Another waterfall close to Boston is the Cascade at the Commonwealth’s Beaver Brook Reservation along the Belmont-Waltham line.
Beaver Brook flows from Lexington through Belmont and Waltham to the Charles River. In the middle part, it runs through the Beaver Brook Reservation, where after coursing over dams at a pair of mill ponds, the brook skitters across rocky ledge and down a waterfall maybe 6 feet tall. In summer, ducks and dragonflies dot the ponds, but on a visit during our recent freeze, the ponds were frozen over and the dams and waterfall coursed through towers of glittering ice.
Beaver Brook is said to have been named by Governor John Winthrop when he led a group exploring the Charles River and up a tributary brook in 1631 and ’32. Because the brook, they found, had a lot of beaver dams.
Land near the waterfall was sold in 1662 to construct a wool mill there. Plympton’s textile mill, which burned in 1849, and Kendall’s flower mill operated there in the 19th century. The industry is now long gone.
The 59-acre Beaver Brook Reservation in Belmont and Waltham became Massachusetts’ first state park when it was established in 1893 as part of an effort to preserve a stand of old white oaks known as the Waverly Oaks, which had attracted picnickers and painters and poets and reunions of Civil War veterans. The ponds and waterfall are in the upper part of the park, north of Trapelo Road. The Waverly Oaks were in the lower part of the park, south of Trapelo (which today offers a spray park that’s great for kids in warm weather).
“The trees now number 25 and are what remain of a vast number of these noble trees that, even within the remembrance of men now living, occupied many of the ridges and valleys in the vicinity of the reservation,” The Boston Globe reported in 1905.
One that fell in the 19th century was counted by the poet James Russell Lowell to have more than 750 rings. But many of the surrounding oaks were cut down for shipbuilding, and by 1905 the remaining oaks were struggling. Though several were more than 75 feet tall, and the largest one had a trunk 18 feet and 7 1/2 inches around, they suffered from dead branches and patch hollows. A 1921 photo shows the oaks stately tall with twisting branches—and Beaver Brook in the background. The last of the famous Waverly Oaks died in the 1920s—though one large oak still grown there is believed to be one of their offspring.
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