Boston Common: The People's Pasture

Why is it significant?

Stand right here on the sloping lawn of Boston Common, where the city opens wide under a green canopy of American elms. This is where Boston truly began.

Key Facts

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Stand right here on the sloping lawn of Boston Common, where the city opens wide under a green canopy of American elms. This is where Boston truly began. In sixteen thirty-four, forty-four Puritan families each pitched in six shillings to buy forty-eight acres of hilly pasture from William Blaxton, the solitary hermit who had lived here with his books and tame bull. That makes this peaceful green expanse the oldest public city park in North America. For generations, ordinary citizens grazed their livestock across these hills. Every householder had the right to pasture one cow, and local boys fought stone-throwing turf wars between rival neighborhoods. But beneath the pastoral charm lies serious martial history. In sixteen seventy-five, during King Philip's War, the colony displayed the severed head of Metacomet right here on a pole. A century later, as revolutionary fever mounted, British soldiers turned the Common into a sprawling fortified camp. Over a thousand Redcoats pitched white canvas tents on these slopes, training their muskets on the town they were occupying. Just south across Boylston Street sat the Central Burying Ground, established in seventeen fifty-six. Many British soldiers who fell at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June seventeen seventy-five were buried there in unmarked trenches, alongside American portraitist Gilbert Stuart, whose famous unfinished painting of George Washington adorns the one-dollar bill. A short stroll toward Washington Street once stood the legendary Liberty Tree, an ancient elm planted in sixteen forty-six. Beneath its sprawling boughs, the Sons of Liberty staged fiery protests, hanging tax collectors in effigy and organizing protests against the Stamp Act of seventeen sixty-five. Furious British troops hacked the great tree down for firewood in seventeen seventy-five, but they could not chop down the rebellion it had sheltered. Today, as you walk across these grassy paths where cattle once wandered and soldiers drilled, you are stepping directly across the bedrock of American independence.