History
Organizational category for all historical articles
The West End was a backdrop of national history, in addition to local memory. President John F. Kennedy’s life as a veteran and public servant intersected with the West End community in subtle yet significant ways.
Jane Jacobs was a journalist, author, and activist who argued for the prioritization of people in urban planning projects.
H.H. Holmes, widely considered to be the nation’s first serial killer, was apprehended after being tracked to the West End in 1894.
Thomas Hodson’s quarry extracted gravel from the north slope of Beacon Hill in the middle of the eighteenth century. This provoked public outrage, but the excavation of Beacon Hill for the expansion of Boston was too difficult to stop.
Lewis Hayden was an escaped slave who became an active abolitionist and assisted many other escaping slaves through the underground railroad.
Prince Hall was a leader in Boston’s free black community on the North Slope and Copp’s Hill. He was one of the United States’ most vocal early abolitionist voices and a founder of Prince Hall Freemasonry. Hall advocated for black education and equality, running a school and making a wide array of arguments in service of bringing the fundamental promises of the Revolution to all Americans.
Primus Hall was an abolitionist, soldier, school master, and leader in Boston’s post-colonial period.
Sarah Josepha Hale was one of the most successful women in writing and publishing in nineteenth-century America, and her letters and editorials were instrumental to the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Hale is connected to the old West End because one of her poems, “Mary’s Lamb,” was set to music by Lowell Mason at the Bowdoin School.
