Russell, Jason House

About this property

The Jason Russell House is a historic house in Arlington, Massachusetts, in and around which at least twenty-one colonial combatants died fighting on the first day of the American Revolutionary War, April 19, 1775 (the Battles of Lexington and Concord). The house was purchased in 1923 by the Arlington Historical Society which restored it in 1926 and now operates it as a museum. In 1775, Jason Russell owned, among other properties, a farm of about 40 acres at the center of the Menotomy District of Cambridge, now part of the Town of Arlington. It was on that farm, on April 19 of that year, that the largest conflict of the day would occur between the Massachusetts provincial militia and the British Army as the latter returned from the Battles of Lexington and Concord Jason's farm was located at the southwest corner of two main roads in Menotomy. The Concord Road (now known as Massachusetts Avenue) was the primary route connecting Boston with towns to the west, while the Watertown Road (now mostly Pleasant Street) offered access to Menotomy from the south. In 1689, as soon as the Town of Cambridge allocated the land west of Menotomy Center as individual properties, Jason's grandfather purchased four lots on the south side of the Concord Road at its intersection with the Watertown Road. In 1699, by acquiring an additional parcel along the Watertown Road he expanded his land to a total of forty-one acres. He referred to these parcels as “The Great Pasture.” The younger Jason’s father died when Jason was only ten, leaving him and his sister in the care of their grandparents. When the grandfather died without a will in 1736, and the grandmother shortly thereafter, a series of negotiations, augmented by the grandmother’s will, eventuated in probate agreements that left perhaps 28 acres to Jason and the remaining acreage to Jason’s aunt Martha Dunster and to Martha’s son, also named Jason. In October of 1744, Jason consolidated the farm property by selling twelve acres from the other side of the Concord Road to the Dunsters in exchange for their twelve acres abutting his own. This completed the property as bounded in 1775, except that in 1740 the newly installed Pastor, the Rev. Samuel Cooke, purchased an acre of land along the Watertown Road from Jason near what is now Maple Street. The Rev. Cooke put a house and a barn on it; the barn may have figured in the battle described below. Finally, in 1724, at the instigation of the grandfather and other neighbors, the town voted to move part of the Watertown Road “from the northerly to the southerly side of the land reserved for a burying place.” This removed the separation between Russell’s property and that of the burying-ground, so that it, and the associated Meeting House added in 1733, would become de facto extensions of the battleground of 1775.

Location

Categories

Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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