The Hartwells

I stood in the low beamed room and reached my hand up.

"That's what let us know this was the room used as the tavern," the costumed ranger told me. My fingers brushed the smooth wood, blackened with smoke stains. At one point the room would have been crowded with bodies, the smoke hanging in the air. Voices would have whispered and shouted. Men would have laughed while wooden chairs scraped against the wood floors washed clean each night. Behind the bar, pints would have been poured while the smell of roasting meat would tempt a man to have a bit to eat.

"Ephraim and Elizabeth had five children under seven and she was pregnant with the sixth when diphtheria swept through the towns of Concord, Lexington, Wayside and Boston. The illness was brutal and swift, killing all five of her children in a matter of three weeks."

Tears welled in my eyes for this Colonial woman. Noticing, the ranger assured me, "Families often lost children at early ages."

I found no comfort in his words as I'm sure Elizabeth found no comfort in the commonality of it. The idea of a woman, belly swelling with life, burying five tiny bodies made me heartsick. "People are people are people," I told the ranger.

He looked at me quizzically, "There is no way, no matter how common it was, that any mother would have been able to bear that sort of loss without it impacting her deeply."

He nodded slowly. "We have no records," he said. "She didn't leave diaries or letters."

I nodded. I didn't need letters.

"The sixth child was a girl. They went on to have nine more children who all lived to adulthood. One of them, Samuel, and his wife lived next door." He pointed out the window to what remained of a home - a large brick fireplace. Another visitor shuffled into the room. I moved to the doorway of the tavern and stood as large raindrops dripped off the roof and onto my face. The kids were waiting patiently for the musket firing demonstration while the rangers consulted the thick clouds.

Muskets don't fire in the rain.

Finally, there was enough of a break - and enough children - that the part of the program I was sure would be a hit began. Each child was handed a wooden musket.

"At sixteen, a boy could join the militia," the ranger said in his booming voice. He held aloft the musket in his hand. The barrel was a smokey gray while the stock gleamed in the filtered sunlight.

He walked up and down the line of potential militia members, regaling them with stories of formation and regiments. He spoke of their bravery and their spirit. Then he started instructing them in their own formations. Tall and proud the children marched, sometimes to the left rather than the right, sometimes forward instead of halting. Barrels swung around, narrowly missing little heads. He instructed them to face an empty field, aim and fire.

Silence met their shots, but in their imaginations, they were firing powder and balls at the approaching Regulars.

When the muskets were collected and the militia orders distributed, the ranger ushered us towards the benches on the side of the field. Another ranger, this one a woman dressed in a bonnet and skirt, her boots worn and her apron tucked into itself, walked forward.

"If we were living in 1775, I would not be allowed in the militia," she began, "but my father or my brothers or my husband would be sure to have taught me to load and fire a musket." She paused and grinned, "I'm the fastest ranger here. I can load and fire in 19 seconds. Minutemen were known for doing it in twenty."

"I want to tell you about Samuel Hartwell. He was born in that house, ran through these fields, climbed on these walls. He and his brothers ate apples off those trees and fished in that pond," she gestured. "They were born here, they grew up here. They sat in their father's tavern and listened while the men spoke of  the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the unrest. When Samuel was sixteen, he joined the militia. Maybe it was there that he first spied his future wife Mary. It was certainly on this road that they walked, courted, and in that house," she pointed to the brick chimney, "where they lived and had three children who were under the age of three on April 19, 1775. Samuel was a minuteman, a sergeant in his company. When Dr. Prescott, having just escaped capture less than a mile away where Paul Revere was being held, banged on his door in the middle of the night that the Regulars were coming, he had maybe a moment to kiss his wife goodbye and warn her to get their daughters to safety.

"Mary handed her four month old baby to a servant and ran across the dew wet fields to warn Captain Smith. Returning home, she watched from their upstairs window as the British soldiers march past, noting that if it were not for their missions she would have thought it was a glorious sight. After they passed, she gathered her children, all three infants or toddlers, and went to her father's home."

The only sound in the small audience was the drops of rain falling from the leaves onto the dirt road. Not a single child whispered or fidgeted. We were all enthralled by the story wove by the woman in front of us.

"It would be the last time she saw her husband for almost a year. Samuel led his men in the battle against the Regulars. He chased them back, across this field, down this road and past his own home. Did he have time to spare a thought for his wife and children, a prayer for their safety as a bullet broke an upstairs window?" We followed her look at gazed at the chimney.

"Samuel was commissioned into the Continental Army and fought bravely beside his brothers until the end of the Revolutionary War. He returned home, whole and healthy, to his wife and daughters. While men rose to power, their names remembered through history, he returned to his job, tended his land, had more children." She paused to let it sink in. "I think, perhaps, his story is the one we need to remember. The story of an ordinary man called upon to be extraordinarily brave and then to fade into history. Don't you?"

The applause belied our small group. Elizabeth jumped off her seat and clapped wildly.

"Now. Who wants to watch me fire a musket?"

Hands flew into the air and with another grin, the ranger walked into the middle of the field. We watched as she loaded and fired, the sound of the report echoing across the empty fields. Smoke hung in the air, wreathing her for a moment before beginning its slow dissipation.

How must this field have looked on that bloody day? How must it have sounded?

I rubbed the goosebumps from my arms and stared, once more, at the Tavern which housed a family woven into the tapestry of the birth of our nation. We left after the second demonstration and walked up the Battle Road, our minds filled with a living, breathing sense of history.