The Boston Stone on Marshall Street

At the base of a brick wall on Marshall Street, beside the narrow alley behind the Union Oyster House, sits a round stone with a carved plinth that reads "Boston Stone 1737." It began life as part of a paint mill. By the usual account, a painter named Thomas Child brought the stone from England around 1700 to grind pigments, and it was later dug up on the property and set into the wall when the present building went up in the 1830s. The story goes that the stone marked the center of Boston and served as the zero point from which surveyors measured distances to the town. There are no contemporary records to support that, and historians think the claim was probably an early nineteenth-century advertising idea by a Marshall Street merchant. Why the plinth says 1737 is still unexplained. The stone carries no plaque and has no official status.