50 Fun Facts About Massachusetts Bay Colony

Which holiday did Puritan Massachusetts Bay outlaw in 1659, fining anyone caught celebrating it five shillings?

Christmas was banned because Puritans said the festival had pagan roots and no place in scripture. Celebrating it only became fashionable around Boston in the mid-19th century.

Which fish, vital to Massachusetts Bay's early trade, is honored by a wooden carving displayed in the State House?

Codfish was the catch behind the colony's first industry. A carving nearly five feet long, called the Sacred Cod, has watched over Massachusetts lawmakers for about three centuries.

Which college, founded by a Massachusetts Bay vote in 1636, was named for a minister who left it his library?

Harvard took its name from John Harvard, a young Charlestown minister who died in 1638 and left the school his 400-volume library and a large sum of money.

Which biblical image did John Winthrop use in 1630 to warn Massachusetts Bay settlers the world was watching?

A city upon a hill echoes the Sermon on the Mount. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan both borrowed the image centuries later to describe America.

Despite the popular image of burning, how were the nineteen people condemned in the 1692 Salem witch trials executed?

Hanging was the fate of all nineteen, fourteen women and five men. A twentieth victim, Giles Corey, was crushed under heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea.

Which Salem minister, convicted of sedition and heresy by Massachusetts Bay in 1635, fled south and founded Providence?

Roger Williams slipped away during a January blizzard, three days before the sheriff came for him. His new settlement promised what he called liberty of conscience.

Which Founding Father dropped out of Boston Latin School, founded in 1635 and among America's oldest schools?

Benjamin Franklin's schooling ended when he was ten, though his parents had talked of a career in the church. Five signers of the Declaration of Independence studied at the school.

Which religious group did Massachusetts Bay ban on pain of death, executing four of its members between 1659 and 1661?

Quakers such as Mary Dyer kept returning to Boston to defy the ban. A bronze statue of Dyer was later placed outside the Massachusetts State House.

The land settler William Blaxton sold to Puritan neighbors in 1634 became which landmark, America's oldest city park?

Boston Common was bought with a one-time tax of six shillings a head and used as a shared cow pasture. Cattle were not banned from it until 1830.

Which Nathaniel Hawthorne novel about Hester Prynne's public shaming is set in Puritan Boston during the 1640s?

The Scarlet Letter unfolds in Massachusetts Bay between 1642 and 1649. Hawthorne had a family stake in the era: his great-great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witch trials.

Which stray farm animal sparked a 1642 lawsuit that split the Massachusetts Bay legislature into two separate houses?

A pig lost by a widow had been taken, she claimed, by a merchant. The row over the verdict ended in 1644 with the assistants and the town deputies sitting as separate chambers.

By what English name was Metacom known, the Wampanoag leader whose 1675 uprising devastated New England's towns?

King Philip was a name the English gave Metacom in 1660 as a gesture of goodwill. The war that carries it destroyed twelve of the region's towns in little more than a year.

Which older colony, founded in 1620, was merged with Massachusetts Bay by the 1691 charter creating a royal province?

Plymouth had never held a royal charter of its own, which left its government on shaky legal ground. The same merger swept in Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.

Which present-day state did Massachusetts Bay buy from the Gorges heirs in the 1670s and govern until statehood in 1820?

Maine cost Massachusetts £1,250, paid to a grandson of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. The purchase covered the coast between the Piscataqua and Kennebec rivers.

The 1629 Massachusetts Bay charter claimed land running west to which ocean, then known as the South Sea?

Pacific waters were the charter's limit on paper. In practice the colony never controlled land farther west than the Connecticut River valley.

Boston, Massachusetts, was named in 1630 after a market town in which English county, home to several leading settlers?

Lincolnshire's Boston sent the colony some of its leading figures. The minister John Cotton preached at its St Botolph's Church for about twenty years before he emigrated in 1633.

Which Boston woman was tried in 1637 and banished from Massachusetts Bay after hosting religious meetings at home?

Anne Hutchinson was drawing 60 or more people a week to hear her views on the ministers' sermons. Her trial was the climax of what became known as the Antinomian Controversy.

What name do historians give the 1630s movement that carried about 20,000 Puritans from England to New England?

The Great Migration slowed sharply once civil war broke out in England in the early 1640s, and some colonists even sailed home to fight on the Puritan side.

Unlike the Separatist Pilgrims, the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay hoped to stay inside and reform which institution?

The Church of England was, to these Puritans, a true church in need of repair. They wanted to purify it of what they saw as leftovers of Roman Catholicism, not to walk away from it.

Which tree gave its name to the famous silver shillings Boston's mint struck from 1652 without England's permission?

Pine was the last of three tree designs, after willow and oak, and it gave the whole series its name. Nearly every coin carried the date 1652, whenever it was actually struck.

Which flagship carried John Winthrop and the colony's charter to Salem in 1630, a decade after the Mayflower sailed?

Arbella had been called Eagle until she was renamed in honor of Lady Arbella Johnson, an earl's daughter who made the crossing as one of the company.

Thomas Hooker left Massachusetts Bay in 1636 and co-founded which city, earning the title Father of Connecticut?

Hartford took its name from Hertford, the English birthplace of Hooker's colleague Samuel Stone. Hooker preached there that authority rests on the free consent of the people.

The first book printed in British North America, in Massachusetts in 1640, was a translation of which part of the Bible?

Psalms in plain English verse filled the Bay Psalm Book, made for singing in Puritan churches. One of eleven surviving first-edition copies sold for $14.2 million in 2013.

Which Puritan minister, called the apostle to the Indians, translated the Bible into the Massachusett language by 1663?

John Eliot's translation was the first complete Bible printed in the Western Hemisphere. Massachusett had no alphabet of its own, so the language had to be put into writing first.

What were the villages called, such as Natick, where Massachusetts Bay missionaries settled Native Christian converts?

Praying towns numbered fourteen in Massachusetts Bay by the 1670s. After the war of 1675-76 the colony's lawmakers disbanded ten of them and put the rest under colonists' supervision.

Margaret Jones, in 1648 the first person Massachusetts Bay executed for witchcraft, worked in which profession?

Midwife and healer Margaret Jones lived in Charlestown, and suspicion grew when patients in her care got worse. Her execution came 44 years before the Salem trials.

Which royal governor, sent by James II to rule all New England, did Bostonians rise up and arrest in April 1689?

Edmund Andros was jailed once Boston learned that James II had been overthrown. He broke out that August after his servant got the sentries drunk, but was caught again in Rhode Island.

How did William Phips, first royal governor of Massachusetts under the 1691 charter, win his fortune and knighthood?

Salvaging sunken treasure from a Spanish galleon made Phips famous in his own lifetime. It also made him the first native-born New Englander to be knighted.

The first seal of Massachusetts Bay showed a Native American speaking which plea, borrowed from the Book of Acts?

Come over and help us comes from a vision of Saint Paul, in which a man of Macedonia begs for aid. The seal was authorized with the 1629 charter and served, with one break in the 1680s, until 1692.

A 1647 Massachusetts Bay law making towns hire schoolteachers is nicknamed for which 'old deluder' it aimed to defeat?

Satan, the law warned, kept people from the scriptures by keeping them unable to read. Towns of fifty families had to appoint a teacher, and towns of a hundred a grammar school.

Which 1953 Arthur Miller play retells the Salem witch trials that convulsed Massachusetts in 1692?

The Crucible was written as an allegory for McCarthyism, when Americans accused of being communists were persecuted. It won the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play.

Massachusetts Bay joined a 1636–1638 war, remembered for the Mystic massacre, against which Native nation?

The Pequot were all but destroyed as a nation by the war. Survivors were scattered: some were shipped to Bermuda and the West Indies, others absorbed into neighboring tribes.

Which king granted the Massachusetts Bay Company its royal charter in 1629, the year he dissolved Parliament?

Charles I was probably left to assume the company was an ordinary business venture. It is unclear whether he knew it was meant to carry Puritans out of his bishops' reach.

Which shell beads, made by coastal Native peoples, were legal tender in New England from 1637 to 1661?

Wampum was cut from whelk and quahog clam shells, in white and purple. Colonists in Massachusetts Bay traded with it alongside English pounds and Spanish pieces of eight.

Under a 1631 Massachusetts Bay law, what did a man need before he could become a freeman and vote?

Church membership was itself hard to win, because elders questioned each candidate closely on beliefs and religious experience. The rule lasted until after the monarchy's return in 1660.

What 80-foot structure did Thomas Morton raise at Merrymount, scandalizing his Puritan neighbors with revels?

A maypole topped with deer antlers was the centerpiece of Morton's drunken parties. The Puritans had it chopped down, and Morton was arrested.

Publick Occurrences, printed in Boston in 1690 and closed after one issue, was British America's first multi-page what?

The newspaper lasted four days before the governor and council suppressed it over a report that angered them. Boston saw no successor until 1704.

What did William Blaxton advertise in 1630 that drew struggling Puritan settlers from Charlestown across to Shawmut?

A natural spring was what Charlestown lacked: the settlement there was failing for want of fresh water. The colonists crossed over on September 7, 1630, and Shawmut soon became Boston.

A 1641 Massachusetts Bay law code was the first in the English colonies to formally regulate which practice?

Slavery entered the colony's written law little more than a decade after its founding. It stayed legal in Massachusetts until 1783.

Which Massachusetts woman, held captive for eleven weeks in 1676, wrote what some call America's first bestseller?

Mary Rowlandson was seized in a raid on Lancaster and ransomed for £20 raised by the women of Boston. Her narrative went through four printings in 1682 alone.

Which 1641 Massachusetts Bay legal code, compiled by minister Nathaniel Ward, foreshadowed parts of the Bill of Rights?

The Body of Liberties promised jury trial, bail and protection from double jeopardy. It also banned cruelty to farm animals, the first animal protection law in America.

Which name, born in Massachusetts Bay Company meetings of 1629, is the formal title of the state's legislature?

General Court stuck because the colonial assembly also sat as a court of appeals. Its first meeting was held in London in 1629, before the company moved to America.

Massachusetts Bay's Puritan dress laws let only colonists worth £200 show off costly silk and which delicate trim?

Lace was frowned on as showy, but attempts to ban it outright failed. The colony settled for limiting such finery to people who could prove they were wealthy.

Which Salem leader defaced the militia's English flag because he saw St George's Cross as a symbol of the papacy?

John Endecott was censured for rashness and kept out of office for a year, yet the militia's committee soon voted to drop the English flag. Nathaniel Hawthorne later turned the scene into a story.

Which Massachusetts Bay poet, daughter of one governor and wife of another, published The Tenth Muse in London in 1650?

Anne Bradstreet's brother-in-law John Woodbridge carried her manuscript to England and saw it into print. The volume appeared in London credited only to a gentlewoman of those parts.

Newtowne, Massachusetts, was renamed in 1638 for which English university town, a center of Puritan theology?

Cambridge honored the university where much Puritan thinking had taken shape. The Massachusetts town had just become home to the colony's own new college.

Which Salem witch trials judge stood in his meeting house in 1697 while his confession of guilt was read aloud?

Samuel Sewall was moved by a verse from Matthew about condemning the guiltless. He also called for a public day of prayer, fasting and reparations.

Before its 1629 renaming, the first Massachusetts Bay settlement at Salem was known by which Native name?

Naumkeag was the name of the peninsula and of the people who lived there. Roger Conant's party of fishermen from Cape Ann settled it in 1626, two years before the Bay Company's men arrived.

Which 1662 compromise let baptized but unconverted New England Puritans have their own children baptized?

The Half-Way Covenant kept such families inside the fold without admitting them to the Lord's Supper. It answered a real worry: fewer colony-born Puritans reported conversion experiences.

Hammersmith, opened at Saugus, Massachusetts, in 1646, was North America's first integrated works producing which metal?

Iron was made at the works until about 1670. Its founder, a son of Governor John Winthrop, had first tried a site at Braintree.