Watching the River Flow
The Charles River winds its sleepy, polluted way from Echo Lake in Hopkinton through 25 municipalities, over 21 dams, past factories, groves, and meadows to Boston Inner Harbor. It takes the Charles eighty miles to cover what an average crow could do in thirty.
The Charles River has not always been the Charles River. The Algonquins called it "Quinebonquin," meaning circular, which it isn't, although it turns this way and that so often it may appear that it could not be going any way but back. When Sieur de Champlain was snooping around the east coast in 1603 and came upon the broad mouth of the river, he named it the River du Guast after his fellow adventurer. He thought he was bestowing a great honor because he believed he had come upon a gateway to the West. He never got around to investigating further. If he had, he might have thought differently.
Ten years later, Captain John Smith, having decided he'd had enough of Virginia-he had three times been sentenced to death there-sailed north and discovered the valley of the Charles. There he proclaimed he had high hopes "to take Whales and make tryalls of a Myne of Gold and Copper". Fish there were, whales there were, but gold and silver there were not, as Smith probably well knew. He was thoroughly enchanted with the place and all he wanted to do was attract the interest and backing of Prince Charles so that he could return with an expedition to found a colony there.
He drew a map of the area and sent it to the Prince. Charles was exceedingly pleased. He crossed off all the unpronouncable Indian names like Trobigzanda and replaced them with good Stuart ones like Anne. The river, in a characteristic breach of modesty, he names for himself: the Charles Riber. Like Champlain, Captain Smith represented the river as a broad high-way to the Pacific. But only for three leagues; he had never been beyond that so he left it blank and hoped no one would notice.
The Captain never made it back to the New World to find out where the river went. An eccentric Anglican, the Revered William Blackstone did make the trip, however. He built for himself exactly what Smith envisioned but never lived to see: an island paradise on the mouth of the Charles.
Blackstone eventually moved up the Charles and others following his example established communities upriver. These villages that sprang up on the Charles began to regard it not as the common link between the settlements, but as a private resource to be exploited by whichever village could, to the exclusion of the rest. It wau Abraham Shaw of Dedham who first had the bright idea of using the river to power a public grist mill. The town was enthusiastic and work began immediately, in 1636. Unfortunately, dramatic alterations in Shaw's scheme proved necessary, as the Charles was simply too lazy to turn a mill. These alterations were left to John Elderkin, who diverted the river down a precipitous slope to his grist mill. This led to a marvelous lawsuit in which a judge ruled that Elderkin was entitled to no more than a third of the Charles's water, although the judge gave no clue as to how the river water could be measured.
During the Revolution the Charles kept the American troops safe from the British-for a while anyway. Bunker Hill was of strategic importance because it commanded the river, and whoever commanded the river commanded Boston.
After the war, the object was not to control the river but to span it. There had been bridges before, most notably the Great Bridge of 1649. It had been a heroic effort for the small community of Cambridge. Heroic and exhausted, for when it began to crumble soon after, the townspeople were willing to spend neither the time nor the money to restore it Eventually the bridge fell into the river and the commuting public returned to Mr. Cooke's penny ferry. After Mr. Cooke, Harvard College ran the ferry, the same boat to Charlestown that Paul Revere used on his famous trip.
A group of businessmen wanted to build a bridge in 1738 but President Holyoke put an end to the idea. He argued to the general court that a bridge would "cause such an increase of Company &c at the College, that thereby the Scholars will be in danger of being too much interrupted in their Studies and hurt in their Morals." The Court agreed and no bridge was built.
In 1785, John Hancock cast his eye upon the Charles, agreed to pay Harvard 200 pounds a year for supplanting its ferry, and four years later the Charles had a bridge again.
The venture proved so successful that within five years other men had plans afoot to build another bridge upstream. By this time Hancock was governor. He didn't dare veto the bridge outright. Instead, he did what he considered the next best thing. He required it to be built near the Pest House-the infirmary for contangious diseased-and required the builders to pay Harvard 300 pounds per year as a fee. The proprietors regarded the first condition as perfectly convenient and, as to the second, they took their case to the general court which agreed they should pay Harvard no more than Hancock, 200 pounds. Harvard quickly realized that the more bridges over the Charles, the better for the endowment fund. So when Andrew Craigie, a wealthy Cantabrigian, proposed building another bridge Harvard put all its influence behind the idea. It was built in 1808. Finally, in 1846, with the construction of a fourth bridge the general court put an end to this craze for bridge-building. It arranged for the purchase of all four bridges by the Commonwealth to be used by the public toll-free.
Other, more dramatic changes were to come to the Charles River in the nineteenth century. A great slice of the basin at the river mouth was to be filled in. The process was set in motion when the city of Boston decided it needed to expand. First it filled in the large Mill Pond near what is now the North End. To replace the water power (used for turning the city's grist mills) produced by the dam around the Mill Pond, the Legislature approved in 1819 a new dam stretching from what is now Brighton across the Back Bay to the Boston Common.
At low tide, as the crowded Bostonians looked across the Bay, newly bounded by dam they probably could not help but envision dry, rent-producing land. The smell of the mudflats was even more compelling. In 1849 the Boston Board of Health declared that the Back Bay was positively unsanitary. A group called the Commissioners on the Back Bay was formed by a Commonwealth commission to study the area. They suggested that it be filled in. They produced a hand-some design for the new land, calling for four broad avenues intersected by smaller cross streets, but the state appropriated no money for the venture. That proved to be no obstacle: if they could not pay in dollars, they would pay in land. The Commissioners announced that whoever would fill in the Back Bay would be given four city blocks of the new land, 260,000 square feet in all. A Vermonter, Norman C. Munson, contracted for the job. Work began in 1859. Using two recent innovations, the railroad and the steam shovel, workmen hauled gravel from Needham, nine miles distant, and deposited it in the Back Bay, finishing the task two decades later, in 1882.
Since then, dams have tapped it, highways pushed out into it, buildings jutted out onto it, but the Charles River has remained the same-only a lot dirtier