Reenactments help Minute Men experience history first-hand

By Brett Wittenberg

Dawn on a mid-April morning in Lincoln. The rising sun’s rays break over the Stone Church and strike the tricorn hats of the Lincoln Minute Men. Assembled with muskets in hand, the Minute Man company receives its marching orders. The call to action has sounded, and these ordinary citizens have arrived to answer that call to march to Concord—and to war.

The year is actually 2013 and the marching and musket shots of colonial Lincoln sounded 237 years ago—but the noble actions of the Minute Men of 1775 still echo, as the tradition of the fighting farmers lives on in the practices and teachings of the modern-day Lincoln Minute Men.

Lincoln re-established its Minute Man Company in 1966, but with a starkly different set of objectives than the first iteration: to demonstrate and celebrate the history of the original Minute Men, explained Lincoln resident Richard Wiggin, author of the book Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783 and five-term captain of the Lincoln Minute Men. Every year in mid-April, the Lincoln Minute Men dress as their predecessors dressed, assemble as their colonial counterparts did, and proudly march to Concord.

War reenactments provide Wiggin and his group the chance to see what war may have been like for the 252 Lincoln residents who fought in 1775. By putting himself in a position to feel the emotions that a Lincoln Minute Man would have felt in 1775, Wiggin is able to better teach the stories of their bravery and sacrifice.

“One of the benefits of becoming a modern-day Minute Man was that I began to appreciate this particular history in a very different way,” Wiggin said. “Having stood on the hill over looking the Old North Bridge, having stood at bloody angles, face to face with British muskets, I know instinctively—not from any book, not from any means except as a human being in those circumstances—I know exactly what those guys were thinking… It’s part of being able to explain the Minute Men in ways that I would never have been able to explain them before.”

While being a member of the Lincoln Minute Men is markedly less dangerous today than it was in the times of Paul Revere, the company could easily pass for the real thing during the reenactments (minus real bullets) at the original historical sites in Lincoln, Lexington and Concord, as well as Lincoln’s annual Fourth of July parade, which kicks off when Wiggin reads the Declaration of Independence in colonial garb in front of the town office building.

Brett Wittenberg is a Lexington resident.