Patriots’ Day honors the first military engagements of the American Revolution—the battles of Lexington and Concord, which took place about 10 miles west of Cambridge in 1775. The battle at Concord’s Old North Bridge is commemorated by The Minute Man, a statue in Concord sculpted by former MIT student Daniel Chester French, who would later become famous for sculpting the colossal marble statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. French, who lived from 1850 to 1931, spent less than a year at MIT as a student in the late 1860s. While his time as a student was unremarkable, French’s Cambridge legacy is permanent. He sculpted the bronze sculpture of John Harvard in Harvard Yard that is a frequent target for MIT hackers, who have added a toilet stall door, a brass rat, and an “Ask Me about My Lobotomy” sign over the years. Because no photographic evidence exists to indicate what John Harvard actually looked like, an MIT urban legend suggests that French modeled the statue after one of his former MIT classmates. Perhaps it was a hack, cast in bronze? #patriotsday #boston #hack #Cambridge