Lafayette's Tour

Somerville, MA

On April 19, 1775, the day the American Revolution began, the fighting did not stay in Lexington and Concord — it ran the length of the British column's long, bloody retreat toward Boston, through what was then part of Charlestown and is today Somerville. James Miller, sixty-five years old, was among the local men who turned out to harry the redcoats as they passed, and on this hillside he was shot down by British regulars. The words remembered on his monument, "I am too old to run," preserve the defiance of an aging New Englander who chose to stand his ground.

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.

Cambridge, MA

In the opening year of the War for Independence, the town of Cambridge sat at the heart of the Siege of Boston, its colleges, homes, and commons pressed into service as barracks, hospitals, and command posts for the newly gathered American army. Elegant houses whose owners had fled were commandeered as officers' quarters and headquarters, making quiet residential streets the nerve centers of a revolution. A marker like this one fixes the spot where such a headquarters once stood, connecting an ordinary Cambridge address to the improvised military capital of 1775–76.

Lexington, MA · est. 1949

At dawn, some 700 British soldiers marching to seize colonial arms confronted about 80 minutemen on Lexington's common. Eight Americans died — the opening casualties of the Revolutionary War.