Tap a toe to banjo as the Paul Revere museum celebrates 100 years

An image on a postcard of what the Paul Revere House looked like shortly after it opened as a museum on April 18, 1908.

By Kate Augusto, Globe Correspondent

It will cost 25 cents today to hear third-graders recite poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, tap a toe to a vaudeville-style banjo player named Uncle Shoe, and eat a cake decorated to look like the olive-colored clapboard house once home to Paul Revere.

That’s because the museum where Boston’s most famous silversmith lived is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The Paul Revere House has rolled back the admission price to when it first opened on April 18, 1908.

Built in 1680, the home had been slated for demolition at the beginning of the last century when it was bought by one of Revere’s descendants and restored.

“It’s a longtime iconic structure for the city,” said museum director Nina Zannieri. “When he moved out, it became a boarding house for sailors and then an immigrant and tenement home and shops, so the history also reflects the entire history of the North End.”

Revere lived in the home when he set out on horseback in 1775 and rode to Lexington to warn that the British were coming.

“Listen, my children, and you shall hear,” Longfellow wrote in his famous poem, “Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.”

Those lines will be recited today by third-graders from the Eliot School in the North End as part of the celebration. Other festivities include music sung by students from St. John’s school, performers portraying two of Revere’s descendants, and the announcement of the winners of a student essay contest.

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