While the Margaret Fuller house maintains a strong similarity to its original appearance, the neighborhood does not. So much has changed that it is a challenge to even locate the present location on historical maps.
The Fuller house is in the little red circle. To the east is MIT, Kendall Square and the Charles River. If you want to orient yourself in the larger landscape, go here.
Before the original landscape had been erased, there was actually an island under this red circle. Pelham's island was the last solid land before the meadows, marshes, Charles River and Boston. Back during the Revolutionary War it looked something like this:
Pelham was a cartographer - the 1777 image is actually from his most famous American map - and also a Loyalist. He fled Boston for London a month after the Declaration of Independence in order to escape the attacks of thugs.
Anyway, by the time Fuller's house was built Pelham's Island was gone, absorbed into the body of Cambridge, and the lattice of roads was beginning to impose itself on newly made land:
And twenty five years later:
By this time the marshes had been pushed ten blocks to the east, the Grand Junction Railroad was built and running along what would become the boundary of the MIT campus, and Margaret Fuller was dead somewhere off the coast of Long Island.
