Dr. Dexter’s Boys

When Lydia (Woods Dexter) Curtis died at the end of 1772, her three surviving sons were all in their late teens, of age to be apprentices. They may therefore have left the household of their stepfather, Dr. Samuel Curtis.

Lydia was from a large and established family in Marlborough. The boys’ paternal relatives in Dedham were also rich enough to take them in if that seemed like the best course. (In 1771 their grandmother there offered to pay “the Charge of Rideing” for one boy so that he could recover from an illness through “moderate exercise.”)

Two of those Dexter boys went into medical professions, and it’s possible that Dr. Curtis helped to train them. But it’s also possible those sons were inspired entirely by their father, Dr. Ebenezer Dexter, and wanted little to do with Curtis. Here’s what we know about the next generation of Dexters.

William (1755-1785) went out to Shrewsbury, perhaps to train under Dr. Edward Flynt, who had treated his father in his last illness. In February 1775, at the age of nineteen, William married a local woman named Betsy Bowker, age twenty-one. Their first child, named Ebenezer after William’s father, arrived eight and a half months later.

By then, Edward Flynt and William Dexter had enlisted as surgeon and surgeon’s mate for Gen. Artemas Ward’s regiment of the Massachusetts army. The young man’s handwritten commission signed by James Warren for the Massachusetts Provincial Congress appears above. Dexter served in the Continental Army through the siege of Boston and accompanied the regiment down to New York under Col. Jonathan Ward.

Betsy Dexter, according to her 1843 application for a pension, was living at her father’s house in Shrewsbury all this time. William “returned after warm weather in 1776,” she recalled. He had reached the age of majority that April, and I wonder if he inherited his father’s estate in Marlborough. (It’s worth recalling that Dr. Curtis decided to leave town and go to sea the next spring.)

According to his wife, William brought his little family home to Marlborough in December 1776 and set up his own practice as a physician. William and Betsy had children in 1777, 1778, and 1779, all of them living to adulthood. But like his father, William Dexter died young, at age thirty. His widow Betsy remarried ten years later to a man named Edward Low and settled in Leominster, living until 1846.

Samuel Dexter (1756-1825) became an apothecary, married Elizabeth Province in Northampton in 1790, and settled in Albany, New York. She was a daughter of John and Sarah Province of Boston, and thus a sister of the David Province whom George Gailer sued for helping to tar and feather him in 1769, when she was six. How she got to Northampton is a mystery. Samuel and Elizabeth had five children, three living to adulthood. Samuel was the longest-lived of the brothers, and Elizabeth died in 1846.

John Dexter (1758-1807) worked as a quartermaster sergeant for the Continental Army for several years under Col. Timothy Bigelow of Worcester. On 3 Mar 1783 he married a woman from Marlborough named Mary Woods, likely a cousin on his mother’s side, with a justice of the peace from Stow rather than a local minister presiding. John and Mary Dexter’s first daughter arrived in late December, and three more children followed by 1794.

John was a tanner. He gained the militia rank of ensign under Gov. John Hancock. In the 1790s the Dexters moved to Berlin. Then John “went into Trade,” and in 1802 he moved the family into Boston. John died five years later, Mary in 1823. The children all lived well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, but none had children.

John Dexter’s third child was John Haven Dexter (1791-1867), who apprenticed at Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel but then went to work in the mercantile firm of Amos and Abbott Lawrence. J. H. Dexter wrote two books (Mercantile Honor, and Moral Honesty and A Plea for the Horse) and also left several manuscripts of genealogical information and gossip about his family and fellow Bostonians, some helpfully transcribed and published in 1997.

How Malden Managed “Our Cannon”

On 21 Apr 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s Committee of Safety officially set up its artillery regiment by sending for Richard Gridley, Scarborough Gridley, and David Mason, three of the top four officers in that unit.

At the same time the committee voted “That the field pieces be removed from Newburyport, and deposited for the present, in the hands of Capt. [John] Dexter of Malden.” That brought those guns closer to the siege lines. Dexter was told “to conceal the cannon committed to his care.”

Three days later the committee felt cautious enough about provoking further fighting to resolve:

That the inhabitants of Chelsea and Malden be, and hereby are, absolutely forbidden, to fire upon, or otherwise injure any seamen belonging to the navy under the command of Admiral [Samuel] Graves, unless fired upon by them, until the said inhabitants of Chelsea and Malden receive orders from this committee or the general of the provincial forces so to do.

But two days after that the committee rescinded that resolution and voted:

That the inhabitants of Chelsea and Malden be hereby desired, to put themselves in the best state of defence, and exert the same in such manner, as under their circumstances, their judgments may direct.

The war was on. And indeed, there was a fight off Chelsea on 27-28 May.

As for the cannon in Malden, that story got picked up in Deloraine Pendre Corey’s History of Malden, Massachusetts (1899). For a little while the guns were hidden “in the hay in Captain Dexter’s barn,” but pretty soon everyone in Malden knew they were there. Then the townspeople started to prepare to use them.

On 13 June, the Malden town meeting voted “That some part of the Town’s stock of powder be made up in Cartridges for the Cannon to be used upon necessity.” Three days later, on 16 June, two men were sent to the army’s headquarters in Cambridge to “request that a person be sent to view our cannon, & advise where to make an Entrenchment, for our own defence.” The field-pieces that had arrived in Malden less than two months before were now “our cannon.”

Then came the Battle of Bunker Hill on 17 June. The British lines moved closer to Malden, and the Royal Navy was probing the Mystic River. People grew more nervous. Two days after the battle Malden voted “That Capt Daniel Waters be desired immediately to prepare ye cannon in this Town for use.”

As instructed by their neighbors, Waters and Ezra Sargeant went to the provincial congress “for direction in using the artiliry in this Town, &…orders to enlist a sufficient number of men to make use of them if necessary, & also to request some assistance from the army for our defence in our very dangerous situation.”

But by this time the provincial congress had already enlisted as many men as it could. It was shoring up the whole siege line and worrying about protecting the long Massachusetts shore as well. All they could offer Malden was free rein:

the inhabitants of the town of Maiden be [directed] to make the best use of their artillery they can, for their defence, in case they shall be attacked by the enemy, and that they make their application for assistance to the general of the army [Artemas Ward], who, doubtless, will furnish them with such detachments from the army, as they shall judge necessary and expedient.

Townspeople built earthworks near the landing place for the Penny Ferry from Charlestown, shown at the upper right of the map above. They prepared the houses near that site with “apertures” to shoot out from. And they waited.

COMING UP: Floating batteries.