One If By Land, Two If By Sea.
As our guide spoke these words I recognized them in the dusty, high-school part of my brain, but I never could have placed where they were from. Some old poem by some old, bearded poet would've been my guess - and surprisingly I'd have been right - but I didn't know any of this until our recent trip to Boston's North Church. This phrase represented a warning, one that was memorialized in the poem Paul Revere's Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. One if by land warned that if the British soldiers were attacking by land one light would be lit in the church's steeple, and two if by sea warned that the British were attacking by the quicker route of rowing across the Charles River. Two is the number of lanterns that hung from the steeple on April 18th, 1775, and with this warning Paul Revere and over thirty men on horseback (I'd been misled in school, it wasn't just Paul Revere himself) spread word all the way from Connecticut to New Hampshire of the British attack.
This historical church broadcast that warning over 200 years ago, and although the original steeple has long since toppled in a storm, the group who restored it only adds to the lore of the story.
The tower was our first stop upon entering the church, and because we'd signed up for the behind the scenes tour we were able to bypass the commoners and head up this rickety staircase marked no admittance.
Ascending into a steeple that had touches of both historical times and modern day, we next learned about the specialized art of bell ringing. This steeple has six bells, and you'd better make sure the phrase Master Bell-Ringer appears somewhere on your resume if you hope to put your hands on these ropes. At this church at least, ringing the bells is like playing an instrument, something each person trains at and is privileged to be chosen for. Their bell-songs are scripted, and together the band rings their music throughout the city at specific times.
Music lessons complete, it was now time for the real reason I'd taken a day off from work to come battle the crazies of Boston's rush hour.
On to the crypts.
Beginning in the 1700's it was common practice for North Church to bury its dead underneath the building, and today an estimated 1,100 bodies (nope, no exact count) are sealed in vaults that hold an average of forty bodies each. That's pretty efficient packing given the size of this empty crypt we saw, which I only dared enter because there was no door on it for Tina to seal.
Occupied crypts were marked by small doors, which lined both sides of a corridor that ran square throughout the basement.
Sometime around when the civil war was heating up the city decided maybe this wasn't the most sanitary thing people could be doing with the dead, and they ordered a stop to the practice. No more bodies were to be buried indoors. Not willing to give up the revenue stream so quickly, however - since the crypts made it easy to discard of old remains and make room for new ones, more and more often the church's larger doners - they ignored the city and continued stuffing their crypts with fresh bodies. This eventually led to the city entering the church and sealing the crypt doors with concrete, forcibly putting an end to the practice.
Although most of the concrete is gone today some crypts have only partially crumbled, revealing how the city tried to hide them so many years ago.
Exiting the crypts and returning to both sunlight and present day America, we continued our afternoon by visiting the main section of the church and its unique seating arrangement. This layout reminded me of a cubicle farm I once worked in, the memory of which gave me a nastier chill than any of the crypts.
On our way back to the car we made one last stop at a place that had caught our eye earlier, the church's cemetery, and there we found this final curiosity. Nearly every one of these old gravestones was adorned with a skull and crossbones, much like the one in this picture below. I don't yet know the significance of this (other than the obvious), but on a day whose theme ran heavy with the macabre, we couldn't think of a more fitting way to end our visit.
Links:
North Church Behind The Scenes Tours
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