1850 Lincoln / Bufford Unrealized Plan of the Boston Public Garden

A curious and impressive large-scale work for the proud Bostonian, this is Ezra Lincoln's unrealized 1850 plan for the Boston Public Garden, published by John Henry Bufford. Part of a wider effort to develop the newly filled in 'Neck Lands' connecting Boston to Roxbury, Lincoln's plan was held up by long-standing and incessant disputes which were finally resolved in the late 1850s.

A Closer Look

Oriented towards the west-southwest, Lincoln's plan proposed the separation of the land into lots and streets around a central parkway 75 feet wide. Such real estate would surely have commanded a premium, and fit within wider schemes to develop reclaimed land in and around the Back Bay into housing for the city's affluent. But Lincoln's plan was not to be; after intense and prolonged debate (see below), the Joint Committee on Public Lands, in the same report which contained the map, determined that the land could not be sold without the approval of the city's voters. The voters rejected the proposal and the land was conclusively set aside as a Public Garden.

Unstable Land

The history of the Public Garden is closely connected with that of Boston Common, though the question of whether it was of the same character as the Common or whether the land on the southern end of the Common that became the Public Garden could be sold was debated for decades prior to the creation of this map. The Public Garden is also similar to the neighboring Back Bay in that much of it was previously mudflats which were filled in during the late 18th and 19th centuries.

In the late 18th century, the site of the Public Garden was used as a ropewalk after a 1794 fire destroyed many existing ropewalks in the city. Afterwards, land was filled in using gravel removed from Mount Vernon and it significantly increased in value. The ropemakers planned to sell the land off for development, but faced strong public opposition. In 1824, the city purchased land back from the ropemakers and finally, in 1837, the Public Garden was established. However, legal disputes (not resolved until 1856) over the character and use of the land continued, hampering any plans for its use. Some in the city government still wanted to develop the land as housing, while others believed it to be public land that ought to be improved as a proper park.

As a result of these debates, initially much of the Public Garden was open grassland, like the Common, rather than a garden in the sense of a cultivated, planned landscape. This changed once the legal disputes were resolved, and in 1859 the Committee on the Common and Public Squares approved a new plan that included planned walkways, a pond, and an iron fence perimeter, closely resembling the Public Garden as it remains today.

Publication History and Census

This plan was drawn by civil engineer Ezra Lincoln and published in 1850 by John Henry Bufford for the Report of the Joint Committee on Public Lands in relation to the Public Garden, July, 1850. It is independently cataloged among the holdings of the Boston Public Library, the Boston Athenaeum, the Wisconsin Historical Society, the New York Public Library, Yale University, and Harvard University, while the entire report is more widely distributed.