oys were able to leap from the
foam of the South Bay to the spray of the waters of the Charles
River--was widened. Suffolk Street, which was one of the first
highways west of Washington Street to be made into hard ground, was
named Shawmut Avenue. About the middle of the nineteenth century,
much land was reclaimed from the salt mud and marshes and made ready
for the pile-driver, mason, and builder. Two splendid districts, the
first called the "South End," and the second the "Back Bay," were
created. Where, in the Revolutionary War, British frigates lay at
anchor, are now Beacon Street and Commonwealth and Massachusetts
Avenues. Where the redcoats stepped into their boats for
disembarkation at the foot of Bunker Hill, stretch the lovely Public
Gardens. The streets running east and west in the new districts,
beginning with Dover and ending with Lenox, are named after towns in
the Bay State. About midway among these, as to order and distance, are
Brookline and Canton Streets.

[Footnote 1: Other good authorities interpret
Shawmut as meaning "living waters."]

On a chance space of hard soil around Canton and Dedham Streets, in
this marshy region, a suburban village of frame houses had gathered,
and here a Sunday school was started as early as 1836. In January,
1842, a weekly prayer-meeting began at the house of Mr. Samuel C.
Wilkins. On November 20, 1845, a church was formed, with fifty
members. In the newly filled up land, the pile-driver was already
busy in planting forests of full-grown trees head downward. All around
were rising blocks of elegant houses, with promise of imposing civic
and ecclesiastical edifices of various kinds. In the wider streets
were gardens, parks, or ample strips of flower-beds. This was the land
of promise, and into it pressed married couples by the hundreds,
creating lovely homes, rearing families, and making this the choicest
part of the young city. For, though "Boston town" is as old as Mother
Goose's rhymes, the municipality of Boston was, in 1852, but thirty
years old. The congregation of Christian people which, on April 14,
1849, took the name, as parish, of The Shawmut Congregational Society,
and, as a church, one month later, the name of the Shawmut
Congregational Church, occupied as a meeting-house first a hall, then
a frame building, and finally a handsome edifice of brick, which was
dedicated on the 18th of November, 1852. This building is now