Boston Transcript, Leverett Pond

I never knew there was a Leverett Pond in Brookline, but there is, and I've located it on a map. It's in the heart of a very urban territory just to the west of the central city, and though lots of roads pass through the area, it's part of a green ribbon of woods and lakes that kind of run all the way through the area.

An old article from the Boston Transcript in the 1890s outlines the history of the area and shows how the Leverett family contributed to its development, or lack thereof. It was part of a series of grants to the heavies of the early Puritan colony: the Leveretts, the Cottons, the Olivers, and a few others. Where did the colony get this land? Not sure. It was all called Muddy River back then and only later became Brookline. Nowadays it may be part of Olmstead Park.

Here I am already over my head in specific west-Boston geography. The article outlines the boundaries of what became the park, but it's clear that what exactly was Thomas', upon his death, and what of other grants got mixed in there, has been middied by history. And then the article references a period of time when the whole thing was tied up in endless lawsuits. Some history books have said that the property deed for Thomas' land somehow fell into the hands of the Gardner family in the late 1600s without ever a document showing that. But I also know that Leveretts came and went from the land, or at least appeared to, all throughout the 1700s, and often were referred to as living in Roxbury, but at other times Brighton. The land is lowland, swampy, heavily wooded, and could in fact straddle both what was Old Roxbury at the time and what was Brighton. It is very possible that there were houses on either end of it, or, that it could have been used by several people at once.

The whole thing leaves me with a number of questions, which I have no idea how I could possibly answer. Thee is probably some record somewhere of the boundaries of this land, but in the position I'm in, I'd have a hard time understanding it. I'm not about to go wading through legal documents to find out what happened or how it happened to fall into the hands it did. It seems to have become a park around then, in the 1890s, and was called Leverett Park for a while, apparently, but only the pond has kept its name. And what about Cotton's land? Who knows - the Cotton family didn't fare that much better than we did at the time, in terms of keeping its family estate safe from the marauding marches of time. It was the first area to get swallowed up by Goston's westward exxpansion and it was only because it was hostile lowland swampy bush that it apparently got left alone for years, regardless of who actually owned it or who was suing whom.

Someday I'll find the banks of Leverett Pond.