Queer Places:
Harvard University (Ivy League), 2 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138
147 Canton Ave, Milton, MA 02186
128 Canton Ave, Milton, MA 02186
182 Adams St, Milton, MA 02186
Chauncey Cushing Nash (October 17, 1884 - July 16, 1968) was a stockbroker and collector. He was a member of the Horace Walpole Society, secretary from 1939 to 1962, elected in 1929.
Chauncey Cushing Nash was born to Herbert Nash (1848-1937) and Mary Chaffee Baldwin (1852-1928) on October 17, 1884, in Boston. He prepared at Boston Latin School and the Volkmann School and entered Harvard with the Class of 1907. After three and a half years and with course work finished he left college at the mid-year in 1907 and went on a shooting trip with classmate William Bowditch Long in the South. He returned to take his A.B. in time and then crossed the river to Boston and Weld, Grow & Company, stockbrokers. In two and a half years he was with Long and Nash, also stockbrokers, but also classmates and shooting companions. In addition to stockbroking, Nash started a poultry farm in Milton, where he had moved with his wife, Susan Higginson Long, whom he had married on the third of April 1913, and their two children: Mary Otis Nash (1914-1994) and Stephen Higginson Nash (1916-1983). His Bantams and Langshans took prizes at Madison Square Garden in New York and at shows in Boston.
In order to furnish his Milton establishment, though not the coops, Nash took to the countryside in search of early American furniture. He broadened this hobby soon to encompass "American objects of the decorative and other arts, and I like to read books on hunting and on antiquarian and historical subjects pertaining to this country." In this broadened avocation he became quite an authority and was one of a small and congenial group who "have helped to furnish some of the rooms in the new wing of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts." He was also a trustee of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (SPNEA) and was a member of the Club of Odd Volumes, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. He left his Willow, Oak, and Pine Tree shillings and pence to the Houghton Library and his collection of Eskimo carvings to the Peabody Museum at Harvard.
It was as a member of the Walpole Society that he corresponded often with Clarence Brigham, another member. In their letters they discussed such matters as the completing of Antiquarian American Society's collection of Walpole publications, the plight of the stockbroker in wartime, the good times had at the Walpole Society meeting in Worcester, and the matter of the crayon portrait of Miss Hannah Weld which, along with one of Mrs. Isaiah Thomas, Jr., he presented to the Society in 1951.
From the time of Nash's election at the Boston meeting in April of 1941, it was a rare occasion when he missed a Boston meeting in the spring, and it was even more rare when he traveled to a Worcester meeting in the fall. It was at one of the Boston meetings that Nash exhibited a selection of Massachusetts coins from his collection when Sydney Noe delivered a paper on the coinage of Massachusetts Bay Colony.
At eighty-three years of age, Chauncey Cushing Nash died in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on Tuesday, July 16, 1968.
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