Artifacts from Parker's Revenge

The Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center has been working to conserve a number of  Revolutionary War era artifacts excavated at a location associated with part of the running fight during the British retreat from Concord Bridge back to Lexington on April 19, 1775.  These items were found on a portion of land that is part of  Hanscom Air Force Base and scheduled for transfer to the National Park Service.  According to the MPM&RC website, the relics include:

"musket balls (fired and un-fired), a brass shoe buckle, a fascine knife or “bill hook,” and a musket ball bullet mold that produces a size caliber ball for pistols."

The fascine knife intrigues me, as it is not an item that one would expect to be carried by Massachusetts militia on the first day of the war though both armies used them thereafter. It could easily have been carried by a member of one of the British grenadier and light companies that participated in the march to Concord and back that April morning.  These military knives, distant relatives of the machete, had their origins in medieval agricultural tools that were used for pruning and cutting saplings.  Their primary military application was in the construction of brushwood bundles called fascines that were used to reinforce earthworks. 

The Pequot Museum states that these artifacts are believed to be associated with a skirmish now known as Parker's Revenge.  This part of the fight happened at a point near the border of Lincoln and Lexington where Captain John Parker and his bloodied Lexington Minutemen waited to ambush the returning British forces that had fired on them on Lexington Green that morning.  Parker's men attacked the British column from the cover of dense trees on a rocky hill, wounding the British commander Col. Smith and inflicting significant casualties.

The precise location of the find is not public knowledge.  There is a marker maintained by the National Park Service to the fight at Parker's Revenge within Minuteman National Park to the south of Hanscom Airforce Base.  If the artifacts were recovered to the north of existing NPS land, they may have been dropped during the efforts made by the British light companies to drive off the militia who were firing on the column.  Alternatively, it could have come from a site a bit further to the west. The Air Force Base land north of the Parker's Revenge marker is heavily developed, and the artifacts reported come from an "unused" part of the base.

In any event, the planned protection of the site and the interpretation of the artifacts undergoing conservation are both noteworthy undertakings that have not, to my knoweldge, been the focus of media attention aside from what is on the Mashantucket Pequot Museum website.

 

Comments

[Laura Burke]

Fascinating!

[Heather Wilkinson Rojo]

This is very interesting to me. I have a number of ancestors and their extended family involved in the retreat, including a slew of Munroes who had their tavern/home torched in Lexington. This is the area where Hezekiah Wyman may have taunted the British, too. I'm going to search out this museum exhibit.