When you visit our website, if you give your consent, we will use cookies to allow us to collect data for aggregated statistics to improve our service and remember your choice for future visits. Cookie Policy & Privacy Policy
Dear Reader, we use the permissions associated with cookies to keep our website running smoothly and to provide you with personalized content that better meets your needs and ensure the best reading experience. At any time, you can change your permissions for the cookie settings below.
If you would like to learn more about our Cookie, you can click on Privacy Policy.
CHAPTER I. THE PRISON DOOR A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple-crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes. The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground,