The Complete Battle Road Journey

8.  (2 soldiers)  Between the two Nelson Houses.

    Go to the back of the parking lot at the Visitor center in the park.  The houses are gone but the cellars are there.  One house is directly behind the parking lot.  The marker is down the trail to the left (west) next to the walking trail. 

NEAR HERE ARE BURIED

BRITISH SOLDIERS

APRIL 19, 1775

Hersey (pages 27 and 28)

“Just east of the pasture where Paul Revere had been captured lay two fields on the northerly side of the road.  The first was meadowy and scarred with trenches and rough mounds of grass; the second was strewn with huge bowlders.  Hiding in a hole in the first field, William Thorning, one of the Lincoln Minute Men, fired at the Regulars in the road.  Their bullets cut up the ground about him.  He began to run for the woods behind him, but met a flanking party which had been marching a hundred feet in his rear.  They fired but did not hit him.  Immediately he dropped down into one of the shallow trenches and lay quiet until the flanking party had passed.  When the cross fire ceased, he ran quickly into the rocky field, and took his stand behind the jutting corner of a huge bowlder, which amply protected his body.  Levelling his musket on top of the rock, he fired several shots and killed two soldiers.  They were buried on a knoll in the orchard across the road, southeast of the Nelson house.”

Nichipor –

“There are various accounts of the William Thorning story.  All agree that two soldiers were killed by him and buried by a knoll on the south side of the road.  In addition, one soldier who looted the Hastings house was killed, and buried on the north side of the road by an orchard according to Tom Hasting family tradition.”

Coburn (pages 103-104);

“Then comes an easterly bend in the road, though still continuing nearly level and for about a quarter of a mile to the Nelson House.²  Here lived Josiah Nelson, the Lincoln patriot, who, as we have written, alarmed his neighbors in Bedford the night before.  Around it were many picturesque bowlders, large enough to shelter venturesome Minute Men.   And they were there. . . Across the road from the house is a little knoll which is called “The Soldiers’ Graves”³ even to this day, for therein sleep two British soldiers whose summons undoubtedly came from behind the Nelson bowlders.

²  Standing until a few years ago, although in a shattered condition.  It had been abandoned as a habitation for many years.  A conflagration completed its destruction, and now only the scar of its cellar hole and a pile of bricks that formed its mammoth chimney and hospitable hearth mark where it stood.