Bunker Hill

to find her husband dead and her house “riddled with bullets.” Two days later, the bodies were piled on a sled and dragged by oxen to the cemetery. The townspeople dug a trench and laid the bodies “head to point” in a single grave.
    Several more harrowing incidents occurred along the road through Menotomy, all of them within hearing, if not seeing, distance of each other. Seventy-eight-year-old Samuel Whittemore decided to make a stand not far from his house. After killing several regulars, he took a musket ball to the jaw and was bayoneted repeatedly before being left for dead. He lived for another eleven years. Prior to Whittemore’s encounter, Deacon Joseph Adams had run for the safety of the hay barn, leaving his wife and children (among them a newborn baby) hiding in his house’s bedroom. Fortunately, Adams’s nine-year-old son showed a bit more pluck than his father, and after admonishing the regulars for stealing the family silver, the boy used some newly brewed beer to put out a fire that might have otherwise destroyed the house.
    At Cooper’s Tavern, two townspeople insisted on enjoying a rum drink known as a flip even as the regulars approached. The tavern keeper and his wife fled for the cellar, leaving their customers to have their brains literally bashed out by the soldiers. Just outside Menotomy in the outskirts of Cambridge, at a house on Watson’s Corner, yet another group of novice militiamen, many of them from the town of Brookline, were “scooped up” by the British flank guard and killed. It’s estimated that approximately half the total deaths that occurred that day (forty-nine for the provincials, sixty-eight for the British) happened in and around Menotomy.
    Soon after the incident at Watson’s Corner, with sunset approaching, General Percy made the decision that saved his command. Rather than push on through Cambridge and return to Boston via the bridge, he veered left and headed for Charlestown, just a few miles away on the other side of a narrow, defensible neck and under the protective guns of the navy. This seems to have caught General Heath completely by surprise. In his memoirs Heath was quite proud of the fact that prior to heading for Lexington, he instructed the Watertown militia to dismantle, once again, the bridge. He appears to have also sent instructions to prepare an ambush for the British. What he had not anticipated was this last-minute decision on the part of Percy to make what was, in retrospect, a quite predictable move given what Percy had earlier encountered when crossing the bridge into Cambridge.
    But as it turned out, the provincials had, unknown to Heath, a trick up their sleeve. Marching south from Salem were militia captain Timothy Pickering Jr. and several hundred men. Instead of taking the road through Menotomy, the Salem men were well to the east in Medford. If they pushed on, they just might cut off the British before they reached Charlestown.
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    As Pickering marched south and the British continued to fight their way, house by house, toward Charlestown, John Andrews looked out from the hills of Boston. He could see, he wrote, “the engagement very plain. It was very bloody for seven hours.” Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane Mecom later wrote to her brother of “the horror the town was in when the battle approached within hearing,” especially since it was expected that the fighting “would proceed quite in to town.” Similar fears were felt in communities throughout the region. Like Andrews in Boston, the Reverend Samuel West watched the fighting from Needham. “We could easily trace the march of the troops from the smoke which arose over them,” he wrote, “and could hear from my house the report of the cannon and the platoons [i.e., volleys] fired by the British.” Even worse for the residents of Needham, who lost five that day, were “the infinitely more distressing scenes which we expected would follow. We even anticipated the enemy enraged as they were at our doors and in our houses acting over all the horrors which usually attend the progress of a victorious exasperated army especially in civil wars like this.”
    In Menotomy, where the women and children had gathered in houses safely removed from the firing, the rumor began to circulate that the town’s slaves were about to launch a revolt of their own and “finish what the British had begun by murdering the defenseless women and children.” When Ishmael, an enslaved man