Boston Public Garden

About this property

The Public Garden, also known as Boston Public Garden, is a large park in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts, adjacent to Boston Common. It is a part of the Emerald Necklace system of parks and is bounded by Charles Street and Boston Common to the east, Beacon Street and Beacon Hill to the north, Arlington Street and Back Bay to the west, and Boylston Street to the south. The Public Garden was the first public botanical garden in America. Boston's Back Bay, including the land the garden sits on, was mudflats until filling began in the early 1800s. The land of the Public Garden was the earliest filled, as the area that is now Charles Street had been used as a ropewalk since 1796. The town of Boston granted ropemakers use of the land on July 30, 1794, after a fire had destroyed the ropewalks in a more populated area of the city. As a condition of its use, the ropewalk's proprietors were required to build a seawall and fill in the land which is now Charles Street and the land immediately bordering it (now a part of the Public Garden). Much of the landfill material came from Mount Vernon, formerly a hill in the Beacon Hill area of Boston. Initially, gravel and soil were brought from the hill to the landfill area by handcart. By 1804, a gravity railroad had been constructed to rapidly bring material from the top of the hill to the marsh; today, Mount Vernon no longer exists, having been completely removed to be used as landfill for the Back Bay. In February 1824, the city of Boston purchased back the land granted to the ropemakers, for a cost of $50,000. The next year, a proposal to turn the land into a graveyard was defeated by a vote of 1632 to 176. The Public Garden was established in 1837, when philanthropist Horace Gray petitioned for the use of land as the first public botanical garden in the United States. By 1839, a corporation was formed, called Horace Gray and Associates, and made the "Proprietors of the Botanic Garden in Boston." The corporation was chartered with creating what is now the Boston Public Garden. Nonetheless, there was constant pressure for the land to be sold to private interests for the construction of new housing. The year that Boston's Public Garden opened, Mr. John Fottler Sr., dubbed "the Father of Our Parks", delivered the first load of plants ever set at the gardens, from the Hon. Marshall P. Wilder of Dorchester. While most of the land of the present-day garden had been filled in by the mid-19th century, the area of the Back Bay remained an undeveloped tidal basin. In 1842, the state legislature created The Commissioners on Boston Harbor and the Back Bay, in order to determine how to best develop the land; the state wanted to control the lands and to build an upper-class neighborhood in the area beyond the Public Garden. The City of Boston petitioned the state to grant control over the basin (which was controlled by the then-independent city of Roxbury), in hopes of generating significant revenue from any developments that would be built after filling it in. When the state commission rejected Boston's petition, the Boston City Council threatened to sell the garden to housing developers, which would have significantly reduced the desirability of the area for the upper-class elite that the state was hoping to attract.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

More in Suffolk County

Historic places, battles, and census history across Suffolk County.

More historic places in Massachusetts

Browse all historic places in Massachusetts.

Conflict records

Explore 19,000+ military engagements across American history.

Massachusetts history

Colonial settlement, territorial period, and statehood narrative.