Joseph Lee was born into slavery in South Carolina in 1847. By 1886, he was one of the wealthiest men in Newton.

When he died in 1908, his obituary in the New York Age, said, “Rich men and poor men, black men and white, all knew and respected Joseph Lee as an able man and a true friend.”

He’d had a long career as a restaurateur, hotelier, inventor, and member of Boston’s African-American intellectual life.

He spent over a decade as a steward for the U.S. Coast Survey, wherein he cooked the ship’s food. He would run several Boston-area hotels before coming to the Woodland Park Hotel in Auburndale, which he would buy in 1883.

It was a modern luxury hotel that attracted many Back Bay families wishing to get out of the city.

“The climate of this locality (like that of Wellesley Hills, a few miles to the westward) is very beneficial in certain diseases of the throat and lungs, too common in Boston; and several of the best physicians of the New England metropolis have been advising their patients to go to Florida or Auburndale, during the inclement seasons of the year,” wrote Moses Foster Sweetser in his 1889 book, King’s Handbook of Newton Massachusetts.

But Lee’s cooking was also one of the attractions.

“[He] has won a renown extending over four counties, for the ingenious excellence and variety of his cookery, a form of carnal temptation to which the most Browningesque and Theosophic of Bostonians are particularly susceptible. It is averred that Mr. Lee serves the only genuine Philadelphia chicken croquettes and dressed terrapin in all New England,” said Sweetser.

He also catered and delivered ice cream.

Woodland Park Hotel, Auburndale. Public domain photo

In 1891, Lee entertained the presidential family of Benjamin Harrison. The First Lady would host a ball at the hotel.

“The wealth, wit, fashion and beauty of the Garden City were represented,” according to the Boston Globe.

There were also less welcome guests, like the loose steer an officer had to shoot on the hotel grounds in 1884. It had escaped from the stockyards of Brighton with several other steers.

“The presence of the steers, in such a usually quiet neighborhood, has created a stir among the residents,” the Globe story continued.

Unfortunately, after the economic calamity of the Panic of 1893, he had to sell the hotel. His mind turned toward other pursuits: inventing. In 1894, he submitted a patent for a bread kneading machine, and in 1895, a bread crumbing machine. He told the Boston Journal that his time in Auburndale, and his frustration with some of his employees, was what spurred him toward making his bread machine.

“I asked myself if a machine could not be constructed which would do the laborious part of the work of bread making–the kneading–for I learned that my bread changed with every baker. With an industrious baker I had good bread; with a lazy baker, bread I did not want,” he said. He would later sell these patents, providing his family with a large sum.

The Lee family was able to stay in Newton, where their son, Howard, would play football for the Newton High school team. He was also successful at tennis, which was attributed to his access to Auburndale’s excellent tennis courts. Howard went on to play football at Harvard College. Lee was also engaged with the African-American community in Boston. He served as a delegate from Massachusetts to the 1890 Colored Men’s National Convention, and was treasurer of the St. Mark’s Musical and Literary Union, which aimed to help foster intellectual growth among African-Americans in Boston.

In 1897, Lee became the chef at the Pavilion Restaurant at the newly opened Norumbega Park in Auburndale. He would not stay for long: in 1898, he moved to work at the Squantum Inn in Quincy. He would stay there until his death in 1908 in Roxbury. The Newton Graphic called him ‘a former well-known resident of Auburndale’ in its obituary. The next time you fire up your home bread machine or eat machine-made bread, remember that those machines got their start in an invention by Joseph Lee.