Newstead Montegrade: The truth comes out

Here's another great thing about Boston: The reference desk at the BPL. You ask them a question, and they answer it. When the whole Newstead Montegrade issue exploded into the news a couple weeks back (oh, OK, here and there, anyway), I submitted an e-mail query to the reference desk. Just got back an answer from one of the librarians, Mary Devine, who basically says:

There is no such place, never was. There was once an estate called Newstead and another one called Monteglade (not "Montegrade"); the city bought them and other estates in the 1870s to create West Roxbury (now Franklin) Park (but not without controversy; seems the city didn't think the estates were worth as much as their owner did).

The websites that listed Newstead Montegrade as a city take information from other websites (i.e. data-mined them), such as MapQuest, to create generic pages. Unfortunately, that causes inaccurate websites and leads people to inaccurate information.

Ed. note: You mean, like this? You can read Devine's entire note (which includes more history and links to resources) here. The BPL reference librarians rule.