Paul Revere

Paul Revere was born in Boston’s North End on December 21, 1734, by the Old Style calendar, a date usually given as January 1, 1735, in the modern calendar, and was baptized on December 22 at the “New Brick” Congregational Church. His father, Apollos Rivoire, a French Huguenot immigrant born in France in 1702, was a goldsmith who changed his name to Paul Revere; his mother, Deborah Hichborn, came from a local artisan family. He was the third child and eldest surviving son.⁠[1][2]

He attended the North Writing School and, after finishing school at about age 13, apprenticed in his father’s shop to learn goldsmithing.⁠[2][1]

When his father died on July 22, 1754, Revere was 19 and nearly finished with his apprenticeship, but by law could not operate a shop for two more years. From February to November 1756 he served in upstate New York as a second lieutenant of MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry artillery in the Seven Years’ War, known in North America as the French and Indian War, and saw no combat.⁠[1][2]

On September 9, 1760, Revere joined St. Andrew’s Lodge of Freemasons, which brought him steady customers, and by 1763 he owned a thriving business. His silver shop remained the core of his career for more than 40 years; he did not work in pewter. After the Sugar and Stamp Acts his income fell from £102 in 1764 to £64 in 1765.⁠[1][2]

During the depression after the French and Indian War he also worked as a copperplate engraver, producing book and magazine illustrations, business cards, political cartoons, bookplates, a songbook and tavern bills of fare. From 1768 to 1775 he practiced dentistry, cleaning teeth, fitting false teeth and selling toothpaste; he did not make George WashingtonGeorge WashingtonGeorge Washington (1732–1799) was the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. Earlier he commanded the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War and presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787.Open the full entry’s false teeth, and there is no evidence that he made full sets of dentures.⁠[2]

In February 1770 Revere bought a house in North Square in Boston’s North End, moving his family from their residence at Clark’s Wharf, and owned it until 1800. Built about 1680 on the site of the former parsonage of the Second Church of Boston, the house had first belonged to the wealthy merchant Robert Howard; the Reveres may not have lived there for most of the 1780s.⁠[1][3]

That year he made his engraving of the Boston Massacre, the best known of his engravings.⁠[1]

In December 1773 Revere took part in North Caucus meetings that planned the destruction of the East India Company’s tea. On December 17 he carried news of the Boston Tea Party to New York and Philadelphia, beginning his work as a messenger of the Revolution, and he later regularly relayed information between the Boston Committee of Correspondence and the Continental Congress.⁠[2][1]

Revere had already ridden to Concord on April 8, 1775, and to Lexington on April 16. At 10 p.m. on April 18, Dr. Joseph Warren informed him that British troops were about to march and sent him and William Dawes to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams at Lexington. Dawes left Boston southward by land; Revere was rowed across the Charles River and borrowed a horse in Charlestown.⁠[1][4]

Revere reached the Clarke parsonage in Lexington at about 11:30 p.m., and Dawes at about midnight. When the sentry William Munroe asked him not to make noise, Revere, as Munroe later recalled, replied “You’ll have noise enough before long, the Regulars are out!” After delivering the warning, Revere and Dawes rode on toward Concord and were joined by Samuel Prescott, a young doctor from Concord.⁠[4]

Halfway to Concord a British patrol ambushed the riders; Prescott escaped and took the news to Concord, Dawes also escaped, and Revere was captured. After hearing distant gunfire, the soldiers took his horse and left him near Lexington’s town center. He returned to the Clarke house, escorted Hancock and Adams to a nearby safe house shortly before dawn, then went back to help remove a trunk of papers, probably related to the Provincial Congress, from Buckman Tavern, crossing the common just before the battle began.⁠[4]

After the battles of Lexington and Concord, Revere lived in Watertown, printed paper currency and helped acquire powder and ammunition. He later served as a lieutenant colonel in the Massachusetts State Train of Artillery and commanded Castle Island in Boston Harbor.⁠[2]

In summer 1779 Revere was appointed commander of the field artillery for the Penobscot Expedition against a British fort at Castine, MaineMaineMaine is a state in the northeastern United States, bordered by Canada and New Hampshire; its capital is Augusta and its largest city is Portland. It entered the Union on March 15, 1820, as the 23rd state, and had a population of 1,362,359 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. The assault on Fort George began on July 28; councils of war met on August 7 and 13, British reinforcements arrived on August 13, and the expedition ended in a panicked retreat.⁠[2][1]

When a Board of Inquiry failed to rule on his case, Revere petitioned the Massachusetts government seven times for a court-martial. It convened in February 1782 and on February 19 found him not guilty of all charges, though its language on the second charge was somewhat equivocal.⁠[2][1]

From 1783 to 1789 Revere ran a hardware store in downtown Boston. He opened a foundry in 1788 that made bolts, spikes, nails, brass fittings for USS Constitution and cannons, and after 1792 it also cast bells, one of which still rings at King’s Chapel.⁠[2][1]

In 1801 he opened what the Paul Revere Memorial Association describes as the first successful copper rolling mill in North America, which supplied copper for the dome of the Massachusetts State House in 1802 and the re-coppering of USS Constitution in 1803.⁠[2]

In the 1790s Revere served three years as Grand Master of the Massachusetts Grand Lodge and several years as Suffolk County coroner. He became the first president of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association on its founding in 1794 and was president of Boston’s Board of Health in 1799 and 1800.⁠[2]

In 1811, at 76, Revere retired, handing the copper business to his son Joseph Warren Revere and two grandsons. In 1813 his wife Rachel died on June 13, and his son Paul also died.⁠[2][1]

He died of natural causes in Boston on May 10, 1818, at the age of 83, survived by five children, several grandchildren and many great-grandchildren, and was buried in the Granary Burying Ground, where a large 19th-century marker stands beside a smaller, older slate stone near the back. An obituary in the Boston Intelligencer said “seldom has the tomb closed upon a life so honorable and useful.”⁠[2][1][5]

Revere married Sarah Orne on August 4, 1757; they had eight children between 1758 and 1773, and Sarah died in 1773. Five months later, on October 10, 1773, he married Rachel Walker, with whom he also had eight children.⁠[1][2]

On April 5, 1860, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited the steeple of the Old North Church and began “Paul Revere’s Ride” the next day; the poem appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1861 and in Tales of a Wayside Inn in 1863. Lexington History Museums notes that the poem was never meant to be historically accurate.⁠[1][4]

After Revere sold the North Square house it became a sailors’ boarding house and then an immigrant tenement with shops on the ground floor. In 1902 Revere’s great-grandson John P. Reynolds Jr. bought it to prevent its demolition, and the Paul Revere Memorial Association was formed; the house was restored in 1907–1908 and opened in April 1908 as one of the nation’s earliest historic house museums. It is downtown Boston’s oldest residence and a partner site of Boston National Historical Park.⁠[3][6]

Paul Revere House (Paul Revere Memorial Association): Official website: https://www.paulreverehouse.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[7]

Granary Burying Ground (City of Boston): Official website: https://boston.gov/node/3266 (opens in a new window).⁠[8]