Samuel Prescott

Prescott encountered Paul Revere and William Dawes on the road after they had warned leaders in Lexington. When a British patrol stopped the riders, his local knowledge enabled him to escape across the countryside.

He reached Concord and helped spread the warning that British regulars were approaching. Accounts of his later life are uncertain; tradition holds that he died while a prisoner during the Revolutionary War. Samuel Prescott was a Concord physician who escaped a British patrol and carried the Lexington alarm onward to Concord in April 1775. Samuel Prescott also worked as Physician and Patriot courier. Samuel Prescott was born in Concord, Province of Massachusetts Bay and died in Halifax, Nova Scotia, traditionally.

David Hackett Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride reconstructs the political intelligence, communication networks and military decisions that led to the fighting at Lexington and Concord. Revere emerges as an important organiser and courier, but Fischer places his journey alongside the work of Joseph Warren, William Dawes, Samuel Prescott, town committees, express riders and militia officers throughout Massachusetts.