Jarrad Fuoss was digging in the cold ground of a Massachusetts park in winter 2023, not expecting he or his fellow archaeologists would find anything.
Then he heard someone yell: “You’re never going to believe what I got!”
Fuoss, a federal park ranger at Minute Man National Historical Park and a trained archaeologist, quickly crossed the roughly 25 yards to watch as dirt was brushed off the discovery: It was a musket ball — a scratched piece of lead that is part of an incredible story.
“It sends shivers down your spine,” Fuoss said. “The last time somebody touched it they were shoving it down the muzzle of a musket on April 19, 1775.”
That was the day 2½ centuries ago when gunfire sparked the American Revolution in what writer Ralph Waldo Emerson dubbed the “shot heard round the world.” And the archaeologists were standing in between Lexington and Concord on the exact spot historians believe the first shot was fired.
The team of National Park Service archaeologists ultimately dug up four more pieces of ammunition. Through scientific analysis, the Park Service determined the balls were fired from muskets by colonial militiamen. That means they can be considered among the first hunks of metal that began America’s bloody history, officials at Minute Man park said.
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The musket balls briefly went on display to the public last week, becoming a crowd favorite and lighting up the eyes of many kids, said Nikki Walsh, museum curator at Minute Man. They’re now back in the archives, with hopes of having them on permanent display before 2026.
“Even if you aren’t into history, this was a moment in time that’s not only a historic moment, but it sets the tone for our new country and this new government and everything that’s happened in the last 249 years,” she said.
The museum has 260,000 artifacts in its collection, she said. But even with so many relics preserved, only 35 other musket balls have been found in the park.
Walsh said she was not working the day of the discovery but received an all-caps text from Fuoss: “WE FOUND MUSKET BALLS”
The crew started its 2023 dig to make sure something like those musket balls wasn’t in the ground: The park received a $27 million grant to upgrade its infrastructure ahead of 2026, the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. Park staff planned to do drainage work in the area where the discovery was made and are required to check for anything of historical importance before the project can proceed.
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Fuoss said they thought finding anything would be unlikely because the area where they were digging was turned into a park in the early 19th century and gets a lot of foot traffic.
No one was holding their breath, but, Fuoss said: “There’s always that little hope there.”
The archaeologists quickly realized what they had, and all of them had the same question: What was the caliber? It could help answer the question of which side had fired the shot. In 1775, the ragtag militiamen brought whatever weapons they had, said Fuoss, a historic weapons specialist. But the British soldiers had standardized weapons that shot .69-caliber musket balls.
So, if the musket balls were outside that range, that meant they were probably fired by the militiamen.
A crew member measured them and confirmed they were outside that range.
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But how do they know they weren’t fired during a hunting trip? Well, Fuoss said, the area at that time had been deforested, and a musket ball would only have been used to hunt larger game. There was no large game to hunt at the time with all the trees gone.
He added that so many musket balls so closely grouped together is “pretty outrageous if not related to military action.” That is also the exact spot, from accounts of the day, where the British soldiers lined up.
Walsh said experts tried to rule out everything. There was only one battle in that spot, she said, and the militia didn’t hold target practice in an open farm field.
“When you start putting all those things in context, it becomes very clear these were fired during the battle itself,” Fuoss said.
The gunfire that day led to an eight-hour battle that spanned 16 miles, involving 4,000 militiamen. Fuoss said 273 British soldiers were either killed, wounded or captured — the number was about 96 for the militia. It was, Fuoss said, “an astronomical number for a battle of this time period.”
“And,” he added, “that’s just Day 1.”
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