this article by Joel Bohy at the Skinner, Inc., auction house about a large deposit of musket flints in Concord, in a field above the North Bridge. Joel makes the case that those flints are a relic of 19 Apr 1775:
…over 150 years later, Concord resident and archeologist Benjamin Smith found many of those flints, resting in that same pasture, known today as the musterfield. Smith didn’t set out to uncover a part of American military history. He was a collector of Native American objects, and noticed in the fall of 1934 that the site had been plowed for the first time in his memory.Joel is working with the museum and other local institutions on a big exhibit about the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 2014, which will include many locally collected artifacts like these. I can hardly wait!
As he searched the area, he found seven English musket flints. That evening it rained quite heavily, and the next day Smith searched again. In a speech he wrote for the Concord Patriots Day ceremonies in 1961, he stated:
“The following day the field was revisited. Gun flints seemed to be everywhere and they stood out against the dark, wet ground like glittering jewels. Thirty-seven more were recovered that day and it was by then clearly apparent that, after making allowance for the natural disturbance of the plowing and the fact that the men may not have discarded the flints in the same manner, they occurred in two long lines about fifty feet apart and running N.E. to Southwest across the slop of the hillside, roughly facing the North Bridge roadway.”
Within the next few years he had found a total of one hundred dropped flints. About seventy of those now reside in the collections of the Concord Museum.