WORCESTER, Mass. – The date September 6, 1774, marks the anniversary of patriots in Worcester County, ending British authority in Worcester's courthouse.

“Worcester was probably the most radical center at the time," Bob Stacy of the Worcester Historical Museum said. "I believe personally, it was more radical and more active than Boston at times.”

In 1774, even though Worcester wasn’t the largest town in the county, it had a prominent role as a "shire town," which meant its court would meet four times a year. Stacy said Worcester had a radical committee of correspondence and because court was an extension of the crown, it was also the best place to stand up against British rule.

“It was decided that when the court opened up in September 1774," Stacy said, "that the people here would close it down.”

“When those judges arrived at the courthouse house," Jeri Stead of the Millbury Historical Society said, "they couldn't get in because the militia were blocking.”

“Four-thousand six-hundred and twenty-seven militiamen. Now, that's an approximate count, but pretty good, gathered from throughout Worcester County," Ray Raphael said. "And we're talking about all the way from the New Hampshire to the Rhode Island border.”

An author and American historian, Raphael has written extensively about the revolution and its traces to Worcester.

Raphael discovered a journal entry about the militia members of the Worcester Revolution, where within the numbers you can see the biggest group of 500 came from Sutton, which also included the town of Millbury at the time.

“They took them to the closest tavern, sat them down and the other militia lined up on Main Street," Stead said. "The ones inside the tavern with them told them, the judges, what they were going to say when they came out.”

“They're going to get a statement. And the statement is going to say, 'We no longer support this absolutely ridiculous, terrible Massachusetts government act and we refuse to implement it,'" Raphael said. "That's a paraphrase, but it's pretty much what it said.”

The patriots of Worcester County then forced the British court officials to walk the very steps from what is now the Deadhorse Hill tavern to where the courthouse stood, the site which is now the courthouse loft apartments. This action on Sept. 6, 1774, marked the end of British rule in Worcester and debatably, the start of the revolution.

“Ever after that," Raphael said, "there was nothing, no British rule.”

“My daughter lives in Lexington, and I keep rubbing it in that she gets all the credit for doing it," Stead said. "And we should have some up here for this.”

There were also smaller crowd actions and moments of revolution across Massachusetts earlier in 1774 in places like Great Barrington and Springfield, but area historians agree Boston gets all the credit for the revolution because of the lack of bloodshed in these court shutdowns.

“I think that it's been buried, in large part, because you can have civic action," Stacy said. "You can close down the courts, you can make social change. But that's always going to take second place to a battle with guns and shooting.”