Historic Boston - The Old South Meeting House

 The Old South Meeting House was the largest building in colonial Boston - and look at it now!

Built in 1729 as a Puritan meeting house to replace the Cedar Meeting House, it was nearly demolished in 1876 - but the good women of Boston came to it's rescue. It's not only historically significant for being the site of the tax protests that led to the Boston Tea Party, but African American poet Phyllis Wheatley worshipped here, and Ben Franklin was baptized here (although the latter happened in the old structure).  You can actually see his birthplace which is the dark colored skinny building to the right of the Old South Meeting House on Milk Street.

The Old South Meeting House is now a museum, but it originally had been a meeting house (or a church, if you will) for the Puritans back in the Colonial times.  They have examples (??) of people who were members of the church, such as Anna Green Winslow, the famous young letter writer and diary keeper.  In her letters and journal, she wrote about daily life in Boston and the tension that was building toward the American Revolution. Her great, great, great grandmother was Mary Chilton - which you may remember as the first woman to step foot off of the Mayflower!

The Old South Meeting House is perhaps best known for being the spot where the Boston Tea Party started.  The Freedom Trail website says it best:  "It was the series of meetings that culminated on December 16, 1773 that sealed Old South’s fate as one of this country’s most significant buildings. On that day, over 5,000 men crowded into the meeting house to hotly debate the controversial tea tax. When the final attempt at compromise failed, Samuel Adams gave the signal that started the Boston Tea Party. The Sons of Liberty led the way to Griffin’s Wharf, where they dumped 342 chests of tea into the frigid harbor." (Mmmm! Iced tea!)

The building itself was also the first instance of historic preservation in New England.  The land that the Old South Meeting House sits on is (obviously) very valuable - both now and back in 1876 when the building was sold at auction for $1,350.  Then, businessmen George W. Simmons and Son purchased the right to "hold" the building for seven days before it's destruction. In that time, they organized a public gathering at the building - which included the ladies of Boston who learned that they needed to raise $400,000 to purchase the land that the building sat on. 

Twenty ladies were able to come up with $3,500 to buy the building back which would hold it until they could come up with the $400,000 to purchase the land. Preservationists were eventually able to purchase the building and the land, and the Old South Meeting House was saved. Even Mary Sawyer Tyler sold bits of wool to help save the building.  You probably know her - and her wool - from the famous nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb."

You know I love a good map!  Here is colonial Boston as it was in 1773.

One of my personal heroes, Margaret Sanger is featured at the Old South Meeting House.  From New York, Margaret was a nurse who made it her life's mission to legalize birth control in the early 1900s. She spoke about sex and contraceptives and was arrested many times as a result. She was banned from speaking in Boston's public buildings (in 1923, 1924 and 1925), so she taped her mouth shut in protest when she appeared on stage at Ford Hall in Boston in April of 1929! Eventually, she went on on to open up the first birth control clinic, which ultimately evolved into Planned Parenthood. You go, girl!

Another interesting story about the Old South Meeting House is that in 1775, the British 17th Dragoons took over the meeting house, raided it of anything valuable, filled it with dirt and used it to practice riding their horses!

Although the congregants moved on to the New Old South Church (which is located off of Boylston Street near Copley Square) in 1875, they do come back just before Thanksgiving each year to celebrate mass.

The clock here is the original - and it's the "oldest American-made tower clock still operating in its original location" - all thanks to the twenty ladies who made it their mission to save the Old South Meeting House. What you also can't see here is that up in that belfry tower, thanks to a 2009 purchase from the First Baptist Church in Westborough (Massachusetts - not the crazies out in Kansas) sits yet another bell from Paul Revere and Sons Bell and Cannon Foundry! This bell has had a crazy history - it was at the First Baptist Church when the 1938 hurricane destroyed the steeple, which sent the 876 pound bell crashing to the ground. It was weirdly NOT damaged in the fall - and was put back in the restored steeple where it sat until the church was closed in 2007.  The Old South Meeting House had been without a bell since about 1875 (meaning the clock did not ring either as it was attached to the bell) so folks thought it was a good idea to send the Westborough bell back to Boston!  The bell was finally restored and the clock officially chimed again on January 12, 2012. 

Until next time, Old South Meeting House!

Historic Boston - The Old State House

The tour of MA CITY continues! This time, I visited the Old State House, which sits right on State Street in downtown Boston.

The Old State House was originally built as a wooden town house in 1657 - but it burned down in a fire in October of 1711 near the intersection of State and Washington Streets (which is literally just behind the building in the picture below.)  This particular structure was subsequently built in 1713 and was the seat of colonial government until 1776, and then State government until the "new" Massachusetts State House was completed in 1798.  The new State House was built over on land that was once owned by John Hancock which is now adjacent to Boston Common. We will visit that area in another post!

The Old State House almost hilariously sits among the giants in the heart of Boston.  On the façade of the building, you can see a few important features.  First, the balcony that you see is the same one that colonial governors would make announcements and proclamations from on behalf of the King of England.  The Declaration of Independence was read for first time in Boston from this balcony on July 18, 1776! You can also see the lion and the unicorn which were actually symbols of the King of England. The originals burned in 1776 but replicas were placed here in 1882.

The very small windows on the "first" floor were a result of the 1903-1904 addition of the orange line station to the east side of the building here.  It raised the original floor by 19 inches, thereby resulting in shorter windows.

And right out in front of the Old State House sits the marker for the spot where on March 5, 1770, the Boston Massacre occurred. Most people agree that these were the first shots fired in the Revolutionary War. There's a lot of symbology here - the five stars represent the five men who died in the Massacre.  The center marks the spot that Crispus Attucks was shot.  He was the black sailor who was the first to fall in the Massacre. I think I read somewhere that the 13 spokes coming out of the center were for the 13 colonies - indicating the 13 colonies that existed before this Massacre lead to the start of a nation but now I can't find anything about that - so don't quote me on that!

I went inside of the Old State House to learn a little lunchtime history!  Inside there is a copy of the famous painting that is a chromolithograph by John Bufford in 1857 (original drawing by William L. Champney in 1856) known as "The Death of Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre 5th March 1770."

This hat belonged to Major Thomas Melvill, who was the grandfather of Herman Melville (the author of Moby Dick).  He was a member of the Sons of Liberty that participated in the Boston Tea Party and he served as a major in the artillery during the Revolution.

When the Tea Party was over, the Sons of Liberty had boarded the British ships and pushed over 46 tons/$1.7 million worth of tea (in todays figures) into Boston Harbor --- AND Melvill's wife happened to find some of that tea in his boot after the affair was over, which they preserved in a little bottle for posterity, I'm sure.

I really liked seeing John Hancock's coat! They also had a letter of congratulations from the people of Boston on his selection as governor of Massachusetts, as well as his ceramic snuffbox.

At the Old State House, you can also visit the Council Chamber that dates back to 1764.

The Royal Governor of Massachusetts used to meet with the members of his council in this (now) very interactive room.

Because the Royal Governor of Massachusetts was working on behalf of the British throne (which at the time was George III), there is a painting of King Charles I from 1636, by Anthony Van Dyck.

There is also a painting of King James I by the first baronet, Sir Godfrey Kneller from 1684. Ironically, James II was overthrown as the last Catholic King of England which led to England becoming a constitutional monarchy rather than an absolute monarchy!

Well, someone left their shoes and coat at the Old State House! 

I thought the Old State House comic books and trading cards (not to mention the limited edition Jim Beam bottles) were a nice touch!  The Jim Beam bottles were made in 1976 to celebrate the Bicentennial.  Interestingly, these are two of the seven that were made, and six of them were featured as Saturday Evening Post cover art by Norman Rockwell. The seventh (on the right), which featured Crispus Attucks, had advertisements that only ran in Ebony and Black Enterprise magazines.

There is a cool and dizzying stairway in the Old State House. These always remind me of snails! This stairway was added around 1830.

Although the Old State House is still the oldest surviving public building in Boston (read: not someone's residence), it has had a lot of work done to it over the years. Don't miss visiting the lower level (where the bathrooms are) because there's a small but very interesting section about the restoration of this building!

The restoration began in 1881 with the goal to restore it to it's original look. The lion and the unicorn, symbols of the British government, had been torn off in 1776.  They were replaced (new, not the originals) with the late 1800s restoration of the east gable.  

In contrast, they placed an eagle and the Massachusetts state seal on the west gable!

The craziest idea they had was when they decided to run the MBTA orange line underneath the building in 1903-1904 (in fact, State Street station is actually IN the building!)

Behind those two people standing in the foreground, you can see the orange doors to the State Street orange line station. Super weird that they thought THIS was a good place for that!  But I read on the Boston History and Architecture website that, "The Old State House's shallow foundation provided an area for the subway stops to be stacked beneath it, without having to dig beneath the far deeper foundations of the surrounding buildings."

I love this picture and I love Boston architecture (well, most of it anyway!) 

Until next time, Old State House!

Historic Boston - Old City Hall/First Public School

Another adventure I had while tooling around Boston in the normally snowy month of January was to see a few of the sights centered around Boston's Old City Hall, as well as the first public school in America!

 

First, and totally unrelated, I love the architecture at the Tremont Temple Baptist Church on Tremont Street!  This super cool looking building opened in 1896 and has largely been a place of worship, but has also served in other capacities, with various offices for lease. It had also served as a location for public speeches by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederick Douglass. In 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation was read here in Boston for the first time and in December 1867, Charles Dickens gave his first public reading of A Christmas Carol. The original building (built before this one in 1827 but lost to fire) had been the Tremont Theater where John Wilkes Booth's father Junius Brutus Booth had taken the stage before it was purchased by the Free Church Baptists in 1843.  I just spotted this on my way to see the old city hall - see? So much cool stuff to see in Ma City!

The Omni Parker House hotel is the longest continually running hotel in the United States and it sits directly across the street from King's Chapel. The original was opened in 1855 although this building dates back to 1927. The hotel website says, "It was here where the brightest lights of America’s Golden Age of Literature—writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Longfellow— regularly met for conversation and conviviality in the legendary nineteenth-century Saturday Club. It was here where baseball greats like Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, and David Ortiz wined, dined, and unwound. And it was here, too, where generations of local and national politicians—including Ulysses S. Grant, James Michael Curley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Colin Powell, Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, William Jefferson Clinton, and Deval Patrick—assembled for private meetings, press conferences, and power breakfasts."  Even the kitchen and wait-staff once included Emeril Lagasse, Malcolm X, and Ho Chi Minh - I mean, if that isn't an impressive list, I don't know what is! AND they created the Boston Cream Pie here! AND JFK announced his candidacy for Congress, proposed to Jackie AND had his bachelor party here! I could go on and on with the history of this place!

The bar attached to the Omni Parker House Hotel is called the Last Hurrah, and Dickens actually gave his first "private" reading of A Christmas Carol here before he gave the public reading down the street at the Tremont Temple.

All within a one block area you can also find Boston's Old City hall which was used between 1865 and 1969.

This site was also the site of the Boston Public Latin School, the first public school in America which was founded in 1635 (Superlative, check!) While Native Americans were taught for free as of 1645, women were not admitted until the mid 1800s.

There is a very ornately decorated hopscotch plaque on the sidewalk (next to the double brick line that is the Freedom Trail) in front of the Old City Hall.  The school was here from 1635 to 1812 when it moved across School Street and was located there until 1844. That location eventually became the back side of the Omni Parker House hotel. Boston Latin next moved to Bedford Street (Downtown Crossing area) where it lasted until 1881 before it moved to Warren Avenue near the South End. In 1922, Boston Latin moved to Avenue Louis Pasteur where it is still in existence and is still known as one of the best schools in the state today.

This version of the Old City Hall is actually the third building to stand here, which was built in 1865. It was built in the beautiful French Second Empire style and now?  It currently houses a Ruth Chris Steakhouse among other offices and retail space. When I think of the Founding Fathers, democracy in America and the rise of the public school system, I definitely think of overpriced beef!

There is a statue of Ben Franklin in the courtyard of the Old City Hall, even though he dropped out of Boston Latin when he was 10 to become the apprentice at his brother's printing shop when he was 12. He had *beef* with his brother and ran away at 17 to Philadelphia where he began his illustrious diplomatic career.

Even though I don't love the idea of overpriced steak dinners being sold at such a cool historic site, this really was an excellent (and one of the first) example of how a historic building could be repurposed rather than being torn down. 

Another interesting statue in the courtyard of the Old Boston City Hall is the Donkey of Democracy.  He has a really strange story.  A man named Roger Webb purchased this bronze donkey in Florence, Italy and "envisioned" it on the Freedom Trail in Boston as something that children might enjoy on an otherwise history-heavy tour.  But the city officials wanted no part of it.  He was able to convince them that it was appropriate to place it in front of the Old City Hall with the idea that the city had been ruled by Democrats for many years - so here he stands!

Blogger is autorotating my pictures without my permission - and the one thing I don't like about this platform is the fact that I can't rotate a picture by hand here.  Grrr.  Anyway, Republicans of the city weren't very happy with the donkey's placement, so this (errr, much smaller) Republican Elephant plaque was placed directly in front of it as a call to "Stand in Opposition" to the Democratic Donkey. Webb didn't have a bronze statue of an elephant, and no one offered up a free one as he had offered the free donkey to the city, so he had his cousin create this small sculpture instead. How very diplomatic of him!

Until next time Old City Hall and Boston Latin Public School!

Historic Boston - King's Chapel Burying Ground

 The OLDEST Burying Ground in Boston is the King's Chapel Burying Ground, which is just around the corner from the old Boston City Hall. Superlative, check!

King's Chapel is pretty much only open for tours, so I didn't get to go in, but did you know that it was Boston's FIRST Anglican church, founded in 1686?  Inside, you will find the OLDEST American pulpit still in continuous use in this (now) Unitarian Universalist church. AND Paul Revere started a foundry after the Revolution, and his family made the largest bell that still rings here in 1816, just two years before he passed away. Paul Revere himself called this particular bell "the sweetest bell we ever made." His legacy lives on in the 25 bells that he made that still ring in various spots across the city. 

It's like follow the yellow brick road, but just follow the red and gray bricks instead. This time, we are going to the King's Chapel Burying Ground, which is just behind the chapel itself.  The King's Chapel Burying Ground is the OLDEST English burying ground in Boston. 

One of the most "controversial" grave markers is that of Elizabeth Pain.  Some say that Hester Prynne from the Scarlett Letter was modeled after Elizabeth since she had a child out of wedlock before she married Samuel Pain.  The child actually died, and although Elizabeth was found not guilty of murder, she WAS found guilty of negligence and given 20 whippings!  Nathanial Hawthorne even mentions the King's Chapel Burying Ground in the Scarlett Letter and some have interpreted the shield on the left of her headstone to contain the letter "A." In reality, headstones with shields usually just meant she had money and/or this was a coat of arms of her family heritage. Although the idea that Hawthorne modeled Hester after Elizabeth might be a stretch, he definitely was inspired by her headstone.

King's Chapel burying ground, much like the Granary Burying Ground is full of sad grave markers that have been worn down by time and the weather.

The church does not currently own or operate the King's Chapel Burying Ground, because it is currently the property of the City of Boston (and has been for a long time.) The church itself had once been a wooden framed building that was built in 1686 but about 30 years later, when the congregation size was too large for the small church, the "town" (or city as it now is) granted some of the burying ground land parcels to the church so it could expand.  Of course, people freaked out because there were people buried in those parcels of land.  They relocated the graves from the site of the church during the early to mid 1700s (after the church had to expand a second time) but it was much like the Granary Burying Ground in that they were haphazardly placed without any real organization. So in 1810, they moved the headstones (errr, but not the bodies) to line up in more orderly rows. So this is a pretty chaotic cemetery! 

William Dawes is also POSSIBLY buried here.  Although probably not! Dr. Joseph Warren sent both Paul Revere and William Dawes out on that fateful night to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams that the British were coming, and both made it to their destination - the Hancock Clarke house in Lexington.  Dawes arrived about 30 minutes after Revere (hence why Revere got all the glory in Longfellow's poem here) but on their later ride to Concord, Revere was captured by the British, while Dawes managed to evade them.  It turns out though, that Dawes and his wife are probably buried at the Forest Hills Cemetery a few miles away and more likely, only his cousin Thomas Dawes is buried here. But the marker stands nonetheless.

No worries, just a grave from 1658. No big deal. This particular headstone has an interesting story.  It's the OLDEST headstone in the burying ground, but it was originally found under the street next to the Old State House in 1830. But apparently his body is here because no body was ever found near the Old State House!

I try to imagine this will look prettier in the summer.

You can see the depth of King's Chapel here, from the burying ground. Interestingly, not many actual congregants of King's Chapel are actually buried here.

John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and pretty much his entire family is also buried here.  John Winthrop was the 2nd, 6th, 9th and 12th governor of Massachusetts, and both his son and grandson went on to become governor's of the Colony of Connecticut.

This is just so sad to me.  A gravestone is pretty much someone's final marking in the world - maybe the only thing to ever tell future generations that you even existed at all. I wish these were in better shape.

This building is so skinny!  This is the Winthrop building that was down the street from - it was built in 1894, and it was the first skyscraper built in Boston that had a steel frame. It's known as the Winthrop building because John Winthrop's second home was right next to it (although that is no longer standing.)  Interestingly, the building has "Spring Lane" and "Water Street" on either side of it because there had been a Great Spring here back in the 1600s in the days of John Winthrop, who's property was on the other side of Spring Lane (the alleyway on the left on the building in this picture). 

The real reason I wanted to add this here was because Mary Chilton, the first woman to step onto North American soil off of the Mayflower lived on Spring Lane with her husband John Winslow.  They purchased this house in 1671, and John died here in 1674.  Mary soon followed, passing away in 1679. She was burying at King's Chapel Burying Ground - and I didn't get a picture of either her gravestone or her house! (Pats self on back for stellar photography performance).  This building is just a 4 minute walk from the King's Chapel Burying ground - basically around the corner!

As I walked back to my office, I spotted this!  Look!  A random plaque on the wall of a building that states the first public Catholic mass was celebrated right here on November 2, 1788!

Another site I happened to pass by on my way back to High Street was the Boston Irish Family Memorial. My Irish side of the family emigrated to Boston in 1883 (although they kept on moving and settled in southern Indiana).  

Surrounding the monument is a series of smaller granite monuments with inscriptions about the Great Famine and why the Irish fled Ireland for America.

A fungus hit the potato crops hard, and many starved as a result. To add insult to injury, the British government was exporting a bunch of grain from Ireland over to England at that time, seemingly indifferent to the problems happening in their neighbor country.

During the famine, about a million people died, and two million Irish came across the ocean to America.  There was another near famine due to poor potato harvests in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and because the worst of this happened in County Mayo, I'm one of those lucky Americans that get to claim Irish ancestry! 

Until next time King's Chapel Burying Ground and Irish Family Memorial!