Boston Timeline

For at least 10,000 years before Europeans arrived, Native Americans inhabited the Boston area, and despite devastating losses from European diseases after early 1600s contact with explorers and fishermen, they continued to live there, trade, and interact with colonists, remaining a vibrant population in Massachusetts today. In 1630 and through 1642, as part of the Great Migration, about 20,000 Puritans emigrated from England to Boston seeking religious freedom, many arriving with John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, while immigration from England remained strong through the 1600s and 1700s. By the 1700s, Boston was remembered both as uneven land of hollows, swamps, and low bushes and as a growing town along the sea banks with wharves, substantial buildings, orderly streets, and a harbor view like a crescent. After the 1846 potato famine, Irish immigrants came in large numbers, and by 1850 half the North End's population was Irish; their community life extended from neighborhood speech and customs to military service, including the Irish 9th regiment under Col. Thomas Cass, which fought bravely and suffered heavy casualties in the Civil War. From the 1870s through the 1890s, many Eastern European Jews settled in a triangular section of the North End between Hanover Street and Endicott and Prince Streets, seeking freedom from religious persecution and building a community centered on places such as Salem Street, while Italians also arrived in large numbers from the 1870s to escape civil unrest. By the 1900s, the North End retained a distinctly Italian character shaped by migration from places such as Abruzzi, close-knit neighborhood ties, unlocked doors, shared meals, help for newcomers, and communal institutions such as the North Bennet Street bathhouse, and later recollections remembered a neighborhood where families and neighbors cared for one another, children were watched over by many adults, and mutual aid sustained people through hardship.

Boston, Massachusetts · United States