Monday was a huge step back in time. We started the day at Faneuil Hall with a Freedom Trail tour with the Freedom Trail Foundation. The guide is dressed in time period costume – our guide was Jeremiah Poope, which sounds very colonial.
He was very knowledgeable, working on his Master’s in history, and a great sense of humor so kept us all entertained and educated. We toured about 1/3 of the Freedom trail, receiving some great background information on all of the sites and the historical events that took place. The tour ended at Boston Commons, so we grabbed some sandwiches from the world famous Sam LaGrassa’s (although no one we told about it had heard of it) and we ate with the locals out on the Commons while someone played piano.
Afterward we walked over to the Old South Meeting Hall for a short visit to the museum there. It is the meeting hall where the town meeting that led to the Boston Tea Party took place. The museum provides a thorough overview of its history as a meeting hall from revolutionary time, through civil war, to today (it is still used as a meeting hall). It presents some interesting perspectives on the issue of free speech.
Then we walked the streets the Boston Tea Partiers took from the South Meeting Hall to the warf where the Boston Tea Party Museum is. This museum provides a really creative re-enactment of the tea party. The guides are dressed in time period clothes and actually take on the character of someone from that time and stay in that character throughout the guided tour through the museum. It starts with the town meeting and each visitor receives a card of the person they represent from the tea party (and some people even had speaking parts in the meeting), then we were led out to the boat where we don our disguise (a feather) (the colonials has disguised themselves as Natives) and throw the tea overboard.
You think that is all, but then the tour continues with a discussion of how life on the boat was, then more discussion of what was happening on that day, with a list of all the people who participated in the Tea Party, which have been collected over time from families.
The museum tour continues with 3- 4 more rooms, one room has a re-enactment by holograms, another room has a display of the only surviving tea box and then another room which shows a film on the initial fight of the Revolutionary war.
Tuesday we started at the Science Museum which the kids really enjoyed. It is huge! three large floors with displays on about every issue you can imagine. And since Boston schools just started this past week, no one was there – too early for field trips.
From there we walked across the bridge toward Bunker Hill but stopped for lunch at Warren Tavern, where Paul Revere used to hang out (built in 1780).
Pretty cool – and good food.
After lunch we walked up to Bunker Hill and had a chance to climb up to the top of the monument for a beautiful view of Boston.
Unfortunately that was the end of our day since Eli and Michael had to catch their plane. We fed our sadness of having to say goodbye with fresh Maine lobster. Marilyn and Peter treated us like royalty with great food every morning and night and every day ended with us watching the Red Sox game, which they usually won. (We are temporarily identifying with the Red Sox, until the Dodgers get it together!)
This is a 1780s water pipe dug up from the renovation of the Warren Tavern.
American History Roadtrip 