Note (Back to main text) — Chapter XXIII

The Indian name, Shawmut, was that of the "place near the neck,"[1] probably the present Haymarket Square. The three-hilled peninsula called Tremont, or Boston, by the white settlers, was connected with the main land at Roxbury by a long, narrow neck or causeway. The future "South End" was then under the waves. After about two centuries of use as a wagon road, this narrow strip between Boston and Roxbury—so narrow that, at high tide, boys were able to leap from the foam of the South Bay to the spray of the waters of the Charles River—was widened. Suffolk Street, which was one of the first highways west of Washington Street to be made into hard ground, was named Shawmut Avenue. About the middle of the nineteenth century, much land was reclaimed from the salt mud and marshes and made ready for the pile-driver, mason, and builder. Two splendid districts, the first called the "South End," and the second the "Back Bay," were created. Where, in the Revolutionary War, British frigates lay at anchor, are now Beacon Street and Commonwealth and Massachusetts Avenues. Where the redcoats stepped into their boats for disembarkation at the foot of Bunker Hill, stretch the lovely Public Gardens. The streets running east and west in the new districts, beginning with Dover and ending with Lenox, are named after towns in the Bay State. About midway among these, as to order and distance, are Brookline and Canton Streets.