1630 — Boston is founded.
English Puritans led by John Winthrop settle on the Shawmut Peninsula and rename the settlement Boston. Their first winter is punishing: food is scarce, hundreds die or return to England, and others scatter to neighboring communities. Boston survives and begins to grow.

1631 — Ferry service begins between Boston and Charlestown.
A family-run ferry begins carrying passengers across the Charles River, establishing one of the earliest organized public transportation services in colonial New England.

1631 — Boston establishes a night watch.
The early watch system eventually develops into the Boston Police Department, giving the city one of the oldest traditions of organized municipal policing in the United States.

1632 — Boston builds its first meetinghouse.
The First Church congregation erects a simple thatched-roof meetinghouse near what is now State Street, providing a permanent center for both religious and civic life.

MAY 24, 1632 — Construction begins on Boston’s first fort.
A defensive fort is built on the downtown hill originally called Corn Hill, overlooking Boston Harbor. The site becomes known as Fort Hill and remains one of the city’s defining elevations until the hill is cut down during the nineteenth century.

CULTURAL AFTERLIFE: Three centuries later, another Boston hill carrying the same name—Fort Hill in Roxbury—becomes home to Mel Lyman’s countercultural community. The two Fort Hills are geographically distinct, but Boston 400 brings their histories into the same cultural conversation.

Motherlode connection: Boston’s original Fort Hill, Roxbury’s Fort Hill, the Lyman Family, Avatar and the David Bieber Archives.

MARCH 4, 1634 — Samuel Cole opens a house of common entertainment.
Governor John Winthrop records that Samuel Cole “set up the first house for common entertainment” in Boston. The early inn or ordinary provides food, drink and lodging while establishing the public house as a center for news, business and civic conversation.

1634 — Castle Island is selected for Boston’s harbor defense.
Governor Thomas Dudley selects the strategic island guarding the entrance to Boston Harbor for fortification. A succession of defensive works follows, eventually producing Fort Independence.

1634 — Boston Common is established.
The town sets aside communal land for grazing livestock, creating what becomes America's oldest public park. Over the centuries, the Common evolves into Boston's great civic stage for gatherings, celebrations, concerts, protests and political dissent.

APRIL 23, 1635 — Boston Latin School is founded.
The town establishes Boston Latin School, the first public school in British North America and today the oldest continuously operating public school in the United States. Its future students include Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

1636 — Harvard College is founded.
The Massachusetts General Court approves £400 for the establishment of a college. The following year, Newtowne is selected as its location; the town is renamed Cambridge in 1638. After minister John Harvard leaves the school his library and half his estate, the General Court names it Harvard College in 1639.

FEBRUARY 26, 1638 — The Desire returns to Boston Harbor carrying enslaved Africans.
After previously carrying enslaved Pequot captives to the Caribbean, the Massachusetts ship Desire returns from Providence Island with salt, cotton, tobacco and an unspecified number of enslaved Africans. The voyage is one of the earliest documented episodes in the Massachusetts slave trade, and the Desire is among the first slave ships built in English North America.

MARCH 1638 — Anne Hutchinson is excommunicated.
Already banished by the Massachusetts General Court in November 1637, Hutchinson faces a church trial before Boston’s First Church and is formally excommunicated. She soon leaves Massachusetts with members of her family and many followers. Her confrontation with Puritan authority becomes one of early America’s defining conflicts over conscience, dissent and religious freedom.

1639 — Boston establishes an early colonial post office.
Richard Fairbanks' tavern is designated as the place where overseas mail arriving in Boston is collected and distributed, creating what is widely recognized as the first post office in the English colonies.

1640 — The Bay Psalm Book is printed.
Printed in nearby Cambridge, the Puritan psalter becomes the first book printed in British North America. Boston's religious and intellectual world helps create an American publishing culture almost as soon as the colony itself is established.

1648 — Margaret Jones is executed for witchcraft.
Jones, a Boston-area healer and midwife, is convicted of witchcraft and hanged, becoming the first person executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts Bay.

1656 — Massachusetts Bay begins legislating against Quakers.
The colony imposes increasingly severe penalties on members of the Society of Friends, including imprisonment, fines and banishment. Boston becomes a central stage for the conflict between Puritan authority and Quaker resistance.

1658 — Massachusetts Bay makes returning after banishment a capital offense for Quakers.
The new law raises religious persecution to the death penalty and sets the stage for one of Boston's most enduring stories of conscience and defiance.

1659 — Boston lays out the North Burying Ground.
Boston establishes its second burial ground on the North End hill later named for shoemaker William Copp. Burials begin by 1660. Now known as Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, it becomes the resting place of merchants, artisans, ministers, abolitionists, free Black Bostonians and generations of North End residents.

1659 — Smallpox spreads through Boston.
An outbreak becomes serious enough that the Massachusetts General Court meets in Charlestown to avoid the disease. Smallpox remains a recurring force in Boston’s population, public health and civic life throughout the colonial period.

JUNE 1, 1660 — Mary Dyer is executed in Boston.
The Quaker dissenter returns to Massachusetts despite being banished upon pain of death and is hanged at the colonial execution site on Boston Neck. Her death becomes a lasting symbol of religious persecution, freedom of conscience and resistance to state authority.

OCTOBER 1676 — John Sparry opens a coffeehouse in Boston.
Sparry’s establishment helps introduce the coffeehouse as a center for drinking, commerce, political discussion and information exchange. Alongside Boston’s taverns, coffeehouses become important gathering places in the growing port city.

APRIL 18, 1689 — The Boston Revolt.
Boston militia companies and townspeople rise against the Dominion of New England and arrest royal governor Sir Edmund Andros and other officials. The uprising dissolves the Dominion and temporarily restores earlier forms of colonial government, demonstrating that Boston’s appetite for revolt was firmly established long before the American Revolution.

1690 — Smallpox returns to Boston.
The recurring epidemic again sweeps through the town, reinforcing disease as one of the defining realities of colonial urban life.

SEPTEMBER 25, 1690 — British America’s first multi-page newspaper is published in Boston.
Benjamin Harris publishes Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick. Colonial authorities suppress it after its first issue, giving Boston both an early newspaper landmark and one of British America’s earliest press-censorship controversies.

JULY 6, 1699 — Captain William Kidd is arrested in Boston.
The notorious privateer comes to Boston seeking protection from Governor Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, but is arrested and imprisoned. Kidd is later sent to London, convicted of murder and piracy and executed in 1701, adding another legend to Boston’s long relationship with the sea, crime and public spectacle.