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

=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.[22][nb 5] Between 1803 and 1805, the first row houses were built for Stephen Higginson