Chapter 1The Prison Door

A bunch of dudes with beards - seriously, a lot of them - were hanging out in front of a building. They were all wearing kinda gloomy clothes and gray hats with pointy tops. There were women too, some with hoods, others without.

The building itself was made of wood, and the door was super solid, with thick oak planks and iron spikes hammered all over it.

The founders of a new colony, no matter how perfect they envisioned their community, always realized they needed a cemetery and a prison pretty quickly.

Following this pattern, the first settlers of Boston probably built a jail somewhere near Cornhill, about the same time they picked out a burial ground on Isaac Johnson’s land. That area eventually became the main cemetery around King’s Chapel.

It's pretty clear that, fifteen or twenty years after the town was founded, the wooden jail was already showing its age - weathered and looking gloomy. The rust on the heavy iron door was the oldest thing around, it seemed. Like everything related to crime, it had never really felt young.

In front of this not-so-pretty building, between it and the street, was a patch of grass full of weeds like burdock and pigweed. This kind of stuff clearly thrived in the soil that had seen the start of civilized society - a prison.

But on one side of the entrance, right near the door, was a wild rose bush. In June, it was covered in delicate flowers, almost like they were offering their scent and beauty to anyone going in - the prisoner - or coming out - the condemned. It was like Nature was saying, "Even I feel for you."

This rose bush, somehow, has stuck around through history. But did it just survive the wilderness after all the huge pines and oaks disappeared? Or, like some people believe, did it grow where Ann Hutchinson stepped when she walked into the prison? We’re not gonna try to figure that out.

Finding it right on the edge of our story - which is about to come out of that not-so-great doorway - we just had to pick one of its flowers and give it to you.

Hopefully, it’s like a little symbol of something good you might find along the way, or a bright spot at the end of a story about people messing up and feeling sad.