Beacon Hill and the American Revolution

I. Beginning at Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge, MA, 02139

This area–and indeed, Boston itself, was once called the “Tremontaine” because there were three hills visible from this side of the river: Mt Vernon (reduced 1811), Pemberton (leveled 1835), and Beacon (reduced 1811) Hills. Beacon still stands, but Mt. Vernon and Pemberton were lopped off and used to fill in an inlet originally called the Mill Pond, just to the left of the Massachusetts General Hospital, with a causway running over it (still called Causeway Street) which now fronts on the Fleet Center (neé Boston Garden, home of the Boston Celtics’ basketball and Bruins’ hockey teams) site.

A. THE SETTLEMENT IN CHARLESTOWN

As discussed above, the Endicott Company’s arrival in this area took place on the oldest part of Charlestown, called “Town Hill,”in the winter of 1629/30. During that winter, the spring the colonists were using went brackish.

As you may also recall, the Rev. Wm. Blaxton had been living since 1624 on the northwest side of what is now called Beacon Hill, on the Shawmut Peninsula side of the Charles. It turned out that a friend of Blackstone’s was a member of Endicott’s company, and Blackstone invited him across the river to join him there. Isaac Johnston arrived, began to clear land, but died shortly after he arrived, and was buried in his own vegetable plot, (they spoke of “planting” Mr. Johnston), which became the earliest burying ground, now called “King’s Chapel Burying Ground,” in Boston. (In fact, this is a misnomer, since no colonial-era burial site belongs to the churches near them. One of the Reformers’ efforts to separate politial and political matters entailed according responsibilities to the town rather than to the church for marriage and burial; the colonists knew this as “The Old Burial Grounds”)

As more people from the Charlestown settlement arrived, Blackstone realized he didn’t want 500 neighbors and left. He deeded the land he had claimed as his to the colony for a cow common (it’s not clear if he had paid the Native Americans in this area–with whom he had traded and set out fishing weirs for years–for it or not), went to Rhode Island, returned to marry a wife five years later and left again; the Blackstone River in RI is named after him.

Charlestown. This is where the earliest group of colonists under Endicott first settled in 1629, until their removal to Boston. You can sometimes (through the bridge arcades) see the Bunker Hill Monument, a stop on the Freedom Trail and interpeted by the National Parks Service. If you visit Monument Hill, you will also want to see the newly refurbished museum of the Charlestown Historical Society, in the brick building across the street.

B. THE BUNKER HILL MONUMENT

Dedicated on June 17, 1843 with Daniel Webster as orator, to commemorate the battle of Breed’s Hill (which the British mistook for Bunker’s Hill, the next farm over) on June 17, 1775–the first battle since the American Revolutionary War had begun about 15 miles away in Lexington and Concord in April of that year. The monument had been conceived for many years, and occasioned the opening of the Quincy Granite quarries, and of the first small rail transport for bringing the stone out for haulage. However, support and funding for the obelisk lagged, and it was finished only when author Sarah Orne Jowett and other of the women of the area took up the fundraising necessary for its completion.

Charlestown was also the location of an early Baptist Seminary, (the school is now defunct, but Seminary Street remains) and the place where the real “first church,” now pastored by Rev. Victor Ford, still exists. One of the young assistants of this church, the Rev. John Harvard, had a great interest in theological studies, and had put much of his wealth into books. He died at the age of 24, of a fever, in 1638, leaving half his wealth and all his books to a newly founded college in what was then called “Newtowne,” across and upriver from Boston...we will discuss that school further later.

From this church also came “the silver-throated Mr. Shepherd,” who took over the Cambridge Church after the followers of Rev. Hooker left for Hartford, Connecticut in 1636. In 1809 its minister, Jedediah Morse, (father of Samuel F.B.Morse) mounted the failed campaign to have a Trinitarian rather than a Unitarian appointed to the then-open Hollis Chair of Divinity at Harvard This turnover of the Hollis chair (to the liberal scholar Henry Ware) is sometimes referred to as “The Second Great Apostasy,” the first being the conversion of four of Yale’s Congregational professors, including its president, to Anglicanism in the early 1700s). One of these newly minted Anglicans, Rev. Timothy Cutler, became the rector of Christ Church, Boston in 1723.

C. THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (MIT)

Although MIT is not a member of the BTI consortium, and we will not be stopping there, it is nonetheless an important conversant in theological ethics discussions and a field placement site for those who plan an active part in the life of scientific exchange or will be pastoring persons who deal with such questions.

To your right, on this side of the river, is the Great Dome of MIT. Most of the MIT campus lies between the Boston University Bridge to the west, and Kendall Square to the east. Many Asian, Middle Eastern, and South American students attend the Institute, who live in Central Square; to the southwest in Cambridgeport, or in the region southeast of Central Square called East Cambridge.

Housing is only one issue for these students. Many come from religious and ethnic traditions new to the area (most of the influx has taken place since the technological advances in computer science and automated design of the mid-to-late 1900s) and the accommodation of holy days, religious observances, and dietary practices must be worked out creatively and with good humor on all sides.

The MIT student religious center houses a kosher kitchen, special prayer rooms and ritual baths, and a beautifully spare, poetic interdenominational chapel (which we will not, unfortunately, have time to visit) and several chaplaincy groups.

While one might not consider a technological institute an active player in theological affairs, MIT in fact hosted the 1980 meeting of the World Council of Churches, entitled “Faith, Science and the Future,” in which matters of ethical and moral concern to the worlds religious and scientific leaders were debated and discussed throughout the campus and the wider Boston theological community via closed circuit television during plenary sessions, and widely distributed VCR tapes used by faith education classes in several area churches and schools concurrently.

That conversation continues through the BTI program called FASE (Faith and Science Exchange) founded by the Rev. Barbara Smith Moran, an Anglican astronomer, and drawing its membership from theologians, science educators, and moral philosophers teaching in the Boston area and beyond. The ongoing debates are kept alive through global conferences like that co-sponsored by FASE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science on “Population, Consumption, and the Environment,” at the Campion Jesuit Center in Weston, MA, in 1995. Other similar events have followed throughout the world; a regular newletter is also published.

D. HEADING ACROSS THE CHARLES TOWARDS BEACON HILL

As we cross the Museum of Science Bridge to go to Boston, you will also see across the Charles River parts of the town of Boston and its environs. Arriving on the opposite shore, DO NOT take the ramp for Routes 1, 3, 93, etc., but DO follow the small access road under that ramp and then bear to the right, going up Stanford Street towards Cambridge Street. You will make a right on Cambridge, then follow the signs to Charles Street, and at the last moment (before you are forced to cross the Longfellow Bridge, a lovely view but a day’s disgression in itself) bear left onto Charles Street, following it to Beacon, where you will make a left to go up to the top of Beacon Hill.

Across the river to the right is what is now considered one of the more tony residential areas, next to Beacon Hill, but once known as “the stinking swamp.” The Back Bay was a large inlet, used primarily as a garbage dump until 1852 when Bostonians approved filling it in with landfill from the Needham Heights area, brought in by railroad cars daily for nearly fifty years.

A block-wide section was filled in and plotted about every ten years, and the area became so affluent that many early downtown churches moved there from their original sites on the Shawmut peninsula–which had become more commercialized, had attracted foreign immigrants (in the North End) or had gone to light industry (in the South End). They did so at such a steady rate that one church historian has suggested that you can follow the developments in Victorian church architecture just by walking down from Arlington to Berkeley to Clarendon to Dartmouth (the streets are named alphabetically after English towns and suburbs of London).

It’s true, you can–and they do. This area is well worth a return walking visit if you have time. (We may try to pass it by trolley at the end of this trip, as well.) And if you get down Boylston Street as far as Dartmouth before being drawn into the deluxe shops, antique stores, or artists’ galleries, you will arrive at what are possibly the three most impressive public buildings at the same intersection: that of Boylston and Dartmouth, otherwise known as Copley Square.

H. H. Richardson’s Trinity Church, Boston (1877); Cummings and Sears’ New Old South (1874), and the façade of the Old Boston Public Library (McKim, 1887-1912) suggest the sophistication and amalgamation of new and old, European and American styles, which set trends and established aesthetic parameters for architecture(especially in the case of Trinity, as a model for church building and especially interior design in the late 1800s) for decades to come.

From the bridge, bear right under the ramp going up to Route 1/93 South, pass the Boston Fleet Center back parking area on the left and continue to the right up Stanford to Cambridge Street. Make a right on Cambridge Street, left under the Longfellow bridge onto Charles Street (unless the mayor’s had it turned to one-way in the other direction overnight again...) and at the end of Charles, go left onto Beacon St, up the hill, stopping in front of the Bulfinch State House. Get off the trolley for a drop off at the top of Beacon Hill, opposite the “Glory” statue)

On the right, we will pass Old West church, once Congregational, briefly a branch of the Boston Public Library, but owned by the Methodist Church since 1964.

This is the second church building on this site. Its present building was built in 1806 by Asher Benjamin, a well-known architect who built the Charles Street Baptist Church which we will see shortly, and the African American Meeting House on Smith Court, which we will also see as we walk down Joy Street on Beacon Hill.

Benjamin’s book, The Country Builder was used as a resource for homes during the Federalist period.
On the back, one can see from the filled-in brickwork that it once had a central pulpit window like that at Old South–an important and identifying difference from Anglican churches, whose east end apses were seen as too Catholic and as putting too much emphasis on the Eucharist rather than on the preaching of the Word. However, unlike Old South, built in 1727, this pulpit window was not on the North side, but on the West end of the building, like the more innovative Brattle Square Church, built in 1773 by William Dawes, had.

Old West’s pulpit was also important since it was occupied Jonathan Mayhew, the second Congregational pastor of the church after its founding in 1737, throughout the Revolutionary war. Mayhew, adamantely opposed to Anglican encroachmnts of power and place in Boston, first coined the phrase, “no taxation without representation” in a sermon given here. He also fought a pamphlet war with the man he feared might be made an Anglican Bishop in New England: East Apthorp, son of the Apthorps of King’s Chapel. Sent to England to study for holy orders, and newly ordained rector of Christ Church, Cambridge. Apthorp returned to build a fine Georgian house (still standing) in Harvard Square which some began to call “the Bishop’s Mansion.” As a result of Mayhew’s campaign, Apthorp left in 1763 ,after a year’s tenure, to live in England the rest of his life.

Mayhew’s preaching and writing was not only politically revolutinonary, but theologically radical as well. He is held by some Unitarians to have predated Channing in his exposition of anti-trinitarian views, which had overtaken 9 of Boston’s original 13 orthodox Congregational churches by the early 1800s, and which led to the “second Great Apostasy” (as described by some) at Harvard College in 1809, in which the Unitarian Henry Ware was seated in the Hollis Chair, endowed by a colonial London Baptist Trinitarian.

E. CHARLES STREET AND THE “BACK OF BEACON HILL”

Going down Charles Street, where a number of antique stores and fresh fruit markets are located, we will pass the location of the Charles Street Baptist Meeting House and, behind it, (the tower alone visible), the Brimmer Street location of the Church of the Advent, whose bells you will have heard ring during the end of the 1812 Overture, if you ever listen to the Boston Pops on the Fourth of July.

Going up Beacon Street, we will pass the Parish house for King’s Chapel,(which is on the other side of the hill), on the left; on the right, there is a large bas-relief carving of the landing of Endicott’s company on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1629. On the right, a bit further up, is the pink granite marker for William Blackstone’s home site, and then the Unitarian Universalist Association’s main offices and archives. (Just opposite, to keep things fair and even, is the Congregational Library, on the other side of the hill.)

And just past the UUA office is the site of John Hancock’s former home (destroyed to make way for the West Wing addition to the Bulfinch Statehouse....there are those of us who hope that when the scaffolding comes down next year, we’ll find that they will have restored the house and torn down the Annex....

We will walk down Joy Street and be met at the bottom of the hill, in front of 100 Charles River Plaza (the mall on Cambridge Street next top the West End Branch Library...there is a pull-up space just past the driveway entrance to the parking lot....we will re-load there 15 minutes after the drop-off at the top of the hill.

F. A WALK ON BEACON HILL: EARLY FOUNDERS, THE BLACK FREEDOM TRAIL, AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN CHURCH

We will get off here and look at three pieces of commemorative sculpture, walk briskly through Beacon Hill to see an early seminary structure, and look at the site of the 1813 African American Meeting House (Third Baptist) and meet the trolley at the bottom of Joy Street at Cambridge Street, to go into Cambridge.

a) BOSTON COMMON AND THE “GLORY” STATUE
(The Robert Gould Shaw/54th Regiment Memorial Relief statue)

Made by the famous New England sculptor Augustus St.-Gaudans, this cast bronze relief commemorates the bravery of the first black regiment in the U.S., mustered out on 28 May, 1863 before then-Governor of Massachusetts Anderson, who watched them in review from the steps of the State House–as shown in the bas-relief of the monument itself, and as recreated in the photograph below. (Since the Denzel Washington film’s opening, the statue has been given the nickname of “The Glory Statue,” by which many visitors now know it.)

Robert G. Shaw, a white Bostonian, commanded the unit and was killed, with many of his regiment, in its attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, 18 July, 1863. The bravery of one soldier, Sergeant William Carney, caused him to become the first black American to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his conduct in the battle.

This commemorative was commissioned sixty years later and dedicated in 1897; the names of the company members are inscribed on the back of the monument.

This is one of serveral sites on the Black Heritage Trail, which, like the Freedom Trail, is administered by the National Parks Service, and links sites related to the history of blacks in Boston on a walking tour that explores African American life in 19th century Boston.

Information on the trail can be obtained at the Museum of African American History at 46 Joy Street (617) 742-5415. Information on related activites and sites elsewhere in Eastern Massachusetts is also available there. (See also the Bibliography listing for Robert C. Hayden’s book, African-Americans in Boston: More than 350 Years)

b) OTHER IMPORTANT SITES NEARBY

There are several things to see, in several different directions, from the place where you are standing as well. Beginning with the State House at noon, and slowing turning in a clockwise direction (to the right first, for those with digital watches...) you will note the following sites, which we will only mention but not have time to see.

1) To the right, looking downhill towards School St., King’s Chapel and the colonial burying ground which shares its name are just visible. Also to the right, encased in a protective shell during the renovations, is a statue of Mary Dyer, a Quaker woman executed because she would not recant her beliefs, in 1659.

2) Opposite the Dyer statue are the Congregational Library (at 25 Beacon Street) with a carved frieze showing four scenes from early church life in Boston. Around the corner and up Bowdoin Street on the East Side of the State House is the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem, which hosts many Boston Clergy events due to its central location and excellent meeting facilities.

3) As you stand facing the State House, to its left you can see the West Annex, original site of John Hancock’s Beacon Hill home, which he inherited from his rich (childless) Uncle Thomas Hancock. Torn down to build the Annex in the early 1900s, the loss of this historically and architecturally imporant structure led directly to the foundation of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (whose central offices, Bulfinch’s Harrison Grey Otis House, we passed going by Old West Church.) There are those of us in the preservation community who will confess to a fond hope: that when the wrappings come off the Reichstag, we will see the Hancock house restored and the West Annex gone.

4) Further down to the left, at 14 Beacon Street, are the national offices and archives of the Unitarian Universalist Association. Several presses (Little, Brown; Beacon; and Houghton-Mifflin) have or have had offices in this area; William Blaxton’s orchard was also on this side of the hill, above Charles Street.

5) If you turn around a quarter turn to the left, still standing next to the “Glory” statue, and stand facing the Common, you will see the large area Blaxton deeded away to the colony (it is not clear if he paind the natives for the land himself, or not). Near the center of the Common is a small plaque locating the original site of the Hanging Elm, used for executions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

6) Almost directly below the Shaw/54th monument, there are three church sites and several other sites of importance in the history of theological education which are visible, or partially so. Because Boston has gone from what was once perceived as a confessional homogeneity to one of thickly textured diversity, these represent a wide range of politial structures and historical issues and ideas.

7) Directly below the statue mall, you may be able to make out the columns of the earliest Greek Revival structure, St. Pauls’ Episcopal Cathedral. Built by Alexander Parris, who built Quincy Market, in 1818, this church reflected the effort of the American Episcopal Church to separate itself in the minds of its neighbors from things English.

8) Two blocks down from the Cathedral, (not visible) on West Street, were the locations of Bronson Alcott’s first school, and of the Unitarian Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore, where she edited the original Transcendentalist Newspaper, the Dial; entertained such controversial speakers as Margaret Fuller Osseoli, and wrote about her own ideas on kindergartens and early childhood education.

9) Park Street Church (Banner and Solomon, 1809), was founded as a Trinitarian response to the perceived threat of the “Second Great Apostasy” at Harvard, and the fact that 9 of Boston’s original 12 Congregational churches had gone Unitarian. “America the Beautiful” was first sung here in the early 1800s

10) The Paulist Center, at 5 Park Street, is a Roman Catholic community strong in its committments to social justice, especially in its shared relationships with El Salvadorean churches, and to a vital, truly celebrative Mass with well-performed music of recent composion.

This location is also the best place from which to view the Bulfinch Statehouse. Now dwarfed by the skyscrapers of the financial district and other structures, the State House (1798) with its golden dome, was once the highest point in Boston.

Currently enshrouded in its protective wrappings while a long-overdue restoration takes place) the gold dome of the Bulfinch Statehouse shines out over the city and can be seen from all directions. Copper-clad by the Revere Foundry in 1802, it was one of the last things Revere oversaw before his death in 1818. The dome was gilded in 1864. Influences on the building might include Wren’s façade for St. Paul’s, London, with its double porch of double columns, those at the sides in Palladian motif, with a dome over center, and an ABA composition not unlike that also used to unify Gothic church façades. His emphasis on the rectangular spacing of the windows into the flat front wall behind the pediment, the contrast of brick with the white columns, and the more severe, undecorated linearity of the facings are elements which comprised the newly popular Federalist style, which he observed in both the houses done here, and in the Dome for the U.S. Capitol which he completed when its original architect, Benjamin Latrobe of Baltimore, died, leaving the structure unfinished. <- The Massachusetts State House (Chas. Bulfinch, 1796; dome clad in copper by Revere Copper Works, 1802)

c) THE “BACK OF THE HILL”

The Bulfinch Statehouse sits atop what is left of Beacon Hill, once one of three neighboring hills called the “Tramontane” (an Anglicized rendering of the French trois montaines, or “three mountains”) by the early colonists who settled in Charlestown. Once a steep "grassy hemisphere" on which was placed (1635) a beacon to warn of impending danger, it was then site of a Tuscan column designed by Bullfinch in 1789 to commemorate the American Revolution. It was partially reduced to help fill in the swampy areas at the base of the Hill and to level the Mill Pond.

Crossing Beacon Street to the State House side of the street, walk down to Walnut Street and make a right, then a left on Chestnut, a right on Willow and stop The site of the former BU School of Theology (now a condominium) stands between Chestnut and Mt. Vernon Streets.

This building was Boston University’s original “footprint” in Boston. Its front, on Chestnut Street, is fenestrated with lancet piercings, whose frames mark the area of the building’s original chapel; when we go past BU’s Marsh Chapel later today you will see the original windows from those frames, moved and reassembled, there. The back of the building, where the classrooms were, is just opposite Louisbourg Square, where Bronson and Louisa May Alcott both lived until their deaths, three years apart from each other.

Go through Louisbourg Square to Pinckney Street and make a right on Pinckney. Walk back up the hill to Joy Street, turn left on Joy going downhill, then left on Smith Court. At the end of the cul-de-sac, on the left, is a brick façade which belongs to the African American Meeting House.

Named for one of the free blacks living on the North side of Beacon Hill, the brick building at the intersection of the court bearing his name and Joy Street was the Abial Smith School, a site on the Black Heritage Trail.

Another site on the Black Heritage Trail is the African American Meeting House, still standing at 8 Smith Court. Begun by free blacks of the African Baptist Church Society in 1806, it was erected in an area in which a number of freed domestic workers and craftsmen had lived since the late colonial period, and in which early schools for black children were begun. Also known as Third Baptist Church, it was a site of antebellum abolition speeches and debates which are occasionally re-enacted today. Massachusetts was the first state in the Union to have freed its slaves, (by the 1790 census none were recorded), prompted in part by several suits for freedom like those by Mumbet Sedgewick and Belinda Royall. This meant that it faced issues of segregation, equal education, and employment early on in its history. (One would think, given the terrible difficulties of the 1960s and 70s, that a better resolution might have been expected). The church was finished c.1813, possibly with a design donated by AsherBenjamin. Its balcony and stairs were donated from the First Church congregation’s third structure, known as “Old Brick.” In 1811 the church decamped from its long-held location just opposite the Town House (now the Old State House) at Court (née Queen) and Washington (née Orange) Streets (where the Boston Trust Building now stands), and as part of the movement of Boston’s churches in the Federalist period to the southwestern parts of the city, built a new church on Chauncy Street.

(As mentioned above, an interesting aspect of Boston’s church history is that the churches moved west from the center of the Shawmut Peninsula towards the South End during the colonial period, and westward again to the South End in the Federalist era. At the end of the tour, we will see that the Victorian era churches moved west yet again, onto fill land created between 1852 and the early 1900s in the Back Bay, once a “stinking swamp,” which became a highly valued real estate area in that period, and remains so today.)

Walk back out to Joy Street; standing at the Smith Court intersection, look towards the Christ Church, Boston steeple. This is the general location of two other important early Baptist sites, now gone.

First and Second Baptist Churches were both built in the North End, on the upper eastern margin of the Mill Pond, located roughly today by the intersection of Margin and Stillman Streets. The former street’s name comes from the fact that it once demarcated the shore line, or margin, of the Pond; the latter from one of the well-liked early ministers, Rev. Stillman, who was installed just before the Revolutionary War.

The trolleys will pick up the group at the bottom of the hill on the opposite side of the street, facing towards Cambridge on Cambridge Street. Return via Cambridge Street to the Longfellow Bridge, crossing the Charles and picking up Broadway-in-Cambridge going towards Harvard Square.