Boston Neck
The Boston Neck or Roxbury Neck was an isthmus that connected the then peninsula of Boston in the state of Massachusetts in the United States with the mainland of the city of Roxbury (now a district of Boston). The area around the strip of land was gradually filled in to keep up with the population growth in Boston.
history
At normal water levels , the Boston Neck was originally 120 ft (37 m ) wide. The first settlers built a wooden city gate and an earth wall on the Neck around 1631 to repel attacks by the Indians and to keep animals and unwanted people out of the city. The gate was guarded around the clock and usually locked during certain hours of the evening. During this time, no resident could enter or leave the city. Just outside the gate there was a wooden gallows where pickpockets , burglars and murderers were regularly executed .
During the colonial period , the were marshland of the Charles River to the north of Boston Neck and the Gallows Bay on the south side, which had its name from the executions near and later in South Bay has been renamed. The main street across the Boston Neck was Orange Street .
In 1710 more fortifications were added, probably a wooden gate each for carts and pedestrians . In September 1774 General Thomas Gage reinforced the old fortifications with bricks , stones and earth mixed with wood. He also ordered a trench to be dug on the outside of the fortifications, which would fill with salt water at high tide and cut Boston off from the mainland. So during the low tide there was very soft mud on both sides of the Boston Neck which made it very difficult to walk into town without using the city gate.
On the night of April 18, 1775, Joseph Warren , the leader of the Patriots , dispatched Paul Revere and William Dawes on horseback with identical messages to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of the British expedition that captured them and the gunpowder should confiscate in Concord . The 30-year-old Boston tanner Dawes was well known to the British guards at the city gate on the Boston Neck, but was able to pass through the gate despite a complete lockdown ordered that evening. He rode overland on a southern route while Revere took a northern route. Warren had sent both men to make sure that at least one of them could bypass the British patrols. Dawes left town around 10 p.m. and rode 17 mi (27 km ) in three hours. He met Revere just before 1 a.m. on the morning of April 19, 1775 at Hancock-Clarke House , Lexington , just hours before the battles at Lexington and Concord sparked the American Revolution .
In the late 18th century, Boston residents began dumping filler material along the Boston Neck as the low-lying area was exposed to soil erosion . At the beginning of the 19th century, beginning in the 1830s, entire trainloads of ballast from the Needham area were being dumped into the Charles River. This created what is now the Back Bay district of Boston . The remains of the fortifications and the city gate could be seen until 1822, but there are no more traces today. In 1824, the section of Orange Street where the city gate once stood was renamed Washington Street .
The Washington Street Elevated operational from 1901 to 1987, a railway line on the Washington Street until the Orange Line of the MBTA , which is named after the ancient name of the street was moved and elevated rail lines and stations were dismantled.
literature
- Nancy S. Seasholes: Gaining Ground . A History of Landmaking in Boston. MIT Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 978-0-262-19494-5 .
- James Henry Stark: Antique views of Boston . Burdette & Co., Boston 1967, OCLC 186584 .
- David H. Fischer: Paul Revere's Ride . Oxford University Press, New York 1994, ISBN 978-0-19-508847-2 .
See also
Web links
- Engraving of the Boston Neck - from The Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution by Benson J. Lossing, (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1851)
Coordinates: 42 ° 20 ′ 38 ″ N , 71 ° 3 ′ 57 ″ W.