Walks & Trails
The Black Heritage Trail®
1.5 miles · 60 to 90 minutes, plus time for the museum
Access Steep: Pinckney and Joy streets climb hard, on narrow brick sidewalks with uneven patches and some corners without curb cuts. The Meeting House has a ramp and an elevator; the Abiel Smith School does not. Step-free alternative: see the Shaw Memorial, then walk Charles Street and Cambridge Street on the flat and a short way up Joy Street to Smith Court, where the Meeting House has a ramp and an elevator.
Hours and prices Each ticketed stop below carries its hours and admission; the full table is Sights at a Glance.
Before the Civil War, Boston’s free Black community organized the fight against slavery from the north slope of Beacon Hill, the side that tilts down toward Cambridge Street. A few blocks behind the State House, families built homes and a meeting house, ran barbershops and clothing stores, and campaigned with a persistence that made the neighborhood a national hub of abolition. Boardinghouses doubled as Underground Railroad stations. After the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, neighbors here hid freedom seekers, paid their fares to Canada, and in 1851 pulled one out of the courthouse itself.
The trail strings those places together, climbing from the Shaw Memorial into the steep, narrow streets of the north slope and ending on Smith Court. The Park Service lists fourteen sites; this chapter treats the five Smith Court houses as one, which makes ten stops. Most stops are private homes, still lived in, so you read them from the sidewalk. The two buildings you can enter, the Abiel Smith School and the African Meeting House, form the Museum of African American History.
Know before you go
- Take the T to Park Street (Red and Green Lines); the Shaw Memorial is a short walk up Park Street at Beacon. From the finish, walk down to Cambridge Street for Bowdoin (Blue Line) or Charles/MGH (Red Line).
- The Museum of African American History at 46 Joy Street runs the Abiel Smith School and the African Meeting House: $15 for adults, which includes a talk in the Meeting House, Thursday to Sunday, by timed ticket reserved on maah.org.
- Every other stop except the Shaw Memorial is private property, most of it homes with residents inside. Look from the sidewalk, keep voices low, and stay off steps and doorways.
- Park Service rangers lead free trail tours in season, late May to late September, Wednesday to Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.; dates at nps.gov/boaf. The NPS app carries a self-guided audio tour for the rest of the year.
- Eat on Charles Street, where stop 5 stands: The Paramount feeds the hill from breakfast through dinner, with a line out the door on weekend mornings, and the rest of the street is in Beacon Hill.
Walks & Trails · The map
The Black Heritage Trail®
Stop by stop
Robert Gould Shaw and 54th Regiment Memorial
Beacon St at Park St, Boston Common
Hours 6:30 a.m.–11 p.m. · Admission Free
Augustus Saint-Gaudens spent nearly 14 years on this high-relief bronze, unveiled in 1897 facing the State House. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw rides beside the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, one of the first Black regiments of the Civil War, as they march down Beacon Street in 1863. On July 18 of that year they led the assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, where Shaw and many of his men died.
In this book: Boston Common
George Middleton House
5 Pinckney St · Private: view from outside
Finished in 1787, this wooden two-family house is the earliest surviving house on Beacon Hill built by Black Bostonians. Its builders were Louis Glapion, a hairdresser, and George Middleton, who trained horses and kept a livery. Middleton made his name in public life: in the Revolution he commanded the Bucks of America, an all-Black militia company that Governor John Hancock honored with a flag, and he went on to serve as third Grand Master of Boston’s African Lodge, the body later called the Prince Hall Masons.
The Phillips School
Anderson St at Pinckney St · Private: view from outside
Built in 1824, this schoolhouse first held Boston’s English High School, then in 1844 became the Phillips Grammar School, named for the city’s first mayor. Until 1855 it taught white children only, while Black children went to the crowded Smith School on Joy Street. That year a state law ended segregated public schools, and the Phillips became one of Boston’s first integrated schools. It is now a private residence.
John J. Smith House
86 Pinckney St · Private: view from outside
Smith made this his home from 1878 to 1893. Born free in Richmond, Virginia, in 1820, he settled in Boston in the 1840s, and his barbershop became a meeting place for abolitionists; Senator Charles Sumner was a loyal customer. When activists freed Shadrach Minkins from the courthouse in February 1851, Smith and Lewis Hayden spirited him away to a safe house in Concord. Smith went on to recruit for the Black Civil War regiments, serve three terms in the Massachusetts House and sit on Boston’s Common Council.
Charles Street Meeting House
70 Charles St, at Mt. Vernon St · Private: view from outside
Asher Benjamin designed this meeting house, or so tradition holds, for the Third Baptist Church in 1807, and the congregation seated its Black members apart. In 1836 a white member, Timothy Gilbert, invited Black friends into his own pew; expelled, he founded the congregation that became Tremont Temple. The First African Methodist Episcopal congregation bought the building in 1876 and, renamed Charles Street A.M.E., worshiped here until 1939, when its move to Roxbury left Beacon Hill without a single Black institution.
In this book: Charles Street
Lewis and Harriet Hayden House
66 Phillips St · Private: view from outside
Lewis Hayden escaped slavery in Kentucky in the 1840s, and by 1850 he and his wife, Harriet, were running a boardinghouse here that became the city’s busiest Underground Railroad safe house. Harriet likely managed the household while Lewis lined up money and transport. William and Ellen Craft, who fled Georgia in disguise, stayed here; Hayden reportedly kept kegs of gunpowder under the house, ready to be lit if anyone tried to take them.
John Coburn House
2 Phillips St · Private: view from outside
John Coburn ran a clothing shop on Brattle Street and made this his home from 1844. He kept the books as treasurer of the New England Freedom Association, which aided people who had escaped slavery, and helped found the Massasoit Guards, a Black militia company formed to defend the community. After the 1851 courthouse rescue of Shadrach Minkins he was arrested as a suspected participant, tried and acquitted.
Smith Court Residences
3, 5, 7, 7A and 10 Smith Court · Private: view from outside
The five houses on this lane off Joy Street show how Black Bostonians lived in the 1800s, often with several families and boarders under one roof. At number 3, clothing dealer James Scott and the historian William Cooper Nell both sheltered freedom seekers. Nell, a leader of the campaign to integrate Boston’s schools, published The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution in 1855, making him one of the earliest published Black historians.
Abiel Smith School
46 Joy St
Hours Thu–Sun 10 a.m.–4 p.m. · Admission $15 adults (incl. Meeting House talk)
Abiel Smith, a white businessman, left $4,000 at his death in 1815 to educate Black children, and the school committee drew on that gift to build this schoolhouse, opened in 1835, the oldest US public school built solely to educate Black children. Its crowded, underfunded rooms fueled Benjamin Roberts’s 1849 lawsuit for his daughter Sarah. The suit failed, but the 1855 law ended school segregation and emptied these classrooms. Today it holds the museum’s galleries.
In this book: Museum of African American History
African Meeting House
8 Smith Court
Hours Thu–Sun 10 a.m.–4 p.m. · Admission $15 adults (incl. Meeting House talk)
Free Black craftsmen built the African Meeting House, which opened in 1806 for the African Baptist Church and remains the oldest Black church building standing in the United States. Known as the Black Faneuil Hall, it hosted Frederick Douglass, Maria Stewart and William Lloyd Garrison, who founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society here in 1832. In 1863 it served as a recruiting post for the 54th Massachusetts. The museum has owned it since 1972.
In this book: Museum of African American History