Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 4.

“[p. 78] which the State takes its name. A whole mountain for a playground—only think of it!” But in 1864, the year he came to live in Medford, another site, richer and more varied in its wild pictures and with a larger promise of a future forest, revealed itself in the old five mile woods or Middlesex Fells, and though at no period of his crowded life harder pressed for time, with God's command in every breath-giving tree, and the cry of breath-starved children in every by-way of Boston, to neglect this fresh call was not in him. That rocky, rambling ground, good for nothing but woods, seemed to him the “predestined gift of nature,” and he had no sooner made himself master of its natural boundaries and resources than he began exhibiting it to others and in 1869 urged its claims to be secured before a committee of the city council specially appointed in behalf of a park or parks for Boston. The paper he read was one which bears the name he had given his Fells, “Mt. Andrew Park.” The outcome of the meeting which was held in December was the passage of a law in 1870 which allowed land to be taken by the city for its park or parks within or near the city limits; but unfortunately this bill had in its Section 17 a proviso by which it couldn't take effect without a two-thirds vote of the city's legal voters,—it was to have been a majority vote, but a grudging amendment raised it,—and as according to the city records, out of 15,149 legal voters only 5,916 wanted a park or to have others have one, the law was killed. Boston, in vulgar phrase, “had cut her nose off to spite her face.”

Mr. Wright, whose hope was for lungs,—large oxygen exhaling Fells and Blue Hills lungs,—wrote of this action April 26, 186: “The well guarded park bill of last year, which submitted the whole problem of the future beauty and grandeur of our city to a competent and impartial commission, was defeated in the interest of projectors who have manifest private ends to serve. Everybody has private ends; and the public is not ”