Boston Founded

1630

John Winthrop's colonists, finding Salem cramped and Charlestown waterless, moved south across the bay to a peninsula with a reliable spring the Algonquians called Shawmut. They named it Boston after the Lincolnshire town many had left. It would quickly become the intellectual and commercial capital of Puritan America, nurturing a culture of education, dissent, and self-governance that shaped the republic to come.