58 TRANSACTIONS OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY 



among all classes in the community for outdoor sports. Sailing, bicycling, baseball, 

 lawn-tennis and many other sports gained unprecedented popularity. Hand in hand 

 with these athletic interests went an interest in flowers and the creatures of the field and 

 wood. At this period the works of certain landscape painters were attracting universal 

 admiration, and the camera had brought a ready means of landscape record to the hands 

 of everyone. These physical and esthetic tendencies in the community ensured the 

 marshaling of a host of champions to assist a movement for parks which would satisfy 

 the newly awakened desires, although based upon sanitary, moral, and educational needs. 

 The success of the parks secured by the city of Boston had proved the practicabihty of 

 public control of large tracts of land for recreation, and it had proved the possibility of 

 making such open spaces beautiful in the highest sense. The Boston parks were examples 

 of the practical and esthetic needs of the cities and towns about Boston which were too 

 short-sighted to provide open spaces for the future when land was cheap and plenty, and 

 too poor and weak to provide them when land for recreation was costly but sorely needed. 



The district needing parks was, of course, composed of those cities and towns in the 

 vicinity of Boston which were so far away from unsettled country that access to it for 

 purposes of recreation was impossible or shortly to be impossible. As already described, 

 this district, although possessing sufficient ties with the central city to make it a political 

 part of that metropolis, was nevertheless divided by petty boundaries into small inde- 

 pendencies, distinct politically from it and from one another. The jealousies of these towns, 

 and cities were likely to be so great, and their breadth of view so narrow, that the inade- 

 quate funds at their command could accomplish little toward the establishment of eff"ective 

 parks. So compact was their growth and so confined were they by one another, that 

 nothing short of a series of connecting parks and parkways could offer them escape from 

 their own streets, and yet they were unable to provide such a system. The problem was 

 not unlike that affecting sewage disposal in the towns near Boston, as already described; 

 but the applicability of state aid was not as evident, and a much larger district was involved. 

 A form of legislation which had never been found necessary before, and which was needed 

 for one part of the state only, seemed at first sight an expedient out of keeping with the 

 provinces of the state government. 



Despite the obstacles which stood in the way of the establishment of parks for the 

 metropolis of separate towns and cities, the acquisition of such open spaces was shortly- 

 to be assured by a park movement so short in apparent duration, so free from opposition 

 and controversy, and so far-reaching in its ultimate results, as to make the ten years' 

 struggle which had been a forerunner of Boston city parks seem inexplicable. It must 

 be remembered, however, that the community was awake to the necessity of greater 

 parks, and that the early battle for Boston parks had defeated an opposition which could 

 nevermore gain audience. At the time of this movement certain picturesque tracts of 

 wild land north of Boston, which had always been resorted to by a great number of persons 

 for the enjoyment of woodland and pond scenery, were threatened by the advance of 

 building operations, which promised, in a short season, to extend over the entire region. 

 At the same period certain wild tracts south of Boston, which had gained a similar public 

 favor by their enjoyable scenery, were also in jeopardy at the hands of private owners. 

 Although both these tracts were owned by many individual proprietors, and the public 

 at large had no rights in the territory, yet when the people discovered that the beauty 

 of these sylvan tracts was to suffer serious injury, and that an enjoyment of one of the 



