North Square and Paul Revere House

Why is it significant?

You have arrived in historic North Square, the oldest continuously inhabited public square in the city of Boston.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You have arrived in historic North Square, the oldest continuously inhabited public square in the city of Boston. Paved with weathered granite cobblestones and surrounded by colonial townhouses, this intimate triangular plaza served as the social and political epicenter of seventeenth-century Boston. Here stood the meetinghouse of Puritan preacher Increase Mather, destroyed by the Great Fire of Boston in 1676.

Fronting the square stands the venerable Paul Revere House, constructed around 1680 on the site of Mather's burned parsonage. Built of heavy timber framing with an overhanging second-story jetty and diamond-paned leaded casement windows, it is officially the oldest surviving residential dwelling in downtown Boston.

Patriot silversmith Paul Revere purchased this seventeenth-century home in 1770, moving in with his wife Sarah, his mother, and five children. Over the three decades he lived here until 1800, Revere raised sixteen children, filling these low-ceilinged rooms with hearth fires, copper-crafting, and family warmth. On the fateful evening of April 18, 1775, Revere slipped out through this doorway to begin his legendary midnight ride to Lexington and Concord, alerting colonial militias of the advancing British regulars. In the late nineteenth century, the house became a tenement for newly arrived Jewish and Italian immigrants, operating variously as a cigar store and vegetable market before being saved from demolition in 1902 by Revere's descendants.

Gazing upon the dark timber siding and steep gables of the Revere House, you are transported three centuries into Boston's colonial past. The square's bronze sculptures and tactile bronze maps celebrate the neighborhood's maritime roots and successive waves of immigrant families who enriched Boston's cultural fabric. Standing in this quiet cobblestone enclave, the everyday texture of colonial life feels remarkably near, bridging centuries of American history through honest timber craftsmanship.

Walk eastward along Richmond Street toward Commercial Street and the historic granite quays of Union Wharf.