The Mill Pond

The Mill Pond was a tidal cove on the north side of the Boston peninsula, dammed for water power in the 1640s and filled in between 1807 and the late 1820s to create the streets now known as the Bulfinch Triangle. On 31 July 1643 the town granted the cove to Henry Symons, George Burden, John Button and John Hill on condition that they build one or more corn mills. Its northern side was closed by a causeway, said to have grown from an old footpath over the marsh, on the line of present Causeway Street, and the partners dug the Mill Creek through to the Town Dock. The pond turned a North Mill and a South Mill near present Endicott Street, and stretched from Prince and Endicott Streets west to Leverett Street and south over the site of Haymarket Square. When the tide mills failed the pond became a dump for oyster shells, dirt and street refuse. The partners' successors were incorporated as the Boston Mill Corporation on 9 March 1804 and that May won leave to use soil from Beacon Hill to fill it; an agreement of 24 July 1807 gave the town one eighth of the lots filled within twenty years. Charles Bulfinch drew the street plan in 1807, a triangle bounded by Causeway, Canal and Merrimac Streets, and earth from Beacon Hill and Copp's Hill filled the basin. Water was cut off from the Mill Creek in 1828. The work added about 50 acres of building land, and by 1871 every railroad leading north out of Boston started from it.