Overview of Boston's History and Its People

A. The Pre-Colonial History of the Area

1) Geology, or “The Charles River Runs Through It”: The Boston Basin is the depressed area between two areas of scarp faulting, which run to the north from Malden Heights to Arlington Heights and to the south through The Blue Hills (named for large blueberry patches harvested there since colonial times). If you visit the lookout tower in Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, you can see the two sets of ridges on either side of you, with the Charles River (named in the early 1600s for King Charles I) running through the basin and draining out into the Atlantic Ocean.

Several important geological formations exist throughout the state of Massachusetts as well. There are volcanic remains in Lynn and outcroppings of a striated argillite (the striations formed by washout ash from those volcanoes’ eruptions, interlayered with mud ) in Cambridge and in the Boston Harbor Islands (notably Slate Island). South of Boston are several varieties of yellowish double conglomerate (occasionally used for building churches here) generally called Roxbury Puddingstone.

Many towns have one or more oddly shaped glacial outwash hills–with a long, lenticulated slope on one side and a sharper drop-off on the other–called drumlins. Mississippian coal deposits may be found on the southern border areas near Connecticut and there is a characteristic reddish-brown sandstone–used for gravestones some times, and for building stone at others–associated with the Connecticut River Valley which bisects the state, running north to south.

Trilobite deposits have been found along the South Shore (i.e., the part of the Atlantic coast south of Boston) which correlate with those in Mediterranean Europe and northern Africa, confirming in part the theory that effusions from the mid-Atlantic Ridge have been increasing the distance between these continents for aeons. And–much further east, in the NW corner near the New Hampshire and New York borders–there are very early Cambrian and pre-Cambrian outcroppings in the North Adams gorge, perhaps the oldest exposed layers in the U.S.

For more information on Boston’s geologic formations, see the Bibliography section, below, for the geological field guide booklet, done for the American Bicentennial by J. Skeehan, S.J., and published by the Weston Observatory, entitled Puddingstone, Drumlins, and Ancient Volcanoes

2) Native Tribes and Fishing Weirs: Sometime between 8000 and 3000 B.C.E. the earliest Paleo-Indians (descendants of the tribes which first crossed the Bering Straits from Siberia) arrived in the area now called New England. By the arrival of the colonizing Europeans of the 17th century, these native groups’ descendants had divided into two warring factions, the Iroquois and the Algonkians.

About 75,000 members of the Massachusetts tribe of the Algonkian nation lived back from the shores, (still unpleasant during parts of the summer, due to ubiquitous populations of stinging black and green flies) and set out fishing weirs in the Boston basin area of what became known as the Charles River. Other nearby tribes included the Wampanoag, south of the Boston area. In addition to these were found the Nausets, Pennacooks, Nipmucks, Pocumtucs, and the Mohicans; another group, the Abenaki, were to be found in the northern parts of Vermont and New Hampshire and in Southern Canada.

These latter often united with the Canadian French during outbreaks in the North American theater of the European Wars of Succession, and were cited in several instances of capture for ransom of English colonists, like Mary Rowlandson and Jemimah Tute, who wrote of their experiences after their return.

Due probably to colonial-era importations of infectious diseases for which they had no immunity, these tribes were decimated in the early part of the 17th century, and were weakened by the continuous wars between themselves as well. Despite their original overtures of friendliness to the colonists–based on their concept of shared rather than deeded land–and the colonists’ avowed intent to convert and civilize the natives they found here in a more peaceful manner than the Spanish had done in Mexico, natives and colonists had become enemies by the mid-17th century

Much has been written on these interactions. See two recent sources on this in particular: Jill LePore’s The Name of War, winner of several book awards, for her discussion of this phenomenon in the context of the early Indian wars in New England; see also Candace Emerson’s unpublished thesis on missionizing patterns between the Spanish colonies and New England; both listed below in the Bibliography.

3) Were there Vikings here? Only Leif Erikson knows for sure.... Some say the Vikings–who visited and settled first Iceland, then Greenland–arrived here in the early 11th century. This favorite claim of earlier 19th century historians is mostly disputed or considered disproven, including a few lettered stones thought to have been carved by visiting Norsemen. LePore ( p. 227-240, see Bibliography) discusses this, offering an alternative possibility, that the “rune stone” is an early record of transliterated Indian texts–and not a Viking inscription at all.)

B. Landings and Locations of Early Boston Area Settlements

When talking about Massachusetts’ early colonial foundation, many people tend to think only of the Separatists, or Pilgrims, who landed in 1620 at Plimouth, further south of Boston; some may also remember the arrival of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s group of Puritans under John Endicott in Salem in 1629/30. However, in order to understand how and why Boston developed as it did, it also helps to think of the landings of several other groups just before and after those periods as well.

Italian, Portuguese, and French sailors and missionaries visited the coast as early as 1524, but none tried to settle there until the early 1600s. The first map of what is now thought of as the New England seacoast was drawn by an expeditionary force from Capt. John Smith’s Virginia Company, which made an abortive attempt to settle in the area in 1614, after the group’s earlier, tenuous 1607 settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, was more firmly established. French Roman Catholic (Jesuit) missionaries also settled on Deer Island near the shore of what is now Maine, later retrenching to Canada.

Two lesser-known groups of settlers also influenced things, although the colonizing efforts one of group failed and the other was absorbed by later arrivants. Roger Conant’s fishing fleet founded a village on Annisquam (Cape Anne, where Gloucester is located today) in 1624-25. Sir Fernando Gorges’ Royalist company attempted and failed to establish a settlement just south of Boston at Wessagussestt, now called Weymouth, near Hingham, in the same year.

Conant’s group on the North Shore settled briefly at Cape Anne, but within a short period of time moved further south to an area known by its Indian name as Naumkeag, since the Annisquam cape was swampy and could not support the entire group.

Gorges–and others in the English Court–not unaware of the political threat to the King’s government which religiously disparate New English colonies like the Plimouth Separatists’ posed. Such a foundation, by offering an alternative politial dispensation, basically stood in judgement against the King’s Anglican, or English, Church. By establishing a more politically reliable beachhead in what was then known as Wessagusset (now the town of Weymouth), down the South Shore but not as far south as Plimouth, Gorges hoped his group would oversee and–with two Anglican clergy aboard–overtake the religiously disloyal Separatists.

However, Gorges’ company suffered from the same difficulties that nearly undermined John Smith’s Jamestown settlement. The people he had signed on were mostly well-to-do folk who had no intention or experience of building homes, farming on a regular basis, or hunting for food (as opposed to sport hunting) which were seen as menial tasks. The colony failed within a year, as Smith’s would have done, had they not been reprovisioned and re-organized in a timely manner. All but three of its surviving members returned to England.

The three remaining colonists scattered. One, Samuel Maverick, went to the area near Revere which still bears his name. Another, Thomas Walford, went across the Charles to Mishuwam (now called Charlestown) and was there when Endicott arrived in the winter of 1629/30.

The third, about whom more later, was Rev. Wm. Blaxton (often given as Blackstone). He went first to live in the nearby Plimouth colony, but found its rules too restrictive, and went to the Shawmut area. Blackstone abided on the north side of what is now known as Beacon Hill with his three cows and his two hundred books, setting out fishing weirs, growing an orchard, and trading with the natives in the area, from 1624-1629. Although he accompanied Gorges as an Anglican, he seems to have become a dissenter at some point along the way, however when Endicott’s (mostly Puritan) company arrived (at his invitation), he did not stay with them for long, went to Rhode Island, and is said by some to have adopted a form of Presbyterianism.

Today three plaques around the Boston Common commemorate his early presence. A pink granite plaque on the wall of no. Beacon Street marks his homesite; a large bas-relief across the street from that, in the Common itself, shows him at the landing of the Endicott company from across the river in Charlestown, and a large plaque near the entry to the T at the corner of Park and Tremont Streets cites his deed of land to the colony on his departure for Rhode Island in the late 1630s.

C. A Discussion of Boston Church History

Introduction
Boston’s early church history can be fascinating, and confusing. While it is not our purpose to give a detailed explanation of that story, (see list of websites and sources in Bibliography below) it is germane to the history of the various schools we will be discussing. Like Boston’s church history, in fact, the history of its seminaries was neither homogenous nor completely without differences of opinion!

One school was instrumental in early religious affairs in many ways, and continues so today. Two other schools were founded directly as responses to later church historical events in Boston, which we will discuss, and the contemporary presence of three more schools of one denomination, and two others of different confessions still, reflect major shifts in cultural and religious perceptions over time here as well. Since some schools began and remain as confessional monuments in their own right, it is also useful to recognize how the interplay between churches, schools, and community events has affected these institutions.

Themes and issues which arose during and after the colonial period include the questions of ecclesiology and church membership which arose during the Puritans’ debate of the Half-Way Covenant; conflicts between charity and purity in anti-ecumenical confrontations before the 1690 Act of Toleration was imposed on the colony; the loss of the charter, Increase Mather’s return from London with a new one, and the trials and executions of those accused of practicing witchcraft in 1692.

In the early eighteenth century, debates occassioned by the first of the two so-called “Great Awakenings” resulted, not in the foundation of churches aligned with Methodism per se, but in a division between orthodox and radical Congregational preachers known respectively as “Old” and “New Lights.” A change in attitude towards cultural events and ideas called “anglicization” took place as the colony prospered economically, especially in eastern coastal towns like Salem and Boston. The years preceding the War for Independence saw a neat parallel split bewteen the politics and polity of the two strongest denominational churches–Anglicans were usually Royalists, patriots were usually partisans of the Congregational Way–and the continued working out of important questions continued after the Peace of Paris in 1783, the failure of the Articles of Confederation, and the ratification of the new Constitution (in Boston, at Federal Street Church).

The issues which arose in the early Federalist period were doctrinal, educational and practical. They included theological concerns like trinitarianism; governmental referenda, like the end of Congregational establishmentarianism; and the incorporation into the society of newly arrived immigrant groups, often members of previously unwelcome confessions. Anticipating in many cases the eruption of these issues in larger communities of faith, in the early years of the confederation and the Federal Republic, these disputes often split churches, theological schools, and communities apart.

At the same time a "culture of colleges" linked to higher purposes had emerged in New England by the early 1800s as well, and the charge to attend to the elevation of human dignity became more urgent as the questions of slavery, economic interdependence, and states’ rights were addressed in the schools, legislatures, and presidential cabinet meetings attended by those in or from Massachusetts. By the 1860s when the American Civil War began, Boston had become a strong center for abolitionary movements. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was written by fifth-generation Bostonian Julia Ward Howe; Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and many other speakers wrote and spoke on these issues; Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was the daughter of fiery preacher Lyman Beecher, whose pulpit was on Bowdoin Street just below the new Bulfinch State House.

At war’s end, the city commemorated those who, like the members of the 54th Regiment, had served the Union–and sought healing, increased growth and purpose, and new direction in the beautiful and elaborate churches which grew up in the recently-filled-in Back Bay. While some issues were motivated by strongly opinionated study (a natural resource in Boston), others resulted from clashing population changes. Interdenominational debates continued as the arrival of Irish, German, Italian, and Portuguese Catholics challenged the town’s perceived Protestant identity. A philosophical movement begun by Bostonian philosophers known as Transcendentalism caused an intradenominational split with Christian Unitarians.

Meanwhile an increased interest in the arts, especially in European painting, decorative art and architecture, led to the reversal of the spare aesthetic thentofore described as that of the “New England Church” and the cooperation of the churches during two world wars may be said to have laid the groundwork in part for the strong ecumenical community and the fairly sophisticated understanding of governmental and ecclesial dynamics necessary to amend social justice problems like housing, racism and education which exist today.

DEMOGRAPHICS AND CHURCH MOVEMENT

MAP TALK - The 1721 Captain John Bonner map to the left shows the Boston coastline as it appeared before the Mill Pond (the deep indentation in the Charles River estuary spanned by the Causeway on the right) was filled in the early 1800s, and before the Back Bay (beginning with the long, angled shoreline on the upper left, and continuing off the page at about the same distance) was levelled, beginning in 1852 and continuing until the end of the 19th century. It also shows areas of more intense settlement at the time, and the sites of all the early churches in Boston then. These three points of population movement coincide with eras of governmental change–and of church-building by Boston congregations. As the city center (or the upper end of its classified population) moved west, so did church styles:

GO WEST, OLD CHURCH, GO WEST

1) The population center of the earliest 17- 18th c. settlements began on the North End side of the Shawmut Peninsula (the small fist-shaped knob to the upper right, or east, of the map). Early meetinghouses and Anglican churches based on those built in London by Wren and Gibbs were common, but other influences can also be traced.
2) As people moved westward to the South End during the Federalist Period, new churches appeared in those quarters as well, with Neoclassical and Greek Revival styles predominating, and then
3) As the South end went towards light industry and commerce, the center of interest moved yet again, made possible by the filling of the Back Bay, so that several earlier churches from both the North and South ends abandoned their original sites and buildings

The development of settlement that led both to the foundation of the town of Boston and the establishment of its particular religious and educational institutions–which underlie the development of Boston as a center for theological education in the present–and its participation and attempted resolution of issues in the past are not unlike those before us today.

Separatists, Puritans, Anglicans, Catholics, Jews, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Methodists and Swedenborgians were all in Boston by the end of the 19th century. We will begin with the landings of the first three of these early groups, whose influence affected Boston’s foundation and development most particularly.