Embedded Files
Artist Ruth Linell Berry's 1974 historic interpretation of the events at the Russell house. The painting shows both the advance of the main column of British troops, as well as the approach of the eastern flanking party upon unsuspecting militiamen.
The greatest concentration of blood shed on April 19, 1775 occurred at the home of Jason Russell. Russell, a fifty-eight year old man at the time of the battle, was excluded from the town’s militia due to problems with his legs which caused him to walk with a cane. Russell initially left with his family to seek refuge at the Prentiss household, but returned and sought to barricade his home from British invasion. According to local lore, neighbor Ammi Cutter, who resided opposite the main road from Russell, approached the man as he barricaded his gate. Cutter pleaded with Russell to leave the area and find a safer place to hide, to which Russell declined, explaining “‘An Englishman’s house is his castle.’”1 As the main British column marched down the main road, Cutter himself narrowly escaped as flanking parties on the east and west sides of the road spread out to locate and eliminate Patriot rebels.2
Militiamen from several companies, including Beverly, Danvers, and Dedham, were situated just behind the Russell home awaiting the main column. Surprised by flanking parties that had been diverted for specifically this purpose, the small group of militiamen found themselves greatly outnumbered. As the British soldiers gave chase, the provincial soldiers fled to the Russell home, some running to the second floor and others to the basement. Russell, the last to reach the home, was taken down by two British bullets and then subsequently stabbed eleven times by their bayonets.3 Seven militiamen from Danvers were killed in and around the home. One British soldier, who did not heed warning from the militiamen hiding in the basement, was killed by provincial fire. Another was killed in a skirmish on the second floor of the home.
Annual historical reenactments at the Jason Russell House in Arlington allow modern viewers to imagine the events that unfolded during the Battle of Menotomy.
At the end of the day, as the townsfolk returned to assess damage, the bodies from the inside and outside of the home were laid in the kitchen of the house. It was there that Mrs. Russell found her husband among the twelve bodies laid out. “She said the blood in that room was almost ankle deep,” Samuel Smith explains in West Cambridge 1775.4 Bullet holes pierced through the walls of the home, some of which can still be seen today. British fusilier Frederick Mackenzie, in describing the scene at Menotomy likely refers to the Russell home: “Many of them were killed in the houses on the road side from whence they fired; in some of them 7 or 8 men were destroyed.”5 Nine of the provincial soldiers were buried in one grave in the nearby graveyard at the First Parish. The British dead were buried together as well, in a spot of the cemetery reserved for the enslaved.
Historian Frank Coburn asserts that “...the highway from Jason Russell’s house, to the centre of Arlington village, proved to be the bloodiest half mile of all of Battle Road.”6 Fighting at the Russell house marked the starting point for what would be the most deadly part of the Battle of Menotomy. The house, still standing today, serves as evidence to the destruction wrought by British soldiers, its walls still marked by bullet holes. The small village was not just a point along Battle Road, it was the site of an actual battle, with true losses for each side. Russell’s words also remind the modern reader that on that day the residents of Massachusetts still considered themselves British, and not Americans yet. The attack to them was from their own: a civil war.
In 1848 the grave of the Patriot soldiers was disinterred, placing the remains of those killed on April 19, 1775 in a stone vault, above which was erected a stone obelisk bearing their names.
Image Credits
Image Credits
Background Image and Menotomy Painting:
Ruth L. Berry, The Fight at the Jason Russell House, 1975, Painting, Arlington Historical Society, https://arlingtonhistorical.org/learn/articles/the-art-of-ruth-linnell-berry/.
Reenactment Photograph:
British Troops Bayonet Colonial Soldiers, Photograph, Arlington Historical Society, https://arlingtonhistorical.org/learn/articles/the-battle-of-menotomy/.
Stone Obelisk Memorial:
Daderot, Patriots Grave, Old Burying Ground, Arlington, Massachusetts, July 17, 2005, Photograph, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Patriots%27_Grave,_Old_Burying_Ground,_Arlington,_Massachusetts.JPG.
Footnotes
Footnotes
1. Frank Warren Coburn, The Battle of April 19, 1775 in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Arlington, Cambridge, Somerville and Charlestown, Massachusetts (Lexington, MA: Frank Warren Coburn, 1912), 139.
2. Samuel Abbot Smith, West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, 37-38.
3. Samuel Abbot Smith, West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, 38.
4. Samuel Abbot Smith, West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, 38.
5. Frederick Mackenzie, A British Fusilier in Revolutionary Boston, ed. Allen French (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926), 50.
6. Frank Warren Coburn, The Battle of April 19, 1775 in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Arlington, Cambridge, Somerville and Charlestown, Massachusetts (Lexington, MA: Frank Warren Coburn, 1912), 140.
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