250th Anniversary Lantern Service

The Old North Church is offering a traditional Lantern Service on Friday, April 18, 2025 at 7:00pm in honor of the 250th anniversary of the “two if by sea” signal from the church’s steeple on the eve of the American Revolution.

Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, professor of history at Boston College, will deliver the keynote address.

Organized by Old North’s clergy and congregation and modeled on the service offered for the 200th anniversary in 1975 with President Gerald Ford, this 250th Anniversary Lantern Service recalls the lights of freedom and encourages reflection on the meaning of faith, freedom, and American democracy today. It will include inspirational music; Paul Revere’s own recollection of his historic ride and Old North’s signal lights; Heather Cox Richardson’s address; and prayers for our nation as we begin our Semiquincentennial. The service will culminate with the lighting of the Old North’s historic lanterns.

About Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson has written about the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West in award-winning books whose subjects stretch from the European settlement of the North American continent to the history of the Republican Party through the Trump administration.

She is the author, most recently, of the best-selling Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (2023) which New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer has called “a vibrant, and essential history of America’s unending, enraging and utterly compelling struggle since its founding to live up to its own best ideals.” Heather Richardson’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian, among other outlets. Her nightly newsletter, Letters from an American, reaches more than four million readers.