Boston Corner: Good borders don't guarantee good neighbors

“Good fences make good neighbors,� Robert Frost ventured in his 1914 verse.

The New England poet’s supposition makes sense to most of us. But if we expand on that idea, to suggest good boundaries make good state neighbors, doubts arise. At least, they do if you’ve read Mark Stein’s book “How the States Got Their Shapes� (Smithsonian Books, 2008). Stein visits each of the 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, and describes how their shapes — some remarkably rectangular, some as meandering as the lace on your mother’s crocheted antimacassar — came about.

Some state borders were arrived at in orderly fashion, some after drawn-out fights. Some were ordained by British or Spanish authorities. Some follow natural attributes, such as mountain ranges or rivers or oceans. Some protect financial investments. Some follow a circle of latitude, such as the 42nd or 46th parallels.

The book is a delightful armchair tour of America’s geography and political history. The author’s description of how the New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts juncture came about is a handy springboard for a brief venture into the past.

Connecticut obtained its own identity as a colony, Stein says, with the surveying in 1642 of a southern boundary line to Massachusetts.

“The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter described its southern border as a line due west from a point ‘three English miles to the southward of the southern-most part of the said Bay called Massachusetts.’� This was easier said than done, and there was a dispute for some years over the towns of Enfield, Somers, Suffield and Woodstock. The upshot in 1804 was the present boundary, with a jog around the Congamond Lakes.

Connecticut at the same time wrangled over its line with New York, made uncertain by Dutch claims and royal grants.

“The two colonies commissioned a boundary survey in 1683. The problem was providing New York with the agreed- upon 20-mile buffer east of the Hudson while at the same time preserving for Connecticut its town of Greenwich and Stamford. The solution turned out to be a panhandle. In compensation for lands ceded to Connecticut in the south, Connecticut gave up the sliver that became known as The Oblong. “It is this strip of land that accounts for the fact that Connecticut’s western border is not quite aligned with that of Massachusetts,� Stein writes.

Patroon’s claim

New York after another long session agreed on a border with Massachusetts. Patroon Robert Livingston’s claims to some 175,000 acres of land, including the present town of Mount Washington, Mass., drew out this negotiation.

The borders might have been permanent, except for some bad neighbors.

Specifically, those residing in the area that came to be known as Boston Corner took to horse thievery and other foolishness. Massachusetts authorities had no direct way to enter the land, at the toe slope of Mount Washington. It was accessible by road only from New York.

Stein errs slightly in calling the triangle of land “Boston Corners.� That term is in popular usage, certainly, as was, for a time, Boston Four Corners. But it is a single corner, ceded by the Bay State to New York as ratified by Congress in 1855.

“So New York did not snip off the corner of Massachusetts,� Stein writes. “Massachusetts snipped it off itself.�

From old records described in an article in the Berkshire Gleaner for Dec. 4, 1936, some 500 acres of this land went to men named Rollenback, Brazee, Race and Darby “as compensation for their loss of all the territory west of there, Ancram and Copake, N.Y., which they purchased from the Indians in 1757 and of which the proposed establishment of the state boundary would deprive them.�

Now part of Ancram, Boston Corner served as the junction for three railroads, the New York & Harlem, the Poughkeepsie & Eastern and the Central New England.

Lawless land

Fiction writers Clay Perry and John L.E. Pell had a lot of fun with Boston Corner in their novel “Hell’s Acres: A Historical Novel of the Wild East in the ’50s� (Lee Furman, 1938). That’s the 1850s they wrote of, a few years before Massachusetts trimmed its border.

Perry and Pell told the story of the fictional “Black Brant, piratical proprietor of the Black Grocery Tavern, patron of the Hillsdale Valley, of James Grayson, Chief of the Regulators, of Spike Brant, sport and racketeer of the time, of Irene, Queen of Jimmytown, once of Troy, of Jean Randall, transplanted Berkshire beauty, and her fugitive father, of prize fighters and horse thieves and their ilk....�

The novel is long out of print and hard to come by, but offers a vigorous story of rough times in the lands below Alandar Mountain and west of Mount Riga.

The writers — Perry had a long career crafting short stories for pulp fiction magazines, Pell became a scriptwriter for D.W. Griffith — knew of what they wrote. Perry, in fact, once got lost clambering through the woods in Boston Corner.

Perry reappeared after a day. “Returning from an unpremeditated overnight stay in the wilds of Tri-State Park near Boston Corners, Clay Perry, local novelist, said that his journey cost him no more than a lamed leg from a fall on slippery snow and an enormous appetite for food and desire for sleep,� The Berkshire Evening Eagle reported Feb. 22, 1938.

“‘Starting at the head of the Blow Hole in Boston Corner,’ Mr. Perry said, ‘I had a long trek through some of the wildest country in this section, interrupted by a night in a cabin where I applied the heat from a fireplace and massaged strained muscles, sleeping late the next morning from sheer fatigue. Then I found my way out at the base of Mt. Riga, in Salisbury, Conn., whence I was given a lift to Canaan and phoned my home last night.’�

His sojourn was not without benefit. “Mr. Perry says he found and explored a gorge which he believes is the one said to have been used by horse-thieves who spirited their booty across the State line from New York to Massachusetts in the 1850s.�

Boston Corner’s reputation grew with the notorious 37-round bare-fist boxing match between John Morrissey of Troy and James “Yankee� Sullivan of the Bowery in October 1853. The match was one of few, if any rules, and a riotous climax. It’s a wonder New York took the corner.