Meriam's Corner

Meriam's Corner holds a place among the notable sites of the Revolutionary War, tied to the opening clashes of 1775 known as Lexington and Concord. Travelers can find it in Concord, Massachusetts, where Lexington Road meets Old Bedford Road along what was once called the Battle Road. Its name comes from the Meriam family, whose presence there gave the crossroads its identity. Still standing along Old Bedford Road is the Nathan Meriam House, which remains part of the corner to this day. Both the dwelling and the surrounding grounds now fall under the protection of the Minute Man National Historic Park. In 1775, the Meriam clan actually occupied three separate homes in the area, with Nathan's brother Josiah and their nephew John each maintaining residences alongside his own.

That afternoon of April 19, 1775, as the sun passed its peak, this junction became the scene of the militia's first offensive move against British regulars who were making their way back toward Boston after departing Concord. Hours earlier, those same troops had marched outward on their mission, encountering colonial resistance for the first time at dawn on Lexington Common.

Near where Old Bedford Road joins Lexington Road, on its western edge, a stone marks the burial place of at least one of the pair of British soldiers who lost their lives in the fighting there. A second marker, set into the wall at the corner's point in 1885, bears its own inscription.

Redcoats' retreat to Boston

Worried for his troops' welfare, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith deployed men along a ridgeline to shield his column as it moved eastward away from Concord, with nearly a thousand colonials now converging on the area. That high ground gave out close to Meriam's Corner, an intersection roughly a mile from the village, where the road narrowed into a small crossing over Elm Brook, a stream feeding into the Shawsheen River. Reaching this bottleneck forced the regulars to draw their flanking parties back into the column and squeeze into ranks only three men wide. Militia units converging from the north and east had gathered at exactly this spot, giving them a decided edge in numbers over the king's soldiers. Once again, the British found themselves facing precisely the scenario General Thomas Gage had tried to avoid through secrecy and a nighttime departure: colonial fighters rallying by the thousands whenever troops left Boston. As the tail end of the column crossed the bridge, the rear guard turned and loosed a volley toward the militia, who until then had been shooting sporadically and without much effect from a distance but had now moved into musket range. This time the colonists' answering fire proved lethal. Two soldiers died and around six more were hurt, while the militia suffered no losses at all. After crossing the narrow bridge, Smith once more sent his flanking troops out to cover the march.