In the summer of 1614, Captain John Smith of Virginia fame, entered Boston Harbor and landed a boat with eight men on the Dorchester shore, at what was then a narrow peninsula known as Mattapan or Mattahunts, and today is known as South Boston. The town was founded at what is now the intersection of Columbia Road and Massachusetts Avenue in 1630. Columbia Point is home to the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum and the University of Massachusetts, Boston Campus.
In 1695, a party was dispatched to found the town of Dorchester, South Carolina, which would last barely a half-century before being abandoned.
America's first chocolate factory opened in Dorchester, in 1765, and the Walter Baker Chocolate Factory operated there until 1965. Dorchester (in a part of what is now South Boston) was also the site of the Battle of Dorchester Heights in 1776, which eventually resulted in the British evacuating Boston. Dorchester was annexed by Boston in pieces, beginning in 1804 and completed in 1870.
In Victorian times, Dorchester became a popular country retreat for Boston elite, and developed into a bedroom community, easily accessible to the city -- a streetcar suburb. The mother and grandparents of John F. Kennedy lived in the Ashmont Hill neighborhood while John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald was mayor of Boston.
The oldest home in the City of Boston, the James Blake House, built in 1648, is located in Richardson Square, a few blocks from the Dorchester Historical Society.
Punk band the Street Dogs named a song after the neighborhood, entitled "In Defense of Dorchester."
Dorchester is the largest neighborhood within the City of Boston located within Suffolk County, Massachusetts. It is now a large and diverse working class community, and is still a center of Irish-American immigration. It is named after the town of Dorchester in England, from which Puritans emigrated.
|
