Unknown New England
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Even Boston’s famous landmarks and historic sites hold secrets: the eclectic museum of the oldest military organization in the hemisphere, hidden on the seldom-visited top floor of Faneuil Hall, for instance. Or the most complete collection of Ernest Hemingway memorabilia, buried deep inside the John F. Kennedy Library.
If anything, much of what people think they do know about the city’s main attractions isn’t true. Bunker Hill? We lost. "Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes!"—ascribed to a zealous patriot—was actually a common military order. Faneuil Hall, the "cradle of liberty," was built with money from the slave trade. "Witches" and heretics were hanged on Boston Common. And not only was the story of Paul Revere’s ride propaganda; neither his house, nor the Old State House, look much like they did when Revere was living, thanks to well-meaning but misguided preservationists. It was the Americans who started the Boston Massacre—marked by a circle of stones on State Street—over a bill owed to a wigmaker by a British officer. Even the pious Anglicans who worshipped in the Old North Church sat under statuary stolen by Boston privateers from defenseless ships at sea.
And yet, for every jingoistic myth, Boston’s epic buildings, ships and cemeteries hide a dozen little-known truths. It is true, for example, that the steeple of the Old North Church was where two lanterns were hung to warn that British troops were traveling by sea the night Revere set out to sound the alarm. (He was arrested before reaching Lexington or Concord, despite what Henry Wadsworth Longfellow later wrote.) But the steeple was already famous. On September 13, 1757, a man named John Childs hurled himself from its 191-foot height in a rudimentary glider three times, once firing a pistol in midair, until the alarmed city fathers quickly passed a law against that sort of thing; there’s a plaque describing the event on the wall of the church garden. The Old State House was home to the nation’s oldest sitting court and first bicameral legislature, and the first place in the world where the public could watch its representatives do business. It also was one of the nation’s first examples of historic preservation, but only after the city of Chicago offended local pride by offering to move it to Lake Michigan as a tourist attraction. On display inside is John Hancock’s coat—evidence he was as small as his famous signature was large—and the lone vial of tea known to have survived America’s most celebrated act of vandalism; the tea was confiscated as evidence against a sticky-fingered patriot caught smuggling it home from the Boston Tea Party in the cuffs of his leggings. The Boston Common is the nation’s oldest public park, but it is also was where the modern game of American football was played for the first time in 1874. And everybody knows the USS Constitution is the oldest commissioned warship afloat, but it was also the first U.S. territory stepped on by a Catholic pope, Pius IX, when the ship visited Naples on a goodwill tour in 1849.
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About the Book
Think you know New England? Think again. Sure, the area is home to many of America's most famous tourist destinations, but its woods, hills, craggy seacoast, and historic cities also hide these nearly 1,100 other extraordinary attractions that are just as—if not more—interesting than the places that get all the ink. A museum brimming with artifacts from the Titanic, for example, the site of the first liquid-fueled rocket launch, and the field where the first World Series was played. There’s the town in Vermont that was the site of a little-known battle in the Civil War, the only place in America shelled by enemy guns during World War I, and the real Pepperidge Farm. You can ponder the sites of presumed Viking settlements, Stonehenge-like ruins, ghost towns, graves of reputed vampires, and the tombstone of a 3,800-year-old Egyptian mummy—in a cemetery in Vermont. You can check out the town that was the model for Riverdale of the Archie comic books, Al Capone's bar, a Cold War-era nuclear missile silo, and the laboratory where Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
Many tiny New England museums are largely unknown, but their holdings are superlative, including the world’s largest collections of mounted dinosaurs, antique trolley cars, and Hollywood memorabilia. There’s a collection of postage stamps second in size only to that in the Smithsonian Institution, and the only museum in America devoted to indoor plumbing. Hidden in these small depositories are Marie Antoinette’s harpsichord, the case that carried Louis XV’s crown jewels, the world’s largest ring, a compass owned by Galileo, the skull of Blackbeard the pirate, the bones of a whale found mysteriously buried 150 miles from the ocean—even Elvis Presley’s gallstones.
So don’t wait. Discover the secrets of unknown New England.
About the Author
A lifelong New Englander, Jon Marcus was born in Boston, schooled in Maine, and began his professional career on Cape Cod.
The editor of Boston magazine, Marcus has written about travel for Yankee and Conde Nast Traveler, and for newspapers including the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, and Washington Post. His stories on other topics have appeared in the Melbourne, Australia, Sunday Herald Sun, The Inde-pendent (London), and in the magazines New York Times Upfront and the American Journalism Review. A U.S. education correspondent for The Times of London, he began his career as a writer at The Cape Cod Times and has served as a full-time Boston-based reporter for The Associated Press. He has won several journalism awards including writer of the year from the City and Regional Magazine Association.
Marcus is the author of the book Boston: A Citylife Pictorial Guide (Voyageur Press, 1998), which Foreword magazine called "packed with information" and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel said "brings Boston to life through interesting, little-known details." He also wrote Lighthouses of New England (Voyageur Press, 2001), and The Complete Illustrated Guidebook to Boston’s Public Parks and Gardens (Silver Lining Press, 2002).
He is a graduate of Bates College in Maine and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and attended Oxford University.