Monday, July 2, 2007

Looking for Ava Gardner: part 2

It's not common knowledge these days, but Ocean Bluff, Massachusetts, was originally founded by a group of Quakers who designed the town to be a memorial to every Massachusetts Indian tribe which had been wiped out by the Pilgrims. The original street map (which was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1941) contained over two hundred Indian tribal names, from Pequod to Wampanoag, but once the Ocean Bluff population began to grow, the town council started renaming streets after themselves, as town councils have been doing since the beginning of time (or at least the beginning of towns), and now there are only seven Indian street names left:














Ironically enough, the single street name that was not the name of a tribe, but the catch-all name of every tribe's destroyer, is the one name that was never changed. Whether this proves that the Ocean Bluff Town Council had no sense of history, or a highly developed sense of humor, is a question that only future historians can answer.


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