Jason Russell House in Arlington Open for Patriots’ Day

Earlier this month it wasn’t clear if the Jason Russell House would be open during Patriots’ Day, but the Arlington Historical Society has announced its visiting hours.

There will be guided tours of the Jason Russell House on Sunday, 16 April, from 1:00 to 4:00 P.M. and on Monday, 17 April, from noon to 4:00 P.M.

Admission includes the exhibit “Menotomy—Road to Revolution.” The cost is $8 for adults, $4 for children aged six to eighteen, and free for younger children.

The house itself was studied by the Dendrochronology Laboratory at Oxford University in 2012. That examination showed that some of the timbers were cut around 1684 and probably used to build an older structure. Then Jason Russell bought the property and erected this house in the 1740s, using some older salvaged beams and some new wood.

By 1775 Russell was in his late fifties and too disabled to serve in the regular militia for this western part of Cambridge. Nonetheless, he chose not to leave his house, near the road on which the British columns marched west in the morning.

In fact, Russell welcomed militiamen from towns to the south (Dedham, Needham) and the northeast (Essex County) onto his property. Those men planned to shoot at the withdrawing redcoats, despite warnings that their ambush position was so close to the road they could be outflanked. They were.

British soldiers killed twelve men on this site. Another eight survived by holing up (down?) in the basement.

The dead, including Russell, were buried in one grave. In 1848 the people of West Cambridge, as the town was then known, erected a granite obelisk on that site. However, they knew the names of only three of the men interred there. The rest were from other towns, so they didn’t have local descendants and neighbors to remember them. The Centennial of 1875 stimulated more research, providing the names all the men who died in the battle there.

As I previously noted, the Arlington Historical Society is also sponsoring a lecture on Tuesday, 25 April, at 7:30 P.M. in the town’s Masonic Temple on “The Battle of Menotomy” by A. Michael Ruderman.