Town Common
Hollis, NH
As recalled in Samuel Worcester’s 1897 History of Hollis N.H., about noon on the 19th of April 1775, news that the British were marching upon Concord and Lexington, forty-two miles away, reached the town. Tradition maintains that Deacon John Boynton, a member of the Committee of Observation, rode through Hollis at breakneck speed warning, “The regulars are coming, and killing our men!” The response was immediate, and others soon joined him in spreading the alarm.
The story continues that on that fateful afternoon, three of the five Nevens brothers were working with crowbars digging stone to build a stone wall near their home. As a messenger approached with the news, they were in the process of raising a large flat stone from a farm roadway. This they propped up with a small boulder as they stopped to listen. The stone was left in that position as they hurried home, took up arms and hastened to the town common to assemble with a company of ninety-two minute men and proceed to Lexington to support the Revolutionary cause. Of the five brothers who served in the war, three lost their lives.
For seventy years, the stone and boulder remained in the location where they fell that morning. Both were eventually removed to the town common to mark the spot where the Minute Men gathered and departed on April 19, 1775.
A bronze plaque listing the names of the ninety-two men who marched to Lexington was placed on the stone beneath the following words:
NAMES OF 92 MINUTE-MEN WHO MARCHED FROM THIS COMMON
FOR LEXINGTON, APRIL 19, 1775.
In Footsteps of the Patriots: Beside Old Hearth Stones written by Abram English Brown and published in 1897, Brown notes that, “Although beyond the limits of Middlesex County and of Massachusetts, the town of Hollis has been the first town to set up a monument on which can be read the names of all who responded to the alarm of April 19, 1775.”
The Nevens Stone was dedicated on June 17, 1898. An engraving on the stone reads:
THE NEVENS BROTHERS WERE AT WORK ON THIS STONE ON THEIR
FARM, APRIL 19, 1775, AND LEFT IT IN THIS POSITION AT THE
MINUTE-MEN'S ALARM, TO JOIN THEIR COMRADES ON THIS COMMON.