She’s remembered as the female Paul Revere. Does it matter if her story isn’t all true? - The Boston Globe (2025)

• Harvard president Alan Garber accused the Trump administration of using combating antisemitism as a pretext to attack the university. Many Jewish students there are disturbed by President Trump’s efforts to freeze research funding.
• The Patriots landed LSU offensive lineman Will Campbell on the first day of the NFL Draft. Selection continues today (and I’m sure my colleague Mark Arsenault will be watching).
• Jurors inKaren Read’s retrial were read text messages she exchanged with her boyfriend before allegedly killing him. Read the texts and see how yesterday’s proceedings unfolded.

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On the evening of April 26, 1777, a 16-year-old girl named Sybil Ludington set out into the rain on horseback. Her mission was desperate and risky. Her father, a colonel fighting to secure America’s independence from Britain, had tasked her with rousing his militiamen to repulse a British attack on nearby Danbury, Connecticut.

Or so the story goes.

Sybil’s 40-mile ride, which took place 248 years ago tomorrow, has become the stuff of legend. It’s memorialized in a life-size bronze statue in Carmel, N.Y., and the subject of children’s books, commemorative stamps, and TikTok videos. Popular accounts compare Sybil to Paul Revere, whose famed midnight ride warned Boston-area colonists of the Redcoats’ approach.

But the story of Sybil’s ride first surfaced decades after it supposedly happened. Some historians stand by it. Others question aspects of the story as it’s remembered today.

The 250th anniversary of the start of the Revolution has many Americans reflecting on the country’s founding figures. Today’s newsletter lays out the evidence for and against Sybil’s ride — and why some think that whether it really happened is the wrong question.

The case for Sybil

Vincent Dacquino lives in Putnam County, N.Y. — called Dutchess County when Sybil lived there. In the 1990s, on his way to work, Dacquino drove past a sign that referenced her ride. “I was embarrassed because she practically went through my backyard and I don’t even know [of] her,” he said.

So Dacquino began researching, ultimately publishing several books about Sybil. In 2015, he told me, he learned that a descendant of her nephew had kept a collection of old family letters in a filing cabinet in his Connecticut home. According to Dacquino, one letter — written in 1854, about 15 years after Sybil died — referenced the ride.

“This was not family hearsay; it was family history,” Dacquino said. “Sometimes there’s information that only families could know.”

Dacquino also thinks Sybil’s family had good reason to keep her story secret. Years after the war ended, he argues, loyalists to the British crown resented revolutionaries like Sybil and her militiaman father. “He would not have encouraged her to brag about it, because it was a dangerous thing to do,” Dacquino said. Yet members of her family seem to have eventually told a historian, Martha Lamb, whose 1880 book gives the first-known published account of Sybil’s ride.

The case against

Others who have studied Sybil’s story are less convinced. “It’s taken on a life of its own beyond what the historical record supports,” said Paula Hunt, who investigated Sybil’s story and how it’s been remembered in a 2015 academic article in The New England Quarterly.

The core of the tale — a teenager riding to patriots’ aid — is “certainly possible,” Hunt said. Yet several of its details are almost certainly false, garbled or made up in a daisy-chain of retellings.

After Lamb’s book, as best Hunt can tell, versions of Sybil’s story appeared in a 1907 biography of her father and a 1929 newspaper. The local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution took notice, spearheading a project to commemorate Sybil’s alleged route with roadside markers. But by then it was 1935, 158 years after her ride would have happened.

Now etched into the landscape, Sybil’s story spread further. A 1952 book inspired by the markers seems to have introduced the detail that her horse was named Star. In 1961, the bronze statue was dedicated. But in a twist, the national DAR resisted recognizing Sybil as an official patriot and, in 2006, called her ride “a great story, but there is no way to know whether or not it is true.”

A powerful story

So the debate has raged. Dacquino acknowledges that popular retellings of Sybil’s story sometimes have errors. Still, he is scathing toward the “naysayers.” “She was cheated out of her history,” he said.

Sybil has inspired an ideologically diverse range of admirers, from 1970s feminists to the National Rifle Association, which still gives out an award in her name. And some who care about her story have found an equilibrium that works.

Kate Egner is a historian at the American Battlefield Trust, a nonprofit that works to preserve Revolutionary War landscapes. The trust’s website describes Sybil as “the female Paul Revere.” And even if Sybil’s story isn’t entirely true, Egner called it a chance to explore the roles women played in her turbulent times, including as wives, mothers, writers, activists, medics — and, yes, as soldiers and daughters.

“Can I back it up, as a historian, with a paper trail? No. Do I want to ensure that we have space to tell stories that we know are real? Absolutely. But my God, do I want you to understand that women were everywhere in the Revolution? Yes, I do,” Egner said. “If I can make a 16-year-old connect with Sybil’s story, and then want to learn more and go check out a book, or go to a library, go to a museum? Heck yeah.”

Read more: Boston’s Revolutionary War tourism sites are evolving to reflect the roles of women, people of color, and other overlooked figures.

🧩 9 Across: “See ya” | ⛅ 76º Partly sunny

Boston and Massachusetts

• Diminished flock: Just 24 percent of Greater Boston identifies as Catholic. As Pope Francis is laid to rest, church leaders are embracing his call by welcoming immigrants.
• ‘Serving others until the moment he died’: State residents reflected on seeing, and in some cases meeting, Francis.
• Rebuked: Suffolk DA Kevin Hayden won’t bring contempt charges against an ICE agent who arrested a man mid-trial last month and criticized the judge who ordered the investigation.
• In mourning: US Representative Jim McGovern said that his daughter, 23, died unexpectedly in Italy.
• Hired: Allan Motenko, a former transportation official, will lead the state’s Office of Disability.
• Still marching: Martin Luther King Jr.’s son will visit Boston tomorrow for the60th anniversary of his father’s push to desegregate the city’s schools.

New England

• Free ride: Johnson & Wales University will cover tuition for students across New England who meet certain criteria.
• Into the woods: Residents of Freedom, Maine, voted to recall the star of “The Blair Witch Project” from the town’s select board over how she handled a land dispute.
• Medical ethics: His wife died of cancer after her parents, both physicians, treated her for years. Then Rhode Island family court got involved.

Trump administration

• Rümeysa Öztürk: ICE must return the detained Tufts PhD student to Vermont, a judge ruled, where her fight to avoid deportation will continue.
• Signalgate: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bypassed Pentagon security so he coulduse the messaging appon a personal computer in his office. (AP) Hegseth’s chief of staff left the administration yesterday. (Politico)
• DEI: A judge temporarily blocked the administration from defunding schools that defy its directive to end diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
• ‘Vladimir, STOP!’ Trump, who pledged to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Day 1, urged Russia’s president to make peace but credited him for not taking over all of Ukraine, calling it a “pretty big concession.” (NBC)
• Trans rights: The administration asked the Supreme Court to let it ban transgender people from the military. (SCOTUSblog)
• Primary concerns: David Hogg, the gun control activist turned Democratic National Committee vice chair, wants his party to stand up to Trump. Visiting Rhode Island, Hogg didn’t rule out supporting challenges to sitting Democrats there.
• Backtracking: The administration reversed course after researchers criticized it for cutting funding to a landmark women’s health study. (NPR)
• Beggar thy neighbor: Detroit and Windsor, two cities located across the US-Canada border from each other, had a close-knit relationship. Trump ripped them apart.

What is Pope Francis’s legacy?

• He held the poor and the marginalized —Palestinians, refugees, migrants —close, the novelist Colum McCann writes in Globe Opinion.
• He appealed to non-Catholics but sowed confusion and division among the faithful, Francis X. Maier argues in the Wall Street Journal.
• Despite promising progressive reforms, his papacy was largely a disappointment, says Philip Shenon in the New York Times.

📺 Watch this: “You,” “Conclave,” and more TV shows and movies to stream this weekend.

⛓️‍💥 ‘Apartners’: Why some couples choose to live separately. (USA Today)

🎣 Gone fishin’: If it’s Friday, local striped bass enthusiasts will be looking for this migration map.

🌈 Spectacle: The profound experience of seeing a new color. (The Atlantic)

🥂 Blind date: He reads about the periodic table, she’s a biomedical engineer. Did unusual topics bond them together?

👋 Here to help: Paris, Scotland, and other popular spots are closing tourist help centers. Not Asia, where the offices offer more than just directions. (CNN)

Thanks for reading Starting Point.

This newsletter was written with help from Kaitlin Lewis, edited by Jennifer Peter and Heather Ciras, and produced by Ryan Orlecki.

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Ian Prasad Philbrick can be reached at ian.philbrick@globe.com.