Paul Revere House Education and Visitor Center at Lathrop Place

The Paul Revere Memorial Association’s Education and Visitor Center at Lathrop Place makes the Paul Revere House historic site fully handicapped accessible, provides modern amenities for all our visitors, features permanent and changing exhibits, new programs in dedicated spaces, and an expanded museum shop.

The new Center is perfectly located in an abutting 1835 row house that sits on land that once belonged to Paul Revere. Key features of Lathrop Place, an important but formerly forlorn historic building (windows, stairways, fireplaces, and clapboards) have been lovingly restored.

Executive Director Nina Zannieri noted, “With the new Education and Visitor Center, we are better positioned to welcome growing numbers of visitors with comfortable program rooms, new exhibits, and accessible restrooms. Equally important is the fact that we were able to save a historically significant building with its own stories to tell. We are enormously proud that we have been able to retain the warmth and feel of this wonderful old building while elevating it to a new use.”

The project was funded by a $4.1 million-dollar capital campaign that attracted over 600 donors. Major donors included the Massachusetts Cultural Facilities Fund, the National Park Service, National Endowment for the Humanities, LPL Financial, Ruby W. and Lavon Linn Foundation, Amelia Peabody Charitable Fund, several anonymous donors, and Julia and Mark Casady and the One Step Forward Education Foundation.

Many years in the making, the new Education Center transforms the visitor experience by providing the level of amenities visitors expect at a nationally significant historic site—restrooms, a water fountain, a museum shop, and a sheltered area where they may gather to escape sun, snow, and rain.

The new Center’s exhibits provide visitors with an enhanced knowledge of Paul Revere’s ride, the Revolution, and Revere’s career as a silversmith and early industrialist. Visitors will view a detailed diorama of Revere’s silver shop while examining Revere silver. It will also allow the Association to display more of its collection, including Revere family items, materials related to the midnight ride, and objects from Revere’s many business ventures.

The new Center has received several prestigious awards including:

2019/2020 Boston Society of Architects Honor Award for Accessible Design (Mills Whitaker Architects)

2018 Massachusetts Historical Commission Preservation  Award

2017 American Association of State and Local History, Leadership in History, Award of Merit

2017 Boston Preservation Alliance Preservation Achievement Award

2016 Institute for Human-Centered Design and the National Endowment for the Arts “What Works” program to recognize innovative approaches to access.