Boston Harbor Islands

in Dorchester

For thousands of years this region has been home to Indigenous people.  The Massachusett Tribe lived, worked, and held ceremony seasonally on all the harbor islands. In the 1600s, colonists appropriated the islands to graze livestock, harvest trees, and as sites for defensive installations. Bostonians soon saw the islands as locations for institutions and facilities that they did not want in the city. In the 1990s the islands were designated the Boston Harbor Islands National and State Park and are now mostly valued for their distinctive ecology and history. The Massachusett continue to hold the islands sacred.

Painting by Rafaela Astudillo

From left to right, the painting depicts three Boston Harbor islands visible from Columbia Point.

Deer Island  In the winter of 1675 during Metacomet’s Rebellion (King Philip’s War), hundreds of non-combatant Native people were forcibly removed from Praying Towns and held prisoner on Deer Island without food or shelter. More than half of them perished. Descendants from Tribal communities return each fall to honor those who died there.

In the 1840s, thousands of Irish immigrants with infectious diseases were quarantined on the island. Many never made it to the mainland.

Despite this legacy, the region’s wastewater treatment plant was built on the island. It processes wastewater from two million people living in 43 Greater Boston communities.

Spectacle Island has undergone multiple dramatic changes. From a Native summer habitation prior to colonization, to housing a quarantine hospital, a rendering plant processing hundreds of horse carcasses a year, and a dumping ground for much of Boston’s trash, to its current place as a gem of Boston Harbor.

Spectacle Island’s turnaround began when 3.5 million cubic yards of soil from Boston’s Big Dig project was used to cap the dump. In 2006, the transformed island with five miles of trails, and planted with trees, shrubs, and native grasses welcomed the public.

Directly across the bay, Thompson Island is one of the largest of the harbor islands and most ecologically diverse. It includes sandy and rocky beaches, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, meadows, and woods. This diversity allowed Native people to thrive on the island for millennia.  

 In 1626, the Massachusett established a brief trading relationship on the island with an early settler, David Thompson.  Two centuries later, the Boston Farm School was founded on the island, to educate the city’s most at-risk boys. Today’s Cathleen Stone Island Outward Bound School in many ways continues the Farm School’s century-long efforts to empower young people

Sign Location

More …

Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens’ rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston’s waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

Acknowledgments

  • Friends of the Boston Harborwalk is deeply grateful to the George B. Henderson Foundation for funding the design, manufacture and installation of the signs at Columbia Point.
  • We are indebted to the late Suzanne Gall Marsh, founder of Friends of the Boston Harbor Islands and a lifelong advocate for the islands. Suzanne kindly contributed her expertise and was a warm supporter of our work.