What happened
Green Dragon Lane took its name from the copper dragon that hung on an iron crane outside the tavern; the lane is Union Street now. The brick house is dated by various accounts to about 1680, and a two-storey brick public house stood on the plot by 1714 at the latest. William Douglas, a physician, bought it in 1743 and lived in it, calling it his mansion house; after his death his sister sold it in 1766 to the St Andrew's Lodge of Freemasons, who took the first floor for their meetings and left the tavern in the cellar. That cellar is why Daniel Webster's phrase, quoted on the memorial tablet of 1892, stuck to the place: headquarters of the Revolution. The Sons of Liberty, the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Boston Caucus met there, the Tea Party was planned there, and Paul Revere set out from there for Lexington. The tavern was advertised for sale in January 1826 and did not long outlive the advertisement.
What is there now
Nothing of the tavern survives. The Lodge rebuilt the site as a warehouse in 1854 and set a sandstone dragon into its wall in 1855; that warehouse was cleared in 1960s urban renewal, and the 1892 tablet went to the Bostonian Society, now Revolutionary Spaces. A pub called the Green Dragon Tavern trades close by at 11 Marshall Street. It is a different building, and we found nothing connecting it to the old house beyond the name.
Sources
- Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- historyofmassachusetts.org
- commons.wikimedia.org
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