The Common / The Freedom Trail / America's First Subway

Boston Common began in 1634, when Boston’s colonists bought a 48-acre tract on the lower slopes of Beacon Hill from Reverend William Blackstone and set it aside as a common area for the town’s use. Over its first two centuries it served many purposes, including public rallies and celebrations, promenading, ball playing, sledding, military training, grazing, public punishment, and burials; British redcoats camped and drilled there for eight years before the American Revolution, and many were buried there. The Common’s Great Elm served as both shelter and meeting place and, in the 17th century, as a hanging tree. By the mid-19th century, new walks, statues, plaques, fountains, fences, and gates gave the Common a more modern park-like appearance, while it continued to host rallies, demonstrations, games, concerts, strolling, wading, and ice skating at the Frog Pond. The Common and surrounding Boston sites also stood at the center of the coming of the American Revolution: Boston’s culture of community and freedom fostered town meetings, militia drill, church self-government, and resistance to British measures between 1761 and 1775, while patriots and British regulars both used the Common during the years of tension. On April 18 and 19, 1775, Paul Revere and other express riders warned fellow patriots as British soldiers crossed the Charles River from the foot of the Common on their way to Lexington and Concord. Boston Common remained part of the Revolutionary story as the war unfolded, including the burial there of many British dead from the Battle of Bunker Hill. More than two centuries later, Boston’s Freedom Trail linked sixteen historic sites from Boston Common to Bunker Hill along a 3-mile route telling how ordinary people shaped the nation’s founding and defense. Boston also became the birthplace of America’s first subway on September 1, 1897, when an open-bench trolley carrying 175 passengers completed the first official run through a six-tenths-mile underground passage between the Public Garden and the Boylston and Park stations; more than 100,000 people rode that day. The system grew from that short stretch into a regional transit network, passing from the Boston Elevated Railway Company in 1922 to the M.T.A. in 1947 and the M.B.T.A. in 1964. That achievement followed earlier stages in Boston transit, from stagecoaches and Ephraim Dodge’s horse-drawn omnibus to horse cars, Henry M. Whitney’s consolidation of horsecar lines, and electrified trolley cars, all amid worsening downtown congestion that helped lead Boston to build the nation’s first subway.

Boston, Massachusetts · United States