City Hall Plaza (formerly 50–62 Hanover Street), Boston
American House was one of Boston’s leading hotels. Opened in 1835, it was the first hotel in the United States to have a passenger elevator.
One of its most famous guests checked in on March 4, 1858. His name was John Brown. Brown was there to meet with his closest supporters, those who would come to be known as the “Secret Six.”
The next evening, Friday, March 12, the six abolitionists—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Samuel Gridly Howe, Theodore Parker, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and George Luther Stearns—met with Brown in his room at American House. There they hatched the plot which would culminate in Brown’s ill-fated attack on a federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). In the following days, the six supporters would form a secret committee to advise Brown and raise the funds needed to undertake the famed raid, one that aimed to incite an armed uprising among the enslaved. The October 16, 1859 raid and subsequent trail, conviction and execution of Brown and his fellow raiders polarized the national conversation over slavery and contributed to the Civil War’s outbreak.
American House permanently shut its doors in 1935, one hundred years after its founding, and was torn down shortly thereafter. The section of Hanover Street on which the hotel was located exists no longer. Along with the rest of Scollay Square, it fell victim to urban renewal in the early 1960s. Today, the John F. Kennedy Federal Building stands on the site.
Getting there:
Blue or Green Line to Government Center Station. The JFK Federal Building stands on the northern side of City Hall Plaza.
To learn more:
Renehan. Edward J. Jr., The Secret Six: The True Tale of the Men Who Conspired with John Brown, New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1995.
Image: American House, by Lewis Rice, circa 1855. Drawing from Library of Congress.