Saturday, 26 April 2025
Saturday, 26 April 2025
About 242 years after the Battle of Lexington sparked the Revolutionary War, a resident of the Massachusetts town where it took place realized with childlike enthusiasm that the 250th anniversary would be coming in no time. Huzzah!
Obsessed with her hometown’s role in America’s origin story, the resident, Sabrina Bhattacharjya, began planning early for 2025. Very early. Even earlier than the town’s elders, since she had the foresight to lock up the internet domain for Lexington250.com with $53 provided by her financial advisers — her parents.
That’s because Sabrina’s full-time position as a first grader at Bridge Elementary School did not produce a steady income. She was, after all, only 7 years old.
But a motivated 7, as resolute as the midnight rider Paul Revere himself to alert other kids in town to the history breathing all around them. It galled her that some children thought Revere was a fictional character, a colonial-era Paul Bunyan.
Within five years, Sabrina was using her website to sell T-shirts with historically sassy sayings intended to spark youthful curiosity but also causing some in town to cough up their mulled cider. Among the phrases was the name of the town — Lexington — followed by a social media abbreviation evoking an emphatic expletive.
Like its creator, the site has matured, becoming an inviting resource for all things Lexington, providing history as well as places to eat, sleep and shop. In preparing for this weekend’s semiquincentennial — which sounds like a medical procedure but simply means 250th anniversary — Sabrina posted an entry with the headline, “For People Who Think The Battle of Lexington Re-enactment Is Coachella: A Perfect Patriots’ Day Weekend.”
Much of the same information can be found on the town’s official anniversary website, Lex250.org, but without the same exuberance.
The competing — or, perhaps, uneasily coexisting — websites have themselves sparked a bit of local kerfuffle. Suzie Barry, the chair of the town’s Lex250 Commission, which is coordinating the events, recalled that Sabrina’s website had created “confusion in the community,” with some people misinterpreting it as the town’s website.
What’s more, she said, people “were surprised by some of the content.” Asked whether this meant they found Sabrina’s website offensive, Barry said she could not speak for anyone, other than to say that the website “wasn’t presented like a typical history book.”
“And I get it,” she said. “Appealing to a different audience.”
But Sabrina, who recently turned 15, makes no apologies. “Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve wanted to make history fun and engaging and cool,” she said. “And living in Lexington is like living in your own theme park.”
Lexington, a diverse Boston suburb of about 35,000, has an exceptional school system, high property values — and fierce pride in its revolutionary past. A neighbor wearing a tricorn hat doesn’t warrant a second look; probably one of the Lexington Minute Men. And those teenagers rocking colonial red-white-and-blue while dining at Tatte Bakery? Just members of the William Diamond Junior Fife & Drum Corps.
The town’s sense of self derives from the events of April 19, 1775, which can be recounted with docent-level expertise by Sabrina, granddaughter of immigrants from India.
Revere, dispatched from Boston to alert local militias that British troops were advancing toward Concord to destroy military supplies, rode up on horseback to warn two revolutionary leaders staying at the Hancock-Clarke house, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, that their arrest might also be on the British agenda. Another derring-do rider, William Dawes, arrived soon afterward, but his role is less known, in part because the historically problematic Longfellow poem, “Paul Revere’s Ride,” features only one hero.
Leave it to Sabrina to help clarify the record through T-shirts for sale. One says, “Paul Revere Was Real”; another says, “Don’t Forget William Dawes.”
Then, in early dawn, an overmatched militia of a few dozen men found itself facing a sea of British redcoats across the town common. There came the crack of a gunshot from a source unknown. The British opened fire on the retreating militiamen, killing seven and mortally wounding an eighth, before moving on to Concord, only to retreat when confronted by an unexpected swarm of militiamen.
The world had shifted. Down with tyranny. Down with kings. The war for American independence had begun.
More than two centuries later, a girl named Sabrina was using the historical hip-hop of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “Hamilton” as her young life’s background music. She had also found “Liberty’s Kids,” an animated educational series about the revolutionary era. In one episode, two children join Revere’s midnight ride; in another, they witness the Battle of Lexington.
The 7-year-old could hardly believe that Revere had raced down this street, or that the deadly skirmish had unfolded in that field, all right here in Lexington.
“I kind of understood that this was the start of something,” Sabrina said. “I’m the granddaughter of immigrants, and I was connecting it back to what attracts people to America. And it started here. It started with common people.”
After Sabrina’s tech-savvy parents, Usha Shanmugam and Durjoy Bhattacharjya, helped her buy the Lexington250.com domain in 2017, it sat unused for a few years. Then, in 2022, the site took on her personality as she began selling T-shirts of her own design, with modest proceeds donated to the historical society.
“A modern-day lemonade stand,” she said. But one that some found a bit sour.
Sabrina’s new website quickly received a note demanding to know who she was and what she was up to, threatening legal consequences. It came from the Lexington town manager.
Her response: I am Sabrina Bhattacharjya, I am 12 years old and I am a student at William Diamond Middle School.
There was no follow-up.
By 2023, Sabrina had transformed her website into something more informative and, yes, more commercial, although she said that her motivation remained the same: “Making history fun, exciting and, most of all, accessible.”
Still, not everyone was charmed by, say, her post purporting to list the favorite songs of the Rev. Jonas Clarke. Although he has been in the town’s Old Burying Ground for 220 years, she joked that the 18th-century clergyman was into the 1980s music of Survivor, Journey and the Police. She also described him as having “our favorite colonial dad-bod.”
In February 2024, the Lex250 Commission sent an email to Sabrina and her mother that applauded the girl’s enthusiasm and invited her to join the commission in some capacity. But it also said her website was “causing some inconvenience for visitors and friends.”
The commission leaders and the middle-schooler met, to little resolution. They asked for a disclaimer and a link to their website on hers; she declined, though her website makes clear that she’s just a kid in town. They offered her a position as student liaison, which she also declined, figuring that she wouldn’t have much of a say; besides, their afternoon meetings would conflict with her rowing practice on the Charles River.
“I took it as her being very busy,” Barry said.
The two sides went their separate ways. The commission went on to deal with logistics, security, protocol and the many issues that an event of national consequence generates. And the girl finished middle school, became a Lexington High School freshman and continued her quest to make real the likes of Paul Revere.
On Friday night, Sabrina appeared as one of the several children in the Hancock-Clarke House during the reenactment of Paul Revere’s ride. That was her in one of the second-floor windows, a white linen mobcap covering her long dark hair.
As for the momentous day itself — Saturday, April 19 — there would be an afternoon parade right down Massachusetts Avenue. And in the Lexington History Museums contingent of that parade, there would be a high school freshman who is also an entrepreneur, rower, granddaughter of immigrants and local historian. Huzzah.
The New York Times News Service
