Boot scrapers gallery

You may have noticed these little wrought-iron devices beside the entryway of houses on Beacon Hill. (This one’s outside 54 Pinckney St.) Back when Boston’s streets were unpaved and horses were the principal mode of transportation, the civilized thing to do before entering a house was to scrape the mud and manure off your boots.

Author Nathaniel Hawthorne rented a room at 54 Pinckney around 1840 while working at the Boston Custom House. Imagine the lovestruck Hawthorne coming home from a day measuring out salt and coal, absentmindedly scraping his boots on this very device. A collection of his love letters shows he penned several here to Sophia Peabody, whom he later married.

With pavement everywhere these days, such “mudders’’ are now obsolete, and some have fallen into disrepair. Just down the street at 98 Pinckney, author Celia Thaxter (1835-1894) likely cleaned her boots on the front steps using this scraper, which lost a key component at some point over the years.

Thaxter wrote about and summered on the Isles of Shoals. In 1852, Hawthorne stayed at a hotel there run by Thaxter’s father. Beginning in the early 1880s, though,Thaxter wintered here in the house on the left. In 1884, after her husband died, Thaxter moved out.

Over on Chestnut Street, you can find a scraper at almost every stoop. The designs vary somewhat, from the basic to the more ornate. This simple mudder is at the entryway of 50 Chestnut, the 1824 Francis Parkman house.

Considered one of America’s leading historians of the 19th century, Parkman lived here—and likely scraped his boots here—from 1865 until his death in 1893. In 1966, the house was named a registered historic landmark.

This attractive scraper can be found a few doors down at 46 Chestnut. It surely got a workout in its day. In the early 1900s, the house attached to it was a private boarding and day school named Mrs. Delafield’s and Mrs. Colvin’s School for Girls.

According to a 1903 advertisement in The Atlantic Monthly, the school offered “exceptional surroundings and relationships to those who value them at an increased cost.’’ And that cost? In 1903, $1,250 per year, equivalent today to nearly $33,000. Thirty students, 11 teachers: not a bad ratio. But a lot of boots to be scraped.

Up the hill at 1 Louisburg Sq., this narrow scraper has been cleverly built into the railing, though it may not have been especially functional. Then again, one of the house’s early owners, William Foster Otis, apparently didn’t get out much.

William Foster Otis (1801-1858) was the son of Harrison Gray Otis, one of Boston’s wealthiest men. William served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1830-1832, but later became something of a recluse. In other words, he kept his boots pretty clean.

Of course, not just the rich and famous wanted to keep their houses clean in Beacon Hill’s early days. This scraper, standing below one of the prettiest entryways on the Hill at 11 West Cedar St., was in the mid-1800s put to use by a City of Boston employee named Charles Bartlett Wells and his family.

Formerly a businessman, Wells (1808-1856) served as the city’s supervisor of sewers and drains at a time when Boston was literally choking in dirty water. The city’s primitive sewer system struggled to rid the city of wastewater, and many Bostonians died of cholera, the transmission of which was blamed in part on poor sanitation. Wells succumbed to tuberculosis and died at home at the age 47.