City to honor Prince Hall with a monument

Cambridge Mayor E. Denise Simmons has been known to buttonhole people to ask what they know about Prince Hall.

And when the Institute for Very Small Things, a group of local geographic activists, was collecting suggestions for renaming the city's streets several years ago, Simmons offered "Prince Hall Boulevard" for Massachusetts Avenue.

Now, Simmons has secured approval for a monument to the Revolutionary-era African-American leader on Cambridge Common. An announcement of the winning design is expected within the next two months.

Hall was probably born in 1738, enslaved by William Hall, a Boston leather merchant, and freed in 1770.

"There is a legend," said Simmons, "that he spoke with Washington on Cambridge Common," where George Washington had taken command of the Continental Army in the summer of 1775. And during that meeting, Hall is believed to have urged Washington to recruit African-Americans into the gathering army.

He may have fought at Bunker Hill, and it is known that he made five leather drumheads for the Boston Regiment of Artillery in 1777.

After the Revolution, he became a leader in Boston's black community, with a school for black children operated out of his house on Beacon Hill, and founded the Masonic lodge that bears his name.

But it is the meeting with Washington that resonated with Simmons, and, she said, "I wanted to place the monument in a place where Hall had a historical context."

And as an African-American mayor, Simmons said, "it's exciting to be working on this."

As now planned, the monument would stand on the cobblestone-paved circle where there is already a "tombstone-style" monument to Washington and three cannons of the Revolutionary War period.

Nearby are the Civil War monument, with its standing figure of Lincoln by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; a monument to Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish nobleman who fought in the Revolution; and a monument commemorating the Irish famine.

The proposal for a Prince Hall monument on the site has received approval from the City Council and the city's Historical Commission.

Simmons said preliminary proposals for the design are being considered. Once a winner is chosen, there will be a capital campaign to raise up to $100,000 for the monument's final design, creation, and installation. Simmons said the goal is to have the monument in place by this time next year.

Hall spoke often in Methodist churches and at public meetings in the area around Boston and Cambridge, and Simmons said the records of those speeches left her deeply struck by his call "to extend the hand of fellowship."

That sentiment, she said, would be a striking one to be depicted on the proposed monument by an outstretched arm.