Off the northwest coast of Ireland, ten miles from the shores of County Donegal, lies Tory Island.  Only three miles long and “the most isolated, the most desolate, and the most windswept of any of the Irish islands” (Thermon 15), Tory Island seems an unlikely ancient settlement, but by the sixth century a monastery had been established and myth tells that Tory was seat of the ancient Fomorian king, Balor (Healy 9).  It is a place of stunning contrasts and thus a natural setting for the most fantastic of myths.   Tory is infinitesimal its size against the vastness of the ocean; it is one of Ireland’s most ancient settlements yet remains one of its smallest and most isolated.   In its barreness there is sweeping beauty.  Not a tree stands on Tory.  Elizabeth Healey said, “In its bleakness it can be spectacularly beautiful, drenched with the clear northern light or softened by mist. . . Drifts of pink thrive on the rocks and cliffs” (9).  Today, hints of the ancient world live on in local tradition: Tory Islanders even have their own king (Franck 82).

The stories of Tory Island are significant far beyond its own tiny shores.  The tales of Balor and Lugh, of course, resonate throughout Ireland, but Tory Island storytelling was never stagnant nor focused exclusively on ancient past.  An excellent primary source for the most ancient of myths is Math Vab Mathonwy, a compilation of Irish and Welsh tales translated by W. J. Gruffydd.  Stories of Tory Island stretching from Balor, to Christianization under Saint Colmcille, to struggles against British rule in modern times have been transcribed from local storytellers and compiled in Stories from Tory Island by Dorothy Harrison Therman.  Contemporary Tory Island life, still rich in storytelling and intertwined among ancient ruins of castles and monasteries, is well-documented in Martine Franck’s Tory Island Images and on the island’s tourism Web site, oileanthorai.com.

Tory Island is essential in the mythic literature and Irish storytelling.  It is at once distant and otherworldly—cold, treeless, home of gods—and an occasional microcosm of Ireland itself—a small island rich in history and culture, but subject to external forces beyond its control.  One telling of Lugh’s story posits that Balor chose Tory Island as his home for its sheer isolation, “because it was prophesied that he would never die unless he were killed by the son of his only daughter” (Gruffydd 67), thinking that locking her in Tor Mor would guarantee she remain childless.   Today Tory Island’s tourist Web site, oileanthorai.com, happily proclaims that the Cyclops Balor’s shadow still lingers over the island.  Tory Island, by its very nature, also speaks to the ideals of kingship held in the Celtic age. “Balor has always failed to grow trees on the island,” remarks Gial Duv (Gruffydd 67) in one telling of Lugh’s birth.  Where better to demonstrate the failings of a king to bring fertility and prosperity to his people than an island with no trees?  Where better to attempt to ensure a daughter’s chasity than a place where the land itself is so infertile?  As a microcosm of Ireland, Tory Island has been subject to many of the same forces that have shaped Ireland as a whole.  Its foundational myth is essential to the mythic understand of all of Ireland’s origins.   In the sixth century, Colmcille of Gartan, in County Donegal, brought Christianity to Tory, legendarily by walking on dry land across the Tory Sound, the water having been parted by God (Therman 20).  In the nineteenth century, islanders drove out British tax-collectors whose ship, The Wasp, sank in 1871 off the island’s shore. (Therman 39).  Tory Island is indeed a place of contrasts, isolated and small, but with a history and stories that intertwine it with all of Ireland and which add narrative to island’s stunning imagery.

Works Cited

Franck, Martine. Tory Island Images. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.

Gruffydd, W. J. Math Vab Mathonwy. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1928.

Healey, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” Martine Franck. Tory Island Images. Dublin: Wolfhound Press.

Therman, Dorothy Harrison. Stories from Tory Island. Dublin: Country House, 1989.

Tory Island Tourism. <oileanthorai.com> (cited July 6, 2009).

December 31, 1918 “was the happiest, snappiest, classiest, and noisiest New Year’s Eve that Boston ever celebrated.”[1] So proclaimed the Boston Post.  At the start of 1919, the people of Boston were breathing a sigh of relief.  Earlier, in November of 1918, World War I drew to its conclusion and good news of veterans safe homecomings began trickling over the newswires.  An editorial cartoon in the New Year’s Day edition of the Boston Post showed 1918 as a mangy dog being kicked over a cliff while the sun, labeled “Peace 1919,” rose in the distance.[2] That paradox—recognition that the last year had been terrible and that 1919 was full of promise, yet distant promise—defined Bostonian life in January 1919.

The front page of the New Year’s Day Post revealed some of the hope felt for the new year.  An op-ed piece encouraged measured postwar treatment of the Germans, with the plea headline, “Must Not Crush Huns.”  Lighter news could be found alongside serious foreign affairs; a photo of millionaire celebrity engaged couple Hugo Cunliffe-Owen and Helen Elizabeth Oliver graced the same front page.  But nestled in later pages were hints of the more complicated daily life in Boston.  The Spanish influenza epidemic raged on.  The elevated railroad company was busy sanitizing its cars in the hopes of stagnating the spread of the disease.[3] By January 2, news of the continuing influenza epidemic retook its place as front page news as Calvin Coolidge, the recent victor of a narrow election, took his place as governor of Massachusetts.[4] January 1919 was a time of dramatic changes and transitions, and a time in which the connection between global affairs and local individual lives was especially acute.  As the month unfolded, influenza fears dominated the news for weeks and then faded, Teddy Roosevelt passed away, a millionaire was murdered by his wife, one of Boston’s most serious, and bizarre calamities—the molasses tank flood in the North End—claimed twenty-one lives,[5] prohibition passed, the League of Nations was forming while the threat of “Bolshevik Terror”[6] loomed large, and troops landed ashore heading for home and desperate for jobs.

The Spanish influenza was at the forefront of the Bostonian consciousness, perhaps because it was the news story with the most severe and most personal consequence.   The strain was especially harming young adults, ordinarily the healthiest segment of the population.  The short, but roller coaster, saga of Mary Pickford is telling.  For four days, the Hollywood starlet’s health was front-page news.  On January 8, the Post reported, “Mary Pickford, America’s sweet heart of the screen is near death.”[7] The following day, Mary was doing better, but Jack, her husband, was presumed near death.[8] Then, on the tenth, Mary was worse.[9] Finally, on the eleventh, both Mary and Jack were reported “out of danger.”[10] Others, of course, were both less reported and less fortunate.

Flu deaths were front page news again on the fourteenth, as “Jolly Josie,” a 616-pound Los Angeles woman, the largest in the world, passed away, as did three family members of a firefighter in Lynn.[11] Dr. Hilton’s No. 3 formula promised in its ads to be the “reliable” influenza protection,[12] while the paper itself provided even cheaper, although perhaps equally suspect, medical advice, proclaiming in its masthead, “Exercise daily! A brisk walk in the open air is prime health insurance!”[13] and “Shoe leather is less expensive than doctor’s bill! Take a walk!”[14] Abruptly, as other news stories gained prominence, influenza ceased to be front-page news with the announcement “Grip wave receding rapidly,” and the encouraging report, “Influenza-pneumonia lost its decade-long grip on the Hub yesterday. . . Reports from the various cities and towns showed that this second wave of the disease is receding in leaps and bounds” and the assurance of the state director of communicable diseases that the situation had “never [been] better.”[15]

While Mary Pickford fortunately survived influenza, two high-profile deaths shaped January 1919 news.  Former President Theodore Roosevelt’s January sixth death garnered moderate coverage and respectful tributes from the day’s luminaries, such as Governor Coolidge, but the public attention was far more interested in the death of millionaire Jacques Lebaudy.   Shot by his wife on January 11,[16] his story combined wealth, romance, murder, and innocent children.  A guaranteed headliner.  As Mr. Lebaudy’s wife was put into jail, the Post placed on its front page not the photograph of either the victim or his suspected killer, but rather of their pretty daughter Jacqueline, the perfect picture of upper-class elegance and the potential orphan of the tragedy.[17] It was her imagine the would tug at readers’ hearts.  The news unfolded, and was reported, with the prose a thriller novel rather than dry news.  “Phoenix Lodge, bare and rain-stained, loomed lonelier than ever in the cluster of pines on Westbury Plain tonight and a rich full moon bathed the strange house of tragedy in a ghostly light,” began the coverage of the suspect, Mrs. Marie Lebaudy, being taken into police custody.  Only after mentioning a “little white cottage” down a country lane and the howling of a brown chow does the article finally discuss the details of the grand jury investigation.[18] The story later revealed that Mrs. Lebaudy shot Mr. Lebaudy to protect young Jacqueline,[19] a claim later corroborated by a priest[20] and ultimately by the hit man Mr. Lebaudy attempted to hire to kill his wife and daughter.[21] The Lebaudy case centered on a New York family, but the intrigue more than made up for the distance in making it a running lead story in Boston.

Nothing prepared Boston the freak accident that was January sixteenth’s cover story: “Huge Molasses Tank Explodes in North End; 11 Dead, 50 Hurt.”[22] Unseasonably warm weather and a 2.3-million-gallon tank at near-full capacity precipitated the disaster.  The Post reported, “A 50-foot wave of molasses—2.3 million gallons—released in some manner yet unexplained, swept over Commercial Street . . . yesterday afternoon.”[23] On Thursday, January 16, five pages were devoted to every detail and witness account of the disaster.  The stories were a mix of touching, odd, tragic, and even humorous.  Mrs. Bridget Clougherty died as the molasses “[blew] through [the] walls of [her] home.”[24] Engineer Lahey of the Boston Fire Department was pinned under a pool table as molasses slowly drowned him.[25] Ten year-old Pasquale Iantosca was the youngest of twenty-one eventual victims,[26] only eleven of which were known the day after the flood.  J. L. Breen from Lynn, who was found with his feet stuck ankle-deep in hardened molasses quipped, “with a wry smile,” “I used to love molasses candy.  Believe me.  I’m off it for life.”[27] The human stories were mixed with the expected practicalities and posturing.  The “L” would need a month’s of repairs[28] and the molasses company quickly, and expectedly, “disclaimed . . . any blame for the affair.”[29] The following day, the post dedicated one inside page to further study of the diaster, and by the eighteenth, the molasses diaster was no longer news.  As dramatic and bizarre as it was, it may have been considered a freak disaster, an isolated oddity, and the news quickly went back to covering other dramatic changes that were incrementally changing the world.

On January 15, five more states ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, leaving the nation one state short of prohibition.[30] By January 17, the day following the first news of the molasses disaster, prohibition became the front-page headline.  “National prohibition, having been achieved today by the ratification of the constitutional amendment by 36 states and other states fairly tumbling onto the water wagon,”[31] reported the Boston Post, its tone perhaps revealing editorial disdain for prohibition, which Massachusetts had passed itself, but of which Boston was less supportive.  With modern hindsight, it is all too easy to see prohibition as the aberration that it ultimately was, but seeing it through 1919 eyes is revealing.  The Post reported that the “sale of liquor probably will be ended forever in American upon July 1, 1919.”  Not only was prohibition’s permanence assumed, its supporters’ zeal revealed a far more wide-reaching agenda.  “Prohibtion leaders here say that it is only a question of time before every civilized land bans liquor.  They point to the fact that only a few years ago prohibition was a hopeless cause in America, and now is triumphant.”[32]

Finally, the end of World War I left the public with many questions, and new fears replaced the terrors of war, as the new world order began to emerge from the armistice.  Europe was in economic ruins and the editors of the Boston Post were unapologetically interventionist.  Russia’s new economic system of communism, then referred to as Bolshevism, was immediately viewed as a threat, and it was clear that the financial turmoil of war torn Europe made its spread likely.  “United States alone can save Europe from Bolshevik terror,” the Post screamed beneath its masthead on January fourteenth.  The solution was that “billions must be poured out to put war ridden lands on firm industrial basis,” and the Post warned that “failure of America to aid would have tragic sequel.”[33] Clifton Carberry, managing editor of the Post (bylines were rare in Boston Post articles of this era), was direct in a front-page op-ed column about the United States role in the emerging world order, including the League of Nations and the restraint of the Bolshevik threat.  This all “means far more to America than most of our people suppose.  No matter what kind of peace is made, Europe must depend greatly upon America in the future.”[34] Carberry seemed acutely and almost presciently aware that in the aftermath of World War I, the United States and Russia and their vastly different economic systems were the dominant powers in the world.  It is also noteworthy that Carberry’s fairly well-thought and global view of Bolshevism was not the only view on the table, and that American special interest groups of 1919 were no more hesitant than today’s to invoke the frightening words to advance their interests, such as the half-page ad by the chamber of commerce on January thirteenth declaring, “Bolshevism = Prohibition.”

Perusal of the January 1919 editions of the Boston Post captures the spirit of the times—milk at sixteen and a half cents a quart[35] and sixty-five cent pork chop sauté dinners with a side of Lyonnaise potatoes.[36] Some of the news coverage is simply timeless—from the utter fascination with celebrity lives, to front-page complaints about the cost of management consultants in public transportation.[37] The city of Boston in January 1919 is unquestionably recognizable as the same city of 2009, but the month captured a moment of such tumultuous national and international news that local news, even as dramatic as the molasses flood, did not dominate the local paper.  Yet, the Boston Post articles show the international scene’s indelible mark on ordinary Boston life.  On the seventeenth it was reported that “178,104 men [were] sent home” from Paris,[38] and on the nineteenth good news was reported that 18,000 Fort Devens men were demobilized and “Mass. Boys” were expected home in the “next month.”[39] With troops coming home, the flu fading, and peace being sorted out in Europe, Boston in early 1919 appears to have felt like a hopeful time, but a cautious hope very much tempered by the complexities of a changing world.  The New Year’s Day vision that 1918 could not be simply kicked off a cliff like a mangy dog proved impossible, as daily life continued to be complicated by the events of the previous year.  Nonetheless, with the veterans home and the Spanish influenza receding, life was becoming calmer, for a very short time, at the start of 1919.

Charlestown, a neighborhood of Boston across the Charles River from the North End, is replete with visual and historical contrasts.  Like the river at whose mouth it sits, Charlestown was named after King Charles who had given the colony its royal charter.  Gas lamps still light the night along narrow streets lined with brick town homes.  Modern strip malls and unfortunate examples of seventies’ concrete-façade architecture, such as the public library, coexist with historic commons and monuments.  The U.S.S. Constitution and Bunker Hill monument testify of old Yankee-stock American pride, but in some city parks the Irish flag flies alongside the stars and stripes, an enduring witness of the Irish community’s lingering influence.  Nonetheless, a Saturday morning visit to a Charlestown coffee shop reveals one of Boston’s most diverse neighborhoods, as Spanish and Haitian Creole conversations occur alongside English, and young professionals with trendy strollers mingle with lifelong residents and new immigrants.

Colonization

Charlestown was first settled in 1629, by an advance party of Puritans to prepare for the “Great Migration” in 1630.[1] Jutting out at the mouth of the largest river in Boston Harbor, with rounded hills and sloping lowlands, the area known as Mishawum, “full of stately timber and hospitable Indians,”[2] become one of the now–United States’ earliest European settlements.  Long a quiet country neighbor to its more prominent neighbor south of the River, the local history of Charlestown—from Colonial farmland, to Revolutionary battlefield, to War of 1812 naval port, nineteenth-century center of immigration and industrialization, to its identity today as a diverse urban neighborhood—is a case study in, and microcosm of, the American experience.

The initial European settlement of Charlestown was a false start.  Eager to prepare for swarms of settlers, the 1629 settlers “erected a fort and laid out streets in preparation.”[3] Ready for the new residents, Charles Bahne argues the colony’s leaders made a “crucial mistake:”[4]

The hundreds of Puritans who landed in “Charles Towne” during a midsummer heat wave found the wells nearly dry and much of the available water brackish. . . Most of the settlers soon crossed the river to Shawmut and its plentiful springs.  Charlestown was essentially a sleepy country town until the Revolution.[5]

Yet the sleepy town did not die.  Its most notable resident, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, moved across the river, but his Great House, later the Three Cranes tavern stood from 1630 until the British burned Charlestown in 1775.  Today the foundation stones are visible in City Square Park.

The community continued to grow, although much more slowly than Boston proper on the Shawmut peninsula.  In 1632, the residents joined together and established a church, effectively creating a community out of the dispersed country side.   With these words a church and neighborhood emerged:

In the Name of our Lord God, and in obedience to his holy will and divine ordinances.  We whose names are here written being by his most wise and good providence brought together, and desirous to unite ourselves into one congregation or church, under our Lord Jesus Christ our Head . . . promise to bind ourselves to walk in all our ways according the rules of the Gospel . . . in mutual love and respect each to other: so near as God shall give us Grace.[6]

The founding covenant of the First Church in Charlestown is a glimpse into Puritan community life.  The austerity of the membership’s “promise to bind ourselves to walk in all our ways according to the rules of the Gospel” is tempered by a commitment to live “in mutual love and respect each to other.”[7]

The nineteenth century local historian Richard Frothingham, Jr., revered his town’s founders as “men of moderate fortunes and high character.”[8] Perhaps it was in this spirit that a young minister from Charlestown, John Harvard, made his 1638 dying bequest of half his wealth to the college established in 1636 in Newtowne, now Cambridge, gave Harvard its name, and much of its land.  New England communities eventually had to emerge as self-sustaining and self-perpetuating, no longer in utter reliance on Britain for its residents or their educations.  Thomas Shepard—the middle of three generations of his name—became Charlestown’s first New England–born and educated minister.[9] Shepard’s ordination was attended by the Revs. Zechariah Symmes, the retiring Charlestown pastor; John Wilson of Boston; and Richard Mather of Dorchester on February 13, 1659.[10] Only thirty years after the advance party scouted out Charlestown, its church was being led by a New Englander trained for the ministry at a local college.

Revolution

The moment in Charlestown history for which it is most well-known is the confusingly named Battle of Bunker Hill, which took place atop Breed’s Hill.  (“A last minute change in plans,” explains Charles Bahne, “causes confusion even today about the battle’s name.”[11])  Pure topography destined Charlestown for this battle.  The hills of Charlestown and Dorchester Heights to the south each served as gates into the harbor, and their strategic importance was not lost on Gage, the British general.[12] Continental soldiers could easily access Charlestown by land, and overnight on June 16, about one thousand soldiers entered and fortified Breed’s Hill.  Having seen the fortifications spring up overnight, the British regulars set about planning an attack.  Cocky and self-assured, they prepared for a three-day campaign in which Charlestown was assumed to be the first of many ready victories.  This arrogance caused the British to be overdressed and over-burdened for their assault.[13]

The historian Allen French, observed said, “The story of Bunker Hill battle is a tale of great blunders heroically redeemed. Each side committed unexplainable, inexcusable error in strategy; and each side paid in blood according to the magnitude of its mistake.”[14] The British were arrogant and the American were ill-prepared, ultimately running out of gun powder.[15] The casualties on both sides were severe.  Half of the British troops were killed; one third of the Americans.[16] At the end of the day, the British took the hill, but New Englanders, too, claimed a victory.  “The engagement demonstrated that the British army was not invincible after all and that an aroused citizenry was capable of resisting trained professional soldiers in red coats.” The triumph came not because “New Englanders had won, but because they had survived.”[17] Nathaniel Green lamented, “I wish I could sell [the British] another hill at the same price.”[18]

Yet it was not only the British who paid that price.  The residents of Charlestown themselves paid a dear price and may have been less prone to such fervent patriotic bluster.  In addition to the human lives lost, the town itself was a casualty.  “One event that seems to have shocked the partisans on both sides almost as much as the battle itself was the burning of Charlestown,”[19] which took place in the late afternoon, hours into battle.  A “wanton act,”[20] it turned Charlestown to ashes; destroyed nearly four hundred homes; and wiped away nearly two centuries of history, destroying both architecture and literary records.  The Mather family library, including the letters of four generations of this prominent New England family was destroyed.  John Adams lamented its loss as “irreparable.”[21]

After the Revolution, Charlestown began to grow from a sleepy countryside to a bustling suburb.  The most important development in changing Charlestown’s role was the construction of the Charles River Bridge, a private-financed project, completed in 1786, and at 1503-feet long “claimed to be the longest bridge in the world.”[22]

Recovery and Reconstruction in the New Republic

The destruction of the town also facilitated a fresh start in its urban planning.  Charlestown’s most charming districts today, especially near the Common and the south portion of Main Street, reflect its late eighteen-century flavor.  A critical source of employment to spur investment and growth, along with the new bridge, was the fledgling United States Navy’s decision to purchase sixty-five acres of waterfront in 1800 at Moulton’s Point.[23] The construction and employment it provided for both civilians and sailors lasted for 174 years until its decommissioning in 1974, and since 1797 Charlestown has been the home port of the storied U.S.S. Constitution.  The most symbolic growth, and most dramatic change to skyline, came with the construction of the Bunker Hill monument, constructed from 1825-1843 and ultimately rising to 221-feet high of Quincy granite, the tallest building in America until the Washington Monument’s completion in forty-years[24]

The connection to Boston via bridge and the thriving Navy Yard changed the demographics with the landscape.  For nearly two-hundred years, from 1829 until 1817, Charlestown was dominated by English-descended Congregationalists.  The Unitarian controversy made belated inroads in Charlestown.  The Unitarian congregation finally built a church, Harvard Unitarian Church, at the site of the modern Boston Public Library branch, 1817.[25] Theological differences as profound as they were, the Unitarians also tended to represent the same upper-middle class and upper-class English heritage as the Congregationalist at First Church in Charlestown.

Immigration and Diversity

In the 1820s, the scene continued to change.  In 1829, Saint Mary’s became Charlestown’s first Roman Catholic parish,[26] first made up of French and then Irish immigrants.  The churches of the early-nineteenth were more likely to be places where ethnicities and classes joined with like kind than to be places where people broke down barriers.  The Catholic Church engendered particular suspicion.  On August eleventh and twelfth, a gang of fifty to sixty disguised men,[27] fueled by rumors of lurid secret abuses in the convent and its school, and as some scholars such as Oscar Handlin theorize, mostly out of fear of competition for jobs from the Irish,[28] destroyed the Ursuline Convent in Charlestown.  The Boston Evening Transcript reported:

The work of destruction accomplished by a mob, last night and this morning, at and about the Ursuline Convent, on Mount Benedict, in Charlestown—resulting in the complete sacking of the principal building itself—a four-story handsome brick edifice, with wings, and front about eighty feet—together with the farm house, cottage, and every other building upon the premises, and also with the demolition or consumption by fire of all the furniture and chattels of every description, appurtant to the whole.[29]

The tragedy of the event and the bigotry it displayed, however, likely did not represent majority sentiment, though certainly the bigotry of a violent minority was clearly on display.  The Transcript, for example, editorialized, “We agree . . . in the utter condemnation of the outrage.”[30]

The Convent fire in time proved to be an isolated aberration and the Irish community of Charlestown grew and the entire community began to thrive.  In the 1840s, Charlestown resident and future Mayor Richard Frothingham, Jr., was eager to describe his home as “a prosperous community” with “handsome streets and creditable public buildings.”[31] Money and appearances were not the community’s sole traits, though.  Charitable enterprises grew and the community could claim to be one which “makes ample provision for its poor.”[32] A notable example of Charlestown’s provisions for its power was the establishment of the Winchester Home for Aged Women in 1865, a charitable nursing home especially for the community’s widows. [33]

Industrialization

Charlestown prided itself as a leader in the “commercial enterprise of the day” and very much was in a period of “rapidly increasing its population, wealth, and consequence.”[34] In industry this manifested itself in Charlestown’s role in innovation and manufacture. Rufus Stickney and John R. Poor opened a spice grinding factory in 1850 that grew into the world’s largest manufacturer of table and cooking spices.[35] Diamond Matches, a company led by Ezekiel Byam was the “pioneer of match manufacturers,”[36] having perfected the technology of friction-strike matches and developed the process to manufacture them cheaply. H.P. Hood, an innovator in milk commercial pasteurization set up his Massachusetts business in Charlestown where the company’s research and development still is centered.[37]

Charlestown’s rapid growth affected its governmental history, too.  From rolling pastures to an emerging city, Charlestown was incorporated as a city in 1847.  So rapid was its growth, and the growth of its neighbor, Boston, that it was annexed into Boston by 1874.[38] Since its annexation, Charlestown’s role in greater Boston has often remained vague.  Legally it is Boston, but separated by the Charles River, it retains a distinct character, and unlike most other Boston neighborhoods has a very clear natural boundary.

The Modern Era

One of its greatest twentieth-century challenges has been balancing old with new, of cherishing its traditions and heritage while being truly modern and open.   With its age, buildings and districts ebb and flow; the line between historic and blighted has often been unclear.  Eras of poverty and gentrification alternate as Charlestown has to adapt its history to its future.  The early 1970s presented Charlestown with one of its biggest such challenges.  In 1974, Richard Nixon ordered the Navy Yard closed.[39] One-hundred thirty acres of industry disappeared overnight, but now the formerly strong manufacturing district has emerged as a center for research and high technology.  Also in the 1970s, Bunker Hill Community College was established, making postsecondary education available in the neighborhood of John Harvard himself for the first time.  As buildings age and industries come and go, Charlestown constantly must adapt.  Historically, to its credit, it consistently has.  The pattern continues endlessly.  The 1848 high school became luxury condos in 1995. [40] Keeping the neighborhood prosperous, while never losing sight of the Charlestown that made provisions for its poor, is the ongoing challenge.

From the history of a neighborhood where a single Congregationalist parish was the only church for nearly two hundred years, where the king’s forces advanced upon sons of liberty, where rioting mobs burned a convent in nativist furor, where a new town quickly was swallowed up into a sprawling city, our modern Charlestown emerged.  It is an example of the mix of old and new its architecture and its diversity.  A century and a half ago, Charlestown historian, and later mayor, Richard Frothingham, Jr., astutely noted:

A town history must necessarily consist mainly of local details, small in themselves, and chiefly interesting to the descendents of the actors of them, or those who occupy their places.  Yet this detail, these little things, if judiciously selected, ‘illustrate classes of men and ages of time,’ and as they show the feelings, opinions, and action of a period, constitute its life. . . A history of one will illustrate the history of all. [41]

Indeed the lessons of Charlestown in its journey from seventeenth-century countryside to twenty-first century urban renewal are applicable beyond its boundaries. Today Charlestown is in the midst of a delicate balancing act.  Irish flags, once a symbol of the new and persecuted immigrants, line streets and flutter in city parks along the stars and stripes and now symbolized the old money and power.  New waves of immigrants, particularly central American and Haitian, are reshaping the demographics.  Charlestown has a double identity of a small enclave and part of a major city, and is subject to both small-town politics and major urban challenges.  Balancing its working-class heritage and its recent gentrification may be its greatest new challenge.  If it is successful, it promises to continue to be one of Boston’s most eclectic and charming neighborhoods.  In its brief life as independent city, Charlestown’s city seal proclaimed as its motto, “Liberty—A Trust to Be Transmitted to Posterity.” [42] Charlestown has a rich history to transmit, and fortunately, a rich history of keeping its heritage alive while keeping its posterity full of promise.