On the morning of April 19, 1775, over 700 King’s troops marched into Concord to search for military supplies that spies had told Royal Governor Gage were being hidden there to support a rebellion against the King. Their search met unexpected resistance, exploding into a day-long battle over eighteen miles from Concord to Boston with fighting on open ground and from behind trees and stone walls. Today, you can retrace the soldiers’ steps along the Battle Road and imagine the landscape and walls as they were that day thanks, in part, to a 2024 project by Minute Man National Historical Park to rebuild the park’s historic stone walls in Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington. Led by Michael Papile, a team of professional stone wallers affiliated with The Stone Trust (an organization dedicated to preserving and advancing the art of dry stone walling) restored these walls. Stone by stone, stories of time were put back together.

Part I: Be Quiet!  And for God’s sake, fire!

This tale begins on an angst-filled June night in 1759, near French-controlled Fort Carillon in New York, as Captain Samuel Merriman exasperatedly sought to quiet soldiers in his camp who he described as “singing, swearing” and cavorting so loudly that watchmen risked not hearing French enemies sneaking up in the dark. 

England and France were locked in the French and Indian War as they vied for control of territories in the new world. Further north of Merriman, Concord-born soldier John Buttrick was among British forces fighting near the French-controlled Fort St. Frederic. The French eventually abandoned both forts, leaving them to the English who renamed them Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Crown Point. 

After the victories in New York, Samuel Merriman and John Buttrick returned to Massachusetts. Merriman went to a farm in Deerfield, where fields settled by Europeans were crisscrossed by stone walls, some of whose stones were placed by Native Americans working for the colonists in exchange for food, and Buttrick to his home in Concord atop a hill overlooking the North Bridge.

For the next twelve years, as Buttrick worked for Concord as a constable, built stone walls, and surveyed highways and bridges, patriotic resistance grew in America, leading to the rise of an independent militia. Samuel Merriman became a captain in his local militia, and John Buttrick a major in Colonel Pierce’s regiment of minutemen. 

When the King’s troops arrived in Concord on April 19, 1775, they split up to search the town. Around 9:30 a.m., the black boots of King George’s soldiers thudded over the North Bridge’s wooden planks; a detachment proceeded to search Colonel Barrett’s farm, while around one hundred soldiers remained to secure the bridge.

Watching from the hilltop above, his house not far behind him, Major John Buttrick and nearly four hundred hastily assembling militia from Concord and surrounding towns looked down upon the bridge. Out of sight, in Concord Center, the King’s troops began burning confiscated military supplies. Embers accidentally set the town house roof ablaze, pushing a column of black smoke into the air. Believing the British to be burning the town, Major Buttrick led the militia down the hill to the bridge. 

Although no order to fire had been given, several guns fired from the King’s ranks, the musket balls skipping over the river. A second unordered volley followed, striking Acton fifer Luther Blanchard. Hearing Blanchard’s pained cry, Major Buttrick leapt in the air shouting, “Fire! For God’s sake, fire!”

Major Buttrick’s order was the first openly declared intentional act of war against the sovereign King, laying stake to Concord’s claim of “The Shot Heard Round the World.” 

Today, the site of this historic shot and Buttrick’s house are part of Minute Man National Historical Park. As the 250th anniversary of April 19, 1775, approached, stone walls by Buttrick’s house on Liberty Street (opposite the North Bridge Visitor Center parking lot) were designated for repair, leading to a hot summer day in 2024 when, towing a black trailer, an SUV bearing a New Hampshire “Live Free or Die” license plate pulled up to John Buttrick’s house and out stepped Victoria Merriman, the sixth-great-granddaughter of Captain Samuel Merriman. With her business partner Justin Walsh, Victoria owns the dry stone wall company Friction and Gravity, named for the two main principles required for mortar-free walls to stand. Together, Victoria and Justin tackled the challenge of rebuilding Buttrick’s walls to make them look as they did in 1775. Explained Victoria, “Any of us can do polished work if we want to, but most of these stone walls were done by low skilled farmers just putting them together. We have to do quality work and make it look rustic. It’s like modern musicians recording music to sound like scratching vinyl.” 

Papile’s team of dry stone wallers came together to finish the wall at Meriam’s Corner. L-R: Victoria Merriman, Justin Walsh, Martin Beevers, Bryce Hollingsworth and dog Blue, Chris Sellars, Michael Papile, and Ron Neil.

Part II: Englishmen and Good Stone Walls

If there’s one thing an Englishman from the countryside knows, it is a good stone wall. On April 19, 1775, as Yorkshire-born Ensign Jeremy Lister (an officer in His Majesty’s 10th Regiment of Foot) led his men towards the North Bridge, he felt an unease as the path around them narrowed, funneling his men into a walking target. In his later published narrative of events, Lister wrote, “there was a good wall which I pointed out as good cover or Brest Work if we would avail ourselves of it….” But the battle at the bridge occurred before the wall could be utilized. Despite Lister and other British officers shouting for their men to hold their ground and form rank, the column turned and chaotically fell back to Concord Center.  

Today, if you retrace the Regulars’ footsteps from the bridge, within ~130 yards, you will see a long stone wall running the length of the North Bridge lower parking lot. This wall was rebuilt in 2024 by Englishman Martin Beevers, president of the Vermont-based Stone Trust.

Like Lister, Martin grew up in Yorkshire where stone walls are part of life, there to be climbed, knocked down, and put back together. Martin obtained professional qualifications with the Dry-Stone Walling Association of Great Britain and spent fifteen years building dry stone walls in Britain. Love of country music moved Martin and his guitar to Nashville, Tennessee, where he plays and composes country music and owns Old England Rock Walls. To establish his company, Martin needed an American contractor’s license, but America does not have a license for dry stone wallers; instead, wallers may get a mason’s license. Masons use mortar in their work, dry stone wallers do not, they are separate crafts. Martin worked with the Tennessee trade licensing board to create a special license, and, as of 2024, Martin is the only state licensed dry stone waller in America. Working on the walls by the North Bridge, Martin observed that “These are not just farm walls; You’ve got history here.”

Martin Beevers in the North Bridge parking lot with Patriot Minister William Emerson’s house in the background.

Part III: Bullets, Brooks, and Bombs

Retreating from the bridge, panicked Regulars turned right onto today’s Monument Street. On their left, out of a house opposite The Old Manse (and today next to the North Bridge lower parking lot), Patriot and blacksmith Elisha Jones stepped into his doorway. According to Lemuel Shattuck’s History of Concord, Elisha was part of Concord’s efforts to stockpile supplies for an army and had 17,000 pounds of saltwater fish stashed on his property. Spotting Jones, a Regular fired at him, the bullet missing and striking the wall to the left of the door. Here, the bullet remained, earning the house the nickname of “The Bullet Hole House.” The property is now owned by Minute Man National Historical Park. Encased in a diamond-shaped frame, you can still view the bullet hole in the wall to the left of the door.

Ensign Lister and his men reached Concord Center, where the entire British column reformed and began the march back to Boston. Half a mile from Concord Center on the Bay Road (today’s Lexington Road), they passed the home of Concord’s Muster Master Samuel Whitney, who is believed to have had seven tons of gunpowder stored in one of his buildings. While committed to the Patriots’ cause of freedom, Whitney enslaved an African man called Casey. Stone walls on his property may have been built by Casey or later by Louisa May Alcott’s father, Bronson, when Bronson acquired the site in 1845. Today named “The Wayside,” Whitney’s house is part of the National Park. As part of the park’s improvement project, Stone Trust affiliated waller Bryce Hollingsworth’s job was to make a retaining wall by the barn look like it could have been built by either Casey or Alcott. As he wrestled a large stone into place, Bryce, who owns Stone Bear Mason, LLC., noted, “Anyone can build a perfect wall. But for a historic rebuild, you have to be someone else. You have to make it look the same but stronger, better, and made to last.”

Victoria Merriman rebuilds a wall with Major John Buttrick’s house behind her.   

Continuing up Lexington Road another half mile brings you to Meriam’s Corner (at the intersection of today’s Lexington Road and Old Bedford Road). As Lister and the British column approached this point, out of the woods, muskets flashing, stepped Captain John Brooks and his company of Reading minutemen. Nearly 1,000 militia joined them. Fierce fighting began at Meriam’s corner as a bullet shattered Lister’s elbow, and casualties from both sides began to fall. Taking cover behind stone walls and barns, Captain John Brooks and the militia chased Lister and the King’s troops as they struggled from Meriam’s corner onward over the road through farmland occupied by several of John Brooks’ cousins. Today, this area is known as “Brooks Village.” British soldiers falling dead or dying along the Battle Road, onward they pushed, past houses including those owned by minutemen Captain William Smith, who had been at the North Bridge battle, and Jacob Whittemore, whom legend says, as the Regulars approached, was carrying his daughter and her newborn baby to safety in the woods. 

If you walked this area in 1942, the echoes of muskets would have been replaced by sounds of modern warfare as, on farmland adjacent to the old Battle Road, Hanscom Air Force base was built and American fighter planes roared off into World War II. America was once again allied with Britain and, fighting together, their missions included bombarding German-occupied Lanciano, Italy, where their bombs destroyed the stone house of teenager Anna Barese. When residents of Lanciano rebelled against German occupiers, a German officer shot at Anna, his bullet passing through her dress.

Years later, now with commercial planes flying overhead, Anna’s son Michael Papile, the chief dry stone waller overseeing the park’s wall preservation project, stood by a pile of rocks outside the Bullet Hole House in Concord, carefully selecting the perfect stones to repair a wall. From there, Michael followed the retreating British soldiers’ steps, rebuilding Battle Road walls around Meriam’s corner, as well as Captain Smith’s and Jacob Whittemore’s houses. As much as stone walls along the Battle Road worked against the Regulars on April 19, Michael, whose company is Stone Wall Tony, is aware of the connection between the wall builder’s mind and the stones, the two working in synchronicity to find balance and resilience. 

Mists of Time: Ron Neil and Michael Papile working on Meriam’s Corner.

British soldier’s grave along the Battle Road

Part IV: The Secret Under the Wall 

As Ensign Jeremy Lister struggled through Lincoln, with (as he wrote in his narrative) his “right elbow joint effectively disabled,” and being “fired at from all quarters from behind hedges and walls,” he may have wished he was back in British-controlled Canada where his military service had started. If he could have been there, he might have met the family of John Densmore, a Scottish-born stone mason who had immigrated to New Hampshire and fled in the 1770s to Nova Scotia with other Loyalists not wishing to test their Patriot neighbors’ seriousness when they said: “Join or Die.” 

Two centuries later, in 2024, drivers passing through the Brooks Village Battle Road section of Route 2A in Minute Man National Historical Park, might have spotted Loyalist John Densmore’s 7th-great-grandson, Ron Neil, pouring olive oil over a stone outside one of the Brooks family houses.

British coin

Ron, whose grandparents moved from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts in the 1900s, owns Bostonian Mason and is part of Michael Papile’s team of dry stone wallers. Ron is also a Freemason and follows an ancient ritual when laying the northeast cornerstone of a wall. A coin from the year the wall was built/rebuilt is placed under the cornerstone, and the stone anointed with olive oil and sprinkled with grain. In a nod to his Loyalist ancestors, Ron carefully placed a 2024 British coin bearing King Charles III’s face under the cornerstone of one of the walls by the Brooks Village houses. Like the identities of the spies in 1775 who tipped off Governor Gage to the supplies hidden in Concord, the exact wall where this coin is buried is a closely kept secret, but as you pass the stone walls in this area, you will know that King Charles III is symbolically keeping a watchful eye, forever, on the road over which his ancestor King George III’s men marched on that fateful day of April 19, 1775. 

To learn more about the Stone Trust, visit: TheStoneTrust.org.

All photos ©Michael P. Krupa