Let’s embark on a historical journey through Boston, Massachusetts, New England, and the fascinating tale of how their borders came to be—a story woven with Native tribes, colonial ambitions, and a royal blunder that reshaped the region.
Native Tribes and the Pre-Colonial Landscape
Before European settlers arrived, the area that would become Boston and greater New England was home to several Native American tribes. The Massachusett tribe, part of the Algonquian-speaking peoples, inhabited the coastal region around what is now Boston Harbor. Their name, meaning "at the great hill," referred to the Blue Hills south of the city. To the west and south, the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Narragansett tribes controlled territories, living off the land through fishing, farming, and trade networks that stretched across the region.
These tribes had fluid boundaries, defined more by seasonal movements and alliances than rigid lines. European arrival would upend this world, but the Native presence left an indelible mark—many place names, like Massachusetts itself, echo their languages.
Colonial Confusion: The Founding of Boston and New England
Boston’s story begins with the English Puritans. In 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, about 40 miles south of modern Boston, establishing one of the first permanent European settlements in New England. A decade later, in 1630, John Winthrop and the Massachusetts Bay Company arrived, founding Boston on the Shawmut Peninsula. The Puritans sought a "city upon a hill," a beacon of religious purity, but their ambitions quickly tangled with those of other colonies.
New England’s borders emerged from a patchwork of royal charters, often vague and overlapping. The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s 1629 charter granted land from "three miles south of the Charles River" to "three miles north of the Merrimack River," stretching west to the "South Sea" (the Pacific Ocean). This absurdly ambitious claim ignored geography and rival colonies. To the south, Plymouth Colony (later absorbed by Massachusetts in 1691) and Rhode Island (founded by dissenters like Roger Williams in 1636) carved out their own spaces. Connecticut, settled by Puritans from Massachusetts in the 1630s, received its own charter in 1662, but its borders clashed with its neighbors.
A King’s Blunder: The Dominion of New England and Coastal Missteps
The real chaos came with King Charles II and his successors. In 1686, the Crown attempted to consolidate control over its fractious colonies by creating the Dominion of New England, stretching from Maine (then part of Massachusetts) to New Jersey. This short-lived experiment collapsed in 1689 amid colonial resistance, but it exposed the mess of overlapping claims.
One royal blunder stands out: the misdrawn borders tied to a misunderstanding of coastal geography. In 1664, Charles II granted his brother, the Duke of York (later James II), a vast territory including New York and parts of what became Connecticut and Pennsylvania. The charter’s eastern boundary was supposed to follow the Connecticut River, but poor maps and a misreading of the coastline placed the line too far east. This error shrank Connecticut’s claim, ceding land to New York. Meanwhile, Massachusetts lost its grip on Maine and New Hampshire, which became separate entities by the 1740s, partly due to royal decrees and surveyor disputes.
Pennsylvania’s border woes added another twist. In 1681, Charles II granted William Penn a charter for Pennsylvania, but its northern boundary overlapped with Connecticut’s western claims. The king, unaware of the true distance between the Delaware River and Connecticut’s holdings, inadvertently fueled decades of legal battles. Connecticut lost its western ambitions, and Pennsylvania’s borders solidified only after surveys like the Mason-Dixon Line (1760s) clarified the mess.
How Boston and New England Took Shape
Boston itself grew within this chaos, its peninsula expanded by landfill over centuries, but its role as a hub was cemented early. As Massachusetts Bay Colony’s capital, it thrived on trade, shipbuilding, and Puritan zeal. New England’s borders, meanwhile, hardened through war and negotiation. The Pequot War (1636–1638) and King Philip’s War (1675–1676) decimated Native power, allowing colonial expansion. Treaties like the 1758 Easton Agreement with remaining tribes further cleared the way for settlers.
By the American Revolution, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Vermont (admitted later in 1791) formed the core of New England, their borders a legacy of colonial squabbles and royal missteps. Connecticut’s loss of territory to New York and Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts’ trimmed ambitions, reflected the limits of vague charters in a land too vast to grasp from London.
The Legacy
Today, Boston stands as New England’s heart, its history a microcosm of the region’s tumultuous birth. The borders we see on maps—Massachusetts abutting Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island—bear scars of Native displacement, colonial rivalry, and a king’s blunder with a quill and a bad map. It’s a tale of ambition, error, and adaptation, etched into the landscape of America’s northeast.