1700-1800

By 1700, the South Slope began to attract residents, and much of the hillside was later acquired by the artist John Singleton Copley before ultimately being developed into a fashionable neighborhood by a real estate syndicate called the Beacon Hill Proprietors. The steep North Slope, initially settled by free Blacks in the 1760s, was becoming a thriving African American community. By 1795, Beacon Hill’s north summit and adjacent Bowdoin Square became fashionable places for the residences of Boston’s well-to-do, and construction began on The Massachusetts State House.