Boston is incorporated as a town.

Court of Assistants, meeting in the Great House in Charlestown, orders “that Trimountaine shall be called Boston,” in honor of the town in Lincolnshire from which many of its settlers had emigrated, and which Nathaniel Hawthorne later describes as the “quick and slovenly English pronunciation” of “St. Botolph’s Town.” While its first settlement is confined to the 783-acre Shawmut peninsula, the town’s original boundaries include what is today Brookline, Chelsea, Braintree, Quincy, and Randolph. It is incorporated as a city in 1822,* and after separations, annexations, and landmaking, Boston reaches its present size of nearly 31,000 acres or 48.4 square miles. Originally a center for shipping and trade, Boston becomes a manufacturing and wholesale center in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then a center for professional services, higher education, health care, science and technology in the last half of the 20th century.