Revere
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a city of Massachusetts, in Suffolk co., on the Boston and Maine railroad. It forms a suburb of Boston, which it joins on the northeast. An excellent beach makes it a favorite bathing resort, and the State has constructed a magnificent public bath house. Among its notable buildings are a city hall and a public library. Pop. (1910) 18,219; (1920) 28,823. triot, famous for his midnight ride from Boston to Lexington; born in Boston, Mass., Jan. 1, 1735. He was the son of a goldsmith from Guernsey, whose trade he followed after serving as a lieutenant of artillery in the expedition against Crown Point (1756). He also engaged in copperplate printing, and before the Revolution constructed a gunpowder mill. A keen patriot, he was one of the party that destroyed the tea in Boston harbo and he was at the head of a volunteer olunteer committee, consisting of 30 young mechanics, who formed a secret society to watch the British. When it was known that the latter intended to move, Revere crossed over to Charlestown, and April 18, 1775, the night before Lexington and Concord, at a signal rode on to Lexington and to Lincoln, rousing the minutemen as he went; at Lincoln he was stopped, but a companion succeeded in reaching Concord. His ride is the subject of a well-known poem by Longfellow. During the war he rose to lieutenant-colonel of artillery; afterward he returned to his goldsmith's work, and in 1801 founded the Revere Copper Company at Canton, Mass. He died in Boston, May 10, 1818.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's counted 28,823 people in Revere in 1920; the 2020 census recorded about 62,000, and the Boston and Maine trains it mentions were long ago replaced for local riders by the MBTA Blue Line, which reached Wonderland in 1954. The beach is still the draw — opened in 1896, it is usually called the first public beach in the United States — but the amusement strip that faced it closed down in the 1970s and the Blizzard of 1978 wrecked much of what remained; the shore today is a restored public reservation rather than a resort midway. On Paul Revere, the account holds up well, including the detail that he was stopped at Lincoln and a companion carried the alarm on to Concord: that man was Samuel Prescott, and William Dawes rode the same night, a shared effort Longfellow's poem obscured and David Hackett Fischer's 1994 book Paul Revere's Ride restored. The copper firm he founded in 1801 survives as Revere Copper Products, though its works are now in Rome, New York, not Canton.
Written for this edition, 2026.