Revolutionary road trip to Massachusetts
Kids check out the Concord Museum in Concord, Mass.
Photo by Mike Ritter
As our nation begins the celebration of its birth 250 years ago (our “semi-quincentennial”), a road trip to Massachusetts can bring to life historic events and the American revolutionary spirit.
The state started celebrating on April 18, 2025, with a re-enactment of the Battle of Lexington by the Lexington Minute Men. At 5:15 a.m., folks in period costume replicated the day in 1775 when the British sent 700 soldiers from Boston, some 20 miles away, to destroy ammunition and other supplies there.
The town’s militia confronted them, and a battle — some say a skirmish — ensued, leaving eight colonists dead and 10 wounded. “The first blood was spilt,” wrote George Washington, and the American Revolutionary War began.
Lexington, then, made the perfect starting point for a closer look at this chapter of U.S. history. My walking tour was a refresher of my high school history class. I started in the history museum and then explored the 1710 Buckman Tavern, where the militia awaited the Redcoats. The bell in the Old Belfry, erected in 1762, summoned the militia and rang out the alarm that the British were coming. The Munroe Tavern, which British troops seized during the war, hosted both Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette after the war; it’s now a museum.
After Lexington, the Brits marched to Concord to ransack more supplies. I spent some time in the Concord Museum, which has more artifacts from April 1775 (including Paul Revere’s iron-and-glass lantern that signaled the British arrival) than any other museum.
Minute Man National Historical Park, located in nearby Lincoln, tells the story of these early conflicts amid a still-pastoral landscape. The visitor center’s film recounts how these men, named because they were ready to fight on a moment’s notice, bravely took up arms against trained British forces.
To get to the park, take the scenic Battle Road Trail, the British retreat route that retains several houses associated with the battle — and the spot where British forces captured Paul Revere and ended his famous midnight ride.
The Old North Bridge over the Concord River in the park was another battle site. Ralph Waldo Emerson later immortalized the bridge in his 1837 poem “Concord Hymn” about the start of the Revolutionary War, coining the phrase “the shot heard ‘round the world.” (Historians debate which was the first shot, who fired it and why.)
On the bridge stands a seven-foot bronze statue made from a Civil War cannon. Known as Minute Man, the statue was the first commission for David Chester French, who later carved Abraham Lincoln in Washington’s Lincoln Memorial.
Revolutionary thinkers
The area’s history started long before 1775, of course. The Concord Museum’s exhibits relate that Indigenous people wintered in the area 10,000 years ago. The Algonquin called the region “water running through grasses.” English settlers displaced most of them.
I meandered along Main Street in Concord, which looks much as it did in Colonial times, with the addition of several hip restaurants. The 1716 Colonial Inn and 1747 Wright Tavern don’t serve food anymore, but they’re both open for tours.
The Lexington-Concord area was home to revolutionary free thinkers in the 19th century: Emerson, Louisa May Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson drafted his essay “Nature” in the Old Manse, a 1770 Georgian clapboard house. You can also visit Orchard House, known as “the Home of Little Women,” because it’s where Alcott wrote her book in 1868.
At the Concord Museum, I browsed its 250 Thoreau-related artifacts, the most anywhere, including the green desk he bought for $1. Another attention-getter is Alcott’s teakettle from her days as a Civil War nurse in a Union hospital in Washington, D.C., where she said she wished she were a man.
In the mid-1800s, Concord was a hotbed of abolitionists, some who founded the Female Anti-Slavery Society. Thoreau’s sisters were members. This hub of activism attracted notables like Harriet Tubman, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Many of the houses still standing today were stops on the Underground Railroad.
Walden Pond, where Thoreau wrote Walden, is two miles from downtown Concord. Visitors can walk along the lake’s woodsy trails and see a replica of the 1840s cabin he built at age 28.
A Revolution in Work
In the first half of the 19th century, America started transitioning from an agriculture-based economy to urban manufacturing. The Lowell National Historical Park is one of the few in the U.S. to preserve part of the nation’s industrial heritage, water-powered textile mills where young women and immigrants made millions of yards of cloth.
American industrialists chose Lowell because the fast-moving Merrimac River drops 30 feet and created power for the mills’ looms. By 1850, Lowell had 10 mills employing over 10,000 people.
Several of the park’s buildings relate the life of the “mill girls,” most of whom came from farms, punched a time clock and labored in a noisy factor six days week from 5 a.m. to 7 p.m. These conditions sparked one, Sarah Bagley, to organize and protest unfair labor practices.
A walk through a typical boarding house gives an inside look into how mill workers lived communally. In its heyday, Lowell had 70 company-owned boarding houses, mostly for women. In a typical boarding house, four girls slept in two beds per bedroom, and the company deducted $1.25 to $1.50 per week from their wages for room and board.
The Boott Cotton Mills Museum shows mid-1800s American industry at its height, with demonstrations of 80 historic, rattling, still-functioning looms in the weave room. Visitors can see, smell, hear and feel what it was like with 3,500 looms clanging at one time. A sign quotes a mill worker, “Looms used to bang, bang, bang all day.” Workers had no ear protection, and cotton dust and lint saturated the air.
Today’s visitors can also learn about the town’s six-mile network of canals and locks, which were key to powering the mills, by walking several trails or taking the Pawtucket Canal boat tour.
As Americans ponder the origins of America’s independence, this hub of revolutionary thinking and activism affirms the fundamentals of our democracy and the need to preserve them.
For upcoming events, see tourlexington.us/events, lexington250.com/events or visitconcord.org/concord-250/concord-250-events.
