Samuel Whittemore's marker stands in the former town of Menotomy, now Arlington, along the road used by British regulars retreating from Concord on April 19, 1775. Whittemore had been born in 1694 and had served the British Empire in earlier wars, including the campaigns at Louisbourg. By 1775 he was an elderly farmer with decades of military experience. The marker calls him eighty, although surviving birth records indicate that he was probably seventy-eight.

That morning Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith's expedition had fought at Lexington and Concord and begun a punishing return toward Boston. Militia companies converged from across Massachusetts, firing from stone walls, houses, trees, and bends in the road. Menotomy saw some of the day's fiercest violence because exhausted regulars and an increasing number of provincials met in a densely settled corridor. Homes were searched or damaged, civilians were endangered, and close-range encounters blurred the boundary between battle and individual combat.

According to the tradition preserved by the monument, Whittemore positioned himself near the road with a musket, two pistols, and a sword. He fired on the passing troops, killing or mortally wounding three soldiers, then drew his sword when British grenadiers closed on him. A regular shot him in the face, and others bayoneted and struck him repeatedly. The soldiers left him for dead as their column continued toward Charlestown.

Neighbors found Whittemore grievously wounded but alive. He reportedly insisted that he be taken home rather than abandoned to die, and a physician treated injuries that seemed unsurvivable in an age before modern surgery or antibiotics. He recovered and lived until 1793. Later accounts made him the oldest known colonial combatant of the Revolution, while the extraordinary contrast between his age, wounds, and survival turned a localized action into one of Arlington's best-known stories.

The episode should be understood within the wider Battle Road, not as an isolated duel. Whittemore's attack formed part of a regional uprising in which thousands of militia responded to alarms and transformed a British arms-seizure mission into a fighting retreat. His earlier imperial service also captures a generational reversal: a man who had fought for Britain against France now took up weapons against British troops moving through his own community.

The marker repeats traditional ages of eighty at the fight and ninety-eight at death, figures that appear to be slightly exaggerated, but the underlying event and Whittemore's survival are well established. His grave lies nearby in Arlington's Old Burying Ground among other local participants and British soldiers killed that day. The monument preserves both personal courage and the violence experienced in Menotomy, where the Revolution arrived not on a distant battlefield but along roads, fields, and doorways familiar to ordinary residents.