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By the early twentieth century streetcar suburbs spread outward from cities. Commuters could live among trees and still work downtown. Automobiles, electric street cars, and busses slowly crowded out the last horses and buggies off Massachusetts Avenue.
Amidst an era of change, community traditions that had started in the days of the Robbins family persisted: the East Lexington Fair continued to be celebrated by Follen Church, Robbins Hall became the Stone Building/ East Lexington Library, and the Robbins elms flourished. Though many of the old abolitionists had died, their descendants like the Stones and the Wellingtons took up new causes such as votes for women and expanding educational opportunities for Blacks.
Wealthy people built summer homes near what became Tower Park. But would Lexington be hospitable to other incomers? Lexington Centre had remained largely white and Protestant and some long-term residents refused to sell land to Irish Catholic immigrants.[1] Catholics, therefore, at first gravitated toward the East Village. Irish farmers like the Wilsons made a success of commercial farming, and East Lexington became a welcoming home for the first Jewish place of worship in Lexington, in a modest house on Sylvia Street. Immigrants found affordable homes in the Dexter Hillside subdivisions, and the O'Hara Plot in Liberty Heights turned a forested hillside once known for cattle breeding and a dairy farm into an ethnically diverse neighborhood of modest bungalows and small homes for tradespeople, chauffeurs, and working-class commuters.[2] By the early twentieth century immigrants, Chinese, eastern and southern Europeans, Latin Americans, and others from around the world made Lexington their home. Blacks had been in Lexington from the beginning, fighting in every war and attending the public schools. But prejudice remained.
[1] Richard Kollen, p. 107.
[2] Historic Commission, Historical Narrative.
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