Old North Church

Boston

Portrait by Artist to Come

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Called Christ Church in the 18th century; also known today as Christ Church in the City of Boston.

On if by land, two if by sea. On 18 April 1775 the church sexton, Robert Newman, using a code pre-arranged by Paul Revere, climbed the steeple and held two lanterns that signaled to colonists in Charleston that British Regulars were headed by sea to Concord to secure gunpowder and munitions that were stored there.

Used later by British General Thomas Gage during the Battle of Bunker Hill. Major John Pitcairn and other British soldiers are buried in vaults under the church.

Part of the Freedom Trail™.

Associated People

Gage, Thomas

Newman, Robert

Revere, Paul

By modern standards there is something unlikeable about John Hancock. His type of patriotism and charity is as obsolete as his brocaded dressing-gowns and jewelled buttons. He was one of those men who curiously go in and out of style. Once they are out they are hard to value. ‘The golden showers of guineas’ that marked his almost royal progress, his big speeches, like ‘burn Boston and make John Hancock a beggar if the public good requires it,’ do not arouse in us the same genuine enthusiasm they did in his contemporaries. Such men as Paul Revere, [Royal Governor Thomas] Hutchinson, Joseph Warren, or Sam Adams never are in style or out. Their personalities exist quite independently from the accident of their birth in the first half of the eighteenth century. This is not quite true of John Hancock.

— Esther Forbes

Paul Revere & The World He Lived In (1942)