“The services of their father in repairing certain cannon”

Preserved Clap was born in Hadley, lived in the part of that town which became Amherst, and ultimately died at age eighty up the Connecticut River in Claremont, New Hampshire.

His headstone appears here courtesy of Find a Grave. His wife Eunice’s stone is nearby.

Clapp probably had earlier ties to that region. The Preserved Clap listed as serving in 1775 in a provincial company recruited largely from Bolton was said to come from Charlestown, New Hampshire, next to Claremont.

There’s also this curious anecdote related by Jaazaniah Crosby in his History of Charlestown in New Hampshire (1833):

On the 18th of June, 1756, while Lieut. Moses Willard was endeavoring to extinguish the fire, which had been kindled in his fence, he was attacked by the Indians, and killed behind the barn of the late Capt. John Willard, and near the academy. At the same time, his son Moses was wounded in the hip by a spear, which is said to have remained in the wound till after his retreat into the fort. It is further said that a Mr. Preserved Clap carried the same spear into the revolutionary war.

Preserved and Eunice Clap’s son Roswell was living in Claremont by 1790, per the first U.S. Census.

Dr. Clap’s children followed in his footsteps in at least one way: asking to be paid for his inventions during the Revolutionary War.

In 1837, the U.S. Senate took up “the petition of Roswell Clapp and Charlotte Reed, children and heirs of Preserved Clapp, praying compensation for the services of their father in repairing certain cannon belonging to the United States.” That referred to work sixty-one years before, just after the siege of Boston.

And the Clap family kept up that plea until 1841, thirty years after the doctor had died.