Beacon Hill

Boston XCOCX Boston 1920

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Beacon Hill is a historic neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts, and the hill upon which the Massachusetts State House resides. The term "Beacon Hill" is used locally as a metonym to refer to the state government or the legislature itself, much like Washington, D.C.'s "Capitol Hill" does at the federal level.

Federal-style rowhouses, narrow gaslit streets and brick sidewalks adorn the neighborhood, which is generally regarded as one of the more desirable and expensive in Boston

History

17th Century

The first European settler was William Blaxton, also spelled Blackstone. In 1625 he built a house and orchard on Beacon Hill's south slope, roughly at the location of Beacon and Spruce street. The settlement was a "preformal arrangement". In 1630 Boston was settled by the Massachusetts Bay Company. The southwestern slope was used by the city for military drills and livestock grazing. In 1634 a signal beacon was established on the top of the hill. Sailors and British soldiers visited the north slope of Beacon Hill during the 17th and 18th centuries. As a result, it became an "undesirable" area for Boston residents. "Fringe activities" occurred on "Mount Whoredom", the backslope of Beacon Hill.

18th century

Beacon Street was established in 1708 from a cow path to the Boston Common. John Singleton Copley owned land on the south slope for pasture for his cows and farmland.

In 1787 Charles Bulfinch designed the Massachusetts State House. Its construction was completed in 1795, replacing the Old State House in the center of Boston.

The Mount Vernon Proprietors group was formed to develop the trimount area, The name trimount later morphed into "Tremont", as in Tremont Street. when by 1780 the city's neighborhoods could no longer meet the needs of the growing number of residents. Eighteen and a half or 19 acres of grassland west of the State House was purchased in 1795, most of it from John Singleton Copley. The Beacon Hill district's development began when Charles Bulfinch, an architect and planner, laid out the plan for the neighborhood. Four years later the hills were leveled, Mount Vernon Street was laid, and mansions were built along it. One of the first homes was the Harrison Gray Otis House on Cambridge Street.

19th century

Construction of homes began in earnest at the turn of the century, such as: freestanding mansions, symmetrical pairs of houses, and row houses. Between 1803 and 1805, the first row houses were built for Stephen Higginson.

In the 1830s, residential homes were built for wealthy people on Chestnut and Mt. Vernon Streets. Some affluent people moved, beginning in the 1870s, to Back Bay with its "French-inspired boulevards and mansard-roofed houses that were larger, lighter, and airier than the denser Beacon Hill."

In the early 19th century, there were "fringe activities" along the Back Bay waterfront, with ropewalks along Beacon and Charles Streets.

South slope

The south slope "became the seat of Boston wealth and power." It was carefully planned for people who left densely populated areas, like the North End.[6] The residents of opulent homes, called the Boston Brahmins, were described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as a "harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy". They had "houses by Charles Bulfinch, their monopoly on Beacon Street, their ancestral portraits and Chinese porcelains, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of the mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness."

Literary salons and publishing houses were founded in the 19th century. "Great thinkers" lived in the neighborhood, including Daniel Webster, Henry Thoreau and Wendell Phillips.

Flat of the Hill

Development began in the early 19th century. Single family homes often had stores on the first floor for retailers, carpenters and shoemakers. Today, many of the 19th century waterfront landmarks, such as the Charles Street Meeting House, are found far from the water due to the filling that has taken place since then.

North slope

See also: Boston African American National Historic Site The north slope was the home of African Americans, sailors and Eastern and Southern European immigrants. The area around Belknap Street (now Joy Street) in particular became home to more than 1,000 blacks beginning in the mid-1700s. While this community is often described as arising from domestic workers in the homes of white residents on the south slope of the Hill, property records indicate that the black community on the north slope was already well-established by 1805, before the filling-in of the south slope was completed, and so before that slope of Beacon Hill came to be considered an affluent area.

Many blacks in the neighborhood attended church with the whites, but did not have a vote in church affairs and sat in segregated seating. The African Meeting House was built in 1806 and by 1840 there were five black churches. The African Meeting House on Joy Street was a community center for members of the black elite. Frederick Douglass spoke there about abolition, and William Lloyd Garrison formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society at the Meeting House. It became a "hotbed and an important depot on the Underground Railroad."

Blacks and whites were largely united on the subject of abolition. Beacon Hill was one of the staunchest centers of the anti-slavery movement in the Antebellum era.

The Republican Party was founded by abolitionists. One of the earliest black Republican legislators in the United States was Julius Caesar Chappelle (1852-1904), who served as a legislator in Boston from 1883 to 1886 and whose district included the Beacon Hill area. Chappelle was a popular, well-liked politician and was covered by many of the black newspapers in the United States.[32]

Blacks migrated to Roxbury and Boston's South End after the Civil War.

In the latter part of the 19th century, Beacon Hill absorbed an influx of Irish, Jewish and other immigrants

Many homes built of brick and wood in the early 19th century were dilapidated by the end of the Civil War and were razed for new housing. Brick apartment buildings, or tenements were built. Yellow brick townhouses were constructed, generally with arched windows on the first floor and a low ceiling on the top, fourth floor. Residential homes were also converted to boarding houses.[6]

The north slope neighborhood transitioned as blacks moved out of the neighborhood and immigrants, such as Eastern European Jews, made their homes in the community. The Vilna Shul was established in 1898, and the African Meeting House was converted into a synagogue.