Old State House

Surrounded today by Boston's glass skyscrapers, the Old State House was the seat of British colonial government in Massachusetts and a flashpoint of the Revolution itself. Beneath its balcony, British soldiers killed five colonists in the Boston Massacre in 1770. From that same balcony, the Declaration of Independence received its first public reading in Massachusetts in 1776. Few buildings anywhere trace the arc from colonial rule to revolution so directly.

Built in 1713 on the site of an earlier town house, the Old State House served as the seat of the Massachusetts colonial government, housing the royal governor's council chamber and the colonial legislature. Its second-floor chamber saw fierce early debates over taxation without representation, including James Otis's arguments against the Writs of Assistance that a young John Adams later credited with sparking the Revolution.

On the snowy evening of March 5, 1770, a confrontation between British soldiers and a taunting crowd just outside the building erupted into gunfire, killing five colonists in what became known as the Boston Massacre — a cobblestone circle still marks the spot. On July 18, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was read from the Old State House's balcony to a crowd below, and the gilded lion and unicorn symbols of the crown were torn down and burned in celebration.

After Massachusetts moved its government to a new State House on Beacon Hill in 1798, the old building served various commercial uses and narrowly escaped demolition in the 1880s, saved by a preservation campaign led partly by the city of Chicago's interest in purchasing and relocating it. It became a museum in 1882, operated today by the nonprofit Revolutionary Spaces, and anchors the start of Boston's Freedom Trail.