Chestnut Hill Does Not Exist...or does it???
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We cover the lost history of a town that was never a town but was planned to be. It's not a ghost town, you can still go there: Chestnut Hill. People may imagine it is a distinct town but it is made of pieces of several other cities. How? Listen to the podcast. The Lee family acquired over 160 acres of what many people considered to be remote, rural, dusty, swampy land on the Newton-Brookline border. Part of that land would be transferred to Roxbury. The Lee's would develop the land, bringing families in, clearing it, building roads and houses and then renaming the area "Chestnut Hill". Their goal was to create a new community but Boston's ambitions made that just a dream as the suburbs tightened their borders in response.
"Named by Francis Lee, who built the first country house in the area in the 1850's, Chestnut Hill is in three different towns"(brooklinehistoricalsociety.org)
"That still doesn’t explain the Brookline-shaped gap in Boston’s present-day silhouette, though. Between 1868 and 1870, Boston tripled its size by annexing first Roxbury and then Dorchester, promising new infrastructure and development. In 1873, it grew larger still, absorbing Brighton, Charlestown, and West Roxbury. Brookline, however, would later vote against joining Boston, putting a stop to the city’s inland expansion until it annexed Hyde Park in 1912."(realestate.boston.com)
"The western part of the City of Roxbury split off to form the Town of West Roxbury in 1851. It survived on its own until 1874, when it was annexed to Boston along with Brighton and Charlestown." (guides.bpl.org)
A history of the Chestnut Hill Chapel; being an address delivered at the dinner held on October sixteenth, nineteen hundred and thirty-six to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Chapel (archive.org)
Col. Francis Lee Gravesite
Crescent Ridge Dairy Bar (crescentridgedairybar.com)
Temulent
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Sound Effects From Zapsplat (zapsplat.com)
Music Courtesy of Free Music Archive (freemusicarchive.org)
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