Setting the Stage: Menotomy on the Eve of Revolution

Menotomy grew from a village in the larger town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, situated just to the northwest of Boston. As was the case with many smaller villages remote from the center of larger towns, the residents began to petition the General Court of Massachusetts as early as 1725 for their separation from Cambridge into a separate precinct, allowing for more convenient access to meetinghouses and schools. In December 1732, Mentomy was officially granted the status of Second Precinct of Cambridge, though it would continue to be known locally as Menotomy due to its location along the western banks of the Menotomy River, now known as Alewife Brook.1 Approximately three miles long and two miles wide, Menotomy served as an important crossroad between several prominent towns, including Cambridge and Concord, as evidenced by the presence of three taverns along its main thoroughfare. While largely considered a farming community, historian Charles S. Parker notes that “the farms to have been often of more than considerable size.”2 Parker also suggests a sense of affluence in the town, as evidenced by the community’s financial support of the church and school.3 The village, at a crossroads of several major towns, and within close proximity to Boston, felt the early effects of political unrest as the colonists reacted to the actions of the British Parliament in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. 

Growth of Menotomy 1650-1750

Embedded below are three maps from the Digital Commonwealth Massachusetts Collection. The maps demonstrate the growth of Cambridge village in the century leading up to the American Revolutionary War. 

Menotomy was a community in which, and through which, early revolutionary ideas flowed. Just up the road, in the neighboring farming community of Lexington, the Reverend Jonas Clark, led the town’s congregation in both spiritual and political matters. Historian Mary Babson Fuhrer describes the pastor as having “a knack for amalgamating contemporary political rhetoric, religious mandate, and the lived social experience of Lexington’s farm folk into a powerful ideological justification—in fact, obligation— to protest incursions on colonial prerogatives.”4 Samuel Cooke, minister of the Menotomy church, was closely associated with the Reverend Clark, and shared a similar ideological orientation in the sermons preached to his congregation. Parker attributes their close association to the trust in which early revolutionary leaders placed in the people and places within the village, explaining that like Clark, Cooke was “implicitly trusted by Hancock, Adams, and their associates.”5 It is of no surprise then, at such a convenient crossroad, and in a village with strong political support, that a location was selected for the convening of the Committees of Safety and Supplies. 

In the early weeks of April 1775, suspicions among the colonists grew in response to the actions of the British soldiers in the colony. Several scouts were spotted, despite their disguises, along the roads leading in and out of Boston. On April 17, 1774, the Committees of Safety and Supplies called for an emergency meeting at the Black Horse Tavern in Menotomy. Fears were raised yet again that the British would march, this time towards Concord, where the Second Provincial Congress had lately been seated, and to where great stores of ammunition had been removed. The residents of Menotomy were on alert, knowing their small village featured the well trodden path to Concord.