10- About the trip to Worcester

Several observations from Mahmud's diary:

Source: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/immigration/denison.html

1- The trip happened after lunch at the the Greek Syrian Relief Society (church?), which used to be hosted at the Denison House in Boston according to a booklet shared by the Boston Baha'is ("In the Steps of The Master)

 2- It latter mentions sitting in the home of Prof.
Black that latter accompanied him to Worcester.  This must be Prof. Blakeslee (the editors of the books were not cleared about the name and thought it might be Blake).  I need to find out if he had a home in Boston. (more on Prof. Blakeslee later)

 

Route 9 (black) and Route 20 (Red)

3- It mentions about his trip that he asked the driver to stop several times, which means that he traveled by car (there was already train connection Boston-Worcester).  There were two major routes at the time joining the two cities: the Boston-Worcester Turnpike (Route 9) and the Old Boston Post Road (Route 20).  The first one is straighter and only about 35 miles between Boston-Worcester, I can't imagine, even today, taking route 20 which is 44 miles to Worcester and arrives in the southern part of the town, unless the condition of the surfaces were significantly different.

Lakes along both routes

 4- They stopped, at the Master's requests, at the shore of a lake to admire "the greenness of the landscape, the translucence of the water and the purity of the air".  Along Route 9 there are 3 significant lakes, coming from Boston they are Lake Cochituate (in Natick), Foss reservoir, known then as No. 3(in Framingham) , and Sudbury reservoir (in Southborough).  On Route 20 there is only one significant lake, Williams pond in Marlborough  (there are hundreds of little ponds  along both routes, but they rarely cross the roads, so it would be very hard to spot from the roads).  There's also Quinsigamond lake between Shrewsbury and Worcester that both routes cross (although at the route 9 crossing it's much wider and deep).

These maps were made with current data, the surroundings have changed from 1912, but the actual locations of routes 9 and 20 haven't changed much for what I've been able to find in old maps, and the lakes/reservoirs already existed in 1912.

Landsat image of Massachusetts. Water bodies show up black, cities in magenta
Source: http://geology.com/county-map/massachusetts.shtml