Arlington

Arlington—then called Menotomy—saw the bloodiest fighting of April 19, 1775. As the British column retreated from Concord, exhausted and increasingly desperate, they passed through a gauntlet of militia fire along what is now Massachusetts Avenue. Here the fighting turned vicious. Men died in houses, in yards, in hand-to-hand combat. More soldiers fell in Menotomy than at Lexington and Concord combined. The violence here foreshadowed what the war would become: not a series of formal battles but a grinding conflict where civilians and soldiers, regulars and militia, would kill each other in close quarters.