Park sinkhole turns out to be old well
Well, well, well.
It turns out that the mysterious, deep sinkhole that formed over the weekend in Dorchester’s Ronan Park came from the cave-in of an old well, City Archeologist Joe Bagley told reporters who assembled near the round opening Thursday morning.
The 2.5-foot-wide hole yawned open on Sunday, and appeared unusual, as it’s basically a clean tube down to unseeable depths, which apparently are about 16 feet.
Bagley’s understanding is that the bottom 6-or-so feet are this old well, which is partially filled in and likely was much deeper. Then on top of that is about 10 feet of landfill, which the city added a century ago as it smoothed out the steep hill of the park.
Bagley and company utilized the ancient archaeological technique of hitting record on an iPhone, taping it to a paint roller, tying a string around that and lowering it down the hole with some flashlights. During the phone’s Jules Verneian voyage, the video shows what appears to be a soda bottle at the bottom.
“Fortunately, nobody’s down there,” Bagley said.
Bagley said he hit the books this week, trying to figure out whose well this was. The conclusion he came to is that it almost certainly had something to do with one Mary Pierce, who owned a house nearby. A 1871 deed selling part of her land says she needs access to an existing well there for the next year until she can build her own, so it’s either that well, which was built in 1818, or the one she made to replace it on her own land.
“The well would have likely been abandoned sometime in the 1870s to 1890s when this area received running water from Boston Water and Sewer,” the archeologist said.
There were likely thousands of such wells around Boston, he said, though most were filled in. Bagley noted that the Big Dig turned up many such wells.
This well even ended up with a social-media presence, as someone created a Twitter account for it, posting messages from the “Dorchester Sinkhole” perspective. The account tweeted quips like “I’d rather be a Dorchester sinkhole than a northshore sinkhole! Who’s with me?”
Bagley said of events like the discovery of the sinkhole/well, “We kind of accept the history of Boston as being everywhere but also not part of our daily lives. And so when something like this turns up, it’s kind of shining a light on the story that may have been lost or unrepresented in the history of this neighborhood.”