Last updated: June 22, 2025
Article
Ringing in America 250
NPS/Horrocks
In April 2025, park staff collaborated with partners to host and support a number of community programs commemorating the revolutionary events that occurred 250 years ago in April 1775.
On Friday, April 18, 2025, residents throughout the Blackstone Valley put two lights in their windows, turning them on as the sun went down. Two small electric candles were also activated in the Slater Mill and Wilkinson Mill buildings of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. In these efforts, our communities joined in the nationwide Two Lights Initiative, a tribute to the patriots who put two lanterns in the bell tower of Old North Church on the night of April 18, 1775. According to Boston National Historical Park, these lanterns “served as an early warning that a detachment of the British Army was crossing the Charles River and heading west towards the towns of Lexington and Concord. By the end of the next night, the American Revolutionary War had begun.”
On April 19, 1775, the first armed conflict of the War for Independence began in a cluster of farming communities north of Boston: Lexington, Lincoln, and Concord. As Minute Man National Historical Park explains, “it was here that British colonists risked their lives and property, defending their ideals of liberty and self-determination. The events of that day have been popularized by succeeding generations as the ‘shot heard 'round the world.’” For people close to the conflict, bells provided a call to action. Witnesses such as Sylvanus Wood, a man in Woburn, MA, were called to action early, and took off immediately.
People living further away in the Blackstone Valley had a delayed response. In Providence and Worcester, most did not learn the news from Lexington and Concord until the afternoon or evening of April 19th at the earliest. While living historians in Lexington and Concord recreated the events of April 19 and April 20, 1775, we prepared for our own commemoration on Monday, April 21, 2025. On that day, a number of churches and cultural organizations rang their bells for two and a half minutes. These long alarms were a call to action, and designed to honor the two and a half centuries that separates us from the people who waited, in fear and anticipation, for news of what had occurred during the conflict at Lexington and Concord.
In Uxbridge, living historians and town officials gathered on the common and recounted the town’s local response during and after April 19, 1775. In North Smithfield, partners gathered on their common to reflect on the impact of the early days of the war. What follows is an excerpt from a talk given by Ranger Allison in North Smithfield at the Slatersville Congregational Church, on Monday, April 21, 2025.
NPS/Horrocks
Thank you all for coming out today for community and fellowship. One of the first challenges to the freedoms of local colonists was the right to assemble. This is a freedom that has persistently been withheld from those with less power in our society and the ability to stand, to speak, and to come together should not be taken for granted.
We came to this meetinghouse following an old pattern: with the ringing of a bell, we processed into a sacred place. In many areas of our lives, an alarm bell is designed to wake us up: to call our attention and to provide us direction. Two hundred and fifty years ago, people communicated the start of a war through secret signals. Their messages could be coded, but their volume had to be loud.
Ringing a bell causes a vibration. Some bells make a small sound, a tiny ripple into the universe we must really pause to hear. Other bells are designed to make a big noise, and high impact: their sounds reverberate, carrying a note across space and time and into our minds. One bell made during the early days of the American experiment has been ringing for the better part of 200 years. It cannot be heard, and yet its vibrations, on some level, persist. The ringing of a bell is more than just noise. It is music, it is interruption; it is power, and it is punctation.
For centuries, people have destroyed bells to signal distrust of authority. Here, people broke through the darkness of imperial rule with lights and alarms. During many revolutions, people rang or destroyed bells to further their cause. For centuries, bells have set the rhythms of the day, for those who worship and for those who work. At least one dissatisfied mill worker in the Valley admitted to cutting the cord to a bell in a mill tower. Many more may have contemplated such a daring move, rejecting the fact that their employers could set the pace of their days with the simple pull of a cord to a bell. In mill villages like Slatersville, a bell might tell you when to wake up, but a bell also told you when it was time to take a pause, and when the day had come to an end.
The people who lived in this village on the eve of the American Revolution were mostly farmers. Some of the people in Smithfield were enslaved by their countrymen, and before the 1770s, few would have dreamed of true separation from their King. For them, in some ways, the American Revolution began with a bang—but the war was a process with many fits and starts.
On Tuesday, April 18, 1775, two men went into Old North Church in Boston on a mission: to send a signal from within the bell tower. Once inside the church, they used two hanging lanterns to let their fellow Patriots know that men from the British Army were moving to the Charles River, with the destination of Lexington and Concord. Paul Revere, an “alarm rider” “had arranged a lantern signal” a few days prior.1
On the night of the 18th, Revere was in motion, heading “toward Concord to spread the alarm” – he was captured before he completed his journey. Other Patriots on horseback spread the word, and some continued the work, pulling the triggers on guns, and pulling down the ropes of church bells. One man in Woburn woke up “on the morning of the 19th of April, 1775” “an hour before the break of day” to the sound of “the Lexington bell” –"fearing there was difficulty there, I immediately arose,” – he then traveled three miles with his gun to Lexington, “in haste.” 2
Elkanah Watson, an apprentice of John Brown, in Providence, later said that “the news arrived on the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775,” while he was at work. Soon after, a “militia unit spent the whole night equipping themselves,” for battle. On April 20th, “they marched off…defying the governor’s proclamation that they not cross the border into Massachusetts.”3 Another man, a barber’s apprentice named John Howland, learned “that a battle was then going on” – he heard someone shout: “war, war, boys, there is war.” 4
Men from “four independent companies” asked for “orders to march towards Boston,” seeking the governor’s permission to move beyond the “Pawtucket bridge” where Slater Mill is today. One of the men who marched and ultimately went “some miles beyond Pawtucket” was Nathaniel Greene, who moved “with his musket on his shoulder, in the ranks as a private.” Years of boiling tensions, coercive acts, some near misses, and some genuine attempts to avoid outright war had built to this moment.
At the start of the war, Rhode Island was a small but wealthy colony, enriched by the slave trade. War did come to Rhode Island, particularly on Aquidneck Island, but those in Smithfield were spared from backyard battles. Still, most prepared “in case of invasion.” Laborers constructed coastal fortifications, the ships of the American Naval fleet, and even the Beacon Pole alarm device located “on Prospect Hill in Providence.” What’s more, “soldiers were recruited for active service, and every man in the Colony, of age and physically fit, was required to hold himself in readiness for any duty that his country might require of him.” 5
For many, the war was a world turned upside down. Those who had been praised for their loyalty to the Crown could be ostracized for their failure to join the fight. Some Quakers, who would not take oaths, and pursued peace, took up arms with their neighbors. Enslaved people were offered a chance for freedom in a new experiment, possibly in exchange for their lives. Free wives and daughters took up the roles of their husbands and fathers. Children donned military uniforms. French military leaders were met with reverence. The patriot was favored over the courtier. Ungovernable groups of people had to form a government, while still wondering: “Would people respect rulers who were not God or their fathers or their masters[?]”6
We have a myth that people knew they would be patriots in an instant. One Rhode Islander wrote that right “after the battle of Lexington, April 19th, 1775, a spirit of resistance throughout the whole country was awakened; — blood had been spilt, and it called forth the most determined opposition to British tyranny. Men met together as if by instinct, without any previous call, in work-shops, in taverns, in town-houses, highways and byways, and determined, by the aid of the Almighty, to avenge the high-handed butchery.”7
We can read romantic renderings, telling us that “The mechanic left his shop and took his gun — the farmer dropped his implements of husbandry and left the field.”8 But this is not quite true. The revolution unfolded slowly. Many were reluctant, and even right after April 19, 1775, Rhode Island’s soldiers did not march immediately to Boston – they paused, they considered, and some even turned back. The revolution did not begin at once, and it was not merely a reflex, a reaction against a cry into the silent night.
Many would have read a first full accounting of the events of April 19th in a newspaper on April 22nd or two days later, April 24th. On those days, leading newspapers in Providence and Newport provided a first draft of a story that is now very well known: “Thus, through the sanguinary measures of a wicked ministry, and the readiness of a standing army to execute their mandates, has commenced the American Civil War, which will hereafter fill an important page in history. That it may speedily terminate in a full Restoration of our liberties, and the Confusion of all who have aimed at an abridgement of them, should be the earnest desire of every real friend to Great Britain and America.”9
John Williams Haley, a Rhode Islander who lived in a world far removed from the Revolution, concluded that once that initial “blow had been struck; the time for diplomacy had passed; a nation of liberty-loving men and women plunged into a bitter struggle that could only end in victory.”10 Yet he was not a witness to these years. In truth, few subjects of the Crown would have believed that victory was the only, inevitable outcome in 1775. In February of that year, Stephen Arnold, Jr., Andrew Waterman, Thomas Aldrich, Elisha Mowry, Jr., and Uriah Alverson formed a committee of inspection, to manage firearms and to start arranging foot companies. The men continued to fortify themselves, to buy more firearms, and to get small amounts of shillings to the recruits. On May 4, 1776, Rhode Islanders declared their independence and continued the work of gathering shovels, food, clothing, powder, bullets, and all other items soldiers needed for war.
The historian Charles Andrews called Rhode Island a “mite of a State” – “a spangle instead of a star [.]”11 Lest we think Andrews was entirely uncharitable, he explained that many of the first Anglo colonists in Rhode Island “were unable to live anywhere else. They were fugitives from other places where they were not wanted…[they] had no common faith or church polity, no common set of opinions or beliefs [.]”12 Roger Williams, our founder, argued “that kings and magistrates had no more power than the people ‘betrusted’ them with.”13 This was a radical idea in his lifetime, nearly 400 years ago. It remains radical today.
Rhode Islanders who wanted sovereignty feared compromising alliances. This may explain why colonists here were quick to declare independence and the last to ratify the Constitution. Some countries rally people around blood – shared lineage – or soil – a shared place. The United States was born from paper instead. The Constitution is what makes us a union: out of many, we are one, because of that document.
NPS/Horrocks
For “four dollars and a monthly wage of one pound sixteen shillings” men from Smithfield, Rhode Island enlisted in a war many believed they could never win.14 They answered an alarm that stopped ringing a long time ago.
Anna Aldrich, the widow of Israel Aldrich, of Smithfield, was 89 “when she applied for a pension,” many years after her husband marched off to war a few years into their marriage. Anna “carried her baby into the field — cradled it in the boughs of a tree, secured in a blanket from reptiles — so that literally, in the words of an old nursery song, ‘When the wind blew, the cradle would rock;’ and during the summer of 1777 she hoed corn and potatoes, raked hay, pulled flax, milked cows, made butter and cheese, mended the fences on the farm, raised three or four hundred weight of pork,” and much more.15 For her, the sound of the revolution was not only the firing of a distant musket, or the alarm of a church bell. Her service evoked the quiet murmur of a parent calming a child, alone, together, in a field, during a frightening war. In April 1775, Anna Aldrich had no idea when her husband would leave her side or when he would return each time he marched away from their home in Smithfield.
It would be poetic to imagine that the alarms that called to the Aldriches are still ringing. But we must ring our own bells, and light our own way. The Revolution is an inheritance, but it comes from a hard-fought battle fought with blood, soil, and eventually, paper, too.
We remember the events 250 years ago not because the people who fought the Revolution are idols meant to be worshipped. We remember their sacrifice because all bells and alarms are eventually silenced. Over time, the noise grows silent, and we forget the power of their vibrations. Yet all of us, still, have the power to make a noise into music, to turn a bell into an alarm for freedom, and to read a single document as a framework for liberty.
1. "April 18, 10:00 p.m.," Concord Museum, October 27, 2023, https://concordmuseum.org/online-exhibition/the-shot-heard-round-the-world-april-19-1775/april-18-1000-p-m/.
2. Sylvanus Wood, "Full Text of Sylvanus Wood's Affadavit, 1826," Gilder Lerhman, accessed April 1, 2025, https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/Sylvanus%20Wood%20Affidavit%20complete.pdf.
3. J. L. Bell, "John Howland the Lexington Alarm in Providence," Boston 1775, accessed April 1, 2025, https://boston1775.blogspot.com/2016/04/john-howland-and-lexington-alarm-in.html.
4. Edwin W. Stone, The Life and Recollections of John Howland (George H. Whitney, 1857), 39.
5. John Williams Haley, The Old Stone Bank History of Rhode Island Volume III (Providence Institution for Savings, 1939),119.
6. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 167.
7. Benjamin Cowell, Spirit of '76 in Rhode Island (A.J. Wright, 1850), 13.
8. Cowell, Spirit of '76 in Rhode Island, 13.
9. As reported on April 22, 2025 in The Providence Gazette and Country Journal and April 24, 1775 in The Newport Mercury.
10. Haley, The Old Stone Bank History of Rhode Island Volume III, 119.
11. Charles Andrews, Our Earliest Colonial Settlements: Their Diversities of Origin and Later Characteristics (Cornell University Press reprint, 2009), 87.
12. Andrews, Our Earliest Colonial Settlements, 89-90.
13. Ibid, 97.
14. Daughters of the American Revolution, Forgotten Patriots: African American and American Indian Patriots in the Revolutionary War (2008), 191. For more information on town meetings, see: Thomas Steere, History of the Town of Smithfield (E.L. Freeman, 1881).
15. Cowell, Spirit of ‘76, 10-11.