He is best known for his role in Paul Revere's "midnight ride" to warn the townspeople of Concord, Massachusetts, of the impending British army move to capture guns and gunpowder kept there at the beginning of the American Revolution.

[3] On the evening of April 18, 1775, Paul Revere and William Dawes were dispatched by Joseph Warren to warn Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were then in Lexington, that a British expedition was on its way to arrest them.

Warren also instructed Revere and Dawes to warn provincial officials in Concord that British troops intended to confiscate or destroy the armaments being amassed there by the province's militia.

In Concord, Prescott bid his brother Abel to ride to Sudbury to alert companies there while, according to tradition, Samuel rode to Acton and Stow to carry the alarm there.

[12] Abel was fired on by a British regular who spotted him as he was returning from Acton and Stow; he was slightly wounded in the side, but succeeded in making his escape by secreting himself in the house of a Mrs. Heywood.

Due to Prescott's efforts that night, the minuteman and militia companies in numerous towns were alerted, mustered, and marched to Concord in time to engage the British Army at the Old North Bridge and other locations along the road to Boston.

A Revolutionary War veteran from Ashburnham, Massachusetts, recorded in his memoir that he had been imprisoned by the British in a prison in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a Dr. Prescott.

The reenactment is preceded by a Patriots' Ball and a procession by modern day Minuteman, ceremonial honor guards, and fife and drum units.