I'm walking around Charlestown on a beautiful day, after a lovely date, waiting for a fun dinner to celebrate Angel's birthday. My mood is much improved from yesterday's doldrums, especially after my latest find here in City Square park.
I walked over here along the Freedom Trail from Winthrop Park, which was also beautiful in the afternoon warmth. City Square is the historic heart of Charlestown; information panels along the park paths tell me all of the original buildings and the square itself were destroyed by fire during the Battle of Bunker Hill, and now the site has been preserved as a park (after some interesting community battles to get a bunch of highway overpasses taken down that formerly loomed over the square ... this is pre-Big Dig). In the most recent renovations of the 90s to create the new park, archaeologists found remains of one of the key old buildings, the Great House/Three Cranes Tavern. Park designers integrated the original foundation stones with a concrete path to outline the bounds of the original great house, the later tavern expansion, and an adjoining house that shared the north wall of the building. It's hard to capture the awesomeness of this exhibit with my little phone camera, but I tried above.
This plaque tells a little about the history of the use of the building, but there's a much more extensive explanation on the information panels.
They also have indications of where various parts of the building were located - the hearth, kitchen, front and back doors, wine cellar. For some reason, this one where you walk from the entry room to the tavern's main room is my favorite; I can imagine myself walking into this little space with wood frame and masonry and tables of revolutionary dudes drinking beer. It's a tiny room, though - I can see why they needed an addition!
In addition to the foundation stones, they found post holes from the structural timbers. So totally fascinating; I would have loved to be there to see the archaeologists digging this out the first time.
This family is standing at one of the corners of the Long family house, which was joined to the Great Housed and shared a rear door/entry. It's also pretty tiny, even if it was multi-story; folks obviously lived much smaller and tighter, which we could learn from in this age of enormous everything, but especially land use. Also, I wanted to show that other family as proof that I'm not the only one who geeks out over these things. :-)
275 year old foundations, in the middle of a park on a gorgeous breezy summer Sunday. How can anyone not love living here?
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