The Later Adventures of Solomon Brown

In 2008 and 2011 I wrote about Solomon Brown of Lexington, who did as much as any individual to start the Revolutionary War in that town.

At the age of eighteen, Solomon Brown:

• spotted British army officers riding through town and alerted local militia leaders.
• volunteered to ride to Concord to warn people there, only to be stopped by those same British officers and thus to become one of the first detainees of the war.
• shot twice at the British troops from Buckman Tavern—after they fired at militia men in the common, he said, but conceivably before.

That day wasn’t Solomon Brown’s last effort in the war. In April 1777, two years after the memorable shots at Lexington, Brown enlisted in Capt. Benjamin Eustis’s company of Col. John Crane’s artillery regiment. He had the rank of sergeant. Army records described him as 5'10" tall with a light complexion.

Brown served three years in the Continental artillery, though for several months in 1777 he was reported as being sick in Boston. In November 1778, Lt. Col. Cornelius Van Dyck appointed Brown the “Conductor of Military Stores” at Fort Schuyler in New York. He remained in the army until 1 Apr 1780, when Gen. Henry Knox discharged him.

According to the short history of New Haven, Vermont, in Hamilton Child’s Gazetteer and Business Directory of Addison County, Vt., for 1881-82, “After leaving the army he remained in Nine Partners, N.Y., two years, then came to this town in 1787.” The years don’t add up, but Brown definitely settled in New Haven, bringing his first wife and child from Dutchess County to live in a log house.

Solomon Brown managed to build a brick house to replace that one before his first wife died in 1802. He remarried and had more children by his second wife. Another local chronicler said Brown “was a noted character and an honest store keeper at the foot of Beech Hill.” He held many town offices and became a church deacon. He or his namesake son, born in 1796, was active in the Anti-Masonic Party in 1831 and 1832.

Brown lived long enough to apply for a Revolutionary War pension, but his affidavit was entirely about his three years in the Continental Army, not his memorable day of militia service in 1775. He was too far away for Elias Phinney to get a first-hand statement for the History of the Battle of Lexington (1825).

Thus, the only recorded statement from Solomon Brown about the events of 18-19 April was the deposition he and his fellow detained messengers, Jonathan Loring and Elijah Sanderson, supplied to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress that month. They complained about being detained by the British officers at pistol point. The three men then offered no explanation of why they had been riding to Concord in the middle of the night, nor did Brown say anything about shooting his gun at dawn.

Solomon Brown died at New Haven, Vermont, on 6 June 1837. His gravestone, shown above, states proudly that he was born at Lexington and had reached the age of “82 years & 5 months.” Among the property he left to his family “the musket from which was sent the first shot.”