Much of the Back Bay stands on gravel carried nine miles by train from the hills of Needham. The contractors Goss and Munson, hired to fill the Commonwealth's 100 acres of the tidal basin behind the Mill Dam, began work about the middle of May 1858. They built six miles of railroad and a machine shop, and dug at a pit near the Newton line, a quarter of a mile from the Upper Falls depot of the Charles River Railroad, on a farm the railroad company owned. By May 1859, according to the Boston Traveller as reprinted in Ballou's Pictorial, 145 dirt cars and 80 men worked night and day. Trains of 35 cars made sixteen trips by day and nine or ten by night, and in daytime one reached the Back Bay every 45 minutes. Two steam excavators, each driven by a 25 horsepower engine, loaded each train in two halves, two shovelfuls to a car, filling all 35 cars in about ten minutes and doing the work of 200 men. In the first year about 300,000 yards of gravel came out of Needham, levelling sand hills 50 feet high, and the contractors made about 2,500 cubic yards of land a day; fourteen acres were finished by May 1859. They took most of their pay in land rather than cash. The filling moved roughly east to west from Arlington Street, reaching West Chester Park, now Massachusetts Avenue, by 1881.
Getting there
42.3533, -71.0726
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