Dorchester Illustration 2593 Treasures Along the Neponset River Trail
Treasures Along the Neponset River Trail contributed by Carole Mooney
Birds and animals including eagles, hawks, heron, ducks, geese, crows, turkeys, deer and rabbits attract the attention of visitors to the Neponset River Trail as well as sunsets over the waving marsh grass and colorful murals under bridges. Reminders of the area’s rich heritage serve as a backdrop for many scenes. In the photograph, ducks and a heron relax on a strip of granite in the river which reflects the Baker Chocolate Company buildings.
The falling waters of the Neponset River provided energy for the country’s first water-powered grist mill and paper mills in the Lower Mills area. Buildings constructed by the Walter Baker Company from 1868 and 1947 border both sides of the river. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, the brick buildings reflect styles from the Second Empire, Queen Anne, Romanesque Revival and Utilitarian Modern.
In 1846, the 3 1/4 mile Dorchester and Milton Branch Railroad was built between Port Norfolk and present day Mattapan Square. In 1899, the recently established Metropolitan District Commission (MDC) acquired 232 acres for the Neponset River Marshes Reservation. In 1990 the rails were removed from the Dorchester and Milton Branch Railway and two years later the MDC acquired the right-of-way to link the former drive-in and dump site parkland in Dorchester Bay with the Neponset marshes. In 2003, 2.4 miles of the Lower Neponset River Trail opened.
Along the trail, outcroppings of conglomerate contain pebbles of older rock that became rounded as they tumbled along the river bed. Because the small andesite pebbles in the compressed silt resembled an old fashioned fruit filled pudding, they were nicknamed Roxbury Puddingstone which became the Massachusetts State Rock in 1983. Found only in the Boston basin, Roxbury Puddingstone has been along the trail for millions of years. Poet Oliver Wendell Holmes described the children of giants who didn’t like their pudding creating the rocks:
“They flung it over the Roxbury Hills,
They flung it over the plain,
And all over Milton and Dorchester too
Great lumps of pudding the giants threw;”
At the eastern end of the trail, lines of pilings which once supported the wharf and dock for the A.T. Stearns Lumber Company rise out of the river. Stearns operated here from 1847 well into the 1900’s with two counting rooms, a lumber building, a planing mill, a dry-house, a molding room, a block of five tenements, two stables and a large shed. The Senator Joseph Finnegan Park now occupies this space. Moldings, columns, windows, doors and other architectural features manufactured here are still part of the fabric of older Dorchester homes.
The trail is easily accessible by public transportation from the red line’s Ashmont station. The Mattapan High Speed Trolley’s stops along the Neponset Trail include Butler, Milton and Central Avenue.