The Hidden History of Boston's Old North Church!!! History Traveler Episode 259

In foreign

episode

s, we have been here in the city of Boston, observing the birth of the American Revolution, we have had the opportunity to visit some incredible places like the Old State House and the Old South Meeting House, and today we are going to another iconic place which is connected with the American Revolution and which is also connected with one of the famous phrases that came out of the American Revolution, if by land and tooth by sea today we go to the old foreign Church of the North in In April 1775, things here Boston was as tense as you can imagine: the British Army had basically blocked everything, it was a powder keg ready to go off, and the colonists received information that the British might be making a move on military supplies and weaponry that were in Concord.

Massachusetts, so one of the leaders of the Sons of Liberty, Paul Revere, got involved with The Sexton here, in this place where we're getting ready to go see the Old North Church, a guy named Robert Newman, and they set up a signal that would alert everyone in the area when the British were on the move. What we are looking at here is one of the most historic and iconic buildings here in Boston. the old North Church and if we come up here and take a look we can see that there is an old sign there that says that Paul Revere's signal lanterns displayed in the steeple of this

church

on April 18, 1775 warned the country of the march of the British troops to Lexington and Concord, so Paul Revere and Robert Newman had this prearranged signal where when the British were going on the March, if they were going to go overland through Boston Neck, a lantern would be hung on the bell tower, but yes They made an amphibious landing and crossed the harbor to Charleston.

Well, then they would hang them too, so one if it's by land, two if it's by sea, okay, we'll go to the old North Church because I think there's a lot of

history

associated with it. to this place even past the hanging lanterns and uh yeah let's see what we can learn abroad so we just walked into the old North Church here and uh wow this place is something else. I love walking into these old

church

es now. The church was not designed by Christopher Wren, but it was based on some of the designs that Christopher Wren had done and as you can see, it has this old pew box design and to me, these are so unknown to me, these pews. box are just really fascinating, okay, here's one with the door open, so if you look closely, you have a couple of pews in here and one of the ways that churches would be funded is that families could buy one of these pews and then donate an annual amount. and that would help keep the church going and pay the pastor and the organist and things like that, it also served a practical purpose.

Keep in mind that this is the 18th century and it will be cold here in the winter, so this boxed design will basically allow people to stay warmer. You could bring like a little foot warmer or you know you have people's body heat, but anyway, yeah, it's very fascinating to me, but yeah, this place is something else that comes from the old North. The church probably comes here because of the connection to Paul Revere and the lanterns in the steeple, but that's a very brief slice of

history

in the 300 year history of this church, so to help me figure out the other story of what happened here.

I've got Catherine and Emily who we've been talking to a little bit and they obviously know this place a lot better than I do, so the Zoo will help us break down some of the history of the ancient North Church. North was founded in 1723 as the second Anglican church in Boston, the first was King's Chapel, but that congregation outgrew their space, so they needed a new church and a gentleman bought the land here and then built this church. Construction took only nine months, which is somewhat remarkable, but it was not built with its famous bell tower at first.

The first minister here was the Rev. Timothy Cutler, who began his ecclesiastical career as a Congregationalist minister. He was working at Yale when he made the kind of surprising announcement that he was no longer. He felt that Congregationalism was the way of the True Religion and he resigned, so he was hired by the people who would become the Old North congregation. They sent him to England, where he was ordained in the Church of England and when he came back here he was. you know, he was stationed for a 40-year tenure as Rector here and his time here was also characterized by a real outreach to the effort to convert black and indigenous peoples to the Church of England.

I moved back here to the front. from the church to the pulpit and if you saw this device before when it was panning, well this is a soundboard, they didn't have a microphone like the one you see up there today, so to project volume to the people in the back back. Well, at the back of the room, a soundboard was set up to help everyone hear the sermon. Now, one thing I wanted to show. Catherine mentioned that originally this church did not have a bell tower. You will notice that this cash bank is decorated a little differently than others.

Of the others that you can see well the story behind it is called the bay Pew and in short there was a group of merchants that operated around Belize and in the Caribbean and they wanted to donate some wood to the church and the church could sell the trunk or use it for themselves and they didn't need it, but they suggested that maybe it would be good if they had a wooden bench right here in the front so they could have a front row seat for the sermon, so that arrangement was made anyway and they donated a bunch of logs to the church and then people could decorate them however they wanted, so yeah, another interesting little tidbit here in the history of this. church.

Now I've moved to the gallery here in the church and up here you can see this absolutely beautiful ornate organ and something that Catherine and Emily told me is that the decoration is different now to what you would have had. Seen in the 18th century, it would have been much more ornate, it would have had paintings on the walls and Garland and different things like that, but one interesting thing is that the gallery space was reserved for indentured servants and people of color and also younger children. the age of 12 years. so we can get a top down view of the Box pews, wouldn't there have been younger children there, they would have sent the children here, well a child during church might get a little squirrel so take a look to this here is a graffiti that has been drawn or engraved on the wood here so here is one by Thomas Gibson um I wonder what their parents thought when someone told them about it and then here I I don't know if you can read that or not, but it says nothing about medley here, so someone here wasn't a fan of the Pope, but yeah, really fascinating to be here and consider that you know some of the different points of view and the different people who would have attended this church, so I just mentioned how do you know the church looks different now than it did in the 1700s.

Here we can see a piece of wood painted to look like cedar, so this is more. representative of how things would have looked you know on the walls of this church there is something else that I wanted to show if you look here around the organ there are four angels now this church is 300 years old these angels are actually a little bit older old. They're about 400 years old and, according to history, you know, the English and the French have historically had a bit of a rivalry and long story short, it's believed that these angels were sculpted in Belgium and they were on a French ship that was headed to Quebec, well they were intercepted by a British ship and the British just took everything, including these angels, and then the angels didn't hate the church and now they are here next to this beautiful organ, yeah, quite an interesting story.

Okay, we're going to get to the bell tower area here in a moment, but first we want to go in the opposite direction and go down to the Crypt of the old North Church, which is super interesting. Here in the Crypt, I guess one of the first tombs you see is that of the church's first pastor, uh, Timothy Cutler, this is where he rests and something interesting is directly above us, the pulpit, so Cutler spent the most of 40 years as a Pastor here and uh yeah, it's right under the place where he spent so much time now here's one that's really interesting to me, you see that name Major John Pitcairn uh Pitcairn was a British regular, he was actually part of the Marched on Lexington and Concord and he was going to be mortally wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill and he was buried in the Crypt right here under the old North Church, so I realize this is pretty dark here, but you can see the Tombstone original on the right.

There with his name here is something that is really interesting is that his family requested that his body be sent back to Britain. When the body arrived, it was cut open and the person inside was wearing a lieutenant's uniform, so there are some questions about whether Pitcairn is still here. or if he is in England, but either way, this is the Crypt he entered. Okay, going through this Crypt here and this is something that Emily was showing me that is incredibly fascinating. This is the inside of one. of these graves so what we're looking at here is the actual coffin of one of these individuals from time to time they would have to make room for more Emily, would you say there are like 1100 people?

Yes, around 1,100 people thought to be buried. Down here, well, they would have to make room from time to time and they would rearrange the bodies and take the skeletal remains and put them in a mass grave, but look how narrow it is and what it would have looked like. Here are just these coffins stacked on top of each other and when there was a new burial pit they had to come here and rearrange these coffins, so this is also before embalming, so sometimes you could smell the church above. The decaying flesh down here looks disgusting, but anyway, yes, there is the inside of one of these very fascinating foreign tombs that are buried here in the Crypt.

Samuel Nicholson, as you can see, is a veteran of the Revolutionary War. Samuel Nicholson was the first captain of the USS Constitution I wish I had time while I'm in Boston to go to the Constitution, uh, but I'm running out of time so anyway it gives me a good excuse to come back, but yeah, here it is the grave of Samuel Nicholson. Well, here's another one. Interesting grave of someone who I guarantee you've never heard of is Shubail Bell and he was one of the people who attended church here and you won't read about him in any history books or anything like that, but this is a guy who did. he did a lot of good in his life he worked a lot with prisoners and helped people get back on their feet.

He also donated a lot of money to the church. I believe he also helped start the first Sunday school here at the church. Yeah, just a regular guy who's buried here and did some pretty incredible things during his lifetime. Okay, let's go ahead and go back to the main floor now for Old North became famous because of a story surrounding its bell tower, so tell us the story, we're actually going to travel back in time to 1860, when a man named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow comes to visit the church, at that time Boston and the rest of the country are divided on the issue of slavery and the country is on the brink of the Civil War and that is why Longfellow is looking for a story that he can tell that help galvanize Americans and make them feel like they can do something to make a difference and prevent war, and that's where you meet history. of Paul Revere and his signal lanterns and writes his famous poem Paul Revere's Ride, but he takes some poetic liberties in that poem, so here at Old North we like to tell the real story of what happened because we think it's just as exciting .

Now we will travel even further back in time, to 1775. And if he had visited Boston in 1775, he would have found a very divided citizenry this time on the issue of taxes. There were groups of people who supported taxes from parliament. People who are neutral on the issue and people who were against those taxes and you would have found those three groups of people even worshiping here in Old North now within the group that was taxed, the Patriots, there was a group called Children of Liberty. and they were organizing ways to protest these taxes, including collecting a cache of gunpowder that they hid in the town of Concord, which is about a 30-minute drive

north

west of Boston.

The British, although they knew about the gunpowder reserve and were somewhere. The Point was going to come out and take over this store, so the Sons of Liberty, trying to prevent it, needed a way to tell each other not only when the British were coming but also what route out of Boston they were taking. The British had two options they could. take the only road out of Boston called Boston Neck or you could row across the Charles River, so it was Paul Reverewho came up with a plan, says, we will have a very simple signal, we will use flashlights, a flashlight will indicate that. the British are going by land two lanterns will indicate that the British are rowing across the Charles River, as Longfellow said, one from Thailand two if by sea and those lanterns will go to the highest point in Boston, which in 1775 was the top of the Norse old Depot and that's what happens on April 18, 1775, the British are on the move, they're going to cross the Charles River, so Paul Revere asked two friends who we think are Robert Newman and John Poling Jr. to go up to the top of the bell tower and display two lanterns for one minute.

Those flashlights are seen by an entire network of cyclists waiting in Charlestown and spread throughout Massachusetts. spread the information about the movement of the British soldiers, so that when the British arrive at Concord the next morning, the American militiamen will outnumber them and that is where we have the first battles of the American Revolution, the battles of Lexington and Concord. We are going to climb some fairly narrow stairs and we are going to reach the belt chamber that is near the bell tower where Newman and his companion would have turned on the flashlights to alert everyone present. the area here right now I'm in the archive room here at the church and we're getting ready to go up the bell tower and there's something really interesting about this church, the bell tower that we're going to go up to is not the original so here's a drawing of the old North Church in the 18th century.

Well, there was a storm that actually passed over the steeple in the 19th century and the one they replaced didn't exactly match the first one, so here you can see a photo of the old North Church in 1909. Note the difference in the steeples here and then here's something you know that shows a commemoration here in the church. In 1954, Hurricane Carol literally destroyed this. I mean, I looked at that and someone took a photo. of the bell tower collapsing while it was happening, that's crazy, okay, anyway, let's go ahead and continue up now, okay, we're climbing to the top and as you can see, it's pretty narrow, which isn't is.

It's unusual, we've been in spaces like this before, but yeah, it's really cool to see the inner workings and the construction and design of this bell tower. Okay, heading towards him, okay, okay, this room. What we're standing in right now is the bell ringing chamber, so this is as high as we'll be able to go today, but the bells are on the level right above us and something that's really interesting that Emily was telling me is that the bells that are heard today are exactly the same bells that the people of Boston would have heard in 1775 and before, and if we look here, this is something else that is quite interesting, so this is a contract that was written for people to be serving as bell ringers um, it was you, you know younger people, kids, one of the bell ringers at this church when I was a kid was none other than Paul Revere, yeah, a little extra detail in the history of this foreign church, it's good.

There you have it, that's just a little bit about the history of the ancient Church of the North and yes, I learned a lot today, now the wind is about to knock me over, but that's why you should come to places like this, the only thing that knew. The old North Church was the story of the two lanterns hanging in the bell tower. I had no idea about all the other things, but it was a very, very fascinating place and if you come to Boston, yes, definitely come here, to the old foreign Church of the North.