Paul Revere House

The Paul Revere House is the colonial home from which the silversmith and patriot Paul Revere set out on his famous midnight ride in April 1775. Built around 1680, it is the oldest surviving building in downtown Boston and a rare example of 17th-century urban architecture in America. Preserved as one of the nation's earliest historic house museums, it offers an intimate look at the home life of a Revolutionary-era craftsman and the family he raised in Boston's North End.

The house on North Square was built around 1680, on land where an earlier dwelling had burned in a great fire of 1676. A timber-framed structure in the medieval-derived style of the 17th century, it stood for nearly a century before Paul Revere — a Boston silversmith, engraver, and son of a French Huguenot immigrant — bought it in 1770.

Revere lived here through the most dramatic years of the Revolution. It was from this house that he departed on the night of April 18, 1775, for the midnight ride that warned the countryside British troops were marching on Lexington and Concord. Revere owned the home until 1800, raising a large family within its small rooms; he fathered sixteen children over the course of two marriages.

After the Revere family left, the North End filled with immigrants and the old house was crowded with shops and tenants. Threatened with demolition around the turn of the 20th century, it was rescued by Revere's great-grandson and a group of preservationists, restored, and opened to the public in 1908 as one of the first historic house museums in the United States. It remains a centerpiece of Boston's Freedom Trail.