Cow-Tunnels

Cows usually travel by groups in fields. Unlike subways, trains, and automobiles, they would not seem to need tunnels. But one has been found.

Along with one subway station, a lavatory, and an imminent city parking lot, the subterranean section of Boston Common also seems to contain a cow-tunnel. The Paulist Fathers have been building a new Information Center on Park Street. To do this they had to tear down an old building. In the sub-basement of the old building they found eight stalls. There was at first some question about whether the stalls had held cows or witches. (Several witches were hanged at the nearby Old Granary Burying Ground). In recent weeks the digging has uncovered a number of large cisterns and a brick thing that looks like a tunnel, and the cow theory seems to have won.

Like most tunnels, the Common cow-tunnel is covered at the top. But it is also unique in having been covered at both ends for many years--ever since the cows left Boston Common. And that is a curious story.

Before the cows' departure from Boston Common--when it was still about the best grazing ground in town--the residents of Boston, most of whom had cows, used to bring them so that they (the cows) might enjoy the Common's superior grass. The grass was so good that cows used to come from far away. This is the way Boston's streets were laid out.

But the luckier cows who lived nearer the Common didn't need to travel overland. The good grass made them so fat and valuable to their wily purtanical owners that they lived in the stalls in owners' own houses.

For some time the Boston amateur historians have suspected that there is, indeed, a network of tunnels burrowing under the Common. These have all been blocked off for so many years that everybody had forgotten about them. But the new discovery has created a stir of renewed cow-tunnel interest among Boston-folk. Lots of people are coming to see. Since a new building will soon be on top of the cow-tunnel, and an underground city parking lot will soon be beneath it, there is not much time left. The address is 4-5-6 Park Street.