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:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“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)
“It’s not that we have too much mother, but too little father. We can’t forgive our mothers for taking the place of our fathers until we are ready to see that the point of a man’s life is to be a father and a mentor, and we can’t do that because we don’t know how we would be a father or a mentor when we never had one.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)