Boston Common

Boston Common is the oldest public park in America — and it started as a cow pasture. In 1634 the town taxed every household six shillings to buy William Blackstone's fifty acres; by 1646 Winthrop was capping the herd at seventy cows. The pasture doubled as the town's stage for everything public: militia musters, a British garrison of 1,700 in the winter of 1775, and the gallows — the Great Elm where murderers, pirates, deserters, 'witches,' and Quakers were hanged, including Mary Dyer in 1660 for the crime of being a Quaker in Boston.

The park grew out of the pasture in stages — the cows banned in 1830, the ground re-graded and planted, the Frog Pond and the malls, and the monuments that stacked the country's memory onto the town green: Saint-Gaudens's Shaw Memorial at the corner, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on Flagstaff Hill, the Central Burying Ground holding British soldiers from Bunker Hill. The 1898 Tremont Street subway under its edge was America's first.

The Common kept the public-square function into every era — Washington reviewed troops on it, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on it, Pope John Paul II said the first papal mass in North America on it, and the protests of every generation assembled on it. The pasture became the park, and the park stayed the place Boston goes to be a public.

Boston Common is the archive's common file — America's oldest public park, bought in 1634 for cows and hanged men, carrying the Shaw Memorial, the first subway, and four centuries of public assembly on its fifty acres.