Cooper's Tavern

Benjamin Cooper and his wife, Rachel Cooper owned Cooper’s Tavern. It, like Blue Anchor Tavern was a local watering hole made famous by its involvement in Revolutionary events.

On April 19, 1775, in the thick of the British retreat from the Battle of Lexington and Concord to Boston, Jason Winship and Jabez Wyman were enjoying a drink at Cooper’s Tavern. Unfortunately for them, it was on the route of the British soldiers’ fleeing to safety, to Boston. A month after the incident, Mrs. Cooper was interviewed and described the dramatic scene, “the King’s regular troops under the command of General Gage, upon their return from blood and slaughter, which they had made at Lexington and Concord, fired more than one hundred bullets into the house where we dwell, through doors, and windows,…The two aged gentlemen [Winship and Wyman] were immediately most barbarously and inhumanly murdered by them, being stabbed through in many places, their heads mangled, skulls broke, and their brains out on the floor and walls of the house.” These two men, along with another Cantabridgian, were buried at the Old Burying Ground.

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