The meeting place of salt and fresh water, low hills, and tidal grasslands provided a favorable environment for Algonquian-speaking peoples to develop settlements. The Central Library sits on a filled bay that was once criss-crossed by an extensive infrastructure of wooden fish weirs, an ecological engineering feat that formed the basis for a thriving economic and cultural system. These lifeways were upended when Europeans arrived in the Americas. European diseases reached New England even before colonists, and by the time the English began to build farms and towns in the area, warfare and property enclosure accelerated the genocidal process of Native removal. Maps of this period show New England as the Europeans wanted it to appear, with Native peoples receding into the hinterland and new territories forming the outlines of a colonial geography. Native peoples resisted and persisted in this landscape, however, and today the region is still home to members of the Massachusett tribe as well as Indigenous people from across the Americas.
