John Raymond’s Lost Son?

As I looked into the death of John Raymond, I found somewhat contradictory statements about his wife and children.

The genealogies published with Charles Hudson’s history of Lexington in 1913 say that Raymond was born on 5 Sept 1731. Genealogies of the Raymond Families of New England, 1630-1 to 1886, gives no birth date, but says he was baptized on 19 Sept 1731, which is consistent. Both books say he was born in Beverly shortly before the family moved to Lexington.

The Hudson volume says that John Raymond married Rebecca Fowle, born in Medford in 1743, and that they had five children between 1763 and 1773. Hudson left out that, according to Medford records, that couple married on 12 May 1763, less than seven months before Lexington records say their first child came along on 24 November. The details of those five births appear here. Similar information appears in Descendants of George Fowle (1610/11?-1682) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, published in 1990.

Genealogies of the Raymond Families (1886) adds another son, born in 1775 after his father’s death and before his mother’s death in October: Isaac Royal Raymond. According to that book, he was raised by an uncle named Royal Tilestone. (That uncle’s surname may have led this genealogist to say that Rebecca was a Tilestone before her marriage, not a Fowle. But he could have been an uncle by marriage, a great-uncle, or simply a guardian.)

There are two striking details about that baby’s name:

• John and Rebecca Raymond had had a son named Isaac in 1770, and there’s no record of him dying in Lexington. Of course, vital records from this time have a lot of holes.
• The baby’s name appears to come from the prominent Medford landowner Isaac Royall. On the same day the baby’s father was killed, Royall was reportedly fleeing into Boston as a Loyalist, which left him a somewhat controversial figure. (The picture of Royall above comes courtesy of PrawfsBlawg, which discusses a more modern controversy: should the Harvard Law School do more to acknowledge that Royall’s founding bequest was amassed from slavery?)

There was definitely an Isaac R. Raymond in upstate New York in the early republic. He shows up in newspapers of Salem, New York, in 1817 declaring bankruptcy, and he died in 1853 or 1854 in East Waverly. The 1879 History of Tioga, Chemung, Tompkins, and Schuyler Counties, New York mentions this man in a profile of his descendants, and states that his father, “John Raymond, a captain of militia, was shot by the English at the very beginning of the engagement” in Lexington.

That sounds like what a child separated from his immediate family and community might come to believe about his dead father, preserving core facts (father killed at Lexington) but exaggerating details (as a captain). The New York tradition is obviously not based on the accounts being written in Massachusetts at the time, which portrayed Raymond as old and crippled.

The New York county history names Isaac’s childhood guardian as “his uncle, Thomas Tilestone, of Boston.” A man of that name, son of Onesiphorus Tileston, died in Boston in June 1794 at age fifty-nine. However, I haven’t found any links between John and Rebecca (Fowle) Raymond and the Tileston family. (In more distant branches, John Tileston of Dorchester and Rebekah Fowles married on 21 Jan 1730; their son John, born five years later, taught school in Boston for many years.) Nor have I found anyone named Royal Tilestone.

So did John Raymond’s widow Rebecca have a child after he was killed in April 1775? Was that child named after a Loyalist who had recently fled from his mother’s home town? Was that infant, orphaned by his mother’s death, given to a relative named Tilestone to raise? As an adult, did he move to New York and raise a family there, passing on misty lore about his father being killed in the first battle of the Revolution?

Undocumented as that story is, it seems a little more plausible than the main alternative—that Isaac R. Raymond seized on a bare report of John Raymond’s death in Lexington on 19 Apr 1775 and spun out the story of that man being his father. But there’s definitely a mystery there.

“John Raymond, an aged man,…was brutally fired upon”?

As I discussed yesterday, in the first half-century after John Raymond’s death outside the Munroe Tavern on 19 Apr 1775, people in Lexington agreed that British soldiers had killed him, but didn’t make a big deal of his death compared to others the same day.

That changed around the time of the Centennial. The Rev. Artemas B. Muzzey (1802-1892) of Cambridge, grandson of a man in Capt. John Parker’s militia company in 1775, published a reminiscence of Revolutionary veterans in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register in 1877 which stated:

William Munroe…kept the public house known as “Munroe Tavern.” Here the British stopped on their retreat, and murdered John Raymond, an inoffensive man, as he was leaving the house.

Thus Raymond’s death during a battle became a murder.

Three years later, in a History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, Lexington historian Charles Hudson wrote:

The officers with Percy resorted to Munroe’s tavern just below. The occupants of the house left the place in affright, leaving only John Raymond, an aged man, who was at the time one of the family. The intruders ordered him to supply them with all the good things the house afforded, which he readily did. But after they had imbibed too freely, they became noisy and so alarmed Raymond that he sought to escape from the house; but was brutally fired upon and killed in his attempt to flee from danger.

Hudson also used Raymond’s death to complain about the British soldiers’ “system of personal insult, treachery, and murder” in his history of Lexington, published in 1913.

In The Battle of April 19, 1775 (1912), Frank W. Coburn went into further detail in describing the activity of Col. Percy (shown above) and his troops:

This energetic destroyer of American homes had selected Munroe Tavern as his temporary headquarters, and ordered his wounded conveyed there also. While their wounds were being dressed his men demanded such refreshments as the place could provide, and unlike [Lt. Col. Francis] Smith’s subordinates in Concord, were not considerate enough to pay for them. So landlord William Munroe’s loss was £203, 11s. 9d., of which £90 was in the “retail shop,” presumably of a liquid nature.

As he was orderly sergeant in Captain Parker’s Company, he was naturally absent on duty, and left a lame man, John Raymond, in charge, who waited upon the unbidden guests because he was compelled to. His last service was to mix a glass of punch for one of the red-coats, after which he essayed to escape through the garden. He was not alert enough, for two soldiers fired, and one of their bullets readily overtook him as he hobbled away. Thus one more was added to the list of American dead, one of the easiest victims, of course, for he was simply an unarmed cripple. This probably happened at the rear of the Tavern.

For this paragraph Coburn cited “A carefully written newspaper clipping evidently from a Boston periodical, dated April 19, 1858, preserved in a scrap book once belonging to the Thomas Waterman collection of American History.” I couldn’t locate such an article in the Archive of Americana newspaper database, but I wouldn’t be surprised if one turns up. I would be surprised if an 1858 article offers more reliable information than was available to William Munroe in 1825.

In fact, as authors added to the drama of John Raymond’s death, they inserted contradictions into the story. Hudson referred to Raymond as “aged,” but also reported his birth date, which showed that he was forty-three years old.

Coburn called Raymond a “cripple,” but other authors listed him among the members of Capt. Parker’s militia company, which suggests that Raymond’s lameness was temporary or didn’t interfere with his military activity, like Nathanael Greene’s. (Alternatively, those authors might have assumed that Raymond’s name on the list of dead meant he died as a militiaman.)

Harold Murdock noted those contradictions in his Nineteenth of April, 1775, published in 1925. He theorized that the British troops might have viewed Raymond as their prisoner, and shot him as he was trying to escape. He also argued that Percy himself spent little time at the tavern. In any event, Murdock felt sure that the Lexington minister Jonas Clarke would have made more of Raymond’s death if his neighbors in 1775 had seen it as an atrocity.

To the credit of the historians who wrote the words now engraved on the memorial to John Raymond at the Munroe Tavern, that text sticks to the facts stated by Munroe and his family. There are a lot of details about Raymond’s killing that we’ll probably never know, so it’s wise to avoid the incendiary language of some authors writing well after the event.

TOMORROW: John Raymond’s children.

The Death of John Raymond

Part of the Munroe Tavern’s formal reopening on Sunday was the dedication of a memorial marker for John Raymond, killed on the grounds on 19 Apr 1775. That’s the stone to the left of the thick white archway in Ray Boas’s photograph above.

Immediately after the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Massachusetts provincial authorities listed Raymond among the men from Lexington who had died that day. Their broadsides and newspaper dispatches put no asterisk beside his name to indicate that he was killed on the common in the morning—so he must have died in the afternoon battle.

But otherwise, I found nothing published in 1775 about the circumstances of John Raymond’s death. The Provincial Congress made as big a deal as possible of certain British army “atrocities”—the deaths of two men in a Menotomy tavern, the invasion of Hannah Adams’s house in that same village. The Rev. Jonas Clarke of Lexington highlighted those same events in his sermon on the first anniversary of the battle. But he didn’t mention Raymond.

The earliest description of how Raymond died that I’ve come across appeared in William Munroe’s deposition about the battle from 1825:

On the return of the British troops from Concord, they stopped at my tavern house in Lexington, and dressed their wounded. I had left my house in the care of a lame man, by the name of Raymond, who supplied them with whatever the house afforded, and afterward, when he was leaving the house, he was shot by the regulars, and found dead within a few rods of the house.

Two years later, Munroe’s death notice (quoted here in full, and referring to him by his later militia rank) stated:

Col. M. participated with his company in the events of the day, leaving the care of his public house in the superintendance of a neighbor, whom the British killed on their retreat.

Those sources established several details about Raymond: he was one of Munroe’s neighbors, and he was “lame”—whether permanently or temporarily is unclear. Munroe left him in charge of the tavern, he served the British troops, and they shot him a short distance from the house “when he was leaving.”

TOMORROW: The story grows new details.