Sam Bass Warner, Jr.

Today's Boston
A History

BOSTON IS A KIND OF CITY that never existed before. While commonplace in the United States today, it is historically unique: a city region of 4.7 million inhabitants spread out over 4,200 square miles. The daily commuting patterns of its residents set the boundaries. These comings and goings establish an urban social entity taking in all of Cape Cod and the Islands, all of eastern Massachusetts to the edge of Worcester County, and extending to the first tier of New Hampshire cities and towns.¹

There are alternative definitions of the region. The Boston Globe with its Sunday supplements covers a slightly smaller eastern Massachusetts territory of 3.8 millions. The U.S. Bureau of the Census adds Worcester to form a Boston Consolidated Statistical Area of 5.5 millions. And a case can be made for adding all of Rhode Island and most of New Hampshire to the metropolitan unit to make a settlement area of 7 millions.² It seems to me, however, that adding Worcester, Providence, and the heart of New Hampshire to Boston would tax the imagination and defy the experience of many Bostonians who are already having difficulty forming a full regional outlook. Such an annexation, therefore, should not be attempted. Instead, common sense directs us to accept the 4.7 million-sized settlement, a definition that rests on the everyday actualities of two giant circumferential highways: interstate routes 495 and 95.

The problem that this historical essay confronts is the absence of an appropriate regional consciousness among the many Bostonians who are now living regional lives. We share a long tradition of thinking of ourselves as New Englanders. We also employ the long-standing foci of city, suburb, mill town, and small town. Consider, for a moment, a list like Boston, Arlington, Brockton, and Essex: a city, a suburb, a mill town, and a small town. References and histories come easily to mind for each. Our living patterns today, however, do not follow such categories. We travel in and out, back and forth, near and far, in an intense network of daily paths that carry us to jobs, schools, errands, and friends. Yes, 292,000 people travel each day to the City of Boston to work there, but 98,000 Bostonians daily leave the city for other parts of the region. The sprawling Middlesex County, not Suffolk County, is the region's largest employer.³

We Bostonians are a people who lack an outlook to match our modern social geography. This essay is an attempt to begin such a cultural process by describing the latest Boston city region according to its geological and its geographical history.

The land that is today's Boston city region is the ongoing result of slow and ancient processes. It is the outcome of the very making and remaking of the earth's crust and the product of the faster change wrought by the advance and retreat of glaciers. There is something curiously fitting in the land's geological histories. Here is a region of people who once set themselves off as unique and who as Bostonians still pride themselves on possessing some specialness. What could be more appropriate than to learn that the rock upon which all this pride rests was once neither Europe nor North America? Both Pilgrim Plymouth and Puritan Boston rest upon the ancient stones of what we today call the Avalon Belt.⁴

Six hundred million and more years ago, a major segment of the Boston city region came into being. This area, some remnants of which are still visible, lies to the east of a line running approximately from Ipswich on the northeast to Narragansett Bay on the southwest. Gloucester, Salem, Lynn, Boston, Quincy, Brockton, Taunton, New Bedford, and Plymouth all rest upon this old construction. At the time of its building, it was not connected to North America. Rather, it formed part of a chain of mountains and islands, much like the islands of Japan, or the Aleutians. The land welled up in volcanoes and hot magma from a subterranean zone where the ocean floor was sinking beneath the arc of new islands. The chain, now called the Avalon Belt, or Zone, stretched from Newfoundland to North Carolina and was separated from North America by ocean. Some of the granite formations we all encounter give evidence of this ancient land-building process that went on for several hundred million years.

Now much of the Boston city region rests on this ancient sloping platform of volcanic rocks and granites whose ages fall between 625 and 590 million years.⁵ The basement of rock is so very old that it has lost its picture-book volcanic appearance due to subsequent erosions, invasions, and continental collisions. For instance, ancient pre-Cambrian weathering formed the sedimentary rocks we call Roxbury pudding stone, rocks easily identified as the building material of many of our late-nineteenth-century Richardsonian churches. The Blue Hills—the granite hills we now use as a southern landmark of the city of Boston—testify as well to the effects of a long aging process: because granite comes into being only from a slow cooling beneath the surface of the ground, the Quincy granites of the Blue Hills must have spent eons deep in the earth before a slow weathering away exposed them.

The Avalon Zone itself subsided in time, a process we can recognize in the form of the basin of harbor and land that makes up Boston and its adjacent suburbs. The same process created the Narragansett Basin that stretches south and west from Brockton to Fall River, Taunton, Providence, and Narragansett Bay. The whole rock Avalon basement tilts to the east so that much of it lies buried under hundreds of feet of sand and gravel. The immense accumulations of sand and gravel are themselves the product of millions of years of erosion and glacial rearrangement. In Cape Cod, the burden varies from 200 to 600 feet.⁶ Seawards, it undergirds the miles of Atlantic shelf and gives us the remarkable Grand Banks fishing grounds.

These later events are crucial to an understanding of the land that makes up the Boston region. As the ancient chain of islands pressed against the North American continent, the pressure formed a belt of tilted hard stone ledges that begin in Massachusetts at Webster in a narrow belt and then spread out to be miles across at Worcester and Marlborough. Then, as the belt curves north and east to Lowell and Newburyport, it narrows once again. This band of rocks, called by geologists the Nashoba Thrust Belt, has been invaded by melted granites. A remarkable subsequent consequence of the belt appears in the turning of the region's largest river, the Merrimack. The Merrimack flows due south from its origin in the mountains of New Hampshire until it meets the Nashoba Thrust Belt at Lowell, where it turns abruptly east to follow the margin of the Belt to the Atlantic Ocean.⁷ Then, years after the formation of the Nashoba Thrust Belt—about 300 million years ago—the collision of the North American and African continents crushed the Avalon Zone into the American continent, where it has remained steadfastly attached ever since.

Much of the visible landscape of Greater Boston is the work of comparatively recent times, the past two-and-a-half million years. Glaciers blanketed the northern half of the continent, advancing and retreating perhaps as often as five times. The immense quantity of water frozen into glaciers lowered the level of the sea by about 400 feet, while the burdensome weight of the glaciers deformed the earth's northern surfaces so that they lay about 300 feet below their current elevation. Like some giant awaking from a sleep, the post-glacial uplifting and stretching of the formerly depressed land brought a succession of earthquakes.

Unknown to many of the region's inhabitants, eastern Massachusetts continues to be one of the most active earthquake zones in the northeastern United States. Research dating back to sixteenth-century observations has established a steady rate of small and medium tremors. The biggest one in the recorded series came on November 18, 1755, at about 4:15 a.m., when Professor John Winthrop of Cambridge reported that many "chimnies were leveled with the roofs of houses, and many shattered and thrown down." According to Winthrop, the quake "spread terror and desolation throughout New England."⁸ Geologists now puzzle over the possibility of another such serious event. Several hypotheses have been put forward to explain these intra-plate continental tremors, but none so far fit the site and timing records well enough to allow of any prediction. Prediction or no, quakes continue. A small one (2.7 on the Richter Scale), centered near the active Newburyport area, awakened North Shore residents in early January 1999.⁹

The glacial grinding of the surface rocks—a process that dragged soil, sand, stones, and boulders along its pathways—also rounded off the preexisting hills and filled valleys. These movements also made new hills and land forms. About 16,000 years ago, the earth warmed once again and the glaciers began to melt, retreating backwards toward the north as their leading edges melted. The resorts of Cape Cod and the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket are glacial dumps—terminal moraines, or piles of material geologists call "till"—that the glaciers left behind. Southeastern Massachusetts, the flat areas of ponds and bogs, is an outwash area, a place where streams of meltwater spread clays, sand, and gravel out into a wide plain. The thickness of these glacial layers varies enormously. In some places it is several hundred feet deep; in others, only a few feet; in still others, the rock has been swept clean and remains exposed.¹⁰

Glaciers also built hills. Often till, sticky with clay, would mound up and a subsequent glacial advance would ride over the heap rounding it off and shaping it in the direction of the glacier's advance. The Boston region is littered with such hills, also called drumlins. Maps show seventy-four drumlins within the suburban ring that runs around from Newton and Lexington to Lynn, Hull, and the Boston Harbor. The islands in Boston Harbor and many hills in the city are of the same origin: Bunker Hill in Charlestown and the hills of the siege of Boston, Dorchester Heights in South Boston and Fort Hill in Roxbury. These sites provided the vantages on which the Revolutionaries placed their cannon in March 1776 to force the British to evacuate the city.¹¹

Beneath the glaciers ran rivers of meltwater whose channels swept up sand and gravel into long drifts called eskers—deposits that quarriers mine today. Locally, the most famous of these was the Needham esker, located on what is now the Needham Industrial Park next to I-95. For thirty years, its contents were carried off on a railroad to make the land undergirding Boston's fashionable Back Bay section. Often too, large chunks of ice would become buried under the glacial till and outwash so that the sunken block only melted after the surrounding debris had settled and warmed. The result was a pronounced depression where the old ice block once sat. These kettle holes can be found everywhere in the woods, and some were even large enough to form ponds. Round Pond in South Truro is such a kettle, as in Kingsbury Pond is Norfolk.¹²

The Legacy of the Land

The final historical-geological process in the making of today's Boston city region has asserted and even today continues to assert itself in the daily interactions of European and other immigrants with the land itself. The scouring of old hills of stone left the region with a poor acid soil ¹³ that is often so mixed with small stones that the gardener who picks the rocks off the surface soon discovers that, down below, some malevolent force sends up an ever-fresh crop. In some places, the number and mix of large rocks and small boulders make farming and even grazing impossible.

This poor soil and the railroad together drove agriculture from the Boston region. The railroad brought inexpensive food and produce in from the west, while the poor soil made local farms uncompetititve. Farm abandonment and forest advance commenced many years ago. The 1840s were the agricultural peak of the region. At that time, three quarters of the land stood either as pasture, under cultivation, or as town and city buildings, streets and roads. Forty years later, commentators began to notice the forest's advance and by 1920 the forest had regained perhaps half the territory. Today, open fields and farms make up about 5 percent of the region's surface, the urban forest covers 65 percent, and the remaining 30 percent is lawns, pavement, and roofs. Only cranberries continue to flourish, while some orchards, vineyards, and vegetables survive in scattered farm sites: apples in the Nashoba Valley to the west; the cranberry bogs and truck farms and vineyards in the southeast; and to the northeast in Hamilton, Beverly, Ipswich, and Topsfield, horses present a pastoral landscape.¹⁴

The old rock and newer glacial configurations of the present Boston city region can be usefully understood as having five distinct land form areas: first, the sunken Boston basin; second, the northeastern uplands; third, the central spine of hills; fourth, the southeastern lakes district; and fifth, the long Atlantic shoreline. One can take a rather cursory glance at the first four of these; the shoreline, which demands considerable attention, I will save for last.

The sunken Boston basin, composed of the City of Boston, its harbor, and a bowl of adjacent towns, provides a literal center for the region. Its surrounding uplands even today offer startling views. A motorist leaving Boston, heading south on Blue Hill Avenue, arrives at the crest of the road at Franklin Park where the panorama of the Great Blue Hill appears in the distance. If, on the other hand, a motorist leaves the city on the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90), the ascent of the road is gradual, but high retaining walls and steep roadside banks announce that the land is rising with the hills and uplands of Newton. To the northwest, Massachusetts Route 2 has been cut through the rock escarpment at the top of Belmont Hill such that the sharp rise of the highway nicely defines the rim of the basin. I-93 heading north cuts through the rock of Stone Hill in Medford to give a similar view. When drivers approach the city on either path the road offers dramatic views of miles of rooftops and a distant palisade of office towers that now rest upon the sites of the early Puritan settlement.

The uplands beyond the Boston Basin are not uniform. The second area, a northeast quadrant—the area north and east of Massachusetts Route 2 from Concord and Ayer to the boundary of New Hampshire on the north, and to Salem, Gloucester, and Newburyport on the east—consists of rolling country, of modest hills and vast wetlands. The land fluctuates between 50 and a 100 feet above sea level. The third area is a higher and rougher spine that extends westward across the region, roughly paralleling the Massachusetts Turnpike (I-90) on its north edge; on its south, an approximate boundary line might be drawn from Sharon to Milford. Here are steep hills and drumlins interspersed with wetland valleys. The range of altitude varies between 100 and 200 feet. The fourth area lies to the south and east of this spine. The lands fall off into what might be called Boston's "lakes district," the low-lying and slightly undulating glacial outwash plain of ponds and bogs that characterize southeastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod.

The fifth area, the Atlantic shore, displays a remarkable variety in geology—a feat performed by the glaciers and exploited much more recently in human settlements that have been as contradictory as any urban process. The melting glaciers left the outwash beaches of southern Massachusetts from Westport to Wareham, and the terminal moraines of Cape Cod, the Elizabeth Islands, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket. The sandy beaches on the South Shore from Sandwich to Marshfield and on the North Shore from Essex to Salisbury are similar, eroded sands and glacial outwash that the ocean has formed into sand bars, barrier beaches, narrow lines of open beach, and small hills of glacial till. Two segments, however, are different. The South Shore from Scituate to Weymouth and the North Shore from Nahant to Rockport are characterized by granite outcroppings, boulders and ledges that strike out at right angles to the shore, allowing only crescent beaches to form between the rocks.

This long southern and eastern shoreline edge of the Boston region alters the local weather by dividing the region into two climate zones, shore and inland. In general, Boston weather comes from the west giving it a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters—six months of warm, six months of cold. The ocean, however, adds special effects to this general pattern. The cold ocean water in the spring makes for a delayed warming in April and May along the coast. Summer winds blow up from the southwest bringing the heat from southern states. In the fall, occasionally, the hurricanes of the Caribbean, instead of following an offshore track, turn inwards to flood the shoreline, level the forest, and tear up the electric power lines. Hurricanes are not frequent, but they can be very damaging, as they were in 1938, 1954, and 1955. In the winter, the counterclockwise swirl of all northern hemisphere storms can draw in the cold wet air from the North Atlantic in severe gales of rain and snow, what are called Nor'easters here from their wind direction.

On the other hand the ocean brings many delights. Along the south shore of Buzzards Bay and Cape Cod, the shallow water and nearby Gulf Stream warm the water to 70 degrees for swimmers. On the north side of Cape Cod and all around Massachusetts Bay, however, the water is cold, even in the shallows so that swimming is for the hardy. But this cold water, part of a large circulating swirl from Nova Scotia, brings summer relief in the form of afternoon on-shore breezes. The city of Boston's famous "East Wind" off the harbor is but a downtown version of the breezes that blow all along the coast. The ocean also brings the soft summer fogs when the warm air from the southwest flows over the cool air that lies on top of the ocean water. As the temperature of the warm air falls, myriad droplets of moisture form and a fog suddenly engulfs everything in its cool embrace.¹⁵

Like the forest that conceals an agricultural past, the resort and retirement shoreline communities cover over a history of shipbuilding, maritime commerce, and fishing. Many of these towns throve during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as builders of wooden ships and centers of extensive coastwise and distant commerce: Taunton, Boston, Medford, Essex, and Haverhill were once shipbuilders as well as traders. Fall River ran overnight boats to New York City until the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad built its present shoreline route in the early twentieth century. New Bedford flourished as a whaling port from the close of the Revolution until the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1857, from which kerosene for lamps could be made. Salem rivaled Boston as a port for trading to the West and East Indies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Steam engines, steel ships, and railroads foreclosed this commerce, but some remnants survive. Old merchant warehouses, narrow port-side streets, and charming old houses now stand as outdoor museums to attract thousands of tourists to the old ports.

The fishing industry has been the latest local economy to fail. Every shoreline community from Fall River around Cape Cod and Massachusetts Bay to Newburyport engaged in ocean fishing, seining inshore, dragging for nearby bottom fish, and seeking the cod of George's Banks. Seagoing factory fishing and packing plants from Europe and later, intensive, modern electronic fishing by New Bedford and Gloucester fleets have finally fished out the area's legendary vast schools. Today, the United States Government and representatives of the fishermen debate the setting of quotas in the hope that decimated species might restore themselves. The restoration is a complex problem because it involves not just leaving a few species to multiply but requires helping the whole ocean ecosystem back into a fertile balance. The plight of these local fisherman stands as a warning to the still thriving Pacific Northwest and Alaska fisheries. Fish of all kinds are still available in small quantities, the lobsters are not yet wiped out, and the scallop and clam beds not all polluted, so the local cuisine can still boast of the pleasures of wild creatures from the sea and shore. Yet as I write this text, the news carries warnings of still another disaster of exploitation: the extensive lobster population is likely to collapse due to overfishing.

The destruction of the offshore fish is a fitting metaphor for the overconsumption of the shoreline itself. Here the first Puritan settlers left a misguided legacy with their law concerning the ownership of shorelines. Their legislation, which has persisted, held that the owners of shore property possessed the land down to the line of mean high tide. That is, private landowners effectively controlled the edge of the sea itself. This conception is quite unlike the rules of Roman Law countries like France and Spain, or its colony, California, where the beach is public. As a result of this unfortunate Massachusetts law, private owners of seaside property have been able to exclude their urban neighbors from using this important natural resource. Like the overfishing of George's Banks, the walls of summer houses that line beaches and the prohibitions of seaside owners have prevented the region from developing these wonderful gifts of nature.

In the late nineteenth century, however, perhaps because of the Boston region's intensive urbanization, a preservation movement sprang up to counteract the private engrossment of the natural and scenic resources of the state. The Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and the Trustees of the Reservations were established in 1891 as companion eleemosynary institutions to receive and even to purchase historic and scenic properties. At the same time, supporters of these private initiatives established the public Metropolitan Park Commission (1892) to set out parks and parkways and to recapture and restore the beaches of Boston and surrounding towns. As a result, the walls of privatization have been breached in significant ways. The Metropolitan District Commission (successor to the Park Commission) owns and manages miles of shoreline and edges of the Charles, Mystic, and Neponset rivers. The Trustees operate very popular public beaches on the North Shore and Martha's Vineyard, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts also maintains important public beaches in Salisbury, Plymouth, and Martha's Vineyard, while the federal government owns and manages a long stretch of the south side of Cape Cod.

Elsewhere, however, private engrossment reigns. The houses and yards of the shoreline owners range from large tasteful spreads that fit into the landscape to the more common line-up of houses against the beach. Moreover, in this climate of artificially created scarcity, the shore towns have reserved their public beaches for the exclusive use of local residents. It is not sufficient to be a citizen of the United States or the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, although both entities protect and, even on occasion, maintain these shores, you must be a town resident.

The Region's Urban Geography

The geologic forces that shaped the forest and the shores of the Boston region also established the pattern of its initial settlement. Today's Boston city region is but the latest expression of human uses for the inherited land. In 1990, there were 21 cities and towns in the region with populations of 50,000 or greater. All, save the suburb of Malden, are located at the sea or along an important river. All save Brockton and Nashua, New Hampshire, were settled before 1660. The early settlements owe their beginnings to the fact that in the seventeenth century water was the only easy mode of transportation. Seaside and river towns offered marshes and wild grasses for cattle. Thus, the glacial forms of shore, river course, and uplands established the initial pattern of European settlements, which in later years of urbanization grew and shifted with the changing economy and new patterns of living.

City building is always a process of bit-by-bit additions so that the lineaments of the past continue to assert themselves directly and indirectly. Many railroads followed the river's edge, and then the highways paralleled the railroad. The airport lies at the edge of the city, but the city is still the passenger's destination. Because of this recurring process of mixing present and past, it is convenient to mark the geographic history of the Boston region by three period labels. The first era is that of the domination of the sea and the rivers, the years from 1600 to 1870. The second era is the time of the domination of the railroad and the newly paved streets, roads, state, and U.S. highways, a period spanning from 1870 to 1960. The third era is the time of the limited access freeways and the new interstate highway network, 1960 to the present.

The first era, 1600 to 1870, is marked by the power of the land and the slowly advancing urban system which grew out of the largest settlement, the port of Boston. Boston harbor, the largest and best in the region, was the initial destination of the great wave of English settlers, the 20,000 who came in the first decade after 1630. The harbor's shores and rivers quickly filled with farms and villages. On the north, the towns of Medford and Chelsea bordered the Mystic River, which drained some of the northeastern uplands. The Charles River, whose meandering route carried it through the central spine of hills, found settlers in Cambridge, Watertown, and Waltham. On the southern edge of the basin the Neponset River, which drained some of the southeastern lowlands, supported the villages of Dorchester and Milton.

Elsewhere, fishing and trading ports along the coast attracted settlers who planted the beginnings of the region's cities: Newburyport, Salem, Lynn, Quincy, New Bedford, Fall River, and Taunton. All these towns engaged in shipbuilding, and all traded along the coast of North America and to the West Indies. During the eighteenth century, the string of North Shore ports from Salem to Newburyport even rivaled Boston in the extent of their ocean commerce.

Boston City Region Towns with Populations Greater than 50,000


Date Settled	Town	Population
		1790	1880	1990

1630	Boston	18,000	362,000	571,000
1700	Brockton	—	14,000	93,000
1638	Brookline	500	8,000	53,000
1630	Cambridge	2,000	53,000	93,000
1656	Fall River	—	49,000	93,000
1650	Framingham	1,600	6,000	65,000
1640	Haverhill	2,400	18,000	51,000
1633	Hingham	2,000	4,000	51,000
1655	Lawrence	—	39,000	70,000
1653	Lowell	—	59,000	103,000
1629	Lynn	2,300	38,000	81,000
1640	Malden	1,000	12,000	54,000
1630	Medford	1,000	8,000	57,000
1673	Nashua, N.H.	600	14,000	80,000
1640	New Bedford	3,300	27,000	100,000
1639	Newton	1,300	17,000	83,000
1625	Quincy	—	11,000	85,000
1630	Somerville	—	25,000	76,000
1638	Taunton	3,800	21,000	50,000
1634	Waltham	900	12,000	57,000
1622	Weymouth	1,500	11,000	54,000
Historical populations from Richard W. Wilkie and Jack Tager, Historical Atlas of Massachusetts (Amherst, Mass., 1991), 140-144.

The Revolution, however, brought significant changes. Taunton, mining the bog iron nearby, cast cannon for the army and began its progress toward becoming an important center of metal working. The Quakers of Nantucket, harassed by American Revolutionaries and the British alike, settled among their mainland fellows from Providence, Rhode Island, to New Bedford. With the coming of peace, they started New Bedford on its ascent to becoming the whale oil capital of the world. When the Tories fled Boston with the British army's evacuation of the port in March 1776, merchant families from Salem moved to Boston, thereby strengthening its dominance. What followed from the Revolution, then, was two urban systems in the region that are just now being unified into one Boston-based system.

In the southeast, Taunton flourished during the nineteenth century as a center for the manufacture of locomotive and railroad equipment, the casting of stoves, and the making of silver plate and alloy tablewares. Fall River established fast overnight boats to New York City. New Bedford flourished as a whaling port until the discovery of petroleum ended its control of lighting oil. All these towns were part of the Providence, Rhode Island, and New York trading system. Indeed, both Fall River and New Bedford became important cotton textile towns, extensions of Providence's Blackstone Valley. After the textile collapse of the 1920s, they became home to many New York-oriented garment shops.

Elsewhere, Boston established its dominance soon after the Revolution. In 1793, Boston merchants who wished to get control of trade with the farmers and new settlers of New Hampshire built the Middlesex Canal. It passed through the Mystic River and its lakes to a junction with the Concord River that then carried the canal to its meeting with the Merrimack at present day Lowell.

The same motive led to a brief speculation in turnpike companies. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, these companies built toll roads that bounded over hills and across valleys in straight lines toward their destinations, regardless of the topography. To the north, the Newburyport Turnpike began across the Mystic River on Broadway, at the harborside town of Chelsea, and then ran northeasterly to Topsfield and Newburyport. To the south, Washington Street in Boston was extended to Dedham, Walpole, Attleborough, and Providence. To the west, Boylston Street, in the suburb of Brookline, was the origin of a turnpike to Framingham and Worcester.¹⁶

The rivers flowing into Boston had been used from the very first to power grist mills, saw mills, rag paper mills, for fulling wool and processing tobacco. In 1813, a consortium of Boston merchants built on the Charles River at Waltham the nation's first integrated cotton mill. It proved a successful copying of contemporary English machinery. The Charles River, however, is a modest stream that suffers from occasional summer droughts when the flow virtually ceases. After their successful Waltham prototype, the investors looked for a more powerful stream. The nearby Merrimack offered the possibility for the large-scale exploitation they sought. The Merrimack has twenty times the flow of the Charles and it is a river whose flow can be managed to sustain a summer volume. Its origin lies in central New Hampshire at Lake Winnipesaukee. The Boston Associates thus could supplement low summer flows by drawing down water from the lake.¹⁷

In 1822, the work began for a new built-for-purpose town at the junction of the Middlesex Canal and the Merrimack. Investors raised a dam and laid out canals parallel to the river to carry the water power to factories that in time would line the canals. First Lowell and then a string of mill towns grew: Lawrence, Methuen, and Haverhill in Massachusetts, and Nashua and Manchester in New Hampshire. In time, Manchester became the site of the world's largest cotton mill. All along the Merrimack and its tributaries there gathered a hive of textile mills and related industries for dying, finishing, and printing cloth, and for making textile machinery. Boston capital controlled the lot.

The Boston-based economy also expanded with the shoe and leather business. Shoes in Massachusetts had often been a winter job for farmers who picked up the makings in the city, worked the leather into shoes, and then returned the finished products to Hawley Street dealers in downtown Boston. The town of Lynn, where English tanners and skilled shoemakers had settled in the seventeenth century, had become, by the time of the Revolution, a significant cluster of small handworkers' shops. A succession of inventions for sewing leather and joining tops to soles (Blake sewing machine, 1858; McKay stitcher, 1862; Goodyear welt machine, 1864-1867) turned this old handicraft into a midcentury factory process. As mechanization advanced, shoe factory sites radiated outward from the Lynn center to Boston itself, Haverhill on the Merrimack, Marlborough on the Assabet—a Merrimack triburary—to the west, and to the southern city of Brockton on the Taunton River.

These early specialties of textiles and shoes and their related industries at first scattered across the region wherever a river or stream offered the possibility of a dam. This early industrialization process was facilitated by the employment of mechanics to build and repair machinery in all the mill towns. Soon an army of skilled men furnished the improvements and inventions that led to still more machines for making all manner of commonplace items from shovels to hats. In this first phase of industrialization, the Yankee tinkerers and the Boston capitalists often prospered together.

The second period from 1870 to 1960 was one in which the urban system freed itself from such strong dependence on seaports and rivers. The coming of the railroad and the coal-fired steam engine both knit together the many small mills of the region and also changed factory work from small mills to big factories. Mills of tens and hundreds grew to factories of hundreds and thousands. The small city of many factories and the small town beneath the big factory became characteristic of the second era. The wall of six- and eight-story brick mills along the Merrimack in Lowell and Lawrence and the giant United Shoe Machinery factories in the small towns of Beverly and Whitman, the Draper Loom Company plant in Hopedale village, and the American Woolen plant in Marlborough dwarfed the houses and tenements of their workers. Boston and its suburbs of Cambridge, Somerville, Waltham, Everett, and Chelsea, thanks to steam power and the railroad terminals nearby, grew to be one interrelated industrial center. Someone built a textile mill in East Boston near where Donald McKay had built his clipper ships, and a huge shoe factory settled down in suburban Roxbury. Foundries, oil refineries, glass, soap, and candy factories, slaughterhouses, and piano factories joined the old port-side activities of sugar refining, operating lumber yards, wool, cotton, and leather warehousing, and the processing of fish. This was the era when the Boston Basin functioned as the industrial metropolis of the region, the factory planet around which satellite mill cities moved.

It is difficult today to recapture a sense of the intense reticulation of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century railroad network which sped passengers, freight, and mail back and forth across formerly scattered river towns. In part, the railroads re-etched the existing pathways. The Boston & Providence went straight to Providence like the turnpike before it. The Boston & Albany followed the Worcester turnpike to Natick, Framingham, and Worcester. If you wanted to go to New York City in 1880, you took the Old Colony Railroad to Fall River and then the night boat. The Newburyport turnpike had not been a town builder, so no railroad duplicated its path. Instead, the Eastern Railroad and the Boston & Maine joined the North Shore towns from Lynn to Gloucester and then branched north to the Merrimack towns.

Major Rail Lines of the 1880s with routes 495 & 128

Such were the main pathways, the railway lines that earned the city its sobriquet, "the Hub." These were the routes now duplicated by the radial highways leading out of Boston. But within the region of Greater Boston you could, with a little patience, travel by railroad from one place to most any other because railroads, large and small, crisscrossed the mill town region. You could go from Concord to Boston by way of the Arlington suburb on the Middlesex Central Railroad (now the Minuteman bicycle path), or to Waltham and then to Boston on the Fitchburg Railroad. From Framingham you could travel southeast to New Bedford on the New Bedford Railroad, or you could go next door to Marlborough on the Fitchburg line. You need not go through Boston to get from Lawrence to Salem—the Eastern Railroad would carry you there directly.¹⁸

A long secular depression set in with the price collapse of 1921, and it lasted in the Boston region until 1960 and the flowering of the new high-technology and service economy. Textile mills and shoe factories began their southern and overseas migration in the 1920s; today, they comprise only a small fraction of local manufacturing. As the mills left, chronic unemployment settled upon the mill towns. Lynn, Salem, Lowell, Lawrence, Marlborough, Whitman, New Bedford, and Fall River suffered intensely, and in time what had been a high wage region became a place of lower than average wages. In the 1950s you could hire a physicist or a secretary or a machinist at lower wages in the Boston region than the prevailing rates across the nation.¹⁹ The empty mill buildings, however, did furnish cheap space for new start-up companies. Once again the Charles River proved an unanticipated pathway.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded in 1861, opened its doors on the edge of the new fashionable section of Boston, in Copley Square in the Back Bay. In half a century it grew so that it required much more space. In 1916, it moved across the Charles to its present location on Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge. Here the university sat on the edge of Cambridge's concentration of varied industries. As a school of technology and a land-grant college, M.I.T. took as its mission to study science and to harness science to technological applications for contemporary industry. At the time of its move, its specialties were chemistry, metallurgy, electric power, and civil and mechanical engineering. Half a century later the core of M.I.T. had shifted to physics, mathematics, aeronautical engineering, and all branches of electronics. Over these twentieth-century years the professors and graduates of M.I.T. became the new inventing class in the region, replacing the machinists and tinkerers of former times. King Gillette, the inventor of the safety razor, typified the old ways; Vannevar Bush and Lawrence Marshall, radio tube and radar men, exemplified the new.

During World War II, a tremendous demand for electronics nurtured the M.I.T. companies, forcing them to find new quarters. They followed the handiest route, the path of abandoned and underutilized mills along the Charles River. After the war, still newer companies spread out from Waltham and Needham along a new highway that the state had built to relieve the cross-town automobile traffic then clogging the Main Streets of what were the outer suburbs. This road, enlarged several times in the 1950s and 1960s, became the highway symbol (Route 128) of the new economy and the new decentralized ways of the Boston city region.

What is new about the geography of the third period, the time since 1960, is its scattered quality. Warehouses, factories, office buildings, stores, and malls sprinkle themselves along the rings and spokes of the highway spider web and take up open land wherever a road offers a convenient connection. Employees have responded by commuting in every which way across the network. The work that now leads the regional economy differs greatly from its predecessors. General Electric makes jet aircraft engines in Lynn; the City of Boston hardly knows manufacturing; and Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the major hospitals are larger employers than the former giant, the United Shoe Machinery Corporation. Digital Corporation exceeded American Woolen, one of whose plants it occupied in Marlborough. By the same token, the highway and road network, its maintenance, and provision with cars and trucks far exceeds the investments in the former railroad system.

Altogether, the years since 1960 have seen an extraordinary transformation, and what happened here has been happening across all of North America. The special local event has been the reunification of eastern Massachusetts. The extension of I-495 through southeastern Massachusetts has finally joined that area and its cities of Taunton, Fall River, and New Bedford to the Boston orbit. These same highways have also promoted an extraordinary boom on the shores of Buzzards Bay and on Cape Cod and the islands as resort and retirement areas. The meanings of these new arrangements are by no means clear, even now. We know that in the future, as in the past, old patterns will persist and penetrate the new. What we cannot know is what the newly evolving ways will be.

SAM BASS WARNER, JR., visiting professor of urban studies and planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is currently completing a book on greater Boston.

NOTES

^1. U.S. Department of Transportation, Bureau of the Census, Census Transportation Planning Package: 1990 [computer disk set], (Washington, D.C., 1990).

^2. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Way We Really Live (Boston, 1977).

^3. Middlesex County in 1990 had 747,000 workers, Suffolk County 324,000. All data from Census Transportation Planning Package.

^4. Despite the absence of petroleum under New England's ground, it is an intensely studied area, subject to continuing geological research whose conclusions are rapidly changing our understanding of the past. I would like to thank Lindy Elkins of M.I.T., Professor Meg Thompson of Wellesley College, and Professor William A. Newman of Northeastern University for their help in explaining this history to me.

^5. M. D. Thompson et al., "Tectonostratigraphic Implications of Late Proterozoic U-Pb Zircon ages in the Avalon Zone of southeastern New England," Geological Society of America, Special Paper #304 (1996), 179-191.

^6. Robert N. Oldale, Geologic History of Cape Cod, Massachusetts (Washington, D. C., 1981), 8.

^7. David Woodhouse et al., "Geology of Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America," Bulletin of the Association of Engineering Geologists 28 (Nov. 1991): 386/2, 389/2, 399/fig. 14, 400/2. Fig. 14 shows the river's path.

^8. John Winthrop, "An Account of the Earthquake Felt in New England, and Neighboring Parts of America on the 18th of November, 1755," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 50, pt. 1 (1755):11; Lawrence Shaw Mayo, The Winthrop Family in America (Boston, 1948), 173.

^9. John E. Ebel, "The Seventeenth Century Seismicity of Northeastern North America," Seismological Research Letters 67(May/June 1996):51-68; John E. Ebel and Alan L. Kafka, "Earthquake Activity in the northeastern United States," in Neotectonics of North America, ed. D. Burton Slemmons et al. (Boulder, 1991), 277-290; Boston Globe, Jan. 11, 1999.

^10. Woodhouse, "Geology of Boston," 401/2.

^11. Clifford A. Kaye, The Geology and Early History of the Boston Area of Massachusetts, Geological Survey Bulletin #1476 (Washington, D.C., 1976), 6; Woodhouse, "Geology of Boston," 401/2.

^12. Kingsbury Pond is now a subject of conflict, drawn down by Franklin Well #4. Robert N. Oldale, Geologic History of Cape Cod, Massachusetts (Washington, D.C., 1981).

^13. Neil Jorgensen, Southern New England (San Francisco, 1978), 88-91, 97.

^14. Jorgensen, Southern New England, 112-113, 206; Charles H. W. Foster, ed., Stepping Back to Look Forward, A History of the Massachusetts Forest (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).

^15. Michael and Deborah Berrill, The North Atlantic Coast (San Francisco, 1981), 29-31.

^16. Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy (1947; Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 111-112; Map, "State of Massachusetts," from Mathew Carey, American Atlas (1804), Harvard Map Collection.

^17. Theodore Steinberg, Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England (New York, 1991).

^18. A. Williams Co., "Railroad and Township Map of Massachusetts" (Boston, 1882), Harvard Map Collection.

^19. Warner, The Way We Really Live.

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