The Mather is the oldest public elementary and the first tax-supported school in the United States. It was founded in 1639 near the corner of what are today Cottage Street and Pleasant Street as a one-room schoolhouse. It remained there until 1694, when it moved about a half mile to Winter Street (the site of a fire station today) atop Meetinghouse Hill, Dorchester’s highest point–just yards from the school’s present location. It was then that the school was named after Richard Mather (Increase Mather’s father and Cotton Mather’s grandfather), a Congregational minister who settled in Dorchester in 1635. It is unclear when girls first attended the school, but in 1784, the town of Dorchester voted to allow females to do so and provide for their education.
In 2014, the Mather School marked its 375th birthday. Today, it is a school of great diversity, with students of African American, Cape Verdean, Haitian, Irish, and Vietnamese backgrounds. With many recently immigrated students of Vietnamese descent with limited English proficiency, the school runs a Vietnamese Sheltered Instruction program.
The Mather is today housed in a building constructed in 1905. There is a beautiful view of the harbor and much of the city from the school’s grounds.
Getting there:
Red Line to Fields Corner station. 0.7 mile (15-minute) walk.
Nearby point of interest:
First Parish Church Dorchester (established in 1631, Unitarian Universalist), 10 Parish Street. The congregation, which founded the Mather School, has had a church on Meetinghouse Hill since the 1670s. The current building was constructed in 1897.
City Hall Plaza (formerly 16 Brattle Street), Downtown
Photo of Joshua Bowen Smith cropped from a larger photo showing ten Massachusetts state representatives in 1874. Public domain.
In 1861, as Massachusetts rallied for the Civil War, abolitionist Joshua Bowen Smith, one of just five Black restaurateurs in the state, fed the state’s 12th Regiment for a period of three months, incurring a sizable outlay, $40,378. On presentation of the bill to the governor, John Andrew, himself an abolitionist, the state refused to pay. However, it did reimburse white restaurateurs. Such discrimination was the norm. According to a historian of the period, Black business people operated in “constant fear” that white clientele would not pay. Eight years later, following a lawsuit, Smith received partial compensation, insufficient however to save his business and rendering him indebted until his death in 1879.
Prior to those events, Smith grew a lucrative catering and then restaurant business serving both Harvard University and the abolitionist movement. His staff included formerly enslaved people, many living as fugitives from the South. Their employment was thus in defiance of federal law. Such a stance was consistent with Smith’s commitments. He was a leader of the Boston Vigilance Committee and founder of the New England Freedom Association, a fugitive slave assistance group founded by African Americans.
After the Civil War, Smith enjoyed enough public support to be win election to the state legislature in 1873. His many legislative activities included persuading the state to erect the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial across from the Massachusetts State House and advising his close friend Senator Charles Sumner on the federal Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Smith’s home at 79 Norfolk Street, Cambridge, is today part of that city’s African American Heritage Trail. Smith harbored people fleeing enslavement in his home, which served as stop on the Underground Railroad in the years preceding the Civil War.
As for the former site of his catering business, the City of Boston eradicated Brattle Street as part of the larger razing of Scollay Square in 1962. The business would have stood on what is today the southern end of City Hall Plaza. In Smith’s time, the area was home to key institutions associated with the abolitionist movement. Located one block away, on Cornhill Street, for example, were the offices of the famed abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, and John P. Jewett and Company, publisher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Getting there:
Blue Line or Green Line to Government Center station.
To learn more:
Kelly Erby, Restaurant Republic: The Rise of Public Dining in Boston. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.*
The Chestnut Hill Reservoir, located at the western end of the city along the border with Brookline, opened in 1870 to help meet Boston’s water needs. Work on it began soon after the Civil War. With a capacity of 550,600,000 gallons, the reservoir greatly helped to relieve the pressure on Boston’s water system—at least for a while, particularly during a time of rapid population growth.
The reservoir was also noteworthy for the beauty of its grounds, constructed to allow for ambling in “nature” and, later, for its built infrastructure—particularly an 80-foot carriage road and greenway around the water body, a grand entrance arch connecting it to Beacon Street, and the pumping station (constructed in 1897). What the bucolic setting obscured was the arduous labor that went into constructing it.
Built on the site was housing to accommodate for more than 400 workers, many of whom were Irish and Canadian immigrants or Civil War veterans. While the Cotichuate Water Board, which oversaw the project, claimed that its policy was to “pay our employés fair wages for their services, and have them well treated,” the workers perceived the wages as inadequate. On March 2, 1867, 225 workers, who were receiving $1.50 for their 12-to-14 hour-workdays, went on strike for higher pay. According to the Water Board, the workers “virtually proposed to supersede those in authority, and to fix their own wages…” The Board promptly fired all the striking workers, the majority of whom they said had been misled by “a few restless, rambling men [who] were the leaders in the affair,” and quickly found replacement workers, whose wages were raised to $1.75 a day. That the Water Board was able to behave as it did suggests the weak bargaining position of workers at the time, a result of low levels of organization among many laborers and the presence of many in need of wage work.
The reservoir was taken offline in 1978, but it still serves as a backup water source in case of emergency. The architecturally grand pumping station on the reservoir’s edge is today home to the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. The museum, entrance into which is free, interprets the history of Greater Boston’s water systems.
Built in 1913, Hibernian Hall was an important center for Boston’s Irish community for almost fifty years. It hosted concerts of traditional Irish music, and contained a bowling alley, ballroom and many meeting rooms. Among other organizations, many local chapters of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an Irish Catholic fraternal organization, which had its 19th century roots in combating discrimination against Irish immigrants, frequently took advantage of the space. So, too, did Boston’s largely Irish Catholic chapter of the Christian Front (see the entry on the Copley Square Hotel), an anti-Semitic organization, in the early 1940s.
In the initial decades of the 1900s, an influx of Jewish immigrants to Roxbury led to the Hall providing space for Bar Mitzvahs. In later years, the growing Black community in Roxbury led it to host James Brown and the Famous Flames before their rise to prominence. In a context in which many residents of Irish origin had moved out of Roxbury to other areas in Greater Boston and growing numbers of African Americans moved in, the Opportunities Industrialization Center bought the building in 1972. Started by Reverend Leon Sullivan of Philadelphia, the Center focused on providing technical and life skills training to the Black community.
In 2000, the Madison Park Development Corporation, a local community non-profit, purchased the Hall and relocated its offices there. The building’s 250-seat ballroom serves as the Roxbury Center for Arts at Hibernian Hall, a venue for theater, concerts, dances, film screenings, and private events.
Hibernian Hall, 2014. Photo by Eleni Macrakis.
Getting there:
Silver Line to Nubian Square station. Walk towards Dudley Street and turn left. Hibernian Hall is on the left side of the street. (0.2 miles, a 4-minute walk.)
To learn more:
Charles R. Gallagher, Nazis of Copley Square: The Forgotten Story of the Christian Front, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2021.
Gedutis, Susan. See You at the Hall: Boston’s Golden Era of Irish Music and Dance. Lebanon, NH: Northeastern University Press/University Press of New England, 2004.
The Columbus Avenue African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church was born, according to its website, “on June 13, 1838 when seventeen persons of color withdrew from the communion of the Methodist Episcopal Church” on Beacon Hill. The Black worshipers opted to become part of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, an African American denomination.
The congregation established itself in its current location in 1903, a time when many African Americans were moving to the South End. The church purchased the building (constructed in 1888 and today the oldest synagogue building in Massachusetts) from Temple Adath Israel (now called Temple Israel and located in the Longwood area of Boston’s Fenway-Kenmore neighborhood).
Soon after the move to the South End, the church became the site of a famous conflict between Dorchester resident William Monroe Trotter, the founder of The Guardian, an influential and African American newspaper based in Boston, and Booker T. Washington. Washington’s emphasis on Black self-help and his accommodationist approach to institutionalized racism greatly frustrated Trotter and his allies, who together became known as the Boston Radicals. So when the Boston branch of the National Negro Business League invited Washington to speak at the church on July 30, 1903, Trotter and his supporters went there to confront him.
Plaque on the outside of the Columbus Avenue A.M.E. Zion Church. Photo by Joseph Nevins, 2015.
Trotter’s contentious questions, declaimed from a chair on which he stood as soon after Washington began speaking, led to shouting and shoving between supporters of the two camps; meanwhile someone reportedly threw red pepper and a stink bomb into the large crowd. Boston police, wielding billy clubs, arrested Trotter, accusing him of provoking of what came to be known as the “Boston Riot.”
While calling it a “riot” seems excessive, the event was important in raising Trotter’s stature as a key opponent of Washington. It also strengthened W.E.B. Du Bois’s identification with the Radicals, thus contributing to the formation in 1905 of the Niagara Movement, a Black civil rights organization which, unlike Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine,” took a strong stance against policies of segregation and disenfranchisement.
Getting there:
Orange Line to Massachusetts Avenue station. The church is a 0.2 mile walk away (about 4 minutes). at the corner of Northampton Street.
In late 1755, ships carrying French-speaking deportees, from what are now Canada’s Maritime Provinces, began arriving in Boston Harbor. Known as the Acadians, some 2,000 of them would resettle in Massachusetts. Their expulsion, what many Acadian descendants still refer to as “Le Grand Dérangement” (Great Upheaval), paved the way for the occupation of their lands by “New England Planters”—about 8,000 New Englanders heeding a British call to replace the Acadians.
Although the treatment of the Acadian diaspora is much debated, responsibility for their expulsion and the expropriation of their lands is not in doubt. Massachusetts Colony Governor William Shirley, who spent at least part of each year living in his mansion on a 33-acre Roxbury estate, ordered their removal during the French and Indian Wars (1754-1763). Although a civilian, Shirley also briefly served as commander of all British forces in North America.
Prior to his governorship, Shirley’s title was that of the “Surveyor of the King’s Wood.” In this role he inventoried New England’s natural resources and engaged with frontier settlers whose antipathy toward the indigenous people and their French allies he shared. Shirley also served on a commission to determine boundaries between New England and New France (part of present-day Canada). As such, Shirley was very familiar with the region.
Although Le Grand Dérangement was but one instance of ethnic cleansing related to the wars, it is especially interesting because Acadian interactions with the indigenous population was far less destructive than those of the English: living in relatively small settlements, the Acadians established stable relations with the Native people, intermarried, and often borrowed indigenous cultural practices. The mass deportation severed those relations. (In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II issued a formal apology to the Acadians for the “wrongs committed in the name of the English Crown.”)
The French and Indian Wars profoundly reconfigured relations between and among indigenous people, the British and French governments, and their respective colonial subjects, the settlers. Ultimate British victory in the wars proved expensive; the taxation associated with the war debt exacerbated tensions between the crown and its colonists. These created incentives for the latter to seek independence and to further plunder native lands notwithstanding the British Crown’s war-ending pledges to protect and “not molest” the indigenous people.
Built between 1746 and 1749 as Governor Shirley’s summer residence, the historic, three-story house is part of Shirley-Eustis Place. (The name reflects that it was also at one point the home of William Eustis, a Massachusetts governor, 1823-1825, and U.S. congressman.) The larger entity, now an official City of Boston Landmark, incorporates a carriage house and the grounds. It also includes an outbuilding (at 42-44 Shirley Street) that is now a private residence.
Archeological research demonstrates that servants and enslaved Africans worked in the mansion and on the lands during Shirley’s ownership of the estate. It also suggests that some of the enslaved people may have lived in portions of the then-outbuilding, probably a barn. If true, it would make the building one of the last free-standing slave quarters (along with the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford) in the U.S. Northeast. None of this would have come as an embarrassment to Governor Shirley who went on to serve the British Crown as Governor of the Bahamas at the peak of its slave trading years.
Today the Shirley-Eustis House Association, founded in 1913, owns and operates the renovated and restored mansion and grounds. The landmark is open for tours from June through September.
William M. Fowler Jr., Empires at War: The French and Indian War and the Struggle for North America, 1754-1763. New York: Walker Publishing Company, 2005.
A small bar directly across the street from the Old Colony Housing Project, the Rabbit Inn and its White clientele were victims of police brutality. That it took place when and where it did was related to the often violent protests in opposition to what was popularly known as busing or forced busing, a federal-court-ordered program launched in September 1974 to desegregate the Boston Public Schools.
Around 8pm on Saturday, October 5, 1974, about 14 members of the Boston Police Department’s Tactical Patrol Force (TPF)—allegedly in response to “officer in trouble” phone calls from the bar—entered the Rabbit Inn after removing their badges. Using their billy clubs, Boston’s elite police squad proceeded to destroy much of the interior and assault the bar’s patrons—as well as individuals who happened to be in front of the building, including a 17-year-old on his way to buy milk. The attack lasted approximately five minutes and resulted in at least 10 individuals going to the hospital for head injuries, and about $20,000 in damage to the tavern.
Former site of the Rabbit Inn, April 2016. The bar was located in the left side of the building. Photo by Joseph Nevins.
The attack appears to have been revenge for what transpired the previous evening: someone had thrown a rock through the windshield of a TPF vehicle parked outside the bar. When three TPF officers tried to arrest a suspect, 25-30 people ran out of the Rabbit Inn and assaulted them.
The Rabbit Inn incident resulted in a City Council hearing, and investigations by the Boston Police Department’s Internal Affairs division and the FBI. While twelve TPF members were charged and tried in court, it appears that none were convicted.
Most TPF members (almost all of whom were White) were strongly opposed to busing. However, as the police officers often on the front lines of law and order in anti-busing strongholds and almost exclusively White neighborhoods such as South Boston and Charlestown, they became very unpopular in these areas as they clashed with protestors. Many in these neighborhoods referred to them by nicknames such as “the goon squad” and “Garrity’s Gestapo”—the latter a reference to W. Arthur Garrity, the federal judge who mandated and designed the desegregation effort.
The site of the Rabbit Inn is now a private home, and the TPF was disbanded in 1978.
Getting there:
Red Line to Andrew Station. The former site of the Rabbit Inn is about 0.4 miles away (approximately a 7-minute walk).
To learn more:
J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families, New York: Knopf, 1985.
David Rogers, “Conflicting Stories Told in South Boston bar incident,” The Boston Evening Globe, October 7, 1974: 3.
David Rogers and Bob Jordan, “Police brutal, City Council told,” The Boston Globe, Oct 8, 1974: 1+.
Jerry Taylor, “Civil Service lifts TPF suspensions in Rabbit Inn case,” The Boston Globe, July 8, 1976: 1+.
There are several school desegregation- and busing-related sites in A People’s Guide to Greater Boston. Among them are South Boston Heights Academy, Carson Beach, Charlestown High School football field, and the Christopher Gibson School.
Nearby site of interest:
St. Augustine Chapel (the oldest Catholic church building still standing in Boston), 181 Dorchester Street.
On August 23, 2007, about 60 activists—from organizations such as the Industrial Workers of the World and Massachusetts Citizens Against the Death Penalty—marched from Copley Square to the North End. Carrying huge effigies of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, they stopped at 256 Hanover Street, the former headquarters of the Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee.
The Committee was founded soon after the arrests of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1920. Headed by Aldino Felicano, editor of La Notizia, a socialist newspaper based in the North End, by then a largely Italian neighborhood, the Committee kicked into high gear following the pair’s conviction a little more than a year later. It was on the floor above the newspaper that the Committee eventually rented two rooms as its offices. Through publication and distribution of literature, the writing of articles for a wide variety of publications, fundraising, and the organizing of speaking tours, the Defense Committee played a central role in creating an international movement in support of Sacco and Vanzetti. And through its financing of a series of court appeals, the Committee helped to keep the pair alive for several years before their execution in 1927 at Charlestown State Prison.
Entrance to 256 Hanover Street, 2014. Photo by Eleni Macrakis.
The building at 256 Hanover Street still stands. A City of Boston marker commemorates it as the Committee’s former home. The 2007 march resulted in the formation of the Sacco and Vanzetti Commemoration Society which now organizes annual events in honor of the pair and explains their significance in respect to contemporary struggles over immigration, political repression, xenophobia, and the death penalty.
Plaque outside of 256 Hanover Street.
Getting there:
Orange or Green Lines to Haymarket Station. (0.2 mile, about a 5-minute walk.)
Bruce Watson, Sacco and Vanzetti:The Men, the Murders, and the Judgement of Mankind. New York: Viking, 2007.
To learn more:
Stephanie E. Yuhl, “Sculpted Radicals: The Problem of Sacco and Vanzetti in Boston’s Public Memory,” The Public Historian, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2010: 9-30.
Former site of Langone Funeral Home (where the wakes of Sacco and Vanzetti took place and over 100,000 came to pay their respects), 383 Hanover Street.
George Frisbie Hoar (1826-1904) was the son of a politically prominent family who would go on to be one of the most well-known opponents of U.S. imperialism of his time. Born and raised in Concord, he studied, as a youth, under Henry David Thoreau, who briefly ran his own school in the town, and later visited with him at Walden Pond. After graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Hoar moved to Worcester where he began practicing law. Within a few years, Hoar won election to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and, five years later, to the Massachusetts Senate. From 1869 to 1877, he served as member of the U.S. Congress. Thereafter, until his death, he was a member of the U.S. Senate.
While his fellow Republican (junior) senator from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, vociferously championed the annexation of Hawaii and U.S. military intervention in Cuba, Hoar was very suspicious of these projects, expressing quiet criticism. But with the outbreak of the U.S. war with Spain in 1898, he became a vocal opponent of U.S. imperialism. He was particularly concerned about the Philippines, the colonization of which he saw as an affront to U.S. ideals and a threat to U.S. institutions. In 1902, Hoar publicly denounced those in Washington complicit with the brutal U.S. war and the atrocities—ranging from widespread torture of Filipino captives and sexual assault to extrajudicial executions of prisoners and civilians—associated with Washington’s effort to pacify the territory. “You have devastated provinces,” he proclaimed. “You have slain uncounted thousands of peoples you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps.”
In the Senate, Hoar supported many progressive causes—including public education for African Americans recently freed from slavery, the right of women to vote, and the right of workers to form labor unions. He also opposed Chinese Exclusion, calling Chinese “absolutely fit” for U.S. citizenship. In the case of Portuguese and Italian immigrants, however, he succumbed to the racism of the time, calling them “absolutely unfit.” And while he never wavered in his position on the right of Filipinos to independence, he remained steadfastly loyal to the Republican Party, refusing to denounce Henry Cabot Lodge and President William McKinley, the main champions of the Philippines’ annexation.
Hoar grew up in the house, purchased by his father in 1819, on 158 Main Street. In 1946, Concord Academy, an elite boarding school, purchased the building. It is now a residential house, called Admadjaja House, for students.
George Frisbie Hoar—like fellow Concordians Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau—is buried in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
Commuter rail from North Station (Framingham line) to Concord Station. Walk north (take a left) on Thoreau Street, and then a right onto Belknap Street. Follow Belknap until Main Street. Take a right. Concord Academy and Admadjaja House is on the left side of the street. About 0.3 mils (a 5-minute walk).
To learn more:
Stephen Puleo, The Boston Italians: A Story of Pride, Perseverance, and Paesani, from the Years of the Great Immigration to the Present Day, Boston: Beacon Press, 2008.
Richard E. Welch, Jr., “Opponents and Colleagues: George Frisbie Hoar and Henry Cabot Lodge, 1898-1904, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 2, 1966: 182-209.
Richard E. Welch, Jr., “American Atrocities in the Philippines: The Indictment and the Response,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 43, No. 2, 1974: 233-253.
The former home of the Bruins and the Celtics (Boston’s professional hockey and basketball teams, respectively), the Boston Garden hosted many non-sporting events over its years. Perhaps the most famous was a concert by James Brown on April 5, 1968—one day after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee.
The Boston Garden, 1965, viewed from Canal Street. Note the then-elevated Green Line in front of the Garden. Source: Dirty Old Boston.
In the immediate aftermath of the killing, rioting and looting broke out in largely Black and working-class areas of Dorchester, Roxbury and the South End, particularly along Washington Street and Blue Hill Avenue. Given such developments and worries about further violence, the Garden management decided to cancel Brown’s concert.
On the morning of the concert, Councilman Thomas Atkins, Boston’s first and (at the time) only Black member of the City Council, called Mayor Kevin White, telling him that “Something terrible is about to happen.”
Warned of the pending cancellation by James Byrd (aka “The Early Byrd”), a very popular disc jockey on WILD radio, at the time Boston’s premier station for soul and R&B music, Atkins feared that it was too late to cancel the concert for ticket holders to find out. The result would have been thousands of teens outside the Garden’s locked doors at a volatile time.
Atkins persuaded White, who had never even heard of James Brown, to convince the Garden to hold the concert. The city councilor also convinced WGBH, the local public television station, to broadcast the event live.
James Brown was furious with the arrangement when he learned about the details upon arriving at Logan Airport. The music star had just recorded a television show in New York City under the obligation that he not do any more television on the East Coast until after the show had aired. Furthermore, the announcement of that evening’s broadcast on WGBH had led to many ticket holders requesting and receiving refunds.
Upon arriving at the Garden, Brown met Mayor White and demanded $60,000 to cover the lost revenue. White very reluctantly agreed. There is some dispute as to whether or not the City fulfilled its obligation. While White suggested that the City did so, Charles Bobbit, Brown’s personal manger, asserts that they received only $10,000.
City Councilor Thomas Atkins, James Brown, and Mayor Kevin White at the Boston Garden, April 5 , 1968. Source: The Boston Globe.
Although only about 2,000 individuals ended up attending the concert, it had a huge television audience, particularly in Boston’s Black neighborhoods. By all accounts, Brown put on a fantastic show and helped to defuse tensions in the city; despite MLK’s assassination the previous day, that night saw little violence throughout the city.
The rioting in Boston was small and low-level in comparison to what transpired in many other U.S. cities. Whereas Washington, D.C., for example saw 11 killed, 1,113 injured, $24 million in property damage in the days following MLK’s assassination, Boston experienced no deaths, 21 injuries, 30 arrests, and $50,000 in damage.
It is impossible to substantiate the popular claim that the James Brown concert “saved” Boston. No doubt, his concert played a significant role. It is also very likely that interventions, organizing and outreach by key community leaders and activists within Boston’s Black neighborhoods did so as well.
The Boston Garden first opened in 1928, and closed its doors for the last time in 1995, two days before the replacement arena opened behind it. It was demolished in 1998.
Getting there:
Orange and Green lines to North Station. The replacement arena, called the TD Garden, sits above North Station.
