Today, Dorchester is the largest neighborhood of Boston, MA, covering more than six square miles. Because it was a separate town in 1692, essential to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and was home to people involved in the Salem witch trials, as well as many patriarchs of families related to the trials, we are treating it as its own community on our online sites tour.
Welcome to Dorchester
Dorchester, Boston, MA, USA
Dorchester, Boston, MA, USA
More About Welcome to Dorchester
In June of 1630, Puritan settlers from Dorchester, Dorset, England, sailing on the Mary and John, landed first at Hull and then “Mattapan,” as called by the native people. Today this is known as Harbor Point (formerly Columbia Point). Dorchester was founded just a few months prior to Boston. The Indigenous people living here were the Neponset Indians of the Massachusett tribe, led by sachem Chickatabot. In 1666, Dorchester got a deed of release from Chicakatabot’s son, Josias.
Initially, home lots were half an acre, and houses could not be built more than a half mile from the first meeting house without permission. Within a short time, 200-acre lots were not unusual. The earliest occupations for this seaside colony were fishing and agriculture. Dorchester originally included the modern-day towns of Canton, Stoughton, Sharon, and Foxboro.
One of the early Dorchester inhabitants was William Hathorne, listed as a landholder and selectman in 1634, and a deputy in 1635. He moved to Salem a few years later, and was one of the most respected and prominent men of Massachusetts until his death in 1681. William Hathorne’s son John Hathorne, who also became a leading figure in Salem, was the most notorious judge on the Court of Oyer and Terminer during the 1692 witchcraft trials.
In 1635, half the Dorchester population, and their first two ministers, Rev. John Warham, and Rev. John Maverick, who served with him, relocated to Connecticut. More ships with more settlers arrived from England that same year, an influx known as the “Second Emigration” and consisting of about 100 colonists.
Among this second group was Richard Mather, who became Dorchester’s third minister. He was one of the parish’s most prominent leaders, serving from 1636 to 1669. Richard and his wife Katherine (Holt)’s youngest son, Increase, was born in Dorchester in 1639. Increase became an influential minister like his father. Rev. Increase Mather led Boston’s North Church congregation from 1664-1723, as did his son, Rev. Cotton Mather, from 1685-1728. Four of Increase Mather’s sons – Cotton, Samuel, Nathaniel, and Eleazer – became ministers. Both Increase and Cotton were involved in the Salem witch trials.
Another early Dorchester settler was Bray Wilkins, born in England or Wales, circa 1610. He was granted land in Dorchester by 1634 and was running a ferry across the Neponset River by 1638, with a penny a passenger going to major landholders Israel Stoughton and Thomas Glover. Bray left Dorchester for Salem around 1654, and was an early settler of the western part of Salem Village, an area known as Middleton today. His granddaughter Margaret married John Willard, hanged for witchcraft in 1692.
As for Israel Stoughton, mentioned earlier, he too emigrated to the New World circa 1630, settling in Dorchester and building the first mill on the Neponset River in 1634, in an area known today as Lower Mills. He was granted 150 acres of farmland that year. He represented Dorchester in the General Court in 1634 and 1635, just the beginning of his political and military career. He maintained lumber and grist mills, a fish weir, and a horse bridge over the Neponset. He commanded the Massachusetts Colony militia during King Philip’s War, and was reportedly cruel to the Pequot Indians, enslaving native prisoners in Massachusetts. He also owned enslaved Africans, one of whom was “Dorcas ye Blackmore,” who joined Dorchester’s First Parish Church in 1641. A dozen years later, the congregation helped to secure Dorcas’s freedom, making her one of the first enslaved people to be freed in British North America. Stoughton returned to England by late 1644, where he died. He bequeathed 300 acres to Harvard in his will. Israel’s son William, born in 1631, remained in Massachusetts. Judge William Stoughton had a long and storied political career, including as the chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials court in 1692.
In 1870 Dorchester was fully annexed to Boston. It is the southernmost neighborhood of Boston today, bordered by Dorchester Bay and the Atlantic Ocean on the east, South Boston to the north, Roxbury and Mattapan to the west, and Milton and the Neponset River to the south. It was largely agricultural for the first 200 years after its founding and became a country retreat for wealthy Bostonians in the nineteenth century. Dorchester declined during the decades from 1950-1980, partly due to changes in transportation and the construction of I-93, which separated the residential areas form the waterfront.
In 1974, the University of Massachusetts’ Boston Harbor campus opened on Columbia Point, followed by The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in 1979, and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in 2015.
The first town meeting in the country was held in Dorchester on October 8, 1633 – celebrated every year on Dorchester Day. The first elementary school, the Mather School, was established here. The population of Dorchester was just over 122,000 in 2020, almost 1 in 5 of Boston’s total population. It is the largest Boston neighborhood, and one of the most diverse.
Special thanks to Sue Goganian and Tina Jordan for their invaluable help navigating around Dorchester.
