A Tour of Eighteenth-Century Boston

When Blindspot’s Stewart Jameson first glimpses the “thicket of steeples” marking the skyline of Boston, he feels the smallness of the town, to him a prim, provincial port on the far western edge of the English-speaking world.

Small it was. The Puritans’ would-be “City on a Hill” occupied a clover-shaped peninsula less than two miles long and at most a mile across. In the mid-eighteenth century, much of the land remained unsettled; the three peaks that dominated the town’s west side — Beacon Hill, Pemberton Hill, and Mount Whoredom, the colonists called them — pushed Bostonians toward the eastern half of the isthmus, where they built a maze of streets near as crooked and narrow as cow paths. Most buildings were made of wooden clapboard. Many were but one story tall. Fire was a constant, map- and life-altering fact of life. Six “Great Fires” leveled whole quarters of the fragile town before 1700. The eighteenth century witnessed sixteen major blazes, including the one whose ruins Jameson spies on Cornhill in 1764, and the one that destroyed Harvard Hall, in Cambridge, that same year.

Jameson’s Boston housed roughly 16,000 people: less than a third the population of his native Edinburgh and a bare fraction of that of London, which teemed with nearly three-quarters of a million souls. The first truly urban place in British North America — a dynamic commercial center as far back as the mid-1600s — Boston as Jameson found it had grown economically and demographically stagnant. New York and Philadelphia boomed; Boston’s wealth and its population stood much where it had a generation before, and much what it would remain a generation hence.

Yet in other ways, Boston led the colonies and, indeed, Britain’s empire. Most Bostonians, like the people of New England more broadly, were “middling” sorts, neither very rich nor very poor. They owned property more widely, and exercised their voting rights more vigorously, than virtually anyplace else in the English-speaking world. They experimented with money and paper credit. And they defended what they understood as “British liberty” with zeal when their King threatened to usurp them. In many ways, Boston earned the nickname its denizens gave it: cradle of the American Revolution.

John Bonner, A new plan of ye great town of Boston in New England in America (1769)

To reconstruct the lanes and byways of eighteenth-century Boston in Blindspot, we relied extensively on John Bonner’s map, The Town of Boston in New England and Henry Pelham’s “Plan of Boston in New England with its Environs, 1775 and 1776” as well as on other maps, travel narratives, and public records. Some of the buildings in the novel still stand, and many of the sites described in the novel can be visited. The Town House is now called the Old State House and sits on State Street (formerly known as King Street). The Long Wharf, Copp’s Hill, the Old South Meeting House, King’s Chapel, Boston Common, the Old North Church, the Granary Burying Ground (where James Otis is buried) and Faneuil Hall are all stops on Boston’s Freedom Trail.

The Pierce/Hichborn House, Boston, built in 1711.

Jameson’s lodgings were inspired by the Pierce Hichborn House, owned by the Paul Revere Memorial Association, and right next door to the Paul Revere House on Boston’s North Square, just behind Hanover Street. Edward Easton’s house is loosely based on the third Harrison Gray Otis House, on Cambridge Street in Boston, owned by Historic New England. Governor Bernard’s house was inspired by the Hooper Lee Nichols House on Brattle Street in Cambridge, owned by the Cambridge Historical Society. Only two of the buildings standing in Harvard Yard in 1764 survive today: Holden Chapel and Massachusetts Hall.