Job Brooks House at Minute Man National Historical Park

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The Job Brooks House is located in the Battle Road Unit of Minute Man National Historical Park. It is one of eleven houses within the park that existed when the Battles of Lexington and Concord took place on April 19, 1775. The National Park Service calls it a “witness house,” so other than being old and standing on the grounds of the battlefield, there is nothing special about it—no famous people lived here and no historic events took place inside. The house is currently used to store the National Park Service’s collection of artifacts that were found on the battlefield. It is rarely open to the public, but you are welcome to stop and see it from the outside and are free to walk on the property grounds.

The area where the Job Brooks House is located is known as Brooks Village; there are three other Brooks-family houses within a quarter mile. For those in a vehicle, park in the Brooks Village parking lot on Route 2A (North Great Road). The Samuel Brooks House is right next to the parking lot, while the others are as far as .2 mile down the road. The Job Brooks House is a tenth of a mile away and on the same side of the street. The Noah Brooks House and Tavern and the Joshua Brooks House are on the opposite side of the very busy North Great Road, and there is not much shoulder area to stand on.

If hiking or biking the Battle Road Trail, you will arrive at the back side of both the Samuel and Job Brooks houses. Samuel’s house can be reached via a path that connects the parking lot and the trail. Due to the possibility of picking up a tick, you’ll want to stay out of the tall grass as much as possible. Therefore, instead of traipsing through the grass to reach the Job Brooks house, I suggest taking the path out to North Great Road and then visiting all of the Brooks houses from there.

The house now known as the Job Brooks House was built in 1740 by Job after his father gave him some land when he married Anna Bridge. The couple had two sons and a daughter. Job and son Asa would later run the farm together.

On April 19, 1775, when the British marched calmly to Concord along Bay Road—now called Battle Road—and then passed by in a rush later that day as Patriot militiamen chased them back to Boston under a hail of bullets, it is possible that Job, his wife, daughter, and Asa’s wife were in the house to witness the fighting, but there are no written statements that this was so. Job was 58 at the time, so he would have not been in the battle. Asa was 29 and a member of the militia, but the Concord militia records were lost, so there is no record of whether or not he took part in the fighting.

The Job Brooks House stayed in the Brooks family until 1850. The land remained in use as a farm by various owners until it was purchased by the National Park Service in 1959 for inclusion in the new Minute Man National Historical Park.

Just thirty yards west of the house is the foundation ruins of a diary barn that stood from the mid-1800s until it burned down in the 1930s. A stone ramp similar to a loading dock leads up to one of the rooms. There is an information panel at the site that states that a tannery existed on the property near Elm Brook all the way until the early 1800s, leading one to believe that the foundation is this tannery. However, there is no brook next to it, and from what I understand, a tannery produces a foul smell, so building one next to a residence doesn’t seem logical. The sign also states that Brooks had a brick kiln, slaughter house, and saw mill, though there is no evidence that any of these were on the property immediately surrounding the house. (Note that during a recent visit that I found the foundation ruins to be overgrown. I decided to keep the photos from an older visit because they show the ruins much more clearly.)