Home > My Ancestors > English > Timeline: 1750-1849

• 1764: The Boston Gazette notes, "the women's shoes made in Lynn do now exceed those usually imported, both in strength and beauty, but not in price." Especially since 1750, English skilled artisans emigrated and trained others.
• 1770: Since 1768, large numbers of British troops resided in Boston. By 1769, nearly 4,000 British soldiers lived among 15,000 Bostonians. The problems over these close quarters lead to British troops firing on, and killing five members of, an angry mob outside of the Boston Old State House in what is now called the Boston Massacre.
• 1772: Boston-born Samuel Adams (1722-1803) and the Boston town meeting publish The Votes and Proceedings of their meetings, which lists the British violations of colonial rights.
• 1773: American Patriots, including Paul Revere (1735-1818), disguise themselves as Native Americans and throw 10,000 worth of tea into the Boston Harbor. The Boston Tea Party protested the Tea Act that taxed a major drink in colonial America. The British government responds by closing the port of Boston and increasing royal control in the colony.
• 1775: In May, colonists start the first naval battle of the Revolution with the Battle of Chelsea Creek. This victory for the patriots results in the first capture of a British naval vessel and gives the first written evidence of trench warfare in history. On June 17, British solders suffer 1,000 casualties routing American soldiers from Breed's Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts. This becomes the Battle of Bunker Hill due to confusion between the two hills.
• 1776: British troops evacuate Boston and fight most of the Revolutionary War further south.
• 1780: Boston merchant John Hancock (1737-1793), born in Braintree (now Quincy), Massachusetts, is elected the first Governor of Massachusetts. He will also serve 1787-93, until his death and subsequent burial in the Granary Burying Ground.
• 1790: Census indicates 84.4% of the residents of Massachusetts are of English origin. This total is much higher than the 49% national figure.
• 1793: English workman Samuel Slater (1768-1835) founds the first successful cotton mill in America in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Massachusetts had, for sixty years, been the home of the first tidewater mill in America at Slade's Mill on the present-day Chelsea-Revere line.
• 1795-1798: The Massachusetts State House is built, after a design by Boston native Charles Bulfinch (1763-1844). He goes on to design the United States Capitol.
• 1796: Braintree (now Quincy) native John Adams (1735-1826) is elected President.
• 1807-1809: The Embargo Act stops American exports, and Boston society sustains a severed depression because of the high number of merchants unable to help the economy.
• 1812-1815: The War of 1812 reduces commercial activity in the Port of Boston. The Harbor is guarded by two British men-of-war, which eventually capture the Chesapeake when it leaves the Charlestown navy yard.
• 1814: Francis Cabot Lowell (1775-1817), a member of the best families of Boston, reproduces a power loom he saw in England. Lowell, with Boston merchants Patrick Tracy Jackson and Nathan Appleton, founds the Boston Manufacturing Company, which starts mills first in Waltham, Massachusetts and then in Lowell, Massachusetts. These men represent the English capitalists that founded many of the mills and mill towns surrounding Boston. Once the towns were founded, working-class English immigrated as laborers and middle-class English came as shopkeepers. While the working class can be seen in the unions and associations it founded, the middle class left few historical records of its presence.
• 1816: The British Charitable Society is founded in Boston. It dies out during the Civil War.
• 1820: James B. Barnes starts the Boston chapter of Odd Fellows, an English Fraternal society for working-class men. The Merrimack Lodge opens in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1829.
• 1824: Braintree (now Quincy) native John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), a 1787 Harvard graduate, is elected the sixth President of the United States.
• 1825-1845: The middle class moves to the South End, then South Boston, and then into Roxbury and Dorchester.
• 1826: On July 4, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, former President John Adams dies at home in Quincy, Massachusetts. In a portent coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, another former President, dies on the same day in Virginia.
• 1826: Omnibus lines start and first cost nine cents to Roxbury. Around this time, the upper class either stayed in Beacon Hill or began moving to Roxbury and Cambridge.
• 1830-1860: 2.1% to 3.6% of Boston's population was born in England.
• 1831: Ship lists indicate English immigrants to Boston worked in the following careers: Agriculture 6.3%; Labor 15%; Service 3.8%; Crafts 18.7%; Industry 52.4%; Commerce/Professions 3.8%.
• 1832: Boston native and Harvard educator George Ticknor (1791-1871) describes Boston as the capital of New England because of the homogeneity of the residents' character.
• 1834: A Protestant mob burns Ursaline convent and school in Charlestown, Massachusetts as tensions culminate between the Anglo-Saxon stock and new Catholic Irish immigrants. In the same year, the Broad Street riot breaks out when an Irish funeral procession and a Protestant fire brigade collide on the street.
• 1836: The Massachusetts House of Representatives cites fears about "pauperism in England" bringing more than 40,000 immigrants.
• 1838: The Oregon Provisional Emigration Society organizes in Lynn, Massachusetts, to develop commerce and agriculture on the Pacific Coast and to convert Native Americans. Reverend T.F. Tracy edits its newsletter with a circulation of 800 and tries to get the British government more involved in the territory.
• 1840s: Lawrence, Massachusetts is created as a factory village and English immigrant societies develop at the same rate as other ethnic groups' associations. This case is unusual because people of English descent in other Massachusetts towns more often rely on government help than establish their own ethnic aid societies.