The Old State House: One Building, Two Governments

The Old State House stands at the corner of Washington and State Streets. Brick, three stories, a small tower with a clock, a gilded lion and unicorn on the eastern gable. Cars and pedestrians flow past it on three sides. The surrounding buildings are taller and newer; the Old State House looks small among them. Completed in 1713, it is the oldest surviving public building in Boston.

One brick shell carried two governments. Royal officials ran the Massachusetts Bay colony from this building for sixty-three years. On July 18, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read aloud from the same balcony to a crowd in the same intersection. The continuity is the point. The building did not change. The authority issuing proclamations from its second-floor balcony did.

The lion and the unicorn

The two carved figures on the eastern gable are the Royal Arms of the United Kingdom. The lion is England. The unicorn is Scotland. The originals were installed on the building between 1743 and 1751. On July 18, 1776, after the Declaration was read, the crowd pulled them down and burned them in the street below. They were not replaced until the 1880s, more than a century later, when the building was restored as a museum.

The two figures you see today are copies. They are accurate copies, faithful to the eighteenth-century originals, and they sit in the same position. What they signify has reversed. In the colonial period the lion and the unicorn meant the king is sovereign here. After 1882 they meant this is what stood here before.

The Old State House is one of the few American buildings that still openly carries British royal symbolism on its facade. The reason is not Anglophilia. The reason is that the building's identity is a record of the change. Removing the lion and the unicorn would erase the before. The decision to put them back in the 1880s was a decision to preserve the contrast.

The Boston Massacre, one floor below

Step out of the building's eastern doorway and look down at the cobblestones. Set into the pavement of the intersection is a circular brick ring. The ring marks the site of the Boston Massacre, March 5, 1770.

That evening a crowd of Bostonians confronted a small detachment of British soldiers stationed outside the Custom House on King Street, which is the street the Old State House faces and which was renamed State Street after independence. The crowd jeered, threw snowballs and chunks of ice. One soldier was knocked down. The detachment opened fire. Five colonists were killed. Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African and Wampanoag descent, was the first to die. The other four were Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Patrick Carr, and Samuel Maverick.

John Adams, who would later be the second president of the United States, defended the British soldiers at their subsequent trial. He believed the men deserved a competent defense, and he won acquittal for six of the eight. Two were convicted of manslaughter, branded on the thumb, and released. The verdict satisfied no one. The event itself, regardless of the trial's outcome, became a recruiting tool for the patriot cause for the next five years.

The cobblestone ring in the intersection is the only marker. There is no statue. There is no plaque on the building above it. The ring is set flush with the surrounding pavement and is easy to walk over without noticing. Two centuries of street resurfacing have not removed it.

The Declaration from the balcony

On July 18, 1776, Colonel Thomas Crafts read the Declaration of Independence aloud from the second-floor balcony on the eastern side of the building. The text had been adopted in Philadelphia fourteen days earlier and brought to Boston by courier. The reading was the first public proclamation of independence in the city.

The balcony is the same balcony from which royal proclamations had been read for the previous sixty years. The accession of a new king. The text of a parliamentary act. The reading of the Stamp Act in 1765. The same elevated platform, the same intersection below, the same building behind. The medium did not change. The message reversed.

After Crafts finished reading, the crowd dispersed to Faneuil Hall, the Bunch of Grapes Tavern, and other nearby gathering points to celebrate. By evening, the royal arms had been pulled down from the gable and from other public buildings. The lion and unicorn went into a bonfire at the corner of King Street and Mackerel Lane. The eighteenth-century originals do not survive. What survives is the building.

The brick shell

The 1713 building you see today is not unaltered. The interior burned in 1747 and was rebuilt. Federal-period renovations modified window frames and the clock tower. A nineteenth-century restoration recreated the gable and the figures. The building has been a state capitol, a city hall, a commercial space rented out to merchants in the 1830s (the city nearly demolished it in 1881 to widen State Street), and from 1882 onward a museum operated by the Bostonian Society.

That 1881 near-demolition is the most consequential moment in the building's afterlife. The city had outgrown the structure as a working government office. State Street was a major commercial artery. Removing the building would have created a useful traffic intersection and a small public square. A coalition of preservationists, led by the Bostonian Society, raised funds to restore the building instead. The lion and the unicorn went back on the gable as part of that restoration.

The argument for preservation was not nostalgia. It was that the building was a single physical object that carried two centuries of Boston government, and removing it would dissolve the connection. The decision was not unanimous. It set a precedent for American urban preservation that would not be widely repeated until the second half of the twentieth century.

What to look for

Stand on the Devonshire Street side of the building, looking up at the eastern gable. Find the lion on the left and the unicorn on the right. They are copies installed in the 1880s, in the same position as the eighteenth-century originals that were burned in the street below in 1776.

Now move around to face the balcony itself. It is the small projecting platform on the second floor of the eastern facade, directly above the doorway. Royal officials read proclamations from there. Colonel Crafts read the Declaration from there. The balcony's railing is reconstructed. The position is original.

Now look down at the cobblestones in the intersection at your feet. The circular brick ring set into the pavement marks the spot where five men died on March 5, 1770. There is no marker explaining the ring. The pavement has been worked and reworked around it for over two and a half centuries.

Three eighteenth-century events at one building. Royal proclamation. Massacre below. Declaration from the same balcony. The building did not move. The country did.

Sources

• Wikipedia, "Old State House (Boston)."
• Wikipedia, "Boston Massacre."
• Revolutionary Spaces (operator of the museum), interpretive materials at the site.
• Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (W. W. Norton, 1970), the standard scholarly account of the 1770 event and the subsequent trial.