A monumnet to Prince Hall, a freed Black man who founded the first Black Masonic Lodge in the U.S., stands in the Copp's HIll Burying Ground. Hall's small, rough-hewn gravestone sits just behind this monument, erected more than 80 years after his death. The burial ground was described in a 1851 catalog of gravesites as a place where “many of the fathers of New England were buried.”

There are few marked graves or details of the Black people buried here, with one very notable exception: Prince Hall, an abolitionist leader and founder of the first Black freemason lodge in America.
Hall was likely born enslaved, but it was as a free man that he drafted several petitions to colonial authorities in the 1770s seeking the liberation of slaves. In 1787, he wrote a petition objecting to the exclusion of Black children from schools.

Hall and 213 other Black men attempted to join a Boston Freemason lodge and were rejected. They instead applied to an Irish lodge attached to British soldiers stationed on Castle Island, where they were admitted in 1775. In 1784, they were granted their own charter for what became African Lodge #459, the first lodge of Blacks in America.