BIRDS OF THE CAMBRIDGE REGION. 



43 



of brickfields, shanties, and ice-ponds." But he was fortunate enough to have 

 known them intimately at a still earlier period when they constituted "a wilder- 

 ness, encompassed to be sure on all sides by civilization, yet of indefinite extent, 

 full of mystery, of possibilities, and invaded only by the Concord turnpike,' 

 — a lonely road with a double row of pollard willows causewayed above the bog." 

 Alewife Brook, he tells us, was then a " steady, tranquil stream — .... curtained 

 with stooping alders and willows — of devious course, allowing the silent paddler, 

 cautiously peeping round the point, to surprise the black-duck or wood-duck with 

 upstretched neck for an instant before, spurning the surface, she rushed into the 

 air. An enchanted stream, not the dull ditch that now meets the passer-by, 

 but broad and deep, leading to Menotomy Pond, to Mystic River, to the ends of 

 the world ! For had not 'the old Captain' passed down this way in his sail- 

 boat to the Harbor, to Cape Cod ? So, at least, it was said, and we believed it. 

 Though how he passed the bridge at the Fresh Pond outlet ? No doubt his 

 masts unshipped, or perhaps at that day Concord turnpike was not. At this 

 outlet, where the brook left the pond, all attractions centred. What it was 

 then is easier imagined without seeing it now. Not merely are all the objects 

 changed, but there is not room enough on the ground for what it then con- 

 tained. Where now is a meagre bit of mangy pasture and a row of icehouses, 

 a vast army of reeds and bulrushes and wild rice encompassed the shore, ten- 

 anted throughout the year by muskrats (for the water was deep at the edge), 

 and at the right times by throngs of feathered visitors." '^ 



This was before the days when Fresh Pond had begun to be drawn upon for 

 our city water-supply,^ and Alewife Brook still received its entire overflow, as did 

 Little River that of Menotomy (now Spy) Pond. Without doubt both streams 

 then ran nearly or quite brimful at most seasons. Dr. Samuel Cabot told me, 

 shortly before his death, that his brother's statement to the effect that they were 

 once navigable by small boats was literally correct, and that he himself had 

 often paddled through them from Fresh Pond into Menotomy (now Spy) Pond 

 without once getting out of his canoe. 



It is evident from what Mr. J. Elliot Cabot says in the passage just 

 quoted, as well as from early maps, that the greater part of the flat and for the 

 most part grassy tract of park land which now borders Concord Avenue on its 

 southern side, between the Watertown Branch of the Fitchburg Railroad and 

 the old Tudor estate, was formerly a cove of Fresh Pond, or rather, the e.xtreme 

 northern end of Cambridge Nook. Mr. Jacob Hittinger tells me that it was filled 



'According to the Cambridge Directory and Almanac for 1850 the Concord Turnpike was 

 "incorporated" in 1803. It is now called Concord Avenue. 



"J. E.Cabot, Sedge-birds, Atlantic Monthly, XXIII, 1869, 384. 

 ^The first pumping station was begun in 1855 and finished in 1856. 



