Stories

British Soldier

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...

Menotomy Farmwife

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...

Militia Survivor

Inside the Russell House

We took shelter in Russell's house when the regulars came thick along the road. There were eleven of us inside, firing from the windows. Jason Russell—the owner, an old lame man—stood in his doorway. ...

Neighbor

The Old Man's Stand

Samuel Whittemore was eighty years old and still talking about Louisbourg, about King George's War, about every fight he'd ever been in. When the alarm came, we told him to stay home. He had no busine...

Finding the Battle

We've found musket balls, military buttons, fragments of cartridge boxes—the debris of the running battle. Every time someone digs a foundation in old Arlington, there's a chance of finding April 19 a...

Walking the Battle Road

I walk people along Massachusetts Avenue and ask them to imagine it unpaved, lined with stone walls and apple orchards, with exhausted British soldiers trying to fight their way through while fresh mi...

The Forgotten Battle

Everyone knows Lexington and Concord. Arlington—Menotomy—gets overlooked, which is ironic because this is where the heaviest casualties occurred. Forty British dead, around twenty-five Americans. The ...

Preserving the Russell House

The bullet holes are still in the walls. People come expecting a sanitized museum and find evidence of violence—actual holes where musket balls struck, the cellar where men died. We don't soften the s...