The owners of the Garden and the bank weren't the first to ditch the Shawmut name

By adamg on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 10:49am

Back in the day, the land south of Charlestown used to be known as Shawmut. Then the Puritans got sick of the mosquitoes and lack of water in Charlestown and moved south and decided on Sept. 17, 1630 to call their new home Boston, in honor of the town in Lincolnshire where they'd come from.

The oldest document still in possession of the Boston City Archives is the 1634 Town Book, basically a journal of meetings of the town fathers, from which the above excerpt comes (more of that page).

H/t PlunkettPrime.

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The first mention of Boston

By gotdatwmd on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 10:52am.

The first mention of Boston by John Winthrop in his diary is that a goat died here.

Winthrop was a miserable man.

There once was a hermit named Blaxton.

By Chris Rich on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 11:25am.

He gave the Winthrop party a wide berth and headed to his misspelled namesake Blackstone Valley when that other pest came poking around soon after 1630. He loaded up an oxen cart and moved to Pawtucket.

I've heard it was the clan name for a particular Algonquian group neighboring Blaxton that was eradicated by small pox and other filthy euromutt maladies.

The indigenous people were brilliant at site selection. Once the euromutts, (who sucked at it), noticed that, they just elbowed the locals aside.

Poor Blaxton got hosed. It is funny how the same basic social problems persist like meta ghosts.

The Puritans landed in nearby Charlestown in 1629, and in 1630 Blackstone invited them to settle on his land in Boston after they had problems finding potable water. The Puritans then granted Blackstone 50 acres of his own land, which he promptly sold back to them.

"According to Louise Lind, author of William Blackstone: Sage of the Wilderness (1993), the cause of the conflict with the Puritans was that Blackstone was an ordained minister of the Anglican Church. The Puritans accused him of trying to bring the established Church of England to the new country. The Puritan court ordered his house burned down."

"While the Puritans also disagreed with leaders of the established Church, they proved to be quite intolerant of anyone who disagreed with them. Blackstone soon tired of their intolerance, and moved about 35 miles (56 km) south of Boston, to a hill overlooking a wide bend in what the Indians then called the Patucket (sic) River and what is today known as the Blackstone River."

Courtesy of Wiki woo hoo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blaxton

Winthrop also requested that

By gotdatwmd on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 11:40am.

Winthrop also requested that a harlequin fetus miscarriage be exhumed so he could know for sure that Anne Hutchinson was a in line with Satan for having the gall to host a womens' prayer group in her home. After ousting her to Providence, he learned she had another miscarriage and enthusiastically wrote everyone he knew down there letters to find out if the corpse was also a harelequin fetus satan spawn so he could be proven right again.

Poor Blaxton/Blackstone

By adamg on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 11:43am.

Forced to ride to Rhode Island on his white bull after the Puritans proved too annoying.

Purity problems plagued politics

By Chris Rich on Wed, 09/17/2014 - 1:55pm.

..then too.

Thompson was a bit better off, having his own island hold fast after getting sick of New Hampshire.

The ultimate entrepreneur was Lord Pepperell up near Kittery. He was the first colonial millionaire and Samuel Maverick was another pre Winthrop denizen.