The area drained is about 110 acres, including Coolidge Corner.īrookline bought Hall’s Pond for the Town’s first wildlife sanctuary in 1975. In 1948, the Town built a storm drain system to collect rain water and direct it into Hall’s Pond. He built brick apartment buildings facing Beacon Street, and behind them, provided a formal rose garden for his tenants. Newhall bought the land between Beacon Street and Hall’s Pond. The land that is now the Sanctuary remained in private hands.Īround 1910, Charles A. Fill was added to raise the playing fields above the water table. In 1903, in order to build Amory Park, the Town of Brookline acquired the land that had been the Amory family homestead. described Swallow Pond in an 1899 book, On the Bird’s Highway, “This bit of country, where Nature still holds sway, is composed of the wilder portions of three estates, and though diminutive in the extreme, it yet offers to the birds all the attractions of marsh, thicket, upland, orchard and wood.” He added that there had been plans to fill the pond and run a street through it, but the pond had been so difficult to fill the plan was abandoned. They founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society which successfully lobbied for legal protection of birds. She and her friend, Harriet Hemenway, organized their friends to protest the killing of song birds, used at that time to decorate ladies’ hats. In 1850, the pond, known as Swallow Pond, was part of the Ivy Street property owned by the family of Minna Hall. By the mid 1800’s, only a one-acre pond remained. During excavations in 2001, peat and chunks of stillundecayed cedar trees were unearthed.Įarly settlers in Brookline cut the cedar trees for their rot-resistant wood and the wet areas were filled for farming or building. The peaty soil that was formed at that time still underlies the park, the sanctuary, and some of the neighborhood. The high level of acidity and the low level of oxygen in such a swamp greatly slow down decay, building up peat. Amory Park and Hall’s Pond were part of a particular kind of wetland-an Atlantic White Cedar swamp-that extended to the Charles River. At the time of European settlement, much of the area that is now North Brookline was wetland.
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