Boston African American National Historic Site

In Boston’s Beacon Hill, this historic site preserves fifteen pre-Civil War buildings tied to the city’s nineteenth-century free African American community along the Black Heritage Trail. After slavery effectively ended in Massachusetts following the American Revolution, Beacon Hill became a major center of Black civic life, abolitionism, education, worship, and political activism. Its landmarks include the African Meeting House, the oldest surviving African American church building in the United States, and the Abiel Smith School. Other homes recall Underground Railroad activity, Revolutionary and Civil War service, and the recruitment of Black troops, making the area a rare surviving landscape of early Black urban history.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States