Note 519 — Chapter II · (continued 2)

The tower upon which the lanterns were hung is a matter of dispute, Revere's "North Church" being considered by some to have been the church in North Square, Boston, pulled down by the British during the siege, and by others the present Christ Church, and it is upon the latter that the tourist to-day is shown an inscription identifying that building with the event. Richard Frothingham, in a letter to the mayor of Boston, called The alarm on the night of April 18, 1775 (Boston, 1876, 2nd ed., 1877) protested against this act, and wrote in favor of the church in North Square. The other alternative was upheld by the Rev. John Lee Watson in a letter to the Boston Daily Advertiser, July 20, 1876, and this was printed separately in 1877 as Paul Revere's Signal, with remarks by Charles Deane, and in a second edition with an additional letter in 1880. (Cf. Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., Nov., 1876.) This second letter was mainly in answer to William W. Wheildon's History of Paul Revere's Signal Lanterns (Concord, 1878), in which, while accepting the Christ Church theory, it was claimed that Robert Newman was the person who showed the lanterns, and not John Pulling, as averred by Mr. Watson (cf. note in Everett's Orations, i. p. 101). Mr. Deane had shown that, both before and after the destruction of the church in North Square, Christ Church had been called the North Church; while the earliest use of that designation for the latter building seems to have been in one of Dr. Stiles's almanacs in 1754, where he speaks of "Dr. Cutler's alias North, alias Christ Church." (Atlantic Monthly, Aug., 1884, p. 256.) E. G. Porter's Rambles in Old Boston, N. E., favors Christ Church.