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Reviews
| Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston. By Nancy S. Seasholes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. xiv+533 pp., 300 maps and illus., appends., notes, index. $49.95 hb (ISBN 0-262-19494-5).
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Boston is a made city, according to historical archaeologist Nancy Seasholes. Landmaking in Boston has generated more fill along its shorelines than any other American city. Of Boston's 30,000 acres, about 5,250 (or one-sixth of the city) is built on fill. Seasholes only studies the seashore between the Boston University Bridge in Allston (north) and the Neponset Bridge in Dorchester (south), as well as East Boston and Charlestown. Her interest is the topographical history of the tidal flats, guts, ponds, coves, bays, rivers, streams, drumlins, islands, hills, peninsulas, and other environmental elements that construct the original land mass once called Shawmut.
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Seasholes organizes her book into geographical sections, some of which are historic neighborhoods and others are new landmasses with special land uses. These chapters are prefaced by an introduction that defines her critical terms like landmaking: the "filling in of the tidal flats and marshes that once surrounded the city." Landmaking is not land filling, which "evokes images of garbage dumps but can also mean adding fill on top of existing land," or land reclamation
for land in Boston was made by actual filling, not by diking, pumping, and draining to reclaim it from the sea.... So landmaking, a term coined by archaeologists, has been chosen as the appropriate term for this study because it describes what really occurred in Boston—making land by filling areas of water (p. 2).
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Boston's environmental history contributed to its landmaking prospects. It lies in a basin covered with glacially deposited clay. Rising above the clay are drumlins, elliptically shaped hills of gravel and glacial till. The sea level prior to the glacial melt was lower than it is now, and the adjacent islands, including Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, were part of the mainland. Melting seawater laid a deep layer of silt over the clay. These became tidal flats, covered at high tide but exposed as mud flat at low tide, with interspersed marshes and tidal creeks.
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To make land, "a retaining structure was built on the tidal flats around the perimeter of the area to be filled and the fill—often gravel, dirt, or dredged material—was simply dumped on the landward side until the fill level was above the level of high tide" (p. 2). Early on, the principal motive for landmaking was "wharfing out," the process by which wharves were extended over the flats or the land between wharves filled in. Other forces shaping the shorelines were town development (extensions of a town generally for commercial purposes); the accommodation of railroads (beginning in 1830); increases in population through immigration, especially the Irish in the mid-1840s; commercial competition with New York; dealing with the pollution of wastewater (tied to sanitation and pubic health); constructing underground drainage; the creation of public parks and playgrounds (from the 1870s); modernizing the port (early 20th century); and transportation facilities, concluding with the building of Logan airport in East Boston, the city's largest landmaking project (1,767 acres).
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Of interest to IA readers is a very brief chapter on landmaking technology, such as the cob and crib systems and other methods of layering timbers and stone for wharves, seawalls, and bulkheads. Much of the information for historical construction comes from numerous archaeological digs conducted in the past 70 years. Seasholes has participated in some of the more recent explorations. Indeed, her knowledge of the field reports and access to extensive archives constitute the basis for the book. Archives and historical publications on the history of the city and its waterfront are the sources for the terrific array of visual materials that add structure to the book. Seasholes invented some visual information, such as the 1992 bird's-eye view that prefaces each chapter, showing the 1630 shoreline under the present physical and spatial organization of a section of the city.
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In addition to construction, Gaining Ground contains much for IA enthusiasts in the themes threaded through the chapters: Boston's transportation history (with much on railroads), public works and environmental history, summaries of historic archaeology, urban history and commerce, the preservation of landmaking structures and buildings, and the intertwining of several historical technologies. The scope of the book is 1630 to the present, which brings us to the Big Dig, the burial of the Central Artery, and the filling of its new roof with dirt and parks. The excavation will disturb some of the fill, but conceptually portions of it will be relocated to the top of the tunnel, revealing the fill rather than hiding it under wharves and roads.
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| Gaining Ground is good and useful book. It could have been a great book with better editing from the dissertation that gave it birth. It has too much repetition and too little overarching narrative. The extended compilations of facts are sometimes tedious, and it is hard to locate information on some of the maps. In the afterword, Seasholes hopes her book "will serve as a useful resource for future studies." No doubt about that exists. The author also calls attention to current and future environmental issues. Falling groundwater levels and rotting foundation pilings have already impacted neighborhoods. There is flooding in the South End, and the earthquake hazard is high. Quakes tend to liquefy fill, as happened in 1727. Seasholes calls for continuing investigations in Boston and new studies in other cities where landmaking has been a major element in local history. Based on her comprehensive study of Boston, we would be wise to pay attention to fill. |
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