Carts, Watchhouses, and Jails: Spaces of Confinement in Colonial Boston

In colonial Boston, structures were built and unbuilt, moved, and reconfigured to create an overlapping punitive matrix. Some, like the “Gaol” on Queen Street or the Bridewell on the Common, were marked on maps. Others went unrecorded; temporary spaces and everyday items such as coal houses and carts were made carceral by their usage and returned to their original state soon after. How were official and unofficial jails visible to citizenry? What role did fixity versus mobility play in this perception? What did their meaning signal to certain populations? What did a jail, a watchhouse, or a cage signify to a passerby? A structure of containment? An ordinary fixture?

This paper seeks to recover the spatial carceral history of Boston by making the jail, and accompanying spaces to jail people temporarily, legible as discrete spaces and places on the landscape. The paper uses petitions, diaries, testimonials, complaints, acts, newspapers, watch reports, and maps to illuminate the interior and exterior spaces of confinement. A spatial and material approach helps us to better understand how the Boston gaol and the various spaces of jailing that left no permanent mark on the landscape materialized and were organized, but more significantly, how they were experienced by ordinary people who found themselves confined within.