Cape Town Lens: 2017 – Boston – Old State House

A Cape Town Lion’s Head tagged image from photographer – Ted’s photos – Stand With Ukraine as published on Flickr.

2017 – Boston – Old State House

Image by Ted’s photos – Stand With Ukraine

Old State House is a feature on the Freedom Trail.

The Old State House, the oldest surviving public building in Boston, was built in 1713 to house the government offices of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

It stands on the site of Boston’s first Town House of 1657-8, which was destroyed by fire in 1711. As the center of civic, political, and business life, the Old State House was a natural meeting place for the exchange of economic and local news.

A merchant’s exchange occupied the first floor, and John Hancock and others rented warehouse space in the basement.

The National Historic Sites Commission has called the Old State House one of the most important public buildings in Colonial America.

THE LION & UNICORN:
The original Lion and Unicorn were sculpted and perched on the top brick corners of the Old State House around 1713 when it was the government offices of Britain’s Massachusetts Bay Colony. But after the Declaration of Independence was read form the balcony on July 18, 1776, the statues and other symbols of royal authority were torched in a bonfire.

So things stood until the 1880s, when the Bostonian Society formed and organized a museum of Boston’s history in the building. One of the ways they marked the city’s revolutionary legacy was to commission wooden recreations of the king’s Lion and Unicorn and place them back atop the edifice, the oldest surviving public building in Boston. Weather rotted those away, requiring replacements around the turn of the 20th century, but those remain.

When the two royal beasts were removed for restoration in 2014, historians opened a time capsule that had been in the lion’s head since 1901. Inside, they found Boston newspapers; campaign buttons (including one for Teddy Roosevelt); a nail from Old South Church; photographs of several 19th century Boston mayors; and wood removed from "the Old Lion.” They refilled it with a 2013 Boston Marathon medal, a David Ortiz bobblehead and an iPhone 5, and sealed it up again for people of the future to discover.