This week’s story ties one of modern Boston’s iconic Freedom Trail sites to the earliest days of English settlement in the Shawmut Peninsula. It’s a story that ties the first Puritan to die in Boston to the hated Royal governor Edmund Andros, and it ties some of the earliest non-English immigrants in Boston to Ben Franklin and Abigail Adams through the invention of two local industries. King’s Chapel is beloved in Boston today, but it was seen as an unwelcome invasion when it was first proposed in 1686. In this week’s show, we’ll look at how Boston found room for an unwanted church, how the church was reinvented three times, and how it launched local glassmaking and founded the granite industry in Quincy. We’ll also see where you can still find the last traces of the original, wooden King’s Chapel hiding inside the walls of a more modern church, but not here in Boston.
Continue reading Granite, Glass, and the Construction of King’s Chapel (episode 279)