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Lewis Wharf, Boston's Gateway to Joshua Norton's New World
When Joshua Norton arrived in Boston on 12 March 1846, the packet ship Sunbeam that had carried him from Liverpool docked at Lewis Wharf.
Probably the first structure that Joshua saw when he stepped off the ship was the wharf's market building — an impressive, long, 4-plus-story gabled edifice of timber and local Quincy granite that had been built ten years earlier, in 1836.
Although no longer being put to the same uses that it was in the 1830s and '40s, that signature building still stands on Lewis Wharf — and perhaps is the only non-California place in the United States that the once and future Emperor is documented to have passed through.
Read on for a brief but richly illustrated history of Lewis Wharf and its signature building — including the wharf's deep ties to one of the most legendary figures in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States of which Joshua Norton declared himself Emperor.
Plenty of documentary goodies here: Engravings, photographs, plans, maps and newspaper clippings from 1772 to the present.