We rode along Paul Revere's route to sort myth from reality, lone hero from legend

LEXINGTON, MA ‒ Everyone knows the story. At least, a version of it.   

Sitting cross-legged on matted classroom rugs, elementary school students each year are read the famous opening lines of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” 

They learn of the lone rider galloping through the moonlit suburbs of Boston, across cobblestones and dirt paths, on a misty April morning in 1775, risking his life to warn his fellow citizens of the British army’s impending attack. Revere, they hear, was the voice of alarm preparing the country for the first battles of America’s War for Independence.

The truth of the story is murkier. Revere was far from alone that evening. He was one man in a complex network of riders, lamplighters, farmers and minutemen whose actions, woven together, sparked a revolution.  

Yet, Longfellow, at the dawn of the Civil War, wrote of Revere’s journey as a call to arms, a rallying cry aimed at stirring patriotic sentiment among Northerners and a reminder that action by a single individual can matter.  

“He's trying to tell the story of a man who does what's right despite it all,” Greg Schofield, an interpreter at the Paul Revere House, said of Longfellow’s poem on a recent fall afternoon. “He sees in this ride of Paul Revere, in the actions of all of these people that day, a story of freedom and a story of change.” 

As we mark the nation’s 250th anniversary, USA TODAY retraced Revere’s ride as part of a project aimed at revisiting journeys that have defined America, and the way we tell our country’s story.

The myth of Revere, the individual hero, the consummate voice of warning rising up against the odds, has become ingrained in the American zeitgeist, twisting its way through social movements, pop songs and marketing campaigns for more than a century. 

We traveled the same path as Revere – at a slightly higher horsepower – to examine how history gets remembered and see how his legacy continues to inform the rebellious nature of Americans today.  

‘Let the warning ride forth’ 

Tucked away on a narrow street in Boston’s North End, a wood-framed structure sits sandwiched between four-story brick buildings stuffed with Italian restaurants and million-dollar condos.

Revere owned the modest home in the late 1700s, long before waves of immigrants in the 1900s turned the waterfront area into Boston’s Little Italy. It’s where he stopped to collect boots and a jacket before taking off on his famous midnight ride.  

Today, the brown colonial is where Nina Zannieri, executive director of the Paul Revere Memorial Association, and a cadre of interpreters attempt to fill in the details of the man behind the legend.

 “If you think about the character who's in the poem, he's kind of a disembodied figure. He's a generalized iconic hero, when in fact Revere is a guy just like the rest of us,” Zannieri said.

 In a blue wallpapered, second-story bedroom, interpreters describe Revere as a husband, who lost his first wife and quickly remarried, and as a father of 16 children, several of whom passed away at a young age.      

He was a businessman – a member of Boston’s artisan middle class who ran a silver shop. And for years before his midnight ride, Revere belonged to the Sons of Liberty, the underground society that protested British taxation and military occupation.

About a 10-minute walk from Revere’s home, a bronze statue on a pedestal now commemorates his role in history. Behind the statue, the Old North Church too has been immortalized for its role as the spot where Revere arranged for lanterns to be hung as a signal of the direction British troops were heading.

The “one if by land, two if by sea” lantern message was designed to be visible across the Charles River, allowing colonists there to pass along the alarm if Revere and his fellow riders didn’t make it out of Boston.   

This past April, another group of defiant Bostonians thought it fitting to display a new set of warnings on the building.  

Messages in italicized vintage typeface illuminated the steeple for two nights: “Let the WARNING ride forth ONCE MORE: Tyranny is at our door;” “The Revolution started HERE And IT NEVER LEFT;” and “One if by LAND, TWO IF BY D.C.,” they read. 

The Boston art collective Silence Dogood, named after one of Benjamin Franklin’s pseudonyms, designed the declarations to protest what they view as tyranny and injustice by President Donald Trump.

They’ve projected sayings on buildings “guerilla style,” or, without permission, across the country since Trump took office in January, said Diane Dwyer, who started the project.

Still, she had an easier time sending her message in April than Robert Newman, the church sexton, and Captain John Pulling Jr. did 250 years ago, when they broke military curfew and climbed steep, switchback ladders in the pitch-black belfry tower to hang the lanterns. Her message also swept across social media far quicker than Revere could have galloped to Lexington.  

Nikki Stewart, executive director of Old North Illuminated, found out about the display with the rest of the public, but said she was glad to see people finding “relevance and meaning in the steeple” and its role in the American Revolution today.

Dwyer sees the Silence Dogood project following more in the tradition of Longfellow, who visited Old North before penning his poem, than in the footsteps of the midnight messengers.

“I wanted to make sure that when we reach these 250th milestone events and celebrate them, that we don't forget how central dissent was 250 years ago,” Dwyer said. 

“We can look back to history to some of those figures and moments and see when people face these challenges before, what have we done? What risks and sacrifices have we made?”

A message that ripples through history 

Dwyer’s Silence Dogood project is far from the first to highlight Revere’s ride in political messaging.  

In 1915, suffragists in Massachusetts printed a cartoon of a woman on horseback with a flag reading “VOTES FOR WOMEN.” They titled the image “The Spirit of Paul Revere.”

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. name-dropped Revere in his 1967 “Where do we go from here” speech addressing persistent racial divides in the nation after the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and 1965. A Revere-like figure was needed, he said, to “alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand.”

Trump invoked Revere in an April 2017 speech to the National Rifle Association, advocating for protecting the Second Amendment.

“As your president, I will never, ever infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms. … It was this conviction that stirred the heart of a great American patriot on that day, April 242 years ago,” Trump said. “It was the day that Paul Revere spread his Lexington alarm.”

As political leaders have looked back at Revere’s story throughout American history, the myths created by Longfellow’s poem have popped up in other social movements.

Revere did not make the journey alone as the poem suggests.  

He left Boston alongside rider William Dawes, who took the land route, rather than the river route, to Lexington. Historians believe dozens of other messengers were out in the streets that night. Unlike others, Revere and Dawes weren’t aiming to alert the countryside about the British’s plan to destroy colonial military supplies, though they did.

Their goal was to warn revolutionary leaders Sam Adams and John Hancock, who were staying west of Boston in Lexington, and who were feared to be in danger.

“Noise? We’ll have noise enough before long. The regulars are out,” Revere is credited as saying indignantly after he arrived around 1 a.m. at the home of the Rev. Jonas Clarke, where the two men were staying.  

Dawes arrived shortly after, and he and Revere met up with another man, Samuel Prescott, to alert farmers in nearby Concord. But Revere never made it to Concord, despite what Longfellow later wrote in his poem. He was captured by British troops just outside of Lexington, on a patch of field now demarcated with a semi-circular stone wall.  

Two centuries later, a similar myth bubbled up. As the story goes, in 1955 civil rights icon Rosa Parks, tired after a long day, refused to give up her bus seat to a White passenger and inadvertently sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Except, Parks was following the lead of others, including 15-year-old Claudette Colvins, who months earlier had been jailed for not giving up her seat. Parks' arrest was the final straw in a burgeoning movement.  

“Others had gone through this same experience, some even worse experiences than mine, and they all felt that the time had come that they should decide that we would have to stop supporting the bus company until we were given better service,” Parks said of the experience in an interview five months after her arrest. 

What would have happened if Parks hadn’t taken that action? Would Revere still be a well-known historical figure without Longfellow’s words? Zannieri, of the Paul Revere Memorial Association, argues yes.

“It's a story about how you put together collective action, and while the poem makes for a single hero, it's also important to think … about each individual mattering and making a difference,” she said. 

A ‘spirit of protest’ 

When British officers released Revere in the early morning of April 19, 1775, without his horse, he was forced to walk miles back to the Hancock-Clarke house where he had met Adams and Hancock hours earlier.

His journey wasn’t over. After escorting Hancock and Adams more than five miles up the road, toward Woburn, Massachusetts, he and Hancock’s secretary, exhausted from the trip and with little sleep, were tasked with removing a trunk full of treasonous letters from Buckman Tavern on Lexington Green so British troops would not find it. 

“When we had got about 100 Yards from the meeting house the British Troops appeared on both Sides of the Meeting-House,” Revere wrote in a 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Historical Society, recounting his midnight ride. Leaving the tavern, where minutemen had gathered hours earlier to wait for the British military, Revere heard the first gunshots of the American Revolution ring out. 

“I could distinguish two Guns & then the Continual roar of Musquetry,” he remembered in writing, 20 years later.

Today, inside Buckman Tavern, a small sign on a wall near where colonial men might have enjoyed a pint of beer asks visitors to ponder the extent they would go to express their “thoughts on our government.” 

Place a sign on your lawn? Vote? Make a social media post?  

For 55-year-old Mei-Hua Hall, the answer is "protest."

The Waltham, Massachusetts, resident was one of thousands gathered on Lexington Battle Green on Oct. 18 for the local "No Kings" rally. They were expressing their dissatisfaction with what organizers described as corrupt and authoritarian policies by the Trump administration.  

People dressed in dinosaur costumes and Revolutionary War-style clothing filled the green where farmers-turned-soldiers spilled the first blood of the War for Independence. They held signs and banners warning their neighbors to “dump Trump and “resist tyranny.”

Instead of fifes and drums, the high school girl group Cozmic Crush played rock hits, including Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Vietnam War-era song “Fortunate Son” and Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me With Your Best Shot.”

The event was one of hundreds of decentralized protests organized from Washington, DC, to California, not by towering movement leaders, but by ordinary citizens and left-leaning groups like Indivisible and 50501.

Hall, director of the Psychosis Neurobiology Laboratory at nearby McLean Hospital, said Trump’s slashing of federal science and research funding, and the changes being made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Department of Health and Human Services, were among the key reasons she opted to attend the protest. The cuts, she said, put the country’s future at risk.  

“I'm an immigrant. I became a United States citizen because I believe in the values of this country. And I still believe it,” Hall said. “It's the people who have the power, not any government. We need to show up and show, we the people have the power to voice our concern.” 

Others there, including 47-year-old Cris Martin, were appalled by Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in cities such as Los Angeles; Chicago; Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, DC, as well as ongoing immigration enforcement.  

“You're seeing a militarized police force attacking people in the streets. You're seeing protests being shut down, opportunities to speak your mind and to gather being limited and threats from the administration against things that are promised to us in the Constitution,” said Martin, who works at a university research center studying Russia and former Soviet states.

“There's a spirit of protest and a real sort of embodiment of being one of the founding places of our country that sits here in Lexington,” she said. “As much as I hope that I would have been on the front lines then, I know that I'm trying to be on the front lines now.”  

Karissa Waddick, a reporter on USA TODAY's Nation Desk, can be reached at [email protected].