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.

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. 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." 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
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  Women's Victorian era garment from C.F. Hovey & Co. including label