AMERICAN HISTORY Exhibit examines Revere's ride

The Longfellow poem is full of historical inaccuracies.
CHADDS FORD, Pa. (AP) -- Listen my children and you shall hear, that Longfellow's poem about Paul Revere. While inspiring dozens of artists whose works you can see, historically is not all that it's cracked up to be.
Fortunately, the Brandywine River Museum is helping to set the record straight in a new exhibit entitled "Revere's Ride and Longfellow's Legend."
The show features more than 50 works by such artists and illustrators as William Robinson Leigh, N.C. Wyeth, Howard Pyle, Leonard Everett Fisher and Charles Santore. The works range in style from romanticism to realism, and include even parody. A 1977 comic strip from "Peanuts" creator Charles Schultz, for example, portrays Linus and Snoopy rehearsing a Revere-like heralding of the Great Pumpkin's approach.
Explores portrayals
Through paintings, drawings, illustrations and other media, the exhibit explores the variety of ways in which Revere has been portrayed, and sometimes lampooned, throughout history. It also examines the inspiration for those images, whether it be historical fact or, as was often the case, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's classic ode, "Paul Revere's Ride."
"People have tended to assume that Longfellow was being historically accurate," said Virginia O'Hara, associate curator for the Brandywine museum. "The poem certainly has value, but we're trying, as historians have been doing for some time, to try to set the record straight."
For example, contrary to the perception that might be drawn from Longfellow, Revere was not the sole rider spreading the alarm on the night of April 18, 1775. He was a member of a well-organized network of patriots that had been monitoring British troop movements and efforts to seize American munitions caches.
"He wasn't an isolated hero, as the poem may suggest," O'Hara said.
Nor did Revere arrive in Concord, Mass., "at two by the village clock," having been stopped by a British patrol after leaving Lexington. Revere's fellow riders, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott, managed to escape the British patrol, and Prescott, whom the other two happened upon along the way, was the only one who made it to Concord.
Biggest error
Longfellow's most glaring error, however, is his description of Revere, "impatient to mount and ride," anxiously watching the tower of Christ Church to learn whether British troops stationed in Boston were crossing the Charles River by boat on their way to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock in Lexington, or marching by land across Boston Neck.
In fact, fearing that he might not be able to cross the river from Boston to Charlestown and ride on to alert the countryside and warn Adams and Hancock, Revere made signal arrangements ahead of time with the church rector. When Revere learned of the British plan, he instructed the rector to show two lanterns to warn fellow patriots that the Redcoats were making a river crossing before marching north.
"The biggest inaccuracy in the poem is the lantern story," said Edith Steblecki, curator of the Paul Revere Memorial Association in Boston, which assisted O'Hara and contributed several items to the exhibit. "Longfellow has it as a signal to Revere, and it was actually a signal from Revere."