Medford Historical Society Papers, Volume 30.

The historic facts on which the plays are based are as follows: Medford was the first stop of the rider Paul Revere, who notified Captain Isaac Hall. It is not known when the Medford minutemen left, but they undoubtedly sent another rider to Malden, and tradition says that they engaged the British at Merriam's corner near Concord. Other unorganized volunteers followed in their wake, among them Henry Putnam, in 1758 a lieutenant in the Louisburg campaign and past the age of military service. Seizing the flintlock as his wife asked if he were going without his dinner, he answered, ‘I am going to take powder and balls for my dinner today, or give them some.’ Another was the Rev. Edward Brooks. From his house opposite the old slave wall on the western side of Grove street he too went to Lexington, and with fullbottomed wig, rode on horseback, his gun on his shoulder. From the garret window of that house his son Peter listened to the guns at Menotomy and saw them glistening in the sun.

As the day wore on armed provincials from other towns trooped through the square.¹ The road between Medford and Salem was the highway leading to the country northeast of Boston. Seventy-six men from Malden, with drums beating, marched to Medford under orders to proceed to Watertown. Near Cradock bridge the company halted while the whereabouts of the British was verified, and then at noon proceeded through the town to Menotomy. At some hour of the morning thirty-eight men from Lynn marched through Medford. The word reached Salem and Danvers at about nine o'clock in the morning of the nineteenth. The Danvers men, three hundred and thirty-one of them, without waiting for a full regiment set off at nine o'clock. Before noon they came striding through Medford, and in four hours did the march of sixteen miles to Menotomy. There seven of their young men were killed.