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. On 18 May 1646 a general town meeting ordered that no more than 70 milch cows be kept on the Common, that no dry cattle, young cattle or horses go there that year except one horse for Elder Oliver, and that a right of commonage could be hired out but never sold. Anyone who preferred sheep could keep four in place of a cow. The cows outlasted the colony. In 1661 General Humphrey Atherton, riding home from a militia training on the Common, was thrown and killed when his horse shied at a cow. In 1823 the new city limited each owner to one cow on the Common, registered every year. Edward Everett Hale, a boy beside the Common in the late 1820s, listed it as a pasture, a playground, a place for beating carpets and a militia ground, and doubted there were ever fifty cows there at once; they kept to the parts near Charles Street. Under Mayor Josiah Quincy the price of pasturage was raised from two dollars to ten, and on 10 May 1830, under Mayor Harrison Gray Otis, the city passed an order banishing the cows altogether.