Whether the Busa Farms land lives as a community farm, is turned into affordable housing or is paved over for athletic use matters less than the opportunity—one of the few remaining—that Lexington has to deepen a crucial link to our unique history.

Along with dozens of other farms in the area, this modest plot of land, which became a farm as early as the 1640s, grew and supplied food to the early European settlers, to Revolutionary War era citizens, and to local families for two more centuries. Its roots lie deep in our Lexington history. In fact, Thomas Winship, descendent of the first family known to have farmed this land, fought and was wounded on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775.

We would be wise to think of our history as imbedded in more than Lexington Green, beautiful taverns and meeting houses scattered through our community. Just as we carefully maintain the path the Regulars marched on from Lexington to Concord, so as to teach and to help us imagine what that day was like, we should give loving honor to one of the last remaining tracts of land that supported a farm to feed those citizens.

Without this and other farms, we might not be a country today.

Lexington Green is surrounded by homes that stood in 1775, and we are moved to walk by them and to think about what it meant to be there then. But it isn’t necessary to have been in sight, or even in earshot, of that day’s fertile chaos to have been connected to that extraordinary moment. This farm, originally owned by the Winship family, much later to become Busa Farm, was every bit as important a “Witness to the Battle.”

David Hoose
2 Audubon Road
Lexington, MA