Last updated: July 8, 2024
Person
Abram E. Cutter
Quick Facts
Significance:
Bookseller and publisher, Member of the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee
Place of Birth:
Newburyport, Massachusetts
Date of Birth:
January 24, 1822
Place of Death:
Charlestown, Massachusetts
Date of Death:
May 14, 1900
Place of Burial:
Saco, Maine
Cemetery Name:
Laurel Hill Cemetery
Boston bookseller and publisher Abram E. Cutter served on the 1850 Boston Vigilance Committee.
Born in 1822, Abram Edmands Cutter spent his earliest years in Newburyport, Massachusetts before his family moved to Saco, Maine in 1826. After an education in Saco's public schools and Thornton Academy, Cutter found employment at a store that sold drugs and books.1
Cutter arrived in Boston by 1843. He briefly worked as an apothecary at an established shop before opening his own apothecary business. In 1852, he moved to Charlestown, where he partnered with Charles W. McKim to form McKim & Cutter, a book and stationary business. McKim & Cutter, and the subsequent Abram E. Cutter & Company, published several Charlestown city directories, as well as sermons and discourses by various local ministers. In 1867, Cutter published The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose and Verse, a volume edited by John Harvard Ellis.2
Cutter married Mary Eliza Edmands in 1853, but tragedy struck when Mary died in February 1854 after giving birth to a stillborn child. In 1857, he married Elizabeth Finley Smith in New York City. The couple had no children.3
In his memoir, Reminiscences of Fugitive Slave-Law Days in Boston, Austin Bearse listed an "Abraham E. Cutter" as a member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization that assisted freedom seekers coming to and through Boston on the Underground Railroad. Bearse, likely meant Abram E. Cutter, not his father Abraham Cutter, who at that time lived in Saco, Maine. Cutter's name appeared on Bearse's "Doorman's List" rather than the official broadside of members published by the committee. Perhaps this omission indicates Cutter's quiet support of the movement. Cutter's contributions to the Vigilance Committee, and the larger Underground Railroad, however, remain unknown.4
Cutter continued running his business until 1875, when he turned over control of the company to Frederick M. Reed. He retired to his home on Monument Square, in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument. During his retirement Cutter continued his support of public education that began in 1857 with his election to Charlestown's school board. After Charlestown's annexation by Boston in 1874, he served on Boston's school board until 1883. Retirement also gave Cutter time to focus on other interests. In 1885, he wrote and published a short book of poetry entitled The Alpine Edelweis: A Christmas Song.5
Abraham Cutter died at home on May 14, 1900. His obituary remembered him as an "Old and Honored Resident" of the Bunker Hill District who has "always been identified with and interested in the various local charities and institutions of the city, and actively connected with the Harvard Unitarian Church."6
His remains are interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Saco, Maine.7
If you are a researcher or descendant of Abram E. Cutter and can provide any further details about his work on the Vigilance Committee, or larger Underground Railroad, please e-mail us.
Footnotes
- "Abram Edmands Cutter," Find a Grave, accessed June 9, 2024.; John C. Rand, ed. One of a Thousand: A Series of Biographical Sketches of One Thousand Representative Men Resident in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts A.D. 1888-’89 (Boston: First National, 1890), 158, Google Books, accessed June 19, 2024. Benjamin Cutter, A History of the Cutter Family of New England: The Compilation of the Late Dr. Benjamin Cutter (Boston: Clapp and Son, 1871), 262, Internet Archive, accessed June 25, 2024.
- Charles Stimpson, Stimpson’s Boston Directory (Boston: Charles Stimpson, 1846), 170, Boston Athenaeum, accessed June 9, 2024; George Adams, Adams’s Directory of the City of Boston: 1847-1848 (Boston: James French and Charles Stimpson, 1847), 84, 764, and 233, Boston Athenaeum, accessed June 9, 2024; George Adams, The Boston Directory: 1848-9 (Boston: James French and Charles Stimpson, 1848), 107 and 283, Hathitrust, accessed June 9, 2024; Rand, 158; George Adams, The Charlestown Directory, Embracing the City Record, Names of the Citizens, a Business Directory, and a Map of the City - 1854 (Charlestown: McKim & Cutter, 1854), 38, Family Search, accessed June 9, 2024.; Ibid., 87,Family Search, accessed June 16, 2024; "Abram E. Cutter Dead," Boston Globe, May 14, 1900, 12; Patricia Pender, "Constructing a Canonical Colonial Poet: Abram E, Cutter's Bradstreetiana and the 1867 Works," The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, June 2015, 4, ResearchGate, accessed 20 June 2024.; Pender, 1; George Sampson, The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July 1, 1874 (Boston: Sampson, Davenport and Company, 1874), 1000, Boston Athenaeum, accessed June 12, 2024.
- "Mary Eliza Edmands Cutter," Find a Grave, accessed June 9, 2024; "Massachusetts, Town Clerk, Vital and Town Records, 1626-2001", FamilySearch, entry for Cutter and Abram E Cutter, February 1, 1854, accessed June 22, 2024; "Massachusetts State Vital Records, 1841-1925", FamilySearch, entry for Abram E. Cutter and Abraham Cutter, July 7, 1853, accessed June 23, 2024.
- Austin Bearse, Remininscences of Fugitive Slave Law Days in Boston (Boston: Warren Richardson, 1880), 3; Dean Grodzins, "Constitution or No Constitution, Law or No Law: The Boston Vigilance Committees, 1841-1861," in Matthew Mason, Katheryn P. Viens, and Conrad Edick Wright, eds., Massachusetts and the Civil War: The Commonwealth and National Disunion (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 73, n.57. Among other things, Bearse watched the door at Vigilance Committee meetings and only let in known supporters.
- It is not clear whether Reed was a partner in Cutter's firm. "Abraham E. Cutter & Co." is in parentheses after his name as a in the 1875 Boston City Directory but is not present in the 1876 edition. Reed is also listed under "Booksellers and Publishers" that year. All NPS maps geo-locate Cutter at his residence at the approximate location of 41 Monument Square in Charlestown. George Sampson, The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July 1, 1875 (Boston: Sampson, Davenport and Company, 1875), 745, Boston Athenaeum, accessed June 22, 2024; George Sampson, The Boston Directory for the Year Commencing July 1, 1876 (Boston: Sampson, Davenport and Company, 1876), 746, listed as a Bookseller, 984, Boston Athenaeum, accessed June 22, 2024; Tax Records in 1876 list Cutter as a "Gent," (gentleman) living on Monument Square. The 1880 United States Census lists him as a "Retired Merchant." "Massachusetts, Boston Tax Records, 1822-1918", FamilySearch, entry for Abram E Cutter, 1876, accessed June 20, 2024; "United States Census, 1880", FamilySearch, entry for Abram E. Cutter and Elizabeth F. Cutter, 1880, accessed June 22, 2024; Rand, 158; A.E.C., The Alpine Edelweis: A Christmas Song (Boston: Gleaves, McDonald & Co., 1886), Internet Archive, accessed June 15, 2024.
- "Abram E. Cutter Dead," Boston Globe, May 14, 1900, 12.
- "Massachusetts, Town Clerk, Vital and Town Records, 1626-2001", FamilySearch, entry for Abram E. Cutter and Abraham Cutter, May 14, 1900, accessed June 23, 2024; "Abram Edmands Cutter," Find a Grave.