On the evening of April 19, 1775, as the last shots of a long and terrible day echoed through the villages northwest of Boston, the people of Menotomy — the small Massachusetts farming community now known as Arlington — began to take account of what had happened in their streets, yards, and houses. What they found was staggering. More men had been killed in Menotomy that day than at Lexington Green, the North Bridge in Concord, or any other single point along the running battle between British regulars and colonial militia. Forty British soldiers and roughly the same number of Americans lay dead or mortally wounded in a stretch of road barely a mile and a half long. This was not the symbolic "shot heard round the world." This was the Revolution's first sustained, house-to-house, close-quarters killing ground, and it happened in a town that most Americans today have never heard of.
PEOPLE
KEY EVENTS
PLACES TO VISIT
STORIES
HISTORICAL VOICE
Through the Gauntlet
By Menotomy we had been marching and fighting for hours. Ammunition running low, men dropping from exhaustion and wounds. Every wall, every window, every tree seemed to hide a rebel with a musket. Per...
HISTORICAL VOICE
A Woman's Witness
We hid in the swamp when the shooting started. My children clung to me in the water and muck while the battle raged along the road. I could see our house from where we hid. Soldiers—I couldn't tell wh...