Boston 1775

The Jackson family of the Brazen Head advertised a lot of hardware that was unfamiliar to me—not that I do much metalworking or woodwork...

An item one could buy at the Sign of the Brazen Head in 1759, but which Mary Jackson didn’t list in her advertising, was a lottery ticket....

As I research Mary Jackson and her family, I must say it would be a lot easier if they weren’t named Jackson. And if they hadn’t kept cho...

By 1756, Mary Jackson had been running her shop at the Sign of the Brazen Head in central Boston for over twenty years. She had starte...

I’m postponing the next installment of The Saga of the Brazen Head to share this announcement from Newport and some thoughts about it. ...

After her business partner Robert Charles died, Mary Jackson stepped up her advertising from the Sign of the Brazen Head . Her main bu...

Jacob Bailey (1731-1808) graduated from Harvard College in 1755, ranked at the bottom of his class in social rank. He chose to go into the...

As proprietor of the brazier’s shop at the Sign of the Brazen Head , Mary Jackson managed a largely male staff of colleagues, journeymen,...

As recounted in yesterday’s posting , by the end of 1735 Mary Jackson had reopened her husband James ’s braziery shop a few weeks after h...

The last installment of The Saga of the Brazen Head ended on 12 Sept 1735 with James Jackson drowning on a trip home from Maine . He le...

The “Fashioning the New England Family” exhibit will be on display at the Massachusetts Historical Society through 6 April. It’s well wo...

It’s a Boston 1775 tradition to share a “carrier’s address” around New Year’s. That’s one term for a poem that newspaper carriers compose...

Before going on with The Saga of the Brazen Head , I’ll zip through what happened with Richard Fry . Under his contract for the  paper m...

In the Boston newspapers printed on Thursday, 15 Sept 1735, we can watch the maritime town struggle to gather and digest news of a calami...

In 1734 Richard Fry finally set about making paper at the mill built for him in Stroudwater outside Falmouth (now Portland), Maine , by ...

In September 1728 the Massachusetts General Court promoted local paper manufacturing by granting a ten-year patent to a group of investo...

Yesterday I related how the brazier James Jackson came to Boston from London and by December 1734 opened a shop called the Brazen Head ,...

One of the landmarks of pre-Revolutionary Boston was the Brazen Head—a carved head covered in bronze. It hung outside a shop near the center...