Topic: Politics & Law
Politics, politicians, political clubs, laws, lawyers, courts, jurisprudence, criminals, crime, law enforcement, jails
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and George Ruffin were eminent African-American residents of the West End in the late nineteenth-century. Josephine’s newspaper, The Woman’s Era, was published from her home and instrumental to the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. She was its first vice president.
John S. Rock was an accomplished Black dentist, doctor, lawyer, and abolitionist lecturer who resided on the north slope of Beacon Hill shortly before and during the Civil War.
George Parkman was a prominent businessman and philanthropist in Boston. He is best known for donating land to Harvard Medical College (now part of MGH) and his murder in that very location.
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.
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.
Don Pedro Gilbert, a nineteenth-century Spanish pirate who raided merchant ships in the Atlantic, was executed by hanging, in 1835, at the Leverett Street Jail in the West End. The West End Museum resides approximately where the Jail stood.
William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most prominent white abolitionists before the Civil War, published The Liberator and shaped the debates that guided the anti-slavery movement. Garrison was held at Leverett Street Jail in the old West End for his own safety during one harrowing case of mob violence.
