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Like many journalists, I spent the run-up to the 2024 presidential election approaching strangers, seeking their opinions of the candidates. I’d walk up to people in barber shops, malls and supermarket parking lots and introduce myself as a reporter for The New York Times.
I came to anticipate the stony looks and tense body language that frequently preceded a “No, thank you.”
So I relished the thought of heading out this spring to speak with people about something much less threatening: the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere’s midnight ride. My editors loved the idea of framing the article as a mini road trip: I would retrace the 16-mile route that Revere, a Boston silversmith, traveled from Boston to Lexington on April 18, 1775, to warn colonists that the British were coming.
I wanted to see what the route revealed about the place Boston is today, and the ways the city’s revolutionary history still resonates.
On a Tuesday in mid-March, a rare day when news wasn’t breaking and it wasn’t raining, I struck out alone on a dry run to familiarize myself with the route and scope out good spots for approaching strangers. I quickly realized it would be complicated: Driving in Boston can be a challenge when you know where you’re going, let alone when you’re referring to a 40-step set of driving directions and a replica period map that is two and a half centuries out of date.
Given the navigational challenges, traffic lights, frequent curiosity stops and, eventually, rush-hour congestion, it took me about six hours to complete the trip, roughly twice as long as it took Revere, who traveled by rowboat and on horseback … in the dark.
The route was filled with rich discoveries. Having grown up north of Boston, I knew some key landmarks on Revere’s route, including his home in the North End, where his journey started, and the Battle Green in Lexington, the swath of grass where he ended up. But much of what lay in between, in modern-day Somerville, Medford and Arlington, was a revelation.
In what’s now downtown Medford, where Revere stopped to warn a local militia captain, I explored a Japanese grocery store and stocked up on ramen, canned lychees and green-tea-flavored Kit Kat bars.
Following his path through Arlington, I found the Cyrus Dallin Art Museum, devoted to the eponymous sculptor whose equestrian statue of Revere took 57 years to finish.
I had forgotten that Revere was captured by the British that night, after warning John Hancock and Samuel Adams in Lexington. In all my years of living in Massachusetts, and driving right by it, I had never been to the capture site, where Revere’s ride ended, in the Minute Man National Historical Park in Lincoln.
The next phase of my journey came in early April, when I drove the route again, this time with the photographer Todd Heisler. (Navigating is much easier when you’re with a colleague who can relay the directions.) Many people we approached for interviews wanted to give us a history lesson. Others hesitated to engage, and then admitted they feared looking foolish. “Honestly, I don’t remember much,” Melanie Asaro, 44, confessed on a sidewalk in Somerville.
In Somerville, a diverse city next to Boston where one quarter of residents were born in another country, many people we approached were immigrants; most had not heard of Paul Revere. But nearly all had heard of Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student who was taken into federal custody last month on the street outside her apartment in Somerville. Some said her detention had made them too afraid to speak to a reporter.
When we ran into anti-Trump protesters in politically liberal Arlington and Lexington, part of a nationwide demonstration, some also declined to speak with us, or share their names, fearful of talking to reporters. They let their handmade posters explain the link they saw between the country’s history and its current turbulence: “No More Kings,” read several signs.
Here and there, our focus on Revere was met with the relaxed response we’d hoped for. Some people exuded pride as they shared the history of their segment of the route. Parents beamed, listening to their children’s wisdom.
“Paul Revere, the man, is different from Paul Revere, the myth,” explained Grant W. Heussner, 12, a sixth grader from Wheaton, Ill., and an aspiring Harvard history professor. His parents planned their trip to Massachusetts to indulge his passion. “If you know the myth, it inspires you to learn the man.”
It might also inspire you to drive the route. (Find directions here; bring a navigator if you can.) If you do, don’t skip the banana pancakes at the Paul Revere Restaurant in West Medford, or a stop at the site where Revere was captured.
Alone there at dusk, surrounded by darkening woods, I felt a thrill of connection with the past. History, no matter how distant, was once an uncertain, fleeting moment just like this one.
Jenna Russell is the lead reporter covering New England for The Times. She is based near Boston.
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