Welcome to the Jungle Traditional Cache
Dr.MORO: Domo!!!
By the City of Cambridge, Gold Mothers Park is completely closed off with fencing and is off limits due to newly found soil contamination, very unfortunately.
No timetable has been given yet of how soon the mitigation efforts will begin nor of how long it will take. Yet, it’s obvious that it’s a major deal to completely change out the top soil of this large park area. I will be monitoring the situation and progress, and will provide updates periodically. Let’s hope that the city will move quickly and reopen this great park as soon as possible, so this geocache can come back online.
(posted by Geocaching app)
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This easy nanocache takes the cacher to a significant site in East Cambridge's history.
(cache adopted 2014/07/01)
Although now populated by a hockey rink, little leaguers, and hipsters playing kickball on its fields, Gore Park (technically Gold Star Mothers Park) was once the site of J.P. Squire & Company, an extensive pork slaughtering and packaging plant that was East Cambridge's largest employer, and the third largest business of its kind in the country. When the plant was founded in the mid-19th century, Boston was too densely settled for a noxious industry to operate safely in; by contrast, East Cambridge was less populated and spacious, and the plant was situated next to the now filled-in Miller's River, an "ideal" waste disposal site. At its heyday in the 1890s, the sprawling complex occupied 22 acres off of Gore Street, and employed a thousand workers, many of them Irish immigrants eager to work ten hour days in dangerous conditions to receive $1.25 at days' end.
A contemporary newspaper account recorded how every day, over 120 carloads of hogs from Chicago and points west arrived by train, where the unbelievable amount of 2,500 hogs were slaughtered per day. The carcasses were butchered, cooled, cured, smoked, salted, or pickled depending on the project, and the process expectedly yielded copious amounts of blood, skin, entrails and other waste products. When the right wind blew, many East Cambridge residents could whiff the "acrid smell" from the slaughterhouse.
J.P. Squire eventually became part of Chicago’s Swift and Company around 1915. The plant stopped operations in the mid-1950s, and was destroyed in a dramatic fire on Easter Sunday in 1963.
While the Cambridge Historical Commission once placed one of its blue oval historical markers on the site, it has since vanished. As you look for this cache, reflect on how this beautifully landscaped area has changed over the years.
Works Cited
Susan Maycock, East Cambridge (MIT Press 1988)
Sarah Boywer, All in the Same Boat: Twentieth Century Stories of East Cambridge (Puritan Press 2005)
Cambridge Historical Commission, Cambridge During the Revolution (1985)
John Harris, Historic Walks in Cambridge (Globe Pequot 1986)
Additional Hints
(Decrypt)
Ebbx gb Dhrra Ovfubc 4
Treasures
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