Day Two was a most remarkable day. We began at Faneuil Hall (pronounce it like Daniel) which is the famed Town Meeting hall for Boston with a short introductory lecture on all we were about to see by Merril, the National Parks tour leader for old Boston. He articulated the pre-revolutionary period with great enthusiasm and insight, saying things that I had heard a number of times but had never quite fully taken in until his presentation. We then went out onto the former wharf line, which is now all new land with massive development (and which is only yards away from the Hall). You would never think of it unless you saw it that had we been transported back in time a couple of centuries, we would have been standing in Boston Harbor and not on terra firma.
This was very interesting: here is the likely site of the actual Boston Massacre. How no one got run over at the time, I just don't know!!!
Just kidding.
We then marched off to see Paul Revere's house, then off to his statue, all along the way receiving an impressive and detailed history lesson on Boston and the politics and players involved in what was about to happen on the eve of the Tea Party. Also, the house was restored some time ago by a curator who was convinced that no pre-revolutionary homes in Boston were more than two stories tall, so he had the third floor of the house removed to make it look authentic again. Turns out, the third floor was original! Lost forever, now. Great Stuff!
We then regrouped after lunch above Boston Commons across from the Statehouse and in front of the Robert Gould Shaw & the 54th Massachussetts Colored Regiment, whose memorial you would likely mistake for just a bus stop unless you realized that it was what it purported to be. I had imagined this monument situated somewhere and somehow else, but between the history of it apparently being too big to go inside the statehouse and too important to not remind the members of the state legislature about what their responsibilities were, it got put where it got put. Interesting. Also, a couple of weeks beforehand, someone had broken off the sword that Shaw is holding in his right hand pointed down to the ground. The rangers said that it keeps getting vandalized like that! What was also interesting was that the memorial has the men marching southwest out of town along Beacon Street astride Boston Common, and the rangers provided a photo from the 1890s (if believe) showing the surviving troops marching beside the statue but coming back into town northeast up Beacon in front of the memorial. Very cool!
We then trekked off on the Freedom Trail and this was the most remarkable part of the day's journey. Going to be making use of a lot of the information about the African American abolitionist movement staged out of Boston and who the major players were and how they were in so many ways related to one another either by blood or by sentiment/resentment. This is one of the narrow alleys that fugitive slaves and their rescuers used to evade the federal slave catchers who patrolled the streets of Boston in search of runaway slaves. It winds back and through several homes and other passages and ends up in front of the site of the Black Meeting Hall and the home of one of the most important underground railroad rescuers. Even more cool!
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