NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Property name Minute Man National Historical Park Section number 7 Page 1 SUMMARY Minute Man National Historical Park (NHP) was created by an act of Congress on September 21, 1959 for the purpose of preserving the Lexington and Concord Battlefield and its contributing resources “in the public interest as prime examples of the Nation’s historical heritage” (Public Law 86-321). Since that time, the primary mission of the park has been to approximate the cultural environment that existed in 1775 and preserve and interpret individual resources that contribute to understanding the events of the Battle of Lexington and Concord. As part of this mission, the National Park Service has removed more than 200 nineteenth and twentieth century buildings and structures in an attempt to recreate the open, agricultural appearance that the area had at the time of the battle. The three units of Minute Man NHP — North Bridge, Wayside, and Battle Road — were administratively listed in the National Register of Historic Places as National Historic Landmark districts in 1966, but no list of contributing and non-contributing resources within the park was included. The goals of this documentation are to define all the National Register areas of significance and criteria under which the park is eligible for listing and to provide an accurate accounting of contributing and non-contributing resources that will aid in the subsequent management of the park. The three discontiguous units of Minute Man NHP comprise an area of approximately 967 acres of land in the towns of Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington. The park is located approximately 16 miles northwest of Boston. A total of 133 resources, of which 105 are contributing and 28 are non-contributing, are located within the boundaries. Of the 105 contributing resources, 43 are buildings, 41 are sites, 11 are objects, and 10 are structures. The non-contributing resources in the district fall into one of two categories: 1) buildings, structures, and objects constructed after the period of historic significance; or 2) those that have been radically altered from their original appearance by the application of modern building materials, additions, or the removal of significant architectural features. There are no resources within the Park less than fifty years old that are architecturally or historically significant. The area contained within the park underwent significant change between 1775 and 1959. The most intensive development occurred in the early to mid-twentieth century when the Concord-Lexington area became a part of greater Boston’s commuting community. Since the creation of the park, many of those structures in the Battle Road and North Bridge units have been removed, and the result has been a partial re-creation of the rural scene of 1775. These reclaimed open spaces provide a backdrop that serves to highlight the remaining historic resources associated with the Battle of Lexington and Concord. SETTING Located within three towns spread out along Route 2 and Route 2A, Minute Man NHP is surrounded by a suburban/commercial landscape and is immediately adjacent to Hanscom Air Force Base (AFB). The communities surrounding Minute Man NHP have a long and rich history associated with the early settlement and development of the United States. The region was first settled by English colonists in the 1630s. The (continued) NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Property name Minute Man National Historical Park Section number 7 Page 2 town of Concord, located on the settlement frontier of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, was established in 1635 and expanded in 1655. Originally a part of Cambridge, Lexington was first known as Cambridge Farms. It was established as the North Precinct of Cambridge in 1691 and was incorporated as an independent town in 1712. Lincoln was incorporated in 1754, carved out of the second precinct of Concord and outlying areas of Lexington and Weston (MHC 1980a; MHC 1980b; MHC 1980c). Nearby towns remained largely agricultural in character well into the nineteenth century, with only limited industrial development. In general the towns enjoyed a steady but modest population growth from the time of settlement through the 1800s. In the early-to-mid twentieth century, the region became increasingly suburbanized, in part due to the improvement of existing roads such as Route 2 and 2A into autohighways in the 1920s and 1930s, and the creation of Route 128 in the 1950s (MHC 1980a; MHC 1980b; MHC 1980c). In 1941, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts acquired approximately 509 acres of land in Bedford, Lincoln, and Concord in order to construct present-day Hanscom Field, which was originally conceived as a civilian airport but began to serve military interests shortly after its completion (Del Papa and Warner 1991:1-2). While under military control during World War II, an additional 600 acres, including land in the town of Lexington, were added to the facility. Hanscom AFB presently occupies approximately 1100 acres of land that straddles the towns of Bedford, Concord, Lexington, and Lincoln, Massachusetts, about 20 miles northwest of Boston. Today, the towns of Concord, Lexington, and Lincoln are largely residential in character, serving as suburbs of nearby Boston (Baker 1998:3-11). The setting of the district is characterized by low-density residential development set within a landscape of open fields and pastures, interspersed with woodland and an occasional marshy area. Immediately adjoining the boundaries of the park are several areas of intensive residential development. Most roads within the district have been paved for modern use, excepting portions of the Battle Road in Lexington and Lincoln, which were abandoned during a ca. 1920 road realignment. The Concord River and several brooks cross park land. The landscape today is markedly different from the landscape at the time of the battle. In 1775, the area was characterized by small farms with open fields. At the park’s inception, the area was part of the suburban landscape, containing residences and commercial development. The land that became the park experienced similar residential development throughout the late nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth centuries as nearby towns. This resulted in a landscape that did not conform to or reflect that found at the time of the battle. Aerial views of the park from the 1940s and 1950s show a number of these buildings lining Route 2A in the area. The Minute Man NHP landscape has been manipulated through the removal of intrusive buildings and landscape elements in order to match to the greatest extent possible the landscape of 1775. Since the 1960s, the National Park Service has removed approximately 200 structures and nearly 100 percent of the commercial development within the park. There were no comprehensive records maintained regarding the properties that were removed, however, and it is therefore difficult to determine the types and distribution of those resources. Remaining commercial development exists in the form of several small roadside stands. (continued) NPS Form 10-900-a OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Property name Minute Man National Historical Park Section number 7 Page 3 A number of buildings have been removed within the park boundaries in the last two years. Included in this group are the Willow Pond Kitchen, an early twentieth-century example of commercial roadside architecture, and two modern ranches and a cape on Virginia Road, and a modern cape on North Great Road. These buildings have been removed in order to open up the landscape and allow for a more effective interpretation of the park as it looked at the time of the battle. Today, over seventy percent of the park is forested. Historically, some landscape was always in forest, for use as fuel and building material. Although the types of agricultural activities fluctuated in terms of their percent of the overall mix, a general continuity of land use has endured and is visible in the open fields and agricultural landscape that remain. Contributing resources within Minute Man NHP include historic buildings, objects, and structures dating from the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries; archaeological sites, including one prehistoric site and a number of historic period sites; about 25 miles of stone walls from all periods of the area’s history; and open fields which evoke a sense of the area’s agricultural past. The stone walls and fields are treated as systems and mentioned throughout the following narrative. In general, stone walls in the park are two to three feet tall and serve as outlines to the pattern of the system of fields. The walls indicate a continuity in the land use over a period that in some places dates to the eighteenth century (Garvin 1993:151). Located one-half mile north of Concord Center, the North Bridge Unit is an irregularly-shaped area, bisected by the Concord River, which flows northeast to southwest on its winding path through the district. The river is flanked on its sides by a relatively narrow strip of flat marsh land. The land begins a steady rise west of the flat land on the west bank of the river and ultimately ascends to a height of approximately 55 feet at what is known as the Muster Field on the west side of Liberty Street. The land east of the river is relatively flat, except for a hill, which rises to a height of about 50 feet on the east side of Monument Street.