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. The two companies set out to capture and destroy each other's effigies, and the clashes were remembered as very severe. The Mill Creek, dug in the 1640s along the line of the later Blackstone Street, divided the North End from the rest of the town. In 1745 the processions met in Cornhill, where by one account the two sides fell upon one another with the utmost rage and fury. The worst year on record was 1764. As the North End stage set off on 5 November, one of its wheels ran over and killed a small child. Magistrates pulled both stages down that afternoon, but the companies rebuilt them after dark and at about 8 pm fought near the Mill Bridge, which carried Hanover Street over the Mill Creek. The South End won and burned the North End's stage on Boston Neck. The companies were led by Ebenezer Mackintosh of the South End and Samuel Swift of the North End. In 1765, through what Isaac Winslow called the mediation of the principal gentlemen of the town, the two companies paraded the streets together all day.