Thirty-miles round Boston

This 1775 map illustrates an important shift in colonial American cartography. Placing Boston at the center of a 30-mile radius that encompasses towns in Essex, Middlesex, and Suffolk counties, it emphasizes the city as a local hub, rather than a distant outpost of the British Empire.

While we might now view Boston and its surrounding suburbs as part of one metropolis, in the eighteenth century Boston and the rural towns around it actually operated in different spheres. Most rural New Englanders felt disconnected from the grievances voiced by merchants in the city.

The separateness of these spheres shifted when British administrators began undermining Boston’s autonomy and local governance. While farmers in places like Concord may have been ambivalent about the taxation of trade goods, they did bristle at threats to self-government that they had known for over a century. The resulting alliance of urban Bostonians and rural New Englanders proved crucial—it united the material and political resources needed to convert scattered discontent into an outright rebellion against imperial control.