What do you know about the earliest crossings over the Charles River in Boston? When it was founded, the town of Boston occupied the tip of the narrow Shawmut Peninsula, with the harbor on one side and the Charles RIver on the other. Residents relied first on ferries, and later on a series of bridges to connect them with the surrounding towns and countryside. The progression of bridge construction illustrates not only the state of construction technology, but also the birth of corporations in America and a landmark Supreme Court case defining the limits of private property rights.
Crossing the River Charles
Charlestown Ferry
- Documents about Harvard’s financial stake in the Charlestown Ferry.
- The first bridge over the Neponset.
Charles River Bridge
- A useful history of the early ferries and bridges over the Charles written for the Boston Transit Commission in 1899.
- Town records related to the debates and first authorization of a bridge.
- Legislation authorizing the Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge to form a corporation.
- Lucy Cranch writes to her aunt Abigail Adams about the new Charles River Bridge.
- John Quincy Adams writes to his mother about the opening of the Charles River Bridge, and shares a little more candidly in his diary.
- July 4, 1786 oration at Charlestown, using the “phoenix” metaphor that so annoyed JQA.
- Josiah Bartlett’s description of the Charles River Bridge.
West Boston Bridge
- Advertising shares in the West Boston Bridge.
- A centennial article about the West Boston Bridge in the Cambridge Tribune.
- A 2000 masters thesis on the West Boston Bridge.
- The Bridge, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Warren Bridge
Boston Book Club
Our pick for the Boston Book Club this week is Planning the City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630, by Lawrence W Kennedy. Published in 1994 by the UMass Press, this book is a tightly packed introduction to Boston’s history of urban planning over nearly 400 years. The book makes it into our episodes as a source fairly frequently, when we’re talking about development or infrastructure. We’ve consulted it when talking about annexation, the first subway, or the industrial Mother Brook, and we quote it briefly this week, as well. It’s written as an engaging narrative that encourages the reader to keep going, and it is surprisingly well illustrated for an academic work, with not only data tables, but also copious historic maps, photos, and engravings. Here’s how UMass describes the book:
The focus of this study is on the changing role of local government in city planning. Boston’s municipal government holds the primary responsibility for guiding the growth of the city. The city’s political leaders have always needed to work with partners in the private sector, and in the twentieth century have found it increasingly necessary to cooperate with federal and state agencies as well. Although the roles played by the federal and state governments–like that played by the private sector–are crucial to the story of Boston, the author considers them in relation to city government. Planning the City upon a Hill is not, then, a comprehensive account of all planning done by government agencies, but an attempt to examine the process of planning and uncover some of the patterns at work. Planning Boston has been a sustained activity for nearly four centuries: this study is the story of the continuous evolution of both an idea and a city.
Upcoming Event
Jane Brox will be giving a lunchtime author talk at the Boston Athenaeum on Tuesday, January 22nd. Brox wrote the book Silence: A Social History of One of the Least Understood Elements of Our Lives, comparing life in a monastery with conditions at one of America’s first prisons, examining enforced silence as the common ground between the two. Here’s how the Athenaeum describes the event:
Conceived in Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia home and fueled by the Quaker ideals of late eighteenth-century America, Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary was introduced as a humane alternative to brutal colonial punishments that took place overseas. Inspired by the spiritual practices of the monastery, the penitentiary’s early promulgators believed that prisoners could find redemption in silence, “wherein God speaks with the soul.” But what they neglected to anticipate was the ways in which it could be abused.
Although the monastic world served as a moral blueprint for solitary confinement, the monastery housed a silence that was far from the one imposed in the penitentiary. For twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton, silence was a carved-out space for stillness and contemplation. But as Merton gained renown, even he came up against its strictures and questioned his place within it. In juxtaposing these stories from the monastery and penitentiary, Brox draws fascinating—often startling—parallels between the constructs of faith and punishment. Her compelling history prompts inquiries into how silence masks and perpetuates injustice within the prison system and how we may rethink the ways in which its employed in our own lives.
Brox illuminates the place of silence in society, as both a means of liberation and oppression, and how the extremes it gave rise to continue to reverberate in our culture today.
The talk is free for Athenaeum members, and free for guests with the purchase of library admission. It begins at noon, and registration is not required.