The Boston of today is very different from the Boston of 1630. Two major differences are that the spring that brought the Puritans to the site is bricked over and only marked with a plaque. The other is that the three hills the penninsula was named for were quickly demolished and used as fill to enlarge the area for the town of Boston.
Boston grew as a port city and was at the center of the beginnings of the American Revolution with the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party and the Siege of Boston. Adding to its Revolutionary War history, Lexington and Concord are just outside the city and Paul Revere, William Dawes and others set out from Boston to warn that the British Regulars were marching to seize weapons stockpiled in Concord.
As Boston grew, manufacturing became a prominent industry, along with trade from the port. In the 1820s, different immigrants began to arrive and changed the makeup and culture of the city, particularly the Irish, and especially during the Potato Famine. The existing residents resented the influx of Irish immigrants and how they shifted the religious makeup of the town towards Catholicism; but the Irish enlisted in great numbers in the Union Army during the Civil War, which impressed the residents and they relaxed their harsh views.
Photo: loc.gov
A third major difference between the Boston of today and the Boston of the 1600s is that it is ethnically diverse, though still predominantly Roman Catholic due to the Irish and Italian populations. In the Colonial Era, Boston was a city of white, Anglo-Saxon Puritans. Today, the hills of the penninsula are gone, the spring is bricked over but Boston is still a sea of culture and political activism.
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