Old Powder House tour docent Mary Mangan welcomed and informed visitors to the site last Saturday.

By Bella Levavi

Public parks serve many purposes. They can be a place for public gatherings, for jazz concerts, public theater, food festivals, quarries, pickle fermentation, grain mills, gunpowder storage, WPA projects made out of old train stations, and parking pass offices. Well, not all parks, but Powderhouse Park has a unique history that has been used for all of these and more throughout its tenure in Somerville. 

The Somerville Museum, in partnership with the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission, gives free docent tours July through October on various Thursdays and Saturdays in Prospect Hill Tower, Old Powder House, and Milk Row Cemetery. I had the pleasure of attending the first docent tour of the season last Saturday at the Old Powder House.

As I sat on a bench, I watched as an unusual theater troupe gathered on the green warming up to practice Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then a woman in Victorian garb, wearing a KN95 mask, and holding a basket filled with historical books and some sort of animal horn walked past me. I knew she was the person who I was going to spend my Saturday morning with.

I quickly learned that Mary Mangan was her name. She grew up in Lowell, Massachusetts, and received this volunteer job while working as a park ranger in Lowell. While she participates in many reenactments, and clearly has a knack for history, she was originally a scientist. She had sewn together her entire outfit from scratch, and was very proud of the bonnet which she just finished making during the pandemic.

A half hour before her show began, Mangan showed me around the park. Powderhouse Park has a spiral walking path with bronze statues every 100 feet commemorating its history. She pointed out bronze sheep to remember when the park used to be a farm, a bronze turtle giving a land acknowledgment, and a bronze pick and axe commemorating when the land was used as a quarry. All of these artifacts were leading up to the main story she was excited about, the 1774 Powder Alarm.

“This was the Colonial gunpowder storage facility. One day General Gage decided it was not a good idea to have the powder outside of Boston. He sent troops out to get the powder,” Mangan explained to Kathy and Jeff Tappert, a couple from Kenosha, Wisconsin visiting their son who were the first people to happen upon the Saturday docent tour. “The colonists in the countryside heard fake news that terrible things had happened here. In reality, the men had a key, it was their powder,” Mangan continued. “The general takes his powder back and goes away, but the folks in the countryside come streaming into the city. After that, the colonists realized they had a terrible communication system, so they set up horses and riders after this.”

Next, Mathew Pasch, a five-year Somerville resident who works outside the city as a mechanical engineer, wandered up to the tower sipping an iced coffee. Mangan jumped at the opportunity to tell him the story, and gave him the same spiel as he slowly took airpods out of his ears.

Before she told the story over and over again to passersby, we waited for a man from the Somerville Public Works. He had the key to unlock the tower so park attendees could see inside, a special privilege that only happens during these docent tours. When he finally came, he pushed the door hard because two years-worth of dust and dirt lined the floors. The docent tours did not take place last summer due to the pandemic.

“Echo echo,” two children yell while running in circles in the tower. One runs out and tells us. “This tower used to hold pickles! I read it in a book,” she explains to us. Before she came, Mangan told me that children in Somerville schools all get an education of the many uses of the tower, and love to tell her what happened there. She then runs through the field with her arms stretched out, “I’m flying.” Her younger sister several paces behind goes next, “I’m flying.”

People notice that Mangan draws parallels to current national politics when she talks about the 1774 Powder Alarm. “There are a number of things you want to contextualize for people, and I think fake news is one thing that people do recognize.”

Local politics was also discussed by tour attendees. Eli Gerzon, a two-year Somerville resident and landscaper/social media consultant, exclaimed, “They had better public transportation back then, than we do now,” when Mangan explained that the park house building was built from the stones of a train station that was destroyed in the 1930s. Gerzon went on to express their excitement about the socialist candidates for City Council, and a need to have local plants at the base of the oak trees around the park.

As I left the park at 11:00 a.m., it was filled with dogs, hammockers, and groups of friends sitting on blankets enjoying the good weather. While walking away, Mangan was in the middle of explaining the history of the tower when a fire truck with horns blasting went by on the street and she stopped her story to let the alarms subside. “That’s what you get at an urban park,” she said.

More information on the docent tours in Somerville’s parks can be found on the city website: https://www.somervillema.gov/departments/parks-and-recreation.