Revere was one of a group of seven change ringers who signed on with the Old North Church, all of them boys about his age. The boys drew up a document after landing the job, a document that was as much a covenant among themselves as it was a contract with the church. The boys referred to themselves as a society that would "not exceed eight persons" and pledged to ring at Old North Church at least one evening a week for a year.
"None shall be admitted a member of this society without a unanimous vote of the members," the covenant said. It also specified that none of the undersigned would beg money from anyone at the church, and that they all were committed to ring at any time that the warden at Old North Church desired. The document was signed in this order and in this way:
John Dyer
Paul Revere
Josiah Flagg
Barthw Ballard
Jonathan Law
Jona. Brown junr,
Joseph Snelling
The boys had learned penmanship at the North Writing School, and several of them accented their signatures with flourishes, none larger than Revere's—a flashy, looping sweep beneath his name, a marking that, as he aged, he shed.
Likely one of these boys, not Revere, knew something of the craft of change-bell ringing. It's not so difficult to get a handle on it, but the practice requires a certain touch, as well as some specific knowledge and understanding and the memorizing of various patterns. Most typically it is a skill passed down. One of the boys' fathers or grandfathers may himself have been a bell ringer in England. As best as anyone can tell, Paul Revere and the rest of them were the first people to ring those bells, or any kind of changing bells, on American soil.
The Revere family didn't attend the Old North Church, which was an Episcopalian church. But rather they went regularly to the New Brick Church, a Congregationalist church. That was where Paul was baptized, and the church that his father and mother supported. Revere's father had come to Boston from France in 1715 when he was thirteen years old, and some years later he changed his name from Apollos Rivoire to Paul Revere, well before naming his firstborn son the same. The older Paul Revere believed in the simple Puritan ethic espoused at New Brick Church, in the importance of good, simple hard work and an uncompromising God.
North Writing was the most heavily attended school in Boston, and one where instructors prepared students for literate lives as artisans or tradesmen, though it was not the school with the greatest emphasis on book learning. By age fifteen the younger Paul Revere, our Paul as it were, was already learning the ways of his father's silversmithing business and of the importance of earning a living. His father did not subscribe to the religious perspective and structure of the Old North Church, but found nothing at all wrong with Paul getting a job there that paid.
The Reveres lived on Fish Street, which had earlier been known as the "common way by the water." Joshua Gee, a minister at New Brick Church, also lived on Fish Street, a few houses away. You could smell the ocean, and the incoming fruit of the sea, the good and the bad of it, from many streets in North Boston but perhaps nowhere more pungently than on Fish Street. The Reveres' home, and the silversmithing business, sat right by Clark's Wharf, where hauls of fish came in (and dead fish inevitably bobbed in the waters) along with innumerable other goods that were often unloaded all throughout the day.
To walk to the Old North Church from Fish Street would take Paul less than five minutes, barely three minutes when he hustled. Inside, he and the other boys climbed the gently curving staircase—twenty-four steps—to reach the balcony seating area in front of the organ. Then they would slip in behind the organ, moving sideways through a narrow passageway, and into the bell ringers' room, where the ropes hung and where the boys would ring according to the patterns, or methods, that the leader of the group set forth.
For any number of reasons the context and details around Revere's time as a bell ringer feel significant in the light of what he would go on to do with his life and what he would be remembered for. The boys showed real enterprise in finding, or in effect creating, the change ringing job. Then they formed a responsible community complete with a kind of elder in John Dyer.
With Josiah Flagg, who was younger than Revere by two years, Revere would keep a friendship into adulthood. In 1764 Revere engraved and helped publish a book of psalms that Flagg had collected and written down. Revere and Flagg knew each other through the smallpox fears, and in the late 1760s they would convene along with others at the Liberty Tree to protest the tyranny of British rule. Joseph Snelling also remained connected to Revere's life. Some among this small group of teenage bell ringers were people Revere would still know a quarter century later, in the spring of 1775.
