The Committee appointed to make a survey of Charlestown streets, 1767, and to assert the town's rights where encroachments had been made reported that, ‘There is a fishing place at Menotomy bridge, South Side, which appears to belong to the Town, but Mr. Dickson has put up a fence and enclosed the most of it.’ That the land belonged to the town is no doubt correct, but its right to take fish there was denied by the County Court in 1681 as appears in the records of the court:—‘The selectmen of Cambridge, plaintiffs against Capt. Lawrence Hammond and John Cutler, jun., defendants, do humbly declare as followeth, &c. In the year 1634 the General Court granted them liberty to erect a ware upon Minottomy river, and they accordingly so did, and have had quiet possession of the same from that time until now, without any disturbance of their neighbors of Charlestown or any other; and hath been in a manner the stay and support of the town by fishing their Indian corn, which is the principal part of their husbandry and liveliehood. The defendants have both violently and contemptuously proceeded to obstruct the passage of the fish to the wares, which they so long possessed as above said, to their great damage and loss of two hundred thousand fish, which we judge will be a hundred pounds damage to the town in their crop, and tending to the inevitable impoverishing of divers poor families.’
Paige says—writing in 1877, “The practice of ‘fishing their Indian corn’ was long ago abandoned by cultivators in Cambridge; but the privilege of taking fish in Menotomy river remains valuable.”
Some arrangement was perhaps made whereby Charlestown might take fish below the Cambridge weir. In 1842, when Somerville was set off from Charlestown, Lorenzo W. Dow, Jesse Simpson and George W. Hayes were appointed
