A Long Line of Preserved Claps

Dr. Preserved Clap, the man who stepped forward to render Boston’s broken cannon useful again in the spring of 1776, came from a long line of Preserved Claps.

According to The Clapp Memorial (1876), the doctor’s ancestors Roger Clapp and Joanna Ford arrived in Massachusetts in 1630, settling in Dorchester.

(This genealogy preferred the spelling “Clapp,” even changing how the name appeared in the period sources it quoted.)

Those Clapps named their first children Samuel, William, and Elizabeth, but then went full Puritan for most of the rest: Experience, Waitstill, Preserved, Hopestill, Thanks, Desire, Thomas, Unite, and Supply.

Preserved Clapp (1643–1720) moved to Northampton and had a son named Preserved Clapp (1675–1757), who likewise had a son named Preserved Clapp (1705–1758). That last man moved to Hadley. He married Sarah West in August 1730, and they had their first son the following May: Preserved Clap (1731–1811).

Histories of Northfield and Deerfield say that in the fall of 1754 our Preserved Clap was in charge of a small force—nine or ten men—guarding the settlement of Huntstown, now Ashfield.

The genealogy above didn’t have this information, but more recent researchers have found that in 1756 this Preserved Clapp married Eunice Atherton of Lancaster, and they started having children by 1760. His name appears a couple of times in the Amherst town records in the following decade.

On 1 Jan 1770 the Connecticut Courant of Hartford ran this notice:

CLOCKS and Watches made in the best Manner, by
PRESERVED CLAP
of Amherst.

Likewise all Kinds of Instruments in Surgery.

That’s the first surviving sign that the latest Preserved Clap had ambitions to be more than a country farmer.

The Colonial Society of Massachusetts published the image of a clockface above in an article about the engraver Thomas Johnston (1708–1767). At the top it says: “Preserved Clapp / New England.”

Did Clap order this plate from Johnston for a clock he planned to build, or for one he planned to own? And did he pay for it? Johnston kept that sheet of copper and used the other side to engrave a musical score for his publication of Daniel Bayley’s A New and Compleat Introduction to the Grounds and Rules of Musick (Boston, 1766).

Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War records that in 1775 a man named Preserved Clap served a few months as a private in the company of Capt. Benjamin Hastings of Bolton. I haven’t found anyone else named Preserved Clap of military age at the time. But it seems unusual for a forty-three-year-old man with military experience, social ambition, and some connection to medicine to serve in the ranks. In any event, Hastings’s company saw action at Bunker Hill.

The next time Preserved Clap surfaces in the records I’ve found is the Rev. Dr. Samuel Cooper’s 29 Apr 1776 letter to Samuel Adams, which refers to him as “a Country Surgeon in our Army.” By this time he was evidently using those “Instruments in Surgery,” not just making them. However, I haven’t found any record of Clap being surgeon for a Continental regiment. Perhaps he had taken that role in one of the militia regiments that Massachusetts raised in early 1776.

TOMORROW: Claiming credit.