The abandoned
train tunnel under City Hall Plaza
IF I WERE THE RAT KING, I’d choose the long-abandoned subway tunnel under City Hall Plaza as my secret lair. Unused since the early 1960s, this prime piece of horror real estate has it all: cavernous chambers connected by cement passageways so small a human has to duck to get through; numerous black-as-night niches and crannies to haunt; a network of rusty ceiling pipes draped in decades of dusty cobwebs; a big pile of rusted whatnot; and an overall aura of deep creepiness.
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
City archaeologist Joseph Bagley ducked as he passed through a door leading from one section of tunnel to another.
A door and other rusted parts were underneath a staircase to nowhere.
A municipal officer shined his light on an object in one section of the tunnel.
Cobwebs dangled from one of the many pipes.
Photos by Jessica Rinaldi
CONGRESS STREET
CITY HALL
TUNNEL LOCATION
Bagley’s shadow was cast on a door leading into the tunnel.
The tunnel, which was opened briefly in 2018 to a limited number of small groups of the press and the public, is estimated to be about 15 feet high, 200 feet to 300 feet long, and 30 feet to 40 feet wide.
VIDEO BY HEATHER HOPP-BRUCE; RAT IMAGE BY BIGJOY/ADOBE
Watch a video of the tunnel:
Globe Staff
Globe Staff
Visit site No. 1:
Above the abandoned train tunnel
There is currently no public access to the tunnel and the entrance is securely locked. But if you stand anywhere between the beer garden on City Hall Plaza and the new Government Center MBTA station, the tunnel is directly underneath.
Plus location, location, location. With the privacy afforded by being a full 27 feet underneath throngs of unsuspecting tourists and local political heavyweights alike, this tunnel is just a scurry away from all the food offerings of Haymarket Station and the current MBTA tunnels via the fancy Government Center Station.
Only an unassuming unmarked door in an underground parking garage separates this vault from the living world. Perfect.
This is not the only abandoned subterranean oddity under the City Hall Plaza. Keep reading and find out what else is underfoot ...
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The tavern
cat dog skeleton
The full analysis of the Three Cranes Tavern dog can be read in Quinlan’s “Puppy in the Pit: Osteobiography of an Eighteenth-Century Dog at the Three Cranes Tavern, Massachusetts.”
By Joseph Bagley
A rounder snout, small size, and evidence of blunt force trauma to the back of the head was seen for years as evidence that the skeleton was from a cat that was possibly killed and then buried under the tavern steps to ward off witches.
Approximate site
of the Tavern
Dental analysis of the jawbone, above, revealed it to be from a dog. Below, a drawing of “The Bull Dog” from Cynographia Britannica, which is a collection of descriptions and drawings of dog breeds by Sydenham Edwards published in 1800. Edwards described the dogs as about 18 inches in height and 36 pounds in weight.
The Salem Witch Trials were in 1692 and 1693, part of an ugly period of persecution worldwide. This engraving, circa 1600-1700, depicts Joan Flower (center) and her daughters Margaret and Philipa with assorted familiars — including a cat. The women were accused of witchcraft in England in the early 1600s; Joan died en route to her trial and Margaret and Philipa were hanged in 1619.
HEATHER HOPP-BRUCE/ GLOBE STAFF
MCGILL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
LOCATION SOURCE: LIZ M. QUINLAN IMAGE: GOOGLE EARTH
PHOTO BY DAVID. L. RYAN/ GLOBE STAFF
City of Boston Archaeology
The Three Cranes Tavern building site is in Charlestown’s historically rich City Square Park. It was erected in 1629 for Governor John Winthrop and became the tavern in 1635, which operated until the building was destroyed in 1775 by fire during the battle of Bunker Hill. All that remains is the foundation.
Visit site No. 2:
The tavern building foundation
After seeing this story published in “A History of Boston in 50 Artifacts,” archaeologist Liz Quinlan visited the lab as part of her master’s thesis work on animal bones in Boston. She reviewed the skeleton and noticed several aspects of the skull and teeth that indicated it was actually a dog, not a cat. After a thorough investigation, Quinlan concluded that it was a very small flat-faced terrier breed similar to the now-extinct toy bulldog breed, and aged about 6 or 7 months old when it died. The back of its head had evidence of the skull being deliberately struck, resulting in death.
This was particularly exciting because cats were often associated with superstitious practices and finding a killed cat in a pit under the front steps of a public building built around the time of the Salem Witch Trials could have meant the builders were trying to ward off witches.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS RECOVERED this skeleton in 1985 from a filled-in pit dug under the front steps of the Three Cranes Tavern, which operated from 1635 to 1775 in Charlestown. At the time, and for decades later, this animal was identified by multiple archaeologists as a cat.
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The massive
carved stone tablets
at Millennium Park
WHEN WE STARTED this project, we honestly didn't know where these massive stone tablets came from. But just as we were finalizing the text, we had a breakthrough: For years, the general consensus was that these tablets were part of the former Mechanics Hall in Boston. The hall was a large building meant for meetings and conventions. It was built in 1881 and torn down in the early 1960s to make way for the Prudential Center, which stands there today. The hall was well-photographed both inside and out, but none showed the tablets.
By Joseph Bagley
There are two stones, “Leather,” above, and “Machinery,” below. Each is roughly 5.5 feet across though large chunks are missing from both.
Photos by
Heather Hopp-Bruce
In this 1908-1909 image of the First National Bank of Boston, five large stones can be seen on the right side of the building. City of Boston archaeologists have identified the tablet on the left as “Leather” and the tablet on the far right as “Machinery.”
T.E. MARR, BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY
HEATHER HOPP-BRUCE/GLOBE STAFF
Globe Staff
City of Boston Archaeology
Park in the kayak launch lot, then follow the path at the end of the lot. Go past the launch, take the wide path on your left, and the stones will be on the river side of the path in about 950 feet. You don’t need to leave the wide main path to see the massive stones. If the Charles River is high they will be underwater, so midsummer to fall is the best time to see them.
Visit site No. 3:
Millennium Park stones
While rereading a 2011 post about the stones on “And This is Good Old Boston,” we noticed an anonymous comment from 2022 crediting the First National Bank of Boston, with a link to an article on the building’s opening in 1908. That article describes five carved tablets on its Federal Street-facing facade representing transportation, wool and cotton, paper and lumber, leather, and machinery. The two tablets at Millennium Park have “Leather” and “Machinery” carved into them.
We pored over image archives and were able to find that the Boston Public Library had an image of the bank from 1910. The tablets are just visible on the right side of the image, enough to confirm that the leftmost tablet is the “Leather” tablet and the far right tablet is “Machinery.” To make certain, we walked over to our neighbors and colleagues at the City Archives and asked them to pull building plans. The original plans from 1908 were not there, but they did have plans for a later addition. The building was demolished in the mid-20th century.
How did the stones get to Millennium Park? In the 19th century, the park was known as Cow Island, a small hill next to the Charles River where it widens briefly to become Cow Pond. The hill was not good for growing food, but it was ideal for grazing cows.
In the mid-20th century, the hill was first used as a gravel quarry, resulting in a massive hole in its center. That hole became a convenient place to dump trash, so the city turned it into the Gardner Street Landfill, a municipal dump that was used into the 1980s. As the First National Bank was demolished during a time when the landfill was active, it’s likely that these and other fragments of the bank were dumped unceremoniously in West Roxbury, where they still lie as ruins on the banks of the Charles River.
The city started converting the landfill into a park in 1994. To do so, it directed soil excavated from the Big Dig to be transported to the site to cap the landfill. The 100-acre Millennium Park opened on Dec. 7, 2000. Today, the city is actively engaged in a $3.2 million renovation of Millennium Park’s playground, pathways, and restrooms.
Now that we know where the tablets are from, there's now a new mystery: Where are the missing three?
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Take a deeper dive into the history of the stones, including archival documents and images, in this excellent article by Globe reporter Emily Sweeney.
Mysteries from a 19th-century North End brothel
Other personal items speak to high hygiene standards in what is thought to have been a relatively respectable establishment, including a wooden toothbrush handle carved in the shape of two snakes face to face. Several bone-handled toothbrushes were found as well; the bristles would likely have been made of animal hair.
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
Glass nipple shields were used by lactating mothers to prevent breast milk from leaking through clothing.
Glass vaginal syringes used for hygiene and abortion give clues to the daily lives of the women employed at the Endicott Street brothel.
Artifact photos by David L. Ryan
City Archaeology program lab manager Sarah Keklak held a glass bird cage cup found at the site. It’s unclear what kind of birds were kept, but canaries were popular at the time.
The privy at 27-29 Endicott St. is seen in this detail of a 1874 Hopkins map.
This wooden toothbrush handle carved into facing snake heads was found, along with several bone-handle toothbrushes.
These 19th-century sex workers were photographed by William I. Goldman at Sallie Shearer’s brothel in Reading, Pa., between 1892 and 1900.
CANARY IMAGE BY SLOWMOTIONGLI/ADOBE
Globe Staff
Globe Staff
The brothel remains were destroyed during the Big Dig, but it’s worth standing on the corner of Endicott and Cross Streets and taking a moment to appreciate the city archaeologists who snuck a secret excavation in before the bulldozers arrived.
Visit site No. 4:
History vs. the Big Dig
RARELY DO WE get a glimpse into the real daily lives of 19th-century women who made a living as sex workers, but the outhouse of a building on Endicott Street that served as a brothel from 1852 to 1867 offered just that. Historical documents show that Louisa Cowen was the madam of the establishment after 1856, but in the circa 1989 excavation of the site, archaeologists uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts that painted a picture that written history had not: Several unusual objects were found among the 8,140 items recovered from the site.
Two of the odder items found there were deeply personal: Glass vaginal syringes that were used to clean between clients or for abortions, and glass nipple shields that prevented breast milk from leaking through clothes for women with nursing infants.
Several press-molded cobalt blue glass seed cups for bird cages hint that the women kept birds as pets. What kind of bird is unclear, though songbirds such as canaries or wrens; doves; or even parrots were signs of wealth at the time. Bird dealer Charles Reiche and his brother operated a wildly popular bird store in Manhattan, importing about 20,000 canaries per year over the same time period the brothel was operating. Perhaps his clients included the women at Endicott Street, either there or in a Boston store he opened in 1871.
An interesting side note is that this excavation was not technically part of the Big Dig archaeology initiative; the site was not old enough to meet the 1800 cutoff date set by the Massachusetts Historical Commission. But several archaeologists, recognizing the significance of the site, went rogue and did the dig on their own time.
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The broken dolls found in the toilet of a 19th-century school for girls
CAST INTO A PRIVY on the grounds of the former Dorchester Industrial School for Girls were the eerie remnants of dolls — hundreds of 19th-century dolls broken all to bits.
In 2015, before the new owner, Epiphany School, began constructing a new school building, Boston’s Archaeology Program conducted a dig on the grounds of the Centre Street property and found hundreds of smashed doll parts at the bottom of an outhouse. Scattered among the doll remains in the 5-meter-deep loo was a trove of little girls’ treasures: beads, pins, precious buttons, and combs.
By Amy MacKinnon
These two are called "Frozen Charlotte" dolls. Their name might come from the fact their limbs don’t move, though there may be a darker origin: They are also associated with the macabre 1843 poem “A Corpse Going to a Ball” by Maine writer Seba Smith.
Doll photos by David L. Ryan
The Everett House in 1965. The Dorchester building was home to the Industrial School for Girls from 1858 until the mid-1940s.
GILBERT E. FRIEDBERG
Globe Staff
Globe Staff
The building that once housed the Industrial School for Girls is still standing, now owned by Epiphany School. Look for a beautifully maintained Second Empire-style building set back from the street on manicured grounds. The building is not open to the public.
Visit site No. 5:
The Industrial School for Girls building
The girls’ lives were carefully managed: They were told what to wear and how to behave and what they could study. The girls would then be loaned out to local homes to work, and while there, the girls’ behavior was overseen by the matron, who checked on them regularly to ensure the relationship with the employer was mutually satisfactory. While the children were saved from a life on the streets, they didn’t have the benefit of a carefree childhood. Many ran away, others faced discipline both at the school and in their placements, and nearly all faced a bleak future.
But why did the children cast their dolls, which may have been their only possession, into the loo? While there’s little documentation accounting for this, I have my suspicions.
The Industrial School opened at the Dorchester location in 1859 and could house up to 30 poor girls. Abandoned by family and fate, the girls — ranging in age from 6 to 15 — received training to become domestic servants from a matron and teacher who were overseen by a board composed of wealthy Boston-area women. The goal? To “prevent evil” in the children and help them to gain “their own livelihood.”
I suspect those hundreds of dolls thrown in among human waste represented a ritual of sorts, a physical representation of how the girls felt being cast away by family who couldn’t protect them and a society that didn’t value them as anything more than handmaids to be shaped and bent — and sometimes to be broken.
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Dorchester's 'portal to hell'
ON THE FIRST WEEKEND in December 2020, a person walking their dog in Dorchester's Ronan Park noticed a deep, 4-foot-wide hole in the grass that had appeared overnight. They called 911 and the Parks Department was on the case; a staff member extended a measuring tape into the hole but didn’t find the bottom. The department called the City Archaeology Team, who went to the site to help solve the mystery of the sinkhole, revealing a slice of Victorian history.
By Joseph Bagley
The City of Boston Archaeology team took this video of the mysterious hole by attaching a smartphone to a paint roller pole.
Below, (from left) City of Boston archaeologist Joe Bagley, project archaeologist Lauryn Sharp, public archaeologist Nadia Kline, and Parks Commissioner Ryan Woods peer into the hole on Dec. 10, 2020.
The sinkhole inspired a parody Twitter account, @DotSinkhole …
Fill
19th-Century
landscape
The well
10 feet
6.5 feet
2.5 feet
CITY OF BOSTON ARCHAEOLOGY/H.HOPP-BRUCE/GLOBE STAFF
PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF
… and merch with a new meaning for “Masshole.”
The sinkhole opened suddenly — and alarmingly — in Dorchester’s Ronan Park in December 2020.
PAT GREENHOUSE/GLOBE STAFF
City of Boston Archaeology
The sinkhole, at the southeast corner of the park, has long been filled. But you can still go and hope to catch a random home run ball from the nearby softball field.
Visit site No. 6:
Grass over "the portal to hell"
In 1818, the Pierce family built a large home on the hill that would later become Ronan Park. In 1871, the property was divided among the Pierce family with portions going to Elizabeth and Charles, the children of Mary and her late husband Charles Pierce. Mary Pierce had fallen on hard times after the death of her husband in 1857. She and her children were living in a boarding house on Dorchester Avenue at the time of the inheritance, despite the extended Pierce family owning multiple large properties in the area.
That same year, Mary purchased the house at auction from her children and the other Pierce heirs. Her deed mentions her continued access to and use of the well on the divided property. Mary died in 1885, passing on the house to her daughter. By then, the house had running water and the well was likely covered and abandoned.
In 1912, the City of Boston purchased the Pierce house and surrounding properties in order to build Ronan Park. The house was demolished and the long-forgotten well was covered in 10 feet of fill during construction of the park. Sometime before 2020, the cover of the well either rotted or collapsed and the soil above began to sink into the open shaft of the well.
After months of near-constant COVID-19 news coverage, both the residents of Boston and media teams were ready to talk about something fun and the story of the Dorchester Hole went viral, spawning a parody Twitter account @dotsinkhole and over a dozen news stories.
Leaning into the lighthearted story, the city’s archaeology team calculated that the hole could hold the contents of 4,653.6 medium Dunkin’ iced regulars.
CITY OF BOSTON ARCHAEOLOGY
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The 17th-century rotten tooth
from Charlestown
MORE LIKE A CAVERN than a cavity, the hole in this human tooth is a reminder of the days when dental extractions were often done by a local barber or (shudder) a blacksmith with the right pliers. The tooth was found in the basement of the James Garrett House site in Charlestown as part of a pre-Big Dig survey in 1982, putting it at around 1639 to 1657.
By Heather Hopp-Bruce and Nadia Kline
These 17th-century dental instruments, including one called “the pelican” (top row, third from right, next to the one that looks like a penguin but is unfortunately not called that), offer an explanation why a person would be hesitant to see a dentist. This illustration is titled, “Instruments to pull out, cutt [sic] and file superfluous teeth” from “A Discourse of the Whole Art of Chyrurgery” by Peter Lowe, 1664.
Tooth photo by David L. Ryan
Horror devices or 17th-century dental instruments? Definitely the latter, but probably the former at the same time.
Paul Revere placed an ad in the Boston Gazette advertising his dental skills in 1768, which included he “... flatters himself that from the Experience he has had these Two Years, (in which Time he has fixt Some Hundreds of teeth) that he can fix them as well as any Surgeon.” [sic]
ARCHIVAL IMAGES ARE PUBLIC DOMAIN
Globe Staff and City of Boston Archaeology
Globe Staff
The tooth was found at the site of the circa 1639-1657 James Garrett House in Charlestown, which is underneath what is now the Nautica buildings. The Garrett House is long gone, but a trip to the area is still worthwhile; park at the Nautica parking garage to visit the USS Constitution and museum, the Paul Revere midnight ride landing site, and the Charlestown Navy Yard.
Visit site No. 7:
The Garrett House neighborhood
Was it kept as a lesson on the dangers of bad mouth hygiene or as a dentist’s trophy? Probably not: It’s been theorized that once the house came down, people threw their trash into the empty cellar hole or that the yard slumped into the hole from around the house. To clarify, it’s likely nobody was hanging onto their rotten old tooth.
Over a hundred years later, in 1768, 34-year-old Paul Revere placed an ad in the Boston Gazette advertising his dental services. A call in the night “The dentist is coming! The dentist is coming” would have been many years too late for the poor owner of this tooth.
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A brain coral and a butchered whale bone
THIS BOWLING BALL-SIZED giant brain coral was found at the North End’s Pierce/Hichborn House, which was built in 1711. Brain corals are endemic to shallow coral reefs in warm waters, so it’s not as if someone found it among the hermit crabs at Wingaersheek Beach and carted it back to Boston. Was it picked up in the travels of boat builder and homeowner Nathaniel Hichborn, a cousin of Paul Revere? Was it left by an unknown worldly occupant during the building’s multiunit tenement era in the 1800s? Regardless of how it got there, informal consensus is that it would make an excellent doorstop.
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
The bone has been cut in numerous places; in this detail, cut marks are visible on top of this part, called the transverse process.
Photos by David L. Ryan
How and when did this brain coral end up at the Pierce/Hichborn house?
Top view of the whale vertebrae found at the John Smith site.
MARITIME ARTIFACTS would not be unexpected at the John Smith house, where this butchered whale vertebra was found in 1987: Smith was an English shipbuilder who moved to Charlestown sometime before 1644 and lived there until his death in 1673.
Though it’s unknown what species of whale the vertebra came from, humpback whales are common in New England waters. This 3-D rendering of a humpback shows the skeletal system and large abdominal area, into which a lobster diver was sucked in 2019.
PHOTO BY
HEATHER HOPP-BRUCE/
GLOBE STAFF
SEBASTIAN KAULITZKI/
ADOBE
ADOBE
Globe Staff
Globe Staff
The dig was to the left of the Pierce/Hichborn house as you’re standing on North Street. A wooden building once stood there between the brick buildings on either side.
Visit site No. 8:
The brain coral house
The John Smith house site, where the whale bone was found, is underneath what is now the Nautica buildings. There is still plenty of history to take in, though; park at the Nautica parking garage to visit the USS Constitution and museum, the Paul Revere midnight ride landing site, and the Charlestown Navy Yard.
Visit site No. 9:
The whale bone neighborhood
However, this bone is interesting because it appears to have been butchered: The vertebra was cut at the pedicle and is missing the vertebral body, and there are cut marks on a traverse process. During Smith’s time, Cape Cod whalers were using harpoons to hunt the animals. By the 1700s, there was a noticeable decline in the whale populations, causing whalers to require larger and larger boats to find and hunt the animals farther out to sea.
Of all the whales butchered during that time, why was this particular bone kept? Was it a souvenir of a notable hunt? A gift to the boatmaker who made the hunt possible? Another convenient way to keep a door open?
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The building
of crushed glass, for feathers
THIS ONE is more fascinating than truly weird.
Where the Faneuil Hall Sephora now stands, there used to be a building called The Old Feather Store. Which, surprise, originally sold feathers.
The Old Feather Store was built in 1680 using stucco, which is a thin, durable layer of concrete that has been used in home building since, well, forever; Encyclopedia Britannica says, “Every building tradition in the history of humankind has produced stuccowork.”
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
The Old Feather
Store, at Dock Square, is looking a bit run down in this undated stereoscope image. The building, later known as The Old Cocked Hat, was built in 1680 and, in a nice bit of number symmetry, demolished in 1860.
COURTESY CHRISTINE HAGEMOEN
HEATHER HOPP-BRUCE/GLOBE STAFF
A feather store? Yes!
Feathers and fashion have
long been intertwined, as seen
in the collection of fanciful
illustrations published in 1788 in
Journal des Luxus und der Moden. Enjoy more images at Rijksmuseum.
Below, modern bottle-dash stucco in Vancouver, B.C., sparkles in the sun. The style was popular there from the late 1930s to the 1960s.
To see how pretty crushed glass in construction really is, look no further than Gloucester; this sidewalk on Rogers Street sparkles with multicolored glass bits.
Globe Staff
The Feather Building was demolished in 1860, but a modern piece of Boston architecture was built on the site in 2017 and is worth noting. The glass Sephora building, which sits in stark contrast to the Georgian Faneuil Hall and the brutalist City Hall nearby, was designed by famed local firm Elkus Manfredi Architects.
Visit site No. 10:
The new glass building
That said, the use of stucco was relatively rare at the time in Boston, and the particular treatment on this building made it unique: The concrete was mixed with a large amount of glass fragments from broken junk bottles. There is no readily available account of why this was done to this particular building, though an account in Ballou’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion Vol. VII, published just five years before the building was torn down in 1860, calls it “one of the architectural curiosities of our city.”
The reason for this odd choice of construction material may be found in a trend in Vancouver, B.C., 250 years later.
Bottle dash stucco, a technique which involves mixing broken colored glass into the concrete before application, became a trendy housing aesthetic in western Canada in the 1930s with surprisingly beautiful results. The glass — in browns, greens, and blues — glints and shines in the sun.
The still-existing homes afford a peek at what the Old Feather Building might have looked like and suggest that the sparkling building near Faneuil Hall was an appropriate predecessor to the beauty-minded Sephora building that is located on the site today.
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The well at Government Center
THAT BIG CIRCLE on City Hall Plaza isn’t just decorative; it’s actually the site of a controversial 17th-century town well.
Bostonians may have walked over this old well site daily and not noticed, but once you know what it is you can’t miss it.
Photos by Lane Turner
Globe Staff
By Heather Hopp-Bruce
Globe Staff
Thomas Venner met a ghastly death unrelated to the well he sunk in the middle of a Boston street. After living for 22 years in New England, he returned to England in 1657 to lead an unsuccessful rebellion against Oliver Cromwell, then in January 1661 he led an unsuccessful coup against Charles II. He was hanged, drawn, and quartered
that same month.
From "Heresiography" by Ephraim Pagitt (1661)
HEATHER HOPP-BRUCE/GLOBE STAFF
Shurtleff wrote that the noise of the well made “morning sleep impossible and early rising no particular virtue.”
Bostonians may have walked over this old well site daily and not noticed, but once you know what it is you can’t miss it. Look for a ring of concrete about 38 feet across, with smaller concentric rings of red brick and more concrete, with dark gray paving stones in the center.
Visit site No. 11:
The well at
Government Center
Those who lived near the well were aggravated by its placement from almost the moment it was sunk by a wooden barrel maker named Thomas Venner in about 1649. For starters, Venner put it right in the middle of what was then the street. But it was the constant cacophony made by people gathering water — all day and night long — that drove people mad. Its description from “A Topographical and Historical Description of Boston” by Nathaniel Shurtleff (1871) explains why: The pump “was one of the greatest nuisances to the neighborhood that could possibly have been tolerated. The pump handle kept going from early morning to late night, and its music was only interrupted by the clatter of the iron cup and its chain against the pump, as from time to time they dropped from the hands of those who had quenched their thirst with the pure liquid from Mr. Venner’s well. Morning sleep was then impossible and early rising no particular virtue.”
Venner’s well eventually fell into disuse in the late 1700s. The pump was removed and the well covered until 1858, when it was exposed by workers on the Metropolitan railroad. Shurtleff wrote, “The well was found dry, owing to its being partially filled up with dirt; and after the drain was completed, the top of the well was closed with large stones and sealed with cement, probably never again to be opened to mortal view.”
The next time a V-twin engine motorcycle with an aftermarket exhaust system blows down State Street and shakes the iced coffee right out of your hand, it may be a small comfort to think of a time when the annoying noise of the city was the clatter of a well located right in the middle of the damn street.
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Visit the sites
Stand a few feet above an abandoned tunnel or a mysterious old well. See the park where an old tavern once stood that may have been the home of a doomed young dog, possibly of a now extinct breed. Turn the corner on a dirt trail and find shockingly large, intricately carved stone tablets, broken and cast aside near the Charles River.
Only traces remain of some of the sites. Some are gone, replaced by new layers of rich Boston history. Some are just out of reach; some you can touch. All are worth visiting.
This is a joint project between Globe Opinion and the City of Boston Archaeology Team. For more information on these finds and many others, follow @bostonarcheo on Instagram or BostonArchaeo on Facebook.
Please share any insights, ideas, or comments here or write to Heather.Hopp-Bruce@Globe.com. If you’d like to submit a letter to the editor, please email us, in 200 words or less, at letter@globe.com and include your name, address, and (for verification only) phone number.
The well at Government Center
The broken dolls found in the toilet of a 19th-century school for girls
The massive carved stone tablets at Millennium Park
Concept, designer, and project manager: Heather Hopp-Bruce
Editors: Marjorie Pritchard and Amy MacKinnon
Digital editor: Rami Abou-Sabe
Audience engagement editor: Karissa Korman
Developer: Andrew Nguyen
Copy editor: Jessie Tremmel
City archaeologist and director of archaeology: Joseph Bagley Laboratory manager: Sarah Keklak Public archaeologist: Nadia Kline Project archaeologist: Lauryn Sharp
Icons by Heather Hopp-Bruce and the Noun Project (Danil Polshin, Hey Rabbit, Oksana Latysheva, bsd studio, Autumn Painter, Lewen Design, Noura Mbarki, Vanicon studio, Timo Schmid, and Leonardo Henrique Martini)
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