Battle Road Unit: Cultural Landscape Report - Site History, Existing Conditions, and Analysis & Evaluation - Volume I, Minute Man National Historical Park, National Park Service
Dietrich-Smith D, Foulds E, Selvek C, Laham L, Harris A. 2005. Battle Road Unit: Cultural Landscape Report - Site History, Existing Conditions, and Analysis & Evaluation - Volume I, Minute Man National Historical Park, National Park Service. Cultural Landscape Report. NPS Northeast Regional Office. Northeast Regional Office/Olmsted Center for Landscape Preservation
Located sixteen miles northwest of Boston, Minute Man National Historical Park's Battle Road Unit extends across portions of the eastern Massachusetts towns of Concord, Lincoln, and Lexington. Between Meriam's Corner in Concord and Fiske Hill in Lexington, the linear unit of nearly eight hundred acres preserves the first four miles through which British Regulars fled under colonial fire on April 19, 1775, marking the first day of conflict in the Revolutionary War. As the unit’s name suggests, the battleground landscape is defined by its relationship with the Battle Road, which existed as a meandering colonial highway in 1775. Today, the major commuter artery Route 2A overlays a significant portion of the historic road. Traffic, noise, and other modern qualities associated with the road detract from the historical character of the park, as do aircraft from the neighboring Laurence G. Hanscom Air Field. The Battle Road Unit landscape is nationally significant for its associations with military history and the nineteenth century commemorative movements following the American Revolution. It is locally significant in the area of agriculture, as much of the area was used for this purpose from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and many existing landscape features are illustrative of this use. The period of significance, identified in the Cultural Landscape Report as 1635 to 1959, represents a span beginning with the earliest date of agricultural land use by European settlers and continuing until the park’s establishment. Although the process has been expensive, lengthy, and controversial, the park has successfully assembled the Battle Road Unit from hundreds of privately owned parcels. Initiated in the late 1950s, this bold undertaking was seen as the last opportunity to preserve a meaningful fragment of the historic Battle Road landscape, which was compromised by post-WWII suburban sprawl. Since land acquisition began, over two hundred modern structures within the Battle Road Unit have been removed and thirteen pre-1810 buildings were preserved, as well as many important features of the colonial landscape including several agricultural fields that have been under cultivation since the seventeenth century. Numerous other historic structures and features, unrelated to the battle yet part of the area's agricultural heritage, also remain intact. While a few agricultural fields remain open, most have succumbed to reforestation; a process that was initiated by abandoned fields and subdivision of parcels beginning in the twentieth-century, and which still continues. Forty years of federal planning, land acquisition, and preservation has created a historical park from suburbia, yet the park's current relationship with Route 2A is threatening its future. Early National Park Service planning assumed Route 2A traffic would eventually be rerouted, allowing for better preservation and rehabilitation of the landscape’s historic character. This has not transpired, and the present failure to plan regionally for local traffic lies at the heart of the park's most serious problems. Route 2A's legal right-of-way and roadbed continues to be managed by the Massachusetts Highway Department (MHD), with decision making shaped by values unrelated to historic preservation. Further approval of commercial air carrier routes between the civilian Hanscom Airfield and other eastern U.S. cities will only increase automobile traffic over the historic road and aircraft noise over the historic landscape. A 2002 traffic analysis prepared for the park revealed that the road is already operating at approximately fifty-percent above its optimal traffic volume for the desired visitor experience and safety. The expansion at the airfield will be possible only through widening, traffic signals, and other modifications to the historic road and the adjacent battleground landscape.
- Type
- Published Report
- Authors
- Dietrich-Smith, Deborah; Foulds, Eliot; Selvek, Christina; Laham, Lauren; Harris, Annie
- Date of Issue
- 2005-09
- Publisher
- NPS Northeast Regional Office
- Units
- HIST , MIMA , NER
- Keywords
- Agriculture, American Revolution, Analysis, Analysis, April 19 1775, Archeology, Architecture, Battle Road, Battle Road Unit, Battle Site, Battlefield Preservation, Bloody Angle, Boston, British Regulars, Brooks Hill, colonial, Colonial Militia, Concord, Craftsman (1890-1915), Cultural Landscape Report, documentation, ehistory, Evaluation, existing conditions, Farming the Northeast, farmland, farmstead, Fiske Hill, Hartwell Farm, Historic Landscape Rehabilitiation, historic site, History, Lexington, Lincoln, Massachusetts, Meriam's Corner, Middlesex County, Military, Minutemen, monument, Native American, Nelson Farm, Paul Revere, Period Revivals (1870-1940), Post-Archaic and Prehistoric Developments, Preservation, Revolutionary War, Samuel Prescott, site history, stone walls, The Bluff, Thomas Gage, Urbanization, Vernacular Landscape, wayside exhibit, William Dawes