From The Bedford Citizen:

On Saturday morning, April 12, 2014, several hundred American Revolutionary War re-enactors from all over Eastern Massachusetts will muster on our Bedford Common. At the stroke of ten-thirty, the troops will step off onto the Great Road, playing fifes and beating drums, flourishing their ancient colors, and firing a few deafening rounds from their muskets. At the end of a short march, minutemen and spectators will mass around Wilson Park to watch Bedford’s historic Polecapping…

[Historically, Wilson Park is the site where] Bedford Minutemen and Militia met at dawn on April 19, 1775 to march off to Concord.  Now, it holds the memorial to their Captain, Jonathan Wilson, who was killed on that day.  And it also holds a stark, bare Liberty Pole…

[In] the years before the American Revolution… patriots would protest [taxation without representation] below their liberty trees and, when the British Regulars cut those down, the patriots erected liberty poles. At that time, a red cap was widely recognized to be a liberty cap, and to flaunt one atop a 20 or 30 foot pole was a deliberate slap in the face to King George and the English Parliament.

Liberty poles were ubiquitous in the 1760s and 1770s, but now, Bedford’s ceremony is unique in Massachusetts.

See also the Bedford Minuteman Company’s website.