By Stewart Coffin
With all the talk in the news these days about nuclear weapons, some Lincoln residents might be surprised to learn that nuclear bombs were once deployed right next door. Don’t worry — note my use of the past tense.
This story begins when my wife and I, together with our three children, move to Lincoln in the summer of 1964. Right away we noticed that our little transistor radio periodically made a strange hissing sound a couple times a minute. It wasn’t long before we associated this with a radar antenna merrily revolving on top of the nearby Drumlin Hill. Back then the top of the hill was clearly visible from our farmyard on Old Sudbury Road, although hard to believe now with so many more trees everywhere.
We were told by neighbors that it was a Nike site of nuclear-armed missiles for defense against Soviet bombers. My later research revealed, to my relief, that this site was only for tracking, and that the actual nuclear-armed missiles were housed deep underground a mile away off of Oxbow Road. Since a few years earlier I had been employed at Lincoln Laboratory working on, of all things, the Sage System of continental air defense, you might think I would have known all about this. But my division worked only on computers. The site was opened in 1959 and decommissioned in 1974. All that remains now, thankfully, is the once bare hilltop now partly covered with trees.
I actually have many fond memories of that hilltop. We had a family tradition of taking the children for a stroll up there on one special evening during the summer to gaze at the full moon rising far to the east. We called it our Moon Walk. The view back then was spectacular. It is less so now with so many more trees, but the large fields that were once Boyce and Van Leer farms are now still open and cultivated as part of Drumlin Farm, thus still affording at least a partial view. Even our own nine-acre plot remains the same, as does so much along our rustic road. Ah yes, so many memories.
Editor’s note: Learn more about the Nike missile sites in Lincoln and Wayland here and here. Stewart Coffin was profiled in the Lincoln Squirrel on April 1, 2026.
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