On April 18, 1775, the sexton and one of the vestrymen of Boston’s Old North Church hung two lanterns in the church’s steeple for a minute. It was just long enough to alert Paul Revere to head to the docks, where two friends would row him to Charlestown.
There he would hop on a horse and ride into the countryside, one of many riders who went out to both awaken militamen and to warn John Adams and John Hancock of a need to flee. The first shots at the Battle of Lexington would ring out early in the morning on April 19.
Revere’s prominence in the American imagination can be attributed to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860). While not wholly accurate, it made Revere—and Old North Church—into a national symbol. Today, Old North Church is a parish of the Diocese of Massachusetts and an active historic site run by a secular nonprofit agency, Old North Illuminated.
One of the things Old North Illuminated hoped to emphasize for the 250th anniversary was that this was not a one-man act of patriotism. “Revere was not alone,” said Catherine Matthews, director of strategy and special projects at Old North Illuminated. “How do we recognize there were more people?”
One tool of education is the play Revolution’s Edge, which the historic agency commissioned for the church’s 300th anniversary in 2023, and which was performed again on April 18 this year. It’s set on the morning of April 18, and is a conversation among three men: the rector, Rev. Mather Byles Jr.; his slave Cato; and Capt. John Pulling Jr., who would later be one of the men to hang the lanterns. The topic is the rector’s resignation because he was a loyalist. Whether he resigned willingly or unwillingly is still unclear to historians, but on April 18 he handed over the keys to the church.
It speaks to the difficulties experienced by Anglicans in Boston at that time. Revere had rung the bells at Old North as a teenager, but like many other patriots, he was a Congregationalist. Byles, too, had once been a Congregationalist; his father and namesake was a Congregationalist minister, and his great-uncle was Cotton Mather. But in 1768, he left that ministry to enter the Established Church, something he shared with Old North’s first rector, Timothy Cutler. It created a special bond between him and the British state, which was true for many Anglican clergy.
The congregation was split into thirds: patriots, loyalists, and undecided. One of the men in the pews was General Thomas Gage, the military governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.
“Their faith was what bound them,” Matthews said. But eventually, faith wasn’t enough. The congregation couldn’t continue as it had. The anger of the past several years, starting with the Stamp Act of 1765, was coming to a head. “It was a bad fit by that point,” Matthews said about Byles resigning.
It was especially bad in Boston, because it had been occupied by British troops since 1768, as a response to protests over the Townshend Acts. In 1774, after the Boston Tea Party, the British closed Boston’s port. For Boston, a city dependent on maritime trade and the production of maritime-related goods like rope, this was a huge blow to its economy.
“People who were dependent on access to the port were severely impacted by the closure of the port. It probably radicalized people who weren’t otherwise political,” Matthews said. One man who would have been affected was Pulling, who was a sea captain. Old North’s membership had a heavy contingent of men involved in the maritime trades because of its location near Boston’s waterfront. They were largely wealthy men: to purchase a pew cost about the yearly salary of a working man. (In the gallery sat a mix of enslaved Black people, free Black people, and Native Americans. Old North’s first rector had made it a special mission to baptize people of color, in part because he thought it would make them better servants.)
The heavy military occupation of Boston also contributed to people’s anger: British soldiers were one-fifth of Boston’s population in 1775. Their presence only made Bostonians’ economic woes worse, because British soldiers, eager for extra income, hired themselves out to do the piecework tasks that out-of-work mariners would otherwise do.
The British would leave the following year, on Evacuation Day, March 17, 1776. Their departure would include Byles. The Banishment Act of 1778 said he was forbidden to enter Massachusetts on pain of death. Old North would have no priest until 1778.
The Rev. Stephen Lewis, a British military chaplain, had been a prisoner of war in Boxford, a town 25 miles from Boston, until late 1777. He conducted a private baptism at Old North in December 1777. In July of 1778, he renounced his loyalty to the British crown and offered himself as a subject of Massachusetts. He would become Old North’s rector in the fall of 1778, modifying the liturgy to remove references to the king.
In 1804, the original steeple that Robert Newman and John Pulling had climbed was blown down in a hurricane. When they replaced it, it was in the style that was popular at the time, not a replica. The church did not start thinking of itself as a historic site immediately, in part because it was not widely known as one until after the publication of Longfellow’s poem.
But this would change. By 1912, during a major renovation of the church, parishioners were thinking about restoring it to a colonial design. When the second steeple came down during Hurricane Carol in 1954, parishioners were keen to replace it with one that emulated the look in 1775.
Today, Old North Illuminated is serious about the church’s historic past. Matthews was excited by how many people wanted to learn about Old North. “It was great to see people really curious about history,” she said. But it’s not just a museum. “It’s still there, and it still exists as a faith community.”
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
