Talk on Dawes, Warren, and Heath at Forest Hills, 17 Apr.

On Sunday, 17 April, at 2:00 P.M., Forest Hills Cemetery will host a talk by Dee Morris on “The Other New England Patriots.”

Morris’s subject will be three men who were significant in the start of the Revolutionary War—particularly the start of it on 19 Apr 1775.

All three are buried at that cemetery:

• William Dawes, Jr.
• Dr. Joseph Warren
• Maj. Gen. William Heath

Warren sent Dawes out to Lexington on 18 April with a warning for Samuel Adams and John Hancock. The following morning, the doctor himself slipped out of town to see what had become of the regulars. He linked up with Heath, the highest-ranking Massachusetts militia officer to see fighting that day, and together they directed provincial troops at the end of the British withdrawal.

Both Warren and Dawes died in the eighteenth century and were originally interred inside Boston. But their families moved them out to Forest Hills in the late 1800s as rural cemeteries became more popular than urban burying-grounds. Heath always lived in Roxbury, dying there in 1814. That was well before Forest Hills was established, so I assume his remains were moved, too.

Dee Morris is an independent scholar and educational consultant specializing in Boston history. She is the author of Boston in the Golden Age of Spiritualism and Somerville, Massachusetts: A Brief History.

This lecture will take place in the Forysth Chapel located at the cemetery’s main entrance at 95 Forest Hills Avenue in Jamaica Plain. The site is “an easy walk from the Orange Line Forest Hills stop via the Tower Street pedestrian gate.” The fee for this hourlong talk is $10. Light refreshments will be served afterwards.

(Image of Warren’s gravestone above courtesy of The Dreamer comic.)