Era: West Boston(~1780-1880)
Black Community on Beacon Hill, Brahmins on the flat
Dr. Joseph Stevens (J.S.) Jones, who lived most of his life in the West End, was a successful actor, playwright, theater manager, and physician in the nineteenth century. Jones graduated from Harvard Medical School and wrote between 150 and 200 plays in his lifetime. In 1924, the City of Boston tore down Dr. Jones’s home on Bowdoin Street, and other historic West End sites, in order to widen Court and Cambridge Streets.
Executive Director Sebastian Belfanti explains the many answers to a common question: where, geographically, is the West End?
Chloe Russell, a Black woman who owned property on Belknap Street in the West End during the nineteenth century, was the attributed author of The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book in an era when fortune telling and dream interpretation was popular and entertaining.
At the age of five, Sarah Roberts was at the center of a lawsuit against racially segregated public schools in Boston in 1847. Roberts, a Black girl, was denied the equal right to attend the public school of her choice, forced instead to walk past five public schools to the Black-only Abiel Smith School in the old West End.
The West End played a key role in defining the U.S. jurisprudence surrounding the execution and maintenance of contracts set out in the U.S. Constitution in two major cases: Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge & Fletcher v. Peck.
The 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment was the Union’s first free Black regiment of the Civil War. The Massachusetts Black regiments were all deeply linked to the West End, from which they were advocated for, recruited, and organized. The 54th is memorialized in a bas relief on Boston Common, and in the 1989 film “Glory”.
Quincy Adams Shaw was a Brahmin who was born in West Boston. After youthful travels, he became a major donor of artwork to the MFA, a successful businessperson, and a notable philanthropist.
Charles Bulfinch is regarded as the first American-born architect. He rose to prominence designing public buildings, including the Boston State House and US Capitol Building, and was a West Boston native whose designs still dominate the historic portions of the West End today.
