Old State House

Boston
MA

Portrait by Artist to Come

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Built in 1713, the Old State House was the seat of Massachusetts government in the 18th century — until it was replaced by the new State House in 1798. It is the oldest surviving public building in Boston and one of the most important public buildings still standing from the original 13 colonies.

Led by Samuel Adams, the freely elected representatives frequently clashed with Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson, whose Council Chamber was also on the second floor of the Old State House (as were the judicial courts). Men like James Otis, John Hancock, and John Adams debated there the future of the North American colonies.

Just outside the building, five men were killed by British soldiers in what would be known as the Boston Massacre.

Two floors of exhibitions tell the story that the Old State House, and Boston, played in the American Revolution.

Part of the Freedom Trail™.

Since the heady moment when he married Martha Custis in 1759, combining their estates into one of the preeminent holdings in northern Virginia, everything Washington touched had turned to brass. He had failed repeatedly to grow profitable tobacco crops. In London his leaf had acquired an unshakable reputation for mediocrity. Meanwhile the expenses of maintaining a great planter’s lifestyle, while keeping up a slave labor force and several plantations, had proved unrelenting. His own debtors — former comrades-in-arms who unhesitatingly touched him for loans, neighbors with whom he ran accounts, tenants who owed him rent — were slow to pay, and sometimes never did; yet he was too tightly bound by the expectations of gentlemanly behavior to refuse a loan when asked, or to press a debtor insistently when payment fell due. By 1763 Washington found himself deep in debt, doubting that he would ever extricate himself by growing tobacco, and casting about to find some way out of his predicament.

Fred Anderson
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754 - 1766 (2000)