Norfolk County, Massachusetts - Chapter 1: General Description, 1918

Chapter 1: General Description

Norfolk County is situated in the eastern part of the state. Two of its towns - Brookline and Cohasset - are segregated, the former being entirely surrounded by parts of Suffolk County, and the latter by parts of Plymouth County and Massachusetts Bay. With these exceptions the county is bounded, generally, on the north by the counties of Middlesex and Suffolk and the Massachusetts Bay; on the east by Massachusetts Bay and the County of Plymouth ; on the south by Plymouth and Bristol counties ; on the southwest by the State of Rhode Island, and on the west by the counties of Worcester and Middlesex. The county is irregular in shape, straight lines forming the boundaries between Norfolk and Plymouth, Bristol and Worcester counties and the State of Rhode Island, while the other boundaries are represented by lines that do not follow the points of the compass, among them being the curves of the Charles River and the ragged coast line of Massachusetts Bay. Its greatest extent - from Cohasset Harbor to the southwest corner of the county - is about thirty-six miles, and from the most northern point of the Town of Wellesley to the Bristol County line the distance is seventeen miles.

Surface And Soil

While much of the surface of Norfolk County is broken and uneven, no portion of it can be considered mountainous. The most noted elevations are the Blue Hills, in the Town of Milton; Great Hill and King Oak Hill, in Weymouth; the Brookline Hills ; Wellesley Hills, in the northern part of Wellesley ; Indian Rock, in Franklin ; Federal Hill, in Dedham ; and the ridge in the central part of Westwood, from which a commanding view of the surrounding country may be obtained. As a rule, the soil of hilly countries is not noted for its fertility, but much of the soil of Norfolk County is strong, especially the lowlands along the Charles and Neponset rivers, and is capable of producing good crops of grains and vegetables adapted to this latitude. The following description of the

"The meadows on Neponset River were so far cleared of trees and underwood that they produced grass. The inhabitants of Dedham, in the beginning of their settlement, hired those meadows of Israel Stoughton for a pasture for their young cattle. A tradition existed at an early period that the grass, called "fowl meadow,' which is superior to that of any other kind in the fresh water meadows, was first brought to the meadows in Dedham by a large flight of wild fowls, and that from thence the meadows and the grass received their names.

. . It is supposed that the Charles River meadows have gradually arisen from a broken, impenetrable swamp, covered with fallen trees, and the greatest part of the time covered with water, to their present state. The grass in many places has much improved in quality within the present recollection. A coat of peat, from three to four feet in depth, covers these meadows and may have been principally formed within two hundred years. The deep soil of the upland was covered with large trees, principally oak. . . . Wigwam and Purgatory swamps were dismal places. They were covered with a thick growth of cedars and hemlock. These, with much underwood, rendered these places almost impenetrable. Wigwam Swamp became the resort of wild beasts. It being near the village, the wolf howl was heard from it. To break up that den, it was made a condition of every grant of land, that the grantee should clear away the wood standing on a certain quantity of land in the swamp."

The Charles River - "The Winding Charles" - is the principal stream of Norfolk County. It crosses the western boundary near the northwest corner of the Town of Bellingham, and from that point follows a general northeasterly course until it empties its waters into Massachusetts Bay at Boston. From the northeast corner of Bellingham to the Middlesex County line it separates the towns of Medway and Millis from Franklin, Norfolk and Medfield ; then for some distance it marks the dividing line between Norfolk and Middlesex counties ; then, turning eastward, it divides the towns of Wellesley and Needham from Dover and Dedham. Near Dedham it makes an abrupt bend toward the northwest and forms part of the county boundary.

The Indians called this stream Quin-o-be-quin, which in the Massachusetts tongue means "Winding Water." The manner in which it received the name of "Charles River" is thus told in "A Short History of the First Settlement of Dedham," published in 1818, the authorship of which has been attributed to Rev. William Montague, rector of the Episcopal Church : "Eleven ships left England and brought into this then howling wilderness 2,200 emigrants, many of whom were of the best families, and even some from the minor branches of the nobility, with their governor and lieutenant-governor, and landed in May, 1630, on a peninsula, opposite which was another, a river emptying into the head of the Massachusetts Bay running between them; which in honor of Charles I they called Charles River, and the peninsula on which they landed Charlestown."

Next in importance is the Neponset River, which is formed by the junction of several small streams in the southern part of the county. Like the Charles, its general course is northeast. It forms the boundary between Canton and Milton on the east and Norwood, Westwood and Dedham on the west. In its lower reaches it marks the dividing line between Norfolk and Suffolk counties. Through East Brook and an artificial channel called "Mother Brook," part of the waters of the Charles River are drained into the Neponset. A history of Mother Brook is given in the chapter on Internal Improvements.

Weymouth Fore River is formed in the Town of Braintree by the junction of the Monatiquot and Cochato rivers. It flows in a northeasterly direction, separating the towns of Quincy and Weymouth, and empties into Massachusetts Bay.

Weymouth Back River drains some of the ponds in the Town of Weymouth. It forms part of the boundary line between the towns of Weymouth and Hingham and falls into the Massachusetts Bay a short distance east of the Weymouth Fore River. Its principal tributary is the Old Swamp River.

In the southern part of the county there are a number of small streams that flow in a southerly direction, their waters finally reaching the Narragansett Bay. The most important of these watercourses are the Salisbury, Billings and Furnace brooks and the Peters River. In the southwestern part of the Town of Randolph is the summit of the watershed between the Massachusetts and Narragansett bays, on an elevation about one hundred and thirty-five feet above high water mark at Weymouth Landing.

Tributary to the Charles River are a number of streams, Mill River, Stop River, Boggastow, Mine, Noanets and Shepard's brooks being the most important. Every part of the county is well watered and along many of the creeks and rivers are beautiful springs of clear, cold water.

Geology

Although America is called the New World, geologists believe that it is really older than most parts of Europe. Dana divides geologic time into four great ages - the Azoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic. These are subdivided into nine periods, and these into a number of eras. The oldest known rocks are the Huronian, so-called by Sir William Logan, because first noticed by him in the vicinity of Lake Huron, though the Huronian limestone, the best example of the formation, is the least abundant of the bed rocks of New England. At the beginning of the Cambrian period, the oldest of the Paleozoic age, mountain masses of granite extended across Massachusetts from northeast to southwest. As granite is generally conceded to be one of the oldest of the igneous rocks, i. e., rocks whose constituent parts have been crystallized from a highly heated condition, Massachusetts was no doubt "dry land" at a time when many parts of the Old World were still under water. Neither the Huronian rocks nor granite contain fossils, indicating that they formed part of the earth's surface before there was. any organic life on this planet.

Granite is an unstratified rock composed of quartz, feldspar and mica. In the Norfolk County granite the feldspar is of the orthoclase variety, a silicate of aluminum and potassium, commonly called "potash feldspar." Granite varies from coarse crystalline masses, in which the crystals are sometimes an inch or more in length, to a fine granular rock called "felsite." It is one of the most abundant and widespread of the igneous rocks. In the United States it is quarried chiefly in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Delaware and Georgia. In 1913, the last year for which reliable figures are available, the State of Massachusetts produced granite valued at $4,096,372. There is also a variety of granite called "syenite," in which the mica is replaced by hornblende. It is so named from Syene (now Assuan) on the River Nile in Egypt, where it was first discovered.

Throughout the world, in almost every granite producing section, there are found also rocks to which geologists have given the names of amygdaloid, diorite and diabase, all of which are to be found in Norfolk County. Amygdaloid is an igneous rock containing numerous oval or spherical inclosures, different in texture from the body of the rock itself. Lava thrown out by volcanoes is one of the best examples of amygdaloid. Diorite and diabase are plutonic rocks usually composed mainly of hornblende and a species of feldspar. Amygdaloid, diorite and diabase are often included in the general term of "trap rock," heavy, compact in structure, and used in macadamizing roads or for railroad ballast. Diorite is sometimes called "greenstone."

In 1875 William O. Crosby began a study of the rocks in the vicinity of Boston, including Norfolk County, and the result of his investigations was published by the Boston Society of Natural History in 1880. The granite area he describes as consisting of about two hundred square miles in the southern part of Norfolk and the northern part of Plymouth County. The best known quarry in this field is the one at Ouincy, which was opened in 1825 by Gridley Bryant, of Scituate, at the instigation of the Bunker Hill Monument Association. It afterward became known as the "Bunker Hill Quarry." Now the value of Ouincy granite is well known all over the United States, and some of it has been shipped to other countries.

In the towns of Dover and Medfield Mr. Crosby found small patches of Paleozoic rocks "exhibiting local transitions toward granite and diorite." These rocks, greenish or grayish in hue. compact in texture and very hard, are a species of felsite which Mr. Crosby classified as petrosilex. Farther southeast he noted a larger area, extending into what is now the Town of Westwood, in which the rock was more perfectly crystallized. In this field is the quarry from which was taken the stone for the Norfolk County court-house, St. Paul's Episcopal Church and the Memorial Hall at Dedham.

Mr. Crosby also found a considerable area of this petrosilex in the central and southern parts of the Town of Needham, where the color was gray or greenish white, with numerous small crystals or grains of transparent quartz, giving the stone the appearance of porphyry. In the northern part of Needham he noticed a reddish brown, compact stone resembling quartz in its texture. Only a few outcrops of this stone were observed in Needham, but just south of the Boston & Albany Railroad, near the village of Wellesley, the deposits were larger and the character of the rocks better defined. Similar deposits were seen in the Blue Hill region in the Town of Milton.

Upon the elevation known as "Rattlesnake Hill," in the southeastern part of the Town of Sharon, and on Moose Hill in the western part of the same town, the rocks are chiefly of syenite. In the eastern part, near the Randolph Town line, there are some beds of granite of excellent quality that have been quarried

Devonian Rocks

The Devonian rocks of the Paleozoic age rest upon the Silurian formations and are among the oldest of the fossil bearing rocks. Mr. Crosby, in speaking of the rocks of this period, says they ''occur only in limited basins or depressions excavated in the ancient crystalline formations." One of these basins, which he calls the ',Narragansett," extends from Newport, Rhode Island, through Bristol and Plymouth counties in Massachusetts. Near the line between the two states this basin divides, a narrow branch of it running northeast into the Town of Braintree, where it terminates in a bed of Paradoxides, a stone resembling the Upper Cambrian formation, from which it can be best distinguished by the large fossils of the trilobite variety.

Some years before Mr. Crosby made his study of the rocks about Boston, W. W. Dodge, of the Boston Society of Natural History, made a geologic reconnaissance in the eastern part of Norfolk County. He noticed the Paradoxides bed above mentioned, particularly the slate deposits connected with it. Says he: "The slate along the Monatiquot River in Braintree is like that of the Paradoxides bed and similarly related to granite, and these two areas are continuous under the bed of the Weymouth Fore River. On the west side of that river, at the first bend north of Weymouth Landing, the slate is greenish gray or brown, tinged with purple. West of the railroad the slate is exposed immediately north of the granite, and is almost identical with that along the Monatiquot River and at Hayward's Creek. The slate at Mill Cove is continuous across the Weymouth Back River with that in the northern part of Hingham."

Mr. Crosby mentions what he calls an "island of slate" in the Blue Hill granite deposits in the Town of Milton, near the boundary between Milton and Quincy. The slate formation extends to the Randolph turnpike, where it ends in several ledges of a gray argillaceous rock, similar to the Paradoxides bed in Braintree, but containing more iron pyrites. Just how these slate beds became intermingled with the Devonian rocks furnishes food for theory and speculation on the part of the geologists.

The bed rocks in the Town of Weymouth are very old, ranging from the Cambrian to the Devonian periods of the Paleozoic age. The rocks underlying a large portion of the town are closely allied to the granite beds in Quincy, though less perfectly crystallized and broken here and there by wide seams of amygdaloid and the slate formations referred to above. Some of the veins of slate here are rich in iron pyrites and contain fine crystals of quartz.

The Shawmut Group

According to Crosby, the principal constituents of what he calls the Shawmut Group are breccia and amygdaloid. The breccia of this group is a conglomerate composed of angular fragments of the older rocks. Mr. Crosby noticed outcrops of this group in Dedham and Milton, the breccia appearing on the west side of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, and the amygdaloid

In the Town of Brookline the Shawmut amygdaloid resembles felsite, though it is not so hard and contains more or less quartz and crystals of feldspar. Some geologists have given this stone the name of "graywacke," commonly called "plum-pudding stone," on account of the numerous oval or rounded nodules of some other mineral found in it. Both the breccia and the amygdaloid of the Shawmut Group belong to the trap rock species. The Shawmut basin extends irregularly from the Blue Hill region on the south to the porphyry hills in the vicinity of Lynn and Maiden on the north.

The Glacial Epoch

About the close of the Tertiary period of Cenozoic time came the Pleistocene or "Ice Age," when practically all of British North America, New England, the Central States as far west as the Missouri Valley and south to the vicinity of St. Louis, Missouri, were covered by a vast mass of ice called a glacier. This sheet of ice was formed by successive falls of snow, each adding its weight to the mass until the whole was compressed into a solid body. How long ago the Ice Age began, or how long the great ice sheet remained upon the surface of the country, can only be conjectured. Then came a geologic change. The temperature rose, the glacier began to melt and the huge body of ice moved slowly southward, carrying with it soil, rocks, etc., and depositing them in the form of "glacial drift" upon the bed rocks of more southern latitudes. The hard substances that gradually settled to the bottom of the glacier left scratches, called "striae," upon the bed rocks, and from these geologists have been able to determine with tolerable accuracy the course taken by the glacier.

Many of the bed rocks of Norfolk County are striated, thus bearing evidence that they were once beneath the great glacier. This is especially true of the Town of Weymouth, where the exposed ledges show the striae plainly; and along the Weymouth Back River the sharp linear hills, called "horsebacks" or "kames," mark the terminal moraine or ridge where the last of the ice melted. The debris carried by the glacier was deposited upon the bed rocks in the form of drift, as above stated. The constant grinding reduced many of the rocks to a fine powder, and these disintegrated rocks form the soil of a large part of the New England States. Many of the ponds and lakes are of glacial origin, the water from the melting ice settling into the depressions in the drift.