Created By: Volunteer JW Boston
The plaque is in the 3rd fl window above the Chinatown Entrance between DD and BKA at the intersection of 630 Washington and Essex
In the 18th century people often used natural landmarks like trees as meeting places, and important points of reference. They took on special importance when colonists started to rebel and become political icons internationally. At this spot there was a tree planted in 1646 just 16 years after Boston’s Founding. It stood on the only road out of town, Orange Street.
…
A copper plaque marked it “Tree of Liberty” and it became a rally site and symbol. Protesters posted calls to action on it’s trunk. Other towns named their own liberty trees – Providence RI, Newport RI, Norwich CT, Annapolis MD, Charleston SC. Boston’s rowdiest and angriest demonstrations took place there. “This tree,” complained loyalist Peter Oliver (Andrew Oliver’s brother), “was consecrated for an Idol for the Mob to Worship.”
In 1768, the Liberty riot, a protest over the seizure of John Hancock’s ship, ended when the crowd seized a customs commissioner’s boat, dragged it from the dock to the Liberty Tree, condemned it at a mock trial there, then burned it on Boston Common. (See John Hancock Counting House)
In 1770, a funeral procession for Boston Massacre victims included a turn past the tree. In 1774, angry colonists tarred and feathered Captain John Malcom, a British custom’s official, for caning a shoemaker, then took him to the Liberty Tree, where they put a noose around his neck and threatened to hang him unless he cursed the governor. (He didn’t, and they didn’t.) Finally, in August of that year, four months after Lexington and Concord, British troops and loyalists axed the tree down. (It reportedly made for 14 cords of firewood -- about 1,800 cubic feet.) Defiant to the end, the colonists simply renamed the tree “Liberty Stump” and continued to revere it. New York’s liberty tree was only cut down in 1999 and a tree in Annapolis is being restored using grafting.
According to “The A to Z of the French Revolution” by Paul Hanson “In the midst of those uprisings often planted, or erected, liberty trees. This symbolic act grew spontaneously out of a traditional peasant custom in the southwest of France, the raising of a maypole at the time of the spring planting. The liberty tree thus borrowed from the maypole the symbolic meaning of fertility, but as a living tree, rather than a dead pole, it also came to connote growth and regeneration. The planting of liberty trees became a common feature of revolutionary festivals in 1790 with National Guards or municipal officials most often responsible for carrying out the ritual. If the planting of liberty trees was a powerful symbol of revolutionary regeneration, it is hardly surprising that the felling of these trees should have emerged as a potent counterrevolutionary symbol. Under ‘The Terror’, the cutting down of a liberty tree became a capital offense. Eight men died on the guillotine in sept 1793 for having committed that crime…One can still see in France today liberty trees that were planted in 1790.”
It is quite an interesting coincidence that a tree is used as a symbol for independence, much like the garden of eden also had a tree that stood for independence.
-Source Links-
https://www.history.com/news/liberty-trees-symbol-revolutionary-war
This point of interest is part of the tour: Boston and The Dual-Powered King of the South
Please send change requests to changerequest@pocketsights.com.