Founding
In 1628, the Cambridge Agreement was signed in England among the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The agreement established the colony as a self-governing entity, answerable only to the king. John Winthrop was its leader, and would become governor of the settlement in the New World. In a famous sermon, "A Model of Christian Charity," Winthrop described the new colony as "a City upon a Hill."
The competing Plymouth Colony had been founded in 1620; it would later merge with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1691.
In June 1630, the Winthrop Fleet arrived in what would later be called Salem, which on account of lack of food, "pleased them not." They proceeded to Charlestown, which pleased them less, for lack of fresh water. The Puritans settled around the spring in what would become Boston, acquiring the land from the first English settler, William Blaxton.
Trimountaine was the name given by the 1630 settlers to the peninsula that would later be incorporated as the City of Boston. The name was derived from a set of three prominent hills on the peninsula, two of which were leveled as the city was modernized. The middle one, Beacon Hill, shortened between 1807 and 1824, remains to this day as a prominent feature of the Boston cityscape. Tremont Street still carries an alternate form of the original name.
Governor Winthrop announced the foundation of the town of Boston on September 7, 1630, with the place named after the town of Boston, in the English county of Lincolnshire, from which several prominent colonists emigrated.
Read more about this topic: History Of Boston
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)