The Original Crypto: 18th Century Burial Practices at Old North Church (episode 347)

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Jake:
[0:04] Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.

Introduction to Old North Church

Jake:
[0:14] This is episode 347, The Original Crypto, 18th Century Burial Practices at Old North Church, with Emily Spence. Hi, I’m Jake. Co-host Emerita Nikki is going to be taking the lead again on this episode. If you haven’t been listening recently, Nikki founded the show with me back in 2016. She used to co-host with me every week, but she left the show in 2019 to pursue a dream job at Old North Illuminated.

Jake:
[0:46] While I’m spending some of my time working on a different podcast project, Nikki’s come out of retirement to help out with some shows here and there. If you want to hear more about what I’m working on, there’s a quick four-minute episode in the feed from December 2025 where you can hear some of the details. In this episode, Nikki’s going to be interviewing one of her colleagues at Old North, Education Director Emily Spence. They’ll be visiting the nearly 300-year-old crypt that lies beneath the floorboards of the historic church and talking about why it exists, who’s buried there, and what researchers learned when the tombs were opened for a restoration project three years ago. At a time when most Bostonians were interred at burying grounds with familiar names like Copse Hill and the Granary, usually under slate markers decorated with winged skulls or cherubs, the congregants at Old North and just a handful of other Boston churches preferred to be sealed up inside the basement walls of their beloved churches. Stay tuned to learn why.

Jake:
[1:53] But before Nikki takes over, I just want to pause and say a big thank you to all the listeners who support the show financially. This week, I sat down to do some production planning for the show, starting to think about what episodes I want to start working on beyond Evacuation Day next month. While I was going through the giant spreadsheet of story ideas that secretly runs this podcast, I was struck by how much of my preliminary research relies on paid access research databases. I’m always grateful for free resources, like our Boston Public Library’s online collections, the Mass Historical Society’s transcription projects, or the Chronicling America archive from the Library of Congress. For some reason, though, local newspapers are mostly collected in paid archives, and when we first started this podcast, I could only dream of having access to them. Now, thanks to our sponsors, I subscribe to a couple of different newspaper archive sites, as well as some more academic databases. And I couldn’t do it without you. To everyone who’s already supporting the show, thank you. If you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory, or visit hubhistory.com and click on the Support Us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.

Meet Emily Spence

Jake:
[3:19] All right, I’m going to turn over the mic to Nikki to take it from here.

Nikki:
[3:23] Hello, listeners. I am joined by my colleague, Emily Spence, Director of Education at Old North Illuminated. Emily has led the education department through an evolution that includes new research, on-site interpretive experiences, and digital programming. These efforts earned Old North Illuminated a 2024 Award of Excellence from the American Association for State and Local History, and a 2023 Preservation Achievement Award from the Boston Preservation Alliance. Emily first came to Old North as a seasonal educator while teaching history to middle school students at St. Joseph’s School in Needham, Massachusetts. She received the 2018 Massachusetts History Day Teacher of the Year Award for her work guiding student research projects for the National History Day competition. Emily, thank you for joining us on Hub History to dig into the history of burials at Old North Church. I’m sure that many of our visitors haven’t seen the crypt at Old North in person, so can you kick us off with a description of what the space looks like?

Emily Spence:
[4:32] Yeah, so it’s a space that’s underneath the church. It kind of follows the footprint of the upstairs with the way the aisles are laid out. It really is like having a graveyard in the basement of the church. And I think something that surprises people when they go into the crypt is sometimes they’re expecting sort of like the catacombs in Rome, but none of the bodies are visible. They’re all inside the tomb. So when you go down into the crypt, what you see are brick tombs that line the walls of the space, as well as through the middle of the crypt as well. So it kind of forms, you can kind of walk around in a big circle around the tombs. And right now, all of the tombs are sealed up. A lot of them have been bricked over or sealed up with stone. A handful of them are the wooden doors of the tombs are visible. So you can see that. It’s also fairly bright for a crypt as well. We have no electrical lighting down there. So you are able to see. It’s kind of a quiet, peaceful place underneath the church. We are right underneath the sanctuary. The original floorboards are above us. So when the church is busy, it is quite creaky down in the crypt. But when there isn’t anyone in the church, it’s a very quiet, peaceful space to be in.

Nikki:
[5:55] And for those who are not going to be able to travel to Old North this year, we will include in the show notes, a link to a virtual reality tour. So folks can actually experience the crypt right from your laptop or your phone.

Exploring the Crypt’s History

Nikki:
[6:11] Old North Church was founded in Boston’s North End in 1723 as the second Church of England congregation in the city after the congregation at King’s Chapel grew too large for their building. But despite that growth, Boston remained predominantly a congregational city. So can you explain how burial practices within the Church of England, which I’m going to refer to as Anglican compared to those of Congregationalists?

Emily Spence:
[6:42] The Congregationalists or the Puritans believed in predestination. And so what that meant is from the moment you were born, it was predetermined whether you were going to heaven or hell. So when someone died, there wasn’t necessarily the belief within the Puritan community or the Congregationalist community that the family members and friends who were left behind needed to do anything to help that person get to heaven that had already been predetermined. So there was not necessarily a need for a funeral rite, for prayers at burial, for a minister to be present, or for that body to be buried on consecrated or holy ground. So rather than burying in churchyards that were associated with their meeting houses, Puritans would have been burying in burying grounds. And when you visit Boston today, you can still see a lot of those burying grounds. There’s one not too far from Old North called Copse Hill Burying Ground, which predates the church. And those spaces would have been owned by the city.

Emily Spence:
[7:45] Now, in contrast, the Anglicans, they believed that it was really important when someone died to be offering those prayers to help that person get to heaven. So they did believe in the importance of a funeral rite and saying those prayers and having a minister present at burial, and for that person to be buried on consecrated or holy ground. So even though we have Copts Hill Burying Ground just up the street from Old North that would have been a less appealing option for the people at Old North because it wouldn’t have been in line with those beliefs. It wasn’t a holy space to them. But the people at Old North also didn’t have the land to build their own churchyard. They were coming in to, they’re building a church in a city that was kind of hostile to the expansion of the Anglican church. So they don’t have the space for an outdoor burial place. So instead, they bury underneath their church. They start building the crypt because it doesn’t get much holier than beneath your church. So that’s how they start to build the crypt in 1732, starting with just one tomb and then gradually adding on as there was more and more demand for crypt burials.

Nikki:
[8:58] So the crypt really fulfills this spiritual need of the congregation, but of course, It’s also a revenue generator, because congregants, for the most part, are paying for spaces to be buried. And I will clarify language at this point for those who aren’t familiar with how we talk about this space all day at Old North. So when we refer to the crypt, we are referring to the full space, the basement, if you will. And then when we talk about the tombs, we’re referring to the individual vaults,

The Evolution of Burial Practices

Nikki:
[9:31] the 37 tombs that make up the crypt. Construction begins in 1732, so it’s just nine years after the church’s construction. How long were the tombs in use? I know this is a this is kind of a loaded question, but it’s a fun tale to tell.

Emily Spence:
[9:51] It is kind of a loaded question. So as I mentioned, they started with one tomb, and then as that tomb filled up, then they started adding on more and more and more tombs. So they were building tombs for over 100 years, adding on those tombs. There’s a total of 37 tombs down in the crypt. And if you visit the crypt, you’ll notice there isn’t a lot of uniformity between the tombs. And I think part of that is because they were being built decades apart from one another. But throughout burial in the crypt, this predates embalming and body preservation being a common practice in the United States that you really don’t see that coming about until after the Civil War in 1865. So you have, there’s over a thousand people buried in the crypt And they were, you know, especially by the mid-19th century, they were burying a lot of people in the crypt. And what that meant was that it smelled really bad downstairs, but also upstairs in the church, out into the neighborhood. We have accounts from people, in particular a minister who actually lived on the second floor of the tower. So, you know, two floors away from the crypt, complaining about how bad it smelled all the way up there.

Emily Spence:
[11:04] In 1853, the city of Boston passed an ordinance banning indoor crypt burials, and that was largely due to the smell that was coming from the crypt. At this point, miasma theory is very prevalent, and there is a fear that the smell is going to make people sick. So they tell Old North you can no longer bury there. But we know from Old North’s records that they were continuing to bury officially until 1860. In 1853, the vestry met about this ordinance and they said, you know, we’re not going to stop burying unless the city compels us to stop. We suspect that they probably had already promised spots to people in the crypt and they really couldn’t afford to go back on those contracts. So the record tells us that in 1860, that is when they stopped burying. But when we did the restoration a few years ago in 2023, as part of that restoration, some of the doors of the crypt were sent off site to be restored. So we’re actually able to see inside the tombs. And in one of the tombs, we could see a nameplate that had been on a coffin. And that nameplate put the person’s death year into the early 1870s. So even after they had officially stopped, we know over a decade later, they were still continuing to bury in the in the crypt, kind of on the quiet, it seems.

Emily Spence:
[12:28] I don’t know how how often that was happening. I kind of wonder maybe this was a person who wanted to be buried with with a family member who had passed years before. But we don’t know other than. What they tell us in the record is not necessarily true.

Nikki:
[12:44] You raise a good point there. You can really understand why the church might choose to disobey the ordinance or the law. Because what if you have a couple and one of them dies before the ordinance and one of them after, right? Like you’re not going to want to be separated for all of eternity because the law changed, right? There are compelling reasons why the church might have continued to do burials.

Emily Spence:
[13:13] Yeah, I think it kind of speaks to, yes, there was a financial benefit for burying in the crypt, but I think there was also the spiritual element, too, and this human element.

Conditions in the Crypt

Emily Spence:
[13:23] And I think that when you spend time in the crypt, I think that really comes through, too. Yeah.

Nikki:
[13:28] I think another thing I appreciate about interpreting the crypt for our visitors is that it gives you an opportunity to really think about, how sterile our lives are today, and just how clean and comfortable we are. And I think about what that space must have been like before electricity, before a clean concrete floor that is dry and gets swept all of the time. And then again, the smell, right, the smell. So to think about what it was like to go and visit a tomb a loved one you know when people say oh wouldn’t you love to go back to the past I’m like not further than 1990 no I really don’t.

Emily Spence:
[14:19] I think the visiting the crypt today is a little bit misleading because you know as I said at the beginning it is well lit you mentioned there is that concrete floor it feels like a very peaceful place. In the summertime, it is the coolest place on campus. In the wintertime, it is the warmest place on campus. So it’s a very, as long as you’re not claustrophobic, a very comfortable space. But you’re right that in the past, there wouldn’t have been that electricity. It would have been very dark down there. There are no windows in the crypt. So you would have needed some sort of lantern or candle to see. There’s a concrete floor now, but it probably would have been dirt. It probably It would have been quite muddy down there. And I think the smell, I don’t think we can begin to appreciate how bad the smell would have been. I don’t think we encounter smells like that today.

Nikki:
[15:07] Most people today have never experienced anything like it, thankfully.

Emily Spence:
[15:12] Yeah.

Crypt Restoration Insights

Nikki:
[15:13] You mentioned the crypt restoration that we partnered with the National Park Service on in 2023. There were multiple aspects of that preservation project. But one of them was the removal of those original wooden tomb doors, which went off site for restoration. Can you talk a little bit about the precautions that were taken to respect and protect the burials during that project? Yeah.

Emily Spence:
[15:40] Yes. So during the project, we worked very closely with a team of archaeologists, in particular, Jane Lydon-Rousseau, who is an osteoarchaeologist and has done a lot of work on Old Norse Crypt. And she and her team were on hand to not only help us look at the tombs and learn from them, but also as tomb doors were coming off, if things shifted, they were on hand to help us in the most respectful way, make sure that anything that maybe came out of the tombs returned to those tombs. We also, in working with the vicar of Old North and the congregation, determined that nobody was going to go inside the tombs. We weren’t going to touch anything inside the tombs. We weren’t going to do any DNA testing on anyone or anything in the tombs because this still is an active church. there still is burials that happen in the columbarium. And the people who were buried at Old North in the crypt saw this as a church in a spiritual place. And we really wanted to protect that, be mindful of that. And so the archaeologists were working with us to kind of be able to look at what we could see from outside of the tombs, help us to understand what we are looking at and how that could inform our interpretation of the crypt in 18th

Discoveries from the Restoration

Emily Spence:
[16:57] and 19th century burials.

Nikki:
[16:58] So there were a lot of discoveries. You mentioned already the burial plates from, I believe, 1872, but definitely in the 1870s. What were some of the other key discoveries that the archaeologists observed?

Emily Spence:
[17:13] I think about it as there were things we believed about the crypt that once we got to see inside the tombs, we were able to confirm or disprove. You know, we have a coffin lid from the either 18th or 19th century that we have on display in the crypt that has kind of informed what we know about coffins. And so getting to see inside the tombs, we were able to say that that coffin lid, for example, has a cutout at the top. So during a funeral, a piece of glass could be placed there so that during the funeral, the family could see their loved one, see the deceased, but have some separation between themselves and the body since they weren’t doing anything to preserve it.

Emily Spence:
[17:57] And during the burial, that piece of glass would be removed and replaced with a piece of wood. I know I personally had always wondered, well, how common would that be? That seems almost a little too contrived. But I was surprised to see how many coffin lids in those tombs did in fact have that wooden insert in them. So it seemed like that was more common than at least I had believed it to be. But also, I think the coffin lid that we have on display is misleading because it’s very small and very plain. And so I think it’s tempting to look at that coffin and to say, oh, wow, everyone was smaller back then. But we did see coffins inside the tombs that were quite large, that were over six feet long. And so I think, you know, just like today, we come in all shapes and sizes. People in the past came in all shapes and sizes too. The coffin lid that we have on display is also very plain. And it is true that there are many of the coffins in the tombs are plain, but there were some that were also quite ornate. You could tell that they had been lined in fabric and fringe and they had decorative metal work on them too. So I think, you know, practices around coffins change. And it also kind of was determined by, you know, what the family wanted, how much they wanted to spend on a coffin.

Nikki:
[19:15] Is there anything that you saw during that time when we were able to observe the tombs that you found just like personally particularly meaningful?

Emily Spence:
[19:26] Yeah, I think it was really, really humanizing. You know, we spent years interpreting the crypt and talking about the practices, talking about the people who have been at Old North who were worshiping there, you know, 200, 300 years ago. But I think to be able to see inside the tombs, to see their coffins and to see them, it really was a good reminder that these were real people. And you could see humanizing elements about their burial. For example, there was a man who, we kind of assumed it was a man, but I guess it could have been a man or a woman, who their foot was visible and the socks that they were wearing were still intact. And you could see that they were these hand-knit socks. And I think that that was really, really moving to see.

Emily Spence:
[20:15] There was another in which it looked like it was the coffin of a child, and the child had their hands folded, and it looked like maybe they had been wearing or holding some sort of piece of jewelry. And that, too, you could imagine, you know, perhaps their parent putting that on them or putting it in their hands before burial. There were a lot of small coffins inside of these tombs, too. I think, you know, we can look at the records and we can see how many infant and child funerals happened at the church, but seeing those, how many small coffins there were was, I think, a really stark reminder of just how dangerous a time childhood was in the 18th and 19th centuries, how real a threat those childhood diseases were. And, you know, it again just makes me thankful that I live in this time where we do have access to antibiotics and vaccines, where diseases we don’t worry about now could have been so deadly in the past.

The Crypt as a Visitor Experience

Nikki:
[21:16] So I don’t think it would be a surprise to our listeners to hear that the crypt is our most popular visitor experience at Old North. What do you think it is about crypts and cemeteries that make for interesting public history?

Emily Spence:
[21:32] Yeah, that’s a great question. I think that there is a lot that we can learn about people through their beliefs about death and burial practices. I mean, I think it is a universal experience that has been happening for millennia. And, you know, just like we talked about at the beginning, you know.

Emily Spence:
[21:52] Thinking about how the burial practices of this Anglican community differed from the congregationalists, the Puritans who were here in Boston can tell us a lot about how these two communities differed from one another. On the one hand, it can seem kind of simple. Well, they buried in burying grounds and Anglicans didn’t. But it’s kind of the starting point for a lot of differences between these two communities that created a lot of tension and hostility in Boston. I think, too, we can visit our cemeteries today. And I think they tell us stories about people from the past. And they’re not just stories about famous people. When you look at these cemeteries, when you start looking at gravestones, you can start to kind of piece together people’s lives. And, you know, I think about, for example, I used to live near this cemetery where I’d walk my dog and I walk along looking at the headstones and I started to notice just how many young women there were in the graveyard. And it was a reminder to me of how dangerous childbirth was for women. You could see I started to notice that there were a lot of young women buried next to very young children, infants. And it was, you know, up into the early 1900s, childbirth was very scary and very dangerous for women. And I think that was, you know, something that I took away from being in that cemetery.

Nikki:
[23:20] It’s interesting to think about places you travel to where cemeteries are major historic sites. I don’t want to say tourist attractions, but they are major historic sites like the cemeteries in New Orleans. Most people who are history lovers and travel to New Orleans are going to go to a cemetery and it’s going to look so, so different than a small, you know, churchyard cemetery in New England.

Emily Spence:
[23:51] And I think it really is a nice tangible connection to the past. There’s something kind of powerful about getting to see the grave of someone, someone famous that we’ve read about, you know, in our history books. You know, even today, I grew up in Boston. I’ve walked by it many times. But seeing the graves of Paul Revere and Crispus Attucks in the granary burying ground is just such a reminder that these events were real. They really happened right here. and these were real people.

Notable Figures in the Crypt

Nikki:
[24:23] Well, Emily, that’s a good segue to a question that I hadn’t been planning to ask. But of course, so many visitors to the crypt ask the question, who is the most famous person who is buried here? That’s in the top three questions that we receive, I would say. So who is the most famous person buried in Old North’s crypt?

Emily Spence:
[24:47] Yes. So a lot of the people who are buried at Old North are not famous. They were members of the church. Maybe they’re famous in kind of the church’s history, but they’re not necessarily people that you’re going to read about in the history books per se. But I would say there’s kind of two individuals buried in the crypt who I think are more famous, and they were both involved in the American Revolution, but on opposite sides of the conflict. And they’re actually buried at opposite ends of the aisle from one another as well, maybe quite fittingly. So one is Captain Samuel Nicholson, who fought in the revolution. He was in the U.S. Navy. He was the first captain of the USS Constitution or Old Ironsides. And he was also the first commander of the Charlestown Navy Yard. So a very important figure in naval history. He was a member of Old North, which is why he is buried in the Old North crypt.

Emily Spence:
[25:43] And then at the other end of the aisle is buried Major John Pitcairn, who was a British Royal Marine. He was one of the commanding officers of the British forces stationed here in Boston at the start of the revolution. So he was actually with the British soldiers at the battle on Lexington Green. He was the commanding officer there. And then he was also at the battle of Bunker Hill. He was the one leading the British forces up the hill to attack the Americans. And he was mortally wounded at that battle. He died in the North End and then was buried in the Old North Crypt because he was an Anglican and this was an Anglican church. We’re not entirely sure if he’s still at Old North. His family, about 15 years later, requested that Old North send his body back to them in England to be buried in their family church. Old North did send back a body, but there is some question as to whether Old North sent back the correct body. So there’s probably like a 50-50 chance that he’s still in Old North’s crypt.

Nikki:
[26:48] And I will say for our listeners who want to learn a little bit more about that, we did do a speaker series event last year with historian John Bell about Pitcairn and where he may lie today. So we’ll link to that in the show notes as well.

Balancing History and Spirituality

Nikki:
[27:04] So Emily, you mentioned earlier that Old North Church is home to an active Episcopal congregation, and there is a columbarium that houses contemporary interments right next to the crypt. So of course, it is also an active burial space. So how do you balance visitors’ desire for, you know, spooky experiences, right, especially in the fall, but really all year round, with the sacred nature of the space?

Emily Spence:
[27:34] Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think that is a common question that people have when they come into the crypt is, are there any ghosts here? And I will say we do not have any official Old North ghosts. I’ve never had any sort of weird, creepy experiences inside the crypt. I’d like to think that everyone or most of the people who are buried here wanted to be to be buried here. So we’re not able to kind of satisfy in that regard. But we do have a cursed brick that’s on display in the crypt that people can come see. This was sent back to us about a year ago in March. We received a package, an unmarked package. And inside was the brick, was this brick with the note, a note that said, you know, my husband took this from your crypt ever since we’ve had a string of bad luck and we want to return the brick. We don’t know much more than that, you know, how long they had it, where it went, what kind of bad luck befell them. But we do have that on display in the crypt for nothing else to remind people to not take souvenirs from the crypt.

Nikki:
[28:42] It’s a gentle reminder. Yeah. Don’t steal from a burial space. Whether you believe in ghosts or not, you might concur that that’s a bad idea.

Emily Spence:
[28:53] Yes. Yeah. Don’t, don’t tempt it.

Personal Connections to the Crypt

Nikki:
[28:56] Who is your favorite occupant in the crypt? We’re in the parish house now, so they can’t hear you.

Emily Spence:
[29:05] It’s hard to pick. I have a soft spot for Shubai Elbel, who is buried at the back of the crypt. He was a warden of the church and one of the lay leaders of the church in the early 1800s. And, you know, so many of the people that we talk about at Old North are complicated. Yes, they did really important things for the church, but they also were oftentimes problematic in their actions, in their views. Many had ties to enslaved labor, either through their work or they themselves were enslavers. But Shubai Abel seems to be one of the few that was just a really good person. He was not a wealthy man, but still a very generous man. What he had, he gave back to his community. He gave Old North the altar paintings, the painting of Jesus at the Last Supper that’s still on display behind the altar, and the bust of George Washington, which is on display just to the left of the altar. He helped start the Sunday school at Old North, which served children of all faiths. So you didn’t necessarily have to be a member of this church to attend the Sunday school. They would learn not only religious instruction, but how to read and write. And for many poor children in this neighborhood, that was their only opportunity of education.

Emily Spence:
[30:26] Shubalabal actually worked in prison reform. He worked with debtor’s prison and helping those who were in debtor’s prison, helping them to kind of negotiate with those that they owed money to. And when they were getting out of prison, would often give them his own money to help them make a fresh start. So, as I said, he’s just he’s kind of seems to be one of the good ones. He’s well-loved and well-respected and has had a lasting impact on the Old North community too. And he’s buried in the crypt at the back, almost directly underneath where he would have sat in the church.

Surprising Facts About the Crypt

Nikki:
[31:01] What do you think our listeners would find surprising about a visit to the crypt?

Emily Spence:
[31:07] I think people are often surprised when we tell them that there are 1,100 people buried in the crypt. It’s not a large space, and it is, I think, surprising to think that that many burials have happened at Old North. They were burying in the crypt for over 100 years, close to 150 years. And the other thing that they would do is they would periodically clear out the tombs to make more space. They had a charnel pit, which was kind of like a sanctified mass grave underneath one of the tombs, the 37th tomb. And that you know that kind of sounds like a strange practice to us today but it would have been fairly common for you know churches old churches in europe that had crypts or you know very old cemeteries to have these charnel houses or charnel pits where they would rebury people to make make more space um so that’s how old north was able to to fit so many burials at old north So all 1,100 people are still buried at Old North. They’re just not necessarily buried where they originally started.

Nikki:
[32:19] I think that brings us to our final question, which is when does Old North Church Historic Site open for the season? And how can our listeners come visit us in person?

Visiting Old North Church

Emily Spence:
[32:33] Yes. So we open for the season March 1st. We are open Tuesday through Saturday, 10 to 5. And then on Sundays from 1230 to 5. Starting in June, we’ll be open seven days a week. and you can visit our website to learn a little bit more about what your visit includes we have an audio guide you’re able to visit the crypt as well we also offer tours of the bell chamber too so if you visit our website you can buy tickets ahead of time but you don’t have to you can also stop by our site and pick up your tickets there Emily.

Nikki:
[33:10] Thank you for joining us today and talking all things crypts and burials.

Emily Spence:
[33:15] Thank you for having me this was my pleasure.

Jake:
[33:19] To learn more about Old North Illuminated and the crypts at Old North Church, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 347. I’ll have links to more information about Old North and how to make sure you tour the crypts during your next visit there. I’ll also link to a past talk by Jane Lydon-Rousseau, who led the team of archaeologists who studied the crypts at Old North, as well as a talk that I gave for Old North during the depths of the pandemic. Debunking some legends about lost tunnels in the North End, including the legend that the crypts at Old North are connected to a secret network of pirate tunnels.

Jake:
[34:00] If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I still have profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and as at hubhistory at better.boston over on Mastodon. Lately, though, the only social media site where I actively post and regularly interact with people is Blue Sky. And you can find me on Blue Sky as hubhistory.com. If, like most of the people I know, you’re stepping back from social media, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the Contact Us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link, and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.