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BOSTON: A GUIDE BOOK

I. MODERN BOSTON
HISTORICAL SKETCH

HE town of Boston was founded in 163o by English colonists sent out by the “Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England,” under the lead of John Winthrop, the second governor of the Bay Colony, who arrived at Salem in June of that year with the charter of 1629. It originated in an order passed by the Court of Assistants sitting in the “Governor’s House” in Charlestown, on the opposite side of the Charles River, first selected as their place of settlement. This order was adopted September 17 (7 O. S.), and established three towns at once by the simple dictum, “that Trimountane shalbe called Boston; Mattapan, Dorchester; & ye towne vpon Charles Ryver, Waterton.” “Trimountane” consisted of a peninsula with three hills, the highest (the present Beacon Hill), as seen from Charlestown, presenting three distinct peaks. Hence this name, given it by the colonists from Endicott’s company at Salem, who had preceded the Winthrop colonists in the Charlestown settlement. The Indian name was “Shawmutt,” or “Shaumut,” which signified, according to some authorities, “Living Waters,” but according to others, “Where there is going by boat,” or “Near the neck.” The name of Boston was selected in recognition of the chief men of the company, who had come from Boston in England, and particularly Isaac Johnson, “the greatest furtherer of the Colony,” who died at Charlestown on the day of the naming. The peninsula was chosen for the chief settlement primarily because of its springs, the colonists at Charlestown suffering disastrously from the use of brackish water. The Rev. William Blaxton, the pioneer white settler on the peninsula (coming about 1625), then living alone in his cottage on the highest hill slope, “came and acquainted the governor of an excellent spring there, withal inviting him and soliciting him thither.”

The three-hilled peninsula originally contained only about 783 acres, cut into by deep coves, estuaries, inlets, and creeks. It faced the harbor, at the west end of Massachusetts Bay, into which empty the Charles and Mystic rivers. It was pear-shaped, a little more than a mile wide at its broadest, and less than three miles long, the stem, or neck, connecting it with the mainland (at what became Roxbury) a mile in length, and so low and narrow that parts were not infrequently overflowed by the tides. By the reclamation of the broad marshes and flats from time to time, and the filling of the great coves, the original area of 783 acres has been expanded to 1801 acres; and where it was the narrowest it is now the widest. Additional territory has been acquired by the development of East Boston and South Boston, and by the annexation of adjoining cities and towns. Thus the area of the city has become more than thirty times as large as that of the peninsula on which the town was built. Its bounds now embrace 27-251 acres, or 42.6 square miles. Its extreme length, from north to south, is eleven miles, and its extreme breadth, from east to west, nine miles. While the Colonial town was confined to the little peninsula, its jurisdiction at first extended over a large territory, which embraced the present cities and towns of Chelsea and Revere on the north, and Brookline, Quincy, Braintree, and Randolph on the west and south. So there was quite a respectable “Greater Boston” in those old first days. The metropolitan proportions continued till 1640, and were not entirely reduced to the limits of the peninsula and certain harbor islands till 1739.

East Boston is comprised in two harbor islands: Noddle’s Island, which was “layd to Boston” in 1637, and Breed’s (earlier Hog) Island, annexed in 1635. South Boston was formerly Dorchester Neck, a part of the town of Dorchester, annexed in 1804. The city of Roxbury (named as a town October 8, 1630) was annexed in 1868; the town of Dorchester (named in 1630 in the order naming Boston), in 1870; and in 1874 the city of Charlestown (founded as a town July 4, 1629), the town of Brighton (incorporated 1807), and the town of West Roxbury (incorporated 1851) were by one act added. These annexed municipalities retain their names with the term “ District “ added to each. Boston remained under town government, with a board of selectmen, till 1822. It was incorporated a city, February 23 of that year, after several ineffectual attempts to change the system.

BOSTON PROPER

The term “Boston Proper” is customarily used to designate the original city exclusive of the annexed parts; but for the purposes of this Guide we comprehend in the term the entire municipality, as in business and social relations, but yet independent political corporations. Together with the municipality these allied cities and towns constitute what is colloquially known as Greater Boston. This metropolitan community is officially recognized at present only in two state departments: the Metropolitan Parks and the consolidated Metropolitan Water and Sewerage Departments; and in part in the Boston Postal districts the Metropolitan Parks District is the largest, comprising Boston and thirty-eight cities and towns within a radius of thirteen miles towns; the Metropolitan Sewerage District, twenty-four; and the Boston Postal District, ten. The “Boston Basin,” however, is regarded as constituting the true bounds of “Greater Boston.” This includes a territory of some fifteen miles in width, lying between the bay on the east, distinguished from the allied cities and towns, closely identified with it District established by the Post Office Department. Of these several from the City Hall, having a combined population approximating 1,300,000. The Metropolitan Water District includes seventeen cities and the Blue Hills on the south, and the ridges of the Wellington Hills sweeping from Waltham on the west around toward Cape Ann on the north. It embraces thirty-six cities and towns. The population of Boston alone (census of 1905) is 595,380.

The present city is divided by custom long established into several distinct sections. These are:

The Central District or General Business Quarter
The North End
The West End
The South End
The Back Bay Quarter
The Brighton District, on the west side
The Roxbury District, on the south
The West Roxbury District, on the southwest
The Dorchester District, on the southeast
The Charlestown District, on the north
East Boston on its two islands, on the northeast
South Boston projecting into the harbor, on the east

The Business Quarters now occupy not only the Central District, but extend over most of the North End, parts of the West End and of the South End, and penetrate even the Back Bay Quarter, laid out in comparatively modern times (1860-1886), where the bay had been, as the fairest residential quarter of the city and the place for its finest architectural monuments.

I. THE CENTRAL DISTRICT

The Central District (see Plates II and III) is of first interest to the visitor, for here are most of the older historic landmarks. This small quarter of the present city, together with the North End, embraces that part of the original peninsula to which the historic town Colonial, Provincial, and Revolutionary Boston — was practically confined. The town of 1630 was begun along the irregular water front, the principal houses being placed round about the upper part of what is now State Street, modern Boston’s financial center, and on or near the neighboring Dock Square, back of the present Faneuil Hall, where was the first Town Dock, occupying nearly all of the present North Market Street, in the “Great Cove.” The square originally at the head of State Street (first Market, then King Street), in the middle of which now stands the Old State House, was the first center of town life. At about this point, accordingly, our explorations naturally begin.

State-Street square and the Old State House. Our starting place is the square at the head of State St., which the Old State House faces. This itself is one of the most notable historic spots in Boston. For the first quarter-century of Colony life the entire square, including the space occupied by the Old State House, was the public marketstead. Thursday was market day, — the day also of the “Thursday Lecture” by the ministers. Early (1648) semiannual fairs here, in June and October, were instituted, each holding a market for two or three days. Here were first inflicted the drastic punishments of offenders against the rigorous laws, and here unorthodox literature was burned.

The Stocks, the Whipping Post, and the Pillory were earliest placed here. When the town was a half-century old a Cage, for the confinement and exposure of violators of the rigid Sunday laws, was added to these penal instruments. In the Revolutionary period the Stocks stood near the northeast corner of the Old State House, with the Whipping Post hard by; while the Pillory when used was set in the middle of the square between the present Congress Street (first Leverett’s Lane) on the south side and Exchange Street (first Shrimpton’s Lane, later Royal Exchange Lane) on the north. The Whipping Post lingered here till he opening of the nineteenth century.

This square continued to be the gathering place of the populace from the Colonial through the Province period on occasion of momentous events. It was the rendezvous of the people in the “bloodless revolution” of April, 1689, when the government of Andros was overthrown. In the Stamp Act excitement of 1765 a stamp fixed upon a pole was solemnly brought here by a representative of the “Sons of Liberty” and fastened into the town Stocks, after which it was publicly burned by the “executioner.” On the evening of March 5, 1770, the so-called Boston Massacre, the fatal collision between the populace and the soldiery, occurred here, the site being indicated by a tablet on the building at the Exchange Street corner, northwest.

On the south side of the original marketstead, by the present Devon shire Street (first Pudding Lane), where now is the modern Brazer’s Building (27 State Street), was the first meetinghouse, a rude structure of mud walls and thatched roof. This also served through its existence of eight years for Colonial purposes, as the carved inscription above the entrance of Brazer’s Building relates:

At the upper end of this side of the marketstead, extending to Washington Street (first The High Street), were the house and garden lot of Captain Robert Keayne, charter member and first commander of the first “Military Company of the Massachusetts” (founded 1637, chartered 1638), from which developed the still flourishing “Ancient and Honor able Artillery Company,” the oldest military organization in the country. A century later, on the Washington Street corner, was Daniel Henchman’s bookshop, in which Henry Knox, afterward the Revolutionary general and Washington’s friend, learned his trade and ultimately succeeded to the business. When the British regulars were quartered on the town, in 1768-1770, the Main Guardhouse was on this side, directly opposite the south door of the Old State House, with the two fieldpieces pointed toward this entrance.

On the west side of the marketstead, — the present Washington Street, — nearly opposite Captain Keayne’s lot, was the second meetinghouse, built in 1640, the site now occupied by the Rogers Building (209 Washington Street). This was used for all civic purposes, as well as religious, through eighteen years.

It stood till 1711, when it was destroyed in the “Great Fire” (the eighth “Great Fire” in the young town) of October that year, with one hundred other buildings in the neighborhood. Its successor, on the same spot, was the “Brick Meetinghouse” which remained for almost a century.

North of the second meetinghouse site, where is now the Sears Building (199 Washington Street), was the house of John Leverett, after ward Governor Leverett (1673). On the opposite corner, now covered by the Ames Building (Washington and Court streets), was the home stead of Henry Dunster, first president of Harvard College.

On the north side of the marketstead, near the east corner of the present Devonshire Street, was the glebe of the first minister of the first church, the Rev. John Wilson, with his house, barn, and two gardens. His name was perpetuated in Wilson’s Lane, which was cut through his garden plot in 1640, and which in turn was absorbed in the widened Devonshire Street.

Doorway, Exchange Building

Looking again across to the south side, we see the site of Governor Winthrop’s first house, covered by the expansive Exchange Building (53 State Street). It stood on or close to the ground occupied by the entrance hall of the building. This was the governor’s town house for thirteen years from the settlement. Thence he removed to his last Boston home, the mansion which stood next to the Old South Meetinghouse. The first General Court — the incipient Legislature — ever held in America, October 19, 1630, may have sat in the governor’s first house, the frame of which was brought here from Cambridge, where the governor first proposed building. At the corner of Kilby Street (first Mackerel Lane), where the Exchange Building ends, stood the Bunch-of-Grapes Tavern of Provincial times, with its sign of a gilded carved cluster of grapes, the pop dated from 1711, and was preceded by a Colonial “ordinary,” as taverns were then called, of 1640 date. In the street before the Bunch-of-Grapes’ doors, the lion and unicorn, with other emblems of royalty and signs of Tories that had been torn from their places during the celebration of the news of the Declaration of Independence in July, 1776, At the corner of Kilby Street (first Mackerel Lane), where the popular resort of the High Whigs in the prerevolutionary period. It were burned in a great bonfire.

The Bunch-of-Grapes was a famous tavern of its time. In 1750 Captain Francis Goelet, from England, on a commercial visit to the town, recorded in his diary that it was “noted for the best punch house in Boston, resorted to by most of the gentn merchts and masters vessels.” After the British evacuation, when Washington spent ten days in Boston, he and his officers were entertained here at an “elegant dinner” as part of the official ceremonies of the occasion. The tavern was especially distinguished as the place where in March, 1786, the group of Continental army officers, under the inspiration of General Rufus Putnam of Rutland (cousin of General Israel Putnam), organized the Ohio Company which settled Ohio, begin­ning at Marietta.

State Street, when King Street, practically ended at Kilby Street on the south side and Merchants Row on the north, till the reclamation of the flats beyond, high-water mark being originally at these points. “Mackerel Lane” was a narrow passage by the shore till after the “Great Fire of 1760,” which destroyed much property in the vicinity. Then it was widened and named Kilby Street in recognition of the generous aid which the sufferers by the fire had received from Christopher Kilby, a wealthy Boston merchant, long resident in London as the agent for the town and colony, but then living in New York.

Nearly opposite the Bunch-of-Grapes, at about the present No. 66, stood the British Coffee House, where the British officers principally resorted. It was here in 1769 that James Otis was assaulted by John Robinson, one of the royal commissioners of customs, upon whom the fiery orator had passed some severe strictures, and thus through a deep cut on his head this brilliant intellect was shattered.

At the east corner of Exchange Street was the Royal Customhouse, where the attack upon its sentinel by the little mob of men and boys, with a fusillade of street snow and ice, and taunting shouts, led to the Massacre of 1770. The opposite, or west, corner was occupied by the Royal Exchange Tavern, dating from the early eighteenth century, another resort of the British officers stationed in town. It was here in 1727 that occurred the altercation which resulted in the First Duel fought in Boston (on the Common), when Benjamin Woodbridge was killed by Henry Phillips, both young men well connected with the “gentry” of the town, the latter related by marriage to Peter Faneuil, the giver of Faneuil Hall. Woodbridge’s grave is in the Granary Burying Ground, and can be seen close by the sidewalk fence.

It was this grave which inspired those tender passages in the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” describing “My First Walk with the Schoolmistress.”

The Old State House dates from 1748. Its outer walls, however, are older, being those of its predecessor, the second Town and Province House, built in 1712-1713. That house was destroyed by fire, all but these walls, in 1747, sharing very nearly the fate of its predecessor, the first Town House and colonial building, which went down in the “Great Fire” of 1711 with the second meetinghouse and neighboring buildings and dwellings. It occupies the identical site in the middle of the market, stead chosen for the first Town House in 1657. It has served as Town House, Court House, Province Court House, State House, and City Hall. As the Province Court House, identified with the succession of prerevolutionary events in Boston, it has a special distinction among the historical buildings of the country. After its abandonment for civic uses it suffered many vicissitudes and indignities, being ruthlessly refashioned, made over, and patched for business purposes, that the city which owns it might wrest the largest possible rentals from it; and in the year 188 its removal was seriously threatened. Then, through the well-directed efforts of a number of worthy citizens, its preservation was secured, and in 1882 the historic structure was restored to much the appearance which it bore in Provincial days. Further restorations were made in 1908-1909.

The restored rooms above the basement are open for public exhibition, with the rare collection of antiquities relating to the early history of the Colony and Province, as well as the State and the Town, brought together by the Bostonian Society, to whose control these rooms passed, through lease by the city, upon the resto­ration of the building. The collection embraces a rich variety of interesting relics: historical manuscripts and papers; quaint paintings, engravings, and prints; numerous portraits of old worthies; and many photographs illustrating Boston in various periods. In the Council Chamber is the old table formerly used by the royal governors and councillors. The Bostonian Society, established here, was incorporated in 1881 “to promote the study of the history of Boston, and the preservation of its antiquities”; and in it was merged the Antiquarian Club, organized in 1879 especially for the promotion of historical research, whose members had been most influential in the campaign for the preservation of this building. It has rendered excellent service in the identification of historic sites and in verifying historical records.

Council Chamber, Old State House

Deep down below the basement of the building is now the State station of the Washington Street Tunnel, and also the State Street station of the East Boston Tunnel, which runs directly under the ancient structure to Scollay Square, where it connects by passageways with the Subway. The first Town House, completed in 1659, was provided for by the will of Captain Keayne, the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company’s chief founder (the longest will on record, comprising 158 folio pages in the testator’s own hand, though disposing of only £4000). Captain Keayne left £300 for the purpose, and to this sum was added £100 more, raised by subscription among the townspeople, and paid largely in provisions, merchandise, and labor. It was a small “comely building” of wood, set upon twenty pillars, overhanging the pillars “three feet all around,” and topped by two tall slender turrets. The place inclosed by the pillars was a free public market, and an exchange, or “walk for the merchants.”

Franklin Press, Old State House

It contained the beginnings of the first public library in America, for which provision was made in Captain Keayne’s will. Portions of this library were saved from the fire of 1711 which destroyed the building; but these probably perished later in the burning of the second Town and Province House.

The second house, of brick, completed in 1713, also had an open public exchange on the street floor. Surrounding it were thriving booksellers’ shops, observing which Daniel Neal, visiting the town in 1719, was moved to remark that “the Knowledge of Letters flourishes more here than in all the other English plantations put together; for in the city of New York there is but one book seller’s shop, and in the Plantations of Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, Barbadoes, and the Islands, none at all.” So, it appears, thus early Boston was the “literary center” of the country, a fact calculated to bring almost as great satisfaction to the complacent Bostonian as that later-day saying in the “Autocrat” (in which this stamp of Bostonian declines to recognize any satire), that “Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system”

Down State Street. Following State Street to its end, we shall come upon Long Wharf (originally Boston Pier, dating from 171o), where the formal landings of the royal governors were made, the main landing place of the British soldiers when they came, and the departing place at the Evacuation. At that time it was a long, narrow pier, extending out beyond the other wharves, the tide ebbing and flowing beneath the stores that lined it. Atlantic Avenue, the water-front thoroughfare that now crosses it, and on which the elevated railway runs, follows generally the line of the ancient Barricado, an early harbor defense erected in 1673 between the north and south outer points of the “Great Cove.” It connected the North Battery, where is now Battery Wharf, and the South Battery, or “Boston Sconce,” at the present Rowe’s Wharf, where the steamer for Nantasket is taken. It was provided with openings to allow vessels to pass inside, and so came to be generally called the “Out Wharves.” Its line is so designated on the early maps.

In the short walk down State Street are passed in succession on either side of the way notable modern structures that have almost entirely replaced the varied architecture of different periods, which before gave this street a peculiar distinction and a certain picturesque ness that is now wanting. The Exchange Building takes the place of the first Merchants’ Exchange, a dignified building in its day (1842 1890), covering a very small part of the ground over which the present structure spreads. The Board of Trade Building, at the east corner of Broad Street, is, perhaps, the most attractive in design of the newer architecture. At the India Street corner, its massive granite-pillared front facing that street, is the United States Custom House (dating from 1847), in marked contrast with its younger neighbors. This occupied several years in building, and the transportation of the heavy granite columns, each weighing about forty-two tons, which surround it on all sides, was a great feat for the time. Its site was the head of Long Wharf, and the bowsprits of vessels lying there, stretching across the street, almost touched its eastern side.

Custom House

On India Street, a few rods south of this specimen of a past architecture, is the modern Chamber of Com­merce (built in 1902), also of granite. Viewed from a distance, its rounded front, with turreted dormer windows and conical tower, has a unique appearance. Opposite it opens Custom House Street, only a block in length, where is still standing the Old Custom House, built in 1810, in which Bancroft, the historian, served as collector of the port in 1838-1841, and which was the “darksome dungeon” where Haw­thorne spent his two years as a customs officer, first as a measurer of salt and coal, then as a weigher and gauger.

Faneuil Hall and its Neighborhood. From lower State Street we can pass to Faneuil Hall by way of Commercial Street and the long granite Quincy Market House, — the central piece of the great work of the first Mayor Josiah Quincy, in 1825-1826, in the construction of six new streets over a sweep of flats and docks, — or we may go direct from the Old State House through Exchange Street, a walk of a few minutes.

Faneuil Hall as now seen is the “Cradle of Liberty” of the Revolutionary period doubled in width and a story higher. The enlargement was made in 1805, under the superintendence of Charles Bulfinch, the pioneer Boston architect of enduring fame, whose most characteristic work we shall see in the “Bulfinch Front “of the present State House, The hall was built in 1762-1763, upon the brick walls of the first Faneuil Hall, Peter Faneuil’s gift to the town in 1742, which was consumed, except its walls, in a fire in January, 1762. Bulfinch, in his work of 1805, introduced the galleries resting on Doric columns, and the platform with its extended front, with various interior embellishments. In 1898 the entire building was reconstructed with fireproof material on the Bulfinch plan, iron, steel, and stone being sub­stituted for wood and combus­tible material

Faneuil Hall

Of the fine collection of portraits on the walls many are copies, the originals having been placed in the Museum of Fine Arts for safe-keeping. The great historical painting at the back of the platform, “Webster’s Reply to Hayne,” by G. P. A. Healy, contains one hundred and thirty portraits of senators and other men of distinction at that time. The scene is the old Senate Chamber, now the apartment of the United States Supreme Court. The canvas measures sixteen by thirty feet. The portrait of Peter Faneuil, on one side of this painting, is a copy by Colonel Henry Sargent, from a smaller portrait in the Art Museum, and was given to the city by Samuel Parkman, grandfather of the historian Parkman. It takes the place of a full-length portrait executed by order of the town in 1744, as a “testimony of respect” to the donor of the hall, which disappeared, and was probably destroyed, at the siege of Boston, — the fate also of portraits of George H, Colonel Isaac Barré, and Field Marshal Conway, the last two solicited by the town in gratitude for their defense of Americans on the floor of Parliament. The full-length Washington, on the other side of the great painting, is a Gilbert Stuart. It, also, was presented to the town by Samuel Parkman, in 1806. Of the portraits elsewhere hung, those of Warren, Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, and John Quincy Adams are all Copleys. The General Harry Knox and the Commodore Preble are credited to Stuart. The Abraham Lincoln and Rufus Choate are by Ames. The “war governor,” John A. Andrew, is by William M. Hunt. The others — Robert Treat Paine, Caleb Strong, Edward Everett, Admiral Winslow, Wendell Phillips, and Anson Burlingame — are by various American painters. The ornamental clock in the face of the gallery over the main entrance was a gift of Boston school children in 1850. The gilded spread eagle was originally on the façade of the United States Bank which, erected in 1798, preceded the first Merchants’ Exchange on State Street. The gilded grass hopper on the cupola of the building, serving as a weather vane, is the reconstructed, or rejuvenated, original one of 1742, fashioned from sheet copper by the “cunning artificer,” “Deacon” Shem Drowne, immortalized by Hawthorne in “Drowne’s Wooden Image.”

The floors above the public hall have been occupied by the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company for many years. Its armory is a rich museum of relics of Colonial, Provincial, and Revolutionary times, and is hospitably open to appreciative inspection. Among the treasured memorials here are the various banners of the company, the oldest being that carried in 1663. Eighteen silk flags reproduce colonial colors and their various successors. In the London room are mementos of the visit of a section of the company to England in the summer of 1896, as guests of the Honourable Artillery Company of London. On the walls of the main hall are portraits of one hundred and fourteen captains of the company. On the street floor of the building is the market, which has continued from its establishment with the first Faneuil Hall in 1742. John Smibert, the Scotch painter, long resident and celebrated in Boston from 1729, was the architect of the first building.

Faneuil Hall was instituted primarily as a market house, the inclusion of a public town hall in the scheme being an afterthought of the donor. Peter Faneuil’s offer to provide a suitable building at his own expense upon condition only that the town should legalize and maintain it, was at a time of controversy over the town market houses then existing. Three had been set up seven years before, one close to this site, in Dock Square; one at the North End, in North Square; the third at the then South End, by the south corner of the present Boylston and Washington streets. The Dock Square market was the principal one, and this had recently been demolished by a mob “disguised as clergymen.” The contention was over the market system. One faction demanded a return to the method of service at the home of the townspeople, as before the setting up of these market houses; the others insisted upon the fixed market-house system. So high did the feeling run that Faneuil’s gift was accepted by the town by the narrow margin of seven votes.

The building was completed in September, 1742. It was only one hundred feet in length and forty feet wide. But it was of brick, and substantial. The hall, calculated to hold only one thousand persons, was pronounced in the vote of the first town meeting held in it as “spacious and beautiful.” In the same vote it was named Faneuil Hall, “to be at all times hereafter called and known by that name,” in testimony of the town’s gratitude to its giver and to perpetuate his memory. Then his full-length portrait was ordered for the hall; and a year and a half later the Faneuil arms, “elegantly carved and gilt” by Moses Deshon, the same who later carved the Colony seal for the Town House, were added at the town’s expense.

The first public gathering in the hall, other than a town meeting, was, singularly, to commemorate Faneuil, he having died suddenly, March 3, 1743, but a few months after the completion of the building. On this occasion the eulogist was John Lovell, master of the Latin School, who in the subsequent prerevolutionary controversies was a Loyalist, and at the Evacuation went off to Halifax. The Faneuils who succeeded Peter, his nephews, were also Loyalists, and left the country with the Evacuation.

The second Faneuil Hall, embraced in the present structure, was built by the town, and the building fund was largely obtained through a lottery authorized by the General Court. The first public meeting in this hall was on March 14, 1763, when the patriot James Otis was the orator, and by him the hall was dedicated to the “Cause of Liberty.” Then followed those town meetings of the Revolutionary period, debating the question of “justifiable resistance,” from which the hall derived its sobriquet of the “Cradle of American Liberty.” In 1766 cm the news of the Stamp Act repeal the hall was illuminated. In 1768 one of the British regiments was quartered here for some weeks. In 1772 the Boston Committee of Correspondence, “to state the rights of the colonists” to the world, was established here, on that motion of Samuel Adams which Bancroft says “contained the whole Revolution.” In 1773 the “Little Senate,” composed of the committees of the several towns, began their conferences with the “ever-vigilant” Boston committee, in the selectmen’s room. During the siege the hall was transformed into a playhouse, under the patronage of a society of British officers and Tory ladies, when soldiers were the actors, and a local farce, “The Blockade of Boston,” by General Burgoyne, was the chief attraction.

Since the Revolution the hall has been the popular meeting place of citizens on important and grave occasions, and a host of national leaders, orators, and agitators have spoken from its historic rostrum. In 1826 Webster delivered here his memorable eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, in the presence of President John Quincy Adams and an audience of exceptional character. Here in 1837 Wendell Phillips made his first antislavery speech; in 1845 Charles Sumner first publicly appeared in this cause; in 1846 the antislavery Vigilance Committee was formed at a meeting to denounce the return of a fugitive slave; in 1854 the preconcerted signal was given, at a crowded meeting to protest against the rendition of Anthony Burns, for the bold but fruitless move on the Court House (see p. 59) to effect the escape of this fugitive slave.

Faneuil Hall is protected by a provision of the city charter forbidding its sale or lease. It is never let for money, but is opened to the people upon the request of a certain number of citizens, who must agree to comply with the prescribed regulations.     Faneuil Hall occupies made land close to the head of the Old Town Dock. The streets around the sides and back of the building constitute Faneuil Hall Square. From the south side of this square opens Corn Court, which runs in irregular form to Merchants Row. This space was the Corn Market of Colonial times. A landmark of a later day here, which remained till 1903, was an old inn long known as Hancock Tavern. While not so ancient as it was assumed to be, nor occupying, as alleged, the site of the first tavern in the town, it was an interesting landmark with rich associations. It became the Hancock Tavern when John Hancock was made the first governor of the Commonwealth, and the swing sign displaying his roughly painted portrait is still preserved. At other periods it was the Brazier Inn, kept by Madam Brazier, niece of Provincial Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phipps (1733), who made a specialty of a noonday punch for its patrons. In this tavern lodged Talleyrand, when exiled from France, during his stay in Boston in 1795; also, two years later, Louis Philippe; and, in 1796, the exiled French priest, John Cheverus, who afterward became the first Roman Catholic bishop of Boston. An annex to a modern office building occupies its site.

The Adams Statue

East of Corn Court, near the east end of Faneuil Hall, also on land reclaimed from the Town Dock, was John Hancock’s Store, where he advertised for sale “English and India goods, also choice Newcastle Coals and Irish Butter, Cheap for Cash.” West of Corn Court opens Change Alley (incongruously designated as “avenue”), a quaint, narrow foot passage to State Street, one of the earliest ways established in the town. It was sometime Flagg Alley, from being laid out with flag stones. Until the erection of the great financial buildings that now largely wall it in, the alley was picturesque with bustling little shops.

On the west side of Faneuil Hall Square the triangle, covered with low, old buildings, marks the head of the ancient Town Dock.

Old Dock Square makes into modern Adams Square (opened in 1879), near the middle of which stands the bronze statue of Samuel Adams, by Anne Whitney. This is a counterpart of the statue of the revolutionary leader in the Capitol at Washington. It portrays him as he is supposed to have appeared when before Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson and the council, in the Council Chamber of the Old State House, as chairman of the committee of the town meeting the day after the Boston Massacre of 1770, and at the moment that, having delivered the people’s demand for the instant removal of the British soldiers from the town, he stood with a resolute look awaiting Hutchinson’s reply.

The principal architectural feature of this open space is the stone Adams Square Station of the Subway.

Cornhill and about Scollay Square. From the west side of Adams Square we pass into Cornhill, early in its day a place of bookshops, and still occupied by several booksellers at long-established stands. It is the second Cornhill, the first having been the part of the present Washington Street between old Dock Square and School Street. Washington Street originally ended at Dock Square north of the present Cornhill, and its extension to Haymarket Square (1872), where it now ends, greatly changed this part of the town and obliterated various landmarks. A little north of the present opening of Cornhill, lost in the Washington Street extension, was the site of the dwelling of Benjamin Edes, where, on the afternoon preceding the Boston Tea Party of December 16, 1773, a number of the leaders in that affair met and partook of punch from the punch bowl now possessed by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

This Cornhill dates from 1816, and was first called Cheapside, after the London fashion. Then for a while it was Market Street, being a new way to Faneuil Hall Market. From its northerly side was once an archway leading to Brattle Street and old Dock Square, which also disappeared in the extension of Washington Street. Midway, at its curve toward Court Street, where it ends, it is crossed by Franklin Avenue (another short passageway, or alley, with this ambitious title), at the Court Street end of which was Edes & Gill’s printing office, the principal rendezvous of the Tea-Party men, in a back room of which a number of them assumed their disguise. This was on the westerly corner of the “avenue,” then Dasset Alley, and Court, then Queen, Street. Earlier, on the east corner, was the printing office of Benjamin Franklin’s brother James, where the boy Franklin learned the printer’s trade as his brother’s apprentice, and composed those ballads on “The Lighthouse Tragedy” and on “Teach” (or “Blackbeard”), the pirate, which he peddled about the streets with a success that “flattered” his “vanity,” though they were “wretched stuff,” as he confesses in his Autobiography. Here James Franklin issued his New England Courant, the fourth newspaper that appeared in America, which Franklin managed during the month in which his brother was imprisoned for printing an article offensive to the Assembly, and himself “made bold to give our rulers some rubs in it”; and which, after James’s release inhibited from publishing, was issued for a while under Benjamin’s name.

The north end of Franklin Avenue, from Cornhill by a short flight of steps, is at Brattle Street, a short distance above the site of Murray’s Barracks, on the opposite side, where were quartered the Twenty, Ninth, the regiment of the British force of 1768-1770 most obnoxious to the “Bostoneers,” and where the fracas began that culminated in the Boston Massacre. The Quincy House, nearer the avenue’s end, covers the site of the first Quaker meetinghouse, built in 1697, the first brick meetinghouse in the town. Opposite the side of the Quincy House, facing Brattle Square, stood till 1871 the Brattle Square Church, which after the Revolution bore on its front a memento of the Siege, in the shape of a cannon ball, thrown there by an American battery at Cambridge on the night of the Evacuation. This was the meetinghouse alluded to in Holmes’s “A Rhymed Lesson,”

A model of the church as it thus appeared is in the house of the Massachusetts Historical Society, where also the cannon ball is preserved. The quoins of the structure, of Connecticut stone, were placed inside the tower of its successor on Commonwealth Avenue, Back Bay, now the church of the First Baptist Society. Though new, and “the pride of the town “at the time of the Revolution, having been consecrated in 1773, it was utilized as barracks for the British soldiers; and only the fact that the removal of the pillars which embellished its interior would have endangered the structure, prevented its use during the Siege as a military riding school, like the Old South Meetinghouse (see p. 51). It was the church that Hancock, Bowdoin, and Warren attended. Warren’s house, from 1764, was near by on Hanover Street, on the site now covered by the American House.

Court Street

At the head of Cornhill, in front of Scollay Square, stood the bronze statue of John Winthrop until its removal was necessitated by the East Boston Tunnel work below it in 1903. It was well worth a moment’s study, though the constant traffic of the busy thoroughfare made its near neighborhood perilous. The Colonial governor, clad in the picturesque costume of the period, is represented as stepping from a gang board to the shore. In his right hand he holds the charter of the Colony by its great seal; in his left the Bible. Behind the figure appears the base of a newly hewn forest tree, with a rope attached, significant of the fastening of a boat. The statue is the work of Richard S. Greenough and is a copy of the marble one in the Capitol at Washington. It was cast in Rome. It was first erected in 1880, on the 250th anniversary of the settlement of Boston. It now stands on Marlborough Street beside the First Church. About where the Scollay Square Station stands, or a little north of its site, was the first Free Writing School, set up in 1683-1684. This was the second school in the town, the first being on School Street, as we shall presently see. It continued in use till after the Revolution (or about 1793), latterly known as the Central Reading and Writing School. Looking down Court Street eastward, we have in near view the somber-pillared front of the Old Court House, dating from 1836. It was designed by Solomon Willard, the architect of Bunker Hill Monument. Its exterior is of Quincy granite. The ponderous fluted columns (originally eight in all, there having been a row on the rear as well as in front) weigh each twenty-five tons. The first two were brought over the roads from Quincy by sixty-five yoke of oxen and ten horses, making a great street show. This building was the center of the exciting scenes attending the fugitive slave cases in 1851 and 1854. Here is the main entrance to the East Boston Tunnel.

Here occurred first, in February, 1851, the rescue of Shadrach, who had been confined in the United States court room awaiting action upon a process for his rendition. Six weeks later came the Thomas Sims affair, when, to prevent the rescue of this slave, the building was guarded and surrounded with chains breast high, under which the judges and all others having business within were obliged to stoop to reach the doors. Finally, in May, 1854, occurred the Anthony Burns riot, on the evening of the 26th, with the failure of the rescue planned by a number of the anti slavery “Vigilance Committee,” when, in the assault made at the entrance on the west side of the building, one of the marshal’s deputies was killed. It was after this affair that indictments were brought against Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and several others, for “obstructing the process of the United States.” For their defense a formidable array of counsel appeared here, but the indictment was quashed.

On this same spot was the Colonial prison, its outer walls of stone three feet thick, with unglazed iron-barred windows, stout oaken doors covered with iron, hard cells, and gloomy passages, where were incarcerated the Quakers and, later, victims of the witchcraft delusion. Here also, after the over­throw of Andros in 1689, Ratcliffe, the rector of the first Episcopal church, which Andros so fostered (see King’s Chapel, p. 24), was confined with his leading parishioners for nine months, till sent to England by royal command. Another distinguished prisoner here, in 1699, was the piratical Captain Kidd. It was this prison that Hawthorne fancifully describes in “The Scarlet Letter.” The prison was first placed here in 1642, and gave to the street the name of Prison Lane, which it bore through the seventeenth century. Then it became Queen Street, and Court Street after the Revolution. Looking westward up Court Street to the upper side, called Tremont Row, we may imagine the site of Governor John Endicott’s house, where he lived after his removal from Salem to Boston, and where, in 1661, Samuel Shattuck, bearing the order of the King releasing the imprisoned Quakers, had audience with him, — the event upon which Whittier’s “The King’s Missive” is founded. This house is variously placed by local authorities on Tremont Row, between Tremont Street and Howard Street, but the best evidence appears to point to a situation toward the Howard Street end.

The Winthrop Statue

Tremont Street and King’s Chapel. Now we take Tremont Street. From the west side, at its beginning, opens the short way up to Pemberton Square, at the head of which we see the façade of the present County Court House (built 1887-1893). This is a long granite structure in the German Renaissance style of architecture, designed by George A. Clough. Its plan is on the system of open courtyards: four are in the area of the general block. It covers 65,300 feet of land. The feature of the interior is the great hall, broad and lofty, a flight of steps ascend ing to it from the front entrance, and other flights ascending from it to the rear exit on Somerset Street. Upon the faces of the cornices in the vestibule at the main entrance are statuesque bas-reliefs of Law, Justice, Wisdom, Innocence, and Guilt. On one side of the hall is the bronze statue of Rufus Choate, the great lawyer of his day. This is by Daniel C. French. It was placed in 1898. It was a gift to the city, provided for in the will of a Boston public-school master. The donor was some time master of the Dwight School for boys, and afterward principal of the Everett School for girls.

Pemberton Square marks the second highest peak of Beacon Hill. This peak at first received the name of Cotton Hill, from the Rev. John Cotton, the early minister of the First Church, whose house was on its slope facing Tremont Street. The Cotton estate originally spread over this peak, extending back across Somerset Street to about the middle of Ashburton Place in the rear of the Court House.

The peak rose originally in irregular heights, the loftiest bluff being at the southerly end of Pemberton Square, or on the west side of Tremont Street about opposite the gate of King’s Chapel Burying Ground. Against its slopes were early favorite places for house sites.

John Cotton’s house was set up in 1633, soon after his arrival in the Griffin. It stood a little south of the entrance to Pemberton Square. Next above, or adjoining it, was Sir Harry Vane’s house. This was built by the young statesman a few months after his arrival (October, 1635), he having at first been the minister’s guest. It was Vane’s home when he was governor of the Colony in 1636-1637. Later the Cotton house came into possession of John Hull, the “mint master,” who made the pine-tree shillings, the first New England money. In course of time it fell to Chief Justice Samuel Sewall (one of the witchcraft judges at Salem in 1692), the diarist of early Boston, through his marriage with the “mint master’s” daughter Hannah, whose wedding dowry, tradition tells, was her weight in the pine-tree shillings.

About on the site now occupied by the showy Beacon Theater, but back from the street, was Richard Bellingham’s stone house, in which he lived through his several terms as governor and till his death in 1672. He was dwelling here when, in 1641, he scandalized his brethren by the manner of his marriage to Penelope Pelham, his second wife, without “publishing” the marriage intention, and especially by performing the marriage ceremony himself, being a magistrate, as Winthrop relates in picturesque detail in his journal. In the next century the grand Faneuil mansion and terraced gardens were here. This was the estate that Peter Faneuil inherited in 1737 and was occupying when he built Faneuil Hall. It was maintained in all its elegance by its several owners till some years after the Revolution. At that time it was confiscated, its owner being a Royalist, — William Vassal, uncle of the Colonel John Vassal who built the Cambridge mansion now treasured as the Longfellow house. Early in the nineteenth century it was joined to the Gardner Greene estate, the finest in the town.

Old Boston Museum

The peak was finally cut down in the thirties, and Pemberton Square was then laid out through the Greene estate as a place of genteel residences in blocks, which character it sustained till the late sixties.

On the east side the Boston Museum, razed in 1903 to make way for a modem business structure, long stood the oldest playhouse of the city. For more than half a century it was a familiar landmark. At first the museum proper, with its halls of marvelous curiosities, was the chief feature of the institution, the performances being subordinate to these attractions, and the theater being called “the lecture hall,” to quiet the consciences of its patrons, who shied from the openly pro claimed playhouse. William Warren, the “prince of comedians,” as Bostonians delighted in calling him, was identified with the Museum for forty years. Here Edwin Booth made his first appearance on any stage.

From King’s Chapel to Park Street Church. King’s Chapel Burying Ground, adjoining the old stone church, is very nearly as ancient as the town of Boston. The exact date of its establishment is not known, but it was probably soon after the beginning of the settlement, for this record appears in Winthrop’s journal: “Capt. Welden, a hopeful young gent, & an experienced soldier, dyed at Charlestowne of a consumption, and was buryed at Boston wth a military funeral.” And Dudley wrote that the young man was “buryed as a souldier with three volleys of shott.” The earliest interment of record here was that of Governor Winthrop in 1649. It is believed that his third wife, Margaret Winthrop, who followed him to New England the year after he came out and who died two years before him, was also buried here.

In the same tomb are the ashes of other distinguished Winthrops — the Massachusetts governor’s eldest son and grandsons: John Winthrop, Jr., the governor of the Connecticut Colony, who died in 1676, and John Jr.’s two sons, Fitz John Winthrop, governor of the United Colonies of Connecticut (died 1707), and Wait Still Winthrop, chief justice of Massachusetts and sometime major general of the forces of the Colony (died 1717). A second Winthrop tomb contains the dust of Professor John Winthrop of Harvard College, the friend of Franklin and correspondent of John Adams (died in 1779).

The first Winthrop tomb is seen not far from the middle of the ground. Beside it is the tomb of Elder Thomas Oliver of the First Church, which subsequently became the property of the church; and close to this a horizontal tablet informs that “here lyes intombed the bodyes of ye famous reverend and learned pastors of the First Church of Christ in Boston, viz:” John Cotton, aged 67 years, died 1652; John Davenport, 72 years, died 1670; John Oxenbridge, aged 66 years, died 1674; and Thomas Bridge, aged 58 years, died 1715. Near by are the modest gravestones of Sarah, “the widow of the beloved John Cotton and excellent Richard Mather,” and of Elizabeth, widow of John Davenport.

In the middle of the ground is the marble monument to Colonel Thomas Dawes, a leading Boston mechanic of his day, who died in 1809, and near it the tomb of Governor John Leverett. A few steps distant is that of the Boston branch of the Plymouth Colony Winslow family. Here are the ashes of John Winslow, brother of Governor Edward Winslow, with those of the former’s wife, who was Mary Chilton, one of the Mayflower passengers, heroine of the popular but apocryphal tale of the first woman to spring ashore from the Pilgrim ship. In a cluster of ancient tombs are those of Jacob Sheafe, an opulent merchant of Colony times, in which was afterward buried the Rev. Thomas Thacher, first pastor of the Old South Church (died 1678), who married Sheafe’s widow; and of Thomas Brattle (died 1683), said probably to have been the wealthiest merchant of his day, whose son Thomas became a treasurer and benefactor of Harvard College. A tomb of especial interest in this quarter is the Benjamin Church tomb, for herein were deposited the remains of Lady Andros, the wife of Governor Andros, who died in February, 1688, and of whose funeral in the nighttime from the Old South Meetinghouse Sewall gives a quaint account in his diary. Other tombs of note are those of Major Thomas Savage, one of the commanders in King Philip’s War, and Judge Oliver Wendell, grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Many of the old tombstones here have been shifted from their proper places and made to serve as edge stones along the paths beyond the principal gateway. This vandalism was the performance years ago of a superintendent of burials who was possessed with an evil “eye for symmetry.”

King’s Chapel in part occupies the upper end of this burying ground, which extended originally to School Street, the land having been taken by Governor Andros in 1688 for the first Episcopal church, no Puritan landholder being found who would sell for such a purpose. This building dates from 1754 and is the second King’s Chapel on the spot. Its aspect has been little changed, beyond the enrichment of the interior, from Province days. The low solid edifice of dark stone, with its heavy square tower surrounded by wooden Ionic columns, stands as it appeared when it was the official church of the royal governors. The stone of which it is constructed came from Quincy (then Braintree), where it was taken from the surface, there being then no quarries. It was built so as to inclose the first chapel, in which services were held for the greater part of the time consumed in the slow work, — about five years. Peter Harrison, an Englishman who came out in 1729 in the train of Dean Berkeley to have part in the dean’s projected but never established university, was the architect. His model was the familiar English church of the eighteenth century; so the visitor sees in the fashion of the interior, its rows of columns supporting the ceiling, the antique pulpit and reading desk, the mural tablets and the sculptured monuments that line the walls, a pleasant likeness to an old London church. Memorials of the first chapel are preserved in the chancel. The communion table of 1688 is still in use. Several of the mural tablets are of the Provincial period. On the organ are in their ancient places the gilt miters and crown, which were removed at the Revolution and deposited in a place of safety. Among the tablets on the northern wall is one to the memory of Oliver Wendell Holmes. This was placed in the autumn of 1895. The inscription was composed by ex-President Eliot of Harvard University.

King's Chapel

At the Evacuation the venerable rector, Mr. Caner, fled with the Loyalists of his parish, taking off with him to Halifax the church registers, plate, and vestments, but most of these were in later years restored. The last Loyalist service before the Evacuation was on the preceding Sunday. In less than a month after the Evacuation the chapel was reopened for the obsequies of General Joseph Warren, who fell at Bunker Hill, and on that occasion the orator, Perez Morton, advocated independ­ence. For more than two years thereafter the chapel was closed. Then it was opened to the Old South congregation, and it was used by the latter for nearly five years, when their meeting­house was restored. In 1782 the remnant of the society renewed their services with the Rev. James Freeman as “reader.” In 1787 Mr. Freeman was ordained as rector, and at that time this first Episcopal church in New England became the first Unitarian church in America. A bust of Mr. Freeman is among the mural monuments.

The original King’s Chapel of 1688 was a small wooden structure, built at a cost of £284 16 s, contributed by persons throughout the Colony, with subscriptions from Andros and other English officers. For more than two years before its erection the Episcopal congregation had joint occupancy of the Old South Church with its proper owners, by order of Governor Andros against their earnest and constant protest. The church organization was formed in 1686, under the aggressive leadership of Edward Randolph, with the Rev. Robert Ratcliffe as rector, who had come from England commissioned to establish the Church of England in the Colony. The use of any of the Congregational meetinghouses being denied them, the projectors of the church founded it in the “library room” of the Town House. This was their place of meeting till Andros ordered the Old South opened to them. When Andros was overthrown the rector and his leading parishioners were imprisoned till their return to England (see p. 19). The remnant of the congregation resumed services in the chapel, which was finished a few months after Andros’s departure.

In 1710 the chapel was enlarged to twice its size. Then the exterior was embellished with a tower surmounted by a tall mast half-way up which was a large gilt crown and at the top a weathercock. Within the enlarged chapel the governor’s pew, raised on a dais higher by two steps than the others, hung with crimson curtains and surmounted by the royal crown, was opposite the pulpit, which itself stood on the north side at about the center. Near the governor’s pew was another reserved for officers of the British army and navy. Displayed along the walls and suspended from the pillars were the escutcheons and coats of arms of the king, Sir Edmund Andros, Governors Dudley, Shute, Burnet, Belcher, and Shirley, and other persons of distinction. At the east end was “the altar piece, whereon was the Glory painted, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed, and some texts of Scripture.” The communion plate was a royal gift.

Less than a block beyond King’s Chapel, on the opposite side of Tremont Street, we come to the Granary Burying Ground, established only about thirty years after the Chapel Burying Ground (in 1660), and of greater historic interest, perhaps, because of the more numerous memorials here.

On the short walk from the Chapel we pass the site of the birthplace of Edward E. Hale, covered by the upper part of the Parker House. This hotel also covers, on its School Street side, the site of the home of Oliver Wendell, the maternal grandfather of Oliver Wendell Holmes, for whom he was named. On Bosworth Street, the first passage opening from Tremont Street, opposite the burying ground, — a courtlike street end ing with stone steps which lead down to a more ancient cross street, — was Doctor Holmes’s home for eighteen years from 1841, the “house at the left hand next the farther corner,” which he describes in “The Autocrat.”

The Tremont Temple, next above the Parker House, is the building of the Union Temple (Baptist) Church, founded in 1839, a free church from its beginning. It is the fourth temple on this site, each of the previous ones having been destroyed by fire. The first one was a theater remodeled in 1843. The playhouse was the Tremont Theater, first opened in 1835, one of the most interesting of its class and time.

It was here that Charlotte Cushman made her début, in April, 1835; that Fanny Kemble first appeared before a Boston audience; that operas were first produced in Boston.

In the large public hall of the second Tremont Temple Charles Dickens gave his readings during his last visit to America, in 1868.

The large Tremont Building opposite occupies the site of the Tremont House, a famous inn through its career of more than sixty years from 1829, of which Dickens wrote, “it has more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember, or the reader would believe.” Preceding the inn, fine mansion houses with gardens were here, one of them being the estate of Thomas Handasyd Perkins, a genuine “solid man of Boston,” a benefactor of the Boston Athenæum and of other Boston institutions. On the gates of the Granary Burying Ground, set in their high ivy-mantled stone frame, are tablets inscribed with the names of many of the notables buried here. They include governors of various periods, — Richard Bellingham, William Dummer, James Bowdoin, Increase Sumner, James Sullivan, and Christopher Gore; signers of the Declaration of Independence, — John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and Robert Treat Paine; ministers, — John Baily (of the First Church), Samuel Willard (of the Old South Church), Jeremy Belknap (founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society), and John Lathrop (of the Second Church); Chief Justice Samuel Sewall; Peter Faneuil; Paul Revere; Josiah Franklin and wife, parents of Benjamin Franklin Thomas Cushing, lieutenant governor, 1780-1788; John Phillips, first mayor of Bos­ton, and father of Wendell Phillips; and the victims of the Boston Massacre of 1770.

Besides these, others of like distinction are entombed here, among them James Otis; the Rev. Thomas Prince, the learned annalist; the Rev. Pierre Daillé, minister of the French church formed by the Huguenots who came to Boston after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes; Edward Rawson, secretary of the Colony; Josiah Willard, secretary of the Province; and John Hull, the “mint master” of 1652. General Joseph Warren’s tomb was here (the Minot tomb, adjoining that of Hancock) from after the obsequies in King’s Chapel in 1776 till 1825. Then his remains were removed to the Warren tomb under St. Paul’s Church. In 1855 they were again removed, being finally deposited in the family vault in Forest Hills Cemetery, Roxbury District. Wendell Phillips (died 1884) was also temporarily buried here, beside the tomb of his father, at the right of the entrance gate. After the death of his widow, two years later, his remains were removed to Milton and placed by her side. The most conspicuous monuments here, all in view from the side walk, are the bowlders marking the tombs of Samuel Adams and James Otis, the former near the fence, north of the entrance gate, the latter, also near the fence, south of the gate; the monument to Benjamin Franklin’s parents, in the middle of the yard; and the John Hancock monument, in the southwestern corner. The inscriptions on the Adams and Otis bowlders give these records:

Granary Burying Ground

Here lies buried Samuel Adams Signer of the Declaration of Independence Governor of this Commonwealth A leader of men and an ardent patriot Born 1722           Died 1803  Here lies buried James Otis Orator and Patriot of the Revolution Famous for his argument against Writs of Assistance Born 1725           Died 1783

Adams’s grave is in the Checkley tomb, which adjoins the sidewalk; Otis’s is in the Cunningham tomb, bearing now the name of George Longley. The bowlders were placed by the Massachusetts Society of the Sons of the Revolution in 1898, as the inscriptions show.

The epitaph on the Franklin monument was composed by Franklin, and first appeared on a marble stone which he caused to be placed here. The granite obelisk was provided by a number of citizens in 1827, when the stone had become decayed, and the inscription was reproduced on the bronze tablet set in its face:

Josiah Franklin and Abiah his wife, lie here interred. They lived lovingly together in wedlock fifty-five years. Without any estate, or any gainful employment, By constant labor and industry, with God’s blessing, They maintained a large family comfortably, and brought up thirteen children and seven grandchildren reputably. From this instance, reader, Be encouraged to diligence in thy calling And distrust not Providence. He was a pious and prudent man; She, a discreet and virtuous woman. Their youngest son, In filial regard to their memory Places this stone J. F. born 1655, died 1744, Ætat 89. A. F. born 1667, died 1752, — 85.

The Hancock monument is a steel shaft, erected in 1895 close by the Hancock tomb, set against the wall of one of the buildings which back on the yard. It is simply inscribed: Obsta Principiis This memorial erected A.D. MDCCCXCV. By the Com monwealth of Massachv, setts to mark the grave of John Hancock.      Near by the Hancock tomb is a dilapidated slate slab with the inscription, “Frank, servant of John Hancock Esq’r, lies interred here, who died 23d Jan’ry 1771, ætat 38.”      The graves of the victims of the Boston Massacre are unmarked. Formerly a beautiful larch tree grew over the spot. It is said to be twenty feet back from the sidewalk fence and sixty feet south of the Tremont Building.      The grave of Benjamin Woodbridge, the young victim of the duel on the Common in 1728, is midway between the gate and Park Street Church, near the fence. The inscription on the upright stone informs us that he was “a son of the Honourable Dudley Woodbridge Esq’r,” and “dec’d July ye 3d, in ye 20th year of his age.”

Hancock Monument, Granary Burying Ground

One stone that many seek here, and some have seemed to identify, is not to be found, if we are to accept the word of an authoritative antiquary. This is the tablet marking the grave of “Mother Goose.” According to the late William H. Whitmore, who, in his “Genesis of a Boston Myth,” marshaled strong evidence to sustain his assertion, “Mother Goose” was not Elizabeth Vergoose, the worthy seventeenth-century matron, as has been alleged; nor was “Mother Goose” a name that originated in Boston.      In this yard, as in King’s Chapel Busying Ground, many of the old stones were years ago ruthlessly shifted from the graves to which they belonged, which caused the remark of Dr. Holmes that “Epitaphs were never famous for truth, but the old reproach of ‘Here lies’ never had such a wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial places, where the stone does lie above and the bones do not lie beneath.” Park Street Church, with its graceful spire, picturesquely finishing the corner of Tremont and Park streets, dates from 1809. It is the best example remaining in the city of the early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical architecture. It was designed by an English architect, Peter Banner, but the Ionic and Corinthian capitals of the steeple were the work of the Bostonian Solomon Willard.

It was the first Trinitarian church established after the invasion of Unitarianism in the Puritan churches, and the fervor with which the unadulterated orthodox doctrine was preached by its earlier ministers made its pulpit famous, and led the unrighteous to bestow upon the point which it faces the title of “Brimstone Corner.” Its history is notable. It is marked as the place in which “America” was first publicly sung. The hymn was written by the Rev. Samuel F. Smith to fit some music for Dr. Lowell Mason, music master of Boston, and was given for the first time at a children’s celebration here on July 4, 1832. Here on a preceding 4th of July (1829), William Lloyd Garrison, then not yet twenty-four years old, gave his first public address in Boston against slavery. In 1849 Charles Sumner gave his great address on “The War System of Nations,” at the annual convention of the American Peace Society, which that year began to hold its sessions here. This remained the Peace Society’s regular place of meeting for a long period. The patriotic sermons of the Civil War preached here by Dr. A. L. Stone (minister of the church from 1849 to 1866) have been called “a part of Boston history.” This church occupies the site of the town granary, a grain house (first set up on the Common, opposite, in 1737) from which grain was sold to the needy by the town’s agents. It was from its proximity to the granary that the old burying ground got its name.

Looking up Hamilton Place, opposite Park Street Church, we see the side of the old Music Hall, now a theater. This is a building of pleasant memories. It was erected in 1852, projected chiefly by the Harvard Musical Association, then the representative of classical orchestral music in Boston. Nearly thirty years later (1881) the Boston Symphony Orchestra began its career here, under the generous patronage of Henry L. Higginson. Once the hall had in its “great organ” one of the largest and finest instruments in the world, but this was permitted to be sold and removed at a time when the hall was undergoing alterations. For some years, during the latter part of his life, Music Hall was Theodore Parker’s pulpit; and at a later period that of W. H. H. Murray, after he had been a pastor of Park Street Church.

Boston Common and its surroundings. Situated in the heart of the city, the Common is unique among municipal public grounds. Its existence and preservation are due to the wise forethought of the first settlers of the town.      Its integrity rests primarily on a town order passed in 1640, reserving it as open ground, or common field. This was strengthened by a clause in the city charter forbidding its sale or lease. Subsequent acts prohibit the laying out of any highway or street railway upon or through it, or the taking of any part of it for widening or altering any street, without the consent of the citizens.

Beacon Street Mall

It dates actually from 1634, four years after the settlement of the town, when it was laid out as “a place for a trayning field” and for “the feeding of cattell.” A training field in part it has remained to the present day, and cattle did not cease to graze on it till the thirties of the nineteenth century. Originally it was larger than it is now, extending to the Tremont Building on Tremont and Beacon streets in one direction, and across Tremont Street to West and Mason streets in another. The taking from the north end for the Granary Burying Ground in 1660 was its earliest curtailment. On the west side, where is now Charles Street, it at first met the Back Bay, the waters of which came up to this line. Its present extent is 48 2/5 acres, exclusive of the old burying ground on part of its south or Boylston Street side. Its surface has been much made over, but without obliterating altogether its old-time contour. The broad tree-lined malls which traverse it display the taste and large-mindedness of the later town and earlier city fathers. Many majestic elms which once embellished the place have been destroyed by time and changes. The building of the Subway beneath the Tremont Street mall removed the oldest row and some of the finest of them; but there yet remain numerous stalwart specimens, with other varieties of trees, shading and beautifying the several paths.

Soldier's' Monument

Of the monuments here the Army and Navy Monument, the granite Doric column of which reaches above the trees, is most conspicuous. This occupies the highest elevation in the inclosure, the point where the British artillery were stationed during the Siege. It is the work of Martin Milmore, and was erected in 1877. The statues on the projecting pedestals of the plinth represent the Soldier, the Sailor, the Muse of History, and Peace. The bas-reliefs between them depict The Departure of the Regiment, The Sanitary Commission, The Achievements of the Navy, and The Return from the War and Surrender of the Battle Flags to the Governor. The figures on these bas-reliefs are mostly portraits of soldiers or citizens prominent in the Civil War period. The sculptured figures at the base of the shaft typify the North, South, East, and West. The crowning statue represents the “Genius of America.” The monument bears this inscription, written by President Eliot of Harvard University: To the men of Boston who died for their country on land and sea in the war which kept the Union whole, destroyed slavery and maintained the Constitution, the grateful city has built this monument that their example may speak to coming generations. At the foot of this hill, on the east side, stood the “Great Elm” till its fall in a windstorm in 1876, supposed to have been old when the town was settled, and a scene of executions in early Colony days, — per haps that of Anne Hibbens for “witchcraft” in 1656. An iron tablet marks the spot. On a northerly side path is another elm grown from a shoot of it. Not far from the “Great Elm” tradition says the Quakers were executed; but the learned antiquary, M. J. Canavan, fixes their gal lows at the South End. Beneath its branches is supposed to have taken place the fatal duel in which young Woodbridge was slain.

Frog Pond

Near by lies the historic “Frog Pond,” so called, as the town wits have it, because it was never known to harbor a frog. The real frog pond was the Horse or Cow Pond, a shallow pool where the cows slaked their thirst or cooled their legs, which lay in the lowlands about the present band stand. The present pond is the survivor of three marshy bogs originally within the Common. It was the scene of the formal introduction of the public water system in 1848, for which celebration James Russell Lowell wrote his Ode on Water.

West of the Frog Pond lies the Parade Ground, which represents, in small compass, the original training field of the Colonial trainbands. It has been the chief mustering place in war times from Provincial to modern days. In 1775, when the Common was the British camp, the force for Bunker Hill was arrayed here before crossing the river to Charlestown. In the preceding April the detachment that moved on Lexington and Concord started from near it, taking boats on the bay. Now it is the place where the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company with great gravity go through their annual time-honored evolutions, and the boys of the school regiments have their clever May trainings.

The granite shaft with its bronze figure of “Revolution,” which stands in the green facing Lafayette Mall on the Tremont Street side, commemorates the Boston Massacre of 1770, and is popularly called the Crispus Attucks Monument. It is by Robert Kraus, and was erected by the State in 1888. The bas-relief on the base reproduces a crude con temporary picture of the scene published in London, together with the “Short Narrative” authorized by the town. The inscriptions are these words of John Adams and Webster:

The names of the victims are inscribed on the shaft.

The promenade of Lafayette Mall is the finishing feature of the Subway work on this side of the Common. It extends over the Subway between Park and Boylston streets, and at Boylston Street joins a narrower walk which follows the Subway course on that side to Charles Street, passing by the picturesque old Central Burying Ground (established 1756) which has among its graves those of Gilbert Stuart, the painter, and M. Julien, the restaurateur, whose fame as the introducer of Julien soup survived him. While these walks lack the fringes of noble English elms which characterized the earlier malls here, especially the Tremont Street mall which once had three magnificent rows, they have attractions in the bordering masses of other trees and in their openness to the spacious street-ways free from street-car tracks.

Being in the heart of things Lafayette Mall is an animated thorough. fare. Close by is the principal theater quarter of the city. On the opposite side of the way are Keith’s Theater (fronting on Washington Street, next east of Tremont) and the Tremont Theater (near the site of the second playhouse built in Boston, — the Haymarket of 1796). On Washington Street (with its rear entrance near the West Street corner of Tremont) is the Boston Theater, and a little way above this the Park Theater. On Tremont Street again, just above Boylston Street, is the Majestic Theater, and a short block above this the Shubert Theater. On Hollis Street, off Tremont, is the Hollis Street Theater (its house including the brick walls of the third Hollis Street Church, dating from 1808, the pulpit of John Pierpont and Thomas Starr King, and the successor of the earlier Hollis Street Church of Mather Byles, the “Tory, wit, and scholar,” used, nevertheless, by the British for barracks during the Siege). On Boylston Street, opposite the Boylston Street walk, is the Colonial Theater (on the site of the first Boston Public Library building).

In the same neighborhood is a notable group of hotels, including the Touraine on Tremont and Boylston streets (occupying the site of the mansion house of President John Quincy Adams, birthplace of Charles Francis Adams, Sr.), the Brewster on Boylston Street, and the Adams on Washington Street (covering the site of the eighteenth-century Lamb Tavern, an early stagecoach starting place). On Washington Street, opposite the opening of Boylston Street, is a revolutionary land mark, — the site of the Liberty Tree, the rallying place of the Sons of Liberty in the prerevolutionary period, where the effigies were hung in the Stamp Act excitement. The business building that now covers the spot displays on its front an old tablet with a representation of a tree and beneath, these lines:

The adjacent hotel, popularly known as “Brigham’s,” stands in place of the Liberty Tree Tavern, where the Liberty men refreshed them selves after their meetings at the tree. “Brigham’s” was originally the Lafayette Hotel, erected to mark the historical spot in season for the great welcome to Lafayette on the Frenchman’s memorable last visit to the country in 1824; and so was named in his honor. It was in commemoration of this visit, very much later — three quarters of a century afterward, — that Lafayette Mall received its name.

The selection is based on a pretty incident of that visit. On the reception day the school children were lined up along Tremont Street mall, and, as Lafayette was passing in the procession, they cast bouquets in his path so that his progress was upon a carpet of natural flowers.

Midway up Boylston Street between Washington and Tremont streets is the building of the Young Men’s Christian Union (instituted 1851) with its stone clock tower. On the Tremont Street corner facing the Lafayette Mall is the white granite Masonic Temple (the second on this site, built in 1898 1899), headquarters of the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts, and housing thirteen lodges. Occupying the streets east of the mall is the heart of the retail shopping quarter. Below the Temple Place corner, hedged in by great stores, is St. Paul’s Church, the fourth Episcopal church in Boston, dating from 1820, a Grecian-like temple of gray granite, the hexastyle porticoes of Potomac sandstone. Solomon Willard carved the Ionic capitals; Alexander Parris designed the whole. The pediment is bare, the original design of a bas-relief of Paul preaching at Athens never having been carried out. It was in one of the tombs beneath this church that General Joseph Warren’s remains rested for thirty years after their second removal. In another tomb Prescott the historian was buried.

Milk Station, Washington Street Station

At the head of the Park Street mall are the Park Street entrance and exit stations of the Boston Subway. The upper west side building is the entrance for west, and south-bound surface cars; the upper east building is an exit only; the lower east building, an entrance for north bound surface cars (North Station and Charlestown); and the lower west building, entrance and exit for west, and south-bound cars. Above the stairways of the Park Street entrance a bronze tablet, placed in commemoration of the initial opening of the Subway in 1897, gives the following data: This Subway authorized by the Legislatures of 1893 and 1894. Hon. Nathan Matthews, Jr., Mayor of the City of Boston. Built by the Boston Transit Commission. Howard Adams Carson, chief engineer. Begun at the Public Garden, 28 March, 1893, was opened to this point for public travel 2 September, 1897. The work was completed throughout and the entire Subway opened September 3, 1898. Its length is about one and two-thirds miles. Its course is shown by the accompanying map. The surface cars coming from the west enter at the Public Garden and make the loop at the Park Street station, whence they return and emerge at the Public Garden. Those coming from the south and north use that part of the Subway between Scollay Square and the North Station. The Subway is owned by the city and leased to the Boston Elevated Railway Company for a term of years, at an annual compensation of “4 7/8 per cent of the net cost of the work.”

The elevated trains use the Washington Street Tunnel, between which and the Subway passengers transfer at the Haymarket Square station. The Tunnel, connected with the Elevated system, passes under Washington Street, and, including inclines, is 1 2/10 miles in length. It is constructed on a generous plan and is attractively finished at the several stations with tiling. The names of the stations are given in order of direction of traffic: south-bound — Friend, Milk, Winter, Boylston; north-bound — Essex, Summer, State, Union. Each platform is three hundred and fifty feet in length and will accommodate an eight-car train. This Tunnel was opened to the public November 30, 1908. In the State station is placed a bronze tablet bearing this inscription: Washington Street Tunnel, authorized by the Legislature, 1902. W. Murray Crane, Governor; Patrick A. Collins, Mayor of Boston. Opened November 30, 1908. Built by the Boston Transit Commission [names of the commission]. Howard A. Carson, Chief Engineer.

This Tunnel, like the Subway, is owned by the city and leased to the Boston Elevated Railway Company. The lease runs for twenty-five years, from the beginning of the use of the Tunnel, at an annual rental “equal to 41/2 per cent of the net cost.”

At the head of the Beacon Street Mall, opposite the State House, is the Colonel Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, facing Beacon Street, between two majestic elms, the most imposing piece of out door sculpture in the city. Colonel Shaw was the commander of the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry, composed of colored troops, in the Civil War, and was killed at the head of his command while leading the assault on Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863; and the monument commemorates the colored soldiers in that event as well as their leader. It consists of a statue of Colonel Shaw mounted, with his men pressing close beside him, in high relief upon a large bronze tablet. The sculptor was Augustus St. Gaudens, and the architect of the elaborate stone frame was Charles F. McKim. The inscriptions are unusually extensive and interesting, including verses of James Russell Lowell and Emerson, and a memorial by ex-President Eliot of Harvard. The monument was erected and dedicated in 1897. Its cost was met from a fund raised by voluntary subscriptions. On the opposite side of Beacon Street, just below Hancock Avenue, — the walk along the west side of the State House grounds, — is the site of a long-cherished landmark that should have been preserved: the mansion house of Hancock. It is marked by a modest bronze tablet set in the low iron fence in front of the brownstone building, the present publishing house of Messrs. Ginn and Company, which now occupies the spot: Here stood the residence of John Hancock, a prominent and patriotic Merchant of Boston, the first Signer of the Declaration of American Independence, and First Governor of Massachusetts, under the State Constitution. At the time of its demolition the mansion, besides being of exceptional historic value, was a rare type of our provincial domestic architecture, and was well fitted by situation and character for preservation as the official dwelling of the governors of the Commonwealth, as was proposed some years before. The main structure was then nearly as in Governor Hancock’s day, when it was called the “seat of his Excellency the Governor,” and it contained much of the furnishings and appointments of his time, with the family portraits by Copley and Smibert. A measure for its purchase by the state for the governor’s house was reported to the Legislature in 1859 by an influential committee; but the project failed. At length, in February, 1863, the land which it occupied was sold.

Shaw Monument

For a while thereafter it served as a museum of historical relics, and then, a scheme for its removal and reërection elsewhere failing, it was pulled down. Souvenirs of it were eagerly sought as it fell. The knocker on the front door was given to Dr. Holmes, who placed it on the door of the “old gambrel-roofed house” in Cambridge, where it remained till that also was demolished. The flight of stone steps which led up to the entrance are now in service on Pinebank, Jamaica Park. The purchasers of the land, J. M. Beebe and Gardner Brewer, two leading Boston merchants, erected the present stately double house here for their occupancy. Messrs. Ginn & Company became established in No. 29 in 1901, and their business offices fully occupy the spacious interior.

The old mansion was of Quincy granite obtained from the surface, as in the case of King’s Chapel, squared and well hammered. The principal features of the façade were the broad front door at the head of a flight of stone steps, garnished with pillars and an ornamental door head; and the ornamented central window over it. The high gambrel roof with dormer windows showed a carved balcony railing inclosing its upper portion. The interior comprised a nobly paneled hall, having a broad staircase with carved and twisted balusters, which divided the house in the middle and extended through on both stories from front to rear. On the landing, part way up the staircase, was a circular-headed window looking out upon the garden, with a broad and capacious window seat. On the entrance floor, at the right of the hall, was the great dining-room, seven teen by twenty-five feet, also elaborately paneled from floor to ceiling. Until the widening of Beacon Street the house stood well back from the street on ground elevated above it. The approach was then through a “neat garden bordered with small trees” and shrubbery. The mansion then, also, had two large wings, one on the east side containing a great ballroom, the other on the west side appropriated to the kitchen and other domestic offices. Beyond the west wing was the coach house, and adjoin­ing that the stable.

Behind the mansion were the gar­dens and fruit-tree nurseries, extend­ing up the side of the then existing peak of Beacon Hill where the State House Annex stands. The mansion with the estate came to John Hancock in 1777, upon the death of Lydia Hancock, widow of his uncle, Thomas Hancock, who built the house. The estate then included the territory occupied by the State House, and extended along Beacon Street to Joy Street. During the Siege Lord Percy occupied the mansion for some time.

Let us now step back to the opposite side of Beacon Street a moment and take a sweeping survey of the fine line of Beacon Street houses down the hill. Standing by the Joy Street steps to the Common, which lead to the head of Holmes’s “Long Path” (the mall running southward across the Common’s length to Boylston Street, — the scene of the crisis in the “Autocrat’s” courtship of the schoolmistress), we have the best point of view. Looking westward at the lower corner of Walnut Street, the next opening below Joy Street, we see the house in which Wendell Phillips was born. Lower down is the Somerset Club, — the stone double-swell-front house originally the “David Sears mansion,” — by the site of the house in which John Singleton Copley lived when painting his remarkable Boston portraits. Still farther down, below the next side opening, we catch a glimpse of the painted brick “swell” of the Prescott house (No. 55), the home of the historian William H. Prescott through the last fourteen years of his life. 

From the State House to the Old South. The front of the State House, with its terraced lawn, occupies the cow pasture of the Hancock estate, comprising about two acres, which the town purchased of John Hancock’s heirs for four thousand dollars and conveyed to the Commonwealth. This is the historic “Bulfinch Front,” designed by Charles Bulfinch and erected in 1795-1797. It alone constituted the Massachusetts State House for more than half a century. Then a new part, extend­ing back upon Mt. Vernon Street, was added (1853-1856), which came to be called the “Bryant Addition,” from its principal architect, J. G. F. Bryant; and finally the “State House Annex” was erected (1889-1895; Charles E. Brigham, architect), extending back from the Bryant Addition, with the archway over Mt. Vernon Street, to Derne Street, in exterior design and ornamentation harmonizing with the Bulfinch Front. Standing on the highest point of land in the city proper, the yellow dome of the Bulfinch Front (the “Gilded Dome” since 1874, when gilt was first applied to it) is a familiar landmark in every direction by day, while at night, lighted up by encircling rows of electric lights, it is a glistening beacon visible for many miles.      Till 1811 the main peak of Beacon Hill rose directly behind the Bulfinch Front, a grassy cone-shaped mound about as high as the dome. On its broad, flat summit the Beacon was set up as early as 1634, from which the name of the entire hill came, it having earlier been called Centry Hill, from a lookout established here.      The Beacon was to warn the country on occasions of danger. It consisted of an iron skillet filled with combustibles for firing, suspended from an iron crane at the top of a high mast, with treenails in it for its ascent. This and its successors stood for more than a century and a half, but it never seems to have been fired for alarm. During the Siege the British pulled the Beacon down and erected a fort in its stead. It was reërected after