A Lithic Journey

A large Normanskill-type stone spear or
knife point from the Late Archaic period
in the collection of the Canton Historical Society. 

As Joe Bagley speaks, his passion for archeology flows. Standing in front of an overflowing room, Bagley looks the part of an archeologist, rugged boots, tough pants, and a boyish smile. The audience hangs on his every word. This is the Friends of the Blue Hills’ 35^th Anniversary Meeting, and the City of Boston Archeologist reveals the amazing history that is beneath our feet. In a word, his talk is about stewardship.

The Blue Hills Reservation is such an amazing place. As someone who has hiked hundreds of miles within its borders, I can never fail to marvel at this historical place in our own backyards. And, this is the perfect time of year to get out and walk on the same trails that man walked on more than 8000 years ago.

The Blue Hills were so named by early European explorers who, while sailing along the coastline, noticed the bluish hue on the slopes when viewed from a distance. The blue comes from the rocks that formed the geology of the hills 600 million years ago. It may be hard to believe but this site was formed as a result of a large volcano that has been worn down over these millions of years to be the site we know today.  And the blue hue of the rock tells a story that extends back almost ten thousand years ago when Native Americans created a bustling community on this land.

City of Boston, Archeologist,
Joseph Bagley conducting field research. 

In his minds eye Bagley, like many of the archeologists who have come before him, can see the camps, the workshops, the quarry sites and the hunting grounds of a great people who were the first stewards of the land along the Neponset Valley. “Many of the trails we walk today are the exact same trails that have been used for thousands of years,” explains Bagley.

Today the trails are used for recreation, but thousands of years ago these were the paths used to commute between quarries to workshops and then onto hunting grounds. The rocks that crunch underfoot tell the story of not only geology of the Blue Hills but also the archeology. It is in the rocks that we start to see why this was the center of industry for early man.

Bagley tells of one “aha” moment. “There was a site that I had read about just south of Granite Links Golf Course, and while still a student with some time on my hands I took an afternoon treat and hiked to look for this area. Based on what I had read, I was not prepared for the scale, I mean you are looking for something and then you discover it is so large you are actually standing in it.”  Bagley says that the personal discovery “was mind blowing.” What he stumbled upon on the western side of the Blue Hill Reservation was the debris of a major prehistoric quarry.

Bagley was off the trail and climbing up the hill, expecting to see rocky outcrops – but instead there were terraces and the back was stone. “I was looking for the rock outcrop, and then I realized there were flakes everywhere. The rock was being dug from the un-weathered rock, which would make for stronger tools. The natives were taking the cobble out of the ground to create the rough shapes leaving behind mounds in the millions of waste products.” At the top of the hill is an old weathered cellar hole of a farmhouse, and the foundation was made up of the byproducts of stone tool making. Essentially the colonial farmer was unknowingly recycling - using waste from thousands of years ago.

What Bagley and other archeologists know is that the Blue Hills Reservation is a treasure worth studying and protecting to understand the tools used by earliest man. While the geology of the Blue Hills was studied as early as 1900, it took almost four decades later for archeologists to delve into the area. In the late 1930’s Harvard’s Peabody Museum began to turn it's attention toward the Blue Hills. Radiocarbon dating was just getting into the science and the archeology team knew that many of the lithic – or stone tool – artifacts were made from stone only found in the Blue Hill range. The Lithic stage was the earliest period of human occupation in the Americas, occurring during the Late Pleistocene period, to a time before 8,000 B.C. The process of flint knapping yields lots of debris. The term knapped is synonymous with "chipped" or "struck.” Throughout the Blue Hills you can find evidence of flaking, pecking, pounding, grinding, drilling, and incising rock in such a way that this area becomes a significant historical resource. 

Allan Lowry 

Canton is a hotbed of early archeological artifacts, and in the collection of the local historical society there are artifacts that include such things such as mortars also known as metates, pestles, grinding slabs, hammerstones, spear points and scrapers. For many people who claim to hunt for arrowheads, they are more likely to find spear points and knives as the bow and arrow was only developed about 1000 years ago. The tools that have been found are much older.  

And we have had local archeologists who have revealed our unique past. Allan Lowry, a much beloved Canton resident found much of what has been discovered beneath some of the most important sites in our town. Allan passed away a number of years ago, but Allan’s wife Elaine recalls how he started. “As a young couple we were raking leaves in the yard and I found a stone that looked like a hammer,” explains Lowry, “ I guess from that point on he was hooked. Each Sunday I would drop him off at a dig site and then I would go to church, he wasn't a church goer.” For Allan Lowry his religion was found deep in the ground and extended back over thousands of years.

This unchanged view across Ponkapoag Pond
is quite close to a Native site used for
perhaps 5000 years an autumn hunting camp. 

Lowry was responsible, in part, for excavating the Green Hill Site, now a protected location and part of the National Register of Historic Places. Highway construction once threatened this place, but today it is now part of the Blue Hills Reservation. The middle and late archaic site is located on the Milton Canton line and encompasses part of the Metropolitan District Commission’s purchase of 78.44 acres of Augustus Hemenway’s estate in 1940.

In 1883 Augustus Hemenway purchased several acres of the site from a family of horse fanciers whose stables then graced the neighborhood. By about 1900 Hemenway had purchased the remainder of the site and upon it situated this "South Farm.” A site report from 1980 writes, “The gentle slopes around the site’s kame hill, which had been used for occasional tillage prior to 1883, reverted back to grazing land. The Hemenway cow pasture was situated just east of the hill. On the site, partridge and quail were hunted.  On the hill itself, virtually treeless until about 40 years ago, strawberries could be picked in season amid scraggly undergrowth, which discouraged all but the most intrepid. Quite possibly the hill has been little disturbed by human activity since prehistoric times. In any case the present mixed pine hardwood cover resembles the hill’s prehistoric appearance.”  In the spring of 1966 more than 200 stone tools were found prior to local highway construction. The site was excavated in two periods, 1966-1972 and then again in 1972-1976.  The conclusion made through the amateur archeology was that this was a site likely used as an autumn campsite, offering easy access to the felsite quarries of the Blue Hills, and provided a manufacturing site for tools.

Bagley knows the importance of the Blue Hills Reservation and his voice wavers with emotion as describes the place as “a mecca of stone production.” Wampatuck Hill, just north of the reservoir, in particular is 353 feet of Rhyolite and largely a source for the raw materials of tool making. Yet another site near Ponkapoag Pond near the golf course yielded evidence of almost 5000 years of use by people of the early and middle late archaic periods. Taken in it’s totality, the Blue Hills Reservation in one fashion or another represents a human timespan starting at the Paleo-Indian Period, through the Archaic, Early and Middle Woodland Periods, and of course the Contact and Colonial Periods. We are talking 16,000 years of man’s use of the natural resources along the Neponset River.

Can we still learn from the Blue Hills? The answer according to Bagley is a definitive “yes.”  During the Middle Woodland Period (1000 - 3000 years ago) – trade routes exploded and goods moved from and between places as far away as Pennsylvania and Coxsackie, New York. We know this, because we have found tools made of stone that only came from these places. And then at 1000 years ago all trade stopped. The tools that are found from this period only come from Lynn or Saugus or the Blue Hills. For Bagley, there will always be questions, and fortunately we have the Blue Hill Reservation protecting the answers. As Bagley puts it, “this place is right, this place is good, our human instincts relate to these sites.” For more than 35 years the Friends of the Blue Hills have protected the paths and trails that have been travelled by ancient man. Next time you hike, take a look down and travel back to an ancient time and place.

Due North

Historians love maps. I love maps. In my dining room is an old map that according to my wife I paid entirely too much for. It is tiled “L’Isle De Terre-Neuve L’Acadie” published in 1780 and drawn by Rigobert Bonne. This French map includes much of Atlantic Canada and all of New England extending southerly to Philadelphia. It is my own little treasure of history showing colonial settlements, forts and Indian tribes. Then there is the map that my wife framed to which I claim, “she paid entirely too much for,” a huge map has she framed as a gift.  It is the historic odyssey of the Acadian People of Nova Scotia. Taken together, these maps tell a story of my Acadian heritage. 

Maps help us define our history, politics, boundaries and stories. In the course of writing these stories I have come to know so many wonderful connections between local history and geography. And, if you know where to look, the intersection between historic maps and the present day is evident all around us.  Maps have helped me locate a long lost cave, ancient roads that no longer exists to the public, and even the spot of buried cellar holes. For this local historian, maps are key to unlocking details of the past and are the connection between the land today and yesteryear.

Our earliest map of the area is the “Map of the Twelve Divisions” which dates to 1698. In 1647, when the natives granted land to the “settlers” the territory was known as the “New Grant.”  This was the undivided land extending from the Blue Hills to the Plymouth Line and contained 40,000 acres of land. The upland was laid out into divisions, by parallel lines running from north to south and became known simply as the “Twelve Divisions.” All of the swamps and lowland was excluded as unusable. Towns that exist today did not exist at the time of this map.

A trip to the boundary marker in 1921.

A second map was drawn around 1713 that became known as the “Twenty-five Divisions.” The lines on this map run parallel from Braintree through the present town of Stoughton along to the Rhode Island border. This is the map that Dwight MacKerron, the president of the Stoughton Historical Society uses the most. “Certain landmarks still exist from that map from over 300 years ago,” says MacKerron. West Street from Plain Street to McNamara’s Corner is a good example. The street is a straight line that exactly matches up with and parallel with the range lines from the ancient map.

Today, MacKerron uses maps to establish links between some of Stoughton’s oldest properties, including the 1750 Glover House, and their locations today. Since Canton was once Stoughton, the maps that survive today in the local historical society are of great interest to MacKerron. Many a Sunday is passed poring over hand-drawn documents that purport to show the boundaries of the Ponkapoag Plantation. MacKerron has located four known boundaries at corners on the ground. In the woods, tramping over stone walls, MacKerron uses maps and modern GPS to define the old boundaries that have been lost to time. Still, more boundary markers may be out there. Just last week the author found a reference to another stone boundary maker that is located “just off Turnpike Street, South of Muddy Pond and East side of the street.” Historic maps and Mackerron’s dedication will help us find this boundary if it still exists.

There are ghosts on the ground that connect us to maps. Take for instance the top of the Great Blue Hill. If you know where to find it, there is a small copper seal embedded in a rocky outcropping. In addition, there are a few drill holes to be found. These are relics of surveys done at the beginning of the 19^th century. The earliest being that of Simeon Borden. Borden was an inventor, engineer and self-taught mathematician from Fall River and was named assistant to the head of the Trigonometical Survey of Massachusetts mandated by the state legislature in 1830. By 1834, the director had resigned and Borden took over. The survey of Massachusetts was finished in 1838 and presented to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in 1841. This was the first statewide survey done in the United States. And, some of the survey points can still be found in the Blue Hill Reservation.

In 1932 a coastal and geodetic survey described the location of the original bolt. “At the highest point of Great Blue Hill, in the Southwestern part of the town of Milton, and within a few feet of the Canton line. A road leads to the summit, from a point near the junction of Blue Hill and Canton Avenues, and a car may be driven to the top, by permission of the police of the Blue Hills Reservation, in which the hill is situated. On the floor of the Blue Hill Observatory there is a triangular brass plate, inscribed as follows--about 2.2 feet below this x was the copper bolt set about 1834 by Simeon Borden for the Massachusetts Trigonometrical Survey in latitude 42 deg 12 min 44 sec n. Longitude 71 deg 6 min 53 sec and 635.05 feet above mean tide.”

Yet, this small plate may not accurate. A short history of the observatory written in 1887 by Abbott Lawrence Rotch, the founder of the weather station, reports that, “although careful search was made under the ruins of the [original] lookout for the copper bolt, set by Simeon Borden, about 1832, it was not found. Its position was, however, known to be 26.25 feet n 15 deg 37 min E of the bolt fixed by the coast survey in 1844, which is in plain view, and a brass plate on the lower floor of the tower now marks the site of the Borden Bolt.

Unfortunately, the plate is incorrect. The latitude of the Borden station shows that it was “South” of the Coastal Survey Station, rather than “North.” Engineers in 1932 supposed, “the direction given is reversed.” It is most likely that the original copper bolt is located under the flagpole that sits at the summit. That said, there are a few reference marks that can be found with a sharp eye.  A trip to the top of Blue Hill is worth the effort and finding the drill hole that dates back to the 1830’s is a real treat.

As Canton begins a month of studying and discussing maps through the One Town, One Book event, we will get a chance to learn much about maps and history. The book, The Map Thief, by Michael Blanding is described as “the story of an infamous crime, a revered map dealer with an unsavory secret, and the ruthless subculture that consumed him.” Against the backdrop of the book, the community will come to love maps through a series of public programs.

And, perhaps the coolest maps under discussion are not quite maps at all. There is a series of “Birdseye Views” that were drawn in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. A hybrid between a map and a poster, these views are spectacular in detail and accuracy. Jim Roache, a curator at the Canton Historical Society has a passion for the 1918 view of Canton. Drawn from a perspective looking north from Gridley Hill (a secret spot that still exists).  The view presents in exquisite detail most every factory and home that can be seen across the entire town. It is both a map and piece of art.

We all have our favorite maps. MacKerron spends so much time with the “Twenty-five Divisions,” as it is “the intersection between the land we see around us today and the original land of our history.” For Roache, the 1855 Walling map is his go-to map. “After the railroad came through town we experienced an enormous growth spurt,” says Roache. “The Walling map shows all the new housing and industrial development in great detail and helps me identify locations that still exist today.”

Finally, my personal favorites are the small hand-drawn maps that had been used for Historical Society walks in the late 1800’s. They are printed on blue paper and were distributed to the participants as they trekked from old to new across the modern roads of the time. One is reproduced here for your enjoyment, and perhaps to study as an overlay to our present day.

1.     

Fast Day Map