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Boston is called Beantown because of baked beans. Colonial Bostonians slow-baked beans in a pot, and once the town was making rum in the late 1700s, molasses went in as the sweetener; a pot put into a brick oven on Saturday was still hot on Sunday, when Puritan custom ruled out cooking. The name spread nationally in 1907, when the Old Home Week tourism campaign handed out about a million bean-pot stickers and postcards reading You don't know beans until you come to Boston. Few Bostonians use it. The nickname the city uses for itself is the Hub.
Where did the Beantown nickname come from?
The bean pot is older than Boston. Native Americans were baking beans before the English arrived, sweetened with maple syrup, and the colonists adopted the method, according to Celebrate Boston's history of the nickname. The Puritans' strict Sabbath gave the dish its place in the week: beans went into a pot and into a hot brick oven overnight on Saturday, and were served warm on Sunday. Baked beans with brown bread stayed a traditional Sunday meal in Boston until the early 1900s.
Molasses came with the rum trade. Molasses is a byproduct of refining cane sugar and the base of rum, and Boston became a maker and exporter of rum in the late 1700s. Boston baked beans, with molasses and salt pork, most likely took their familiar form then.
The word itself owes most to marketing. Old Home Week ran from July 28 to August 3, 1907, and its promoters printed about a million stickers, then a new idea, showing two clasped hands above a bean pot. Postcards that summer carried slogans such as Souvenir of Boston and Vicinity, Won't You Have Some, again with a bean pot. Boston Magazine has since argued the name should be retired in a 2022 piece titled Why the Name Beantown Has to Go.
Why is Boston called the Hub?
The Hub comes from Oliver Wendell Holmes. In The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, published in 1858, a character declares that the Boston State House is the hub of the solar system. The phrase stuck, and the Hub is still a common nickname for the city.
The building he meant is the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Street, across from Boston Common. Samuel Adams laid the cornerstone in 1795, Paul Revere covered the dome in copper in 1802, and the building has been the seat of state government since 1798. Free guided tours run on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.; the building is closed on weekends and holidays.
Why is Faneuil Hall called the Cradle of Liberty?
Because Bostonians argued their way toward independence there. The National Park Service, which runs it with the City of Boston, notes that people have gathered in Faneuil Hall to assert their rights for more than 275 years, and the Freedom Trail Foundation records protests there against the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act in the 1760s. The Park Service is also direct about the building's origins: Peter Faneuil, who gave the hall to the town in 1742, built an Atlantic trading empire that the Park Service describes as one of goods, wealth and enslavement. Admission to every floor is free, the Great Hall is on the second floor, and rangers give short talks from Wednesday to Sunday.
The Boston sights visitors remember
Every nickname points at the same few miles of old Boston, and those are the places most first-time visitors remember. The Freedom Trail is a 2.5-mile line of red brick and paint linking 16 historic sites, the State House and Faneuil Hall among them. Behind Faneuil Hall, Quincy Market turned 200 in 2026, and its colonnade is described by the marketplace as the first food hall in the United States. A block away, Union Oyster House has served oysters and chowder since 1826 and calls itself the oldest restaurant in continuous service in the country.
Outside the old center, Fenway Park opened on April 20, 1912, and its left-field wall, the Green Monster, stands 37 feet 2 inches high; ballpark tours run every day of the year. In autumn, the Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, part of the Olmsted-designed park chain known as the Emerald Necklace, is free and open daily from sunrise to sunset, and its summit has a view of the Boston skyline. The Orange Line's Forest Hills station is the nearest stop.
For more on what the city is known for, read our guides to the things Boston is known for, historical things to do in Boston and the top 10 things to do in Boston.