Opinion : Remembering the original Patriot's Day, April 19; and Iowans who fought British

This Revolutionary War veteran is buried in Center Point Cemetery.

John Osborn was a 'Soldier of the Revolution,' according to his tombstone in Center Point.

A marker honors the grave of Revolutionary War soldier John Osborn in Center Point.

Many of them were farmers. Most were fathers of several children. Some had wives who were about to give birth. Some, like Ebenezer Burgess, were as old as 60.

They were the first to fight for their country. Some bled to death on their front steps. They were the first to die for their country.

I wish I knew their names.

Monday, April 19, is the 235th anniversary of America's oldest, most-forgotten national holiday: Patriot's Day.

Thanks to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, most Americans know about "The Eighteenth of April in Seventy-Five" and Paul Revere's Midnight Ride.

But few Americans can tell you what happened on the Nineteenth of April in Seventy-Five. In only a few places, particularly Massachusetts, where it occurred, are those patriots remembered with their own holiday every year.

Revere's ride was just the beginning of what would be a very long day for the people of Concord and Lexington, Mass.

Tensions between the colonists and the British had escalated to the point where the colonists were convinced that the next step was war. England had ordered the Port of Boston closed, adding a huge economic burden to the area. People were ordered to stop holding local meetings. British troops had carried out several missions against the colonists, confiscating weapons, ammunition and gun powder.

The Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party had already happened, and the emotional wounds from those events hadn't even started to heal.

And it wasn't only Massachusetts.

Just a few weeks earlier, several hundred miles away, a fiery state legislator stunned the Virginia House of Representatives with an impassioned speech that ended with, "Give me liberty, or give me death!"

On the 18th of April, 1775, the residents of Concord got word that the British were planning to send a large number of soldiers to confiscate the arms at Concord. Lexington was on the road from Boston to Concord.

Revere, who later told his descendants that he had used a petticoat to silence his oars as he quietly rowed under the bow of the British warship Somerset, was one of several riders who sped from Boston to warn the colonists that the British were coming.

It all started in Lexington, where 38 Minutemen - men who were trained to be ready, in a minute, to put down their plows or their tools and pick up their guns to fight for freedom - were waiting for the British, who numbered around 700 or so.

After forming a battle line, the British ordered the Lexington residents to disperse and drop their weapons. They dispersed, but hung on to their guns. To this day, nobody knows who fired the first shot, the shot "heard 'round the world."

The British began firing; when the shooting was over, eight men were dead. The British continued on to Concord and were frustrated to find that the Americans had had enough time to hide most of the munitions the British had hoped to confiscate.

Historians say the colonists had dug through the night and buried many cannons in their freshly-plowed fields. As the British returned to Boston, the thousands of patriots lined the road near the North Bridge. In the intense fighting that day, nearly 70 British soldiers and 50 patriots were killed.

Twenty-three Masachussetts towns lost at least one man that day. Several of the women and children took refuge at a minister's house in Concord during the battle there.

Years later, that minister's grandson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, would write of that day:

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood

Their flag to April's breeze unfurled

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world"

Everyone knew that Patriot's Day was the beginning of the war with England.

"The die was cast, the Rubicon crossed," wrote John Adams, who within a year, would be writing the Declaration of Independence with Thomas Jefferson.

But I think Longfellow said it best in "Midnight Ride:"

"A hurry of hoofs in a village street,

A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark

And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing a spark

Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet

That was all! And yet through the gloom and the light

The fate of a nation was riding that night

And the spark struck out by that steed in his flight

Kindled the land into flame with its heat"

There won't be any parades in Iowa this month tomorrow to celebrate Patriot's Day, but I hope that at least some of you will visit Center Point Cemetery.

John Osborn is buried there.

Osborn, served in Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina. He died at age 86, in 1854. He was buried in Center Point Cemetery, where a tombstone honors his service in the Revolutionary War.

Then before you leave the cemetery, look to the south and the east, as the Minutemen did, and try to imagine what they felt as they held their guns and waited for the line of Redcoats to come over the hill on April 19, 1775.