The Freedom Trail: North End Graveyard & Shem Drowne

The North End Graveyard is an unmarked location in Fallout 4, across the street from Mean Pastries, west of Pickman's Gallery and east of Cabot House. Players may end up there during the Gilded Grasshopper quest, in which case they can dig up the grave of Shem Drowne for some loot.

Shem Drowne was a real person, not just a video game story, and he really did make a gilded grasshopper weathervane (read more about that in my Faneuil Hall section). Though whether or not he's actually buried with a radioactive sword or with bars of copper, silver and gold, I have no idea.

The real-life grave marker of Shem Drowne (right) and his wife Katherine, at Copp's Hill Burying Ground in Boston.
Photo by Diane Blair via FindaGrave.com

Shem Drowne's grave and headstone in Fallout 4, after digging up his coffin during the Gilded Grasshopper quest.
PS4 screen capture by Jewelsmith

With the cemetery's location relative to the Old North Church and other landmarks in Fallout 4, and the existence of Drowne's grave there, North End Graveyard seems to be based on Copp's Hill Burying Ground in Boston.

Copp's Hill Burying Ground in Boston
Photo by Rhododendrites via Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0

North End graveyard as seen in Fallout 4, based on Copp's Hill Burying Ground in Boston
PS4 screen capture by Jewelsmith

In use for about two hundred years, from 1659 until the mid-1800s, Copp's Hill is the final resting place of more than 10,000 people, including:

Shem and Katherine Drowne
Cotton Mather and his father Increase Mather, two Puritans who were associated with the Salem witch trials
Prince Hall, leader of the free black community of Boston in the 1700s
Robert Newman, the guy who put the lanterns in the Old North Church steeple for Paul Revere
Edmund Hartt, builder of the USS Constitution

During the Revolutionary War, British troops used the hill to fire artillery onto Charlestown during the Battle of Bunker Hill and possibly used the gravestones for target practice.

Copp's Hill Burying Ground, with Skinny House across the street, and Old North Church in Boston, courtesy of Google maps

Across the street from Copp's Hill Burying Ground in modern-day Boston is an unusual building called Skinny House, while across the street from North End Graveyard in Fallout 4 is an unmarked bakery called Mean Pastries.

I didn't think there was any connection between the two locations until I read that Skinny House is a "spite house" built to anger its neighbors.

Maybe that's why the pastry shop in Fallout 4 is "mean" - because it's spiteful?

The front of Mean Pastries bakery in Fallout 4, across the street from North End Graveyard, and with the green, white and red bunting seen throughout the North End area of the game. Inset map shows the location of the bakery (indicated by the arrow) as well as Pickman Gallery, the Old North Church and Railroad HQ.
PS4 screen capture by Jewelsmith, map from Fallout4map.com

While Copp's Hill Burying Ground is a stop on the Freedom Trail in Boston, in Fallout 4 the "Road to Freedom" quest ends at Old North Church.

However, there are still pieces of the red brick line that can be followed to North End Graveyard and Bunker Hill in the video game, without seals to mark them as official sites because they're not needed to decode the password for Railroad HQ.

A red brick line can be seen by North End graveyard, but there's no seal to mark it as a stop on the Freedom Trail in Fallout 4 - PS4 screen capture by Jewelsmith