Lexington Minute Man Marker

The Lexington Minute Man Marker sits across from the Battle Green near Buckman Tavern. Set on a stepped granite base, the sculpture depicts six minutemen fighting at the Battle of Lexington. Three are shooting, two on their knees, and one stands. One crouches to avoid being shot while another rushes forward. Another slumps, as if dead. A knee-high iron fence surrounds the monument.

The inscription on the front of the bronze base reads:

THESE MEN GAVE EVERYTHING DEAR IN LIFE, YEA AND LIFE ITSELF IN SUPPORT OF THE COMMON CAUSE

It continues on the front of the granite base beneath the sculpture:

MEMORIAL TO THE LEXINGTON MINUTEMEN OF 1775

Unveiled on April 19, 1949, the sculpture was commissioned by the Lexington Minute Men, Inc. and created by sculptor Bashka Paeff. Paeff emigrated from Minsk in the Russian Empire (present day Belarus) to the United States with her family in 1894 as a one-year-old. According to the New York Times article, “Memorial to Minutemen Dedicated at Lexington,” published the day after the unveiling, “…the dedication ceremony, attended by Governor Paul A. Dever, followed Lexington’s annual Patriots' Day Parade and the arrival of riders impersonating Paul Revere and William Dawes.”

In her early teens, Paeff enrolled in the Boston Normal Art School (now Massachusetts College of Art and Design), and completed programs in drawing, painting, and art education. There she studied sculpture under Cyrus E. Dallin of Arlington, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1911 and continued on to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where she studied with Bela Pratt.

Paeff is known as the “subway sculptor” for the pieces she modeled while working her way through school as a toll collector at Boston’s Park Street train station. She is most recognized for her controversial Sacrifices of War memorial on the Portsmouth, New Hampshire/Kittery, Maine border. Paeff defended that memorial, stating, “I hope most of all that we shall not erect memorials to glorify war… we forget what suffering and horror it brought. We should set up memorials that would make us loathe war instead of admire it.”

Her sculpture honoring Lexington’s Minute Men reflects the battle, the bravery, and the fragility of life.

The names of twelve officers and sixty-eight men who were at Lexington Town Green on April 19, 1775, are inscribed on the back of the monument beneath the following inscription:

MEMORIAL
TO THE LEXINGTON MINUTE MEN WHO WERE
ON THE GREEN IN THE EARLY MORNING ENGAGEMENT
APRIL 19, 1775

No official list was ever issued by the company or by the Town. These names are those listed by historian Frank Warren Coburn in his 1912 book, The Battle of April 19, 1775 in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Arlington, Cambridge, Somerville, and Charlestown, Massachusetts. In 2007, three additional names were added to the memorial as a result of ongoing research on the topic.