Just down the road a piece, and toward the great marshes and the picturesque dunes that stretch out towards Sandy Neck, the King’s Highway continues its rambling way from West Barnstable down Cape. It is a street of green lawns and historic houses, of flowering shrubs and well-kept gardens that flourish in the good, black earth of the North Side. There is so much to see there that even the most observing may pass by, unseeing, the peaceful, old, white church at the corner of Rendezvous Lane at Barnstable. Amid the shadows from ancient trees the church dreams serenely in the summer sunlight and it is difficult to imagine that this is the very spot where, in the year 1774, there took place one of the most unusual and daring blows for liberty in all our history. The Third Baptist Church of Barnstable was formed in 1842, after it had purchased, for $77.00, the second Barnstable Court House which had been built in 1774. The old, wooden building had been abandoned by the County upon the erection of the new granite Court House and the Baptists found it well suited to their needs. The building was turned around from the Highway to face Rendezvous Lane and some alterations were made to make it more suitable for a Meeting House. Today, a bronze tablet within the church proclaims that “this building was the Court House where the Kings Court was forced to end its sessions by a band of patriots in September 1774.” The march of a “Body of the People” to Barnstable on September 27, 1774 took place as the result of an Act of Parliament which, in those hectic days, seemed to be enacting everything possible to alienate its colonials. The new act proclaimed that jurors, heretofore drawn by the selectmen, should now be chosen by the Crown’s own representative, the Sheriff. Under such a system it was obvious that the Crown would control the whole local system of justice, and those who came before the courts, and were known to be unsympathetic with the Crown, would receive very short shrift. The patriots decided that, to effectively show protest to such an act, they must close the lower courts, in order that no appeals would reach the “packed”, higher courts. To carry out this purpose a large body of men assembled at Sandwich on the night of September 26, 1774. There they planned for the morrow what must have been the Cape’s first picket line.