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Charlestown, as a historian has said, is the “Mother of Boston”- but the relationship between the two has been more like sisters, with the interdependence of a family as well as family squabbles. Charlestown was a city in itself before it was annexed to Boston in 1874 and it continues to maintain pride in its identity.
Charlestown was settled a year before Boston in 1629. But before there was a Charlestown, the peninsular was home to a group of Indians called the Pawtuckets. They called the land Mishawum. Their chief was Nanepashemit. At his death his power passed to his widow. Squaw Sachem.
The first settler to reside in Mishawum was a hermit named Thomas Walford. On July 4, 1629, Prince Charles granted the area status as a town and bestowed his name on it and a nearby river. The recently appointed Governor John Winthrop and a group of settlers arrived from England later that year. While the governor arrived to a recently built building called the “Great House” all the other settlers lived in tents. Because of a lack of a good fresh water source, Governor Winthrop moved over to Shawmut peninsular which they renamed Boston. It is interesting to note that no drawing or sketch of the building exists today although it stood in City Square for almost 150 years. The site, located in the new City Square Park, has had no building on that site since 1775.
It is interesting to note that when the settlers arrived the streets in Town Hill (Harvard Street area) had already been laid out a year earlier by engineer Thomas Graves. Those same streets are still in use today. The most famous resident who lived in Charlestown during these early days was John Harvard who left his private library to a small struggling college in neighboring Cambridge. Other residents include Margaret Jones the first to die in New England for the crime of witchcraft, and Elizabeth Foster Goose, whose fairy tales and nursery rhymes were gathered into a book and published into the original American “Mother Goose”. Also dating from around 1640 is Phipps Street Burying Ground. This site has very interesting headstones and is one of the oldest in the country.
By 1775, Charlestown was a prosperous community. It boosted coopers, glaziers, joiners, wheelwrights, potters, shipwrights, tanners, and tailors, tile makers, rope makers and happily brewers and distillers. The daily ferry connected Charlestown to Boston.
On April 18, 1775, Paul Revere borrowed a horse from Deacon John Larkin and began his famous ride to Lexington and Concord from the shores of Charlestown. Paul Revere was captured and Deacon Larkin never saw his horse again.
Charlestown was the scene of one of the most glorious defeats of American history. The Battle of Bunker Hill hurt the British more than the Americans and proved that the Americans could defend their liberties against superior numbers of disciplined and well-trained British Soldiers. But the burning of the town in the British attack left no building standing.
Refugees began returning after two years; by 1780 they had built 289 houses. In 1786 the first bridge connecting Charlestown to Boston was built. It was considered the greatest engineering feat to be accomplished in the new United States up to that time. The transition from village to town to city was rapid. As Charlestown multiplied in population, it decreased in area. The area once included parts of Woburn, Cambridge, Malden, Everett, Stoneham, Medford, Somerville, Winchester, and Arlington. The last town to break away was Somerville in 1842. In 1848, Charlestown became a city.
The town flourished as a port during the Golden Age of sail. Many sea captains built grand homes on its imposing hills. In 1800 The United States Navy established a shipyard in Charlestown. The Navy Yard brought fame to Charlestown for the many famous vessels built here. It also brought jobs to the thousands of immigrants arriving in Boston. Also bringing fame to Charlestown was the imposing Bunker Hill Monument. American statesman Daniel Webster and a hero of the American Revolution, from France, Marquis de Lafayette laid the cornerstone in 1825.
Charlestown was home to many distinguished people during the nineteenth century. There was John Boyle O’Reilly, Irish patriot, poet and writer, Loammi Baldwin, considered the Father of Civil Engineering, Samual Morse artist and inventor of the telegraph and Morse code, Dr. Jedidiah Morse considered the Father of American Geography due to his authorship of geography texts. Statesmen include Edward Everett, U.S. Congressman, and Senator, Governor, Secretary of State and Ambassador to Britain and Nathaniel Gorham, a President of the Continental Congress and signer of the U.S. Constitution. College founders and benefactors beside John Harvard were William Carleton and Charles Tufts.
Of the foreign-born population in Boston in the mid-nineteenth century, 85% were Irish. Many of those Irish immigrants settled in Charlestown attracted by jobs at the local docks. They lived in working-class houses, which sprang up in the valleys and in the yards and gardens of the old estates. As the Irish moved in, most of the Yankee families moved out. In 1874 Charlestown became part of the City of Boston.
Twentieth-century Charlestown is about transportation and economic booms, hard times and redevelopment. It starts in 1901 when a new elevated train system, a symbol of progress, started operation. The elevated train ran down the length of Main Street with stops at Sullivan Square, Thompson Square and City Square and then proceeded over a new bridge, the North Washington Street Bridge, also called the high bridge to distinguish it from an older lower bridge that also traveled to the Boston. This new form transportation was fast and convenient. It also put Main Street, no longer in the shade of trees, but in the shadow of train tracks. It was also dirty and the noise of the trains was unbearable. By the time the elevated train was demolished in 1975, all of Main Street was either vacant lots or vacant buildings.
Adjacent to the bridge, the railroads built a series of wharves, all linked to a great new elevator for grain. The scale of construction reflected the railroad’s optimism on grain traffic to be transported from the West via Boston. Unfortunately, this optimism was not supported by the realities of the market.
West of City Square, the Boston and Maine Railroad filled in all the marshes to create more track space. This enormous rail yard served north and west Greater Boston commuter traffic and all the trains from Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. It also boasted the nation’s largest facilities for the shipment of Maine potatoes. Potato sheds lined the west side of Rutherford Avenue from City Square to Sullivan Square.
Also at the beginning of the twentieth century, the road into Charlestown and Boston from the North Shore was traveling over a narrow low drawbridge over the Mystic River. In 1950, the Tobin Bridge replaced it. In those days all the traffic from the North Shore would travel over the Tobin Bridge and dump all the traffic into a rotary in the middle of City Square and then the traffic would travel on to the North Washington Bridge. Many homes and business along Chelsea Street were torn down for this transportation improvement.
Traffic from Somerville and points west and traffic from Everett and Malden would meet in Sullivan Square and proceed down two lane Old Rutherford Avenue to meet the Tobin Bridge traffic at the City Square rotary and all would proceed very slowly to Boston.
In 1959, a major transportation changes began with the connection of the Tobin Bridge traffic to the new Boston elevated central artery. While this helped the transportation flow it also cost Charlestown the loss of more homes and businesses. In 1973, Route I-93 was completed and it was also connected to the Boston elevated central artery. In 1975, the elevated train was removed from Main Street and relocated over to where I-93 is located.
More positive highway changes occurred in 1994, after a successful twenty-year neighborhood effort. The overhead I-95 elevated highway that traveled above Chelsea Street and directly over City Square relocated into a tunnel under City Square. This change allowed for the redevelopment of the area into new housing developments, with new office buildings and retail stores in City Square surrounding a beautiful new one acre City Square Park where the old traffic rotary was once located.
The final traffic improvement was the completion of the gorgeous new Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge that connects existing I-93 to the new depressed Boston Central Artery.
Economically, in 1901, life in Charlestown centered on the Navy Yard and the other town dock areas. A residential Armed Forces YMCA was built in City Square in 1917. Charlestown during the two World Wars prospered and had a large transient navy population. The population of Charlestown in those days peaked at 50,000. Changes came in the early 1970’s with the decommissioning of the Navy Yard. Soon the last of the commercial enterprises along Chelsea Street and the YMCA closed.
In the early sixties, after much heated debate, the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA) was invited to redevelop the depressed Charlestown neighborhood. In many respects the changes were as significant as the burning of Charlestown in 1775.
The BRA tore down many dilapidated buildings. Unfortunately, many old but wonderful old buildings were also removed. The closed historic Navy Yard was converted into residential and office use. The Bunker Hill Community College was built on the site of the old 1801 state prison. In addition, new utilities, lighting, streets, sidewalks and buildings were built. One set of buildings that were restored, called Thompson Triangle, included the 1780 Warren Tavern. This restoration saw the beginning of many new residents moving to the area and buying the old homes for very little money and restoring them.
The Charlestown of the twenty-first century is a very different place then it was just a few years earlier. Gone are the highways that cut Charlestown off from its waterfront. Gone is the elevated train that ran down Main Street. The state prison has been replaced by a community college. The population once at 50,000 is now 15,000. The blue-collar neighborhood of many large families who lived here for generations now has many young white-collar residents some with small families. Once one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods Charlestown is now one of Boston’s more prosperous neighborhoods. However, some things don’t change. Now as is in 1629, Charlestown is a peninsular with an ever-changing history.
Here are several interesting links with more Charlestown History
National Park Service Bunker Hill Monument
The Freedom Trail
American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives on the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown
Massachusettes Historical
WPI Military Science research on the Battle of Bunker Hill
Charlestown Navy Yard
Questia on line resource library of Massachusetts History sites
Charlestown Walk
COLONIAL BOSTON UNEARTHED, City Square Park
Charlestown Houses
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