“The Fate of This Country” in Concord, 20 July

Last Saturday, Minute Man National Historical Park celebrated Archeology Day by unveiling musket balls found last year near the North Bridge.

There were also fine technical talks about recent archeology projects in national parks across the Northeast and about analyzing musket balls from Revolutionary War battles.

This Saturday, 20 July, the park’s programming continues with “The Fate of This Country: Massachusetts Militia on Alarm 1757–1775.” The event description says:

In 1757, the people of Massachusetts were under threat of French invasion. Through the crisis, they learned valuable lessons to better prepare themselves for the future. In 1774, a new threat emerged, and the people drew from their past experiences to confront it.

Join us across the street from the home of Major John Buttrick, who marched on alarm in 1757 and 1775, for two interpretive talks that explore the experiences of the Massachusetts militia on alarm.

Those talks will take place at the North Bridge Visitor Center at 1:00 and 3:00 P.M. They are scheduled to last about thirty-five minutes.

Visitors will also be able to enjoy the park’s ongoing presentations on such topics as “Concord’s North Bridge: History and Memory” and “Enemies to Their Country.”

G. F. Hoar and “stories of the Battle of Concord”

George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904, shown here) was born in Concord. His father, Samuel Hoar, represented the area in the U.S. Congress and contributed to the wording of the town’s monument at the North Bridge.

In his autobiography Hoar wrote fondly about growing up in Concord, and particularly about living reminders of the Revolutionary War:

Scattered about the church were the good gray heads of many survivors of the Revolution—the men who had been at the bridge on the 19th of April, and who made the first armed resistance to the British power. They were very striking and venerable figures, with their queues and knee-breeches and shoes with shining buckles. Men were more particular about their apparel in those days than we are now. They had great stateliness of behavior, and admitted of little familiarity.

They had heard John Buttrick’s order to fire, which marked the moment when our country was born. The order was given to British subjects. It was obeyed by American citizens. Among them was old Master [Thaddeus] Blood, who saw a ball strike the water when the British fired their first volley. I heard many of the old men tell their stories of the Battle of Concord, and of the capture of Burgoyne.

I lay down on the grass one summer afternoon, when old Amos Baker of Lincoln, who was in the Lincoln Company on the 19th of April, told me the whole story. He was very indignant at the claim that the Acton men marched first to attack the British because the others hesitated. He said, “It was because they had bagnets [bayonets]. The rest of us hadn’t no bagnets.”

One day a few years later, when I was in college, I walked up from Cambridge to Concord, through Lexington, and had a chat with old Jonathan Harrington by the roadside. He told me he was on the Common when the British Regulars fired upon the Lexington men.

He did not tell me then the story which he told afterward at the great celebration at Concord in 1850. He and Amos Baker were the only survivors who were there that day. He said he was a boy about fifteen years old on April 19, 1775. He was a fifer in the company. He had been up the greater part of the night helping get the stores out of the way of the British, who were expected, and went to bed about three o’clock, very tired and sleepy. His mother came and pounded with her fist on the door of his chamber, and said, “Git up, Jonathan! The Reg’lars are comin’ and somethin’ must be done!” . . .

A very curious and amusing incident is said, and I have no doubt truly, to have happened at this celebration. It shows how carefully the great orator, Edward Everett, looked out for the striking effects in his speech. He turned in the midst of his speech to the seat where Amos Baker and Jonathan Harrington sat, and addressed them. At once they both stood up, and Mr. Everett said, with fine dramatic effect, “Sit, venerable friends. It is for us to stand in your presence.”

After the proceedings were over, old Amos Baker was heard to say to somebody, “What do you suppose Squire Everett meant? He came to us before his speech and told us to stand up when he spoke to us, and when we stood up he told us to sit down.”

In Concord, George F. Hoar became lifelong friends with Henry David Thoreau. They met as schoolboys at different grades, and George later attended the Thoreau brothers’ Concord Academy for a while. It’s unclear whether he overlapped with Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr.

However, in an 1891 letter Hoar wrote that as a boy he attended a lecture in Concord where the speaker exhibited the skull of a British soldier killed in 1775. That could only have been Walton Felch at the town’s lyceum in the spring of 1840.

After the obligatory years at Harvard, George F. Hoar went into the law, establishing his practice in Worcester. Then he went into politics. He served in the Massachusetts General Court, then the U.S. Congress after the Civil War, and finally the U.S. Senate from 1877 to 1904.

Back home, Hoar helped found what became the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and served as president of the American Antiquarian Society. He also sat on boards of the Smithsonian Institute and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, so he didn’t have a complete aversion to museums holding human remains.

But Sen. Hoar didn’t like the idea of the Worcester Society of Antiquity holding that skull of a British soldier killed on 19 Apr 1775.

TOMORROW: A private arrangement.

“Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”

When we left the nonagenarian Amos Baker of Lincoln yesterday, he had just described how the commanders of the Middlesex County militiamen massed above the North Bridge in Concord agreed to march toward the British regulars holding that position.

Baker then recounted:

And the order was given to march, and we all marched down without any further order or arrangement.

The British had got up two of the planks of the bridge. It is a mercy they fired on us at the bridge, for we were going to march into the town, and the British could load and fire three times to our once, because we had only powder horns and no cartridge boxes, and it would have been presumptuous. I understood that Colonel Abijah Pierce got the gun of one of the British soldiers who was killed at the bridge, and armed himself with it.

Pierce had come out with nothing but a walking-stick as a weapon. Baker probably exaggerated when he said the provincials had “only powder horns and no cartridge boxes,” emphasizing how much the locals were underdogs. At the bridge they had a clear numerical superiority, which is why the regulars soon retreated.

There were two British soldiers killed at the bridge. I saw them when I went over the bridge, lying close together, side by side, dead.

Joshua Brooks, of Lincoln, was at the bridge and was struck with a ball that cut through his hat, and drew blood on his forehead, and it looked as if it was cut with a knife; and we concluded they were firing jackknives.

When we had fired at the bridge and killed the British, Noah Parkhurst, who was my right hand man, said, “Now the war has begun and no one knows when it will end.”

Baker then told the story of James Nichols, an Englishman in the Lincoln company. Richard C. Wiggin wrote about that story and the records behind it here.

I believe I was the only man from Lincoln that had a bayonet. My father got it in the time of the French war.

I went into the house where [Isaac] Davis and [Joseph] Hosmer were carried after they fell, and saw their bodies. I supposed the house to be Major [John] Buttrick’s.

When we marched down to the bridge, Major Buttrick marched first, and Captain Davis next to him. I did not see Colonel [John] Robinson [of Westford] to know him.

I verily believe that I felt better that day, take it all the day through, than if I had stayed at home.

After justice of the peace Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar finished writing this down, the text was read back to Baker and he signed it in front of three witnesses. Baker died later that year, thought to be the last veteran of the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

(The picture above is Don Troiani’s painting of the fight at the North Bridge. True to form, he has given the provincial militiamen up front bayonets.)

Amos Baker at the Bridge

On 22 Apr 1850, three days after the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, justice of the peace Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar took down the memories of a nonagenarian veteran named Amos Baker.

Baker was thought to be “the sole survivor of the men who were present at the North Bridge at Concord,…and the only man living who bore arms on that day.”

Hoar wrote out an affidavit that said:

I, Amos Baker, of Lincoln, in the County of Middlesex, and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on oath depose and say that I was ninety-four years old on the eighth day of April, 1850; I was at Concord Fight on the nineteenth of April, 1775; I was then nineteen years and eleven days old.

My brother Nathaniel, who was then paying his addresses to the girl whom he afterwards married, was at the house where she was staying, near the line between Lexington and Lincoln, and received the alarm there from Dr. Samuel Prescott, and came over and gave it to me. My father and my four brothers, Jacob, Nathaniel, James, and Samuel, and my brother in law, Daniel Hosmer, were in arms at the North Bridge. After the fight at the bridge, I saw nothing more of them, and did not know whether they were alive or dead, until I found two of my brothers engaged in the pursuit near Lexington meeting house. Nathaniel followed the enemy to Charlestown.

When I went to Concord in the morning, I joined the Lincoln company at the brook by Flint’s pond, near the house then of Zachary Smith, and now of Jonas Smith. I loaded my gun with two balls,—ounce balls, and powder accordingly. I saw the British troops coming up the road that leads on to the Common at Concord. The sun shone very bright on their bayonets and guns.

Abijah Pierce of Lincoln, the Colonel of the minute men, went up armed with nothing but a cane.

When we were going to march down to the bridge, it was mentioned between Major [John] Buttrick, and Capt. Isaac Davis, that the minute men had better be put in front, because they were the only men that had bayonets, and it was not certain whether the British would fire, or whether they would charge bayonets without firing. I do not remember which of them said it, but they both agreed to it; and Captain Davis’s company of minute men [from Acton] was then brought up on the right. Then they saw the smoke of the town house, and, I think, Major Buttrick said “Will you stand here and let them burn the town down?”

Local historian Josiah Adams noted that other witnesses were more certain in ascribing these words to adjutant Joseph Hosmer.

That smoke having roused the officers, Baker said, “the order was given to march, and we all marched down without any further order or arrangement.”

TOMORROW: “Firing jackknives”?

Newfangled Displays at Pluckemin and Concord

Last month Boston 1775 reader Bill Welsch sent me an interesting link to a virtual recreation of the Continental Army artillery park in Pluckemin, New Jersey. The website explains:

The Friends of the Jacobus Vanderveer House announced the release of the 3D Visualization of the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment, the lost 1778-1779 winter cantonment of General Henry Knox’s artillery in Pluckemin, New Jersey. While no buildings survive on the site except General Knox’s Headquarters at the Jacobus Vanderveer House, significant archeological work and other historical records permitted the creation of the first of its kind 3D virtual renderings of the buildings and area that made up the cantonment.

This 3D visualization is an interpretive guide for visitors who now can come to General Knox’s Headquarters at the Jacobus Vanderveer House Museum and understand the Pluckemin Artillery Cantonment’s importance to American Revolutionary War history.

Knox had about a thousand troops under his command at Pluckemin. Gen. George Washington’s infantry, about 8,000 strong, camped nearby at Middlebrook.

Closer to home, the Minute Man National Historical Park has revamped the display in the visitor center at Concord, above the North Bridge. The Boston Globe reported:

Until recently, the centerpiece of the three-room space was a glass-encased diorama showing soldiers dotting the hillside on both sides of the Concord River and over the bridge.

Along with the new video, produced by Northern Light Productions of Boston, which brings the Battle of Concord to life by filming historical reenactors on location, the exhibitions area now contains displays of archeological artifacts, documents, and weaponry, including an original cannon.

“We focus on three men who played key roles in the Revolutionary War: Captain David Brown, whose house foundation is visible from the park; Colonel James Barrett; and Major John Buttrick,” [chief of interpretation Leslie] Obleschuk said. “Those are names that may be fairly well known in Concord, but definitely are not known to visitors from across the country and around the world.”

The “Hancock” cannon is still on display, but it’s been taken off its carriage to make room for other artifacts and exhibits.