The Jewel on Newburyport’s Crown

A Jewel in Newburyport’s Crown: Bartlet Mall 

by Susan C.S. Edwards 

Bartlet Mall has long been a significant jewel in Newburyport’s crown. The large green common at the top of the town served as a grazing place and watering hole for sheep in the 1630s when European settlers first arrived in Newbury. The pond at the bottom of the kettle hole was named Frog Pond by these settlers. 

Commerce began to play a part in the eighteenth century with the erection of a windmill in 1703 on the southeasterly end of the land. By the mid century, John Crocker received permission to operate a rope walk along the mall. A long building housing machinery to wind rope from hemp, it stretched along High Street. In the 1770s, the green was leveled and used as a training ground for colonial militia, After the rope walk was torn down, Nathaniel Tracy was responsible for planting shade trees along the site in 1779, and by 1796 a schoolhouse had been built at the south end. 

Detail from a plan by Joseph Chaplin, 1800. Museum of Old Newbury collections 

The land underwent a significant alteration in 1800 when Edmund Bartlet gave $1,400 to fill in an “unsightly gully” and subsequently created a promenade where Crocker’s ropewalk had been. For his efforts and generosity, the park was named Bartlet Mall. Four years after Bartlet made his gift, the townspeople authorized building a new courthouse, and a stately structure designed by Boston architect Charles Bulfinch was completed in 1805. 

Today, however, we are focusing on the conversion of the Mall to a park and pleasure ground and the individuals who were responsible for this transformation of the landscape. Fast forward to 1887 when the Mall Improvement Association was founded.  

Charles Eliot (1859-1897) Photo courtesy of The Trustees of Reservations 

One of the first acts of the Association was to seek advice from landscape architect Charles Eliot. Eliot, born in 1859, came from a patrician Boston family and his great-grandmother was Catharine Atkins of Newburyport. After graduation from Harvard, Eliot apprenticed to Frederick Law Olmsted, and in 1885, at Olmsted’s suggestion, he traveled and studied in Europe before returning to Boston in 1886 and establishing his own practice at 9 Park Street. Eliot’s association with the Mall Improvement Association and the Bartlet Mall was among his first commissions as a sole practitioner. 

In October of 1887 he begins a letter to the Association as follows: 

Gentlemen: 

You are determined that your ancient Common shall be made more useful and attractive than it ever has yet been as a promenade for the grown folks of your City and as a playground for the children of the schools. At the request of Mr. Currier I submit a suggestive or preliminary plan for the improvement of the Common — the plan being directed towards fulfilling the two ends just mentioned — without proposing any such radical changes of surface or outline as would involve large expense. Let me describe my plan part by part. 

Charles Eliot’s 1887 Plan for the Old Common, Newburyport. The letters on the plan correspond to those areas described in Charles Eliot’s letter to the Mall Improvement Association. Museum of Old Newbury collections 

In an eight page letter in his rolling script (now in the collections of the Museum of Old Newbury) Eliot goes on to describe his recommendations for the scope of work. His general scheme was to provide adequate “broadwalks” along High Street with strips of grass and rows of trees that would be trimmed high to provide a pleasant vista, and a less wide broadwalk on Pond Street. He advises broadening the gravel beach by filling part of the lowest shores and providing an adequate number of flights of steps down the steep banks, and two sloping approaches to the beach, one a footpath, the other a driveway. Repair and protections of the grass banks was an important concern as well as planting out the rear wall of the Courthouse with large shrubs and climbers. Eliot describes the rear wall as “a very ugly thing from many points of view.” The changes involved a good deal of gravel cutting and filling, and re-grading of considerable areas, some with loam and some with gravel. The plan was accepted and slightly modified in 1888. By 1890 much of the work had been completed, and the Mall Improvement Association was dissolved during the summer. By fall a City Improvement Society had been organized. 

This was the end of Eliot’s direct association with the Bartlet Mall. By 1893, he had become a full partner with the Olmsted Brothers, forming the firm of Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot, in which he had a brilliant but short career in landscape architecture and town planning. By 1897, at the age of 37, he died of spinal meningitis. 

Eliot’s legacy, however, has lived on. In 1914 Boston landscape architect Arthur Shurtleff was called in to advise on Mall improvements. In January of that year he sent the first of several letters regarding proposed improvements to the Mall: 

Arthur Shurtleff’s Plan of the Old Common, Newburyport, 1914. Museum of Old Newbury collections 

I send you under separate cover … a print of a plan for the Newburyport Common, which I have incorporated from the original plan for this ground by the late Charles Eliot… . I have tried faithfully to follow Mr. Eliot’s original lead and have departed from it only where modern conditions seem to require changes. In some parts of the Common Mr. Eliot’s plan has not been carried out, notably at the broad walk. 

Shurtleff goes on, in much the same way as Eliot, to recommend planting out the basement of the Courthouse, and, At each end of the Court House in the space between the walls and the steps plant Japanese Barberry to prevent children from running along these slopes and wearing away the ground. … Japanese Barberry is inexpensive, will endure moderate hardship and its thorns will remind children of the neighborhood of the unwisdom of further destruction of these stair margins. 

He advises that additional stairways, as proposed in Eliot’s plan, be rebuilt, that concrete seats should replace failing wooden ones, and that a drinking fountain be installed. He closes by saying, 

I am taking the liberty of sending a copy of this report and plan to President Eliot, as he will be glad no doubt to learn that the plan which was prepared by his son so many years ago is still good and has proven by a lapse of time to be well conceived. 

In making modifications in it, I feel a great hesitancy, as I told you, as Mr. Eliot was a prophetic planner. 

Hand-tinted photograph of the Bartlet Mall. Photo by Bob Watts, Museum of Old Newbury collections 

Again, in 1935 Arthur Shurcliff (as he was then known) was involved briefly in the specifications of flights of stairs at the Mall but by then he was immersed in the restoration and recreation of the gardens, landscape, and town planning of Colonial Williamsburg, a decades long project. 

Arthur Shurcliff. Photo courtesy of Massachusetts Historical Society. 

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