I was chatting with someone a while back, part politics, part history, part personal, and the question was asked of me whether I was conscious of the history of where I live. Although most people aren't, I actually am. I think it's pretty neat.
The subject had arisen in the context of the American Revolution, and, yeah, I remember as a teenager sneaking into John & John Quincy Adams' formal garden, and even to this day I sometimes take a left off the Great Road made famous by Paul Revere's Midnight Ride to dart into a supermarket after work. That's me darting into the supermarket, not Paul Revere.
But for this article, I skipped the Revolutionary period, bracketing it with things in my neighborhood from the period before and the period after the Revolution. Both of these sites are within a few hundred yards of me. Follow the captions for the narrative and click the images for the relevant sources and sites.
Yeah, well, nepotism in political circles has long and storied history here in Massachusetts. The famous John Winthrop, first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (the not-Puritan early colonists) had the legislature set up his son with the first commercial blast furnace in North America.
Which, unfortunately, went bankrupt a few years later. But everything worked out for the young man because he skedaddled to Connecticut and set up a successful blast furnace there.
The grist mill he also set up there is regarded by many scholars as the first monopoly in America. So crony Capitalism might be bad, but it's certainly nothing new.
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When my car is in the shop or I don't feel like driving for whatever reason, this view is a couple of blocks from the bus stop I use to get to work.
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I stepped into what I surmised was the oven to grab a picture of the pretty incredible 'dry stone' masonry, still solid after four hundred years.
No need for Mending Wall, whatever Robert Frost says.
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Up the hill near which bottom I reside lies the Granite Railway.
It was built in 1826 to move granite from the quarry. It was supposedly high-quality granite, but the real reason it was used not just in local projects but as far away as Baltimore and Washington, D.C. was because of the efficiency of transport.
There's a little bit of controversy about that 'First Railway' claim, but--like the internet--if it's carved in stone, it must be true, right?
(I was fiddling with the filters to make the inscription more readable and it came out like that.)
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Here's the view down the hill.
The granite plaque is affixed to the front of the pillars visible at the bottom.
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This is the view up the hill. For some reason, the grade seems a lot scarier at the bottom looking up than at the top looking down.
Whether we have the first railway or not, we have the first railway passenger fatality.
Oddly enough, it wasn't the risky exercise of transporting huge stone blocks on rickety rails that caused the death. The railway had become a tourist attraction, so when they weren't moving stone they carried folks up and down the hill for fun--and profit.
Granite Ave. in Milton, so called for the obvious reason that it's built almost exactly where the railway had run (or, I think, some few feet or yards to the East)
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