17th century survey of the city with
Boston Neck visible at roughly at 7 o'clock. near Boston Common
William Blaxton was the first European owner of the land. He arrived in the
Massachusetts Bay Colony as chaplain to the
Robert Gorges expedition that landed in
Weymouth in 1623. All other member of this colonization attempt returned to England before the winter of 1625. Blaxton migrated five miles north to the
Shawmut Peninsula, then a rocky bulge at the end of a swampy isthmus surrounded on all sides by mudflats. Blaxton lived entirely alone for five years on the peninsula that became Boston. In 1630, Blaxton wrote a decisive letter to the Puritan group led by
Isaac Johnson, whose colony of
Charlestown was then failing from lack of fresh water. Blaxton advertised the excellent natural springs of the peninsula and invited Johnson's group to settle with him on it, which they did on September 7, 1630. Johnson died less than three weeks later and Blaxton negotiated a grant of 50 acres around his home on the western edge of the peninsula from Governor
John Winthrop. This amounted to approximately 10 percent of the available land on the
Shawmut Peninsula, stretching from Beacon Hill to Boylston Street. One of Johnson's last official acts as the leader of the Charlestown community was to name the new settlement across the Charles River after his original home in
Lincolnshire, England. He had immigrated to
Massachusetts Bay Colony with his wife, Arbella, and
John Cotton, grandfather of
Cotton Mather, during the
Puritan Migration. However, Blaxton quickly tired of his
Puritan neighbors and the difficulty of retaining such a large plot of land in a town that had grown to nearly 4,000 people by 1633. This led him to sell all but six of his 50 acres back to Winthrop in 1634 for £30 ($5,455 adjusted). The governor purchased the land through a one-time tax on residents amounting to 6 shillings per person (approximately $50 in adjusted value). Those 44 acres became the town commons of Boston and today form the bulk of Boston Common. In 1646, grazing was limited to 70 cows at a time. The Common continued to host cows until they were formally banned in 1830 by Mayor
Harrison Gray Otis. The
Granary Burying Ground, located at the southern edge of the Common, was established in 1660. Two years later, part of this land was separated from the Common, with the southwest portion used for public buildings—including a granary and jail—and the north portion dedicated to an almshouse (probably the first in the
Thirteen Colonies). Boston Common took over from the gibbet outside the gate of
Boston Neck as the town execution ground and was used for public hangings until 1817. Most of these executions were carried out from the limb of a large oak, which was replaced with a gallows in 1769. Those executed included common criminals, military deserters, Indians, captured pirates, and religious dissidents. The most famous victims of the Common's era as an execution ground were the group of
Quakers known almost immediately after their deaths as the
Boston Martyrs. The most famous of the Boston Martyrs was
Mary Dyer, who was executed on June 1, 1660. She was hanged from the oak by the Puritan government of Boston for repeatedly defying a law that banned Quakers from the
Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Common was used as a military camp by the British before the
American Revolutionary War, and it was from the Common that British troops set off for the
Battle of Lexington and Concord. Fireworks displays over Boston Common began as early as July 3, 1745, in celebration of the
fall of Louisbourg. These were followed by the celebration of the repeal of the Stamp Act on May 19, 1766, and the first anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1777, when Son of Liberty "Colonel Crafts illuminated his park on the Common" with fireworks, according to the Pennsylvania Evening Post of July 24, 1777. True park status seems to have emerged no later than 1830, when the grazing of cows was ended and renaming the Common as Washington Park was proposed.
19th century The renaming of the bordering Sentry Street to Park Place, later called Park Street, in 1804 already acknowledged the reality. By 1836, an ornamental iron fence fully enclosed the Common and its five perimeter malls, or recreational promenade. Tremont Mall, modeled after
St. James's Park in London, had been in place since 1728. The Common was used for a variety of purposes until its formal conversion into a public park during the 1830s. These uses gradually became more urban as the city developed, shifting from pastureland to military drilling field, execution grounds, public gathering place, and finally parkland. The park was originally "off-limits" to Black and Indigenous people, a restriction the Black community in Boston actively resisted until it was lifted on July 4, 1836. The
Charles Street side of Boston Common, along with the adjacent sections of the
Public Garden, was initially used as an unofficial dumping ground, as these areas were the lowest-lying parts of the two parks. This left the area “a moist stew that reeked and was a mess to walk over,” deterring visitors—yet the cost of repair delayed any improvements. This finally changed in the summer of 1895, when the required quantity of soil was made available as a result of the excavation of the
Tremont Street subway which was used to regrade the Charles Street sides of Boston Common and the Public Garden.
20th century A hundred people gathered on the Common in early 1965 to protest the
Vietnam War. A second protest happened on October 15, 1969, this time with 100,000 people protesting in the
Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. Boston Common was added to the
National Register of Historic Places in 1972 along with the adjacent
Boston Public Garden. The Common was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987 with its own listing on the National Register. ==Notable features==