Bonfires were a regular feature of life in the early republic. They may have been lit on Gallows Hill to celebrate victories, in war or at the polls, or to mark other civic occasions. Certainly, they were lit in New England towns at every available excuse. When the Declaration of Independence was ratified, and John Adams wrote that its anniversary "ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other," he was drawing upon the full and familiar array of holiday celebrations.
And his words proved prophetic. In the young republic, the Glorious Fourth was the premier political holiday, filled with partisan speeches, processions, and public feasts. Celebrations lost much of their civic character after the Civil War, becoming rowdier, drenched with liquor and punctuated with exuberant gunfire. In Salem, the young men returned to Gallows Hill, where their fathers and grandfathers had built bonfires to mark Pope-Day, and proved similarly devoted to the momentary blaze. The pyramids they constructed were not only physically imposing, but also practical. Old barrels were abundant and available, a by-product of the industrial age.
These wild, towering conflagrations garnered support at the beginning of the 20th century from an unlikely quarter: the national movement for a Safe and Sane Fourth of July. In 1903, the year that the Journal of the American Medical Association first compiled statistics, celebrations of the Glorious Fourth left more than 400 dead and nearly 4,000 injured. Blank cartridges, fired off by children with toy guns, were the leading cause of injury. "Patriotic tetanus" often ensued; the bacillus claimed most of its annual victims in that first week of July. Parents, one reformer wrote, "each hoped that the Angel of Death might pass by our own child and that it might be only a strange little toddler whose eyesight would be destroyed or whose pretty baby fingers would be torn and mutilated."
Fortunately, New England had an alternative tradition readily at hand. Compared to the deadly mayhem of firecrackers and guns, a public bonfire seemed positively innocuous. It could be carefully sited, supervised and controlled. It could supplant the smaller, improvised bonfires that boys built by taking everything wooden that was not nailed down, and which often set neighboring houses aflame. It could replace the blazing tar barrels, lighted and rolled unevenly through the streets. Local politicians, once burnt in effigy at rowdier bonfires, could instead wave to the assembled crowds and light the pyre. In 1915, Boston officially sanctioned one of its three annual conflagrations, in Roxbury; the crowd there tripled that year, to more than 30,000. More than 200,000 gathered at the official bonfire in 1929, as the city congratulated itself on creating a "general observance of 'the night before' under safe and sane conditions," leaving behind "the old idea of individual parties where danger lurks."