Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Connections North 1775 - Lord Percy led British soldiers from Boston traveling along Boston Neck (“one if by land”) to the Battles of Lexington John Quincy Adams took a diferent view of the celebrations, refusing to attend what he considered an afront to and Concord. To slow down the British advance, patriots destroy the Great Bridge. the memory of the fallen. “I do not think this was a proper place for reveling and feasting,” he wrote his sister. “The idea of being seated upon the bones of a friend, I should think would have disgusted many”. Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Prior to the building of the Charles River Bridge the journey overland to Medford and the North Shore via Boston Neck, Roxbury, Brookline, Cambridge was approximately 14-miles. The new bridge cut the distance to 5-miles and opened up new opportunity. 1789 - A view of the bridge over the Charles River from Boston. Listen, my children, and you shall hear Ready to ride and spread the alarm Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, Through every Middlesex village and farm, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five: For the country-folk to be up and to arm." Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year. Then he said "Good night!" and with muled oar Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore, He said to his friend, "If the British march Just as the moon rose over the bay, By land or sea from the town to-night, Where swinging wide at her moorings lay Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry-arch The Somerset, British man-of-war: A phantom ship, with each mast and spar Of the North-Church-tower, as a Across the moon, like a prison-bar, signal-light,-- And a huge black hulk, that was magniied One if by land, and two if by sea; By its own relection in the tide. And I on the opposite shore will be, Courtesy Boston Public Library, Print Department A view of the bridge over the Charles River from Charlestown. Courtesy John Carter Brown Library, Brown University 1791 - An act incorporating certain persons for the purpose of building bridge over Charles River from the westerly part of Boston to Cambridge, extended the interest of the proprietors of the Charles River Bridge from 40 years to 70 years. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives 1792 - Proprietors of the West Boston Bridge Corporation formed: Francis Dana, Oliver Wendell, James Sullivan, Henry Jackson, Mungo Mackay and William Wetmore. The Harvard Corporation encountered many complications in managing the Charlestown ferry. Everything from The original charters of both the Charles River and West Boston Bridge are extended to 70 Years. payment with worthless wampum shells, decreased ferry use, ice on the Charles River, a small pox epidemic in Boston, to the destruction of the ferry shed when British troops evacuated Boston, consequently afected the bot- tom line. The Corporation petitioned the General Court in 1781 to help pay for the repairs. 1785 - A petition to oppose a bridge proposal from Barton’s Point in West Boston to Lechmere Point Cambridge by Andrew Cabot was iled by Thomas Russell, John Hancock and others who wanted the ‘privilege’ to build their own bridge at the location where “an ancient ferry had been established”. Despite active lobbying by Harvard, the General Court granted a charter to the Proprietors of the Charles River Bridge Corporation for a bridge to be built from Boston to Charlestown "in the place where the ferry was then kept." In compensation for divesting the College of the income from the ferry, the General Court ordered the bridge proprietors to pay the College £300 annually for forty years, when the bridge was to become the property of the State. Samuel Sewall, who built the irst long wooden pile bridge in America, was chosen as chief architect, while Lemuel Cox assisted by John Stone were the head builders. Lemuel Cox portrait painted by John Singleton Copley. 1786 - The 1503-foot Charles River Bridge opens to coincide with the eleventh an- niversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1786. It was a grand event as dignitaries paraded with artisans who had built the span and attended a banquet on the site of the battle. “I never saw such a vast crowd of people in my life, they poured in from every part of the country,” Lucy Cranch wrote her aunt Abigail Adams in London. “The Bridge looks beautifully in the evening, there are 40 lamps on it.” Courtesy State Library of Massachusetts .

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