Dorchester is a dissolved municipality and current neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is named after the town of Dorchester in the English county of Dorset, from which Puritans emigrated and is today endearingly nicknamed "Dot" by its residents. Dorchester, including a large portion of today's Boston, was separately incorporated in 1630. It was still a primarily rural town and had a population of 12,000 when annexed to Boston in 1870. Railroad and streetcar lines brought rapid growth, increasing the population to 150,000 by 1920. It is now a large working class community with many African Americans, European Americans (and is still a center of Irish American immigration), Caribbean Americans, Latinos, and East and Southeast Asian Americans. Recently, there has been an influx of young professionals, gay men, and working artists to the neighborhood, adding to its diversity.
May 30, 1630, Captain Squib of the ship Mary and John entered Boston Harbor and on June 17, 1630 landed a boat with eight men on the Dorchester shore, at what was then a narrow peninsula known as Mattapan or Mattaponnock, and today is known as Columbia Point (more popularly since 1984 as Harbor Point). Those aboard the ship who founded the town included William Phelps, Roger Ludlowe, John Mason, Samuel Maverick, Nicholas Upsall, Henry Wolcott and other men who would become prominent in the founding of a new nation. The original settlement founded in 1630 was at what is now the intersection of Columbia Road and Massachusetts Avenue. (Even though Dorchester was annexed over 100 years ago into the city of Boston, this founding is still celebrated every year on Dorchester Day, which includes festivities and a parade down Dorchester Avenue).
Most of the early Dorchester settlers came from the West Country of England, and some from Dorchester, Dorset, where the Rev. John White was chief proponent of a Puritan settlement in the New World. (Rev. John White has been referred to as the unheralded champion of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, because despite his heroic efforts on its behalf, he remained in England and never emigrated to the Colony he championed.) The town that was founded was centered around the First Parish Church of Dorchester, which still exists as the Unitarian-Universalist church on Meetinghouse Hill and is the oldest religious organization in present-day Boston.