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  • Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston
  • Sara Wermiel (bio)
Gaining Ground: A History of Landmaking in Boston. By Nancy S. Seasholes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+532. $49.95

Many coastal settlements have expanded their land area by filling in along the water's edge, but Boston probably leads all other North American cities in the amount of land created through filling. In Gaining Ground, Nancy Seasholes gives readers a blow-by-blow account of this process, which added about 5,250 acres of land, or approximately one-sixth of the area of the city, to Boston's perimeter.

Seasholes's purpose is to document landmaking from the start of European settlement in the seventeenth century to the present. Her focus is on projects in the water-washed northern parts of the city, which includes the downtown as well as formerly separate towns that Boston annexed. Landmaking, she explains, is a term coined by archaeologists, and it means making land by filling areas covered by water. Thus, it differs from other methods of gaining usable land, such as draining.

Because topographical change is such a prominent feature of the city, the topic has already been treated by many writers, including Walter Muir Whitehill in his standard, if unreadable, Boston: A Topographical History, which is still in print in a third edition, updated by coauthor Lawrence Kennedy. Such earlier works contain errors, however, and none are as comprehensive as Gaining Ground.

Seasholes's method was to first locate and date filled areas using historical maps, then "to find out why and how these areas were filled" (p. 431). Why did Bostonians make so much land? One reason is that the topography lent itself to filling. Colonial-era settlement was on a small peninsula, practically an island, surrounded by shallow water and dotted with inconveniently tall hills. Bostonians cut down the hills and used this earth to build up the shoreline. Another reason for filling was that city's concentrated [End Page 844] population turned the tidal rivers and harbor into cesspools and garbage dumps; when these became unbearable nuisances, the state and city resorted to burying polluted coves and flats. Not all fill came from within the city or from hills; for some projects, most famously the Back Bay, earth was brought in by rail from the suburbs, and part of South Boston was filled with material dredged from the harbor.

The projects were undertaken by the state, city, and even the federal government, as well as by private entities, and the cost of many nineteenth-century projects ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Readers can learn a bit about how projects were financed, but I would have liked to find out more about what I suspect was a local specialty in the nineteenth century: the speculative land development corporation. Moreover, projects could take years to complete and contractors might be paid with new land; in such cases, one wonders where the contractor got working capital until the project was complete and the land sold.

The technology of filling is treated mainly in a short thematic chapter. The common method was to build a retaining wall at the boundary of the area to be filled and then deposit fill—earth, gravel, ashes, rubbish, or whatever—between the land and the wall. Building reliable walls on water-covered sites was not easy. To move earth from the hills to the project sites, various kinds of tipping carts and railroad cars were used. Early steam shovels clawed down the hills and steam dredges plowed up the river and harbor bottoms. But the reader learns little about construction processes or machines, or whether they were commonplace for such projects.

While the use of the new land was not Seasholes's focus, it inevitably comes up. In the colonial and early national periods, land was made for wharfs, warehouses, and manufacturing. Then, railroads needed depots and the growing population needed houses, and land was made for these. Beginning in the late 1850s, land was made for parks. And in the twentieth century, land was made for transportation infrastructure, including arterial roads and an airport. Reasons for filling...

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