This was written in the Daily Evening Item sometime between 1915 and 1932:
"This boulder until recently lay upon the beach, a little beyond Sand point, upon the harbor side of the peninsula, at a point about opposite the watering stand at Little Nahant. When the Nahant Street Railway was laid down, the lonesome boulder was seized upon as good material for stone ballast and it was broken into three pieces. It was then discovered that it belonged to the Metropolitan Park Commission, and further work upon its demolition as a boulder ceased.
The work, however, brought to public attention the fact that it was of a composition unlike any other known about Nahant, and as its not uncommon, the wonder-loving element began to circulate stories as to its origin, one going so far as to state that there was nothing like it this side of the Great Lakes. It is always well, in dealing with a science so abstruse as geology, to seek a high source of authority or confirmation.
The Item, therefore, sought the opinion of Prof. John Henry Sears, curator of geology, mineralogy and botany at the Peabody Museum, Salem.
Hardly had the wrapping paper been removed from the fragment submitted to him, no mention of the locality having been made, when Prof. Sears remarked, 'Ah, a message from the Nahant boulder?'
In reply to specific queries, he said in substance: - 'The boulder is a quartzite conglomerate; quartzite pebbles contained in a deposit, and part of an old beach conglomerated, or hardened together. Not so old as the Cambrian layers, because Cambrian pebbles compose it. It occurs in situ upon Breakheart Hill, Saugus; not at the farm, but some distance further up the hill, where there is a ledge of it.
The boulder was doubtless carried to Nahant by the ice, when this part of the country was ice covered, and deposited when the ice melted. The stone is well known to geologists, and I have a small piece of it here in the museum grounds."