So far, all she has been able to dig up is a bit of speculation. “I started e-mailing everyone I knew who knew a lot about the park.” “It ignited this desire to want to solve the mystery,” she said. Oeser examined the details of the Instagram shot, and that’s when she began to notice the similarities to the stone in the old photo.Ĭould it be the fountain, a relic of time consumed by the park? She took a photograph with her phone and went about her business.Ī few weeks later, while scanning pictures on Instagram, she found a post by a user named The photo showed the same stone structure poking from the earth. Then, in February, while out for a walk in Franklin Park with a group of friends, she happened upon the tip of a stone arch, rising just above the ground. “I had looked, and looked, and looked and I couldn’t find it anywhere.” “People have offered different versions and have said it’s overgrown, or it’s still there,” she said. Oeser has even gone out in search of remnants of the fountain and asked those familiar with the park’s history about its exact location. “So I comb through really old photos and the history of the park, and I have always wondered about this fountain.” I’m what they call an ‘Olmstedian’ - someone who loves Olmsted,” she said. “I have this crazy love of and fascination with Franklin Park. She had come across the photograph of the little girl more than once in her research. Kate Sosin Oeser, a spokeswoman for the conservancy, has long been intrigued by what happened to the fountain, an echo of the past in the park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. If it were still around today, it would be impossible to miss.īut a recent revelation by an employee with the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, which helps maintain the park, has sparked questions about whether the fountain is perhaps still there, buried beneath the earth but for a small lip of stone. The “fountain in blasted rock,” as it’s labeled in the image, is massive. In the black-and-white photograph dated 1893, a young girl stands near a cavernous drinking fountain in Franklin Park, leaves and branches spilling around it as she reaches for a cup of water.Ĭourtesy of the National Park Service, Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site The article appeared in the Jedition of the Boston Globe and is used with permission.
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