About Access Massachusetts

What this site is

Eighteen landmarks across Massachusetts, one page each, six city guides, and ten sections on how the state works for a visitor: arriving by air, rail and road, driving and the T, the ferries to the islands, the scenic drives, the seasons, what to eat, where to stay and how to put the days together. There is also a journal of longer answers to the questions visitors ask most.

Every page tries to answer what a visitor actually needs: what a place is, what you see when you get there, how a visit works, what to combine it with, and where a well-known story is a legend rather than a fact.

It is not a listings site. There are no opening hours, admission prices or fares anywhere on it, because those change, and the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.

What Massachusetts means here

This site keeps to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts: Greater Boston, the North Shore, the South Shore and South Coast, Cape Cod and the islands, Central Massachusetts, the Pioneer Valley and the Berkshires. Places across the state line, such as Newport, Providence, Portsmouth or the mountains of Vermont and New Hampshire, are much visited from here, but they are not sights of this state and appear only where a road or a train passes through them.

Many of the state's place names are borrowed, and the photographs and facts here are checked for it: Boston in Lincolnshire, Plymouth in Devon, Cambridge in England, the other Salems, Concords, Lexingtons and Springfields, and the Connecticut River's namesake state are not the places this guide describes, and nothing about them appears as if it were.

How it is written

Each page is built from sources that are named at the foot of it, and the facts in it, such as dates, heights, distances and who built what, are checked against those sources before the page is published. Where the sources disagree, the page says so or leaves the number out.

Access Massachusetts is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. It is independent: it is not connected to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the National Park Service, the MBTA, the ferry lines or any museum, and it does not use their emblems. Anything wrong is worth pointing out, and will be corrected.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is credited on the page it appears on, with the photographer's name, the license and a link to the file.

They are chosen by looking at them: recent rather than archival, showing the place the page is about, and captioned from what is actually in the frame. Many files labeled Boston, Plymouth or Salem show a town of the same name in England or another state, a replica or an event somewhere else, so each one is checked before it is used.

What it costs you

Nothing. A few planning pages carry affiliate links, marked as such before the first one, and the privacy page explains what that means. No page about a landmark or a city carries one, and nothing on this site is recommended because of a commission. This site does not sell, book or reserve anything.