“Boston, perhaps more than any other place in the nation, is the venue where America invented itself,” writes the historian Martin Blatt, and anyone who’s taken just one stroll through the city’s tourist sites would agree. Boston’s well-known Freedom Trail, for instance, seeks to make the story of the United States’ birth accessible to visitors by guiding tourists through a series of Revolution-era landmarks like Paul Revere’s house, the site of the Boston Massacre, and Faneuil Hall.
But even the Freedom Trail, the most trafficked attraction in Boston, has its dark side.
In his 2022 book Lost on the Freedom Trail, historian Seth Bruggeman argues that “the Freedom Trail was always largely a tourist gimmick, devised to lure affluent white Americans into downtown revival schemes, its success hinging on a narrow vision of the city’s history run through with old stories about heroic white men.” While the National Park Service hails the Freedom Trail as a successful example of a “partnership park” in which the NPS works with local companies and nonprofits, Bruggeman sees “gentrification and profit” lurking at the Freedom Trail’s every turn.
It is clear that the Freedom Trail sweeps non-White, non-male, non-affluent areas under the rug — ignoring areas like Beacon Hill that house much of the city’s Black and women’s historical landmarks.
Although Beacon Hill in particular has a reputation for housing the “Boston Brahmin,” a burgeoning lower- and middle-class Black community has also called Beacon Hill home for centuries, serving as a hotbed for abolitionist activism. And Beacon Hill also housed pioneering middle-class women who worked as doctors, writers, and activists.
As a result, it seems like the sanitized version of history has won out, at least in the tourist arena. Before the pandemic, more than four million tourists visited Boston’s Freedom Trail every year. In contrast, only 419,000 tourists visited the Boston African American National Historic Site in 2019 — less than one tenth the numbers that its neighbor boasts.
But what would a less sanitized version of the Freedom Trail look like? And what do we lose in terms of Black and women’s history when we focus so much on the Freedom Trail and not on other areas in Boston? The Black Heritage Trail and the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail offer potential answers.
Before I start, I want to emphasize what this photojournal does not do: It does not attempt to “uncover” this history. Attempting to do so would discredit the work of the historians, activists, and curators who have worked to make walking tours such as the Black Heritage Trail and Boston Women’s Heritage Trail available to the public. And of course, it ignores the fact that this history is not “covered” at all: The historical documents and the built environment both show that this history exists out in the open.
A product of the efforts of curator J. Marcus Mitchell, the Black Heritage Trail, started in 1963, although it did not grow beyond an informal tour until 1968, when Mitchell and his wife Gaunzetta drew up an official brochure. By the 1970s, Harvard-educated Byron Rushing, then President of the Museum of African American History, which now runs the Black Heritage Trail, was lobbying Congress to reckon with race and slavery in Boston’s revolutionary past. Those efforts paid off in 1980 with the creation of the Boston African American National Historic Site.
The Women’s Heritage Trail started nine years later, its founders galvanized by the Black Heritage Trail’s success.
I had walked the Freedom Trail and experienced its whitewashed version of history before, but I thought I should expand my horizons as a graduating history major and give the two trails a visit. Despite their common location in the Beacon Hill neighborhood and occasional overlap in the sites featured, the Black and Women’s Heritage Trails do not share any branding or promotional material, so I had to figure out the best way to cover both trails at once on my own.
My walking tour starts at the Massachusetts State House facing Boston Common and the beginning of the Freedom Trail. Anne Hutchinson (top) and Mary Dyer (bottom) both challenged the Puritan Church’s hold on Boston politics and paid the price. The Puritans expelled and excommunicated Hutchinson and hanged Dyer. Today, their statues stand in front of the State House’s two wings. Ironically, a chain-link fence hides Hutchinson’s statue, currently blocked off due to construction
My path then diverges from Boston Common and enters Beacon Hill. To investigate the Women’s Heritage Trail, I take a sidetrack along Mt. Vernon Street before returning to the main Black Heritage Trail along Pinckney Street. George Middleton — a leader of the Bucks of America militia during the American Revolution — lived in the black clapboard house (left); the Phillips School (right) became one of the first integrated schools in Boston. Along the way, I pass the home where Louisa May Alcott — author of “Little Women” — grew up and the Home for Aged Colored Women (which, ironically, is not on the Black Heritage Trail).
I then took a detour along Louisburg Square to pick up the Women’s Heritage Trail again. Right along the street is St. Margaret’s Convent, run by Episcopalians as a hospital and chapel to serve the community. (Presently, the order runs a convent in Duxbury, Mass., and the convent at Louisburg Square is inactive.) Further afield is 9 Willow Street, where poet Sylvia Plath lived for a time while studying at Boston University.
I then traded the relatively tranquil neighborhood streets of residential Boston for the hustle and bustle of Charles Street at the city’s center. Although the Charles Street Meeting House once housed a thriving African Methodist Episcopal congregation, it has become a victim of the rampant commercialization of historic spaces. Today, you can shop at boutiques while sipping an overpriced Tatte coffee in the building. A sign in a window touts the building’s historical status as a selling point for potential tenants.
After following Charles Street for several blocks, I dip back into Beacon Hill’s sanctuary. Along the way, I passed by 103 Charles Street, home of the Woman’s Era Club. Founded at the turn of the 20th century, the club illustrates today’s discussions about intersectionality quite well: Florida Ruffin Ridley, one of its founders, noted that the “many questions which, as colored women, we are called upon to answer” necessitated the establishment of a club “started and led by colored women.” Again, the Black Heritage Trail largely does not acknowledge this site, although the National Park Service has highlighted the club on its website.
Back in Beacon Hill, I follow Phillips Street to the Lewis and Harriet Hayden House. After escaping to Boston on the Underground Railroad, the Haydens established themselves in Beacon Hill, and their home later became a well-trafficked stop on the Underground Railroad itself. The site is also a stop on the Women’s Heritage Trail, which emphasizes Harriet Hayden’s role in organizing the resistance, perhaps to counter the fact that the plaque on the building itself ignores her altogether.
The Women’s Heritage Trail then takes me along Phillips Street to the Vilna Shul, the only place where either trail substantively engages with Boston’s deep-rooted immigrant history and where the synagogue’s female founders are highlighted prominently. Named after Vilnius, capital of Lithuania and a hub for Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, the synagogue hosted a congregation of Lithuanian Jews from 1919 until its closure in 1985. The Vilna Shul has since reopened as a Jewish community center.
My second-to-last stop was the Museum of African American History (located in the Abiel Smith School and the African Meeting House, pictured). The Smith School was the first school in Boston purposefully built to educate Black children, while Beacon Hill’s Black community built the African Meeting House as a center of community life.
Here, I paused to reflect on how my tour of the Black and Women’s Heritage Trails differed from the Freedom Trail. With their exploration of the antebellum Black community, sites highlighting Black female organizing, and much more, the two trails reminded me that there is much more to Boston’s history than just the Revolutionary War. The trails also send a clear message: One trail alone, whether it be the Freedom Trail, the Black Heritage Trail, or the Women’s Heritage Trail, cannot tell a complete story. Indeed, while the trails complement each other, focusing on just one deprives trail-goers of valuable context.
Certainly, these two trails have their own problems. For instance, the Black Heritage Trail’s focuses on the free Black community and the successes of the Underground Railroad, causes it to amplify a largely upper-class perspective and gloss over the realities of chattel slavery — slavery that took place in Boston and at Harvard, as the recent Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery report notes. And the Women’s Heritage Trail in Beacon Hill again omits a working-class perspective, although the group’s tours in different areas do include this often-ignored strand of history.
Of course, this is not to denigrate the curators and historians who put the trails together, but it’s indubitably true that each tour has a number of unavoidable limitations. Indeed, by focusing on a singular neighborhood, these trails are limited by geography, context, and history, and therefore can only tell a limited story.
I finished my informal dual tour at 59 Hancock Street. Located right next to a staff entrance to the State House, the building housed the offices of Salome Merritt, a doctor who helmed the Ladies’ Physiological Institute for decades, teaching women how to live healthy lives. Merritt also advocated for women’s suffrage and for greater transparency within city government, playing “an important role in the civic life of Boston” in the late 19th century.
As I looked at my phone to confirm the address, a woman sitting in the front vestibule asked if I needed any help. I floundered for a second before smiling and shaking my head. “Well, lots of people get lost around here,” she said to explain herself.
At that moment, I certainly looked like a lost tourist trying to get back to more well-trodden attractions. Back then, I was too tired to do anything other than shake my head and move on, but looking back, I wish I had explained exactly why I had stepped in the State House’s shadow — not to ignore Boston’s history, but to celebrate it and people like Salome Merritt.
Above all, I want us to look at these places not merely as sideshows where lost tourists pass by but as destinations unto themselves.
