The city government at the time feared wharf builders would continue crowding the harbor with their irregularly-shaped shoreline alterations. The brown area, labelled “200 feet of flats,” was pierced by two inlets that allowed boats to sail to the smaller wharves and docks.Ī notable feature on this map is the thin blue half-circle near the wharves, which indicates an early conflict between private enterprise and public regulation on the shoreline. The line running perpendicular to Long Wharf marks the position of a defensive jetty called the “Barricado,” built in 1673 but soon abandoned. If you look closely, you can see the appropriately-named Long Wharf jutting out into the water from about 5 o’clock to 12 o’clock. The jagged white shapes at bottom are wharves poking into the harbor. This color-coded map from the 1820s, redrawn from an original from the early 1700s, might seem a little confusing at first. (Courtesy Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library) Snow after Jacob Sheafe, Manuscript plan showing wharves of Boston (ca. These ever-more elaborate fingers jutting into the harbor eventually led the way towards Bostonians filling in the ocean to facilitate maritime trade. Wharf builders came up with a solution: they stretched their wharves further and further into the harbor to accommodate large and small craft, even at low tide. But the shallow water surrounding much of the city was a problem for loading and unloading ships. Early European communities relied heavily on Indigenous ecological and economic systems for their survival.Ĭolonial Boston depended on the ocean for trade, food, and a constant influx of settlers from England. The fish weirs they built were some of the most important and extensive human interventions into the coastal landscape. The Massachusett people knew that the marshes around this peninsula - known as Mashauwomuk (or Shawmut) - held thriving fisheries. The Boston peninsula was a good place for defenses, and also a rich intertidal ecosystem. That was the hub of Boston’s maritime traffic. (now State St.) and Dock Square (where Faneuil Hall stands). If you look at the lower right section of the map, you’ll see an arc of docks at the foot of King St. The Bonner map shows Boston sitting on a peninsula - in technical terms, it’s actually a “tied island” connected to land by a sandy spit called a “tombolo.” Tidal marshes and flats surrounded most of the city the Common, near the center of the map, backed up onto Roxbury Flats, which stretched from what is now the Public Garden all the way to near Northeastern University. This particular version shows the city between 17. It provides some of the best evidence for what the city looked like in the first century of European colonization, before massive engineering projects dramatically reworked the city’s coastline. An English captain named John Bonner originally created the map in 1721, and it was revised many times throughout the 18th century. The Boston we see in this first map hardly resembles the city we know today. These eight historical maps, selected by Garrett Dash Nelson, curator of Maps & Director of Geographic Scholarship at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map & Education Center, offer snapshots of Boston’s growth over time, documenting the city's ongoing - and ever-changing - relationship with the sea. Now that climate change is causing rapid and accelerating sea-level rise around Boston, much of that made land isn’t quite high enough to resist the highest high tides, and the problem will worsen in coming decades. People built new land by filling in the spaces between wharves, or building out into marshes and tidal flats, and usually constructed their new land right above the high tide line. That’s an astonishing amount, and that history of landmaking is part of what makes Boston so vulnerable to sea level rise today. Facebook Email This article is more than 1 year old.Ībout one-sixth of Boston sits on landfill.
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