Over the Fourth of July weekend, I started what I hope will be a substantial, enlightening, and, since I’m writing, unorthodox block of work focusing on America’s 250th birthday. My first piece — on Mount Vernon — looked at Washington’s home as a construction site since it’s getting an overdue renovation. I also challenged what I thought was an excessive, and incessant, attention to Washington as slave master. Before we get too far from the Battle of Bunker Hill, 250 years ago this past June 17, I want to bring Boston to the fore. Whether or not “don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” was ever ordered, Boston’s story is central and stirring.

Two or three weeks ago, I spent the day in Boston hitting spots on its famous Freedom Trail. That’s the 2.5-mile brick-and-granite walkway connecting 16 historic landmarks in the Hub, all linked to Boston’s colonial and early Federal history and nearly all of consequence during the American Revolution. I’m not sure why the Old Corner Bookstore is on the trail. It was a pharmacy during the upheaval, wasn’t a bookstore until 1828, and is a Chipotle’s restaurant today. Knowing Boston, someone was bribed. Putting payola aside, the Freedom Trail, established in 1951, is a marketing masterstroke, but it also seriously foregrounds history as well as heritage preservation.

At one end is the Boston Common. It’s now America’s oldest park, but in the 1630s it was common pasture, then the host for public hangings and a spot for celebration and protest. Boston partied hardy there when the Stamp Act was repealed in 1766 and, with fireworks, on the Declaration of Independence’s first anniversary on July 4, 1777. On the other end is the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood.

I covered only a sliver of the Freedom Trail, since it was 104 degrees the day I visited, but what a history-rich, evocative sliver, from the Boston Common, to the King’s Chapel and its graveyard, to the Granary Burying Ground, forever home of Paul Revere and many other Patriots. My dividends were the Boston Athenaeum — the library, art museum, and Boston’s secret pleasure of the mind — and a supremely good parking place on Beacon Street. Given the intense heat, I did something not anti-colonial but post-colonial and drove to Bunker Hill.

At the Granary, as many as 5,000 sets of bones are believed to repose forevermore, and, yes, I saw a raven or two. Set on only two acres, it was established in 1660 in what was then the edge of the Boston Common. Today, it faces Tremont Street and a formidable wrought iron fence and Egyptian Revival gate from 1840. Egyptian motifs, suggesting not ancient death cults — very pagan — but eternity as a general proposition, decorated lots of antebellum American cemeteries, among them Mount Auburn in Cambridge. Buildings hem the Granary on three sides. Today, windows overlook the cemetery. In ye olden days, one building was Boston’s main grain-storage warehouse. Hence, the name. The city jail and the almshouse once bordered it, too. With plenty of mature trees and shades, it’s an oasis.

Cemeteries are landscape architecture like parks and gardens, so, no surprise, the Granary has been tweaked over the years. It’s not overgrown as most English cemeteries are, but mowing is a challenge. It’s not unkempt but tousled. Though gravestones are now in rows, until around 1900 there were more clumps of stones. In jiggering stones to get a more even look and to facilitate mowing, Granary honchos tried to match stones and their dead as best as they could. Many graves had footstones, but these are long gone.

The Granary is a feast for those of us who want to commune with the Revolutionary dead. Aside from Revere, John Hancock and Samuel Adams are there. For Hancock, the Granary is close to what was once his home on Beacon Street and is now the State House lawn. Hancock, Adams, and Robert Treat Paine, also buried there, were potentates and signers of the Declaration of Independence, which, lest we forget, was treasonous. They risked all, as did the five Boston Massacre fatalities, who share a grave at the Granary. The central monument honors Benjamin Franklin and his family. Franklin? Known as Philadelphia’s lion in science, diplomacy, journalism, and life advice, he’s buried in Philadelphia, but he was born and bred in Boston.

Samuel Sewall, the best known of the Salem witch-trial judges, is there. An abounding diarist, he abetted and witnessed and later wrote, more squeamish by the paragraph, about the death of my ancestor Giles Corey in 1692. He’s the only American legally pressed to death, boulders piled on a board placed on top of him to break his silence on the charge of wizardry. Corey wasn’t talkin’, and, later, Sewall repented of his role the best he could.

I’m an art historian, which means I’m a historian and fix on the systematic, truth-oriented study of human affairs, but I focus, of course, on art. In early New England, ruled by iconoclastic Puritans, the first visual art was minimalist, frank gravestone sculpture. At the Granary and the King’s Chapel graveyard a few hundred feet away, the most common, earliest decoration is a low, arched stone in which a winged skull is carved in a band on top. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. Yes, you’ll molder in the grave, but the soul takes flight, let’s hope to heaven rather than that hot place where 104 degrees is a cold snap. An economical, wingless skull and crossbones from 1700 makes no promises. It’s the ultimate Do Not Disturb sign.

Old New England wasn’t all scarlet letters, witchcraft trials, and theocratic socialism. Splashes of elegance in gravestone carving appear as the mirthless old Puritans die, people get richer, and London goes royal. Three baby Neal children, dying in 1666, 1671, and an unknown year get the skull-with-wings but also an hourglass, serpentine borders, a Latin inscription, and decorative triangles above each name. The gravestone looks like a little house. A third of the graves at the Granary and King’s Chapel belong to children. Epidemics, especially of smallpox, were common. By 1775, 250 years ago, winged angels carrying a Crown of Heaven are to be seen. Later in the century, sleek neoclassical monuments are the rule.

The Granary opened in 1660 because what we call King’s Chapel graveyard, opened for burials in 1630, was thought to be full. Early markers are gone, if there ever were any, and the two are, in terms of carving styles, on the same track. As the first Boston graveyard, King’s Chapel holds the early marquee corpses, such as that of John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony and Boston’s founder, and a raft of early ministers, including John Cotton and John Davenport. Elizabeth Pain has a small but elegant headstone from 1704, beautifully carved and with a coat of arms that has a design element that looks like an “A.” This made for the apocryphal story that she was the model for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne. Some secrets go to the grave, but there’s no evidence for this.

Both the Granary and the King’s Chapel graveyards are outdoor museums with public art, so I’m entitled to review the quality of interpretation. King’s Chapel’s is juicily biographical, with texts profiling Frederic Tudor, the Ice King of Boston, and Elizabeth Smith Inman, known as the She-Merchant for owning a women’s clothing shop and, in marrying her second husband, negotiating what might have been Boston’s first prenup, which allowed her to control her assets. The Granary’s interpretation is more topographical — who’s where, with a few tidbits. King’s Chapel’s graphics, alas, have been vandalized, with some slashed. New, protected ones are in order.

King’s Chapel was established in 1683 as the first Anglican church in New England, which was settled starting in 1620 by dissenters who wanted a theocracy and religion shorn of folderol, cant, and the stink of popes and kings. Over the years, Puritanism faded, Cromwell came and went, and the Church of England developed a base of Boston followers. The current stone church — King’s Chapel — opened in 1754. Henry Caner was its last Anglican rector. He left in 1776 with the British evacuation from Boston. After the Revolution, locals reconstituted it as an independent Christian Unitarian church, the first in America, and it remains Unitarian today.

King’s Chapel was designed by Peter Harrison (1716–1775), the English-born architect who brought Georgian Palladian style to America. Ordered, balanced, formal, and restrained, the chapel draws from Wren’s and James Gibbs’s churches. Charles Bulfinch, who went to church there, designed the elegant interior columns. The exterior is stone, rare for early American churches. Harrison planned a steeple, but that never got done, alas, since the front is squat, but, inside, it’s serene. I was there to visit the Freedom Trail but also to attend an organ recital in the chapel, which was the first New England church to own an organ, acquired in 1713 and very Anglican of them. Puritans didn’t believe in music in churches — distracting — and neither did their Congregationalist successors.

King’s Chapel has a minister and offers Sunday services. I assume that on Sundays they remove the easel-borne history panels, displayed every few rows. Most are about King’s Chapel and slavery. Over a period of about 150 years, 55 church members owned slaves. Then in the antebellum years there were the mill owners who bought cotton; they’re faulted for facilitating the slave system. The ministers weren’t keen on the abolition movement — too controversial and political — so, today, King’s Chapel dings them as well as members of the church as “bystanders,” since they were disinclined to top the abolitionists’ barricades. I don’t know how long these panels have been displayed, but it seems the points have been made. Churches are best at fostering the spiritual well-being of the living. I read the “Slavery and King’s Chapel” page on the church’s website, all six sections. “Enslaved” and “enslavers” are vogue terms now, and it’s clear whoever wrote these sections gets a frisson from them. Would there be as many pixels spilled on, say, Jesus?

Rather than follow the granite brick path — it was 105 degrees at that point — I drove to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown. It’s Exhibit 1 in how maddening Boston’s streets can be. Driving in Boston, you can see your destination, but that doesn’t always help you in getting there because of the cow-path origins of Boston’s streets and the giddy abundance of one-way streets. Even GPS was flummoxed, but only a little, in reaching Bunker Hill — Karen Jacobsen, GPS’s voice, is Australian and learned to drive on the madcap, neither right nor wrong, left side of the road. But I got there. The monument is actually on Breed’s Hill, which is where most of the Battle of Bunker Hill unfolded. The adjacent Bunker Hill was more for Patriot staging. Tricky, tricky, tricky.

Coming weeks after Lexington and Concord, the battle marked the British effort to control the hills surrounding Boston’s harbor. Technically, the Brits won. The Patriots retreated, and one of their leaders, General Joseph Warren, was killed, but about a third of the Loyalists’ 3,000 troops were also killed or wounded. Patriot losses were far fewer. The Patriots knew that the Brits were coming and fortified the site, forcing the Brits into a frontal assault. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes” wasn’t coined there, but that was the Patriot tactic. The Brits learned the hard way that the locals were fierce, serious, and competent.

A wooden column memorialized the battle by the 1790s, but Boston movers and shakers in the early 1820s envisioned something grand, especially with the battle’s 50th anniversary approaching. After a monument association bought 15 acres of Breed’s Hill, a committee composed of engineer Loammi Baldwin, Harvard professor George Ticknor, Daniel Webster, and artists Gilbert Stuart and Washington Allston suggested a design. The latter, by the by, was the subject of my dissertation. The future powerhouse sculptor Horatio Greenough, then a 22-year-old Harvard student, presented a drawing based on the Lateran Obelisk in Rome, made around 1400 b.c. in Karnak in Egypt. General Lafayette, during his famous tour of America in 1824, officiated over the laying of the obelisk’s cornerstone.

The monument is a handsome, spartan granite obelisk rising 221 feet from the hill, at 62 feet, so it’s impressive. Construction started in 1825 but, given fits-and-starts fundraising, wasn’t dedicated until 1843. The French gray stone has darkened over nearly 200 years, but its light color and austerity contrast perceptively and soothingly with what is now Charlestown’s dense, ragtag city landscape. The monument’s presence seems to quiet all the urban noise. It kindles a sense of purity of purpose, stoicism in the face of sacrifice, and implacable will. The National Park Service runs the monument and its small visitor center, which is thorough, though nearly all graphics.

In the 1820s, there were very few monuments in America, outside of cemeteries. There’s a lovely, substantial wall monument to General Richard Montgomery on the porch of St. Paul’s Chapel in New York from the 1780s. He led the failed Patriot invasion of Quebec. Houdon made a full-length sculpture of George Washington for Virginia’s Capitol in the late 1780s. Nothing, though, with size and public prominence of the Bunker Hill Monument had happened. It inspired the Washington Monument, designed around the time that the Bunker Hill Monument opened.

Did I climb the 294 steps to see the view of Boston? Been there, done that. I want to live to see the Semiquincentennial!