Come explore the only house on Boston's Freedom Trail and find out what everyday life was like for Paul Revere, his first and second wives and his sixteen sons and daughters. Learn how the girls prepared food over an open fire, wove cloth tapes to fasten their clothing and scrubbed dirty linens with water lugged from a well. Ask the guides to tell you what really happened on Revere's midnight ride to Lexington and to separate fact from fiction in the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which made Revere famous. See furnishings and personal artifacts which belonged to Revere, as well as silver produced in Revere's shop.

Panels and displays will acquaint you not only with Revere's work as a silversmith, but with his many other business ventures as well. Before the war, Revere supplemented his income by cleaning teeth and engraving copper plates for printing political cartoons. After the war, Revere manufactured bells, some weighing almost three thousand pounds, fittings for ships including the USS Constitution and cannon for the Navy.

As you tour the site, you will discover that hundreds of people lived in the Revere House both before and after the Reveres. When Paul Revere bought the house in 1770, the structure was already ninety years old! Originally considered quite grand, it was first owned by one of the city's wealthiest merchants. By the time Revere bought it, the house was unfashionable but affordable to a middle-class silversmith. Revere sold the house in 1800. The wooden structure then became a boarding house for sailors and later for families who had fled Ireland, Russia and Italy hoping to make better lives in the United States. Purchased by one of Revere's descendants in 1902, the house was opened to the public as a museum in 1908. More than 200,000 visitors from around the world now visit the house each year.