HistoricSiteMarkers
American Revolution

1836 Battle Monument

Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts

Marker Inscription

Here on the 19th of April 1775 was made the first forcible resistance to British aggression. On the opposite bank stood the American Militia. Here stood the invading Army and on this spot the first of the enemy fell in the War of that Revolution which ...

The Story

On April 19, 1775, at Concord's North Bridge over the Concord River, colonial militia and the advancing British regulars exchanged the volleys that opened the American Revolution. Ordered by their commanders to hold, the assembled minutemen returned fire when the British fired first, and a British soldier fell here — among the earliest to die in the war. This granite obelisk, raised in 1836, marks the ground where organized armed resistance to the Crown began, immortalized soon after as 'the shot heard round the world.'

Why it matters

The clash at Concord's North Bridge was the moment American colonists first met British troops with deliberate armed force, turning a tax dispute into a war for independence.

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Related events

  • · Battles of Lexington and Concord
  • · April 19, 1775

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American RevolutionMonument

Nearby & related markers

Old North Bridge

Concord, MA · est. 1936

Hours after Lexington, colonial militia massed at Concord's North Bridge and exchanged fire with British regulars, forcing their retreat to Boston. Emerson's 'Concord Hymn' immortalized the moment.

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Brister Freeman Homestead Site Marker

Concord, MA

In the decades surrounding the American Revolution, slavery persisted even in Massachusetts towns like Concord, and the men and women who won their freedom often built new lives on the margins of the communities that had once held them. Brister and Fenda Freeman were among these formerly enslaved residents, making a home near this spot and raising a family in the years of the young republic. The surname they carried — Freeman — was itself a quiet declaration of the liberty they had claimed.

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Four Cambridge Citizens Killed, April 19, 1775

Cambridge, MA

On April 19, 1775, the war for American independence began at dawn on Lexington Green and spread down the road through Concord. The bloodiest hours came not in the morning volleys but during the British column's long, harried retreat toward Boston, when militia and townsmen fired from behind walls and houses along the route. Cambridge lay squarely on that path, and here four of its citizens fell to the retreating regulars. The city raised this monument in 1880 to mark the ground and keep their names — Isaac Gardiner, William Marcy, John Hicks, and Moses Richardson — from fading.

American Revolution