Harper's Young People, May 10, 1881 / An Illustrated Weekly

PAUL REVERE AT LEXINGTON.—Drawn by Howard Pyle.

Between thirty and forty years ago I went on a pilgrimage to places hallowed by events of the great and successful struggle of Americans for freedom and independence.
I there found many things and persons remaining as mementos of that contest. All were hoary with age, and some were crumbling and tottering ruins. All were rapidly passing within the veil of human forgetfulness, for houses, fortifications, battle-fields, and men and women would soon become only pictures on Memory's wall.
From the lips of the venerable men and women whom I saw I heard thrilling narratives of their experience in those days of strife. In hidden recesses of memory and in written notes I preserved those narratives for the entertainment and instruction of the youth of this generation, hoping to be with them to tell the tales myself. Here I am, and I propose to relate to the readers of Young People some of the stories I then received from living lips. I will begin with the story of
Lexington! Concord! What American boy or girl has not heard of these two little villages in Massachusetts, where the first blow was struck for independence, and where the hot flames of the Revolution first burst out, on the 19th of April, 1775? One of my first pilgrimages was to these villages.
It was a bright, sunny morning in October, 1848, when I travelled by railway from Boston to Concord—a distance of seventeen miles northwest of the New England capital. There I spent an hour with Major Barrett and his wife, who saw the British scamper, and had lived together almost sixty years. The Major was hale at eighty-seven, and his wife, almost as old, seemed as nimble of foot as a matron in middle life. She was a vivacious little woman, well-formed, and retained traces of the beauty of her girlhood.
After visiting the place of the skirmish at Concord, I rode in a private vehicle to Lexington, six miles eastward, through a picturesque and fertile country, and entered the famous village at the Green whereon that skirmish occurred, and where a commemorative monument now stands. After a brief interview with two or three aged persons there, we drove to the house of Jonathan Harrington, in East Lexington, who, a lad seventeen years old, had opened the ball of the Revolution on the memorable April morning with the war-notes of the shrill fife.