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." The Autocrat thanks him, calls the satire essentially true of Boston, and adds that it is just as true of every other place, considerable or inconsiderable, that he has known, from London and Paris to the smaller towns he has visited on lecture tours. He then lists rules he says hold for every town, the first being that "The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city." Bostonians adopted the jibe and enlarged it: the State House as the hub of the solar system became Boston as the hub of the universe, shortened to "the Hub." In 1907 the Nuttall Encyclopaedia defined "Hub of the Universe" as a name humorously given by Holmes to Boston, "or rather the State House of the city." The State House, designed by Charles Bulfinch, stands on land that had been the Hancock family's cow pasture; its cornerstone was laid on 4 July 1795, and it was dedicated in 1798, sixty years before Holmes wrote the line.
Getting there
42.3582, -71.0637
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