48 MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



grows here abundantly and the turtle head {Chelone glabra) very commonly. 

 Our local observers of the present younger generations do not appear to visit 

 the Maple Swamp very frequently, but from 1871 to 1885 it was regarded as 

 the best collecting ground to be found anywhere in the immediate neighborhood 

 of Cambridge. During this period it attracted — especially in early autumn — 

 a great number and variety of the smaller migratory birds, among which was 

 the Connecticut Warbler, then but little known. It was also a favorite roosting 

 place of the Night Heron, and the Green Heron continues to nest there. 



The Brickyard Sivanip. 



As one approaches Fresh Pond from Cambridge by way of Concord 

 Avenue, he will notice, on the right hand side of this road, in the rear of 

 a row of squalid tenement houses, a wide open space stretching northward 

 along the Watertown Branch Railroad to the main line of the Fitchburg 

 Railroad. A considerable part of this has been roughly graded for streets 

 and house-lots, the remaining portion (to the northward) being occupied by 

 an immense clay-pit. The entire area was formerly known as the Brickyard 

 Swamp. When I first became acquainted with this swamp in i860 or 1861, it 

 covered upwards of fifty acres. Along its northern and eastern edges stretched 

 the brickyards, two or three in number,^ from which it took its name. They 

 had then only begun the stupendous work of excavation, now all but completed. 

 When the steam-shovels were scooping up the surface soil to get at the deep 

 bed of pure clay which lay just beneath, they removed many large stumps of 

 white pines which still showed the marks of axes, wielded, no doubt, in early 

 Colonial days when the place formed the extreme eastern end of what was 

 known as the Great Swamp. The only trees that had been left standing 

 down to my time, however, were some oaks, maples and gray birches which 

 covered a tract of slightly elevated ground, less than an acre in extent, where we 

 used to start Woodcock in summer. Elsewhere the swamp was perfectly level 

 and subject to inundation in early spring. It contained a bewildering number 

 of small, shallow ponds and deep, wide ditches, which made it seemingly diffi- 

 cult of access, but there were obscure and miry foot-paths, familiarly known to 

 sportsmen and nest-hunting boys, by which it could be traversed in every direc- 

 tion with comparative ease and safety. Some of the ponds were irregular in 

 shape and apparently of natural origin, but by far the greater number occupied 



'According to the Cambridge Directory and Almanac for 1850 there was then but one brickyard 

 in this part of Cambridge — that of "Hubbel and Co., Fresh Pond railroad." 



