Old North Church: The Midnight Lanterns

Why is it significant?

Look up at the white wooden steeple of Christ Church in the City of Boston, immortalized as the Old North Church, piercing one hundred and seventy-five feet into the sky.

Key Facts

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Look up at the white wooden steeple of Christ Church in the City of Boston, immortalized as the Old North Church, piercing one hundred and seventy-five feet into the sky. Built in seventeen twenty-three, this is the oldest standing church structure in Boston, and the stage for the most famous signal in American military history.

In the spring of seventeen seventy-five, Massachusetts was a powder keg. British authorities knew colonial militias were stockpiling gunpowder and cannons in Concord, twenty miles away. Patriot intelligence learned that General Thomas Gage intended to dispatch seven hundred British regulars on the night of April eighteenth to seize the arms.

Paul Revere had devised a backup communication plan with patriot watchers across the Charles River in Charlestown, in case messengers were captured while attempting to slip out of the city. The agreed code was simple but brilliant. "One if by land, two if by sea."

On that evening, church sexton Robert Newman and vestryman John Pulling Jr. took two candle lanterns and secretly entered the locked church. Newman crept up through the darkened interior, ascending flight after flight of wooden ladders into the upper belfry windows. He hung the two lit lanterns in the north window for barely sixty seconds—long enough for watchers across the river to spot the twin beacons through their telescopes. Two lanterns meant the British were not marching south across Boston Neck by land, but were crossing the Charles River in longboats to Cambridge by water!

British sentries caught sight of the flicker and pounded on the church doors below. Newman scrambled down through the shadows, escaped through a low window behind the pulpit, and vanished over cemetery walls into the night. Today, beneath the sanctuary floor lie thirty-seven brick burial tombs holding over eleven hundred souls, including Major John Pitcairn, the British marine commander who fell at the Battle of Bunker Hill.