Puritans borrowed a Lincolnshire market town’s name in 1630
Boston, Massachusetts’s capital and largest city, was founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritans who named it after Boston in Lincolnshire, itself a shortening of St. Botolph’s town. It went on to claim America’s first public park, first public school, and first subway.
The Massachusett people had kept seasonal villages here, and a fish weir under Boylston Street may be 7,000 years old, but European diseases had emptied the peninsula by the time John Winthrop’s Puritans arrived in 1630. An Anglican cleric, William Blaxton, already living there, invited Isaac Johnson’s group across from struggling Charlestown. Boston Common followed in 1634 and Boston Latin School in 1635. The town was the largest in the Thirteen Colonies until Philadelphia overtook it in the mid-1700s, and molasses from the Caribbean trade gave rise to Boston baked beans.
Resistance to Parliament centred here. Mobs attacked officials’ homes over the 1765 Stamp Act, 2,000 British troops arrived in 1768, and soldiers fired into a crowd in the 1770 Boston Massacre. After the 1773 Tea Party came the Intolerable Acts and a siege from April 1775. Washington broke the stalemate when cannons hauled by Henry Knox from Fort Ticonderoga appeared on Dorchester Heights, and the British left on 17 March 1776, still marked as Evacuation Day.
After independence the city grew as a port, then a manufacturing centre. It became a town of Brahmin elites and abolitionists, and from the 1820s of immigrants; by 1850 about 35,000 Irish lived there. Chartered as a city in 1822 with some 46,000 people on 4.8 square miles, it tripled its area between 1631 and 1890 by filling marshes and mudflats.
Today it has 675,647 residents (2020), and Greater Boston about 5 million, with strengths in universities, medicine, and biotechnology.
Source: Boston
