King’s Chapel and Burying Ground
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Transcript
King’s Chapel began as an Anglican congregation in 1686 in a town dominated by Puritan religious traditions. The present stone building dates from the mid-eighteenth century. Its very existence reminds us that colonial Boston was not politically or religiously uniform.
Anglicanism was closely associated with the British establishment. As revolutionary politics intensified, Loyalists — colonists who remained loyal to the Crown — became increasingly vulnerable. Many left Boston during or after the war. The Revolution was therefore also a civil conflict within communities and families, not simply thirteen colonies unanimously rising against an external occupier.
The adjacent burying ground is older than the chapel and contains some of Boston’s earliest English graves. Names and dates can make colonial life seem settled, but the town stood on Indigenous homelands transformed by epidemic disease, colonization and displacement before the revolutionary generation was born.
The Freedom Trail tends naturally toward Patriot sites because Patriots won and later chose what to commemorate. King’s Chapel is a good place to recover the people who did not share that political destination — and to remember that winners usually inherit the plaques.