One of the more enjoyable rites of springtime in and around Boston is the annual celebration of the events leading up to the American Revolution. Now held on the third Monday in April, but originally occurring on April 18, the state holiday known as Patriot’s Day sees all kinds of special events. Most famous is the Boston Marathon, which since 1897 has been run from Hopkinton southwest of the city through Newton to its finish at Copley Square. Although the marathon follows a very different route, it is held on the anniversary of another famous race, the one between British soldiers and patriot Paul Revere, who made his legendary ride on the night of April 18, 1775, to warn his fellow minutemen of the British march on Lexington and Concord.
At the end of his ride, on the morning of April 19, Paul Revere reached the Buckman Tavern in Lexington, where fellow revolutionaries John Hancock and Samuel Adams (he of boutique beer fame) were asleep, awaiting word of the British advance. Revere woke them (and some 70 others), and at 5:30 am they assembled to meet the redcoats. Although the minutemen backed off, shots were fired and eight Americans were killed. Three hours later, when the British moved on to Concord, they were met by a much larger and better organized force of minutemen, who fired back and started what we now know as the Revolutionary War. This battle, which raged all day and followed the overwhelmed British all the way back to Boston, was remembered in another oft-recited patriotic poem by Concord writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, words from which are inscribed on the base of Concord’s minuteman statue.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
heir flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
These events and many related ones are all reenacted each year, either on their actual anniversary or on Patriot’s Day, and usually at the historically accurate crack of dawn.
