Photograph: Courtesy of Burns Library

In November 1872, a great fire destroyed some 65 acres of downtown Boston between the Common and the waterfront, including the building on the site of Ben Franklin’s birthplace on Milk Street, in ruins above. The image is part of an exhibition of 17th- through 20th-century Bostoniana, the gift of Ellerton J. Brehaut, a business lobbyist in Boston who died in 1985, that runs through March 31.