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Waltham, MA → Boston, MA 31.9 mi (51.3 km) |
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The Ivy League awaits, everyone!
As you may know, the Ivy League is a group of eight elite New England schools, seven of which were founded before the Revolution! They’re super exclusive, full of legends, secret societies, and of course, history! So to fill the hours between checking out of my AirBNB and catching the flight home, I’m going to wander the most recognizable of these centers of higher learning: Harvard University in Cambridge!
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I started off on the “Yahd,” by Matthews Hall, a dormitory for some of the just under 3% of applicants who get admitted to this prestigious school each year. In fact, in 2023, over 36,000 aspiring Pilgrims applied to Harvard, and just over 1,000 were accepted! As a beaver with no formal education, I felt out of my element and wondered if I should have visited MIT instead, where they have Tim the Beaver. BUT, this beaver is not here to enroll, only to explore!
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Across the Old Yard was University Hall, designed by Charles Bulfinch and built in 1815. The famous architect donated his skills to pay for his son, Thomas’, education, and Thomas Bulfinch would famously become a scholar of world mythology (i.e. three volumes of Bulfinch’s Mythology)! Out front of Harvard’s only stone building sat its own myth, a statue of John Harvard by Daniel Chester French of Minute Man Statue and Lincoln Memorial fame. It’s known as the statue of three lies! The first is small: the pedestal says the school was founded in 1638, but it was actually 1636 (nevertheless, this is America’s oldest institute of higher learning). The second is that John Harvard was a benefactor, not the founder; the college was founded by the Massachusetts colonial legislature to ensure they had literate clergy! Lastly, and most importantly, this isn’t John Harvard at all! He never sat for a painting, so we have no idea what he really looked like! The model for this statue was a student believed to be descended from an early Harvard president!
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And oh, for the mythical appeal of the Harvard library system! I paused out in front of the beaux-arts Widener Library, built in 1915 in memory of Harvard alum, Harry Widener, who drowned in the Titanic disaster three years earlier. The school’s flagship library, it was built by the firm of Harry Trumbauer with major contribution by Chief Designer and renowned Black architect, Julian Abele. Today, it’s home to 50 miles of shelves and over three million volumes, including a super rare Gutenberg Bible! Oof, I could spend years here, but first, tea time!
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With an MBTA station just outside campus, I paused my campus wanderings and hopped on the southbound Red Line for six stops, almost right back to where I’d been wandering the Freedom Trail yesterday, only much, much sunnier. No trip to Boston would be complete without an immersive Tea Party experience, and I could think of no better place for it than the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum!
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Unlike a lot of places I visit, this museum is not on the actual site of the Boston Tea Party, but it is Boston’s Official Tea Party Site since 1972. That’s because the original 1773 site of the Boston Tea Party doesn’t exist anymore! Griffin’s Wharf, where the ships were moored, was obliterated by landfill in the 1800s, its exact location lost to the ages! So today, this museum is as close and official as can be, and it ended up being so much more than I expected!
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As you’ll remember from yesterday, the Seven Years’ War of 1756 to 1763 had left the British empire in heavy debt, and Parliament decided that the American colonies would help them foot the bill through taxes on everything from paper to glass to—thanks to the 1767 Townshend Revenue Act—tea! See, the Brits used tea as a tool of empire from the beginning, even pushing the importance of “masala chai” on their Indian colonies to build new markets. Having established tea as an essential part of the daily schedule, they could then raise the prices as much as they liked. After all, tea didn’t grow in North America! But it all backfired the night of December 16, 1773 with a raid on three British tea ships: the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and—wouldn’t you know it?—the Beaver!
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And whoa! This museum lets you taste the Revolution! They had five historic teas available for sampling: three black (Bohea, Congou, and Souchong) and two green (Singlo and Hyson). There were 340 chests of it on board, most of it Bohea from the Wuyi Mountains south of Shanghai, and all of it past its prime, having sat in British warehouses for 2-3 years before making the Atlantic crossing! Talk about adding insult to injury!
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The clock struck 10, and it was time for the first tour group to funnel in. A fellow dressed as Samuel Adams passed out character cards to everyone, as though we were Sons of Liberty gathering in the Old South Meetinghouse on the night of December 16, 1773. I got the part of Thomas Chase, a distiller and co-owner of Chase and Speakman’s Distillery. He’d been one of the Loyall Nine, the predecessors of the Sons of Liberty who’d gotten their start organizing angry mobs against Stamp Act enforcers. It didn’t seem like we’d be mobbing anyone today, especially since no one was disguised as members of the Mohawk tribe, but as soon as the talking was done, we headed for the ships!
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Two replica ships were docked on either side of the museum, and they directed us to the Eleanor, which was a lot smaller than I expected for a ship that could cross the Atlantic! The docent toured everyone above and below deck then invited anyone who fancied it to hoist some packets of “tea” overboard! These were, of course, tied to ropes and easily retrieved, but back in 1773, these 340 chests of tea were meant to sink to Davy Jones’ Locker! Only they didn’t sink! The chests floated, and for weeks afterward, the Sons of Liberty would have to take small boats out onto the harbor, which now smelled very much like tea, and beat the floating crates until they sank! Inside the museum is the only known surviving crate from the original Boston Tea Party! Called the Robinson Chest, it was passed down casually through generations of descendants of John Robinson, who found it washed ashore at Dorchester Heights the morning after the dumping!
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Speaking of inside, the museum was super impressive! No photos were allowed, but suffice it to say they made the most of history and technology! There were oil paintings of Sam Adams and Governor John Gage that came to life and argued with each other! There were holographs of two women, a Tory and a Patriot, debating British tax policy! And then there was a full movie recounting the events of Lexington and Concord, which brought this Revolutionary experience to a close, sending me out through the extraordinary gift shop and back to the Red Line for a boomerang trip back to Harvard!
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I came back to see two renowned museums, starting with the Harvard Museum of Natural History! Only open since 1998, it’s a combination of three different campus research centers: the Herbaria, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the Mineralogical & Geological Museum! And it came highly recommended by a bunch of folks for its specimens!
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First off, this tiny peek into the Herbaria was astounding! They had dried specimens, like this bristle thistle, that had been collected by Henry David Thoreau himself at Walden Pond! Their exhibit talked about how valuable his specimens have been at studying the effects of climate change. With changes in temperature and rainfall, about 30% of the hundreds of plant species collected by Mr. Thoreau have gone locally extinct in Concord, even in undeveloped areas.
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From the shores of Walden Pond to New England at large, plants were very well represented here! I was particularly interested in the tasty-looking tree specimens, spanning maples, hemlocks, cherries, and birches! This region is a unique crossroads (crossroots?) of northern conifers and southern deciduous trees. All in all, this Herbaria houses more than five million plant specimens, making it the largest university-owned herbarium and one of the largest of any category in the world!
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Even more massive is the Museum of Comparative Zoology with over 21 million specimens of fossilized and taxidermied critters! I decided to avoid the latter, because I think I’d get queasy staring at a stuffed beaver. A South American glyptodont, however, was just the ticket! During the Cenozoic, South America was separated from North America, so mammals developed differently there: carnivorous marsupials, giant ground sloths, and of course, the huge, armadillo-like glyptodonts, all of which went extinct after the North and South American continents intersected and the North American critters flooded into the south!
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The next room was full of even more fossils, plus one that can still be found swimming the seas off Madagascar and Indonesia: the coelacanth! These amazing fish are almost unchanged from their fossilized ancestors, which predated the dinosaurs by at least 150 million years! Only two species are known to exist today, but there used to be at least 125 of them. And wouldn’t you know it, they’re surprisingly more closely related to land animals than most modern fishes!
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But don’t you worry, plenty of land reptiles were represented here, like those paragons of the Permian, Eryops, Edaphosaurus, and Dimetrodon! Some of these fossils were collected by Alfred Romer, who was the Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology from 1946 until 1961! His area of expertise, where he shed the most light on the fossil records, was in Permian vertebrates. He literally wrote the book on it (Vertebrate Paleontology)! Thanks to him, we have clear categories and families of the critters that swam and scurried long before dinosaurs were dinosaurs!
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Dr. Romer was also responsible for wiping the dust off the most complete skeleton of a Kronosaurus queenslandicus ever found! Brought from Australia in 1932, the blocks couldn’t be prepared because of budget constraints. It wasn’t until Dr. Romer told philanthropist, Godfrey Cabot, about the mothballed sea monster that checks were written and work got kraken, er, cracking on restoring this leviathan! There was some controversy, though, because the reconstruction work might have used too many vertebrae, putting this fierce predator of the sea anywhere between 9 and 12 meters in length. Either way, Kronosaurus was one sea beast to avoid on a prehistoric snorkeling tour!
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I very quickly breezed past the halls of taxidermy, which were very impressive in their own right, but I focused instead on the Mineralogical and Geological Museum, which was founded in 1784, making it the nation’s oldest! It’s home to 600 different meteorites, a thousand gemstones, and of course, a sampling of monumental gypsum crystals from the Maravilla Lead Mine in Naica, Mexico! That place has been on my wishlist for ages, but I’ll probably never go, because inside the cave, it’s pushing 150°F with nearly a hundred percent humidity! Better to enjoy this smidgen with air conditioning!
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And then I was circling around the back of the museum into the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology! These two museums share the same 1877 building, but the Peabody, funded by George Peabody, has been here for over a century longer! The goal of this museum was to make the budding field of anthropology more professional, amassing one of the most important collections of human history in the world!
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The first exhibit I explored was anything but ancient, but very close to home for the school. It was a special showing called Resetting the Table, which laid out the meal enjoyed by the Class of 1913 as they finished their freshman year. All-male and mostly white, they enjoyed fine halibut and roast filet with champagne in the years before 65% of them went off to fight in World War I. This exhibit examined each dish, where each ingredient came from, and how many hands got to work between growth and plate!
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And then I spotted something familiar in this exhibit, talking about the Gullah-Geechee communities I’d encountered in South Carolina and Georgia! In particular, these folks had been rice farmers in Africa, stolen away by the slave trade for their special skills in raising Oryza glaberrima, a hardy type of rice that made up 10% of all British exports from the Americas. But unlike other groups who were enslaved in what became the USA, the Gullah-Geechee folks held on to some of their language and traditions, which can still be encountered in the Lowcountry today!
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The top level of the museum was a special exhibit based around Harvard’s participation in the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago! There, Museum Director Frederic Putnam teamed up with Franz Boas to introduce the world to their brand new study of anthropology, built on with some solid principles and some that, shall we say, didn’t age well!
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Early anthropology hyper focused on collection of artifacts from ancient civilizations! It was an evidence-based approach to building a natural history of humanity, rather than the literary-religious style of education at the time! This massive scavenger hunt launched the “Museum Age” which saw widespread collection from 1875 until 1920. In contrast to European archeology of Greek and Egyptian civilization, American anthropology focused on studying the ancient civilizations of its own hemisphere, like the Hopewell Culture, though their methods emphasized that these were all primitive and disappearing folks. In the background of the photo, you can see the models of two “standard” human bodies against which more “exotic” folks were compared during the Exposition.
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But anthropology alone wasn’t enough to get visitors to the museums! There had to be spectacles, and what more spectacular oddity could there be than the Feejee Mermaid?! There are over 15 Feejee Mermaids in the US, and this one was donated to the Peabody Museum in 1897, supposedly after P.T. Barnum tried his hand at exhibiting the part-fish, part-monkey, mostly papier-mâché creature in his freak show! It made its way into the Peabody collection as a donation from Moses Kimball of the Boston Museum when that museum closed in a fire!
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And then I headed downstairs, where the whole hall was filled with plaster casts of Mesoamerican pillars, made in the 1800s. The Peabody Museum has over 800 plaster casts from archaeological sites in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, and this exhibit highlighted how plaster preserves information that can later be lost to erosion, theft, or vandalism. In some ways, the details preserved in plaster have been clearer than the original stone!
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One more level down, I entered the Hall of the North American Indian, where I encountered some very familiar faces, upon faces, of Tlingit totem poles and even a mask of Dzonokwa, who’s associated with Bigfoot! The whole bottom level of the Peabody is dedicated to the different tribes of North America, and their collection is shifting! See, the original idea of Frederic Putnam was to collect at any cost, but only since November 16, 1990, with the passing of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, has that cost gotten widespread attention. Today, the Peabody Museum is practicing Ethical Stewardship, allowing different tribes to reclaim the belongings—and sometimes the body parts—of their ancestors. The goal is for the museum to only display items that have been given freely, and as of June 1, 2023, the Peabody has repatriated 4,309 ancestral remains and more than 10,000 funerary items!
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For instance, their Penobscot canoe was purchased in 1912 from actual, willing Penobscot, Francis Sebattis. The design of these birch bark canoes became very influential among naturalists and outdoorsy folks, like the Boy Scouts, and folks who hired Penobscot guides often bought a canoe after their adventures were done.
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And then I stumbled upon a tiny tribute to California’s tribes! This one didn’t have much in the way of artifacts, but it did talk about the impact of California’s 21 Spanish missions and how geography allowed some tribes, like the Hupa, Yurok, and Karok, to hold onto more of their traditional language and practices! In short, it came down to gold: where it could be found, who was living on top of it, and how to force, bribe, or swindle them off of it!
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There was an exhibit on Diné (Navajo) weaving from 1650 to the present, but at its center was a super impressive (and enormous) rod-coiled Western Apache olla basket! These have been made for ages by coiling willow or cottonwood branches and weaving in intricate designs with red yucca root or black devil’s claw!
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And then, I concluded my circuit of the Hall of the North American Indian with a special exhibit on the Sioux called Wiyohpiyata (West). In it was a ledger book that the Lakota took from a gold prospector in the late 1860s and drew in it all the way until the Battle of the Little Bighorn! But the real treat for me was seeing the war club, tobacco bag, and arm ornaments of Sitting Bull himself! With even Sitting Bull’s final resting place being a mystery, it’s hard to know how these items would fit in with repatriation, but at least, on a very small scale, folks are starting to respect what Sitting Bull fought for, one item at a time.
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Speaking of time, I better get moving. I’ve got a plane to catch at 6:15, and with traffic lines getting redder and redder, that’s a flight I don’t want to miss. What an amazing week this has been, seeing legendary places I’d long wondered about and all-new places I’d never even thought about, plus all the unexpected ways they tie together! In fact, this may have been the most history-packed adventure I’ve taken to date! It’s kind of crazy looking down the road at what’s next, but I think, after all this breakneck adventuring, it’ll be nice to have an easier, breezier pace.
Bye bye, Beantown!
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Total Ground Covered: 860.7 mi (1,385.2 km) |
More 2023 Adventures |