Paul Revere House: The Silversmith of North Square

Why is it significant?

Notice the heavy timber framing and leaded diamond-pane windows of this dark wooden home tucked quietly into North Square.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Notice the heavy timber framing and leaded diamond-pane windows of this dark wooden home tucked quietly into North Square. Built around sixteen eighty after the Great Fire of Boston destroyed the parsonage of Increase Mather, this three-story colonial house is the oldest surviving residential dwelling in downtown Boston. Notice the overhanging second-story jetty, a classic feature of medieval English domestic architecture designed to protect the lower walls from New England driving rains.

Paul Revere bought this seventeenth-century home in seventeen seventy, moving in with his wife Sarah, his mother, and five children. Over the three decades he lived here, Revere had sixteen children by two wives, filling these low-ceilinged rooms with bustling family life and the smell of hearth-cooked chowder.

Revere was far more than an equestrian courier. He was one of colonial America's most skilled silversmiths, crafting elegant silver teapots for wealthy patrons, engraving political cartoons, casting copper bells, and wiring false teeth carved from walrus tusks!

On the night of April eighteenth, seventeen seventy-five, tension hung thick in these cobblestone streets. Revere received word from patriot leader Dr. Joseph Warren that British troops were preparing to march on Lexington and Concord to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock and seize provincial munitions. Revere quietly slipped through his front door, leaving his second wife Rachel behind. He met two trusted friends who rowed him across the Charles River under the shadows of the British warship Somerset.

Mounting a borrowed horse in Charlestown, he began his legendary midnight ride across Middlesex County, evading British cavalry patrols to raise the alarm in Lexington by midnight. By the nineteenth century, this historic house had become a tenement for Irish, Italian, and Jewish immigrants, operating variously as a cigar factory and bank. In nineteen zero-two, Revere's great-grandson John Reynolds Jr. purchased the property to save it from the wrecking ball, restoring it to the authentic home you see today.