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image Map of Historical Sites

Historic sites on and around Nobscot Hill

This page is dedicated to the memory of Lee Swanson, who led me and many others to each of these sites - many times.

Tantamous's cave - closed by an earthquake in the early 1700s. Tantamous, a medicine man called Old Jethro by the colonists, He lived with his family on Nobscot Hill at the beginning of King Philip's War in 1674. The cave was collapsed by an earthquake in 1755 according to Lee Swanson. The flat rock about the cave, sometimes referred to as Jethro's Table or the Tantamount Lookout has a great view of downtown Boston.

General John Nixon's Homestead was on the northern slope of Nobscot. The cellar hole is still visible. Nixon was born in Framingham in 1727 and led the Sudbury militia to the battle of Concord as Captain and to Bunker Hill as Colonel before being promoted to Brigadier General. Thee is a book about his military career.

Smallpox Burial Ground - featuring the cellar holes of the "pest house" and six grave sites.

Grinding Stone - "It's the mortar and you would bring your own pestle," said Swanson as he stopped at a large Native American grinding stone. "All of our grinding stones in Sudbury have a seat, and we don't know why. This was a great area for growing corn, and we still find hillocks where corn was planted along with squash and beans."

Tippling Rock - very nice view of the Sudbury Valley and Boston in the distance.

Ford's Folly - not shown, further to the west. It is a dam in the middle of the woods that does not hold water. It was built by Henry Ford when he owned the Wayside Inn

 

The Frankenmap to the left was created from the 1928 Boy Scouts Map, the Sudbury Town Map with the contour and stone wall layers turned on. The hi-res version appears in the book: Historical Maps of Sudbury

The website nobscot.org has more on Nobscot History and the early inhabitants, the Eaton Family and Noah's old foundation in the woods.

The Boy Scouts drew up plans for many cabins. The original drawing was in 1928. The camp was owned by NORUMBEGA COUNCIL INC, which was reorganized into the Knox Trail Council, in honor of the trail of the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Dorchester Heights. The British evacuated Boston immediately. Now the camp is owned by the Mayflower Council. The Town of Sudbury owns a conservation restriction on the Sudbury portion.

Thirty Rod Road   Thirty Rod Road runs north/south below Tippling Rock in the 2021 map of the Boy Scouts' Nobscot Reservation. A rod was a unit of measure equal to 16.5 feet, which means the road was 495 feet or 165 yards wide. It is described in Hudson's History of Sudbury.

See Also: Tippling Rock
Preserving Nobscot's History cached: NobscotHistory.pdf

2021-07-10 jch.com/tipplingrock/NobscotHistory.html     YON - Jan C. Hardenbergh