Boston's South Shore

9781889833774

1889833770

Boston's South Shore is bracketed by two of the oldest settlements in North America: Plymouth to the south, where the Pilgrims landed in 1620, and of course Boston to the north, where the Puritans began building their "city on a hill" a few years later. And there's a whole lot of history in between, as well. As Amy Whorf McGuiggan writes in her foreword to this beautiful portfolio of South Shore images, "The history of our nation-from first footings to Revolutionary War to clipper ships to immigration-is recorded in the annals of South Shore towns. It is a place, still, of ancient Native American names and charming monikers that recall gentler times. It is a place of manicured town greens with whitewashed bandstands, Fourth of July parades, New England-style town meetings, stately old meeting houses and clapboarded Cape Cod and colonial houses surrounded by picket fences. It is a place of wandering roads fashioned from the old byways that had been cow paths, a place where it is easy to imagine how things looked a century ago. It is a place of natural beauty: beaches and harbor islands, pine forests, pristine lakes and cranberry bogs." The South Shore does not have the rocky, storm-tossed coast of Boston's North Shore nor did it have, until recently, the social cachet (some might say snobbery) of the opposite coast. But in Greg Derr's images, collected over two decades of covering the area and its people for the region's leading newspaper, the South Shore is clearly a collection of fascinating communities, each of them unique, with a common heritage to treasure.