Long Wharf

Extract

A stroller wandering on Boston's waterfront will find in one of the better known wharving districts a pier that is a prolongation of State Street (known as King Street in Colonial days), the financial avenue of the City. There will be a penetrating tang of fish in the vicinity, and well might this be so for practically the only vessels that put into this wharf are fishermen's schooners and smacks. There is certainly nothing pretentious about this quay, and yet if some of its rotting timbers only had the powers of speech, what a story they might tell. It is, indeed, Long Wharf, the center of Boston's expanding shipping interests from early Colonial days up to the middle of the nineteenth century. However, we do not have to wait for the old timbers to acquire speech in order to ferret out the romance of Long Wharf; for there are references to it in most Boston histories, and in addition there are numerous business papers of the pier's proprietors now deposited in the Baker Library.