood High School, and entered Harvard in 1877. He later dropped his middle names: the class records list him as “Frederick Reed (formerly Frederick Silas Gregory Reed).” Newspapers of 1907 liked to call him a “Classmate of Roosevelt.” Theodore Roosevelt was actually Harvard ’80, a year ahead of him.

His own entry in the class’s 25th-anniversary report, written in March 1906, traces a restless career:

“At present am working out those views in practical living, with the result which has always followed those who step outside the beaten path of conventionality, — social condemnation and ostracism.”

Reed’s widowed mother, Betsey, moved to Overbrook after his father’s death in 1897 and lived there until she died on 28 February 1910. Her Townsman obituary names a daughter, Mrs. Horatio W. Dresser of Cambridge, which made Reed the brother-in-law of one of the best-known New Thought writers of the day.

That world of liberal religion is where Reed turns up before the Spirit Fruit years. In August 1900 the Lewiston Journal reported that “Sunrise Camp” at Sarah Farmer’s Greenacre conferences in Eliot, Maine, was “under the efficient charge of Mr. Frederick Reed of Wellesley,” and in 1901 he gave morning talks there titled “Helps by the Way.” That November the Natick Bulletin noted that Mr. and Mrs. Reed of “Overbrook” had returned to Boston for the winter, which suggests the house was at first a summer place.

The Harvard reports list no children. Murphy’s history of the movement says the Reeds lost a child at birth in 1895.

The movement Reed joined was the creation of Jacob Beilhart, born on 4 March 1867 to a Columbiana County, Ohio, farm family and trained as a harness maker. He left his Lutheran and Mennonite upbringing for the Seventh-day Adventists, attended an Adventist college in California, and studied nursing at John Harvey Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. There he befriended C. W. Post, the future cereal maker, and worked with him on faith healing before striking out on his own.

Back in Lisbon, Ohio, Beilhart decided in 1899 to found a community, and the Spirit Fruit Society was incorporated as a religious body around 1900–01. Its members farmed, printed their own papers, and preached that selfishness and the urge to possess, including possessing other people, were the root of human misery. Newspapers summarized that as “free love.” After an open house on 26 June 1904 drew more than 400 curious visitors, local hostility drove the group out of Ohio.

After a stay in Chicago the society bought about 90 acres on Wooster Lake at Ingleside, Illinois, in 1905. There its members built by hand a large concrete-block house they called the “Spirit Fruit Temple.” The society never numbered more than a couple of dozen people and did not recruit. Clarence Darrow was said to be a frequent visitor.

Beilhart died of peritonitis after appendicitis in November 1908 (accounts give both the 2nd and the 24th) and was buried in an unmarked grave overlooking Wooster Lake. Virginia Moore led the group afterward. In the winter of 1914–15 the survivors moved to California and in 1915 bought about 80 acres at Soquel, near Santa Cruz, which they called Hilltop Ranch. The society disbanded in 1930, after Moore’s death.

Where Reed fits

Reed came to Beilhart around 1904–05, and his loss of the Boston Latin post followed. Overbrook became the society’s eastern station. The 1906 Post printed Beilhart’s portrait beside Reed’s, and in 1907 it reported that Beilhart was “sometimes among these visitors and his coming is always looked forward to with the greatest pleasure by Mr. Reed.” After Beilhart died, Reed spent six weeks at Ingleside, and on 4 April 1909 the Boston Sunday Post ran “Rumor Head of Wellesley Spirit Fruiters Will Be Cult’s Prophet.” It reported that Reed had helped choose 147 acres for the society’s new western site and was expected to succeed Beilhart, though he himself disclaimed any succession. It quoted him: “We receive socialists, anarchists, believers in free love — in short, all classes of people are welcome to come here and enjoy the freedom of our colony at Overbrook.” Its photographs show Reed, Mrs. Reed, Miss Caroline Norwell of the colony, and the Overbrook henhouse, “Mr. Reed’s most thriving industry.” In November 1912 Reed announced that he, his wife and their followers would leave Wellesley to settle in California with the Beilhart group.

On 4 February 1906 the Boston Sunday Post gave the colony a full illustrated page. It showed the house, its drawing room “where devotees assemble,” Mrs. Reed, Beilhart, and Reed himself in working clothes. The Post described the estate’s pine groves and “a beautiful stream emptying into an artificial pond in the rear of Overbrook House.” It called Reed the head of the Boston Latin School; he had in fact been a master there. Reed later explained that he had left teaching to take work at $15 a week in a department store. The Post feature was syndicated at once: on 24 February the Louisville Times ran it across the top of a section front as “Classmate of Roosevelt Quits Riches for Faith,” adding that Reed had bought the place “seven years ago” as “a retired country residence for his wife, who was in failing health.”

Locally, the Townsman treated Reed as a neighbor. In August 1906 he was “progressing finely” with a new water supply. That September a brush fire in the Oak Street woods threatened “Overbrook” and was only put out with Reed’s help, and later that month he was improving his land along Worcester Street. In 1907 one of three trolley waiting shelters on the Boston & Worcester line stood “at Overbrook on the property of Mr. Frederick Reed.”

1907: the colony makes national news

Beginning with the Brooklyn Eagle in January 1907, the story spread nationally. Lisbon, Ohio’s Buckeye State ran “Classmate of Roosevelt Heads Spirit Fruit Cult” in April, and in June the Montgomery Advertiser counted Overbrook among “Religions That Have Proven to Be Gold Mines.” On 23 June the Boston Post ran “Wellesley College Horrified,” reporting that students on their country walks had been stopping at Overbrook and that the faculty wanted them kept away. The page included a photograph of college president Caroline Hazard. A syndicated story headed “Too Much Free Love” reported that Wellesley’s police chief, Kingsbury, was looking into the colony. It inflated the numbers (“25 members”) and wrongly called Reed a former Wellesley professor. A Boston Herald interview that same week counted five residents.

“Boston’s latest contribution to religious cults”

In April 1907 a syndicated Sunday feature, “The Spirit Fruit Society,” carried the story across the country with a drawing of Reed at a wheelbarrow and five photographs: the house, Reed “in colony dress,” a corner of a room at Overbrook, and Mrs. Reed, Mr. Reed and Caroline Norwell “making partridge berry bowls.” In it Reed told his own story of coming down in the world: from the head of the Latin School to a department-store floorwalker at $15 a week, then to a laborer at $1.75 a day for a man who had once been his own gardener at Wellesley. He also explained the bowls. A visiting friend had brought glass jars, someone thought of planting partridge berries in them, and the colony sold them, with “remarkable success.” The feature put the estate at eighty-nine acres. The Brooklyn Eagle reprinted the Boston Post’s version that March.

June 1907: the story goes around the world

On 12 June 1907 a Boston dispatch reported that Wellesley College had forbidden its students to visit Overbrook. The reporter found Reed “wearing blue jeans and rubber boots, digging in a brook,” and let him explain himself: “We live as we are prompted. God moves us according to some purpose. If I wake up at 4 o’clock in the morning and the spirit tells me to climb a tree, I climb a tree.” He added that he had “an income of from $3,000 to $4,000 a year.” Papers from Chicago to Fort Wayne printed it within two days, and Battle Creek was still running it in late July. The Cincinnati Enquirer put it on its front page on 18 June as “Break It Up: Is the Demand in Boston Against Reed’s Place,” adding that Wellesley College’s president, Caroline Hazard, had “implored the Chief to blot out the colony.” The Washington Times ran the longest version: Reed’s niece, a Wellesley student, had brought classmates to the “spirit community,” wealthy neighbors grew suspicious of “some painted women with glittering diamonds,” and the colonists wore bloomers, “the primitive dress of the Greeks and Turks.” Near the Spirit Fruit farm in Illinois, the Waukegan Daily Sun and the Lake County Independent ran “Bombless Anarchy: Beilhart’s Law,” in which members at Ingleside denied the free-love story and the paper called Reed’s Wellesley house the society’s eastern “branch” (misprinting it “Overbury”). This is the article Murphy cites.

A longer New York World version, reprinted as far away as Evansville, Indiana, said Reed had bought Overbrook about ten years earlier as a summer residence, counted twenty-five members (twelve men and thirteen women), and reported that the women wore bloomers. Cabled to Britain by the London Daily Telegraph’s New York correspondent, it ran in Bradford, Birmingham, Hull, Sunderland and Grimsby that same week under headlines like “Menace to Morals” and “Home of Spontaneous Love,” and it reached Adelaide by 27 July and Sydney by August. At home the fuss ended quietly. On 19 June Wellesley’s police chief, Kingsbury, said he had taken no action: the college had made no formal complaint, “but there has been a great deal of gossip relative to the place.”

Leaving Wellesley

By 1912 the town taxed Reed on a $3,000 dwelling, eight acres at Overbrook, outbuildings, several Stevens parcels and about 26 acres listed as “land, Metropolitan Water Board.” On 22 November 1912 the Boston Post announced “Cult Colony to Quit Wellesley.” After seven years on the 70-acre estate, Reed planned to take his wife and followers to California to join the Beilhart faction. The fuller wire version, printed in the Springfield Daily News, describes life on the estate: most of the work “has been done by Mr. Reed, who, dressed in homespun, mows the lawn, cleans out the stables and does all sorts of menial labor. When the weather is not too cold he goes barefooted.” It credited him with starting the colony in 1907, said he was weighing an offer for an estate “worth more than $30,000” with “three houses, its pond and its shady groves,” and quoted his creed: “I obey God because I want to. … You may call the great force God or nature or love. It is all one.” The next day’s Waukegan Daily Sun, the local paper for the Spirit Fruit farm in Illinois, told the other side on its front page: “Spirit Heads Clash on Who Is to Be Boss of Spirit Fruit Farm.” Reed said a “still small voice” had told him to take charge of the farm, join the Wellesley and Illinois colonists, and move them all to California, “where he will be boss of a big tract of forest land.” Virginia Moore, who had led the farm since Beilhart’s death, refused “non-resistingly but firmly”: a similar voice, she said, had told her Reed “would better stay where he is.” The paper added that at Wellesley Reed “dresses up in homespun and goes barefoot.” Chicago’s Day Book turned it into comedy, “Ah! Ha! New Kind of War Bound This Way,” with Miss Moore replying that “a large, loud voice tells me” Reed “had better stay where he is.” It wondered whether the neighbors’ objections had “something to do with the spiritual urge that told Reed to come to Chicago,” and mocked Beilhart’s followers as “high-brow bugs.” Two weeks later a Los Angeles dispatch, printed in the St. Louis Republic on 8 December and as far away as Fort Worth as “New Cult to Walk Barefoot Over U.S.,” had the colony planning to come west on foot to settle near Los Angeles, which Reed called “the place I have selected for the purpose.” “Were I consistent,” he told the reporter, “the attitude of my neighbors could neither hurt nor move me, but I am not always consistent. I need to get into the wilds.” The state, he predicted, would become “the world’s center for true thought and religious relief.” The move stalled. In March 1913 the Boston American found “Reed Is a Puzzle to Wellesley”: a local land boom made his $30,000 estate hard to sell. That August he was a guest at Green Acre, “the head of the Overbrook Colony at Wellesley, which has been so widely criticised because of its alleged tenets on the doctrine of free love.”

Reed solved the problem by subdividing. In February 1914 the civil engineer Arthur P. French drew the Plan of the Overbrook Estates, property of Frederick Reed (Land Court plan 4252). It cut more than 100 acres into roughly 600 lots, some only 20 feet wide on Edgemoor Avenue, 40 feet on Overbrook Drive and 60 feet on Woodside Avenue, and ringed “Overbrook Pond” with park land. Reed’s own house kept a lot of its own on the plan.

That spring the auctioneer J. G. Twining sold lots at $17 to $800, and the trolley was his selling point. His Boston American ad showed a Boston & Worcester car stopped at Overbrook station, promised “200 Boston & Worcester Cars Pass Daily,” and urged city people to spend a weekend “in the Country — not too far from or too near the city” looking at “Home Sites — Camp Sites on Lake or Brook — Among the Forest Trees.” The house on the rise behind the streetcar, with an “Office” sign on its roof, is probably Reed’s own. It sits where the Reed house stands above the old station, it has the same gable-fronted shape as the 1906 photograph, and the house stayed empty and unsold until 1927, which would have made it the natural sales office. The halftone is too coarse to confirm smaller details. On 19 April the American reported that hundreds of people had turned out and “Many Lots Sold at ‘Overbrook’ Wellesley.” A year on, in April 1915, the Boston Globe reported that Twining, now “manager of the Overbrook estates,” had sold over 100 more lots since the previous July, spent over $7,000 on development, and planned $5,000 more for new roads “round the pond and through the park, which is reserved for the benefit of the purchasers.” Several houses, and stores, had been built.

A sad episode came just before the sale. In March 1914 a Pittsburgh physician who had been staying for two weeks in a small cottage behind Reed’s house, at what the papers called “Overbrook Farm, which is conducted by Frederick Reed,” took his own life there; the news ran from Boston to Scranton.

Reed had already gone. In 1921 he wrote that in 1914 he “left my real estate interests in the hands of an agent, and came to California.” A 1917 Land Court notice names “Frederick Reed, of Los Angeles,” and from 1918 the town carried him as a non-resident taxpayer. In September 1918 the Riverside Daily Press announced that “Frederick Reed will teach English at poly.” In March 1922 it credited “Prof. Frederick Reed” with proposing a national “post office course” for schoolchildren, an idea Postmaster General Will Hays wrote to commend. That October he spoke at a Prohibition rally as “professor of English in Junior college.” By 1931 he had moved to Fallbrook in San Diego County, and that May the local paper reported “Frederick Reed Goes East for Reunion of Class at Harvard” for the class’s 50th. He was “formerly of Fallbrook, now in Riverside” by August 1937, two months after he gave the pond land to Wellesley, and Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Reed were receiving visitors in Riverside at New Year 1939. Reed died in Riverside on 31 July 1944, aged 85, and was buried on 5 August in Evergreen Cemetery (now Evergreen Memorial Park), Riverside. His obituary named his wife, Lillian Rachael Reed, and his sister, Mrs. Horatio W. Dresser of South Hadley, Massachusetts.

Building came slowly. In July 1918 Town Meeting voted $2,500 to extend electric lights into the Overbrook section. About 20 cottages stood by 1921 and nearly 50 by 1925. In September 1921 the Boston Post photographed a Pentecostal camp meeting pitched in tents at Overbrook station.

The trolley stop at Overbrook, 1903–1932

Overbrook grew up around a streetcar stop. The Boston & Worcester Street Railway opened along the old Worcester Turnpike, now Route 9, in May 1903, running from Boston to Framingham Junction and on to Worcester that July. It passed right along Reed’s frontage on Worcester Street. There was no station building. In 1907 the Townsman counted three waiting shelters in the Fells, all on private property: one “at Overbrook on the property of Mr. Frederick Reed,” a second at Woodside built by Everett Felch and Abel F. Stevens Jr., and a third at Weston Road. It urged other residents to build more.

The stop was the selling point of the 1914 auction: Twining’s ad showed a car standing at Overbrook and promised “200 Boston & Worcester Cars Pass Daily.” The name stuck to the place. In 1921 a Pentecostal camp meeting pitched its tents “at Overbrook station,” and through the 1920s and early 1930s residents gave their address simply as “Overbrook Station, Wellesley,” with an Overbrook post office by 1922. The 1926 timetable ran cars from Wellesley Hills every half hour, then hourly until 11.30 p.m., “for Overbrook, Natick, Framingham or Framingham Center.” In 1928 the company offered to give Natick the roadbed of its Natick branch for a new Middle Street, which the Townsman called “a great boon to all the residents of East Natick and Overbrook.”

The end came with the rebuilding of Worcester Street as a state highway. After a long dispute, the state and the company agreed to take up the rails. The last trolley ran on Sunday, 17 April 1932, leaving Park Square at midnight. The company invited everyone to ride free as its guests, with the westbound car due at Overbrook at 10.45 p.m. The next morning buses took over, and Overbrook gained something the trolleys never gave it: buses every 15 minutes “between Chestnut Hill and Overbrook,” where the electric cars had run only half-hourly, plus an hourly bus from Overbrook to Framingham Centre.

By the early 1920s the old Reed land, together with the neighboring Oaks section across the Natick line, was generally called Wellesley Park. On 11 August 1922 the Townsman put it on the front page: “Wellesley Park Section Showing Great Activity.” The section had about 250 families, two-thirds of them year-round residents, and credited its progress to the “pull-together” spirit of the Wellesley Park and Oaks Improvement Association.

The association had 140 to 150 members, about 40 per cent of them women, and met monthly. Officers elected in July 1922 were W. H. Foster (president), M. J. Blaisdell (vice-president) and Thomas Gard (secretary-treasurer), with directors including William O’Reilly, Mrs. Booker, Mrs. McCarty and Mrs. Ernest Cole. Its committees covered entertainment, education and legislation.

Its big project was a Community Hall, built on the site of an earlier meeting house that had burned. In August 1922 the association, which advertised itself as “of Natick, Mass.,” took bids for “a Community Hall to be situated on Wellesley Road, Natick.” The plans called for a one-story building over a basement, with a 40-by-30-foot auditorium and a stage 18 feet wide and 16 deep. Reuben Heckman won the building contract in September. The “new Community Hall at Wellesley Park” opened with dancing and vaudeville on the evening of Wednesday, 18 April 1923. That July a field day “under the auspices of the Wellesley Park Improvement Association at Overbrook” went so well it was repeated, ending with a dance at the hall.

Neighbors did for themselves what the town would not yet do. The Overbrook Community Whist Club rebuilt the dam at Reed’s Pond in 1924 with whist-party money and a house-to-house collection (see the next chapter). In 1929 residents were asking for a firehouse for the Overbrook section.

Reed made the pond. No record found gives the exact year, but it falls between March 1898, when he bought the land and the 1897 atlas showed no pond, and February 1906, when the Post described an “artificial pond” behind the house. In June 1907 Reed told a reporter how it came about: “One morning I woke up and the spirit said: ‘Build a dam.’ I had had trouble getting water through a brook about one section of my estate. Engineers said my plan of getting water through it was impossible. The spirit said: ‘Go ahead and work.’ Now the water supply is secured from the brook and the spirit was right, as it always is.” By 1908 “Mr. Frederick Reed’s dam” was a local landmark, standing where the colonial Hawes mill dam had been. The 1914 plan labels it “Overbrook Pond.” The 1962 Townsman recalled that water was piped from the pond to a stone pump house that supplied the estate.

The dam was the neighborhood’s problem after Reed left. In July 1922 “a section of the dam at Reed’s Pond fell out recently and flooded Brookside Avenue.” In 1924 the new Overbrook Community Whist Club drained and cleaned the pond and built “a new modern Dam,” and by mid-July “every afternoon the shore is crowded with bathers.” In 1926 heavy rain sent water over the top, and in 1927 residents rebuilt the dam again.

On 29 June 1937 Frederick Reed deeded “the land along Overbrook Pond and brook” to the town for park and drainage purposes, and in March 1938 Town Meeting accepted it and voted the town’s thanks to Mr. Reed. The pond became a place to fish and skate. A 1990 state survey photographed the old straight concrete spillway. In 1999 a $134,000 restoration planned a new adjustable dam because “the old one is difficult to operate.” The town lists Reeds Pond Dam as town-owned and is dredging the pond from autumn 2026 into summer 2027.

Reed’s house is the one building that ties all of this together. The 2017 Historical Commission plaque dates it to 1898: builder Ernest T. Wilson filed a mechanic’s lien for $234.85 on 2 September 1898, and in 1899 the town taxed Reed for a dwelling worth $2,200, plus a hennery, barn and eight acres on Worcester Street. The 1990 state survey instead dates it to about 1905 and notes that it is unclear whether that taxed dwelling is this house. The 1906 photograph proves only that it stood by early 1906.

The survey describes a two-and-a-half-story gabled house with Craftsman details: wide eaves on knee braces and a hipped dormer. In 1962 the Townsman recalled that under Reed it had a music room and art gallery and two stages for theatricals on the third floor, and that Reed’s barn became the house at a neighboring house on Overbrook Drive.

Deeds in Reed’s name sold the house in 1927; it changed hands several times, came back to Reed in 1931, and was taken by the Wellesley Co-operative Bank in January 1935. That spring Anna G. Baxter of Stoughton won permission to run a rest home in “the Old Reed House,” bought it on 20 April 1935, and held an open house for the “new and modern” Overbrook Rest Home that June. She ran it until her death in 1961, as Anna Baxter Moore, a registered nurse born in New Brunswick. The Townsman marked its “Quarter Century” in 1958 with a photograph showing the front porch glassed in as a sunroom. The house returned to private use in the 1960s and received its Historical Commission plaque in 2017.

Every known image of the house