Twenty Fascinating facts about Paul Revere beyond his "Midnight Ride"

 

Paul Revere by John Singleton Copley

 

Many of us had to memorize parts of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere in grade school. It immortalized the Boston Silversmith, but there was so much more to him. I was looking through my copy of The Book of This Day in History by Jim Dailey. When I came across the entry for April 18, 1775, marking the Paul Revere’s ride to alert those in Concord, Massachusetts that the British were coming, I got curious about the man. The things I knew about him: he was a successful silversmith, had been married twice and had 16 children and he was a patriot. 

Here is my list of fascinating facts after a little research on Paul Revere

1.   He helped organize an intelligence and alarm system to keep watch over the British troop movements before and during the Revolutionary War. This system consisted of men who would observe and report. He was such a well-known courier that The London Times listed his name as being wanted for spying. I’m impressed he avoided being arrested. However, during his “Midnight Ride” through a British Checkpoint his horse was confiscated.

2.   In 1748 at 13, he began his apprenticeship with his father to be a silversmith. Paul never attended college but had a brilliant mind.  

3.   In 1756, he briefly served in the army during the French and Indian War. He wasn’t old enough to take over his father’s silversmith shop after his death in 1754, so this was a way for him to earn a consistent wage.

4.   1758 at 21 he opened his own silversmith shop. He’d already married Sarah Orr in 1757. 

creamer  created by Paul Revere

 

5.   Business was poor due to the economic stresses like the Stamp Act on the economy. So, he learned dentistry to add to his income.

6.   In 1765, he joined the Sons of Liberty and was an active participant in the Boston Tea Party. Three shiploads of tea were dumped in the harbor after the patriots had blocked the harbor for several days, not allowing the ships to unload their cargo.

7.   He served as a courier for the Boston Public Safety, traveling 18 times to New York and Philadelphia to report on the political unrest in Boston. The colonists were monitoring the movement of the British.

8.   In 1775, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War he continued as a courier and printed currency Congress used to pay the Colonial Army. He also created silver engravings of the Boston Massacre and the British entering Boston, which he titled “the insolent parade.” He made many other politically themed engravings.

Bloody Massacre Engraving

 

9.   He served as an officer in the Revolutionary War after the British overtook Boston and he had to flee with his family.

10.       If there was a need, Revere stepped up to meet it. He designed and built a gunpowder factory for the Colonial Army.

11.       John Warren, a close friend, had died at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. Paul went with Warren’s brother to find his body amongst mass graves on March 21,1776. Although his body was badly decomposed, Paul was able to identify him by dental work he’d preformed on John. Was this the first use of dental work to identify a body?

12.       Seeing the need to expand his business after the war, with a slow economy, he began producing things for the masses rather than the wealthy class. Among those items were silver teaspoons and belt buckles.

13.       After the war, the economy was depressed. Revere saw the need to learn more technology and expanded beyond silver and gold to other metals. By 1788 he bought a furnace and began to produce cast iron items like sash-window weights, stove backs, fireplace tools sold to the masses in Boston.

14.       Revere used artisans to create various items in his factories and, rather than treat them as common laborers, he gave them benefits that were not available in other factories. He offered higher wages to match their skills, flexible working hours and liquor on site.

15.       Revere was always looking for ways to expand his business. He was constantly learning from other manufacturers ways to make his factory better. Always looking for consumer needs, he expanded to cooper and created the first sheet cooper machine. The sheet cooper was sold to the Navy to coat their ships and was used to cover the original wood dome at the Massachusetts State House. He also developed cooper hinges, spikes and other items that he also sold to the Navy and manufacturers.

16.       He learned to cast bronze cannons, which he sold to the federal and state government and some private clients.

17.       And his most noteworthy creation was casting bells. During the Second Great Awakening, a revival that brought many to The Lord, new churches needed bells. In 1792, he became known as one of the world’s best bell casters. He produced over a hundred bells. Some are still in operation. One is even at the National Museum of Singapore.

18.       Paul saw the need to standardize production and worked toward creating standardized instructions for creating items so they could be produced faster and cheaper.

Portrait done in 1810

19.       He also supported Alexander Hamilton’s campaign for standardized currency for the nation. At this time, each state had its own currency and often Revere found himself unable to get raw materials for his factories because of insufficient funds in circulation.

20.       He was 83 when he died on May 10, 1818. Only his daughter Maria Revere Balestier outlived him. Can you imagine outliving 15 of your 16 children.

I was very impressed with all that he accomplished as a patriot, an entrepreneur, and a businessman. 

Anyone have Revere Ware?

 He passed on a legacy of good business practices that continues today. Paul Revere was more than one of several guys who warned his fellow-patriots that the British were on the way. If you haven’t read the poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, click here.

Did you know about the Revere Legacy?

Cindy Ervin Huff is an Award-winning author of Historical and Contemporary Romance. She loves infusing hope into her stories of broken people. She addicted to reading and chocolate. Her idea of a vacation is visiting historical sites and an ideal date with her hubby of almost fifty years would be live theater.Visit her  website www.cindyervinhuff.com Or on Social media:

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Rescuing Her Heart

As her husband's evil deeds haunt a mail-order bride from the grave, can she learn to trust again and open her heart to true love? Jed has his own nightmares from a POW camp and understands Delilah better than she knows herself. Can two broken people form a forever bond?

 Click to learn more.

 

Your Freedom in Jeopardy

 By Catherine Ulrich Brakefield

         Winston Churchill was seventy-four when he addressed the House of Commons with this line, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” He’d gone against the current of popularity again facing the same brick wall as he had with the impending doom of Nazism, now, with the threat of Communism.

He summed his life up thusly: “All the great things are simple, and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope.” The Brit’s British Bulldog was still on his feet, growling his warnings.

In my February blog, we traveled through the hallways of Churchill’s early days, his accomplishments, and his defeats. In March we learned about the obstacles he faced in World War I and World War II and the trials he overcame.

He was often lonely, misunderstood, and yes, made a couple of wrong turns. He fought heroically in the trenches of World War I and battled the Blitz of World War II. But this latest threat looming upon Britain’s borders worried him even more. When in 1949, George Orwell’s (the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair) science fiction book Nineteen-Eighty-four was published, more discord followed. Most know Blair as George Orwell, so I shall refer to Blair as Orwell henceforth.

         It is amazing how much Orwell and Churchill had in common—and how many differences. Both ended up with the same ideals—but with very, very different outcomes.

        

Both had experienced severe loneliness in their lifetime. Both were well-known authors. Both were British subjects. Both had a heart for the poor and downtrodden, and both had experienced the snobbery of their constituents during their young school years and adult years.  Perhaps there was even a little awe in Orwell’s temperament toward Brit’s Bull Dog because he named his protagonist Winston in Nineteen Eighty-four.

         Perhaps it was the deciding differences between them that made each choose a different path to notability—and in the end, the outcome of their souls.

         Churchill was born into an aristocratic family and struggled with maintaining his grades. Orwell was born into a lower-middle-class family. He was intellectually brilliant and received outstanding grades throughout school. He won two scholarships, one to Wellington and Eton.

Though both men experienced loneliness, they reacted very differently. Orwell often wrote about his miseries throughout his novels, as seen in his autobiographical essay, Such, Such Were the Joys (1953).

Churchill chose to see the brighter side of life, and wrote, “When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future? We have come safely through the worst.”

Orwell once shrugged off imperialism and labeled himself an anarchist. He continued this self-behavior for several years. Then, during the 1930s, he decided he was a socialist. Thinking this was even too libertarian in the way he thought, he took the next step to saying he was a communist.

Orwell’s Animal Farm came into print in 1945. It was a political fable based on the Russian Revolution and its betrayal of Joseph Stalin. The book is about the barnyard animals that overthrow their human masters and then set up their own society.

The intelligent and power-loving pigs form a dictatorship and then encourage bondage even more oppressive and heartless than their former human masters had bound them beneath.

The pigs’ slogan was, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Animal Farm made Orwell famous. Many critics said, “Animal Farm was one of Orwell’s finest works, full of wit and fantasy and admirably written.”

Well into his forties now, Orwell pondered his political preferences. And after brooding over Naziism and Stalinism, he realized there loomed a dark menace in each. This is when he took up pen again and wrote his science-fiction thriller Nineteen Eighty-four.

It’s about an imaginary future where the world is dominated by three warring totalitarian police states and the leader is called Big Brother. The hero in Orwell’s book is Englishman Winston Smith who lives in Oceania. It is Smith’s job to rewrite the history books. To systematically destroy the truth and rewrite history in the Ministry of Truth, therefore, bringing it up to the current political thinking.

The party has created a propagandistic language known as Newspeak, designed to limit free thought and promote the Party’s doctrines.  For instance, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. Winston has doubts and shares these thoughts with a like-minded woman. They fall in love. They get caught and are arrested by the Thought Police.

The method was so diabolical that it eventually worked. The imprisonment, torture, and reeducation broke him physically and rooted out his independent mental existence, and his spiritual dignity—the only love he felt was toward Big Brother.

Afterwards, meeting the woman he once loved, he feels no attraction toward her at all. Only an allegiance to Big Brother.

“Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present, controls the past,” Orwell said in his book. Pointing out the dangers of totalitarianism did make an impression upon many. The book was later turned into a movie entitled Big Brother.  Nineteen Eighty-four is considered a classic and mandatory reading for some high schools and colleges in the United States. Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London hospital in January 1950.

Nineteen Eighty-four continues in print and into the minds of our youth today. As I wrote in March’s blog, here is Churchill’s speech at Westchester during the Great Depression of the 1930s again, “Words are the only things that last forever. The Pyramids molder, the canals silt up, the bridges rust, the railroads change and decay…But words spoken two or three thousand years ago remain with us now, not as mere relics of the past, but with all their pristine living…leaping across the gulf of ages—they light the world for us today.” How ironic you hear nothing of this today. Churchill was right when he said, “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.”

In 1951 Winston Churchill was at the ripe age of 77 when he was elected prime minister for the second time. Queen Elizabeth made Winston Churchill a knight of the Order of the Garter in 1953.

In 1963, President John F. Kennedy made Winston Churchill the first foreigner to be granted honorary U.S. citizenship. “In the dark days and darker nights when Britain stood alone…he mobilized the English language and set it into battle.”

Upon Churchill’s death, we learn of his most cherished Bible verse,  John 14:2–3 

“In My Father’s house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also” (NKJV)

His funeral was laced with Christian undertones, for he orchestrated it himself and wanted lively hymns. And so, before a worldwide audience of 350 million, the congregation listened to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic;” in respect to his Anglo-American parentage, “Who Would True Valour See” and “Fight The Good Fight With All Thy Might.” His coffin was carried out of St Paul’s Cathedral to “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.”

Once, someone said to him that he was a pillar of the church. He retorted, “No, no, not a pillar, but a buttress, supporting it from the outside.”

Orwell and Churchill had commonalities, but both went about achieving their notability in different ways.

What if history were rewritten? Words are a vital network of wisdom for the next generation to explore. What if history books are changed to uphold the dominant party’s agenda? As seen in February, March, and April’s blog, this has been tried throughout the years.  It is Orwell’s words that the schools are exploiting. Churchill’s words are all but obscure.

Churchill once said in his boisterous voice, “What is foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.” 

         

Love’s Final Sunrise: Fleeing for her life Ruth finds herself in an hourglass of yesteryear. Can Joshua’s Amish ways help them survive these final three-and-one-half years? “To be honest, I’m not usually drawn to fiction. But for this no-nonsense nonfiction lover, Love’s Final Sunrise was a risk that paid off in full measure. I highly recommend this author’s way of weaving intrigue, romance, and Christian principles.”  Lori Ann Wood

            Catherine is the award-winning author of Wilted Dandelions, Swept into Destiny, Destiny’s Whirlwind, Destiny of Heart, Waltz with Destiny and Love's Final Sunrise, and two pictorial history books, The Lapeer Area and Eastern Lapeer. She has been published by Guideposts Books, CrossRiver Media, Revell Books, Bethany House Publishers, and Arcadia Publishers. 

Catherine and her husband of fifty-one years live on a ranch in Michigan and have two adult children, four grandchildren, four Arabian horses, three dogs, three cats, six chickens, and five bunnies. You can learn more about her at CatherineUlrichBrakefield.com

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/winston-churchill 

https://www.biography.com/political-figures/winston-churchill

https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/winston-churchill-quotes

https://www.history.com/news/meet-the-woman-behind-winston-churchill

https://www.thoughtco.com/what-does-that-quote-mean-archaeology-172300#:~:text=%22Who%20controls%20the%20past%20controls%20the%20future%3A%20who%20controls%20the,quote%20means%20may%20be%20found.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Orwell/Animal-Farm-and-Nineteen-Eighty-four

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nineteen-Eighty-four

https://www.churchillsocietyny.com/westchester-county

 

Who is Alfred Nobel and what is the Nobel Prize?

 

I think we have all read headlines or heard it mentioned on the news of Nobel Peace Prize Winners. But do you know where that started, why it started, and who started it? And did you know that there are several different Nobel Prizes every year?

Let's start with the who. Alfred Bernhard Nobel of Sweden was the third child of eight, born to Immanuel Nobel in October 1833. He and three brothers were the only of the children that survived in a life of poverty. Immanuel Nobel the victim of several business failures left Sweden and moved to Saint Petersburg, Russia. There, Immanuel became a wealthy man in the manufacturing of explosives and machine tools. With his new-found wealth he brought his family to Russia. Now having the money, he and his wife hired private tutors for Alfred.

Alfred Nobel was an ambitious young man who worked hard and loved his studies, excelling in them. He could speak six different languages. Once an adult, he could claim inventor, businessman, engineer, and chemist to his accomplishments. Most people can't claim one invention, however Nobel had 355 patents held in his name. His first patent filed was a gas meter at age 24, but his best-known patent was dynamite filed at age 34.

Young Nobel
Wiki public domain

 At age 26 Alfred moved back to Sweden with his parents. He gained an interest in explosives and worked diligently on them. Through his hard work and inventions, Nobel became a wealthy man.

 This story may or may not be a myth since it can't be confirmed. But because Alfred instituted the Nobel Peace Prize and if true could have influenced his decision to start the award, I thought it noteworthy. The story goes, Alfred's brother Ludvig passed away and several newspapers mistakenly wrote Alfred's obituary. It is said that one French newspaper wrote, "The merchant of death is dead...Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday." As I said the story has never been confirmed by historians but as the myth goes, this influenced Nobel to leave a better legacy.

Nobel wrote a rather interesting will, leaving large amounts of money to his nieces and nephews. He left money to some of his servants as well as acquaintances that are not specified of relationship. But with the bulk and remainder of his estate, he established what we know today as the Nobel Prize. The remaining estate was converted to securities where a fund was set up and the interest on said fund would be distributed annually as prizes for those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The interest from the account was to be split into five equal parts and distributed as five prizes for (1) the most important discovery or invention in physics, (2) chemical discovery or improvement, (3) most important discovery in medicine, (4) the most outstanding work of literature, and (5) "the person who has done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations, abolition or reduction of standing armies, and the establishment and promotion of peace congresses." 

Nobel went on to say that no consideration was to be given to nationality but that the prizes should be given to the worthiest persons. He gave instructions as to explain how each prize was to be selected and by what institutions or committees. 

Nobel
Wiki public domain

The Nobel Prize is one of the most prestigious awards of our day. A sixth prize was created to honor Alfred Nobel by Sweden's central bank. They established the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, in 1968.

From 1901 to 2023 the six different prizes were awarded 621 times. Some have received the Nobel Prize more than once. There have been 965 individuals and 27 organizations that have received the award. As of 2022 the Nobel Peace prize has only been given to 18 women, but that is more than the other Nobel Prizes. Only 2 recipients have won more than one prize and both of those were organizations. The International Committee of the Red Cross has won the Nobel Peace Prize 3 times and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has won twice. Only one person has refused to accept their Nobel Peace Prize and that was a Vietnamese general, diplomat and revolutionary named Le Duc Tho. 

Nobel ended his last will and testament on a rather unusual note: "Finally, it is my express wish that following my death, my arteries be severed, and when this has been done and competent doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains be incinerated in a crematorium." I guess he wanted to make sure he wasn't burned alive.

He couldn’t very well hear God if he wasn’t listening. He needed to lay his life before God and let him direct it instead of trying to manipulate things to his liking.

Kirsten Macleod is in a bind. Her father’s last will and testament stipulates that she must either marry, lead the plantation into a first-year profit, or forfeit it to her uncle. But marriage is proving no easy option. Every suitor seems more enamored with the land than with her. Until her handsome neighbor sweeps into her stable to the rescue… of her beloved horse.

Silas Westbrook’s last year at veterinary school ends abruptly when he is called home to care for his young orphaned sisters. Troubles compound when he finds an insurmountable lien on the only home they’ve ever known, and the unscrupulous banker is calling in the loan. The neighbor’s kind-hearted and beautiful stable girl, Krissy, provides the feminine influence the girls desperately need. If only he had a future to offer her. But to save his sisters from poverty, he should set his sights on Krissy’s wealthy relative Kirsten Macleod, the elusive new heiress. Surely this hard-working and unassuming young lady and the landowner could not be one and the same?

Debbie Lynne Costello is the author of Sword of Forgiveness, Amazon's #1 seller for Historical Christian Romance. She has enjoyed writing stories since she was eight years old. She raised her family and then embarked on her own career of writing the stories that had been begging to be told. She writes in the medieval/renaissance period as well as 19th century. She and her husband have four children and live in upstate South Carolina with their 4 dogs, 4 horses, miniature donkey, and 12 ducks. Life is good!

Sources: Nobel Prize wiki, Alfred Nobel wiki, The Nobel Prize, Last Will