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!