60 State Street - Site History

Site History

Sixty State Street marks the site of one of two colonial taverns named the Great Britain Coffee-House, where Queen Street (now Court Street) ended and King Street (now State Street) began. This Great Britain Coffee-House, established in 1713, advertised "superfine bohea, and green tea, chocolate, coffee-powder, etc."

In 1838, Thatcher Magoun Sr., a ship designer, builder and merchant who ran a shipbuilding facility in Medford, established Thatcher Magoun & Son, a counting-house, on the 60 State Street site to manage his business revenue, bookkeeping and correspondence. This helped to establish State Street as one of Boston's financial centers, hence initiate the city's Financial District. His son and grandson, Thatcher Magoun Jr. and Thatcher Magoun III, kept the firm going in the maritime trade until the late 1870s. An abstract from the firm's records reads:

Upon Magoun Sr.'s death at 81 in 1856, the Thatcher Magoun, a clipper ship built by Hayden & Cudworth in Medford for Thatcher Magoun & Sons, was named and launched in his memory. Author Hall Gleason described the clipper as follows: "Her figurehead was a life-like image of the father of ship building on the Mystic... She made five passages from Boston to S.F., the fastest being 113 days and the slowest 152 days; seven from N.Y. to S.F., fastest 117 and slowest 149; two from Liverpool in 150 and 115 days. The average of the fourteen is 128.7 days. S.F. to NY. in 96 days in 1869."