Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, created a forty-eight-acre estate here in the eighteenth century. Although the house was demolished in about 1870, a portion of the estate survives as Governor Hutchinson's Field. The Trustees of Reservations preserve this field, one of their earliest acquisitions (1898), which provides an unobstructed vista toward the Neponset River salt marshes. A ha-ha survives from Governor Hutchinson's gardens, an important element of an eighteenth-century British picturesque landscape in the form of a brick wall and sloping ditch that kept the cattle away from the home grounds but was not visible from the mansion. The field conveys the original sense of open space and dramatic views that drew merchants to build houses in Milton in the early nineteenth century.