Black Heritage Trail

This guide to the Black Heritage Trail in Boston starts on Pinckney Street in 1786, where George Middleton, a coachman and violinist who once led the Bucks of America militia, and Louis Glapion, a hairdresser, pooled their own money to buy land no bank would lend against. You'll hear how the two men built the house with their own hands, boarding it as two households to make the payments work, and how Middleton later helped found an early Black mutual-aid society. It traces how Beacon Hill's free Black community built and insured itself when the rest of the city refused to.