Charles Fox Hovey

Charles Fox Hovey

Charles Fox Hovey (1807–1859) was a businessman in Boston, Massachusetts who established C.F. Hovey and Co., a department store on Summer Street. Through the years Hovey's business partners included Washington Williams, James H. Bryden, Richard C. Greenleaf and John Chandler. In 1947 Jordan Marsh absorbed Hovey's.^[1][2][3]

Hovey was also an abolitionist and a supporter of other social reform movements. He was one of a group of Boston businessmen who provided most of the funding for the American Anti-Slavery Society.^[4] He also signed the call to the first National Woman's Rights Convention in 1850. Hovey left a bequest of $50,000 to support abolitionism and other types of social reform, including "women's rights, non-resistance, free trade and temperance."^[5] The bequest was used to create the Hovey Fund, which provided significant support to social reform movements of that time. It was headed by abolitionist Wendell Phillips.

References

• Abbott, Richard. Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854-1868. University of Massachusetts Press, 1991. ISBN 978-0870237492
• Daniel Hovey Association. The Hovey Book: describing the English ancestry and American descendants of Daniel Hovey of Ipswich, Massachusetts. Press of L.R. Hovey, 1914; p. 266+
• Dudden, Faye E. Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America. Oxford University Press, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-0-19-977263-6

Further reading

• Tribute to the Memory of Charles F. Hovey, Boston, 1859.
• History of the House of Hovey, containing reminiscences of almost three quarters of a century. Boston: 1920.

Images

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  Interior of C.F. Hovey & Co., Summer Street, Boston, 19th century

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  Exterior of C.F. Hovey & Co., Summer Street, Boston, 19th century

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  Hovey's after the fire, 1872