Headed Into Boston Today

Just thirty minutes away from Merrimack, New Hampshire is the amazing city of Boston!

 

So rich in history it is impossible to describe!  We were here once before, from Hartford, Connecticut on our second contract as medical travelers (http://www.thetravelerstwo.net/2011/08/hartford-connecticut.html), but it was raining cats and dogs and battleships even.  We tried our best to sight-see, but rain was coming down as though it was being poured out of buckets and water was running over the gutters right into the doorways of shops.  I've never seen rain like that!  No wonder they don't just have taxis but also the famous Duck Boats for tourists.

This trip we have bright blue skies - but it was cold!  However, buried somewhere in there

 

is the story of our Founding Fathers, of the first shots fired in the American Revolution (March 26, 1770)  (Not a typo.  The Boston Massacre happened in 1770.)  None other than John Adams, the future second President of the United States of America, defended the BRITISH involved in that shooting.  Fair play is part of what America was founded on, and Adams exemplified that even before "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one nation to dissolve the political bands which have connected them to another..." The U.S. succeeded in its dissolution of its bonds to the British.

Here at Park Street Congregational Church in the much older Old Granary Burial Ground (established in 1660) are lie the bodies of many of those who began the fight for America's independence and the creation of these United States of America.   People like Paul Revere (1734-1818), Samuel Adams (1722-1803), several members of the "Boston Tea Party" of 1773 such as Joseph Shed and Matthew Loring, Robert Treat Paine who served as a military chaplain during the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and in 1770 led the prosecution of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre,  John Hancock, the parents of Benjamin Franklin, Peter Faneuil, and (just to lighten the moment) Mother Goose.  Yes, that's right, Elizabeth Goose, the second wife of Isaac Goose.  She raised 10 step-children and 10 of her own - twenty children!  Is she the Mother Goose though?  James Otis (1725-1783) is also buried here.  He was a prolific pamphlet writer in the time of the American Revolution.  Pamphlets were the Facebook of the 1700's.  In one, "The Rights of the British Colonies, Proved and Asserted," he argued that since the Stamp Act had been passed in the English Parliament but bypassed the Colonial legislature, it was taxation without representation.  Now, where have I heard that before ...?

The oldest headstone was carved in 1672.  

Many of those headstones sport skulls and crossed bones and grim reapers. 

These images were supposed to remind the living to be God-fearing Puritans and of the mortality of the body.  Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), who presided over the horrific Salem Witch Trials, is also buried here! You need to remember that the Puritans were still around in the 1770's.  At the conclusion of the American Revolution/War of Independence, the things you and I might see on a headstone, like angels and cherubims, began to appear.  (Thank goodness!)

Unfortunately, in the 1830's, graveyards began to evolve into botanical cemeteries.  I say unfortunately because, to compete with new, commercial graveyards, older places like this church graveyard began to move "organic groundskeepers" (cows and pigs) out, and arrange existing headstones into neat little rows to make human grounds-keeping easier.  For good or bad, the bodies were not rearranged. So, who really IS buried under those names???

And, last info on the Granary Burial Grounds, does anyone remember this "Hunt For More":

Compliments to "Jimmy's Tangents."
http://jimmysgranary.com/GranaryGuide.pdf
http://www.jimmysgranary.com/hrgranarymap-left.jpg

Even Queen Elizabeth thought this place was necessary to honor and visited her on one of her trips to America.