As you'll hear it, word for word
You're coming up on a place the militia understood better than the British did.
The road bends twice here, hard, in the space of a few hundred yards. A column of soldiers has to slow down and bunch up to make those corners. And on April 19th, 1775, the men from Bedford and Woburn were waiting on both sides of it.
The British had already been marched out to Concord, turned around at the North Bridge, and sent back the way they came. By the time they reached this bend they had been on the road for something like fifteen hours. They were exhausted, they were being shot at from behind stone walls, and they could not see who was doing the shooting.
The fighting at this corner was some of the worst of the day. Enough men died in these few hundred yards that the place got its name from it, and kept it for two hundred and fifty years.
It is very quiet now. That is the strange part.
In short
A sharp double bend in the old Battle Road where the retreating British column was caught from both sides on April 19th, 1775. The road turns twice in quick succession here, and colonial militia used the cover on either side to fire into the flank of the column as it slowed to make the corners. It was among the deadliest stretches of the entire retreat from Concord back to Boston.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past — no searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
Coming to iPhone