Dorchester is a Bostonian neighborhood comprising more than 6 square miles (16 km) in the City of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Originally, Dorchester was a separate town, founded by Puritans who emigrated in 1630 from Dorchester, Dorset, England, to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This dissolved municipality, Boston’s largest neighborhood by far, is often divided by city planners in order to create two planning areas roughly equivalent in size and population to other Boston neighborhoods.

The neighborhood is named after the town of Dorchester in the English county of Dorset, from which Puritans emigrated on the ship Mary and John, among others.

Founded in 1630, just a few months before the founding of the city of Boston, Dorchester now covers a geographic area approximately equivalent to nearby Cambridge. It was still a primarily rural town and had a population of 12,000 when it was annexed to Boston in 1870. Railroad and streetcar lines brought rapid growth, increasing the population to 150,000 by 1920. In the 2010 United States Census, the neighborhood’s population was 92,115.

The Dorchester neighborhood has a very diverse population, which includes a large concentration of African Americans, European Americans (particularly those of Irish, German, Italian, and Polish origin), Caribbean Americans, Latinos, and East and Southeast Asian Americans. Dorchester also has a significant LGBT population, with active political groups and the largest concentration of same-sex couples in Boston after the neighborhoods of South End and Jamaica Plain. Most of the people over the age of 25 have completed high school or obtained a GED.

History

Indigenous peoples

Prior to European colonization, the region around Dorchester was inhabited by the indigenous Massachusett. They lived in settlements established alongside the Neponset River estuary, which was a plentiful source of fish, including trout; they also gathered shellfish from the riverbed, and hunted beaver and deer. They established farms in nearby hills. During the initial period of colonization of the region by Puritan settlers, the Massachusett suffered a rapid decline in population due to the introduction of foreign infectious diseases to which they had no immunity and violence related to settler colonialism.

The Massachusett sachem, Chickatawbut, negotiated land treaties with the Puritan settlers before dying of smallpox in 1633. His brother, Cutshamekin, who succeeded him, deeded further land to the settlers. The remaining Massachusett in the region, including Cutshamekin, accepted some Christianity as a form of survivance and eventually resettled in the Praying Town of Natick.

European settlement in the 17th century

A syndicate of Dorsetshire fishermen organized an outport of fishing stages and flakes at Dorchester in 1623. In 1626 David Thompson settled his family on Thompson Island in what is now Dorchester before Boston’s Puritan migration wave began in 1630. May 30, 1630, Captain Squib of the ship Mary and John entered Boston Harbor and on June 17, 1630, landed a boat with eight men on the Dorchester shore, at what was then a narrow peninsula known as Mattapan or Mattaponnock. Today it is known as Columbia Point (more popularly since 1984 as Harbor Point). Those aboard the ship who founded the town included William Phelps, Roger Ludlowe, John Mason, John Maverick, Nicholas Upsall, Capt. Roger Fyler, William Gaylord, Henry Wolcott, and other men who would become prominent in the founding of a new nation. The original settlement founded in 1630 was at what is now the intersection of Columbia Road and Massachusetts Avenue. (Even though Dorchester was annexed over 100 years ago into the city of Boston, residents still annually celebrate the founding on Dorchester Day, which includes festivities and a parade down Dorchester Avenue).

Most of the early Dorchester settlers came from the English West Country, and some from Dorchester, Dorset, where the Rev. John White was chief proponent of a Puritan settlement in the Americas. The town was centered on the First Parish Church of Dorchester. It is now operated as the Unitarian-Universalist church on Meeting House Hill and is the oldest religious organization in present-day Boston.

On October 8, 1633, the first Town Meeting in the United States was held in Dorchester. Today, each October 8 is celebrated as Town Meeting Day in Massachusetts. Dorchester is the birthplace of the first public elementary school in America, the Mather School, established in 1639. The school still stands as the oldest elementary school in the United States. In 1634 Israel Stoughton built one of the earliest grist mills in America on the Neponset River, and Richard Callicott founded a trading post nearby. In 1641, Dorcas ye blackmore, an enslaved servant to Israel Stoughton, was the first recorded African American to join a church in New England. She served as an evangelist to Stoughton’s Native American servants, and the First Parish Church of Dorchester attempted to help Dorcas gain her freedom.

In 1649, Puritan missionaries, including John Eliot, began a campaign to convert the Indigenous people in Dorchester to Christianity with the help of Cockenoe and John Sassamon, two Indian servants in Dorchester. Eliot was given land by the town of Dorchester for his mission, where he established a church and school.

The James Blake House, oldest surviving home in the city of Boston, is located at Edward Everett Square. This is the historic intersection of Columbia Road, Boston Street, and Massachusetts Avenue, a few blocks from the Dorchester Historical Society. The Blake House was constructed in 1661, as was confirmed by dendrochronology in 2007.

In 1695, a party was dispatched to found the town of Dorchester, South Carolina. It lasted a half-century before being abandoned.

18th century

In 1765, chocolate was first introduced in the American colonies when Irish chocolate maker John Hannon (or alternatively spelled “Hannan” in some sources) imported beans from the West Indies and refined them in Dorchester, working with Dr. James Baker, an American physician and investor. They soon opened America’s first chocolate mill and factory in the Lower Mills section of Dorchester on the Neponset River. The Walter Baker Chocolate Factory, part of Walter Baker & Company, operated until 1965.^: 627

Before the American Revolution, “The Sons of Liberty met in August 1769 at the Lemuel Robinson Tavern, which stood on the east side of the upper road (Washington St.) near the present Fuller Street. Lemuel Robinson was a representative of the town during the Revolution and was appointed a colonel in the Revolutionary army.” Dorchester (in a part of what is now South Boston) was also the site of the Battle of Dorchester Heights in 1776, which eventually resulted in the British evacuating Boston.

19th century

Victorian era

In Victorian times, Dorchester became a popular country retreat for Boston elite. It developed into a bedroom community, easily accessible to the city by streetcar. The mother and grandparents of John F. Kennedy lived in the Ashmont Hill neighborhood while his grandfather John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was mayor of Boston.

American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote a poem called “The Dorchester Giant” in 1830, and referred to the special kind of stone, “Roxbury puddingstone”, also quarried in Dorchester, which was used to build churches in the Boston area. Most notable of these is the Central Congregational Church (later called the Church of the Covenant) in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.

In 1845, the Old Colony Railroad ran through the area and connected Boston and Plymouth, Massachusetts. The station was originally called Crescent Avenue or Crescent Avenue Depot as an Old Colony Railroad station. The name was changed to Columbia until December 1, 1982, and then again changed to JFK/UMASS. It is a Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority rail line station for both the Red Line subway and the Plymouth/Kingston, Middleborough/Lakeville and Greenbush commuter rail lines.

In the 1840s and 1850s, a new wave of development took place on a strip of waterfront overlooking Dorchester Bay (Park and Mill Streets at the Harrison Square Historic District, later known as Clam Point.) Renowned architects who had contributed to one of the most significant and intact collections of Clam Point’s Italianate mansards include Luther Briggs, John A. Fox, and Mary E. Noyes. By the 1890s, Clam Point gained prominence as a summer resort: the Russell House hotel was its centerpiece and the Dorchester Yacht Club was established on Freeport Street.

In the 1880s, the calf pasture on Columbia Point was developed for a Boston sewer line and pumping station. This large pumping station still stands. In its time it was a model for treating sewage and helping to promote cleaner and healthier urban living conditions. It pumped waste to a remote treatment facility on Moon Island in Boston Harbor, and served as a model for other systems worldwide. This system was operated as the Boston Sewer system’s headworks, handling all of the city’s sewage, until 1968, when a new treatment facility was built on Deer Island. The pumping station is architecturally significant as a Richardsonian Romanesque designed by then Boston city architect, George Clough, then architect for the city of Boston. The only remaining 19th-century building on Columbia Point, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

In the history of the United Kingdom, the Victorian era was the period of Queen Victoria’s reign, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. The era followed the Georgian period and preceded the Edwardian period. Its later half overlaps with the first part of the Belle Époque era of Continental Europe.

Annexation to Boston

Dorchester was annexed by Boston in pieces beginning on March 6, 1804, and ending with complete annexation to the city of Boston after a plebiscite was held in Boston and Dorchester on June 22, 1869. As a result, Dorchester officially became part of Boston on January 3, 1870. This is the historic reason that Dorchester Heights is today considered part of South Boston, not modern-day Dorchester, since it was part of the earliest cession of Dorchester to Boston in 1804. Additional parts of Dorchester were ceded to Quincy (in 1792, 1814, 1819, and 1855). Portions of the original town of Dorchester developed as the separate towns of Hyde Park (1868 and later annexed to Boston in 1912), Milton (1662), and Stoughton (1726, itself later subdivided).

In 1895, Frederick Law Olmsted, architect of the Boston Public Garden/Emerald Necklace and Central Park in New York City, was commissioned to create Dorchester Park. It was intended as an urban forest for the residents of a growing Dorchester.

In 1904, the Dorchester Historical Society incorporated “Dorchester Day”, which commemorated the settlement of Dorchester in 1630. Celebrated annually, Dorchester Day is a tableau of community events, highlighted by such activities as the Landing Day Observance, the Dorchester Day Parade along Dorchester Avenue the first Sunday in June, and the Community Banquet.

Turn of the 20th century

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Dorchester was a site for community activism related to diverse issues. The first racially integrated neighborhood developed on Jones Hill. One of the residents of that neighborhood, William Monroe Trotter, with W.E.B. Du Bois, helped to found the Niagara Movement, the precursor of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Many leading suffragettes also lived in Dorchester, including Lucy Stone.

In the early 20th century, Dorchester received numerous Catholic immigrants from a variety of nations, such as Ireland, French Canada, Poland, and Italy, as well as mostly Protestant African Americans from the South who were part of the Great Migration to northern industrial cities. Numerous three-decker apartment buildings were built in Dorchester to house the many industrial workers.

1950s–present

In the early 1950s, Dorchester became a center of civil rights activism by African Americans. Martin Luther King Jr. lived there for much of the time he attended Boston University for his PhD.

During the 1960s–1980s, the ethnic landscape of Dorchester changed dramatically. The established descendants of early 20th-century Jewish, Italian, and Irish immigrants generally moved to newer housing, and new African, Asian, and Caribbean immigrants and their descendants settled here in a succession of ethnicities.

The first community health center in the United States was the Columbia Point Health Center in Dorchester. It was opened in December 1965 and served mostly the massive Columbia Point public housing complex adjoining it. It was founded by two medical doctors, Jack Geiger, who had been on the faculty of Harvard University and later at Tufts University, and Count Gibson from Tufts University.

Geiger had previously studied the first community health centers and the principles of Community Oriented Primary Care with Sidney Kark and colleagues while serving as a medical student in rural Natal, South Africa. The Columbia Point Health Center is still in operation and was rededicated in 1990 as the Geiger-Gibson Community Health Center.

In 1974, the University of Massachusetts Boston moved from Park Square in downtown Boston to Columbia Point in Dorchester. In 1982, Boston State College was incorporated into UMass Boston. Since the 1970s, UMass Boston has expanded substantially, including building a new campus center in 2004 and a new science center in 2015. It has also hosted numerous important social and civic events. In 2000, for example, the university hosted a presidential candidates’ debate between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

In 1977, after an unsuccessful bid to have the John F. Kennedy Library located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to the late president’s alma mater Harvard University, it was sited at the tip of Columbia Point and ground was broken. Designed by architect I. M. Pei, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum was dedicated on October 20, 1979.

By the 1980s, the Blue Hill Avenue section of Dorchester had become a predominantly Black community.

During the 1990s, the city administration increased police presence and invested city money into the area for more street lighting.

On March 30, 2015, the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate was dedicated by President Barack Obama. The Institute opened to the public on March 31, 2015.

Education

Primary and secondary schools

Public schools

Students in Dorchester are served by Boston Public Schools (BPS). BPS assigns students based on preferences of the applicants and priorities of students in various zones.

Dorchester High School predated the annexation of Dorchester to Boston. At its founding, it was an all-male school, first opened on December 10, 1852. In 1870 Dorchester was annexed to Boston and its schools became managed by the City of Boston. A replacement facility opened in Codman Square on Talbot Avenue 1901. The current Dorchester facility opened in 1925 on Peacevale Road to males, while the Talbot Avenue building was for females. In 1953 Dorchester High School consolidated as a coeducational school.

BPS schools located in Dorchester include

Charter schools include

Catholic schools

Many Catholic schools closed in the 2000s as the demographics of the area changed.

The remaining schools as of summer 2018 are:

Colleges and universities

Public libraries

Boston Public Library operates six neighborhood branches in Dorchester.

Demographics

Up until the 1960s, the Blue Hill Avenue part of Dorchester from Roxbury to Mattapan was primarily composed of Jewish Americans whose ancestors had immigrated from eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Neponset neighborhood was primarily Irish-American, most of whom were Catholic.

During the 1920s–1960s, many African Americans moved from the South to the North during the Great Migration and settled on Blue Hill Avenue and nearby sections. While some Jewish-Americans were moving “up and out” to the suburbs, certain Boston banks and real estate companies developed a blockbusting plan for the area. The Blue Hill Avenue area was “redlined” so that only the newly arriving African Americans would receive mortgages for housing in that section. “White flight” was prevalent.

After changes to US immigration law in 1965, Dorchester received new waves of migrants from Puerto Rico, and immigrants from the Caribbean and Central America, such as Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. Immigrants also came from Cape Verde and Vietnam, as well as other Latin American, Asian, and African nations. Dorchester also continued to receive immigrants from Northern European countries such as Ireland, Germany and Poland. Dorchester became more diverse than at any point in its long history, with many nationalities represented here. These immigrants have helped revive the economy of the neighborhood by opening ethnic stores and restaurants.

The sections of Dorchester have distinct ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic compositions. The eastern areas of Dorchester (especially between Adams Street and Dorchester Bay) are primarily ethnic European and Asian, with a large population of Irish Americans and Vietnamese Americans. Residents of the western, central and parts of the southern sections of the neighborhood are predominantly African American. In Neponset, the southeast corner of the neighborhood, as well as parts of Savin Hill in the north and Cedar Grove in the south, Irish Americans maintain the most visible identity. In the northern section of Dorchester and southwestern section of South Boston is the Polish Triangle, where recent Polish immigrants are residents. Savin Hill, as well as Fields Corner, have large Vietnamese-American populations. Uphams Corner contains a Cape Verdean-American community, the largest concentration of people of Cape Verdean origin within Boston city limits. Western, central and parts of southern Dorchester have a large Caribbean population (especially people from Haiti, Jamaica, Barbados, and Trinidad and Tobago). They are most strongly represented in the Codman Square, Franklin Field and the Ashmont area, although there are also significant numbers in Four Corners and Fields Corner. Significant numbers of African Americans live in the Harbor Point, Uphams Corner, Fields Corner, Four Corners and Franklin Field areas. In recent years Dorchester has also seen an influx of young residents, gay men and women, and working artists (in areas like Lower Mills, Ashmont Hill/Peabody Square, and Savin Hill).

American Community Survey – Estimates – 2013

The American Community Survey (ACS) for Dorchester, from 2007 to 2011, estimates the total population is 113,975 people. Slightly more than half are female, 52.6% or 59,914 and 47.4% or 54,061 are male.

In Dorchester, 68.4% or 77,980 of the residents are native born and 31.6% or 35,995 people are foreign born, of which 50.1% or 18,024 are not U.S. citizens. The largest racial group in the neighborhood is Black or African-American with 49,612 people or 43.05% of the population. People who self-identify as white represent 26,102 or 26.99% of the community. Hispanic/Latino account for 19.09% of the population with 19,295 resident. The Asian enclave represents 9.6% of 10,990 of the citizenry. The smallest racial group is bi/multi-racial and they make up 1.9% (2,174) of the population.

According to the ACS survey, Dorchester has a large under 25 population with 38.1% or 43,472 people and 33,162 (29.1% of the total population) of them under the age of 19 years old. Between the ages of 25 and 64 years old there are 59,788 or 52.6% people and 10,715 people or 9.3% are over the age of 65 years old. In Dorchester, approximately 61.9% or 70,503 people are over the age of 25, 23.5% or 16,582 people do not have a high school diploma or GED, 30.5% or 21,479 have a diploma or GED, 18.5% or 13,045 people have completed some college, and 27.5% or 19,397 people have a college degree.

The ACS Survey estimates there are 40,443households in the neighborhood of Dorchester, the per capita income of $22,120 and a median income of $44,136. A total of 13.1% or 5,286 households have reported income of less than $10,000. 27.3% or 11,020 households earn less than $19,999. A total of 19.1% or 7,720 households earn between $20,000 and 39,999.16.5% or 6,651 households in the earn between $40,000 and 59,999. A total of 19.7% or 7,977 households earn between $60,000 and 99,999. A total of 15.3% or 6,174 of household report annual incomes of $100,000 to 199,999. Only 2.2% or 901 households in Dorchester earn $200,000 or more per year. The ACS reports as of 2011, Poverty affects 23.5% or 9,511 households and 24.3% or 9,820 of households are receiving SNAP Benefits.

Race

Ancestry

According to the 2012-2016 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, the largest ancestry groups in ZIP Codes 02121, 02122, 02124, and 02125 are: