Massachusetts Travel Journal—Day One: Lexington, MA (Buckman Tavern and Lexington Green)

As I did with my Chautauqua vacation a few months ago, I thought I’d use this blog as a kind of online postcard/letter of my trip to the Boston area.

I spent half of the four-hour trip up here driving through pouring rain that dogged my steps from the moment I left Englewood. By the time I reached Hartford, it began to abate, thank God, and was actually sunny—for a short while—when I reached my bed and breakfast in nearby Lexington.

With not much time left late in the afternoon, I decided to go to the nearest place of historic interest—downtown Lexington. You’d never know it from the kind of chi-chi yuppified establishments lining either side of the downtown—banks, bookstores, restaurants, with chain stores cheek to cheek, so to speak, with antique stores, bread shops, and even an old-fashioned independent drug store—but in 1775, this community was primarily agricultural.

Anyone who attended in its heyday St. Cecilia High School in Englewood, N.J., is familiar with Brandon’s Tavern. So naturally, I just had to stop at the colonial equivalent: Buckman Tavern in Lexington. The original was built in 1709, with a wing added in 1813, then restored in the 1920s. The site (do I have to say that it’s no longer a going establishment?) is now one of three houses that can be visited courtesy of the Lexington Historical Society.

The guide for my small group was Anthony, a fact-filled, charming raconteur who knew everything and then some about this house. (He’s the fellow in period costume next to yours truly in the picture accompanying this post—the first time, incidentally, that the CEO of this blog has ever appeared in an image on this Web site!).

Back when we were memorizing all about “the midnight ride of Paul Revere” as kids, I don’t recall anyone ever telling us about Buckman’s Tavern. But this is where the Lexington militia—filled with dozens of the “embattled farmer” type memorialized by Ralph Waldo Emerson—gathered on the morning of April 19, 1775, waiting for a British force on its way to confiscate the rebel arms supply in Concord. It didn’t turn out quite as well as the redcoats had hoped.

The tavern is one of those small places you see on historic tours, with guides in the dress of the time, but you can still learn much that somehow doesn’t seep out of the pages of historic texts in these kinds of establishments. I learned some more about the first action of the American Revolution here, and even more about daily life in the colonies.

Just down the road a patch, at what is now the Hancock-Clarke House, John Hancock and Samuel Adams were staying as the guests of the Rev. Jonas Clarke, at the same parsonage where Hancock’s grandfather had once resided. Royal authorities in London would dearly have loved to have caught the two troublesome rebels, but it was not to be.

Right around midnight, Paul Revere arrived from Boston, coming breathlessly to the tap room at Buckman’s to let Hancock and Adams know the British were coming. The next morning, the Americans were waiting for them.

With only 77 militiamen with him on the Lexington Common, across from Buckman’s, Capt. John Parker didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of impeding the redcoats, let alone defeating them. What he was producing was a show of force—a demonstration of will.

British Maj. John Pitcairn ordered the rebels to disperse. As the rebels slowly, reluctantly, obeyed, a shot rang out—at whose order, nobody was sure afterward—and the redcoats (a large group of new recruits—“greencoats,” if you will) began firing. By the time it was over, eight Americans lay dead. If you ask me, it’s a lot like those hotly disputed police actions when, in the blink of an eye, someone gets nervous and suddenly bodies are lying all over the ground. Except this time, the authority of a global empire was at stake.

Inside, the tavern has examples of six muskets, including two “Brown Besses” that would have been used by redcoats. Anthony noted that, beyond a range of 75 yards, their accuracy was pretty poor—thus accounting for the famous rebel order, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.” These muskets were famously cumbersome to use, with even a well-trained marksman only able to load, shoot, and reload three or four times in a minute.

It was not surprising that Revere would have come to Buckman’s. As Anthony pointed out, the ceilings of Loyalist taverns were unadorned, but patriot taverns had special markings if you looked overhead—in the case of Buckman’s, this included a mixture of—are you ready for this?—blueberries, crushed eggshells and buttermilk.

Colonial men might have reminded their wives to “keep a civil tongue in your head,” but if they were patriots they didn’t mind picking up whatever their women told them. You think they were minding their own business in the kitchen behind the tap room? No sirree Bob! They were listening very carefully to every word that was said, and ready to pass along anything that an unsuspecting Tory might have blurted out.

And, with the stuff served here, they were liable to blurt out anything. From the beginning of the day, Anthony informed us, colonials were imbibing, starting with “small beer.” A particular specialty that I don’t think Brandon’s Tavern got around to serving was “Flip Beer,” four fingers’ worth of the stuff mixed up with brown sugar and molasses. If that didn’t cure what ailed you, you were a hopeless case.

Buckman’s was a hotbed of intelligence and listening post in other important ways. Let’s start with that word “post.” The term took on literal meaning here because the post by the bar was where news items were put up.

Throughout the day, as the British headed toward Concord, then were chased back to Lexington on their way to Boston, a couple of the men who gathered here in the tavern did more than just exchange news at the bar. Solomon Brown, for instance, came running down from his upstairs room and fired his musket at the passing redcoats. A bullet hole from their return fire is still lodged in a door in the house. Dr. Joseph Fiske tended to several patriots and even rebels who had been wounded. The workbench he used elsewhere in town is now located in Buckman’s.

Just past the kitchen in the tavern is the landlord’s room. If you were traveling, you could use his bed for 10 cents. If you wanted a discount, you could get the bed for 7 cents, but you’d have to share it with at least one, and maybe two, men. A lucky thing that nutrition wasn’t as good back then—the smaller bodies meant it was a bit easier to fit two fellows together. (I don’t think a discount would have done much good for the rebels’ genius at artillery, General Henry Knox—a hefty fellow indeed.)

Believe it or not, Buckman’s Tavern was one of those places where George Washington did indeed come. So did two other Presidents, Grant and Ford, on, respectively, the centennial and bicentennial of the war.