This is Marlou Terrace. There were six buildings on Marlou Terrace. These were built by Louis Mahn, the baseball manufacturer. He bought this plot of land in the late 1870s and constructed the buildings. It's not entirely clear about which buildings here now that dates from then. We do know that a building here was once taxed as a baseball factory. Louis Mahn’s second wife was named Marie, so the name of the street is made of the beginning of Marie and Louis Mahn’s names combined.
The owners in number one found a label in the attic addressed to the L.H. Mahn baseball factory from a twine company in Rhode Island. Twine was the essential material of a baseball. The core of the ball had twine and horse hair wound around it, that was all hand-stitched. The early baseball factories were all pretty small because it was a cottage industry. They might have wound the twine around the cores here, but the horse hair was sewn by teenage girls in the area. The JPHS has the memoirs of some of those girls from the Agassiz School who said they would stitch up baseballs at home and then send them into the factory. Jamaica Plain also had a lot of tanneries along the Stony Brook who could have created the leather for the baseballs. So with the local school girls to do the stitching, tanneries to make the leather, Mahn’s process supported local manufacturing.
As mentioned earlier, when the National League was formed in 1876 the founder, Albert Spalding decided a regulation ball was needed. He licensed the Louis Mahn ball and sold it under the name Spalding. He formed the Spalding Sporting Goods Company. Mahn then expanded into this great manufacturing complex here.