Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Welcome to “the Hub”
Boston State-house is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out
of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a
crow-bar.
—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table (1858)
manufacturing rose in importance,
Boston took a back seat to New York and
Philadelphia in size and influence. But
the “Athens of America” became known
for fine art and architecture, including
the luxurious homes you see today on
Beacon Hill, and a burgeoning intellec-
tual community.
In 1822, Boston became a city. From
1824 to 1826, Mayor Josiah Quincy
oversaw the landfill project that moved
the waterfront away from Faneuil Hall.
The market building constructed at that
time, which still stands, was named in his
honor. The undertaking was one of many,
all over the city, in which hilltops were
lopped off and deposited in the water,
transforming the coastline and skyline.
For example, the filling of the Mill Pond,
now the area around North Station,
began in 1807 and in 25 years consumed
the summits of Copp's and Beacon hills.
In the 19th century, landfill work
tripled the city's area, creating badly
needed space. The largest of the projects,
started in 1835 and completed in 1882,
was the filling of the Back Bay, the body
of mud flats and marshes that gave its
name to the present-day neighborhood.
Beginning in 1857, much of the fill came
by railroad from suburban Needham.
By the mid-1800s, Ralph Waldo Emer-
son, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Haw-
thorne, Bronson Alcott, Louisa May
Alcott, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt
Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and
even Charles Dickens (briefly) and Mark
Twain (more briefly) had appeared on the
local literary scene. William Lloyd Garri-
son published the weekly Liberator
newspaper, a powerful voice in the anti-
slavery and social reform movements.
Boston became an important stop on the
Underground Railroad, the secret network
the abolitionists developed to smuggle
runaway slaves into Canada.
LOCAL GLORY
During the Civil War (1861-65), aboli-
tionist sentiment was the order of the day
in Boston—to such a degree that only
names of members of the Union Army
appear on the rolls listing the war dead in
Harvard's Memorial Hall, which is open
to the public. Massachusetts' contribu-
tions to the war effort included enormous
quantities of firearms, shoes, blankets,
tents, and men.
Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass,
a former member of the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society, helped recruit the
54th and 55th Massachusetts Colored
Regiments. The movie Glory tells the
story of the 54th, the first army unit
made up of free black soldiers, and its
white commander, Colonel Robert
Gould Shaw. The regiment's memorial, a
gorgeous bas-relief by Augustus Saint-
Gaudens, stands on Boston Common
opposite the State House.
A CAPITAL CITY
The railroad boom of the 1820s and
1830s and the flood of immigration that
began soon after had made New England
an industrial center. Then as now, Boston
was the region's unofficial capital. Thou-
sands of immigrants from Ireland settled
in the city, the first ethnic group to do so
in great numbers since the French
Huguenots in the early 18th century.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search