FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, No. 1. (Looking towards Dorchester Heights.)
Note.—This and the three companion sketches are drawn from a panoramic view in colors, now in the Cabinet of the Mass. Hist. Soc., of which a much reduced heliotype is given in the Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 80. This view is a copy by Lieutenant Woodd of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, from the original by Lieutenant Williams, of the same regiment, which is preserved in the King's Library (Brit. Museum). Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., iv. 397, 424; Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 80.
The foreground on the left is the summit of Beacon Hill, not far from the spot where the State House now stands, though at a level considerably higher than the present one. Two of the guns now standing on Cambridge Common were taken from the dock in Boston after the British evacuated it, and they resemble the cannon here sketched, and one of them may possibly be that identical gun. The spire at the left would seem to be that of the First Church, which stood on the present Washington Street nearly opposite the head of State Street. (Cf. view of it in Memorial History of Boston, ii. 219.) The spire next to the right must have been that of the Old South Church. That on the extreme right would seem to be the steeple of the New South (Church Green) in Summer Street, now disappeared.
FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, No. 2. (Looking towards Roxbury.)
In No. 2 the Hancock House is in the foreground. The earliest sketch of this house is a very small one, making part of the Price-Faneuil View of Boston (1743), and its presence in which and other data led to the suspicion that this 1743 view was from an old plate, which had been originally cut twenty years earlier, and this was subsequently proven. Cf. Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xviii. 68; xxi. 249. The earliest enlarged view of the house is in the Mass. Mag., 1789. Cf. Mem. Hist. Bost., iii. 202. An oil painting, belonging to Mrs. F. E. Bacon, is on deposit in the halls of the Bostonian Society, where, also, are some interior views of the house.
The British encampments on Boston Common are indicated in the foreground at the left. The parallel lines (8) show the neck connecting Boston with Roxbury. The meeting-house (10) on the distant land is that of the First Religious Parish in Roxbury, on the site now occupied by the church near the Norfolk Home. The American fort just beyond (at 11) was on a rocky summit, where now the stand-pipe of the Cochituate Water Works is placed.