Whittemore Park

Samuel Wilson, later associated with the national figure of “Uncle Sam,” was born near the main crossroad of Menotomy, then the Northwest parish of Cambridge, on September 13, 1766. When Paul Revere rode past the family homestead on his way to Lexington and Concord, Wilson was eight years old, and on April 19, 1775, fighting between retreating British troops and pursuing Minutemen raged around the boy’s home. Wilson later moved to New Hampshire and then to Troy, New York, where he became a meatpacker whose casks of beef and pork for American troops in the War of 1812 were marked “U.S.” and were said to have inspired the association of those letters with “Uncle Sam” Wilson. Menotomy, now Arlington, honors him with a statue near his birthplace, sculpted by Theodore Barbarossa and dedicated on April 18, 1977. The park also reflects Arlington’s wider history: Paul Revere passed through this Menotomy intersection on April 19, 1775; a plaster cast of Revere is based on portrait sculptures by Arlington artist Cyrus E. Dallin; the Jefferson Cutter House, built about 1817, was moved here in 1989; the coming of the railroad in 1846 transformed local life and industry; and the Minuteman Bikeway later followed much of the old corridor and Revere’s route. Arlington itself began as a seventeenth-century settlement known as Menotomy, became West Cambridge in 1807, and took the name Arlington in 1867, while developing from farms and mills into a town of major nineteenth-century industries and, in the twentieth century, a residential suburb. Its Town Center Historic District, including the Robbins Library, Town Hall, the Whittemore-Robbins mansion, and Olmsted Brothers-designed gardens, was given to the town by members of the Robbins family between 1892 and 1951.

Arlington, Massachusetts · United States