The final stop on our leaf peeping road trip from Boston was not about leaves at all, but Part 2 of our American Revolution education. Having finished Part 1 on the Freedom Trail in Boston, we were keen to follow the action to Lexington, Concord and the Minute Man National Historical Park, which slotted perfectly into our last day before flying home to the UK. Here’s what we discovered.
Lexington and Concord sit 16 km northwest of Boston and are where the American Revolution began on 19 April 1775. Walk Lexington Green with a costumed guide, see the Old North Bridge, and tour Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House; the Minute Man National Historical Park connects it all along the Battle Road Trail.
Lexington is a smart suburban town 16 km from downtown Boston, with close links to MIT and Harvard, attracting academics, doctors and researchers; apparently its preppy residents buy more LL Bean clothing than anywhere else in the States. Established in 1642 as Cambridge Farms, it still has five working farms today.
Concord lies about 10 km northwest of Lexington, both in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Alongside its colonial history, Concord was home to the famous authors and thinkers of the 1850s: Louisa May Alcott (Little Women), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) and Henry David Thoreau (Walden). The two towns keep up a friendly rivalry over which is the true “birthplace of American liberty”.
Our Freedom Trail day had ended at the Old North Church, where Paul Revere’s lanterns signalled that “the British were coming” (strictly, the army was coming, since everyone was technically British at the time). The Redcoats, sent by General Thomas Gage, were marching on Concord to seize a store of arms.
On the night of 18 April 1775, Revere set off on his Midnight Ride, stopping in Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams before continuing towards Concord, although he never made it that far, and he was far from the only messenger on horseback that night.
The Minute Man National Historical Park runs between Lexington, Lincoln and Concord, following the route taken by Revere and the Redcoats and preserving the sites of the opening battles of 19 April 1775. There is a monument marking the spot where Revere was captured and his ride ended; other riders made it through, but Revere gets all the glory.
Unluckily for us, the park was closed during our visit because of a federal shutdown: both visitor centres, Hartwell Tavern, the Paul Revere capture site and the toilets were shut, with no tours or re enactments running. You could still do a self-guided walk or cycle the Battle Road Trail under your own steam, just without any of the information points open. Happily that was a one off, so here is what the park normally offers.
The site of the Concord fight, with Daniel Chester French’s famous Minute Man statue standing guard, inscribed with the ‘shot heard round the world’ line from Emerson’s Concord Hymn. A short walk from the North Bridge Visitor Center, which adds exhibits, a short film and the brass cannon known as The Hancock.
The recommended starting point, near the eastern entrance off Route 2A, with a huge mural of the fighting, battlefield artefacts, the Road to Revolution multimedia film, maps and rangers on duty.
An 8 km trail from Meriam’s Corner to Fiske Hill, following remnants of the original Battle Road through fields, wetlands and woods, with several trailheads and car parks along the way. Walk it or bike it.
A restored 18th century home and tavern on the Battle Road, brought to life by costumed interpreters telling the story of the Hartwell family, whose sons fought as Minute Men, with occasional musket firing demonstrations.
The house of authors, covered properly below in the Concord section.
The park is free to enter at all the main sites, and the grounds and trails are open daily from sunrise to sunset year round. The buildings are a different matter: visitor centres, historic houses and ranger programmes run seasonally, roughly late spring to the end of October, and hours shift about, so check the official NPS site or ring the park before you set your heart on going inside anywhere.
A few pointers from the practical file:
By car, follow the brown NPS signs from I‑95 onto Route 2A, as GPS can be unreliable here. By public transport, the MBTA Fitchburg Line runs to Concord Depot, from where you can walk or bike in.
The free NPS mobile app carries self guided tours of the North Bridge and Battle Road, handy if you visit when the centres are closed, as we can confirm.
Free talks, battlefield walks and living history run through the season; the daily schedule is posted at the visitor centres and on the park calendar.
Welcome on the trails and grounds on a lead, but not inside the buildings.
Allow anywhere from an hour to most of a day, depending on whether you drive between the headline sites or walk the Battle Road properly.
We started with breakfast at the Tatte Bakery and Cafe on Massachusetts Avenue, fortifying ourselves in the sunshine with roasted peach, raspberry and pistachio overnight oats and pumpkin spiced lattes. Delicious.
Look out for the horses of Lexington, a series of sculptures around town decorated with mosaics and bright colours; the one near Tatte holds a lantern in its mouth, a nod (or a neigh) to the Midnight Ride.
Lexington Green is where the first shots were fired on 19 April 1775. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1837 poem gave the moment its name: “the shot heard round the world”. When around 700 Redcoats arrived, roughly 70 to 80 local militia stood ready, and in the stand off a shot was fired, by whom nobody knows. In the short battle that followed, eight militiamen died and only one Redcoat was injured, before the soldiers marched on to Concord.
The Lexington Visitor Center was offering walking tours of the Green, so we booked on and met our guide, in historical costume (him, not us), outside.
The Lexington Minutemen statue stands at the corner of the Green, honouring the militia who would fight “at a minute’s notice”, led by Captain John Parker, who apparently looked nowhere near as handsome as his statue.
Also on and around the Green:
The flagpole: Flying the Stars and Stripes 24 hours a day.
Site of the Old Belfry: From which the alarm rang out on 19 April 1775.
Monument to the eight militiamen: Erected by the town in 1799 for those killed on the Green.
The Witness Houses: Two private houses that stood here in 1775 and witnessed the battle; a third is now an empty plot.
The Call to Arms stone: Engraved with Captain Parker’s “Stand your ground”.
Buckman Tavern: Where the militia waited for the Redcoats to arrive.
Prince Estabrook plaque: Honouring an enslaved man who fought and was wounded on Lexington Green, recognised as the first Black soldier of the American Revolution.
The tour finished at the Old Burying Ground, with its joint memorial to the eight fallen (cracked, after someone reversed a car over it) and rows of graves with both head and foot stones, since walking over a grave between the two was considered bad luck.
The Old North Bridge sits just outside Concord, technically inside the national park but accessible on foot from the free parking nearby. Of the riders who set out from Boston, it was Dr Samuel Prescott who got through to Concord, and this time around 400 militia had assembled. About 90 Redcoats reached the bridge while the rest searched the town, and the militia’s vantage point on the hill, plus the Redcoats’ exhaustion after Lexington, won the day.
Finding no arms, the Redcoats retreated to Boston, where they ended up trapped by a growing colonial army until the British evacuated in March 1776, almost a year after the first shot.
When we visited, the bridge and the fields along the river were peaceful and full of autumn colour, serene and hard to square with the carnage that happened here.
On the road in from Lexington stands Orchard House, where Louisa May Alcott lived from 1857 and wrote Little Women, basing the four sisters on her own family with tweaks to keep it from being too autobiographical. You can tour the house and the School of Philosophy built by her Transcendentalist father, who championed education, including for women, and backed Louisa’s writing until she out earned him, despite an early publisher telling her to “stick to teaching”.
The tour opens with a video in the School of Philosophy before moving to the house itself. No photography is allowed inside, a shame, as you see the desk her father built where she wrote her novels, and the flower and owl paintings her sister May made while Louisa recovered from illness after nursing in the war. It ran over an hour and was fascinating, finishing in a pretty garden planted to reflect the sisters’ personalities.
Orchard House was not the Alcotts’ first Concord home: they lived at Hillside from 1845 to 1852 before selling it to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who renamed it Wayside. It still stands within the national park (visitable when fully open), and beyond its authors it holds a place on the National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom – during their years there, the Alcotts are known to have helped at least one freedom seeker escape via the Underground Railroad.
For food, head to the Concord Market, doing brisk cafe and takeaway business, with long waits at busy times. With more time, visit the Concord Museum, or drive 5 minutes to Walden Pond, where Thoreau lived in the woods for two years and wrote about it, and stretch your legs among the sculptures of the deCordova Sculpture Park near Lincoln.
There are at least four towns called Concord in the US. Make sure your maps app has the Massachusetts one!
In closing
Lexington and Concord were not on our original itinerary, but visiting on our last day brought the holiday full circle - we started with a blast of American Revolution history and ended with one, and everything clicked into place.
A fully open Minute Man National Historical Park would have been the icing, but the Lexington Green tour gave us the baseline we needed, so all was not lost.
You do need an interest in history for this kind of sightseeing, but the more I learnt, the more I wanted to know, and now I have the places to pin the story to.
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