Town Hill District

Town Hill in Charlestown, Boston, is a dense neighborhood of small-scale buildings from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, laid out along streets that follow the sloping ground. The street plan goes back to a 1641 layout by engineer Thomas Graves. After the British burned Charlestown in 1775, rebuilding kept the original street pattern. Eleven surviving residences date from the late Georgian and Federal periods, which the nomination describes as the best-preserved cluster of its kind in Boston. Notable buildings include the brick Edward Everett House, the splitstone house at 92 Main Street, the Warren Tavern, the Benjamin Thompson House, and the wooden Larkin and Hurd mansions. St. John's Church, built in 1841 by Richard Bond, shows early Gothic Revival design. Brick row houses, Greek Revival rows and Italianate townhouses on Harvard Street add later nineteenth-century variety. The district covers roughly 11 acres and includes homes, shops, a church and a park.