More on Joel Adams of Arlington

Earlier this month, I told the story of the Adams children of Menotomy village on the exciting afternoon of 19 Apr 1775, based on an 1864 local history, and mentioned having leads to earlier versions. On Monday I stopped into the American Antiquarian Society and looked at one of those sources, the Rev. James F. Brown’s Old Age: A Sermon Preached at West Cambridge, February 8, 1852, on the Sabbath Succeeding the Death of James Hill.

This sermon has some nice, if not entirely comprehensible, praise for Hill: “He was brought up to farming; and, agreeably to his good mother’s promise, when he was able to swing a scythe, he was allowed to retire from his dish of bean porridge and take a cup of tea with the ‘grown folks.’” Brown seems to have thrown other stuff that he couldn’t fit into the sermon into an appendix.

In particular, Brown wrote about the family of Hill’s widow, Ann. She was still living in the town, by then independent of Cambridge and on its way to becoming Arlington. And she was obviously a source for Brown’s story of the Adams family in 1775:

When the British soldiers were retreating from Lexington, a detachment entered the house of Mr. [Joseph] Adams (which is now owned by Mr. Artemas Locke) and began the work of plunder and destruction. Mr. Adams being connected with some secret committee, and fearing for his life, secreted himself in a barn now owned by Miss Bradshaw. Mrs. Hill (as we have said) was then an infant in her mother’s arms. The lives of mother and daughter were spared from the bayonet of a common soldier through the interposition of an English officer; but they were ordered from the house, and accordingly fled and concealed themselves in the barn.

Several of the children were under the bed. Parlors, probably, were not as common then, as now, and beds were “made up” upon the lower floor of the house. In this snug retreat, the children were suffered to remain and watch the movements of their household foes. As the soldiers were about to take possession of the Communion Service, Joel Adams, then a lad of about nine years of age, knowing how sacred these things were to his father, could restrain himself no longer, and thrusting his head from beneath the bed-quilt, with a burst of eloquent indignation, told them, “Not to touch them things, or Daddy would lick ’um.”

The name of our spirited hero is worthy of being remembered. He grew up to be a man, and, no doubt, “acted well the part;” but we follow him no farther than to say that he died at New Salem, at the age of seventy-six. Tradition tells us that the silver tankard [given to the congregation by Jonathan Butterfield in 1769] was taken and pawned to a silversmith in Boston by the name of Austin. After the British army evacuated Boston, however, it was redeemed, and is now in the hands of the church. The deeds of the place were taken and were found afterwards on board of an English vessel that was captured by an American cruiser under the command of Captain, afterwards Commodore [Samuel] Tucker.

The house of Mr. Adams was set on fire before the soldiers left it; but the fire was soon extinguished by one of the older children, at the expense of the “good beer” that had just been brewed, together with water brought from the tank by the side of the house.

In interpreting this account, it’s important to recall that the former Ann Adams couldn’t have witnessed what had happened on 19 Apr 1775, or even learned about it shortly afterward. She was only “about three weeks old on the day of the Lexington battle.” So we’re dealing with family lore, not eyewitness recollections. Furthermore, Joseph Adams’s decision to run and hide, leaving his wife and children behind, gave the family a motive to try to excuse his behavior and claim heroism for the children.

As far as I can tell, there’s no corroborating evidence for Deacon Adams being on Cambridge political or military committees before the war. Towns were usually straightforward about naming the men on their Committees of Correspondence because part of their message to the world is that they were behaving legally and honorably, unlike that secretive Tory cabal.

The longer 1864 account said nothing about a committee. It suggested a different reason for Deacon Adams to flee: “on account of his name [i.e., the British troops would think he was related to Samuel Adams], and also from his reputation for patriotic zeal.” Zeal which had not led him to take up arms that day.

No other version of the Adams family story mentions an “English officer” restraining the soldiers from attacking Hannah Adams in her bedroom. She gave a deposition about her experience to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress in 1775. It specified that three soldiers entered the house, and one of them told her to get out.

Another divergent detail: This account credits only “one of the older children” with putting out the fire in the Adams house.

Finally, this account raises the question of why Brown could share no more information about Joel Adams than that he had died in New Salem about 1841. Had he fallen out of touch with his baby sister Ann?

Tracking the Tale of Joel Adams

Yesterday I left nine-year-old Joel Adams in his Arlington home shortly after some British soldiers had marched on toward Boston on the afternoon of 19 Apr 1775. Four of Joel’s siblings were hiding in the house, their parents were hiding outside, and those soldiers had set the furniture on fire.

Joel and his siblings hurried to douse the flames with water from a cask outside, and with their father’s home-brewed beer. There was some damage to the family pewter, but the house survived and no one was injured.

Joel’s mother, Hannah Adams, gave an indignant deposition about how the soldiers had treated her to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress. His father, Joseph Adams, and a fellow deacon eventually bought the local meeting’s communion service back from a silversmith in Boston. And the Adams children grew up to tell their story of the redcoat home invasion to their baby sister Ann, their own children, and their grandchildren.

Samuel Abbot Smith printed this story in his West Cambridge on the Nineteenth of April, 1775, published in 1864. (The Arlington Historical Society has reprinted this short book, as shown above. Smith did a good job of collecting his town’s lore.) Smith cited:

Mrs. Thomas Hall, grand-daughter of Mrs. Adams. Rev. Mr. Brown’s sermon on James Hill. S. G. Damon’s article in Christian Register, Oct. 28. 1854.

It’s always wise to seek the earliest printed version of a story, so I began looking for that sermon and article (since Mrs. Hall is probably no longer available).

Locating an undated sermon by a man named Brown about a man named James Hill isn’t easy. I got lucky and stumbled across a reference to its publication in 1852 under the title “Old Age.” So that went onto my to-do list the next time I visit the American Antiquarian Society, which has a great collection of such things.

As for the article, I thought I’d gotten lucky when I found Harold Murdock’s footnote for this same anecdote in The Nineteenth of April, 1775:

This is the story as repeated in 1854 by Mrs. [Ann] Hill, then in her eightieth year, to Samuel Griffin Damon: see Christian Register, October 28, 1854, vol. 39, p. 169.

Clearly Murdock had traced back the article since he included more detail than Smith had.

I learned that the Christian Register was a weekly newspaper published for Unitarian churches from 1821 to 1957, and that the Harvard library system has a full run on microfilm. So a couple of years ago I went into Cambridge to find this story.

The staff at the university’s main library told me this microfilm was in the collection of the Divinity School library, on the other side of campus. So I had a pleasant walk over there, found the right building, found the right desk, asked for the reels, and started cranking away.

And the first thing I discovered was that Murdock’s citation to “vol. 39, p. 169,” had no visible link to the date of 28 Oct 1854. Volume 39 covered the year 1860. Cranking and scrolling and peering at the closely set columns, I still couldn’t find Ann (Adams) Hill’s recollection in October 1854. By then my eyes were beginning to swim, so I’m going to check again later. Until I read the earliest printed versions of his tale, Joel Adams stays on my list of Lost Youth.

Joel Adams and the Redcoats

I’m concluding “Lost Youth Week” at Boston 1775 with two postings on the story of Joel Adams and the redcoats. On 19 Apr 1775, the Adamses were living in the western part of Cambridge, then called Menotomy and now called Arlington. According to vital records, the family consisted of:

• father Joseph, fifty-nine-year-old deacon of the local meeting.
• mother Hannah, Joseph’s second wife.
• Thomas, born in 1751 and not yet married.
• Rebecca, born in 1753.
• Susanna, born in 1758.
• Mary, born in 1761.
• Nathan, born in 1763.
• twins Joel and Amos, born in 1765.
• Daniel, born in 1768.
• Abigail, born in 1772.
• little Ann, born less than three weeks before on the first of April.

It’s possible some of those children had died, or were living elsewhere in 1775.

On the night of 18-19 April, the British troops sent to search Concord had marched west past the Adams house. Col. Percy’s reinforcement column marched past that morning, and in the afternoon the family learned that the soldiers were coming back. The house was close to the road, and thus well within the area where the redcoats and provincial militia companies were conducting a running battle. Probably Thomas Adams, then twenty-three years old, was already with his company.

Father Joseph Adams was at home as the fighting neared, and he decided it would be best to run and hide in a neighbor’s hayloft, leaving his wife and children behind. The British column arrived. Some soldiers entered the house, probably to ensure there were no militiamen hiding inside. They found Hannah Adams in her bed with little Ann and told her to get out. She fled with the baby to the “corn-house,” leaving five other children behind.

The soldiers kept searching the house and spotted one of those kids peeking out from under a bed. A redcoat asked this boy, “Why don’t you come out here?”

Joel Adams answered, “You’ll kill me if I do.”

“No, we won’t,” said the soldier, so Joel crawled out and started following the soldiers around his house. The redcoats were thus up against one of the most indomitable forces of nature: a nine-year-old who thinks he’s in the right.

By this time, the soldiers were pocketing various things they thought they might be able to carry back to Boston and sell, including bits of the family silver and the works of their clock. (The workless clock is preserved at the Jason Russell House.) Then the men found the communion silver that Deacon Adams was guarding for his meeting-house.

Joel told the soldiers not to touch those things. “Daddy’ll lick you, if you do,” he reportedly said. Meanwhile, Daddy was still hiding in that hayloft. (That rendering of Joel’s words looks like a late-nineteenth-century portrayal of childhood, not an eighteenth-century one, indicating a story passed down orally.)

We can guess how fond the soldiers had grown of Joel from what they did when they left: they made a pile of wood chips and broken furniture on the floor of the Adams house and set it on fire.

TOMORROW: What happened next, and tracking down the tale.