The Landmarks

Eighteen places

These are the places that best explain Massachusetts: where the Revolution began, where the Pilgrims landed, where the whaling ships sailed from, where Thoreau and Wharton wrote, and the coast, islands and hills that have drawn visitors for more than a century. Each has its own page with its history, what you see there and how to visit.

They are grouped here by region, starting in Greater Boston, where half of them stand, and working outward to the coast, the islands and the hills. The city guides cover the six towns best used as bases, and the itineraries join the landmarks into days.

Greater Boston: the city

Boston's landmarks lie close together, and most can be joined on foot. The Freedom Trail is the obvious start, a walking path of two and a half miles linking sixteen places from the years before and during the Revolution, marked by a red line on the sidewalk. It begins on Boston Common, the oldest city park in the United States, set aside in 1634, beside the Public Garden of 1837 with its lagoon and Swan Boats.

Along the trail stands Faneuil Hall, the market and meeting hall of 1742 that Boston calls the Cradle of Liberty, with the granite market buildings of 1826 behind it. At the trail's far end, across the river in Charlestown, USS Constitution, Old Ironsides, launched in 1797, lies at the old navy yard below the granite obelisk of the Bunker Hill Monument.

Greater Boston: the museums and the river

Two great museums stand a few minutes apart on the Fenway. The Museum of Fine Arts holds more than 450,000 works, one of the most comprehensive collections in the Americas, with a rotunda painted by John Singer Sargent. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a Venetian palace built by one collector, opened in 1903 and kept as she arranged it around a glass-roofed garden court.

Across the Charles, Harvard Yard is the oldest part of the oldest university in the country, grown from a parcel bought in 1637: a lawn of elms and brick halls behind twenty-seven gates, with the Widener Library and Memorial Church facing each other across the middle.

Greater Boston: the first battle

West of the city lies the countryside where the Revolutionary War began. At Minute Man National Historical Park you can follow the events of April 19, 1775 from the Battle Green in Lexington along five miles of the Battle Road to the North Bridge in Concord, where the militia fired the shot heard round the world.

A short drive south of Concord is Walden Pond, the glacial kettle pond where Henry David Thoreau lived for two years from 1845 and wrote Walden, published in 1854. It is now a state reservation for walking and swimming, with the site of his cabin marked on the north shore. Together the two make an easy day from Boston by car or commuter train.

The North Shore and the South Coast

North of Boston, Cape Ann is a rocky granite peninsula with two harbor towns: Gloucester, the old fishing port with its fisherman's memorial, and Rockport, whose red fishing shack on Bradley Wharf, Motif Number 1, is called the most often-painted building in America.

South of Boston lie the Pilgrims and the whalers. Plimoth Patuxet recreates Plymouth Colony as it stood in 1627, with a Wampanoag Homesite beside it and the Mayflower II on the town waterfront. Farther along the coast, New Bedford was the world's preeminent whaling port of the nineteenth century, remembered in a national historical park across thirteen city blocks, with the Whaling Museum and the Seamen's Bethel of Moby-Dick.

Cape Cod and the islands

On the outer arm of Cape Cod, the Cape Cod National Seashore, set aside in 1961, protects nearly forty miles of Atlantic shore: high sand cliffs and dunes, kettle ponds and pine woods, and a chain of lighthouses from Nauset to Race Point.

Off the south coast, reached by ferry, lie the two islands. Martha's Vineyard, Noepe in Wampanoag, is an island of about 96 square miles with the whaling captains' houses of Edgartown, the gingerbread cottages of Oak Bluffs and the clay cliffs of Aquinnah. Nantucket, some thirty miles out to sea, was once the whaling capital of the world, and its town is among the finest surviving New England seaports of the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Central Massachusetts and the Berkshires

In the rolling hills of the center, Old Sturbridge Village is New England's largest living museum: a country town of the 1790s to the 1830s on more than two hundred acres, with 59 antique buildings brought from across the region, water-powered mills and a working farm.

In the far west, the Berkshires hold two more. Hancock Shaker Village, a Shaker community from 1790 to 1960, is now an open-air museum of twenty buildings, among them the Round Stone Barn of 1826. In Lenox, the Mount is the country house Edith Wharton designed for herself in 1902, where she wrote The House of Mirth, with its terrace and restored gardens.

Choosing among them

With only a few days, keep to Greater Boston: the Freedom Trail, the museums, Harvard and the first battle can fill three days without a car. With a week, add either the coast, Plymouth, the Cape and an island, or the west, Sturbridge and the Berkshires; with two weeks, see both. The history is best in spring and autumn, the coast in summer, the Berkshires in summer for the stages and autumn for the leaves. When to Come has the details month by month, and Driving and Getting Around explains how to reach each one.

Some of these places are landscapes and streets, free to walk in any season: the Common, the Freedom Trail's sidewalks, the Battle Road, the seashore beaches and the Walden shore. Others are museums with admission and seasonal hours, and the living history museums, Plimoth Patuxet, Old Sturbridge Village and Hancock Shaker Village, run their fullest programs from spring to autumn. Check each place's own website for hours and tickets before you go, and allow at least half a day for each of the museum villages.