USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Metropolitan Boston; a modern history; Volume I > Part 2
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"These glacial effects, successive ice-sheets, rested on a surface of rock, already much varied by the metamorphism and dislocations to which it had been subjected. Owing to the fact that ice cuts more power- fully in the valleys than on the ridges, and more effectual on the soft than on the hard rocks, these ice-sheets carved this surface into an amazing variety of valleys, pits, and depressions. We get an idea of the irregu- larity of the rock-carvings from the fretted nature of the seacoast over which the ice-sheets rode. When the last ice-sheet melted away, it left on the surface it had worn a layer of rubbish often a hundred feet or more in depth. As its retreat was not a rout, but was made in a meas- ured way, it often built long irregular walls of waste along the lines where its march was delayed. When the ice-wall left the present shore- line, the land was depressed beneath the sea to a depth varying from about thirty feet along Long Island Sound to three or four hundred feet at the coast of Maine. The land slowly and by degrees recovered its position ; but as it rose, the sea for a time invaded the shore, washing over with its tides and waves the rubbish left by the ice-sheet, stripping the low hills and heaping the waste into the valleys. While this work was going on, the seas had not yet regained their shoreline, which had been driven away by the ice, and the forests had not yet recovered their power on the land; so the stratified deposits formed at this time contain no organic remains. At the close of this period, when the land had gen- erally regained its old position in relation to the sea, there were several slight irregular movements of the shore,-local risings and sinkings, each a few feet in height. The last of these were accomplished in this locality not long before the advent of the European colonists; some trace of their action is still felt on the coast to the northward .. . "
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METROPOLITAN BOSTON'S NATURAL SETTING
Looking on a detailed map of Southeastern New England, the reader will observe that Massachusetts Bay and Boston Harbor form a deep but rudely shaped reëntrant angle on the coast. If the map is geologically colored, he will perceive that around this deep bay there is a fringe of clay slates and conglomerates, or pudding-stones. Further away, making a great horseshoe, one horn of which is at Cape Ann and the other at Cohasset, the curve, at its bottom near the Blue Hills, includes a mass of old granitic rocks. This peculiar order of the rocks that surround Boston is caused by the existence here of a deep structural mountain valley or synclinal, the central part of which is occupied by the harbor. Long after the formation of the Green Mountains, at the time just after the laying down of the coal-beds of the Carboniferous age, this eastern part of New England, and probably a considerable region since regained by the sea, was thrown into mountain folds. These mountains have, by the frequent visitations of glacial periods, been worn down to their foundations, so that there is little in the way of their original reliefs to be traced. They are principally marked in the attitudes of that period of their rocks that have escaped erosion. The Sharon and the Blue Hills are, however, the wasted remnants of a great anticlinal or ridge that bordered the Boston Valley on the south side. The Waltham, Stoneham, and Cape Ann Bay granitic ridges made the mountain wall on its north side. Narragansett Bay and Boston Harbor are cut out in the softer rocks that were folded down between these mountain ridges. The lower part of the Merrimac Valley is a mountain trough that has been similarly carved out, and there are others traceable still further to the northward. This mountain trough is very deep beneath Boston; a boring made at the gas-works to the depth of over sixteen hundred feet failed to penetrate through it. If we could restore the rocks that have been taken away by decay, these moun- tain folds would much exceed the existing Alleghanies in height.
Rocks of the Vicinity-Within the peninsula of Boston, the seat of the old town, these older rocks that were caught in the mountain folds, do not come to the level of the sea. They were deeply covered by the waste of the glacial period. But in Roxbury, Dorchester, Somerville, Brookline, and many other adjacent towns, they are extensively exposed. They consist principally of clay-slates and conglomerates,-a mingled series, with a total thickness of from five to ten thousand feet. The slates are generally fine-grained and flag-like in texture, their structure showing that they were laid down in a sea at some distance from the shore. The conglomerates were evidently laid down in the sea at points near the shore; and they are probably the pebble-waste resulting from a glacial period that occurred in the Cambrian age, or at a time when the recorded organic history of the earth was at its very beginning. These
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rocks represent a time when the waters of this shore were essentially destitute of organic life. In the whole section we have only about three hundred feet of beds among the lower layers that hold any remains of organic life; and these remains are limited to a few species of trilobites, that lived in the deep sea. From the slates and conglomerates of the Cambridge and Roxbury series, the first quarried stones of this colony were taken. The flagging-slates of Quincy, at the base of Squantum Neck, were perhaps the first that were extensively quarried. A large number of the old tombstones of this region were from these quarries. The next in use were those similar but less perfect slates of Cambridge and Somerville; and the last to come into use were the conglomerates and granites, that require much greater skill and labor on the part of the quarryman to work them. At first, the field-boulders supplied the stone for underpinning houses and other wall work; so that the demand for gravestones was, during all the first and for most of the second century of the existence of the town, the only demand that led to the exploration of the quarry-rocks of this neighborhood. Indeed, we may say that the exploration of the excellent building and ornamental stones so abundant here has been barely begun within the last two decades.
Although the rocks of this vicinity are extensively intersected by dykes and veins,-those agents that in other regions aid the gathering together of the precious metals,-no ore-bearing deposits have ever been found very near Boston. There is a story that a very thin lode of argentiferous galena was opened some fifty years ago in the town of Woburn, about eight miles from Boston, out of which a trifling amount of silver was taken, but, unlike the most of the other settlers in this country, the Massachusetts colonists seem never to have had any interest in the search for precious metals, and we know of no efforts at precious metal mining in the eastern part of this Commonwealth until we enter the present century. The craze for gold and silver, which seems almost inevitable in the life of the frontiersman, was unknown in the early days of New England.
Although the general features of the topography of this district are determined by the disposition of the hard underlying rocks, the detail of all the surface is chiefly made by the position of the drift or glacial waste left here at the end of the last ice time, but much sorted and rearranged by water action. If we could strip away the sheet of glacial and post- glacial deposits from this region, we would about double the size of Boston Harbor and greatly simplify its form. All the islands save a few rocks, the peninsulas of Hull and Winthrop Head, indeed that of Boston proper, would disappear; with them would go about all of Cambridge, Charlestown, Chelsea, Everett, Revere, a large part of Malden, Brighton,
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METROPOLITAN BOSTON'S NATURAL SETTING
Brookline, and Quincy. Charles River, Mystic River, and Neponset River would become broad estuaries, running far up into the land.
The history of the making of these drift-beds is hard to decipher, and harder still to describe in a brief way. The following statement is only designed to give a very general outline of the events in this remarkable history.
Retreat of the Glaciers-After the ice had lain for an unknown period over this region, climatal changes caused it to shrink away slowly and by stages, until it disappeared altogether. As it disappeared, it left a very deep mass of waste, which was distributed in an irregular way over the surface, at some places much deeper than at others. At many points this depth exceeded one hundred feet. As the surface of the land lay over one hundred feet below the present level in the district of Massachusetts Bay when the sea began to leave the shore, the sea had free access to this incoherent mass of debris, and began rapidly to wash it away. We can still see a part of this work of destruction of the glacial beds in the marine erosion going on about the islands and headlands in the harbor and bay. The same sort of work went on about the glacial beds, at the height of one hundred feet or more above the present tideline. During this period of reëlevation, the greater part of the drift-deposits of the region about Boston was worked over by the water. Where the gravel happened to lie upon a ridge of rock that formed, as it were, a pedestal for it, it generally remained as an island above the surface of the water. As the land seems to have risen pretty rapidly when the ice-burden was taken off,-probably on account of this very relief from its load,-the sea did not have time to sweep away the whole of these islands of glacial waste. Many of them survive in the form of low, symmetrical bow- shaped hills. Parker's Hill, Corey's Hill, Aspinwall, and the other hills on the south side of Charles River, Powderhorn and other hills in Chel- sea and Winthrop, are conspicuously beautiful specimens of this struc- ture. Of this nature were also the three hills that occupied the peninsula of Boston, known as Sentry or Beacon, Fort and Copp's hills. Whenever an open cut is driven through these hills, we find in the center a solid mass of pebbles and clay, all confusedly intermingled, without any dis- tinct trace of bedding. This mass, termed by geologists till, or boulder- clay, is the waste of the glacier, lying just where it dropped when the ice in which it was bedded ceased to move, and melted on the ground where it lay. All around these hills, with their central mass of till, there are sheets of sand, clay, and gravel, which have been washed from the original mass, and worked over by the tides and rivers. This reworked boulder-clay constitutes by far the larger part of the dry lowland surface about Boston ; all the flatlands above the level of the swamps which lay
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about the base of the three principal hills of old Boston-lands on which the town first grew-were composed of the bedded sands and gravels derived from the waste of the old boulder-clay. These terraces of sand and gravel from the reassorted boulder-clay, make by far the greater part of the low-lying arable lands of Eastern Massachusetts; and of this nature are about all the lands first used for town sites and tillage by the colonists,-notwithstanding the soil they afford is not as rich nor as enduring as the soils upon the unchanged boulder-clay. The reason these terrace deposits were the most sought for town sites and cultivation is that they were the only tracts of land above the level of the swamps that were free from large boulders. Over all the unchanged drift, these large boulders were originally so abundant that it was a very laborious work to clear the land for cultivation ; but on these terraces of stratified drift there were never boulders enough to render them difficult of cultivation. The result was that the first colonists sought this class of lands. One of the advantages of the neighborhood of Boston was the large area of these terrace deposits found there. There was an area of fifteen or twenty thousand acres within seven or eight miles of the town, that could have been quickly brought under the plough, and which was very extensively cultivated before the boulder-covered hills began to be tilled.
After the terrace-making period had passed away, owing to the rising of the land above the sea, there came a second advance of the glaciers, which had clung to the higher hills, and had not passed entirely away from the land. This second advance did not cover the land with ice; it only caused local glaciers to pour down the valleys. The Neponset, the Charles, and the Mystic valleys were filled by these river-like streams, which seem never to have attained as far seaward as the peninsula of Boston. This second advance of the ice seems to have been very tem- porary in its action, not having endured long enough to bring about any great changes. At about the time of its retreat, the last considerable change of line along these shores seems to have taken place. This move- ment was a subsidence of the land twenty feet or more below the former high-tide mark. This is shown by the remains of buried roots of trees, standing as they grew in the harbor and coastlands about Boston. These have been found at two points on the shore of Cambridge, a little north of the west end of West Boston Bridge, and in Lynn Harbor. Since this last sinking the shoreline in this district shows no clear inclination of change.
Recent Geological Conditions-With the cessation of the disturbances of the glacial period and at the beginning of the present geological condi- tions, the last of the constructive changes of this coast began. Hitherto mechanical forces alone had done their work on the geography of the
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METROPOLITAN BOSTON'S NATURAL SETTING
region ; henceforward, to the present day, organic life, driven away from the shore and land by the glacial period, again takes a share in the con- structive work. This is still going on about us. The larger part of it is done by the littoral seaweeds and the swamp grasses. Along the estu- aries of the Saugus, Mystic, Charles, and Neponset rivers there are some thousands of acres of lands which have been recovered from the sea by these plants. The operation is in general as follows: The mud brought down by these streams, consisting in part of clay and in part of decom- posed vegetable matter, derived from land and water plants, coats the sandy bottoms or under-water terraces. In this mud, even at consider- able depths, eelgrass and some seaweeds take root, and their stems make a dense jungle. In this grass more mud is gathered, and kept from the scouring action of the tide by being bound together by the roots and cemented by the organic matter. This mass slowly rises until it is bare at low tide. Then our marsh-grasses creep in, and in their interlaced foliage, the waste brought in by the tide is retained, and helps to raise the level of the swamp higher. The streams from land bring out a certain amount of mud, which at high tide is spread in a thin sheet over the surface of the low plain. Some devious channels are kept open by the strong scouring action of the tide, but the swamp rapidly gains a level but little lower than high tide. Except when there is some chance deposit of mud or sand from the bluffs along its edges, these swamps are never lifted above high tide mark, for the forces that build them work only below the level. Their effect upon the harbor of Boston has been dis- advantageous. They have diminished the area of storage for the tide- water above the town, and thereby enfeebled the scouring power of the tidal currents. Except at the very highest tides, the Charles, Mystic, and Neponset rivers now pour their mud directly into the harbor, instead of unloading it upon the flats where these marshes have grown up. There are other forces at work to diminish the depth of water in the harbor. The score or more of islands that diversify its surface are all sources of waste, which the waves tend to scatter over the floor. For the first two hundred years after the settlement, the erosion of these islands was not prevented by seawalls; and in this time the channels were doubtless much shoaled by river-waste. Just after the glacial period these channels were very deep. Borings made in the investigations for the new sewer- age system showed that the channel at the mouth of the Neponset had been over one hundred feet deeper than at present,-the filling being the rearranged glacial drift brought there by just such processes as have recently shoaled the channels of the harbor.
The depth of this port has also been affected by the drifting in of sands along the shore contiguous to the northeast and southeast. When
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the sea surges along these shores, it drives a great deal of waste towards the harbor. A fortunate combination of geographical accidents has served to keep the harbor from utter destruction from this action. On the north side, whence comes the greater part of this drifting material, sev- eral pocket-like beaches have been formed, which catch the moving sands and pebbles in their pouches, and stop their further movement. But for these protections-at Marblehead Neck, Lynn, and Chelsea on the north, and Nantasket on the south-the inner harbor would hardly exist, since these lodgments contain enough waste to close it entirely. At Nantasket the beach is now full and no longer detains the accumu- lating sands, which are overflowing into the outer harbor; yet, as the rate of flow is soft, its effect is not likely to be immediately hurtful.
From Professor Shaler's account of the geology back of the building of the "Basin" occupied by the original town of Boston, and of the varied and beautiful country which borders this center, let us turn our attention to the peninsula and what man has made of it. The general shape of this chosen spot has been described by the older writers as "almost square" and as "heart-shaped; its area as less than eight hundred acres." The hills were the dominant features of the landscape as viewed from afar, although no longer as prominent as they were. They have, for the most part, been swallowed up by the coves and the "oozy sea margins," marshes and swamps, for the needs of the residents of the continuously expanding city required the removal of the heights and the casting of them into the low lands that men might have sufficient room to build their places of business and their homes. Sanitation, docks for an increas- ing shipping, were necessities, and that most modern development, avia- tion, all have had a part in the changes made in the original natural set- ting of Boston.
The Hills of the Peninsula-The most conspicuous of the original hills was the triple-topped one which gave a name to the peninsula, Tra- mount, or Tre-mount, for it was not only the loftiest but of such a pecu- liar formation as to render it very noticeable. The tri-mounts, as viewed from the west, suggested the head and shoulders of a giant, the shoulders being hunched like those of an old, old man. Several titles were given to this hill before it became known by its present name, Beacon Hill. Very early after the Winthrop band came over from Charlestown to found the village, when it was thought wise by the Indian-fearing settlers to estab- lish a watch, the eminence was chosen as the fitting place and hence became Sentry Hill. In 1635 a beacon was erected upon the summit, so that its light might warn the surrounding country of approaching danger, and from this came the present well known title. The easternmost of the triple summits was called Cotton Hill, because upon its slope John Cot-
JOHN WINTHROP, SECOND GOVERNOR OF MASSACHUSETTS
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METROPOLITAN BOSTON'S NATURAL SETTING
ton established his home and farm; later this name was changed to Pemberton, which is somewhat to be regretted. The west peak, one side of which had been chosen by Blackstone for his abiding place, might well have been named in his honor, but it has borne the various title of West Hill, Copley's Hill, Mount Vernon, and others all but forgotten. The West Hill, for the most part, lies in the river bed of the Charles and is covered with the buildings of an important part of Boston. Beacon Hill once soared to a height of 138 feet above the sea, or about the height of the lantern on the top of the State House, which rests upon the depleted summit.
Copp's Hill, not so high as Beacon, the king of them all, was named for the worthy shoemaker who once owned much of it. It was the site of the first windmill in Massachusetts, although the mill was brought here after first having been erected in Watertown. Its removal to Boston was due to the lack of steady winds at its original home. This hill was vari- ously known as Wind-mill Hill, Snow Hill, before given its present title. The Puritans were exceedingly direct, and rather unimaginative in the nomenclature used to mark the important places which they found and used. The hill first seen by the voyager, since its position in the fore- ground all but hid Beacon, was called Corn Hill, since it was one of the first places planted by the colonists. In 1632 a small fortification was built upon it and, of course, thereafter it was Fort Hill. If one wanders much in the lower part of the Metropolis, one will come across a flat little park, only a few feet above the level of the harbor. A tablet will tell him that this is all that is left of the eighty-foot hill whose fortified heights once protected Boston from invasion from the sea. It, like a number of other small elevations, has fallen a prey to the maw of progress and long since been flung into a marsh, there to serve a more useful purpose.
Topographically, the coves of the original peninsula are of almost equal interest to those of the hills. Had the settlement of Boston been delayed a century, there would have been far less land on which to build and, instead of an irregular bit of land connected by a thin thread to the mainland, Shawmut would then have been very different in its topog- raphical aspect. Even as early as 1630, the sea and river were cutting their way between Copp's Hill and Beacon Hill in the process of carving an island from the peninsula; and for years after the coming of Win- throp, in time of storm, the narrow thread known as the "neck" would be cut through by the sea.
"The Neck"-All of Boston proper was, at one time, known as "The Neck" in distinction from South Boston, Brookline and the other terri- tory within the jurisdiction of the town. But the term was usually con- fined to the narrow isthmus which held the peninsula to the mainland. Met. Bos .- 2
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METROPOLITAN BOSTON
"The Neck may be said to have begun at Beach Street, where was its greatest breadth, diminishing to its narrowest point at Dover Street, increasing gradually in width to the neighborhood of Dedham Street, thence expanding in greater proportion to the line at the present car stables nearly opposite Arnold Street. The Neck according to its desig- nation in Revolutionary times, was that part lying south of Dover Street" (Drake). As described by Captain Nathaniel Uring, in 1710, "The Neck of Land betwixt the city and the country is about forty yards wide, and so low that the spring tides sometimes wash the road, which might, with a little charge, be made so strong as not to be forced, there being no way of coming at it by land but over the Neck."
Both the prevention of the destruction of the neck, and the fortifica- tion of it as a protective measure, occupied the attention of the early fathers. In 1708, individuals were granted places all along the neck, con- ditioned on the erection of barriers to "secure and keep off the sea," and the maintenance of a road, since this was the only highway out of Boston. Dikes had been built along it, on the seaward side, long before the Revo- lution, with a seawall on the west. Except for these dikes and compara- tively slight improvements of the roadway in the center, the neck was but little changed during half the history of Boston. One may get an impression of the appearance of this region, now so wide and so solidly a part of the mainland, if he will but stop and look at any of the wide roads now crossing the Lynn marshes, at the same time recalling, of course, the fact that there were no mechanical dredges in those days to make smooth and straight embankments, and that paved turnpikes are a modern invention. So dangerous was it to traverse the causeway with its adjacent marshes at night, the General Court of 1723 passed an act requiring the dangerous road to be fenced in for the "salvation" of the traveler. The neck was paved through it length, for the first time, less than a hundred years ago. Provisions were made for the protection of the neck, and Boston, the next year after the town was founded. An officer with six men was stationed at its narrow part, and a few years later a barrier with a central gate was built across it.
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