Minute Man National Historical Park

Concord
MA
North Bridge, Minute Man National Historical Park

North Bridge in Concord

OTHER IMAGES

Old Manse
Hartwell Tavern, Minute Man National Historical Park
Minute Man, 1899

QUICK FACTS
  • Commemorates the 19 April 1775 Battle of Lexington / Concord, which started the Revolutionary War.
  • 88 militia were killed or wounded that day; 247 British Redcoats were killed or wounded.
  • There are reenactments of the battle on Patriot’s Day, which is an annual state holiday in Massachusetts.
  • Throughout the park are witness houses, whose occupants would have seen the British soldiers first-hand.
  • Not part of the park, but certainly a witness house, is the wonderfully preserved Old Manse near Concord Bridge.
  • It was colonial Major John Buttrick who first ordered his militia to fire on the British Regulars; the mansion that is now the North Bridge Visitor Center was built by descendants of the Buttrick family.
LINKS
LOCATION

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With over 900 acres, the Minute Man Historical Park traces the route originally taken by the British Regulars from Lexington to Concord. Starting at the Minute Man Visitor Center, a multimedia theater program provides an excellent introduction to the battle which began the American Revolution. Park Rangers are available for questions.

Battle Road Trail

The five-mile trail connects historic sites from Meriam’s Corner in Concord to the eastern boundary of the park in Lexington. It can be hiked or biked; or for the main sites, parking is available.

Hartwell Tavern

A significant community landmark in its day, Hartwell Tavern was also a prosperous farm and home to Ephraim and Elizabeth Hartwell and their children. The authentic structure is open for a self-guided tour.

North Bridge Visitor Center

Located in a brick mansion built in 1911, the North Bridge Visitor Center features a short video about the North Bridge fight, a bookstore, and exhibits. Includes a brass cannon, smuggled out of Boston in 1775, that was one of the four cannons hidden in Concord. The rebuilt North Bridge is a five-minute walk away.

Associated People
Warren, Joseph
Smith, Francis
Percy, Hugh
Parker, John
Buttrick, John

Virtually all modern accounts of the Revolution begin in 1763 with the Peace of Paris, the great treaty that concluded the Seven Years’ War. Opening the story there, however, makes the imperial events and conflicts that followed the war — the controversy over the Sugar Act and the Stamp Act crisis — into precursors of the Revolution. No matter how strenuous their other disagreements, most modern historians have looked at the years after 1763 not as contemporary Americans and Britons saw them — as a postwar era vexed by the unanticipated problems in relations between the colonies and metropolis — but as what we in retrospect know those years to have been, a pre-Revolutionary period. By sneaking glances, in effect, at what was coming next, historians robbed their accounts of contingency and suggested, less by design than by inadvertence, that the independence and nationhood of the United States were somehow inevitable.

— Fred Anderson
Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754 - 1766 (2000)