Nothing is more central to Boston than the Common, the oldest public park in the United States and undoubtedly the largest and most famous of the town commons around which New England settlements were traditionally arranged. Boston Common is not built on landfill like the adjacent Public Garden, nor is it the result of 19th-century park planning, as are Frederick Law Olmsted's Fens and Franklin Park; it started as 50 acres where the freemen of Boston could graze their cattle. (Cows were banned in 1830.) Dating from 1634, it's as old as the city around it. Latin names are affixed to many of the Common's trees; it was once expected that proper Boston schoolchildren be able to translate them.

The Central Burying Ground (Boylston St. near Tremont. Park St.) may seem an odd feature for a public park, but remember that in 1756, when the land was set aside, this was a lonely corner of the Common. It's the final resting place of Tories and Patriots alike, as well as many British casualties of the Battle of Bunker Hill. The most famous person buried here is Gilbert Stuart, the portraitist best known for his likenesses of George and Martha Washington; he died a poor man in 1828. The Burying Ground is open daily 9-5. On Tremont Street near Boylston stands the 1888 Boston Massacre Memorial; the sculpted hand of one of the victims has a distinct shine from years of sightseers' caresses. The Common's highest ground, near the park's Parkman Bandstand, was once called Flagstaff Hill. It's now surmounted by the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, honoring Civil War troops. The Common's only body of water is the Frog Pond, a tame and frog-free concrete depression used as a children's wading pool during steamy summer days and for ice-skating in winter. It marks the original site of a natural pond that inspired Edgar Allan Poe to call Bostonians "Frogpondians." In 1848 a gushing fountain of piped-in water was created to inaugurate Boston's municipal water system.

On the Beacon Street side of the Common sits the splendidly restored Robert Gould Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial, executed in deep-relief bronze by Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1897. It commemorates the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first Civil War unit made up of free blacks, led by the young Brahmin Robert Gould Shaw. He and half of his troops died in an assault on South Carolina's Fort Wagner; their story inspired the 1989 movie Glory. The monument -- first intended to depict only Shaw until his abolitionist family demanded it honor his regiment as well -- figures in works by the poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell, both of whom lived on the north slope of Beacon Hill in the 1940s. In Lowell's moving poem "For the Union Dead" he writes, "at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe." This magnificent memorial makes a fitting first stop on the Black Heritage Trail.