Early Colonial Life
The Mary and John immigrants organized the town of Dorchester upon their arrival at what is now the intersection of Columbia Road and Massachusetts Avenue in South Boston. The Puritan settlers landed at Columbia Point, which the Native Americans called "Mattaponnock".
The immigrants founded the First Parish Church of Dorchester in 1631, which exists today as the Unitarian-Universalist church on Meetinghouse Hill, being the oldest religious organization in present-day Boston. The first church building was a simple log cabin with a thatched roof. The settlers held their first town meeting at the church, and they set their laws in open and frequent discussion. In all of this they were inspired by the ideal of the Kingdom of God on earth and the attempt to realize this in England in the time of the Rev. John White. The church is referred to as a 'Foundation Stone of the Nation".
The new settlers also founded in 1639 the first elementary school in the New World supported by public money, the Mather School. The school is the oldest elementary school in America. Dorchester was annexed by the City of Boston in 1970.
Read more about this topic: William Phelps (colonist)
Famous quotes containing the words early, colonial and/or life:
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The North will at least preserve your flesh for you; Northerners are pale for good and all. There’s very little difference between a dead Swede and a young man who’s had a bad night. But the Colonial is full of maggots the day after he gets off the boat.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“War is more like a novel than it is like real life and that is its eternal fascination. It is a thing based on reality but invented, it is a dream made real, all the things that make a novel but not really life.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)