Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / Liberty's Shot

Transcript

Liberty's Shot · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:14
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristin.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode we'll be opening the gate and entering Old Hill Burying Ground, located in Concord, Massachusetts.
0:25
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug, cozy up and let's take a dig into history.
0:31
Kristin: I didn't grow up on the East Coast.
0:33
Kristin: For most of my life, american history came second hand, filtered through brittle textbooks and flickering reels in dimly lit classrooms.
0:41
Kristin: It felt distant, faded, like echoes from another world.
0:45
Kristin: But then I moved to New England.
0:47
Kristin: History stopped whispering and started breathing.
0:50
Kristin: It arises from the ground here, cold and unrelenting beneath my feet, in worn gravestones and crooked crypts.
0:57
Kristin: It turns to the fog that clings to colonial streets at dusk.
1:01
Kristin: I've lived in places where history made its mark colonial streets at dusk.
1:06
Kristin: I've lived in places where history made its mark, london among them.
1:08
Kristin: But New England is different.
1:12
Kristin: It doesn't just remember its past, it wears it.
1:13
Kristin: A second skin stitched from stone walls, iron gates and the blood-stoned names etched into a churchyard slate.
1:18
Kristin: The locals might seem indifferent, but don't be fooled.
1:21
Kristin: They've simply grown used to living alongside ghosts.
1:24
Kristin: Your memory isn't locked away in museums.
1:27
Kristin: It walks beside you.
1:29
Kristin: It reenacts itself, not on this stage, but in fields where muskets smoke once curled and cries once split in the morning air and New England.
1:37
Kristin: The past doesn't rest.
1:39
Kristin: It greets those willing to relive it.
1:46
Kristin: Just this past weekend, boston marked the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's Midnight Ride.
1:48
Kristin: If you were lucky enough to be there or caught glimpses of it through glowing screens, the event was something pulled from the dreams of every American history enthusiast.
1:57
Kristin: But it was more than that.
1:58
Kristin: The celebration didn't stop with lanterns and horses galloping into the night.
2:03
Kristin: It unfolded into a drone show that lit the sky of the Charles River and an art installation at the Old North Church, hauntingly titled Silence Do Good, that cast shadows across sacred spaces in the name of liberty.
2:16
Kristin: It was beautiful and eerie and somehow heavy, because beneath all the commemoration, beneath the spectacle, there was this lingering sense that the revolution never really ended.
2:26
Kristin: It only sank deeper into the bones of this place the echoes of rebellion, of sacrifice and of the silence that caused dearly and still that haunt these cobblestone streets.
2:37
Kristin: Yet beyond the cobblestone streets of Boston, two towns were first to taste the blood of revolution.
2:43
Kristin: Boston, two towns were first to taste the blood of revolution.
2:47
Kristin: The first shots of the war had barely faded into silence when the soil of Concord took on a new weight, grief, memory and the burden of a nation's beginning.
2:53
Kristin: But long before April 1775 etched Concord into history, books and rebellion alike, there was already a place here for the dead, a place older than revolution, older than cause.
3:06
Kristin: That place is Old Hill Burying Ground.
3:09
Kristin: After Concord officially incorporated in the fall of 1635, one of its earliest acts of its settlers, alongside raising a meeting house, was the establishment of two small burying grounds.
3:20
Kristin: This one, now known as the Old Hill Burying Ground or the Old Hill Burying Place, was laid out across the northwest edge of a long gravel ridge.
3:29
Kristin: That ridge once sheltered the crude homes of Concord's first residents, and at its eastern tip, near the crest of the hill, the town's original meeting house stood watch over both the living and the dead.
3:41
Kristin: The second cemetery, the South Burying place, was a more modest half acre near the south side of Millbrook, but it was here, atop the gravel ridge, that nearly all early burials occurred.
3:52
Kristin: According to tradition, the first graves may have been placed just east of the current bounds, though no trace remains.
3:59
Kristin: In those earliest decades.
4:01
Kristin: Markers were simple, if they existed at all Wooden slabs or field stones long since surrendered to time, weather and silence.
4:09
Kristin: Only a few stones from that era survive.
4:12
Kristin: The oldest visible marker belongs to Joseph Merrim, who died in 1677 at the age of 47, but his is simply the oldest named grave.
4:22
Kristin: How many lie beneath the earth?
4:23
Kristin: Nameless, forgotten even by history?
4:26
Kristin: That's anyone's guess.
4:27
Kristin: Many of those buried here helped build the town from wilderness.
4:31
Kristin: Others may have lived to see it burn with a spark of revolution.
4:35
Kristin: The cemetery spans just 1.16 acres, a small patch of land for so many souls.
4:40
Kristin: Nearly 500 gravestones remain, with burials spanning from 1677 to 1854.
4:47
Kristin: The stones range from crude markers to finely carved slate, adorned with winged skulls and soul effigies, grim testaments to the region's early Puritan iconography.
4:57
Kristin: And the stone covers you etched mortality into memory.
5:00
Kristin: In official records, this burial ground goes by many names.
5:04
Kristin: The Massachusetts Historical Commission lists it as Conn.804, the Old Hill Burying Ground, and the vital records of Concord, massachusetts, to the end of the year 1850, it's simply labeled GR1.
5:19
Kristin: But none of these cold catalogings capture the strange hush of standing among these crooked stones, where wind the entrance is easy to miss, nestled between the Holy Family Parish and a brick-ended colonial house on Monument Street.
5:37
Kristin: But once you pass through its gates, time slips.
5:40
Kristin: The present begins to recede, the air stills, the echo of musket fire.
5:45
Kristin: Just beyond the rise lies the North Bridge, where blood once mingled with river water and the revolution took its first breath.
5:52
Kristin: And whether you come daylight or dusk, you may feel it too that this hill is not entirely at rest.
5:59
Kristin: From here is only a breath away to the blood-soaked soil of April 19th 1775, where rebellion walked and the first to fall were laid to rest.
6:09
Kristin: Gunpowder and ghosts mingled in the misty dawn of a new nation, stepping back into the dark birthing hour of the American Revolution, to the fateful battles of Lexington and Concord.
6:21
Kristin: This was no ordinary confrontation.
6:23
Kristin: It was a chain reaction of vengeance and shadow, a spectral march across the fields of Massachusetts that left behind broken bodies, scorched timbers and a silence that only the dead can keep.
6:34
Kristin: Tensions had simmered for months.
6:37
Kristin: Colonial anger burned hot after British Parliament imposed the so-called Intolerable Acts, a series of punishments for the Boston Tea Party.
6:46
Kristin: By late 1774, the providence of Massachusetts Bay was a powder keg, with the Massachusetts Provincial Congress forming an open defiance of British rule, training militias and hiding weapons.
6:59
Kristin: Then came the night of April 18th.
7:01
Kristin: The British regulars, some 700 of them under Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, slipped from Boston under darkness, tasked with seizing arms at Concord.
7:11
Kristin: But the colonials were ready for a revolution.
7:14
Kristin: Lanterns flickered from the steeple of the Old North Church.
7:17
Kristin: One if by land, two if by sea.
7:20
Kristin: Riders like Paul Revere and Samuel Prescott flew into the night, their hooves beating a desperate rhythm against the stone.
7:27
Kristin: The alarm spread like a wildfire.
7:30
Kristin: Bidon militias had aroused from 30 towns At Lexington.
7:34
Kristin: As the sun broke through the mist, captain John Parker's militia faced off against the British.
7:40
Kristin: The men stood on Lexington Green, quiet but unyielding.
7:44
Kristin: Stand your ground, don't fire unless fired upon, parker ordered.
7:48
Kristin: But if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.
7:52
Kristin: No one knows who fired the first shot, but when the smoke cleared, eight colonials were dead.
7:58
Kristin: Their blood soaked the grass of Lexington Common.
8:02
Kristin: The British moved on to Concord, but the land itself seemed to rise against them.
8:06
Kristin: At the North Bridge the tide turned.
8:08
Kristin: Many men from Acton, concord and beyond gathered in force.
8:12
Kristin: The British fired first, but the colonial militia answered with a deadly volley.
8:17
Kristin: The bridge, now iconic, became a threshold, the place where rebellion stepped into revolution.
8:23
Kristin: Captain Isaac Davis was the first to fall his blood, marking the place that Emerson would later call the shot heard around the world.
8:32
Kristin: But the horror didn't stop there.
8:34
Kristin: As the British retreated toward Boston.
8:37
Kristin: The militia swarmed like phantoms, firing from behind trees, stone walls and houses.
8:42
Kristin: In present-day Arlington the fight turned savage.
8:46
Kristin: British soldiers enraged and terrified, stormed homes, banished innocents and burned what they could.
8:52
Kristin: At the Jason Russell House, 21 colonials were slaughtered, some hacked to death as they fled.
8:59
Kristin: Bullets still scar the wooden walls and some say you can feel the dread soaked into the floors.
9:05
Kristin: Even now the road from Concord to Charleston carries an eerie echo the unrelenting march of boots, the rattle of muskets and the cries of those who would not live to see nightfall.
9:16
Kristin: By the time the British limped into Charleston under the cover of their cannons, they had lost 73 men, with over 170 wounded or missing.
9:26
Kristin: The colonists only lost 49.
9:29
Kristin: But the real toll?
9:30
Kristin: It was the moment peace died or had taken its first true breath.
9:35
Kristin: In the aftermath, thousands of colonial militias besieged Boston, blood had been spilled and there was no turning back.
9:43
Kristin: So why begin with two battles that didn't unfold within the gates of where we've opened today?
9:48
Kristin: Because the echoes of Lexington and Concord were buried here, quite literally the soil of Old Hill Burying Ground cradles.
9:56
Kristin: The men who lived through, died through and helped ignite those first sparks of war.
10:01
Kristin: Fifteen veterans of the Revolutionary War rest behind these crooked stones.
10:06
Kristin: Their story is woven into the very landscape.
10:10
Kristin: Among them is a man whose name looms large in the telling of America's violent birth Major John Buttrick.
10:17
Kristin: If the name doesn't ring a bell, perhaps the phrase the shot heard around the world will.
10:22
Kristin: It was Buttrick who led the colonial militia at the North Bridge and, according to legend, gave the command to fire.
10:28
Kristin: Whether or not he gave that fateful order or it was misheard remains a matter of debate.
10:33
Kristin: But his place in this story is certain.
10:35
Kristin: He stood at the tipping point where protests turned to war and Musket's gave rise to revolution.
10:42
Kristin: Born July 20, 1731, in Concord, massachusetts, buttrick was not bred for war.
10:49
Kristin: He was no general, no strategist from European courts.
10:53
Kristin: He was the son of the soil, a local man who knew the bend of the river better than the twist of a musket.
10:58
Kristin: But on April 19th 1775, as smoke rose from Concordstown Square and the Redcoats held the bridge, it was Buttrick who stood at the head of the column of the trembling farmers and blacksmiths and gave the order that changed everything.
11:16
Kristin: That morning, as British forces fanned across Concord in search of hidden arms, colonial militias retreated.
11:22
Kristin: Colonel James Barrett, commanding the hastily assembled force pulled back across the North Bridge, giving the town to nearly 700 British regulars.
11:31
Kristin: But as reinforcements poured in from Acton, bedford and Lincoln, the hill behind the bridge swelled with bodies over 400 many-men-d'arm, mostly untested.
11:42
Kristin: The British guarding the bridge now found themselves outnumbered, nearly five to one.
11:47
Kristin: At around 10.30 am, barrett issued the order.
11:50
Kristin: Weapons were to be loaded but not fired unless fired upon, and so the long line of militia began to march two abreast down the narrow, flooded road.
12:00
Kristin: At the head walked Captain Isaac Davis of Acton, lieutenant Colonel John Robinson of Westford and Major John Buttrick of Concord.
12:07
Kristin: The British, seeing the approaching column, began pulling up the bridge planks.
12:11
Kristin: In desperation, buttrick shouted for them to stop.
12:15
Kristin: And then a crack, a single warning shot, then another.
12:18
Kristin: Then a musket ball struck a young fifer.
12:21
Kristin: The next tore through Davis's heart, dropping him mid-step into the muddy earth.
12:26
Kristin: Moments later, private Abner Holmser of Acton fell dead.
12:30
Kristin: Beside him.
12:31
Kristin: The farmers halted.
12:32
Kristin: There was a breath of disbelief and then Buttrick's cry ran out.
12:37
Kristin: Not just the command, but defiance, grief and fury.
12:40
Kristin: Fire, fellow soldiers, for God's sake.
12:43
Kristin: Fire that moment.
12:45
Kristin: That shot was the first return of fire by colonialists in the American Revolution.
12:50
Kristin: It wasn't the beginning of war, but it was the moment that became irreversible.
12:55
Kristin: The volley shattered the line of stunned British infantry.
12:58
Kristin: They turned and ran, abandoning their wounded, racing back toward the safety of the reinforcements in Concord.
13:04
Kristin: Buttrick and others crossed the bridge, no longer retreating but advancing, and took defensive positions behind a stone wall.
13:12
Kristin: The battlefield behind them was littered with the first bodies that would become a war spanning years and continents.
13:17
Kristin: Later the British, who searched in vain for weapons and ammunitions at Barrett's farm, returned to find their comrades dead or dying when Salter's skull cleaved, possibly by a hatchet, some believed it was.
13:30
Kristin: A scalping Rage simmered in their ranks and the retreat to Boston would be a long, bloody, haunting road.
13:38
Kristin: Buttrick's shot, heard around the world's debate, comes from the historians believing he actually was sick at the time with tuberculosis, unable to cry out.
13:47
Kristin: His order may have been to hold fire to the colonial militia, but his men only heard fire.
13:52
Kristin: No one will truly know, but his command fire reverberated through time.
13:57
Kristin: It was his words that unleashed the shot Ralph Waldo Emerson would immortalize in his Concord hymn by the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to April's breeze unfurled here.
14:09
Kristin: Once the embattled farmer stood and fired the shot heard around the world.
14:14
Kristin: That shot, that moment belonged to John Buttrick.
14:18
Kristin: He died May 16, 1791, and lies buried in old hill-bearing ground in Concord.
14:25
Kristin: His statue, the Minuteman, now stands near where Isaac Davis fell back straight, musket in hand, forever watching the bridge.
14:33
Kristin: And in nearby Finchburg, a street still bears his name.
14:38
Kristin: But here, among the trees, stone and water, patrick's too.
14:41
Kristin: Legacy remains in the silence before the volley and in the echoes that still hum across the Concord River when the wind is just right.
14:50
Kristin: Before the muskets cracked in the April dawn, before blood soaked the roadside between Lexington and Concord.
14:57
Kristin: The men who would shape that day walked the same New England paths farmers, blacksmiths, ministers and sons.
15:04
Kristin: And how many of them lie beneath the soil in old hill burying ground.
15:09
Kristin: This small patch of land holds more than weatherboard stones and crumbling epithets.
15:13
Kristin: It holds the memory of those who stood when the first line was drawn between colony and crown.
15:19
Kristin: Fifty Revolutionary War veterans are interred here, their names sometimes fading from stone, but never in the history they helped forge.
15:27
Kristin: Among them Colonel James Barrett, commander of the Middlesex Militia, but never in the history they helped forge Among them, colonel James Barrett, commander of the Middlesex Militia, whose farm was the target of the British expedition.
15:35
Kristin: His son, nathaniel Barrett also rests here.
15:38
Kristin: Two generations bound to the soil they defended.
15:41
Kristin: Captain David Brown led one of Concord's two-minute companies, turning not just into battle but into legend.
15:48
Kristin: Reuben Brown, the saddler whose tools and tact helped equip the militia, watched from his shop as the war thundered past his doorstep.
15:57
Kristin: And Samuel Brooks, whose house bore witness to the British retreat, is buried here too, his family's land now woven into the landscape of memory.
16:06
Kristin: Roger Brown, once a corporal in the Framingham Minutemen, would rise to the rank of colonel.
16:12
Kristin: Samuel Brown, jacob Brown and Abner Hosmer, whose son died that morning on the bridge, are buried nearby their shared surname, a reminder of how families, not just soldiers, were shaped by that day.
16:27
Kristin: From the pulpit, reverend William Emerson stirred spirits and stoked the fires of resistance.
16:33
Kristin: As Concord's minister, he offered sermons of liberty before joining the cause, himself serving as chaplain to the Continental Army at Fort Ticonderoga, where he died in 1776.
16:44
Kristin: Names like Nehemiah Hunt, samuel Hosmer, josiah Miriam and Aaron Wright round out the muster, each tied to the militia companies that met the Redcoats with fire and steel.
16:55
Kristin: Others Ephraim Wood, ephraim Wheeler, joas Myot and John Miriam leave behind less detailed records but no less weight in the history they walked.
17:06
Kristin: Some were old by the time of rebellion history.
17:10
Kristin: They walked.
17:11
Kristin: Some were old by the time of rebellion, others still young.
17:12
Kristin: Most were buried here with simple stones, a few perhaps without any markers at all, but together they rest beneath this hillside, the same ridge where Concord's first meeting house once stood, the same ridge where the town's first settlers laid out their future, never knowing how fiercely it would be defended.
17:28
Kristin: The grave grind for Old Hill Burying Ground was an ice-cold milk from the Saltbox Kitchen in Concord.
17:35
Kristin: For more honorary grinds in the area, please visit the-grimcom.
17:41
Kristin: For now we're closing the gate on Old Hill Burying Ground.
17:44
Kristin: We hope you enjoyed our dig into history, if you did subscribe today, to join us next time when we open the gate on the Grimm.