The Freedom Trail: A 1950s Invention That Rewrote a City's Past

Best Time to Visit

Weekdays in the morning before the cruise-ship crowds, or late afternoon in spring and fall when the light reaches into the North End. The trail is open all year; January and February are cold but the cemeteries and exterior stops all read cleanly in winter. Sundays the Old North congregation holds services and the church interior is closed to tourists, but the Salem Street facade and the lantern-signal beat work without entering. The Visitor Information Center on Boston Common is open daily; the State House interior tour runs weekdays during the legislative session.

Pro Tips

• •The red line of the trail is mostly painted; in some downtown blocks the line is set into the sidewalk as a row of bricks. Watch your feet at the curb cuts where the line crosses streets, especially around the Old State House intersection.
• •Stop 5 anchors on the Old State House exterior and the cobblestone Massacre ring in the intersection. The audio works without entering the museum. The interior is the Revolutionary Spaces site and charges admission.
• •Stop 6, the Paul Revere House, anchors on the North Square facade. The interior charges admission and is worth it for the seventeenth-century rooms, but the audio works from the plaza without entering.
• •Stop 7, Old North Church, has Sunday service hours during which the interior is closed to tours; the lantern beat is anchored on the Salem Street spire and works from the sidewalk.
• •Stop 8, Copp's Hill, slopes downhill toward Snow Hill Street. The unmarked-graves beat is anchored on the western slope; walk to the Snow Hill Street side of the cemetery for the closing view of the harbor.
• •The Black Heritage Trail mentioned at Stop 2 and Stop 8 is a separate route administered by the National Park Service through the Boston African American National Historic Site, headquartered on Beacon Hill at the Museum of African American History. The Roamer Beacon Hill tour walks that trail; this Freedom Trail tour names it and points to it.
• •Alfred F. Young, 'The Trouble with the Freedom Trail,' Boston Globe, March twenty-first, two thousand and four, is the published critique of the official trail's editorial frame that this tour leans on. Susan Wilson's Boston Sites and Insights, Beacon Press, two thousand and four, is the canonical multicultural-trails guide for Boston. If the editorial argument holds your attention, those are the two readings.