Beantown And The Beanpot: Some Local Culture

Today and next Monday is the 58th annual Beanpot Hockey Tournament, among local colleges Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, and Northeastern. This 58-year tradition will be broadcast on NESN on TV, and by each of the four colleges' radio stations.

Boston is known as Beantown because baked beans was a commonly eaten dish in the past. This dish was common because it used molasses (a kind of sugar). Boston had plenty of molasses, unfortunately, because of the path of ships in the "triangle trade": slaves were brought from Africa to the Caribbean, molasses from the Caribbean to New England, and rum from New England to Africa.

The final chapter in Boston's beans-and-molasses history is both humorous and tragic. Molasses is a thick, sticky form of sugar which oozes so slowly that we sometimes describe things as being "as slow as molasses." It is hard to imagine not being able to simply walk faster than molasses would ever flow. When people hear the phrase "The Great Molasses Flood of 1919,"* they usually laugh, never imagining that it actually was a deadly event. But on January 15, 1919, a tank of more than 2 million gallons of molasses burst. The wave of molasses destroyed buildings and killed 21 people. My grandmother once told me that for many years after the event, downtown Boston would still smell like molasses on hot summer days.

Understandably, the smell and taste of molasses - and therefore baked beans - were unpopular in Boston for a long time after that. The companies which made baked beans either moved or closed. Ninety years later, Boston still doesn't eat many baked beans, but we use the nickname to express affection for our city.

*The Yankee magazine article available on this site may describe the tragedy too graphically for some children, but otherwise the site is an excellent source of information.