The house is a typical New England farmhouse with five windows across the front, a door in the center and a large chimney in the middle of a pitched roof.

[3] Robert Nylander proposed in 1964 that the house was built in two stages; however, research conducted in 2012 by the Dendrochronology Laboratory at Oxford University confirms that the home was erected during a single campaign in 1745, as had been maintained by Russell family lore.

[4] The Oxford study also revealed that many of the timbers used in the house were made from lumber cut in 1684–85 or earlier and was probably salvaged from an older building on the property.

Around midnight of the night before, a rider named Paul Revere had passed the house on his mission to warn that the British regulars (soldiers) would be coming by on their way to Lexington and, ultimately, to Concord.

[12] Meanwhile, the rides of Revere and Dawes triggered a flexible notification system (express riders as well as bells, drums, alarm guns, bonfires, and a trumpet) to let the towns within 25 miles of Boston know that a sizable body of troops was on the move.

Accordingly, militias and minutemen companies from many outlying communities assembled and began marches that would eventually bring them to Jason Russell's property.

From bundles of shingles that were lying about, because Jason had been preparing to reshingle, he and some provincial militias formed a barricade behind his gate, thinking this would be a good position from which to fire on the enemy as they returned.

Danvers's Gideon Foster, having been warned by the more experienced Hutchinson of the possibility of a flanking attack, also set up among the trees rather than behind barricades.

As Lord Percy wrote back to London the following day, “During the whole [retreat] the Rebels attacked us in a very scattered, irregular manner, but with purpose and resolution, nor did they ever dare to form into any regular body.”[33] The stories we have are therefore rather of engagements of individuals or of small numbers of people.

[36] Jotham Webb, a minuteman serving under Danvers’ Colonel Hutchinson,[37] was “shot through the body and killed by the first fire.”[38] Abednego Ramsdell of Lynn also "fell immediately”.

Two friends, Daniel Townsend and Timothy Munroe, who were from the part of Lynn that became Lynnfield, were standing in the yard behind the house, firing at the British troops.

Then, according to Lewis and Newhall,"Townsend had just fired, and exclaimed, 'There is another redcoat down,'  when Munroe, looking round, saw, to his astonishment, that they were completely hemmed in by the flank guard of the British army, who were coming down through the fields behind them.

[45] As the flankers closed in and the main body of regulars was advancing along Concord Road, Jason Russell and a number of other troops rushed to take refuge in the house.

It is said that, because Russell was old and lame, he was in the rear and was felled by two bullets at his own doorstep, then received "eleven bayonet stabs from the exasperated enemy as they passed in and out.

[48] Three men from the now-Peabody part of Danvers – George Southwick, Joseph Bell, and Dennison Wallis – managed to find their way upstairs.

Sensing a lull, they then ventured down the stairs with Southwick in the lead, till suddenly the outside door was flung open to admit British soldiers.

Meanwhile, outside, three or four of the Danvers men from the enclosure, having nowhere to go, had surrendered as prisoners of war ... but then “were butchered with absolute severity.”[52] When Wallis saw the British killing the others, he took off running.

But in an unsigned letter a British soldier would later described some events of that day -- events that may well have occurred at Jason's house -- in this way:“In another house which was long defended by eight resolute fellows, the grenadiers at last got possession, when after having run their bayonets into seven, the eighth continued to abuse them with all the [beastlike rage] of a true Cromwellian, and but a moment before he quitted this world applied such epithets as I must leave unmentioned..."[58]Such a bloodletting would be consistent with the copious amounts of blood that surrounded the bodies at the end of the day.

When they found themselves nearly surrounded, Foster led them down the hill, along the margin that extended from the mill pond into Russell's property, and across the road in front of the advancing British column, finally finding a safe position behind a ditch wall on the north.

[68] The next morning, learning that the British had all returned to Boston, the Danvers men gathered up their slain and brought them back to town by ox-cart.

[69] They were met by the townspeople, and the sexton of the south parish drove four of them to the home of Samuel Cook, Sr. on Central Street in what is now Peabody.

[71] Also on the 20th, the body of Reuben Keniston was returned to the Ryan Side neighborhood of Beverly to be buried in a plot next to the farm where he had been living and working with his wife Apphia; they had been married for less than a year.

Smith reported that the bodies were buried in haste, at least for the time being:“In the consternation and fear of that hour, the dead were placed on a sled, and drawn by a yoke of oxen upon the bare ground to the grave-yard.

William Adams, who lived nearby, is reported to have brought a sheet from his house for Jason himself, as he could not bear to see his neighbor buried without a winding-sheet.

[76] A story passed down to John Bacon's great-grandson emphasizes how quickly the twelve were buried, and notes that the men's outer clothes must have been saved off before the burial: “Immediately on receiving the news my grandfather (son of Lieut.

The clothes were found in the school-house, and the moment grandfather entered the room he knew the old striped hat which was put on top of the roll of clothes.”[77]A plain obelisk of New Hampshire granite was later raised above the grave.

As noted above, Jason Russell himself is said to have been felled on his own doorstep, while Abednego Ramsdell was one of the first to be killed by the flankers rounding the south side of the house, and Lieut.

[81] Two others, Jabez Wyman and Jacob Winship, died not at Jason Russell's house, but "were most barbarously killed and mutilated" down the road at Cooper's tavern,[82] and were evidently placed with the others after the fighting had ceased.

[83] Thus, the most likely explanation is that the kitchen floor was used during the evening as a repository, a kind of "morgue," for provincials and others slain in much of Menotomy, with bodies being added or removed in the time before Mrs. Russell returned home to see them.