Most of this information is duplicated in the notes for the map of Cambridge. I’m repeating it all here for the sake of visitors who are following just the Cambridge Farms/Lexington part of the story.
The map above represents my idea of what was included in Cambridge Farms both before and after it became the town of Lexington. I got invaluable help from John C. MacLean’s excellent history of the town of Lincoln (A Rich Harvest, 1996). Since that town was put together from pieces of three older towns—Concord, Weston (originally part of Watertown), and Lexington (originally part of Cambridge)—MacLean’s research led him to study the original boundaries of all those places, and the maps he made shed light on some geographical mysteries that were otherwise dark to me.
Nevertheless, maps drawn more than three centuries after the fact have to involve a certain amount of speculation. Whatever of this quality may underlie MacLean’s maps, I have certainly added my own share. I feel fairly sure that this map gives a good general idea of the relevant 17th-century borders, but I’m also sure that I must have gotten it wrong here and there.
The background of this map (including one version with town lines and one without) comes from OLIVER, a mapping tool provided on the Web by the Massachusetts Office of Geographic Information (abbreviated MassGIS—the S is for Services). If you’d like to investigate this tool for yourself, Google “MassGIS”—the URL is too long to quote here.
The geographical features on this map are of course those of today, not the 17th century. The most obvious one that didn't exist back then is the large body of water below the southern end of the eight-mile line. In the 1600s it was a humble stream called Hobbs’ Brook, but it’s now the Cambridge Reservoir, created in the late 19th century by excavation and damming. As you’ve probably already noticed, the runways of Hanscom Field Airport (upper left) are also anachronistic. (They don't show on the Cambridge map, but this one is enlarged a bit more).
The map above represents my idea of what was included in Cambridge Farms both before and after it became the town of Lexington. I got invaluable help from John C. MacLean’s excellent history of the town of Lincoln (A Rich Harvest, 1996). Since that town was put together from pieces of three older towns—Concord, Weston (originally part of Watertown), and Lexington (originally part of Cambridge)—MacLean’s research led him to study the original boundaries of all those places, and the maps he made shed light on some geographical mysteries that were otherwise dark to me.
Nevertheless, maps drawn more than three centuries after the fact have to involve a certain amount of speculation. Whatever of this quality may underlie MacLean’s maps, I have certainly added my own share. I feel fairly sure that this map gives a good general idea of the relevant 17th-century borders, but I’m also sure that I must have gotten it wrong here and there.
The background of this map (including one version with town lines and one without) comes from OLIVER, a mapping tool provided on the Web by the Massachusetts Office of Geographic Information (abbreviated MassGIS—the S is for Services). If you’d like to investigate this tool for yourself, Google “MassGIS”—the URL is too long to quote here.
The geographical features on this map are of course those of today, not the 17th century. The most obvious one that didn't exist back then is the large body of water below the southern end of the eight-mile line. In the 1600s it was a humble stream called Hobbs’ Brook, but it’s now the Cambridge Reservoir, created in the late 19th century by excavation and damming. As you’ve probably already noticed, the runways of Hanscom Field Airport (upper left) are also anachronistic. (They don't show on the Cambridge map, but this one is enlarged a bit more).
Click the map to display the version with modern town lines, and you can see that Lexington’s boundaries today are only slightly different from what they were in 1691.
The map of Cambridge’s outline shown on another page includes the Shawsheen grant, a big chunk of territory that separated from Cambridge as the town of Billerica in 1655. To complete the separation, a boundary had to be drawn from the northeast corner of ancient Concord to the southwest corner of ancient Woburn at “the pine in Cambridge” (a location that’s now the southwest corner of Burlington). A straight continuation of the Concord line would have missed that target. Instead of connecting the corners with a straight line, the surveyors drew a shallow zigzag line to get there, perhaps trying to avoid crossing property lines or perhaps to achieve an equitable division of good land between the towns.
Of Lexington’s boundary changes since 1691, the most obvious is the incorporation of what was once the town’s southwest corner (along with larger parts of Concord and Weston) into the town of Lincoln, incorporated in 1754. Josiah Parker, one of Lexington’s town assessors at the time, calculated that his town lost nearly one eleventh of its territory in that transfer.
The other change (or changes) along the Woburn line, are smaller but more mysterious. The obvious “tab” at the southeast corner of Burlington was the property of the Locke family, who, when Burlington separated from Woburn, decided that they'd rather belong to Lexington, a wish that was granted in the final arrangement. But the rest of the line between Woburn and Lexington seems to reflect a feeling that the boundary line was somewhat north of where it is on the map. It may have been drawn this way in order to include property whose owners had always thought was in Cambridge Farms or Lexington, when in fact at least part of it was on the Woburn side of the line.
The map of Cambridge’s outline shown on another page includes the Shawsheen grant, a big chunk of territory that separated from Cambridge as the town of Billerica in 1655. To complete the separation, a boundary had to be drawn from the northeast corner of ancient Concord to the southwest corner of ancient Woburn at “the pine in Cambridge” (a location that’s now the southwest corner of Burlington). A straight continuation of the Concord line would have missed that target. Instead of connecting the corners with a straight line, the surveyors drew a shallow zigzag line to get there, perhaps trying to avoid crossing property lines or perhaps to achieve an equitable division of good land between the towns.
Of Lexington’s boundary changes since 1691, the most obvious is the incorporation of what was once the town’s southwest corner (along with larger parts of Concord and Weston) into the town of Lincoln, incorporated in 1754. Josiah Parker, one of Lexington’s town assessors at the time, calculated that his town lost nearly one eleventh of its territory in that transfer.
The other change (or changes) along the Woburn line, are smaller but more mysterious. The obvious “tab” at the southeast corner of Burlington was the property of the Locke family, who, when Burlington separated from Woburn, decided that they'd rather belong to Lexington, a wish that was granted in the final arrangement. But the rest of the line between Woburn and Lexington seems to reflect a feeling that the boundary line was somewhat north of where it is on the map. It may have been drawn this way in order to include property whose owners had always thought was in Cambridge Farms or Lexington, when in fact at least part of it was on the Woburn side of the line.
