Needham History: Gravel Quarries and the Murphy Tragedy

Gravel was valuable, but digging it was dangerous.

Gravel Quarries and the Murphy Tragedy

It is axiomatic that early photography in the mid-19th century was a slow and rigid process. Equipment was finicky and unwieldy. Exposures were long – often longer than a minute or two. People sitting for portraits often needed to be braced to stay still enough; their dour, wide-eyed expression is an indication of how hard it was to not move and not blink for the duration of the shot. Sometimes the results were comical, as when a dog or child who could not keep still shows up as two-headed because the camera captured the movement as their head turned.

By the later 19th century, photographic technology had advanced, and cameras became more manageable. Although outdoor photography was possible early on (just ask Matthew Brady), it was less common than studio work. At the History Center, we have numerous studio portraits that date to the 1850s or 1860s, but outdoor photos of Needham prior to 1870 are more rare.

After 1880, however, outdoor photography became more common. There were several photo studios in Needham, and the History Center has a good collection of Needham images from 1880 and after. Most are set pieces – views of the downtown buildings, sometimes with the proprietors standing on their doorsteps; views of houses, locomotives, schools. Views of events are rarer before 1900, because the scene and motion were harder to control.

That’s what makes this photo so notable. At first glance, it is nothing more than the face of a gravel quarry. But in reality, it is the scene of a tragedy.

This photo is unusual because it records an unexpected event – not scheduled, not staged, and not planned. The scene shows the side of a gravel quarry, the layers of stones clearly showing on the slope. At the base of the slope is a wrecked cart. This photo records an accident on October 7, 1898 that claimed the life of quarryman Patrick Murphy. Murphy was employed by the town, digging in “Hewett’s Pit,” one of the town’s gravel quarries. He and his cart fell into the pit when the loose ground at the pit’s edge collapsed under them.

Patrick Joseph Murphy was born in Ireland in 1868. The town Directories in the 1890s list him as a “teamster” living on Garden Street; he paid the poll tax but did not own property. He was just under 31 years old when he died, leaving a wife and several young children. Because he was working for the town, Needham settled the “Murphy Case” by paying his widow about $350 per year to support her family; the payments continued until 1910 and totaled about $4000.

Hewett’s gravel pit was located near Upper Falls, in the area between the train tracks and Central Avenue, in the general area of Crawford and River Park Streets. The town purchased the quarry in 1892, and extracted gravel there until 1913, when they sold the land to Edward Daly and Leonard Vara.

Because gravel is loose, quarrying it was dangerous work. In the early days, men would climb along the slope of the quarry wall, loosening the gravel with poles. The loose scree would slide down the slope to be collected by steam shovels and loaded into wagons or freight cars for transport. Neither the banks of the quarry nor the ground surface at the edges were solid, and rock slips were common. Although later operations relied more on machinery than poles, the ground was still unstable and prone to collapse.

Nevertheless, gravel was a valuable resource in the 19th century, and Needham was fortunate to sit along a significant range of gravel beds. Gravel beds are basically heaps of loose stones, collected by glacial movement and sorted by water into layers. They are usually found along river beds, and Needham’s long Charles River frontage supplied it in abundance. Our gravel beds were famously the source of fill for the Back Bay (1850s-1880s), but even after the Back Bay was filled, Needham’s gravel beds were quarried for local land-filling projects, road-building, and other uses. The town owned several large gravel beds, purchased from about 1800 through the turn of the 20th century.

In the mid-19th century, during the period of the Back Bay Fill, most of the gravel quarries in Needham were privately-owned (most of them by the company carrying out the fill project). As the project wound down, Needham began to buy up the quarry sites. Gravel was used for landfill and road building. It was even used for sidewalks – “In towns like Needham, of large area but of small population, the gravel sidewalk, which is cheaper to build than concrete and, when properly constructed is pleasant to the eye and dry to the feet and makes a very serviceable and durable sidewalk” (Needham Selectmen’s Report, 1903). By the 1940s, however, the town had sold off most of the quarry sites to commercial operators. After 1950 most of the gravel beds became part of the new Route 128 roadway (pre-excavated land!) and by 1953 there were no more gravel-quarrying operations in Needham.

Gloria Polizzotti Greis is the Executive Director of the Needham History Center & Museum. For more information, please see their website at www.needhamhistory.org.