Boston's Maverick Square

For a yearly consideration of "a fat wether, a fat hog, or 40 shillings in money," the Great and General Court of Massachusetts in its assembly of 1633 granted to Samuel Maverick a plot of land which had come to be known as Noddle's Island.

The Island was a pastoral ground of almost 1,000 acres, in the bay directly east of the new settlement of Boston; it made a worthy estate for one of the American colonies' worthiest citizens. Samuel Maverick was "a young man of means and education in his twenty-second year" when he arrived in Massachusetts three years after the landing of the Mayflower. The son of the Reverend John Maverick of Exeter, England, often called "the godly Mr. Maverick," he had been appointed a royal commissioner for the Massachusetts settlements. As a strict Episcopalian, he often upset the Puritans of Boston and the other diverse communities and was a frequent antagonist of John Winthrop.

The property at Noddle's Island was granted to Maverick "to enjoy to him and his heirs forever" and, in fact, remained in the family for some time. Apparently the last of the Mavericks to hold the land was the original Samuel's great-grandson, who was killed in the Boston Massacre. The Mavericks then moved gradually southward, eventually to found the famed Maverick clan of Texas.

The first of these Mavericks was another Samuel, one of the great cattlemen of the nineteenth century who, leaving his cattle unbranded, made "maverick" a common as well as a proper noun. His grandson Maury Maverick was a controversial Texas Congressman and reform-minded mayor of San Antonio; Maury Maverick, Jr., is a lawyer, writer, and leading spokesman for the Texas liberal movement.

But the Maverick family homestead did not fare so well as the Mavericks did themselves. The old acerage became in the mid-nineteenth century a rather reputable, almost elegant, community of proper Bostonians, but as the century subsided so did Noddle's Island.

It is now East Boston, an area populated largely by immigrant groups living in sub-standard housing. At the center of this area is Maverick Square.