Lexington and Concord Travel Guide

On the night of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere rode down what is now Massachusetts Avenue from Boston, racing through Cambridge and Arlington on his way to warn the American patriots gathered at Lexington of an impending British attack. Close behind him was a force of more than four hundred British soldiers, intent on seizing the supplies that they knew the "rebels" had hoarded at Concord further north.

Although much of Revere's route has been turned into major freeways, the various settings of the first military confrontation of the Revolutionary War - "the shot heard round the world" - remain much as they were then. The triangular Town Common at Lexington was where the British encountered the opposition. Captain John Parker ordered his 77 American " Minutemen " to "stand your ground. Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war let it begin here." No one knows who fired the first shot, but the Minuteman Statue commemorates the eight Americans who died. Guides in period costume lead tours of the Buckman Tavern , where the Minutemen waited for the British to arrive; the Hancock-Clarke House a quarter of a mile north, where Samuel Adams and John Hancock were awakened by Paul Revere, is now a museum . All three sites are open Monday to Saturday from 10am to 5pm, on Sunday from noon to 5pm, and admission to each is $5 or $12 to visit all three.

By the time the soldiers marched on Concord the next morning the surrounding countryside was up in arms. In running battles in the town itself, and along the still-evocative Battle Road leading back toward Boston, 73 British soldiers and 49 colonials were killed over the next two days. The relevant sites now form the Minuteman National Historic Park , with visitor centers at the scenic North Bridge (174 Liberty St) in Concord and at Battle Road in Lexington. Paul Revere's ride and the Battle of Lexington are re-enacted annually on Patriot's Day, a city holiday on the third Monday in April that is also the day of the Boston Marathon.

South of Concord, Walden Pond was where Henry David Thoreau conducted the experiment in solitude and self-sufficiency described in his 1854 book Walden . "I did not feel crowded or confined in the least," he wrote of life in his simple log cabin. The site where it stood is now marked with stones, and at dawn you can still watch the pond "throwing off its nightly clothing of mist." Thoreau is interred, along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott, atop a hill in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery , just east of the center of Concord.

As well as guided bus tours from Boston, buses run to Lexington from Alewife Station, at the northern end of the Red "T" line, and trains to Concord from North Station ($4 one-way).