Brick walls and a gilded lion and unicorn rise above you here, marking the oldest surviving public building in Boston, built in 1713. The Old State House was built in 1713 as the seat of the Massachusetts colonial government and served as the site of the Massachusetts General Court, the highest courts of the colony, and the merchants' exchange. On March 5, 1770, a confrontation on the street directly before you between a crowd of Bostonians and a squad of British soldiers escalated into the Boston Massacre: the soldiers fired into the crowd, killing five people.
Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American heritage, was the first to fall and became the first American killed in what would become the Revolutionary War. Paul Revere's engraving of the Massacre, which deliberately exaggerated the scene to inflame public opinion, was one of the most effective pieces of propaganda in American history. The Declaration of Independence was first read to Bostonians from the balcony of this building on July 18, 1776, to a crowd that tore the royal lion and unicorn from the building's facade.
Replicas of those symbols still stand on the facade today. The circle of cobblestones in the traffic island outside marks the spot of the Massacre.