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Tour >Walking
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Description and Basic Information ::
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You won’t find the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail on any Boston map, nor will you find Park Rangers ready to guide you along it’s walkways. This Walk (or walks really) was the brainchild of a group of Boston teachers, librarians, and students. The five walks meander through several Boston neighborhoods as testaments to the accomplishments of local women.
The booklet with maps that guides the walker is available at both National Park Service locations: Boston Common and 15 State Street. Unlike NPS brochures, the booklet is not free. Although it costs $9.95 on the Common, you can get it for $5.00 on State Street. The 80-page book is a worthy publication, however, for not only does it detail the walks, it includes a vast amount of Boston history, and lots of illustrations.
The five walks are labeled: Downtown, North End, Beacon Hill, South Cove/Chinatown, and Back Bay. Several of the stops overlap those found on the Freedom and Black Heritage Trails, so if you plan to walk either of these, have the booklet with you before you start. The stops include private homes (with plaques – look for the little icon of a tall woman in a long dress), public buildings that have changed use, and sites with various functions that are open to the public. The number of stops on each walk varies.
As an example, the North End Walk (12 stops) celebrates the diversity of our cultures, and visits, among other sites, the Paul and Rachel Revere House; the Mariners House where wives of sailors were provided a place to sell the items they made at home; and the birthplace of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Plaques commemorating North End women feature among those hanging in the Revere Mall. The North Bennet Street Industrial School was founded by a woman named Pauline Agassiz Shaw in 1881. It still holds an international reputation for training students in fine carpentry, violin making and restoration, and in making jewelry. This Walk weaves around quite a bit, but stays in the North End. All the Walks do much the same, overlapping at times with other Walks.
The Beacon Hill Walk (17 stops) shares two sites with the Black Heritage Trail: the African Meeting House (some prominent abolitionists were women) and the Harriet and Lewis Hayden House where an escaped slave, Ellen Craft, lived for a time. Craft dressed like a man, pretending to be her own master, acting as if her own husband were her slave. Thusly disguised, the two of them labored against slavery. Elsewhere, the walk focuses on women writers and artists.
The other three walks (Back Bay is the most jam-packed at 35 stops), are similar.
Any of the five can be walked within 1 ½ hours. The neighborhoods they pass throu |
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