Dorchester Heights, Sixty Years Later

W. H. Bartlett painted This watercolor in 1836, showing the view of Boston from the top of Dorchester Heights. Two years later it was adapted into this engraving; the Boston Public Library shared both on its Flickr page. There was also a color print, and later artists copied the image.

In the background is the skyline of Boston, topped by the dome of the State House on Beacon Hill. Some church steeples stick up as well. In the foreground are the remains of the earthworks built on Dorchester Heights in 1776, though most of what we see was probably built during the War of 1812 when the site was refortified. I suspect the decorative arch was more recent.

There was still a lot of water between this vantage point and Boston, but already some of the buildings in Dorchester were rising into the view. The sheep grazing inside the earthworks show how farmers had already reclaimed this land for their purposes. Indeed, the only reason this site remained undeveloped, sixty years after the British military left Boston, was probably because the hilltop was inconvenient to plow or build on.

In the nineteenth century most of those hills were cut down, and their tops went into the shallow waters between Dorchester and Boston to create part of South Boston. By 1898 there was little of the original topography left, and the state commissioned a monument on the remaining peak.