HISTORY OF THE MIDDLESEX FELLS RESERVATION
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"The Middlesex Fells, a wild forest within the perimeter highway that surrounds greater Boston, is unique for any large city in the world. Zoologists have been surprised to find not only foxes and deer in the Fells, but also coyote and fisher-cat.
A botanical survey to be published early in 2012 has discovered over eight hundred different species of plants in the Fells."
[Bryan Hamlin, Friends of the Fells board chairman]
Generations of visitors have enjoyed experiencing the nature of the Fells since its creation in 1894, but the history of how such a diverse natural oasis was preserved, which led to the creation of the entire greater Boston Metropolitan Park System, is little known.
The Fells, shown in this view from Bear Hill taken in 1895 or 1896 by Nathaniel Stebbins, was known for its rugged landscape features. Too wild to have been farmed, clear cutting for timber raised alarm that if action wasn't taken its beauty would be lost forever. The Fells region was known as 'The Five Mile Wood' in the mid-1800s.
Two Visionaries
“The first important publication in regard to the conversion of the “Five-mile Wood” into a public domain was an article of nine pages, written by Mr. Wilson Flagg and published January, 1856...This essay was entitled “A Forest Preserve: A Proposition to State and City Governments:” “It is proposed that these public bodies should authorize the purchase of a thousand acres or more of wooded land as near as practicable to every large city, to be kept as a ‘preserve’ and to be used as a place for the study of natural history and for summer recreation.” He then alludes to this wild region extending from Stoneham through Saugus and Lynn as far as Salem as a good site for the location of one or more of these “preserves”. This was a plan to be made to extend all over the United States.”
“In 1869 Mr. Elizur Wright published a pamphlet entitled “Mount Andrew Park,” in which he recommended to the citizens of Boston to convert this region, then known as “The Five-Mile Wood,” into a park...He advised the preservation of the forest upon the hills, and the establishment of school of natural history in connection with it. It is remarkable that Mr. Wright and Mr. Flagg, while working for almost the self-same project, were personally unacquainted and each knew nothing at all of what had been done by the other.” [From: Boston Evening Transcript, Sat. Nov. 13, 1880]
Wright and Flagg founded the Middlesex Fells Association on October 15, 1880, at a meeting on Bear Hill in the Fells, attended by 200 people.
Wright's Tower was constructed in 1937
under the direction of the Works Progress
Administration. In 2008, following restoration of
the tower by DCR, a plaque commemorating the visionary
who was responsible for the creation of the Fells
was attached to the tower. The inscription reads,
IN HONOR OF ELIZUR WRIGHT
"The years of whose unceasing labor was the natural foundation of the Metropolitan Park System, and whose aim was that the Middlesex Fells should be forever preserved as a People’s Forest Park.”
Daughter Ellen Wright in a letter to the Board of the Metropolitan Park Commission in 1896.
A brief history of the creation of the Middlesex Fells Reservation is available. For PDF version cick here.
Frederick Law Olmsted and the Middlesex Fells Reservation
In November of 1880, the month after its formation, the Middlesex Fells Association wrote to prominent American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted asking his advice on the plan for creating a four thousand acre rural park in the wild rocky hills north of Boston.
Olmsted's letter in response referred to a earlier visit he had made to the Fells landscape, and conveyed what he declared was “the most important lesson of my professional study” which spanned thirty years; “the wisdom of… developing in the highest degree whatever may be the distinguishing characteristics of each particular property.”
He advised that since the impulse for the Fells preservation “comes from an appreciation of the beauty & use of absolutely wild sylvan scenery it is most desirable to avoid complicating the purpose of preserving & developing such scenery…”
Referring to the topography of the Middlesex Fells, Olmsted wrote it was advisable to “…take it as it stands, develop to the utmost its natural characteristics, and make a true retreat not only from town but from suburban conditions” and that “every inducement should be offered visitors to ramble and wander about…”
As it turned out F. L. Olmsted himself did not work on the Fells Reservation plan. He retired in 1885 the same year that Elizur Wright died. But in 1890 Olmsted’s protégé, Charles Eliot, had begun to put together what became a successful movement to create the nation’s first metropolitan park system.
When the Metropolitan Park Commission was established in 1893, Eliot, working with Olmsted’s two stepsons, was appointed to lay out boundaries for five reservations, including the Fells. The first parkway Eliot designed was a route to connect the Fells to Boston.
Following Charles Eliot’s death in 1897 the Olmsted Brothers firm continued extensive landscape work in the Fells Reservation.
Thanks to the efforts of the Massachusetts Historical Commission today Fells Historic Parkways and the Fells Spot Pond Historic District have been listed on the State and National Registers of Historic Places, to provide protection to the legacy which has been bequeathed to us.
And we would like to think that F. L. Olmsted would solidly endorse the growing citizens’ movement to protect the Fells from being swamped by development, to actively make sure the Reservation and its parkways remain a natural place of refuge, “a true retreat” from city life."
