Colonial Craftsmen

Until a few decades before the American Revolution, Boston was the largest port in the British colonies, thriving on maritime trade, shipbuilding, and the labor of hundreds of craftspeople, and in this burial ground many gravestones belong not to wealthy merchants and politicians but to the skilled and unskilled workers of colonial Boston and their families. Among them were engravers, silversmiths, and goldsmiths Nathaniel Hurd and Benjamin Hurd; Nathaniel designed the seal of Harvard College and, like Paul Revere, was painted by John Singleton Copley in his working clothes. Paul Revere, who lived in Boston’s North End, was a master engraver, silversmith, and goldsmith, but became most famous as one of the patriots who made the midnight ride to warn John Hancock and Sam Adams of the British march to Concord on April 18, 1775; he was an active Son of Liberty, helped plan the Boston Tea Party, participated in the Revolutionary War, and later became an industrialist whose copper foundry and rolling mill made brass fittings for the U.S.S. Constitution and the Massachusetts State House’s original dome. Samuel Gore was a painter, japanner, and printer who participated in the Boston Tea Party, and others buried here who took part in that event included Henry Bass, Joseph Eaton, Joseph Lee, and William Pierce. John Hull, a silversmith, goldsmith, the colony’s mint master, and treasurer, was one of Boston’s leading craftsmen in the seventeenth century; with his partner Robert Sanderson, he produced the pine-tree shilling and other colonial coinage and also created silver and gold tableware for customers. Hull’s only daughter, Hannah, married Judge Samuel Sewall and bore him fourteen children, seven of whom survived to adulthood and are buried here; Sewall is probably best known as one of the judges at the Salem Witchcraft trials, publicly asked forgiveness in 1696 for condemning innocent people, and in 1700 published The Selling of Joseph, an anti-slavery treatise. More than forty Hull-Quincy-Sewall family members were buried in one tomb over two centuries. Also buried nearby is Abiah Holbrook, master of the South Writing School on West Street from 1742 to 1769, who taught John Hancock his penmanship, and John Foster Williams, a patriot privateer and naval officer who fought many battles, was captured by the British in 1781, and served as captain of the revenue cutter Massachusetts for twenty-four years. In colonial Boston, the free black community lived in the North End and most often chose Copp’s Hill for burial, while some Africans who lived around Granary Burying Ground had been enslaved and were buried in the tombs of their owners; among them was Cloe Spear, an African woman captured and sold into slavery at a young age who, though freed after the Revolution, was buried in the tomb of her owner, Captain John Bradford, and whose autobiography, published in Boston in 1832, is a rare northern slave narrative.

Cambridge, Massachusetts · United States