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MAMassachusetts Fun Facts
Massachusetts still runs on a constitution written in 1780, drafted mostly by John Adams and ratified eight years before the federal one. It is the oldest written constitution still in force anywhere in the world, and it did real work almost immediately: the Quock Walker cases of 1781 to 1783 used it to rule slavery incompatible with state law.
Facts most people get wrong
- The Pilgrims did not land at Plymouth Rock. The Mayflower's first landfall was Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, in November 1620, and the Mayflower Compact was signed there. No 17th century account mentions a rock. The stone got its story in 1741, when a 94-year-old named Thomas Faunce pointed it out from memory.
- Nobody was burned at the stake in Salem. Nineteen people were hanged in 1692 and Giles Corey was pressed to death under stones. Burning was a continental European punishment, not an English colonial one. Most of the accusations started in Salem Village, now the separate town of Danvers.
- Paul Revere never shouted "the British are coming" and never reached Concord. A patrol stopped him in Lincoln and Samuel Prescott carried the alarm the rest of the way. Longfellow's 1860 poem is why one of three riders got the credit.
- John Harvard did not found Harvard. The colony's General Court voted the money in 1636. John Harvard was a minister who died two years later and left the school his library and half his estate. The seated statue in Harvard Yard is not his likeness, since no portrait of him exists.
- Boston cream pie is a cake. It came out of the Parker House hotel kitchen, the same one that produced the Parker House roll, and became the official state dessert in 1996.
Records and firsts
- Boston Latin School opened in 1635, the first public school in the country, and Harvard followed in 1636.
- The first subway in the United States opened under Tremont Street in Boston on September 1, 1897, seven years before New York's.
- Basketball was invented in Springfield in 1891 with a soccer ball and two peach baskets, and volleyball in Holyoke in 1895, ten miles up the same river valley.
- Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone call in Boston on March 10, 1876.
- Massachusetts became the first state to license same-sex marriage on May 17, 2004, after the Goodridge ruling the previous November.
- The Big Dig, finished in 2007, ran to roughly $24 billion with interest, the most expensive highway project in American history.
Geography that surprises
- The high point is Mount Greylock at 3,491 feet, tucked in the far northwest corner. Herman Melville could see it from his desk at Arrowhead in Pittsfield while he wrote Moby-Dick.
- A block of Massachusetts about two and a half miles wide hangs down into Connecticut. The Southwick Jog is the leftover of a botched colonial survey settled in 1804.
- Webster Lake carries a 45-letter Nipmuc name, Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, the longest place name in the country.
- Cape Cod curls so far back on itself that Provincetown at the tip faces west, under 50 miles from Boston across the bay and about 115 by road.
Where the name comes from
Massachusetts was a place name before it was a colony. It belonged to the Massachusett people, an Algonquian nation on the coast, and breaks down roughly into massa, great, wadchu, hill, and a locative ending: at the great hill. The hill is the Great Blue Hill in Milton, 635 feet high and ten miles south of downtown Boston. The Bay State nickname comes from the Massachusetts Bay Colony chartered in 1629, and the Latin motto, Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem, means by the sword she seeks peace under liberty.
Questions people ask about Massachusetts
What is Massachusetts known for?
The start of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord in 1775, the oldest school and college in the country, the 1692 Salem witch trials, basketball, Cape Cod, and a 1780 constitution still in force.
What is the weirdest law in Massachusetts?
Happy hour is illegal. State liquor regulations have banned discounted drink promotions since 1984, so bars cannot cut prices for part of the day, and the rule has survived every attempt to repeal it.
Did the Pilgrims really land on Plymouth Rock?
No. The Mayflower first anchored at Provincetown on Cape Cod in November 1620, and no account written aboard mentions a rock. The identification dates to 1741, when a 94-year-old named Thomas Faunce pointed the stone out.
Why is Massachusetts called the Bay State?
After the Massachusetts Bay Colony, chartered in 1629 and named for the bay the settlers sailed into. The formal name is still the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, one of four commonwealths among the 50 states.
What was invented in Massachusetts?
Basketball, volleyball, the telephone, the first American subway, the Fig Newton, named for the town of Newton, and the chocolate chip cookie at the Toll House Inn in Whitman.