Union Oyster House, Boston

The claim

An oyster house on the Blackstone Block, in a brick building of about 1716 that was a dwelling and then a draper's shop. Hawes Atwood opened his counter on the ground floor on 7 October 1826, and the semicircular oyster bar has stood in the same spot ever since, with its soapstone top under copper. Drink is served at that counter and in the Union Bar of 1983 next door.

What the records show

The 1826 is documented and is not a drinking house, which is why the grade here is C and the ranking leaves the house out. The nomination that made this a National Historic Landmark on 27 May 2003 sets out the sequence plainly: a dwelling in the early 1700s, a specialty store from 1742, and a restaurant from 1826, when Hawes Atwood opened his oyster house on the ground floor on 7 October. The house's own wording is the same — it says it started serving food in 1826. The oyster bar, a semicircular oak counter over soapstone with cast iron stall fittings, has stood in its original position since the alterations of that period, and the nomination calls it and the booths the only known survivors of their kind in the United States. Drink at the counter comes into the record next, in an advertisement of 1854 that offers prime oysters by the bushel at the old noted house of W. and H. Atwood and "their liquors" at sixty-two and a half cents a gallon — a price for carrying drink away rather than for a glass at the bar. Daniel Webster, a regular of the 1840s and 1850s, is reputed to have taken a tumbler of brandy and water with each half dozen oysters. The bar room that trades today, The Union Bar, opened in August 1983 in the north building. As for drinking here now, the city's licensing board records an active all-alcohol licence at the house with no condition tying a drink to a meal, of the kind it attaches to some Boston restaurants, and the Boston Globe's sister site described trays of martinis going out across the floor when it visited for the two hundredth anniversary in July 2026. Read at first hand rather than summarised, the nomination is more careful about the building than this page had been. It reviews five datings and rejects four — Frank C. Brown's 1704, the Historic American Buildings Survey's "built prior to 1714", Donlyn Lyndon's about 1715 with a Marshall Street addition of 1724, offered with no justification, and the Boston Landmarks Commission's about 1730 in its Blackstone Block nomination of 1983 — and accepts instead Arthur Krim's work in the registry of deeds. The conveyance of 13 September 1717, from the tailor John Savell to John Green, describes a newly built brick messuage on Union Street; the deed of 1713 had sold the ground for fifty pounds and mentioned no dwelling, and the deed of 1741 sold it for eighteen hundred. So the house stood by 13 September 1717 and is unlikely to be much older. The chain runs John Cosser in 1679, Savell in 1713, the Reverend James Pierpoint in 1717, Phillips Chamberlain in February 1741 and Thomas Stoddard in 1742, each with a deed book and page. Two dates this page carried need reading the other way about. The house of 1851 at 37 Union Street and the house of 1916 at 14-22 Marshall Street were built in those years but were no part of the oyster house then: the Milano family bought the northern one in 1982 and the southern one in January 1995 and cut openings through the party walls, and the nomination counts only the original building as contributing to the landmark. The family trade is older than the house's own year, too — the Boston directories for 1818 to 1827 have a Stephen Atwood keeping an oyster shop at 8 Water Street from 1818, eight years before his son Hawes opened here. One earlier designation belongs on the record. The house went on the National Register in 1973 inside the Blackstone Block historic district, a 2.3-acre area the nomination describes as the largest unwidened fragment of Boston's original seventeenth-century street plan, its streets settled in their present lines by about 1676 and Union Street formally named in 1708. That district entry draws a boundary and describes no individual building; we have not traced its own reference number or the day it was listed, and the individual entry of 27 May 2003 is the one that dates and describes this house.

Dated evidence for Union Oyster House, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1826	Claimed founding	The pub
c.1716	Present building	https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/03000645_text
1854	First record of a drinking house here	National Register of Historic Places

What to look for inside

The semicircular oyster bar and the stall booths are called the only survivors of their kind in the United States
Daniel Webster was a regular in the 1840s and 1850s
The toothpick was introduced to America here in about 1890

Visiting

Union Oyster House is in Boston, United States, at 41 Union Street, Boston, Massachusetts. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

unionoysterhouse.com Directions in your maps app