Boston Associates dominate the local economy.

The group includes Nathaniel Appleton, Kirk Boott, Patrick Tracy Jackson, Abbott and Amos Lawrence, Harrison Gray Otis, T.H. Perkins, William Sturgis, and assorted Cabots, Eliots, Lowells, Lymans, and Quincys. By 1850, according to Lawrence Lader, the 15 families held two fifths of the city’s banking capital, a third of the state’s railroad mileage and to-fifths of its insurance capital, and a fifth of all the cotton spindles in U.S. Henry Cabot Lodge biographer Kurt Schriftgiesser later writes, “They controlled the press and pulpit and politics of Massachusetts.”