Local Stories in Massachusetts
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History·Suffolk County
Charlestown Neck
Charlestown Neck was the narrow isthmus joining the Charlestown peninsula to the mainland, roughly where Main Street runs today toward Sullivan Square. In 1775 it was, in Richard Frothingham's description, an artificial causeway so low that the tides often flowed over it, and Main Street ran from the Neck down to the ferry. It was the only way on or off the peninsula by land, and twice in 1775 that made it the place everything funnelled through.
History·Suffolk County
Cows on the Common
For almost two centuries Boston Common was a working pasture. After the town bought out the first settler, William Blackstone, in 1634, with each householder paying at least six shillings, it laid out the land as a training field and for the feeding of cattle, common to all the inhabitants. Grazing soon had to be rationed.
History·Suffolk County
Gage's Lines
Gage's Lines were the British fortifications across Boston Neck, the narrow strip that was then the only road into the town, during the siege of 1775 and 1776. At high tide the Neck was about 120 feet wide, and the road over it, Orange Street, is today's Washington Street in the South End. General Thomas Gage began fortifying it in September 1774, and by the summer of 1775 there were two lines.
History·Suffolk County
Gray's Ropewalk
Gray's Ropewalk was one of seven long rope-making sheds that lined what is now Pearl Street, and the fight there between ropemakers and British soldiers on Friday 2 March 1770 led, three days later, to the Boston Massacre. The business was begun by Edward Gray in 1712 and run in 1770 by his son John, whose walks were 744 feet long. Sworn depositions printed by the town later that month tell the story.
History·Suffolk County
Griffin's Wharf
Griffin's Wharf, where the tea ships Dartmouth, Eleanor and Beaver were boarded on the night of 16 December 1773, no longer exists. It ran out into the harbour from the foot of Hutchinson Street, now Pearl Street, and its site lies under landfill beneath Atlantic Avenue near Pearl Street. The shore street of the time was Purchase Street, so everything east of it was once water and wharves.
History·Suffolk County
Hub of the Universe
Boston's nickname "the Hub" began as a joke about the Massachusetts State House. In the sixth instalment of Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.'s series The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, printed in The Atlantic Monthly in April 1858, a jaunty stranger brought to the narrator's boarding-house table offers one more wise saying he has heard about the town, though he does not know who said it: "Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system.
History·Suffolk County
Hutchinson's House
Hutchinson's House, the brick mansion of Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson on Garden Court Street in the North End, was gutted by a crowd on the night of 26 August 1765, the most destructive of Boston's Stamp Act riots. Hutchinson was at supper when the crowd arrived. He sent his children away and escaped with his eldest daughter through neighbouring yards and gardens, and by four the next morning, in his own words, there was nothing remaining but the bare walls and floors.
History·Middlesex County
Lechmere Point
Lechmere Point in East Cambridge is where the British column bound for Lexington and Concord came ashore on the night of 18 April 1775. About 800 grenadiers, light infantry and marines under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith had embarked at about ten o'clock at the foot of Boston Common, in the boats of the warships in the harbour, and were rowed across the Back Bay to what was then Phipps Farm, a low point of upland that was almost an island at high tide.
History·Suffolk County
Moulton's Point
Moulton's Point, also called Morton's Point, was the south-eastern corner of the Charlestown peninsula, where General William Howe's troops landed on the afternoon of 17 June 1775 to attack the American works on Breed's Hill. Richard Frothingham, the historian of the siege, wrote that the name was as old as the settlement of the town.
History·Suffolk County
Ponzi's Office
Charles Ponzi ran his Securities Exchange Company in 1920 from an office in the Niles Building at 27 School Street, at the corner of City Hall Avenue beside Old City Hall. He promised investors 50 per cent in 45 days, or 100 per cent in 90, and said the profit came from international postal reply coupons, which cost about one cent in Spain and could be redeemed for six cents in the United States. Deposits grew from $870 paid by 15 people in December 1919 to almost $500,000 in May 1920 and $2.
History·Suffolk County
Pope's Night
Pope's Night, the 5 November anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, was one of colonial Boston's liveliest holidays and by the 1740s a yearly battle between the North End and the South End. Each side built a stage carrying effigies of the Pope, his attendants and later the Devil, which servants and Black men hauled through the streets collecting money from householders before the figures were burned at night.
Industry & Science·Suffolk County
Prince Spaghetti
The Prince Macaroni Company was founded in 1912 by three immigrants from the same village in Sicily, who opened a small macaroni and spaghetti shop at 92 Prince Street in the North End and named the business after the street. By the company's account, Gaetano LaMarca was the administrator, Giuseppe Seminara the salesman and Michele Cantella the pasta maker.
History·Suffolk County
Sacco and Vanzetti
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists convicted of the 1920 South Braintree payroll murders after a trial now widely judged unfair, were executed in the electric chair of the Charlestown State Prison death house just after midnight on 23 August 1927. Celestino Madeiros, a condemned prisoner who had confessed to taking part in the crime and said that neither man was there, went first: he entered the chamber at 12.02 and was dead by 12.09. Sacco followed at 12.
History·Suffolk County
The 1768 Landing
The 1768 Landing was the arrival of British regulars to occupy Boston, at noon on Saturday 1 October 1768, when the troops came ashore on Long Wharf and formed up at its head, where it met King Street, today's State Street at Merchants Row. Warships from Halifax had anchored in the harbour the day before.
History·Suffolk County
The 1903 Chinatown Raid
On the evening of Sunday 11 October 1903, Boston police and federal immigration officers sealed off the city's Chinatown, then centred on Harrison Avenue between Beach and Kneeland Streets, and arrested every Chinese man who could not at once produce the registration certificate required under the Chinese exclusion laws. At 7.
History·Suffolk County
The 1919 Police Strike
At 5.45 pm on 9 September 1919, 1,117 of the Boston Police Department's 1,544 officers and men failed to report for duty. The policemen had organised a union under a charter from the American Federation of Labor in August, and Commissioner Edwin Upton Curtis, who held that police had no right to such a union, suspended 19 of its officers and on 8 September found them guilty of union activity. The union voted 1,134 to 2 to walk out the next evening.
History·Suffolk County
The Anthony Burns Riot
The Anthony Burns Riot broke out on the night of 26 May 1854 at the Suffolk County Court House, a granite building by Solomon Willard that opened in Court Square in December 1836, on the footprint now occupied by the City Hall Annex at 26 Court Street. Burns had escaped slavery in Virginia and was working in Coffin Pitts's shop on Brattle Street when federal marshals seized him on 24 May under the Fugitive Slave Act and held him in the building.
History·Suffolk County
The British Coffee House
The British Coffee House was a tavern on the north side of King Street, now State Street, on the site of today's 60 State Street, and a favourite of British officers and Crown officials. It was there, at about seven in the evening of 5 September 1769, that James Otis Jr., the lawyer whose speeches against the writs of assistance had made him the leading voice of Boston's opposition, was beaten by John Robinson, a commissioner of customs.
History·Suffolk County
The Burning of Charlestown
Charlestown, a town of about 1,600 people across the Charles from Boston, was burned on 17 June 1775 during the Battle of Bunker Hill. Most residents had already left. When colonists fired on General William Howe's troops from the empty buildings, Howe had the town set alight, by shells from the Copp's Hill battery in Boston and by marines landed from HMS Somerset. Some witnesses said the fire began at the meeting house, others at an old house above the ferry, and it burned for two days or more.
History·Suffolk County
The Copp's Hill Battery
The Copp's Hill Battery was a British gun position on the summit of Copp's Hill in the North End, near the south-western corner of the burying ground, aimed across the mouth of the Charles at Charlestown. Admiral Samuel Graves had it thrown up in the spring of 1775 to cover his ships. A City of Boston history of the burial ground describes the works as hastily built and never completed, a few barrels of earth arranged as parapets with an earthwork behind for infantry.
Transport·Suffolk County
The Elevated Artery
The elevated Central Artery, officially the John F. Fitzgerald Expressway, was a six-lane steel viaduct raised 30 to 50 feet above downtown Boston, and through the North End it followed Cross Street, between the neighbourhood and Haymarket Square. The state began condemning property for it in 1950, and demolition started in the North End in the autumn of 1951. Over its whole length the road displaced an estimated 20,000 people.
History·Suffolk County
The Garrison Mob
On the afternoon of 21 October 1835 a crowd that the Boston Commercial Gazette put at fifteen hundred or two thousand broke up a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, called for 3 o'clock in the hall adjoining the Anti-Slavery Office at 46 Washington Street. The office stood on the east side of Washington Street a short way north of the Old State House, which was then Boston's City Hall, with its rear on a narrow alley called Wilson's Lane.
History·Suffolk County
The Gravel Trains
Much of the Back Bay stands on gravel carried nine miles by train from the hills of Needham. The contractors Goss and Munson, hired to fill the Commonwealth's 100 acres of the tidal basin behind the Mill Dam, began work about the middle of May 1858. They built six miles of railroad and a machine shop, and dug at a pit near the Newton line, a quarter of a mile from the Upper Falls depot of the Charles River Railroad, on a farm the railroad company owned.
History·Suffolk County
The Lost Fort Hill
Fort Hill was the most easterly of the three prominent hills of the Shawmut peninsula, about 76 to 80 feet above tide water, covering the ground between Pearl, Batterymarch and Broad Streets and the harbour. First called Corn Hill, it took its name from the town's first fort, begun on it on 24 May 1632. From about 1800 a park on the summit anchored a planned residential square, called Washington Place from 1808 and Washington Square from 1837, with fashionable houses around it.
History·Suffolk County
The Mill Pond
The Mill Pond was a tidal cove on the north side of the Boston peninsula, dammed for water power in the 1640s and filled in between 1807 and the late 1820s to create the streets now known as the Bulfinch Triangle. On 31 July 1643 the town granted the cove to Henry Symons, George Burden, John Button and John Hill on condition that they build one or more corn mills.
History·Suffolk County
The West End Clearance
Between 1958 and 1960 almost all of Boston's old West End, a working-class neighbourhood of three- to five-storey apartment houses at the foot of Beacon Hill, was demolished under the federal urban renewal programme. Mayor John Hynes's administration had marked it for "slum clearance" and luxury apartments. In November 1956 the Boston Housing Authority awarded the redevelopment to Charles River Park, Inc.
History·Suffolk County
Trimountain
Boston's central hill once had three summits. In 1634 William Wood described, north-west of the town, "a high Mountaine with three little rising Hills on the top of it, wherefore it is called the Tramount," the source of the names Trimountain and Tremont. The middle peak, first called Sentry Hill and later Beacon Hill, carried a town plot six rods square reserved for a beacon in 1634-35, and stood perhaps 60 feet higher than the ground beside the present Beacon Hill Monument.