History
Before recorded history, Native Americans and then later colonists used weirs to catch alewives and fertilize their crops. In 1631, after the arrival of the English, the first ship built by Europeans in Massachusetts, the Blessing of the Bay, was launched from the river's shores. A few years later (1637) the first bridge was built; neighboring towns squabbled about the costs for more than a hundred years.
Over one hundred years later, the Mystic River played a role in the American Revolution when on September 1, 1774, a force of roughly 260 British regulars rowed from Boston up the Mystic River to a landing point near Winter Hill in today's Somerville. From there, they marched about a mile (1.6 km) to the Powder House where a large supply of provincial gunpowder was kept, and after sunrise they removed all the gunpowder, sparking a popular uprising known as the Powder Alarm. In 1775, the Battle of Chelsea Creek took place in the river's watershed in May, and the British attacked via the river's beach in the Battle of Bunker Hill in June.
In 1805 the Middlesex Canal linked the Charles and Mystic Rivers to the Merrimack River in Lowell, and during the 19th century, 10 shipyards along the Mystic River built more than 500 clipper ships. Shipbuilding peaked in the 1840s as schooners and sloops transported timber and molasses for rum distilleries between Medford and the West Indies.
By 1865, overfishing and pollution all but eliminated commercial fishing.
Extensive salt marshes lined the banks of the Mystic until 1909, when the first dam (Craddock Locks) was built across the river, converting salt marsh to freshwater marsh and enabling development. A dam named for Amelia Earhart, was built in 1966. It has three locks to allow the passage of boats, and is equipped with pumps to push fresh water out to the harbor even during high tide. Dam operators leave the locks open at times to allow the passage of fish. There is a fish ladder, but it has never been functional. The dam is closed to the public.
In 1950, construction was completed on the Maurice J. Tobin Bridge which spans the Mystic River, joining Charlestown and Chelsea.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)