Major John Pitcairn

John Pitcairn was a major in the British army during the American Revolution, and he belongs to the history that visitors to Whit's End relive through the Imagination Station and Whit's storytelling. He served as second-in-command of the column of regulars that marched on Lexington, Massachusetts in April 1775. There his force of several hundred soldiers confronted about seventy minutemen gathered on the green. A shot rang out that no one saw fired, eight colonists fell, and the war began. Two months later, in June 1775, Pitcairn faced the colonists again at Bunker Hill. As the redcoats pressed their assault on the American fortifications, a Black patriot named Peter Salem shot him at the wall.