Paul Revere House

The Paul Revere House is the oldest remaining structure in downtown Boston — a wooden house built around 1680, bought by the silversmith and patriot in 1770, and preserved as a museum that gives you a direct, physical connection to the man who rode through the night shouting that the British were coming. The house is small, timber-framed, and slightly crooked after 340 years of settling, and standing inside it is one of those rare museum experiences where the building itself is the exhibit.

Revere bought the house when it was already nearly a century old, and he lived here with his family — he had 16 children by two wives, which explains why a man of considerable means lived in what would have been a modest dwelling even by 18th-century standards. The rooms are furnished with period pieces (some original to the Revere household), and the scale gives you an immediate sense of Colonial domestic life: low ceilings, small rooms, a central fireplace that was the only source of heat.

The house sits in North Square, one of the oldest public spaces in Boston, surrounded by the Italian-American neighbourhood of the North End. Revere left from this house on the night of April 18, 1775, walking to the waterfront where friends rowed him across the Charles River to begin his midnight ride. The courtyard behind the house contains a 900-pound bronze bell cast by Revere's foundry — a reminder that before he was a revolutionary hero, he was a craftsman who made his living working with metal.