John Morton
Paul Revere: Messenger Boy turned Industrial Entrepreneur
Almost everyone knows about Paul Revere’s midnight ride, but less discussed is Revere’s role during the Revolution as a man always on the go. The American revolutionaries sent Paul from Massachusetts to New York, to Philadelphia, to New Hampshire, to Hartford, back to Philadelphia, and so on. At one point, apparently because Paul had a head for machines, he was asked to visit a gunpowder mill in Pennsylvania and then replicate it on the Neponset River in Massachusetts. He did it, and that success sparked something. When his church needed a new bell, Revere decided he should be a bell maker. When the USS Constitution needed copper sheathing, he decided to open a copper rolling mill. Paul Revere never won a major battle, or election to high office. But his revolutionary experience transformed him from a small-time silversmith to an industrial entrepreneur.
John Morton, PhD, is the Executive Director of the Paul Revere Museum of Discovery and Innovation (MoDI, paulreveremuseum.org) in Canton, Massachusetts. Before becoming director of the MoDI, John was a visiting professor at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, and at Boston College. Before becoming a professor he worked at the William Cullen Bryant Homestead in Cummington, Massachusetts; at the Astors’s Beechwood Mansion in Newport, Rhode Island; and at the Central Park Zoo. He studied history at Boston College, UMass Amherst, and the University of Vermont. His published research focuses on New England and Atlantic Canada in the years after the American Revolution, and he serves as a councilor on the Middle Atlantic and New England Council for Canadian Studies.
