The Old Town Hall has wandered quite a bit in its 175 years. It was built in 1848 at a time when Lincoln needed a new civic gathering place. Until then, the town had used the original meetinghouse built in 1746 where today’s stone church now stands. The new Town House was built opposite the…
history
Remembering the Destruction of the Tea 250 years ago
By the Lincoln250 Planning Committee In May 1773, the British Parliament passed the widely unpopular Tea Act, and in December that same year, nearly 100 patriots dumped an entire shipment of East India Company tea into the Boston Harbor. Four days after the Destruction of the Tea and again a week later, Lincoln’s Town Meeting…
Lincoln field finally gets its historically correct name
For years, Lincolites have known the field at the corner of Sandy Pond and Baker Bridge Roads as the Muster Field. But now, thanks to some historical correction, it’s been officially renamed Dakin Field. Almost a dozen Dakins from all over gathered at the field on October 13 to witness the installation of a new…
Lincoln starts gearing up for the nation’s 250th birthday
Here’s your SAT word for the day: “semiquincentennial.” That means 250th anniversary, which is coming up for the United States — and Lincoln and neighboring towns will be deeply involved in the celebration. The Select Board has established the Lincoln250 Planning Committee to “identify thoughtful, creative, and inclusive opportunities to celebrate Lincoln’s contributions to the…
Minute Man NHP being spruced up for 250th anniversary
Minute Man National Historical Park is in the early stages of getting a $27 million facelift, due to be finished in time for the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution in 2025. The grant from the Great American Outdoors Act will fund repairs to the park’s buildings, structures, landscape, trails, signage, monuments,…
Restored sampler gives a glimpse of life in Lincoln 200 years ago
The Lincoln Town Hall is home to plenty of historically valuable documents — but until now, few if any of them were hand-stitched. The Lincoln Town Archives and Lincoln Historical Society recently put on display a sampler created in 1826 by 13-year-old Sophia Adams. The artifact is in a climate-controlled case just down the hall…
News acorns
Lincoln historian speaks on her latest book Civil War historian and Lincoln resident Megan Kate Nelson will give a talk about her new book, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America (Scribner, 2022) at the Concord Museum on Tuesday, Jan. 24 at 7 p.m. at the Concord Museum. It tells the vivid story of how,…
Booklet celebrates 10 years of the Lincoln Squirrel
The Lincoln Squirrel is celebrating 10 years of publication this month — a decade of covering Lincoln with 3,534 posts on the website as of December 9, 2022 (not to mention almost 4,000 individual calendar events). To celebrate, I’ve created “Lincoln Squirrel: The First Ten Years,” a 14-page PDF publication that gives a glimpse of…
The Storrows built New England’s first bomb shelter in Lincoln
By Sara Mattes “Did you know…?” that Lincoln had the first bomb shelter in New England and possibly the first in the United States? The Storrows’ bomb shelter was so newsworthy in 1940 that the Wide World photo service circulated this photo nationally. It even appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The puzzle is: Why…
MacLean honored by history group and town
Town Historian Jack MacLean was recently honored with a proclamation of appreciation by the Select Board after he received the Star Award for “long-term volunteer contributions to public history” from the Massachusetts History Alliance. MacLean, who was born and raised in Lincoln, began putting more time into researching the town’s history in the early 1980s…