Boston’s first European inhabitant was a man named William Blaxton, who hated people. Enough to move to Boston. Not that Boston is a bad place—I find it quite charming. But back in 1625 it was just undeveloped swamp. So, after having left England to get away from the English, Blaxton moved to a swamp to get away from the other colonists.

As it happened, Puritans moved to his general vicinity not long after, although far enough away to allow him to continue his splendid introversion. This did not last long. As you’ll recall, the Puritans excelled at finding new and innovative ways to incompletely starve in the New World. They were always relying on Indians for food, or getting confused and wearing buckles on their hats, and so forth. So the Puritans who settled near Blaxton forgot to check for springs or rivers, and thus realized they had no potable water and would soon all drop dead. Thus they approached Blaxton to ask if they could resettle around his bog shack, in order to take advantage of his well.

Blaxton was fairly misanthropic by nature but nonetheless agreed to let them live on his land and not mortally dehydrate. Shortly thereafter, the Puritans ordered his house burned down because he was an Anglican priest, and they had left England precisely to avoid the Church of England, so why was this miserable heretic hanging out in their swamp? Blaxton thus packed up his bags and moved to Rhode Island, to further get away from any white people, and thus became the first European inhabitant of Rhode Island as well.

Thus did Boston lurch into existence, on the swampy ashes of a priest’s house. Nowadays Boston is overwhelmingly Catholic, or at least some syncretic combination of Catholicism and Red Sox worship, but in its infancy the city was a staunch colony of the very anti-Catholic Puritans. A group which comedian Greg Proops describes as “people too boring for England.”

Although this isn’t entirely fair. Yes, Puritans eschewed things like “alcohol” or “anything fun.” Including Christmas, which the Puritans literally banned in England between 1640-1660 when they controlled Parliament. But they did find alternate forms of amusement. These included three things:

Reading the Bible
Putting people in stocks and throwing rocks at them
Burning witches at the stake

Perhaps due to lack of diversions, the Puritans of Boston had plenty of time to work hard and become a prosperous British colony. You’ve probably heard about “the American Revolution,” so I’ll skip much of that. Suffice it to say, by the 1760’s American colonists profoundly disliked paying taxes, and lack of representatives in Westminster, and often burst into song about it while wearing crushed velvet, as portrayed in the Broadway musical 1776. Many of our nation’s founding fathers hailed from Boston, including no less than John Adams, John Hancock, and Sam Adams.

Also James Otis, who you’ve never heard of. Had James Otis been better at avoiding canes, he would almost certainly be on one of our coins by now.

Recall that the American Revolution was hardly cut-and-dry in public opinion. Throughout the Revolutionary War the American population fell more or less into three equally apportioned sentiments: Patriots, Loyalists, and Apathists. (The Patriots won.)

But even many of the most vociferous advocates of American Independence began as stalwart Britons. Benjamin Franklin started out as a loyal Englishman—his own son William was the Royal Governor of New Jersey. Franklin didn’t switch from advocating for reform on behalf of colonists to “You Brits are a bunch of dickheads” status until 1775 when members of Parliament humiliated him as a country bumpkin during his trip to London.

Boston native James Otis was ahead of the game in advocating for independence, well before cleaving from Great Britain was standard bar chatter, let alone a revolutionary casus belli. He’s the guy who coined the phrase, “No taxation without representation.” He gained prominence in the colonies for delivering a thunderous five hour speech against the unpopular Writs of Assistance. John Adams, present at the oration, said later about Otis’s speech that “the the child independence was then and there born.”

Why, then, do we not have a state named Otis, or at least a memorial overpass? Probably because he went insane towards the end of his life. In 1769 he so irritated a British tax officer at a Boston coffee house that the man cudgeled Otis in the had with his cane. By which I do not mean a polite tap against the noggin. According to eye witnesses, Otis was struck so hard that when doctors arrived that they could see parts of his brain.

That he survived this head trauma at all is astounding, let alone in an era when doctors kept leeches on hand for bloodletting purposes and no one knew you should wash your hands before surgery. They did manage to sew up Otis, and installed a plate in his head. A lead plate.

Lead is not the best sort of mineral you want in your body, what with being toxic. Rebuilding parts of your skull out of lead is bound to have side effects, and between the brain damage and lead poisoning, Otis developed what we now infer was manic depressive disorder and schizophrenia. Either of those is an asset in a modern GOP primary, but in the Revolutionary era it meant that Otis rapidly declined from one of our most prodigious spokesmen to a kind of spooky, embarrassing uncle no one wanted to talk about.

The final problem with lead skull plating, incidentally, is its irritating tendency to attract lightening. In 1783 James Otis was fatally struck by lightning. Which was terrible, but not entirely. Before his death James Otis once told his sister, “I hope, when God Almighty in his righteous providence shall take me out of time into eternity that it will be by a flash of lightning.” So at least he got that.

After James Otis the other most exasperating revolutionary in Boston was quite likely Samuel Adams. Sam Adams was briefly a brewer, but not a very good one, and subsequently went out of business. He hated the British and despised taxes, so naturally his next career move was to become a British tax collector. This might strike some as counterintuitive behavior, but Ron Swanson is a libertarian who works for a municipal government to weaken it from within. Sam Adams did this, and due to his very lax taxing abilities, became the most popular tax collector in Boston before the British finally fired him.

The Sam Adams Brewery, located in Boston, is not directly related to the man (the Sam Adams brewer has lasted longer than Sam Adams’ brewery actually did). And the brewery took some artistic liberty with Sam Adams when putting him on the label, as in real life he was both overweight and homely.

If you want to have a very deep emotional connection with Sam Adams and the revolutionary history of Boston, you can do so by visiting Beantown Pub, across the street from the Granary Burying Ground, where James Otis, Paul Revere, and Sam Adams are all buried.

The author spent a very fine afternoon drinking a cold Sam Adams while looking out the window at cold Sam Adams.

Boston’s Other History