Rambles around Old Boston by Edwin Monroe Bacon

Author:Edwin Monroe Bacon [Bacon, Edwin Monroe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Geschichte
Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
Published: 2018-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

V. OVER BEACON HILL

AS we were strolling down the Beacon Street Mall while the Englishman remarked the charm of the Beacon Street border largely of old-time architecture, disfigured though it is in spots by the intrusion of incongruous reconstruction, the Artist recalled the earliest extant painter's sketch of the Common, of a date some sixty years after Bennett's pen picture, which includes this border.

It is a water color representing the Common and Beacon Street as they appeared in or about 18051806, when the making of Park Street was under way, and the development of Beacon Hill west of the new Bulfinch State House into a fair urban West End, was progressing. Although the border was occupied in part in the Province period our guest was told that no piece of provincial architecture is seen in the line. The oldest dates back only to 1804-1805, about the period of this painting. Several pieces are of the second decade of the nineteenth century. Others are examples of the spacious Boston domestic architecture of the eighteen thirties.

From its first occupation the border was a favored seat of Boston respectability. When Bennett wrote in 1740 two seats were here, one at the head of the line, the other at the foot. The street was then a lane through the Common "and so to the sea" — the Back Bay, the bound of this side of the Common then being the hill. The house at the head was the mansion of Thomas Hancock, uncle of the famous John, then new, it having been erected in 1737, and pronounced one of the most elegant in Town. At the foot or back on the hill slope, were "Bannister's Gardens", the estate of Thomas Bannister, merchant — or at this time of his heirs — occupying the six-acre home-lot of William Blaxton, the first planter, which he reserved from the sale of the peninsula to the inhabitants. Between these two places the hill spread out much as in its primitive state. The Hancock mansion was the first house to be erected on the top of the hill west of the summit, or the highest of the three peaks. The mansion-house stood in solitary grandeur with no near neighbor westward for some thirty years.

Then in or about 1768 John Singleton Copley, the painter, built here, setting his house midway down the line, about where we see the distinguished double-swell front stone house, now the home of the Somerset Club, originally the early nineteenth-century mansion-house of David Sears, merchant, eminent in his day. Copley at this time was at the height of his prosperity as the court painter of Boston gentility; and upon his fortunate, and happy, marriage in 1769 with Miss Susanna Clarke, the fifth daughter of Richard Clarke, a wealthy merchant, agent of the East India Company in Boston, and later one of the consignees of the tea which the Bostoneers threw overboard, he acquired a large part of the hill west of the Hancock holdings, including the Blaxton six-acre lot which had passed from the Bannisters.

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