Huguenots, Women, and Tories

In the 17th century, religious persecution brought large numbers of French Protestants, known as Huguenots, to Massachusetts, and descendants of families such as Cazneau, Johonnat, Revere, Sigourney, Faneuil, and Bowdoin became part of Boston’s history. Peter Faneuil, a West Indies merchant and slave trader, inherited his uncle Andrew Faneuil’s fortune after agreeing never to marry, built Faneuil Hall for Boston, and was also known for charitable deeds. The burial ground also preserves the stories of colonial women, including Sarah Wells, who maintained property after her husband’s death and chose not to remarry, and Mary Thaxter Gutteridge, keeper of Boston’s Gutteridge Coffee House, who outlived two husbands and kept her second husband’s business rather than remarrying. It also connects to Phillis Wheatley Peters, an internationally recognized poet brought to Boston on the slave ship Phillis, taught to read and write by her owners, freed at her master’s death, and dead in 1784 after losing two children, with the location of her burial unknown. Among political figures buried there are James Bowdoin, governor of Massachusetts and first president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, John Hancock, merchant, patriot, president of the Massachusetts Provisional Congress and the First and Second Continental Congresses, governor of Massachusetts, and member of the Constitutional Convention, and Jeremiah Gridley, attorney general of Massachusetts who argued for the Crown in support of the Writs of Assistance and served as Grand Master of Masons for all North America. The site also reflects Revolutionary division through Mather Byles, a minister, poet, and humorist dismissed from Hollis Street Church and later kept under house arrest because he was a Tory, and William Molineaux, a Boston Tea Party participant remembered as a zealous but rash patriot.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States