442 H. W. Shinier — Post- Glacial History oj Boston. 



A small portion just beneath the " fill " maj be due to the 

 presence of dam walls built in the early part of the 19th cen- 

 tury. In 1814 a corporation, — " The Boston and Roxbury 

 Mill Corporation," led by Uriah Coting, obtained a charter 

 from the General Court empowering them to build a dam from 

 the end of Beacon Street (at Charles St.) to Sewell's Point in 

 the uplands of Brookline, with a cross dam to Gravelly Point 

 in Poxbury ; also to make a roadway of each dam and to levy 

 tolls for its use. It could confine tide water within this area 

 and run mills by the water power thus created. At this time 

 there was nothing but water and salt marsh from the foot of 

 the Common to the uplands of Brookline. The mill dam was 

 finished in 1821. But the tidal power, rather insufficient at 

 the beginning for the running of the mills, was soon encroached 

 upon, first, by the owners of bordering property filling in their 

 land, thus restricting the area of the dam ; and especially, 

 secondly by the building of the Boston and Providence and the 

 Boston and Worcester Railroad across the water basin (incor- 

 porated in 1831). With this restriction of the tide and the 

 increase in population this basin soon became a public nuisance, 

 and in 1852 a commission of the state legislature recommended 

 that the property be abandoned for mill dam purposes and be 

 filled in for building purposes. This was finally done, giving 

 as a result the topmost 15 to 20 feet in the above Back Bay 

 sections. 



Bibliography. 



Bryant, D. L. A Study of the Most Eecent Geological History of the Tide- 

 Water Region of Charles River. An unpublished thesis in 

 the library of the Geological Department of the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology. 1891. 



Crosby, W. 0. A Study of the Geology of the Charles Eiver Estuary and 

 Boston Harbor, with special Reference to the Building of the 

 proposed Dam Across the Tidal Portion of the River. Tech- 

 nology Quarterly, vol. xvi, pp. 64-92, 1903. 



Upham, Warren. Recent Fossils of the Harbor and Back Bay, Boston. Proc. 

 Bos. Soc. Nat. Hist., vol. xxv, pp. 305-316, 1891. 



Windsor, Justin. The Memorial History of Boston. 



Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 

 July 3, 1915. 



