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One tea bale the British will never be able to tax

Floating tea bale

John Hanzl followed the progress of a tea bale that apparently escaped from the Tea Party Museum and managed to avoid the Gillette water-intake pump as it slowly floated down, down, down Fort Point Channel, all the way down to the little curvy bit that ends in South Boston.

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Comments

That little curvy bit was once the Roxbury Canal. I guess we can still call it that. But maybe it should get a new name, in keeping with the new geography. Widett's creek, to go with Widett Circle?

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Per Google Maps.

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No one seems to be able to figure out why Google calls it that. The only Bass River I know of in Massachusetts is on the Cape.

FWIW, this has come up on Uhub before.

If you go to mapjunction.com and pull up the 1776 Boston and Environs (Pelham) map that shows the harbor, you can see what South Bay looked like before we filled it in. That whole area was tidal flats but the area in question was always one of the channels that drained the flats. It seems unlikely that a channel in a tidal flat had a name. The stream that fed that channel from Roxbury appears to be the old Smelt Brook, now culverted underneath Washington Street between Fort Hill and Tommy's Rock, under Dudley, and presumably all the way to what I now choose to call Widett's Creek. The Smelt Brook is pretty well documented.

Ellis's History of Roxbury Town has a brief mention of something called "Bass Point" on page 82, but it's not clear what that point was.

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Haha!!!! Now THIS is why I appreciate UHub. Thank you, Gaffin!

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Someone make a children's book out of this.

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