The Central Burying Ground is on the Boylston Street side of Boston Common and contains the graves of artist Gilbert Stuart and composer William Billings.

Blaxton migrated five miles north to the Shawmut Peninsula, then a rocky bulge at the end of a swampy isthmus surrounded on all sides by mudflats.

[8] In 1630, Blaxton wrote a decisive letter to the Puritan group led by Isaac Johnson, whose colony of Charlestown was then failing from lack of fresh water.

Johnson died less than three weeks later and Blaxton negotiated a grant of 50 acres around his home on the western edge of the peninsula from Governor John Winthrop.

[9] One of Johnson's last official acts as the leader of the Charleston community was to name the new settlement across the river Boston after his original home in Lincolnshire, England.

However, Blaxton quickly tired of his Puritan neighbors and the difficulty of retaining such a large plot of land in a town that had grown to nearly 4,000 people by 1633.

The most famous victims of the Common's era as an execution grounds were the group of Quakers known almost immediately after their deaths as the Boston Martyrs.

This was Mary Dyer, who was hanged from the oak by the Puritan government of Boston for repeatedly defying a law that banned Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

[16][17][18][8] The Common's status as a civic property led to its use as a public speaking grounds, frequently used by evangelists such as George Whitefield.

They later attacked the ships and warehouses of wealthy merchant Andrew Belcher who was exporting grain to the British West Indies for higher profits.

These uses gradually became more urban as the city developed, shifting from pastureland to military drilling field, execution grounds, public gathering place, and finally parkland.

This resulted in the portions of the two parks being "a moist stew that reeked and that was a mess to walk over" and driving visitors away from these areas, but the cost of repair prevented the work from being undertaken.

[1][3] It is managed by the Boston Park Department and cared for by Friends of the Public Garden, a private advocacy group which also provides additional funding for maintenance and special events.