This low, weather-beaten timber house is the oldest surviving structure in downtown Boston, home to the man behind the most famous ride in American history. Paul Revere bought this house in 1770, and it was from here that he set out on the night of April 18, 1775, rowed across the Charles River to Charlestown, borrowed a horse, and rode to Lexington to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock that British troops were marching to arrest them and seize the colonial military stores at Concord. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem Paul Revere's Ride, written in 1860, immortalized the journey with details that were historically imprecise — Revere was actually stopped by a British patrol before reaching Concord, and two other riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, completed the warning — but the poem made Revere's name synonymous with patriotic alertness.
Revere was a silversmith, engraver, and industrialist who ran a successful metal foundry; the bell in many New England church steeples was cast by his company. The house was built around 1680 and is the oldest remaining structure in downtown Boston. Walk through the low-ceilinged rooms; the scale of a seventeenth-century Boston merchant's home is startling.