page_title: Boston Common
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Boston Common / History
caption_attribution_description: English: For years, Bannister painted landscapes with muted colors that recalled the works of the French Barbizon school so popular among New England collectors during the second half of the 19th century. However, in one of his last works, which he painted during a stay in Boston in the late 1890s, Bannister adopted a much more vivid palette. Bannister, the son of a black immigrant from Barbados and his Scottish-Canadian wife, was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada. Initially a seaman, he settled in Boston, where he eked out a living as a hairdresser and as a hand-tinter of photographs. With the encouragement of his wife, he turned to painting and for a while shared a studio with Edwin Lord Weeks. His atmospheric landscapes found a ready market, especially in Boston. At the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, Bannister received a first-place medal. He was the first African-American artist to win a national award, but the judges were surprised by his ethnic background. Bannister resided in Providence, Rhode Island, where he became one of the seven founding members of the Providence Art Club, an institution that still flourishes today.
context_page_description: Boston Common is a central public park in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It is sometimes erroneously referred to as the Boston Commons. Dating from 1634, it is the oldest city park in the United States. The Boston Common consists of 50 acres of land bounded by Tremont Street, Park Street, Beacon Street, Charles Street, and Boylston Street. The Common is part of the Emerald Necklace of parks and parkways that extend from the Common south to Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain, Roxbury, and Dorchester. A visitors' center for all of Boston is located on the Tremont Street side of the park.
  The Central Burying Ground is located on the Boylston Street side of Boston Common and contains the burial sites of the artist Gilbert Stuart and the composer William Billings. Also buried there are Samuel Sprague and his son, Charles Sprague, one of America's earliest poets. Samuel Sprague was a participant in the Boston Tea Party and fought in the Revolutionary War. The Common was designated as a Boston Landmark by the Boston Landmarks Commission in 1977.
context_section_description: Boston Common originally included the entire block northeast of where Park Street is now, bounded by Beacon Street and Tremont Street.  What is now called the Granary Burying Ground was established on this land in 1660, as part of the Common.  In 1662, the land was separated from the Common; the southwest portion of the block was taken for public buildings including the Granary and a house of correction, and the north portion of the block was used for housing.
  The Common's purpose has changed over the years. It was once owned by William Blaxton (often given the modernized spelling "Blackstone"), the first European settler of Boston, until it was bought from him in 1634 by the Puritan founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the 1630s, it was used by many families as a cow pasture. However, this only lasted for a few years, as affluent families bought additional cows, which led to overgrazing, a real-life example of the "tragedy of the commons". After grazing was limited in 1646 to 70 cows at a time, the Boston Common continued to host cows until they were formally banned from it in 1830 by Mayor Harrison Gray Otis.
  The Common was used as a camp by the British before the American Revolutionary War, from which they left for the Battle of Lexington and Concord. It was used for public hangings up until 1817, most of which were from a large oak which was replaced with a gallows in 1769. On June 1, 1660, Quaker Mary Dyer was hanged there by the Puritans for repeatedly defying a law that banned Quakers from the Colony. Dyer was one of the four Quakers executed on the Common and known as the Boston martyrs.
  On May 19, 1713, two hundred citizens rioted on the Common in reaction to a food shortage in the city. They later attacked the ships and warehouses of wealthy merchant Andrew Belcher, who was exporting grain to the Caribbean for higher profits. The lieutenant governor was shot during the riot.
  True park status seems to have emerged no later than 1830, when the grazing of cows was ended and renaming the Common as Washington Park was proposed. Renaming the bordering Sentry Street to Park Place (later to be called Park Street) in 1804 already acknowledged the reality. By 1836, an ornamental iron fence fully enclosed the Common and its five perimeter malls or recreational promenades, the first of which, Tremont Mall, had been in place since 1728, in imitation of St. James's Park in London. Given these improvements dating back to 1728, a case could be made that Boston Common is in fact the world's first public urban park, since these developments precede the establishment of the earliest public urban parks in England—Derby Arboretum (1840), Peel Park, Salford (1846), and Birkenhead Park (1847)—which are often considered the first.
  Originally, the Charles Street side of Boston Common, along with the adjacent portions of the Public Garden, were used as an unofficial dumping ground, due to being the lowest-lying portions of the two parks; this, along with the Garden's originally having been a salt marsh, resulted in the portions of the two parks being "a moist stew that reeked and that was a mess to walk over", driving visitors away from these areas. Although plans had long been in place to regrade the Charles Street-facing portions of Boston Common and the Public Garden, the cost of moving the amount of soil necessary (approximately 62,000 cu yd (47,000 m³), weighing 93,000 short tons (84,000,000 kg), for the Common, plus an additional 9,000 cu yd (6,900 m³), weighing 14,000 short tons (13,000,000 kg), for the adjoining portions of the Public Garden) prevented the work from being undertaken. This finally changed in the summer of 1895, when the required quantity of soil was made available as a result of the excavation of the Tremont Street subway, and was used to regrade the Charles Street sides of both Boston Common and the Public Garden.
  A hundred people gathered on the Common in early 1965 to protest the Vietnam War. A second protest happened on October 15, 1969, this time with 100,000 people protesting.
  Today, the Common 
caption: Boston Street Scene, Edward Mitchell Bannister, a depiction of the street and Boston Common area in 1898–99.[8]
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