page_title: Roxbury, Boston
section_title: Colonial origin
hierarchical_section_title: Roxbury, Boston / Colonial origin
caption_attribution_description: English: Roxbury Massachusetts Town Hall, as printed in Roxbury Magazine By Branch Alliance, All Souls' Unitarian Church (Roxbury, Boston, Mass.).
context_page_description: Roxbury is a neighborhood within the city of Boston, Massachusetts.
  Roxbury is a dissolved municipality and one of 23 official neighborhoods of Boston used by the city for neighborhood services coordination. The city states that Roxbury serves as the "heart of Black culture in Boston.”
  Roxbury was one of the first towns founded in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630, and became a city in 1846 before being annexed to Boston on January 5, 1868.
  The original boundaries of the Town of Roxbury can be found in Drake's History of Roxbury and its noted Personages. Those boundaries include the modern day Longwood, Mission Hill and Symphony neighborhoods, including the Christian Science Center, the Prudential Center and everything south and east of the Muddy River including Symphony Hall, Northeastern University, Boston Latin School, Madison Park Technical Vocational High School John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics & Science, Roxbury Community College YMCA, Harvard Medical School and many hospitals and schools in the area. This side of the Muddy River is Roxbury, the other side is Brookline and Boston.
context_section_description: The Massachusetts Bay Colony founded a group of six towns, including Boston, Cambridge, and Roxbury. For more than 200 years, Roxbury also encompassed West Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. Three miles south, the only land route to the capital led through Roxbury, which made the town important for both transportation and trade. Roxbury in the 1600s also held many of the resources that the Colonists prized: potentially arable land, timber, and a brook (source of water and water power), and stone for building. That particular stone exists only in the Boston basin; it is visible on stony outcroppings and used in buildings such as the Warren House, and it proved to be a valuable asset to the community that led to early prosperity. The village of Roxbury was originally called "Rocksberry" for the rocks in its soil that made early farming a challenge. It is noted for its hilly geography and many large outcroppings of Roxbury Puddingstone, which was quarried for many years and used in the foundations of a large number of houses in the area.
  The settlers of Roxbury originally comprised the congregation of the First Church in Roxbury, established in 1632. During this time, the church served as a place of worship and as a meeting place for town government. The congregation had no time to raise a meeting house the first winter and so met with the neighboring congregation in Dorchester. One of the early leaders of this church was Amos Adams, and among the founders were Richard Dummer and his wife Mary. The first meeting house was built in 1632, and the building pictured here is the fifth meeting house, the oldest such wood-frame church in Boston.
  Boston was previously connected to mainland Massachusetts by a narrow isthmus called Boston Neck or Roxbury Neck, and this was home to a number of early leaders of the colony, including original Massachusetts Bay Colony treasurer William Pynchon. Pynchon left Roxbury in 1636 with nearly one third its men to found Springfield, Massachusetts on far less rocky and more arable soil. Within a few decades, Roxbury residents developed prized apple orchards, and this led to another unique claim to fame: the Roxbury Russet apple, particularly suited for cider.
caption: Roxbury Town Hall built in 1810, as seen in 1899
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