Chelsea History, part 1 of 6. This week chelseamass.net revisits six chapters of the city’s past, checked against the original records.
Before there was a Tobin Bridge, a Silver Line or a Route 1, there was a rowboat. For almost three centuries the way from Chelsea to Boston was across the water, on the Winnisimmet Ferry.
Three pence a person
The ferry begins with one line in the records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. At the General Court held in Boston on May 18, 1631, Thomas Williams “hath undertaken to set up a ferry betwixt Winnisimmet and Charlestown,” at three pence a passenger, and four pence from Winnisimmet to Boston. Winnisimmet was the colonists’ name for what is now Chelsea, a point of land the founders of Boston could see from their own shore but could reach by land only after a long trip around through the towns to the north and west.
The Winnisimmet Ferry is often called the oldest ferry in the country. The same volume of colony records shows the court ordering a ferry between Boston and Charlestown a few pages earlier, so the safer claim is that it was one of the first, and that it lasted longer than almost any of them.
The franchise changed hands quickly. In 1634 the General Court granted “the ferry at Winnisimmet” to Samuel Maverick, the colony’s first settler on the Chelsea side, “to enjoy to him and his heirs and assigns forever.” The next year Richard Bellingham, later governor of the colony, bought the lands at Winnisimmet, and the ferry went with them.
Why Chelsea became a town
For a century Winnisimmet, Rumney Marsh and Pullen Point were part of Boston. The ferry was the reason that arrangement made sense, and the water was the reason it did not last. In January 1739 the General Court set the district off as a separate town. The act gives the residents’ reason: they “labour under great difficulties, by reason of their remoteness from the body of the said town, and separated by the river that renders their attendance on town meetings very difficult.” The new town was named Chelsea.
Steam
The boats were rowed and sailed for two hundred years. The change came in 1831, when the Winnisimmet Company, a group of investors who also bought the old farms that became the streets of downtown Chelsea, purchased the ferry franchise. Mellen Chamberlain’s 1908 history of the city tells what happened next. The company let the owners of two small steamers, the Tom Thumb and the Byron, land at the Chelsea slip. The old ferry keeper, a man named Fenno, called it an outrage and ordered his men to cut the steamers’ cables if they tied up to the posts “so long consecrate to legitimate ferry usage.” It made no difference. “It was like resisting fate,” Chamberlain wrote, “and so it was suffered.”
Steam ferries ran from the foot of Winnisimmet Street to Boston for most of the next century. The slip Chamberlain described was two plank runways about 200 feet long, sloping into the water so boats could land at any tide, and at low tide passengers walked down over a green and slimy surface to get aboard. A side-wheel steam ferry named Winnisimmet was chartered by the Union Army in August 1862 and bought by the Quartermaster Department in 1864, according to the standard dictionary of Civil War transports.
The last run
Bridges, the horse railway, the electric streetcar and the East Boston tunnel all made the trip to Boston faster by land, and the ferry made its last runs in January 1917, ending a service that began in 1631. The landing at the foot of Winnisimmet Street is long gone, but the name survives on the street, and the ridge where Maverick lived and the first boats landed is now Admirals Hill, the site of the former Naval Hospital.
The woodcut above, from the Bay State Monthly of February 1884, shows the Chelsea landing as it looked in the 1840s. For more photographs of the ferry slips and boats, see the site’s Winnisimmet Ferry archive page.
Next in the series: Lewis Latimer, the son of fugitives from slavery, born in Chelsea in 1848, who drew the telephone and improved the light bulb.