Why Massachusetts Is Sitting On The Most Valuable Land In Human History

Forget the foliage montage. What's actually here is a piece of crust that arrived from another hemisphere, got welded onto North America in a continental collision, and was then scraped bare and rearranged by a mile of ice. The ice left a sandbar where a state shouldn't have one, a harbour full of drowned hills, a bank offshore that still feeds whales, fields so full of stones that the greatest agricultural product was rocks — and a line of waterfalls that ran the first factories in America. The rock itself has almost nothing in it worth digging. That turned out not to matter. 25 facts, counting down. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 A pile of things the ice put down 0:52 25. Boston is standing on Avalonia 1:38 24. The Berkshires are roots, not mountains 2:14 23. Marble in the hills 2:43 22. America's first railroad hauled rock 3:26 21. Cape Cod has no bedrock 4:10 20. Which means it's temporary 4:54 19. Walden Pond is a hole left by ice 5:30 18. The drowned drumlins of Boston Harbor 6:14 17. Why the Puritans stopped here 6:47 16. A sixth of Boston didn't exist 7:31 15. The timber under the Back Bay 8:06 14. Stellwagen Bank and the whales 8:40 13. Georges Bank 9:12 12. The Sacred Cod 9:51 11. 240,000 miles of stone wall 10:28 A question for people who live there 11:25 10. Industrial espionage, from memory 12:06 9. They built a city for it 12:40 8. Holyoke, the Paper City 13:17 7. The man who exported winter to India 13:57 6. New Bedford and the whale oil 14:39 5. Salem and the pepper trade 15:13 4. The shoe machine 15:47 3. Cranberries, courtesy of buried ice 16:20 2. When the value left the ground 17:09 1. One accident — and the number that isn't a guess 18:56 Final thoughts 📍 COVERED Avalonia terrane • Berkshire marble • Quincy granite & the Granite Railway • Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket • Billingsgate Island • Walden Pond • Boston Harbor drumlins • Back Bay fill • Stellwagen & Georges Bank • Lowell, Waltham & Holyoke • Frederic Tudor • New Bedford • Salem & Derby