Scollay Square was a city square in downtown Boston, Massachusetts. It was named for William Scollay, a prominent local developer and militia officer who bought a four-story merchant building at the intersection of Cambridge and Court Streets in the year 1795. Local citizens began to refer to this intersection as Scollay's Square, and, in 1838, the city officially memorialized the intersection as the Scollay Square. Early on, the area was a busy center of commerce, including daguerreotypist (photographer) Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808–1901) and Dr. William Thomas Green Morton, the first dentist to use ether as an anaesthetic.