The next set of medallions in our collection cover the Revolutionary War, from the Declaration of Independence to the Battle of Yorktown. Of course, the first shots were fired over a year prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and the signing of the Treaty of Paris didn’t occur until two years after the surrender of General Cornwallis. If you are interested in this time period, you should consider watching Ken Burns’s excellent documentary on The American Revolution. The narrative of this conflict is often oversimplified – this was a complex war, with many factions, and hostilities endured for six long years – but the Burns film does a good job of covering the complexities while highlighting many stories from the war that are not commonly known. We are proud to have a couple of ancestors who actually fought in this war (John Pipes, Jr. and Michael Harmon), and consequently have members of our family who were inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR).
Those first battles of the Revolutionary War are commemorated by the Minute Man statue in Lexington, Massachusetts.
