“All the Province Stores Sent to Col James Barretts”

Sometime in the early spring of 1775, James Barrett of Concord, a Massachusetts Provincial Congress delegate and militia colonel, wrote down “An account of all the Province Stores Sent to Col James Barretts of Concord Partly in His Own Costody & Partly Elsewhere all under his Care.” That undated document is now at the American Antiquarian Society.

The top of the list begins with the most valuable, dangerous, and risky-to-be-caught-with items:

Two peices of Cannon Brought From Watertown to ye Town
Eight Peices of Cannon Brought to ye Town by Mr Harrington
Four Peices of Brass Cannon & Two Mortar from Col Robertsons

That last name should be Lemuel Robinson, proprietor of the Liberty Tree Tavern in Dorchester. Massachusetts Committee of Safety records confirm that Robinson had those four brass cannon and two mortars in his custody early in 1775.

Barrett was thus in possession of sixteen pieces of artillery, on top of the handful of cannon that Concord itself had bought and mounted. Such weaponry had no use other than warfare, and there was no other foe on the horizon but the royal government.

Barrett’s account also listed a great many other military supplies, including musket cartridges, musket balls, flints, gunpowder, entrenching tools, medical chests, tents and tent poles, dishes and spoons, and “Four Barrels of Oatmeal containing 20 Bushels.” He was helping to equip an army.

Barrett clearly didn’t expect this account to fall into the hands of royal agents since he listed the names of men who had sent him those illegal supplies, including:

• Jeremiah Lee of Marblehead (“thirtyfive half barrels of powder,” tents).
• Moses Gill of Princeton (tents, “axes & pick axes & hatchetts”).
• David Cheever of Charlestown (“Two Barrels of Musquit ball containing 2100 weight,” another “2900 of ball,” another “2000,” &c.).

All those gentlemen were members of the congress’s Committee on Supplies.

Barrett also kept notes of where he was storing different supplies: at the homes of his son James, Ethan Jones, Joshua Bonds, Willoughby Prescott, Abijah Brown, Thomas Hubbard, Ephraim Potter, James Chandler, Joseph Hosmer, Jonas Heywood, and so on. Again, Barrett seems to have felt that information was secure, almost twenty miles from Boston.

But Crown agents found out about those military supplies in March 1775. They gave Gen. Thomas Gage detailed information about where things were in Concord, including those four brass cannon. And on 19 April three companies of the king’s soldiers arrived at Barrett’s farm.

How all that came about, what happened next, and what mysteries remain will be the topics of my talk this Thursday, 29 September, at Minute Man National Historical Park: “Cannons in Concord, and Why the Regulars Came Looking.” That event will start at the park’s Lexington/Lincoln visitor center at 7:00 P.M., and I’ll be happy to sign copies of The Road to Concord afterward.

“The person chose to carry on our Military preparations”

A few years back, Boston 1775 reader Judy Cataldo alerted me to the United States Revolution collection of the American Antiquarian Society. In it are several documents linked to James Barrett, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress delegate and militia colonel who was collecting artillery and other military stores in Concord in the spring of 1775.

On 15 March, David Cheever of Charlestown wrote to Barrett on behalf of the congress’s Committee on Supplies that he was sending “a Load of Bullets,” and that “Seven Men for putting up the Cartrage and Ball will be up with you tomorrow, when you must provide for them, and a House to work In.”

Two days later Cheever wrote:

Mr John Austin the Bearer of this Letter is the person chose to carry on our Military preparations and of more men the names of whome he will aquaint you with, and desier you will Furnish them with provision and a House to Carry on our military preparations. The Committee will be up next Wednesday and ease you of the trouble

And a day after that, on 18 March, Cheever sent another load that included “a chest of Cloathes and 2 Caggs for Mr Austan’s Workmen.” That letter also said:

this teem is sent away at 10 O’clock Satturday night in a Graite pannick Just having heard that the Kings Officers have seazed a cart load of Cartrages going thru Roxbury containing 19000 which must make you and I Extremely Cautious in our carrying on

Lemuel Shattuck quoted briefly from those letters in his 1835 history of Concord, when the documents were probably still held by the Barrett family.

These letters basically confirm what Agnes Austin told Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley about her father in 1858, as I quoted yesterday: “John Austin, with ten others, was at work nine weeks at Concord before the battle. They were collecting and arranging public stores.” There appear to have been only eight men, they were working in Concord for only a month before the war began, and they were probably making musket (or maybe artillery) cartridges rather than being in charge of all the stores.

But Agnes Austin was only six years old in 1775, and she spoke to Sibley over eighty years later. Furthermore, given that her father’s work was top-secret, there’s remarkable confirmation of her recollection.

That documentary support adds credibility to the rest of Agnes Austin’s anecdote, about how her father responded to the warning that British soldiers were on the way:

Mr. Austin told the men to dress themselves as much like gentlemen as they could, to put on two shirts as they might be captured & they would want them. & then disperse & take care of themselves.

I’ve read about men on privateers also putting on two shirts when they expected to be captured. Clothing was relatively expensive in the eighteenth century, and an extra shirt was also the equivalent of an extra pair of underwear.

On 19 Apr 1775, British soldiers reached the James Barrett farm, the far end of the march into Middlesex County, looking for the very supplies John Austin and his men had been preparing.

TOMORROW: What happened to Austin after the shooting started?

“Two or Three Women, for Cooks”

So if Adam Foutz wasn’t cooking all those robins for Gen. George Washington’s Cambridge household in the spring of 1776, who was?

The records of steward Timothy Austin mention a cook named Edward Hunt. On 19 July 1775, Austin wrote down the cost of going to Medford to fetch him and, most likely, his wife to work at the house Washington had just moved into.

Over the next few weeks, Austin gave Hunt payments of between one and three shillings every few days: eight payments in August and one in early September. But on 19 September, the steward “paid him in full for his Service in the Kitchen to the 14th. Instant,” and also “paid his Wife.” So the couple’s work was apparently over.

There are a couple of small mysteries associated with that employment. First is that Edward Hunt was already on site in late July when Gen. Washington gave money “To a French Cook.” Is that how Washington identified Hunt? Were two cooks vying for the same job? Was the Frenchman (not mentioned as such in Austin’s records) brought in for a special dinner? Did Washington dine out that day?

The second mystery is that Austin wrote down two payments to Mrs. (Elizabeth) Hunt in the spring of 1776 for “washing the food Linnen” and “washing the Servts. Cloaths.” If that was Edward Hunt’s wife, she might have come back to headquarters to earn some money.

But back to the robins. Since Edward Hunt was long gone by the time Austin started buying robins by the dozen, someone else must have cooked those birds. It looks like Washington’s kitchen staff for most of his stay in Cambridge consisted of women. Indeed, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress had initially resolved to recommend to the general a steward and “two or three women, for cooks.”

Unlike Hunt, the women didn’t receive cash payments every few days, so they barely show up in the household accounts. The ones still at work in the spring of 1776 were most likely some of the following:

• Austin’s daughter Mary, thirty years old and unmarried.
• Austin’s second wife, Lydia, who also still had three minor children.
• Dinah (no last name stated, and thus almost certainly an African-American), who started work around the beginning of August.
• Elizabeth Chapman, a seventeen-year-old who arrived in October.

The Austins and Chapman had all been living in Charlestown before the Battle of Bunker Hill destroyed most of the houses there. The Chapman family found refuge with another family in Malden, and Elizabeth probably jumped at the chance for work that came with room and board and payment at the end of her tenure.

Since there’s no way to be sure what these women’s arrangements were, it’s impossible to compare their compensation to what Austin had paid Edward Hunt in the fall. But I’m fairly certain they got paid less.

(Photo above taken by kroo2u at the Yorktown Victory Center, available through Flickr under a Creative Commons license.)