Elizabeth Murray (1726-85) came to Boston in 1749 and established a business selling imported cloth and dry goods right next to the State House. She earned enough to be entirely self-sufficient, a rare achievement for a colonial woman. Although she married three times, Murray remained childless but oversaw the education and upbringing of her nieces, helping them and other needy women set up shops. She once wrote, “I’d rather [be] a useful member of society than all of the fine delicate creatures of the age.”
In June and July 1776, Abigail Adams moved her household to Boston to her uncle Isaac Smith’s home on State Street, right next to the Old State House, for smallpox inoculation. John Adams’ uncle, Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, had started the program 50 years earlier, inspired by an enslaved man, Onesimus. Many household members were very sick, but they all recovered.
Abigail wrote to John: “Our little ones stood the operation Manfully… Such a spirit of inoculation never before took place; the Town and every house in it, as full as they can hold…”
On July 18, 1776, Abigail Adams went to the Old State House, then called the New Town House, where the Declaration of Independence was read for the first time in Massachusetts. She described the event in a letter to John: “When Col. Crafts read from the Belcona of the State House the Proclamation, great attention was given to every word… Thus ends royall Authority in this State and all the people shall say Amen.”
Near the end of her life, from about 1778-1781, Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American woman poet, lived on Court Street (then Queen Street) with her husband, John Peters. Unfortunately, not much is known about her life during this period.
