Old State House (Boston): Difference between revisions

<gallery mode=”packed” heights=”140″>

<gallery mode=”packed” heights=”140″>

File:1751 CourtHouse Boston byNathanielHurd.png|The “Court House”, by [[Thomas Dawes|Thomas Dawes Jr.]] (artist) and [[Nathaniel Hurd]] (engraver), in 1751

File:1751 CourtHouse Boston byNathanielHurd.png|The “Court House”, by [[Thomas Dawes|Thomas Dawes Jr.]] (artist) and [[Nathaniel Hurd]] (engraver), in 1751

File:Old State Houston Boston from State Street.jpg|The same State Street elevation in 2025

File:1793 StateHouse Boston MassMag.png|Engraving by [[Samuel Hill (engraver)|Samuel Hill]] of the eastern elevation, published in the ”[[Massachusetts Magazine]]”, 1793

File:1793 StateHouse Boston MassMag.png|Engraving by [[Samuel Hill (engraver)|Samuel Hill]] of the eastern elevation, published in the ”[[Massachusetts Magazine]]”, 1793

File:Old State House and State Street, Boston 1801.jpg|State Street, 1801, by J. Marston

File:Old State House and State Street, Boston 1801.jpg|State Street, 1801, by J. Marston

Building in Boston, Massachusetts

United States historic place

The Old State House, also known as the Old Provincial State House,^[4] is a historic building in Boston, Massachusetts. Built in 1713, it was the seat of the Massachusetts General Court until 1798. It is the oldest extant public building in Boston and one of the oldest public buildings in the United States.^[5]

One of the landmarks on Boston’s Freedom Trail, the Old State House stands at the intersection of Washington and State Streets and now serves as a history museum. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and a Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 1994.

Today’s brick structure replaced the wooden Town House of 1658 which was designed by Thomas Joy and which burned in the fire of 1711.^[6] Its successor was built in 1712–1713 (with its cornerstone laid in May 1712 by Samuel Sewall),^[7] and possibly designed by Robert Twelves. Some historians credit Thomas Dawes with being the architect, but he was of a later generation. Dawes’s contributions probably came in about 1772, after a four-year period of the General Assembly having to meet in Cambridge due to British use of the building as a military barracks, which resulted in considerable damage.^[8][9][10] A notable feature is the pair of figures depicting a lion and unicorn, symbols of the British monarchy, on the eastern parapet.^[11] A Royal Coat of Arms was removed from Council Chambers during the Revolution by Loyalists fleeing Boston;^[12] it has been at Trinity Anglican Church in Saint John, New Brunswick, since 1791.^[13] The coat of arms is now in the nave, having survived the fire at Trinity in 1877.^[14]

The building housed a Merchant’s Exchange on the first floor and warehouses in the basement. The eastern side of the second floor contained the Council Chamber of the Royal Governor, while the western end contained chambers for the Courts of Suffolk County and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The central portion contained the chambers for the Massachusetts General Court. This chamber is notable for including public galleries, the first example of such being included in a chamber for elected officials.^[15]

The interior was rebuilt in 1748, after a fire the previous year; the exterior brick walls survived the fire.^[16] The interior was rebuilt according to the 1713 plan, but the exterior was altered: the gambrel roof was replaced by a gable roof, the polygonal cupola was replaced by a central tower in three tiers and the parapet on the eastern end was adorned by lion and unicorn rampants.^[17] National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers have also studied the effects of the Cape Ann earthquake of 1755 on the building’s foundation and walls, given the age of the structure.^[18] Between 1750 and 1830, significant modifications were mostly confined to the building’s interior.^[17]

In 1755, Spencer Phips, Lieutenant Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, signed a Proclamation at the Old State House calling on all settlers to hunt and murder Penobscot men and women in exchange for pay and land. The Proclamation was one of more than 100 government-issued scalp bounties issued in the United States between 1675 and 1885. In 2021, Penobscot Nation leaders and their children visited the Old State House to read the proclamation aloud.^[19]

In 1761, James Otis argued against the Writs of Assistance in the Royal Council Chamber. He lost the case, but he influenced public opinion in a way that contributed to the American Revolution. John Adams later wrote of that speech, “Then and there … the child independence was born.”^[20]

On March 5, 1770, the Boston Massacre occurred in the vicinity of the State House. A cobblestone memorial (a stop on the Freedom Trail) is inlaid into the concrete in front of the building’s eastern end, between Devonshire Street and State Street. Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson stood on the building’s balcony (above today’s memorial) to speak to the people, ordering the crowd to return to their homes.^[21]

On July 18, 1776, Colonel Thomas Crafts read the Declaration of Independence from the balcony to jubilant crowds. At one o’clock, he rose in the Council Chamber and read it to the members.^[22] Sheriff William Greenleaf attempted to read it from the balcony, but he could only muster a whisper. Crafts then stood next to the sheriff and read it from the balcony in a stentorian tone. For most people, it was a festive occasion, as about two-thirds of Boston residents supported independence. The lion and the unicorn on top of the building were removed and burned in a bonfire on King Street.^[23] Replicas were put in place in 1921.^[11]

An illustration from 1743 shows steps leading up to a set of double doors on the building’s eastern elevation.^[24] Both the steps and the doors were removed as part of a later renovation.^[25]

After the American Revolution, the building served as the seat of the Massachusetts state government until 1798, when it moved to the Massachusetts State House.

From 1830 to 1841, the building was Boston’s city hall. The city’s offices had been in the County Court House. In 1830, Isaiah Rogers altered the building’s interior in a Greek Revival style, most notably adding the spiral staircase, leading up from and down to the rotunda, which remains today. The staircase design is believed to have been inspired by that of the 1747 structure in the Shirley–Eustis House in Roxbury.^[26] The building was damaged by fire in 1832.^[6]

City Hall shared the building with the Boston Post Office and several private businesses. On October 21, 1835, Mayor Theodore Lyman Jr. gave temporary refuge to William Lloyd Garrison, the editor of the abolitionist paper The Liberator, who was being chased by a violent mob. Garrison was kept safe in the Old State House until being driven to the Leverett Street Jail, where he was protected overnight but charged with inciting a riot.^[22] In 1841, City Hall moved to the former Suffolk County Courthouse on School Street.^[27]

After City Hall’s relocation, its former home was rented out for commercial use. This had been the case once before, in the interim between the State House period and the City Hall period. Occupants included tailors, clothing merchants, insurance agents, railroad line offices, and more. As many as fifty businesses used the building at once.^[28] Clothiers Brown, Lawrence and Stickney altered the basement access panels in the eastern façade to accommodate their store. At the western end, Charles A. Smith’s tailor shop filled the space from Washington Street to the rotunda for almost thirty years. By 1870, there had been fifty different occupants of the premises. Around a decade later, it was overrun by businesses, with the building’s lower exterior adorned by advertising billboards.^[29] The central staircase was also removed and a mansard roof was installed.^[30]

The Bostonian Society was formed in 1881 to preserve and steward the Old State House, in response to plans for the possible demolition of the building due to real estate potential. In 1881–1882, restorations, funded by councilor William Henry Whitmore,^[29] were undertaken by George A. Clough.^[31] Whitmore had discovered Isaiah Rogers’s 1830 plans for City Hall conversion in an archive in Cincinnati and mistakenly thought they were based on the 1748 plan. Rogers, though, had substantially altered the interior’s configuration for the building’s new use, but Whitmore convinced Clough to restore the building per the 1830 plans. In 1882, replicas of the lion and unicorn statues were placed atop the eastern side of the building, after the originals that had been burned in 1776.^[32] On the western side, the building features a statue of a gilded eagle perched atop a small gilded glob, in recognition of the Old State House’s connection to American history. To commemorate the building’s time as the State Capitol, gilded scrolls are attached to the parapet.^[11]

The building’s interior features four sections―Keayne Hall and Whitmore Hall on the first floor and Representatives Hall and the Council Chamber on the second floor―with a rotunda beneath the central tower.^[26]

Since 1904, the State Street MBTA station has occupied part of the building’s basement. The East Boston Tunnel opened in 1904, now called the Blue Line, and the Washington Street Tunnel opened in 1908, now part of the Orange Line.^[33]

In 1907, a restoration headed by Joseph Everett Chandler added recessed entrances in the center of the northern, southern and western elevations as part of the building’s return to its original provincial style.^[11][30]

The Boston Marine Museum occupied rooms borrowed from the Bostonian Society from 1909 to 1947.^[34]

Architectural firm Perry, Shaw and Hepburn renovated the building’s interior in 1943.^[26]

Queen Elizabeth II toured the Old State House with her husband on July 11, 1976, as part of her Boston visit to celebrate the bicentenary of the United States. She appeared on the balcony and delivered an address:^[35]

If Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, and other patriots could have known that one day a British monarch would stand on the balcony of the Old State House, from which the Declaration of Independence was first read to the people of Boston, and be greeted in such kind and generous words—well, I think they would have been extremely surprised! But perhaps they would also have been pleased to know that eventually we came together again as free peoples and friends to defend together the very ideals for which the American Revolution was fought.

Goody, Clancy and Associates, in cooperation with the Denver Service Center of the National Park Service, undertook a preservation program of the building in 1991. Their work included amending the truss rafter system, which was held in place by gravity, after it was discovered that it was unable to withstand substantial winds from the north or south.^[30]

In January 2020, the Bostonian Society merged with the Old South Association in Boston to form Revolutionary Spaces, which continued to operate the museum.^[36][37]

The Old State House frequently has preservation and restoration projects as a part of the ongoing effort to keep the building in good condition. In 2006, the museum underwent a restoration to repair water-damaged masonry. The damage had long been a problem, but it was aggravated in fall 2005 by Hurricane Wilma. The project was the subject of an episode of The History Channel‘s Save Our History.^[38]

In 2008, the museum’s tower was given a major restoration. During the project, the building’s 1714 weathervane was re-gilded, which may have been made by Shem Drowne.^[7] The windows were repaired and resealed, the balustrades were repaired, and the copper roofing and rotten wood siding were replaced. This was done to prevent structural damage and to protect the museum’s collections and the 1831 clock by Simon Willard in the pediment below.^[39] A sundial, the work of local architect George Sherwood in 1957, was installed to replicate one depicted in an 1800 illustration of the building. The sundial obscured the clock, however, and was not replaced when the clock was repaired and reinstalled in the early 1990s.^[11]

• Brockton Fairgrounds, Brockton, Massachusetts^[40][41]
• Curry College, Milton, Massachusetts; traditional residence, northern side^[42]
• Eastern States Exposition (“The Big E”), West Springfield, Massachusetts; Avenue of States section^[43][44]
• Jamestown, Virginia Expo. of 1907, state buildings section
• Weymouth Civic District, Weymouth, Massachusetts

• 
  The “Court House”, by Thomas Dawes Jr. (artist) and Nathaniel Hurd (engraver), in 1751
• 
  Engraving by Samuel Hill of the eastern elevation, published in the Massachusetts Magazine, 1793
• 

  State Street, 1801, by J. Marston

• 

  Advertisement for Clothing Warehouse in the Old State House, 1849

• 

  Old State House, c. 1898 photo, looking west

• 

  Eastern elevation, 19th century

• 

  The Old State House’s spiral staircase

• 

  Devonshire Street entrance to State subway station

• 
  Marker commemorating the Boston Massacre, which occurred nearby, at the eastern end of the building