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For more than a year, Joe Bagley has been figuratively — and literally — digging into Charlestown’s history. After all, it’s his job, as Boston’s city archaeologist.
To mark the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Bagley has been leading an effort to understand what Charlestown was like before and after June 17, 1775.
Why? Because basically all of Charlestown was burned to the ground in the run-up to the battle when British troops fired heated cannonballs into the neighborhood from Boston Harbor. Thousands of residents lost everything; some never returned.
Bagley’s team is immediately excavating parts of Charlestown to find what was left behind. Ahead of an event about the project tonight at the Bunker Hill Museum, Bagley spoke with WBUR’s Tiziana Dearing about what they’ve been finding.
Here’s an excerpt of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity:
What are you finding?
“One of the biggest things we actually found in the archives, which was the handwritten accounts of hundreds of Charlestown residents who fled the town and then submitted a list of what they lost. It’s kind of like archeological cheatsheets. When we dig, we look for stuff, and these are essentially lists of all the things that they lost in the battle when their homes burned.”
You’re basically reconstructing the lives of people in a town from the 1700s-equivalent of insurance claims.
“Exactly, and they were never paid back. The last documents we have from the claims are from the 1830s where essentially they’re saying, ‘We’re giving up, but know that we’re still upset that we haven’t gotten paid back for this.’ “
Where did people rebuild their lives? Did they come back to Charlestown? Did they go elsewhere?
“Some did and some didn’t. We had an entire pottery industry in Charlestown. After the fire, people lost their kilns, their warehouses, their workshops, and they fled the town because everybody did and essentially went to their families, who were mostly other potters in other towns, and didn’t come back.”
What have you found in the rubble from the homes they lost that has really fascinated you?
“We have a tavern site that essentially is Boston’s Pompeii. The townspeople fled. When they came back, they voted to leave their town tavern, the Three Cranes Tavern, undeveloped forever. They pushed all the stuff into the middle of the foundation, and it’s essentially a time capsule of everything that was dropped on that day in 1775.
“immediately, we have the claims from Nathaniel Brown, who owned the tavern site, listing everything that he claimed. We’re talking about thousands of fragments of dishes and drinking vessels, and the actual burned building fragments.”
What’s the end game with this set of digs?
“My goal is to add something back to the story that personalizes this history and makes it hopefully mean something to a broader segment of the population. There are stories about everyday people, who were in the town of Charlestown, who saw their lives change in one morning, who ran out their doors and came back to literally nothing. And I think that’s really the human story of the impacts of war. We see it all around the world today. The battle is something that we kind of glorify today, but also there was this deep loss, this trauma that hundreds and hundreds of people went through on that day, in addition to the people at the battlefield who lost their lives.”
In other news:
Stopping the stop: Work can resume on Revolution Wind — for immediately. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction yesterday against the Trump administration’s stop-work order to the large and nearly complete offshore wind farm near Rhode Island.
- Why? Judge Royce Lamberth said the Trump administration failed to provide “any factual findings or cite any reasons” for the potential national security concerns it used to justify the stop-work order. Additionally, he said the order was causing “irreparable harm” to the project’s developer, which said it was losing at least $2.3 million a day. That said, Lamberth’s injunction isn’t a final ruling; it simply allows construction to resume as Revolution’s lawsuit moves forward. WBUR’s Miriam Wasser has more on the reactions to the ruling here.
It’s official: Boston Mayor Michelle Wu will be unopposed in November’s election. Boston’s election department announced yesterday afternoon that a recount bid by Domingos DaRosa, the preliminary’s third-place finisher, came up short.
- DaRosa was hoping to get on the ballot after second-place finisher Josh Kraft dropped out two days after the election. Due to a little-known state law, DaRosa needed to get another 600 votes to do so. Ultimately, the recount only added 19.
P.S.— Calling all early-career journalists. The deadline to apply for one of WBUR’s 2026 newsroom fellowships is this Friday. These paid fellowships provide hands-on training in every aspect of public media journalism, whether it’s in the studio, on the website or in the field. And you can specialize in climate or arts and culture reporting. Learn more about the different types of fellowship and application process here.
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