A new book that looks at the 50 oldest buildings in the city includes only one on Beacon Hill, which admittedly came as somewhat of a surprise to the author.
“I figured there would have been a least a couple of them, but Beacon Hill as a neighborhood kind of appeared out of nowhere around 1800,” said Joseph M. Bagley, the city’s archeologist and author of “Boston’s Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them” (2021 Brandeis University Press). “The reality is if I had made it ‘Boston’s 100 Oldest Buildings and Where to Find Them,’ at least half of them would be in Beacon Hill or in Charlestown.”