Hill, Aurin F.

Roaming the intellectual hinterlands at the turn of the twentieth century, Aurin F. Hill was a free thinker, a carpenter and labor activist, a building inspector, unemployed worker, a Spiritualist, and a self-styled “insane architect” of Boston. Born in Wakefield, N.H., in 1853, Hill landed in Boston in the mid-1880s and found employment as a laborer making improvements to the Charles River Basin, later operating as a draftsman, carpenter, and architect. Already inclined toward progressive or even radical views, he enlisted in the union movement with the Knights of Labor, and over the course of the next decade, he claims both to have helped organized Local 33 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters of Joiners of America and to have led the campaign for an eight hour day as Secretary to a Committee of the Boston Central Labor Union.
In his activism as in his personal life, Hill stood out, his dreams more expansive than his position in the social order. Like many radicalized workingmen, he railed against class privilege and the various centers of social power, from the organized church to the police, politicians, capitalists, and industrialists, and he transformed his rage into an idiosyncratic form of action. The year 1890, he wrote, was a turning point. Thrust by the financial downturn into three years of unemployment, Hill concluded that “there was no God in the whole earth” and dedicated himself to the people of Boston. Starting with a campaign to bring a World’s Fair to the city, he went on to carry the torch for issues large and small: the nationalization of railroads and corporations, civil rights, and women’s rights, as well as opposition to vaccination, Comstockery and censorship, capital punishment, and lynching.
Although he worked with a variety of organizations, Hill waged his reformist campaigns largely through a series of letters to the editors of both the liberal and mainstream press. From a cramped hallway apartment at 13 Isabella Street — described as “chair less and in cold weather cheerless” — he dreamed of becoming known as a writer, even, as he wrote, “if I have to sleep in a smaller room and eat more bread and beans” (Old Maid, 1894). Taking as a motto the free thinker’s phrase, “I am my own God until I find a better man,” Hill also began to delve deeply into the most progressive religion of the day, Spiritualism, developing himself as a writing medium. Throughout the remainder of his life, he communed regularly with Indian spirits such as Red Jacket, White Flower, and Tecumseh, from whom he received counsel and comfort, and insight into the inner workings of the city and American society.
As the nation recovered from the depression of 1893, Hill landed employment with the city of Boston, though his precise title and position are difficult to confirm. Having tried to establish himself as an architect as early as 1889, he claimed association with the city Building Inspector’s office and with the Bathing Department of the Board of Health. Even as he found financial stability, however, he remained zealous in pursuit of universal reform, zealous enough to earn the title (in his own mind, at least) of “the insane architect.” Insanity was the operative word. Hill was confined to an asylum at least twice (1891 and 1901), winning release on both occasions through the intervention of his friend and fellow Spiritualist medium, Izetta (Etta) Sears.
Hill’s experiences with the authorities did little to dissuade him, and during the 1890s, his radicalism may have increased. Having been imprisoned himself, he became keenly interested in the issues surrounding prisons and insane asylums, but he also took up radical positions on marriage, divorce, sexuality, social equality, race, and freedom of the press as well as more exotic ideas such as flat earth theory. Informed by Spiritualist and phrenological philosophy, his view of reform was holistically integrated, his observations on city life and social ideals intermingling. While visiting a jail in 1893, he wrote a passage that suggests his characteristic flow of thought:

A dreamlike quality permeates Hill’s writing about the urban environment, the lines between reality and imagination blurring on occasion. On an excursion in 1894, for example, Hill wrote:

Literal dreams were critical to Hill’s life. Never shy about his own significance, he wrote that “Nations may remember me and wonder at my force. The pen is mightier than the word or sword. Dynamite is less severe in its work than mind.” His dreams, however, were the true social dynamite: “A whore beset me in my dreams, though the sight of her secrets did not affect my mind nor body; for in my dream I smiled at her desire to show me her secrets without cost to me. Women have as good a right to ventilate their secrets as cats and dogs, horses or cattle. We may soon expect an order from some person that the secrets of dogs and cats may be enveloped in cotton or wood, or wool.” (Spirit Combine, 1894).
Hill attained a measure of prominence in Spiritualist circles in the new century. His spiritual stock rose when he led opposition to an effort by the Commonwealth to license clairvoyants in 1905, and his marriage to his long-time friend and Spiritual lecturer, Etta Sears, brought him more connections. When the National Spiritual Alliance (TNSA) broke away from the New England Spiritualist Campmeeting Association in Lake Pleasant, Mass., in 1913, Hill became a leading voice. One of the organization’s founders, Hill succeeded G. Taber Thompson as president of the TNSA, serving in that capacity for two years.
Hill’s later life is somewhat harder to delineate. His passion for spirit communication clearly continued, and he and his wife continued to summer at Lake Pleasant. Etta remained active as a spiritual evangelist almost to the time of her death in 1928, and Hill continued to write spirit-influenced letters to public officials as late as 1930, remaining in the progressive camp until the end.

Esoteric, rambling, and often difficult to follow, the Hill papers provide profound insight into the eclectic mind of an important Boston Spiritualist and labor activist at the turn of the twentieth century. Whether written as a diary or scattered notes, a scrapbook, essays, or letters to the editor, Hill’s writings cover a wide range of topics, from spirit influence to labor law, from his confinements for insanity to police strikes, hypnotism, reincarnation, and housing. More than just a reflection of one man’s psychology, the collection reveals much about broader social attitudes toward gender and race, sexuality, urban life, politics, and religion, and the collection is a particularly important resource for the history of the American Spiritualist movement between 1890 and 1920.
Much of the Hill collection defies accurate description. An indefatiguable diarist, essayist, and writer of letters, Hill’s writing is dense and forms a free flowing stream of consciousness. Although a few essays are relatively coherent and tightly focused, the majority are far from it. The diaries do indeed include standard diary-like entries, but they may also incorporate essays, rants, and letters and they are often interspersed with prints, newspaper clippings, advertising cards, labels and wrappers, or other pieces of ephemera. Even the essays that bear formal titles ramble through a succession of topics and they too include letters, spirit communications, records of dreams and visions, and other items that may (or may not) bear an obvious connection to the putative topic.
The highlights of the collection include the extensive records of Hill’s spirit communications and records of his dreams and visions (both is sleep and awake). There are, as well, two notebooks associated with the early years of the National Spiritual Alliance, recording transactions and events relating to that organization, along with several letters and notes stemming from Hill’s activities as President.

For additional material related to the history of Spiritualism in Massachusetts and Lake Pleasant see:

• Louise Shattuck Papers (MS 563)