On the morning of Sept. 27, 1774, several hundred Massachusetts colonists stepped off to the rattle of fife and drums on a 12-mile stretch of King’s Highway, now Route 6A, to Barnstable, the county seat for Cape Cod, assembling here at the Olde Colonial Courthouse to urge restoration of their long-held rights of self-government that Britain’s so-called Intolerable Acts had summarily  just ripped away.