The $14.6-billion “Big Dig” in Boston runs right through the original site where early English settlers built their homes on a small peninsula jutting out into the harbor. The massive project has turned up many artifacts from that colonial period, including, of all things, a bowling ball that is approximately 333 years old.
The project, which was for many years the largest, most complex, public works project in the country, also has uncovered links to hunting and fishing lifestyles at a Native American campsite established 1,400 years ago on nearby Spectacle Island, which now holds 2.7-million cu. yds. of the Big Dig’s landfill.
Here’s how Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel (CA/T) work, a mammoth undertaking to unclog traffic in the modern city, has reached a bygone, simpler era. This challenging infrastructure development has yielded more than 200,000 artifacts that suggest how the first European colonists, and Native Americans, lived before cars, smog and modern construction arrived on the scene.
Initial Efforts
Archaeologists began surveying the project’s 7.6-mi. corridor in 1987. They identified 89 sites of potential digs to preserve cultural resources, as required on federally-funded projects by the National Historical Preservation Act of 1966.
Three of the sites were finally designated for listing in the National Register of Historic Places: the Mill Pond; the Paddy’s Alley/Cross Street Back Lot sites on the former Shawmut Peninsula; and Spectacle Island, where Neponset Indians held the equivalent of today’s New England clambakes on the beach.
“We did an archaeological survey while the Big Dig was still in preliminary design,” said Holly Sutherland, the project’s senior public information coordinator. “We then excavated the main sites before we were in mainline construction at these locations, without holding up the tunnels and highways. There was actually some talk that we might find chests from the Boston Tea Party, which was at the Fort Point Channel, but that wasn’t the case. However, we did find very interesting material of local and national importance, which really gives an insight into colonial and Native American life.”
Original Boston Found
The original Shawmut Peninsula, site of one of the first settlements by European colonists in 1630 (just 10 years after the first Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock) had been built over and surrounded by landfill over the centuries to become part of downtown Boston’s North End. Oddly, much of the digging at this site in the North End was below the elevated highway of Boston’s Central Artery, an eyesore and traffic nightmare that the CA/T project is completely replacing.
The archaeologists had a field day after the three sites were identified. Call it the “Little Dig.” No big pieces of construction equipment. Just uncovering the original ground with bulldozers and then lots of shovels and hand-brushes for painstaking work finding pieces from the past.
“We probably had less than 40 people working at a time rather than a large group,” said Sutherland, who has been close to the Big Dig in various capacities for 13 years.
Ann-Eliza Lewis, archaeological collections manager of the Massachusetts Historical Commission, a division of the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s Office, is enthusiastic about what has been discovered because of the Big Dig research.
“The amount of stuff we found [as a result of the advance excavations before the Big Dig reached the sites] was really phenomenal,” she said. “It also was unprecedented. We hadn’t received this type of opportunity in Boston previously. Because the highway goes the whole length of the city, we were able to go [survey] the whole length of the city. We’ve done archaeological work on other highways in Massachusetts, like I-495, but this was something special as far as having a lot of stuff and really compelling stories.”
A wooden bowling ball (for lawn bowling, not tenpins) dating from approximately 1670, was found in the Kathy Nanny Naylor privy (outhouse) on original peninsula land under which the Big Dig’s I-93 highway has tunneled. Made on a lathe, it is the oldest bowling ball in North America. (Archaeologists are pretty sure about the date because of the age of other artifacts found at the same depth.)
“The ball was, surprisingly, in good condition,” said Lewis. “The watertable is so high in Boston that all the artifacts were submerged. That’s actually very good for preservation. A funny thing is that it was actually illegal to bowl in public, so we’re not quite sure where they were bowling. It wasn’t until the 1700s that there were bowling greens.”
Lewis said fish was the major commodity that the colonists could trade with the rest of the world.
“One of the really interesting things was that the artifacts from the 1600s, which we found in people’s households, as in the privy, came from all over the world,” she said.
“We think of the Puritan settlers, but it was a very cosmopolitan city fairly early-on. In that privy there were ceramics from Spain, Portugal and Germany, plus exotic spices, olive pits, Venetian glass, coral from the Caribbean, and shells from the Indian Ocean. You could really see that the life they were actually living was a little different from the story that we get — certainly for me growing up in New England — of what a Puritan Bostonian was like.”
Lewis said the first settlements “had a really good harbor so the shipping industry was just phenomenal. They would trade furs, fish and lumber. A lot of the lumber was exhausted pretty quickly. There were a few hundred people in the first settlements of Boston but in that first decade or so immigration was massive so the settlements grew very quickly.”
Archaeologists believe the Paddy’s Alley site (named for the last name of an early English, not Irish, settler) was originally a network of unpaved streets lined with small shops and frame homes. One of the main places identified at this site, besides the privy, was the home of John Carnes, a pewterer, who was wealthy enough to order English wine bottles whose seals were embossed with his full name.
Investigating teams, led by a woman from project management consultant Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, found clay pipes for smoking tobacco, tin-glazed cups and bowls made in Holland and dating from the early 1700s, glass seals from wine bottles, plates, buttons, belt buckles, a pair of leather shoes and an Irish half-penny, dated 1783, which historians found to be counterfeit. (Evidence indicates no half-pennies were made that year.) Most of the findings were near the privy that had been filled with trash and sealed with clay, which acted as a preservative.
Doug Smith, exhibits director of the Boston Museum of Science, told Construction Equipment Guide that such relics were found “within the footprint of the original landform of Boston, which was a small peninsula.” He pointed out that much of downtown Boston is built on landfill placed there after colonial times.
“The areas along the coast and Back Bay were filled in, incrementally, as they ran out of room on this original peninsula,” he said. “Some of the original landfill was taken off the Beacon Hill, which was the high point of Boston. That hill was literally lowered.”
Smith pointed out that landfill would often fill in the spaces between original wharves and on top of the original docks so that the city “just grew out by filling in.”
“In terms of the Big Dig, and also archaeology, that has created all kinds of significant engineering issues,” Smith said. “Much of the Big Dig was constructed on landfill, which is very unstable. To excavate on landfill requires all kinds of special techniques to keep the fill in place while you cast the tunnels, as they did under Boston’s South Station.”
At the Mill Pond archaeological area, near the site of the Fleet Center stadium now used by the Boston Bruins and Boston Celtics, tidal water had been captured in a small pond where it powered an early 18th century grist mill. The site yielded millstones and clues to colonial construction techniques and local commerce.
Finds included cobble paving, remains of a wharf, a wood plank floor, and five brick-lined drains.
The pond was filled in 1804, became a manufacturing and distribution district, and then a parking lot, which was dug up for the archaeological excavations.
The historical excavation work at both the Paddy’s Alley and Mill Pond sites were basically completed in 1995, although millstones at Mill Creek, close to the pond, were found in 1999. The sites were subsequently further excavated and covered in constructing the I-93 tunnel for the Big Dig.
Native American Lifestyles
At Spectacle Island (so named by settlers because its shape resembled eyeglasses), archaeologists uncovered harpoon tips made from deer bone and used for hunting seals or sturgeon; middens (refuse heaps) of shells from soft-shell clams; pronged points, also from deer bones, of fish spears; shards of pottery used for cooking soups, stone pestles for grinding wilds seeds into flour, bones of bay ducks, which were probably caught with bolas (stones tied to thongs), and many other well-preserved artifacts.
Approximately 90 percent of the shells at the site are from soft-shell clams, enjoyed today as “steamers.” These were probably harvested by women and children while the men fished for cod, which were the main fish caught at Spectacle. Birds, especially black duck, brant and scoter, provided about one-fifth of the food.
Remains indicate that the natives caught sturgeon up to eight feet long and weighing as much as 200 lbs. Both the Native Americans and early settlers could have feasted during May and June, when these fish clogged the pristine local rivers at spawning time.
Archaeologist believe the campsite had been visited by early hunters 6,500 to 8,000 years ago. (They found a spear point dating from that primitive time.)
The research indicates that the Native Americans were virtually wiped out from 1615 to 1620 by an epidemic that had begun before Europeans sailed in, and then by a series of diseases brought by the settlers.
Used for picnics in the 1700s, the island became the site of two hotels in 1827, “taking advantage of the remote location for less-than-desirable purposes,” the Big Dig’s Web site said. Police closed the hotels 10 years later charging that they were used as gambling dens.
A horse-rendering plant was built on the island in 1857, and then a garbage plant operated there until 1935. Dumping raw trash at the site stopped in 1959 when a bulldozer moving refuse sank into the trash pile. (The Web site doesn’t say if the operator emerged safely.)
Now the Central Artery/Tunnel project has approximately tripled the size of the island with huge amounts of dirt from the Big Dig.
The island will become a 105-acre park, part of the National Park System, next year.
Charlestown Site
Before the downtown Big Dig began, construction crews were working on a Big Dig connector in Charlestown, just over the Charles River north of Boston, which would link Route 1 and the Central Artery Highway (I-93).
“There were a number of significant sites there as well near the present City Square,” said Lewis. “One site was a tavern, built about 1635, which stayed open for 140 years until the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1776. We found 140 years of our history of eating and drinking —lots of glassware, dishes, clay pipe stems, everything you would expect from a tavern, which also was an inn where people would stay and be served meals. Lots of smoking, lots of drinking. We also found a few pieces of the foundations for the first frame house, which John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, built after coming there in 1630.”
The Charlestown settlement actually predates the one on the Shawmut Peninsula. However, Winthrop only stayed in his Charlestown home, which also was used for religious meetings, very briefly before also leading a second settlement on the peninsula.
Popular Display
A display of many artifacts from the archaeological digs, including the bowling ball, is featured in an exhibit called “Highway to the Past, the Archaeology of the Central Artery,” at the Commonwealth Museum in the Massachusetts Archives building at Columbia Point in Dorchester, MA (next to the JFK Library).
“The exhibit has been a very popular attraction, particularly with student groups,” said Brian McNiff, communications director for the Secretary of the Commonwealth, William F. Galvin.
The exhibit may be viewed on the Secretary’s Web site: www.state.ma.us/sec in the subsection for museum archives. Also, in the Web site’s Latest News section, visitors can view a short CBS Morning News feature on the bowling ball and other finds.
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