The Common / Charles Street

In 1634, four years after John Winthrop and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony settled the Shawmut Peninsula and created Boston, the colonists bought a 48-acre tract on the lower slopes of Beacon Hill from Reverend William Blackstone, an Anglican hermit who had been the area’s sole inhabitant for nearly a decade, and immediately set it aside as a common area for the use of all Boston’s townfolk. During its first two centuries, Boston Common served not as a modern park but as a place for public rallies and celebrations, promenading, ball playing, sledding, military training, pasturing cows and sheep, public punishments, and burials; for eight years British redcoats camped and drilled there and many were buried there during the occupation leading into the American Revolution. A tree-lined pedestrian mall appeared in 1728, while the ancient Great Elm served as both shelter and meeting place and, in the seventeenth century, as the colony’s hanging tree. By the mid-nineteenth century, Boston’s parks movement reshaped the Common with new tree-lined walks, statues, plaques, fountains, fences, and gates, while it continued to host rallies, demonstrations, ball games, celebrations, concerts, strolling, wading, and ice skating at the Frog Pond. Along Charles Street, the flat western edge of the Common had been a primitive beach in 1630, with the Charles River reaching the edge at high tide and marshland exposed at low tide for fishing, wading, and clamming; in the early 1700s young Ben Franklin was among those who angled in the mudflats. Beginning in 1769, a town gallows reportedly stood there after the Great Elm ceased to be the preferred in-town execution site, and the area’s flatness also made it a natural military training ground used by colonial militias, the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, various infantry, artillery, and light horse brigades, and British regulars during the occupation of Boston. On the night of April 18, 1775, seven hundred redcoats launched from there for Lexington and Concord as couriers such as Paul Revere and William Dawes rode out warning colonists. Fox Hill along the coastal edge was often fortified, including during the British occupation of 1775 to 1776. In 1794 the tidal marshland was turned over to rope walks, and the Back Bay Mill Dam of 1821 further fouled the area by clogging the river’s tidal flow, but the cutting down of Beacon Hill and use of its earth for landfill at Charles Street, officially recorded by 1803, transformed the landscape. As the nineteenth century progressed, the Public Garden and the Back Bay were filled, planted, and built upon, and by 1824 Mayor Josiah Quincy had planted trees for the new Charles Street Mall, marking the Common’s emergence into its modern era as both meeting ground and public park. Its grounds also came to include and feature such sites as the Blackstone Memorial Tablet recalling the Common’s founding and the people of Boston as its lawful owners, the Lafayette Monument, Brewer Fountain, the Commodore John Barry Monument, the Boston Massacre Memorial, the Central Burying Ground, the Parkman Bandstand, the Flagstaff, the Papal Mass Plaque recalling Pope John Paul II’s 1979 visit attended by four hundred thousand people, the Fox Hill Plaque, the Carty Parade Ground, the Charles Street Gate, the Beacon Street Mall, the Founders Memorial, the Frog Pond, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, the Great Elm Site, and the Shaw Memorial honoring Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the Fifty-fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Infantry, whose assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, on July 19, 1863, cost Shaw and thirty-two of his men their lives. Across the centuries, the Common has remained both a meeting ground and a public park, reflecting the history of Boston and of America.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States