Federal-style rowhouses, narrow gaslit streets and brick sidewalks run through the neighborhood, which is generally regarded as one of the more desirable and expensive in Boston.

The shoreline and bodies of water such as the Mill Pond had a "massive filling", increasing Boston's land mass by 150%.

According to the 2012–2016 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, the largest ancestry groups in ZIP Codes 02108 and 02114 are:[17][18] The first European settler was William Blaxton, also spelled Blackstone.

[11] John Singleton Copley owned land on the south slope for pasture for his cows and farmland.

[11][nb 4] Eighteen and a half[22] or 19 acres of grassland west of the State House was purchased in 1795, most of it from John Singleton Copley.

The Beacon Hill district's development began when Charles Bulfinch, an architect and planner, laid out the plan for the neighborhood.

[25] Some affluent people moved, beginning in the 1870s, to Back Bay with its "French-inspired boulevards and mansard-roofed houses that were larger, lighter, and airier than the denser Beacon Hill.

"[26] In the early 19th century, there were "fringe activities" along the Back Bay waterfront, with ropewalks along Beacon and Charles Streets.

[6] The residents of opulent homes, called the Boston Brahmins, were described by Oliver Wendell Holmes as a "harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy".

They had "houses by Charles Bulfinch, their monopoly on Beacon Street, their ancestral portraits and Chinese porcelains, humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of the mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness.

"Great thinkers" lived in the neighborhood, including Daniel Webster, Henry Thoreau and Wendell Phillips.

[6] Today, many of the 19th century waterfront landmarks, such as the Charles Street Meeting House, are found far from the water due to the filling that has taken place since then.

The north slope was the home of African Americans, sailors and Eastern and Southern European immigrants.

The African Meeting House on Joy Street was a community center for members of the black elite.

Frederick Douglass spoke there about abolition, and William Lloyd Garrison formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society at the Meeting House.

[6][21][33] Many homes built of brick and wood in the early 19th century were dilapidated by the end of the Civil War and were razed for new housing.

[6] Banks, restaurants and other service industries moved into the "Flat of the Hill", with a resulting transformation of the neighborhood.

[6] Red-light districts operated near Beacon Hill in Scollay Square and the West End until a 1950s urban renewal project renovated the area.

[39][40][41][42] Charles Street Meeting House was built in 1807, the church had seating that segregated white and black people.

Founded in 1922 by neighbors with the goal of preventing home building and other construction, today it continues as a volunteer advocacy organization focused on improving quality of life in the neighborhood.

[45] Since then its efforts have been instrumental in preserving Beacon Hill as a historic district, and have expanded to include such initiatives as: working to become the first neighborhood to receive resident parking permits, streamlining trash service, and creating a virtual retirement community serving the neighborhood's elderly.

[48][49] Religious organizations include the Vilna Shul, an Orthodox Jewish synagogue, and the Unitarian Universalist Association headquarters.

[51][21] The Park Street Church, nicknamed "Brimstone Corner" in the 19th century, was used to store gunpowder during the War of 1812.

[23] One of the few outposts of the small Protestant group the Swedenborgian Church is on Bowdoin Street, and was embroiled in controversy in 2013 over alleged extortion by a former mafioso.

[52] While home to a Paulist chapel, Beacon Hill is currently one of only two neighborhoods in Boston that does not contain a Catholic parish church.

Beacon Hill has been home to many notable persons, including: Highstyle Federal brick townhouses, two and three stories tall with elliptical porticoes, pilasters and balustrades, the most ambitious of them free standing and Bulfinch-designed, were built along the crest of Beacon Hill and on Cambridge Street.

Substantial but less pretentious middle-class housing, three story, brick sidehall Federal rowhouses with side and fanlit entrances, filled in the lower slopes of Beacon Hill and the South End along Washington Street while modest sidehall brick houses, three stories tall, were built in the working class neighborhoods of the North End, the north slope of Beacon Hill and the West End.