Calvin Piper in Sickness, War, and Peace

Yesterday we left eleven-year-old Calvin Piper of Westborough in bed after falling off a colt and banging his head in August 1774.

Dr. James Hawes gave the boy a poor prognosis. The Rev. Ebenezer Parkman came to pray with him.

After a few days, Hawes gathered some medical colleagues to consult and perhaps perform surgery to relieve pressure in Calvin’s skull.

But on that morning of 6 August, Calvin woke up feeling much better than before. He was no longer delirious or babbling. The surgeons reconsidered.

The Rev. Mr. Parkman wrote in his diary:

It was feared the Trepan must be used: but it was first determined to take off part of his scalp and examine his Head. We began with prayer. Dr. [Charles] Russel [shown here] performed the Operation, and finding the grumous Blood, and that there was no Fracture, desisted from any thing further.

So Calvin was sewn up and allowed to keep recovering on his own. Parkman visited him again a couple of days later, and then Calvin drops out of the minister’s diary, presumably going back to normal farm boy behavior.

Nearly two years later, as the British military was preparing to leave Boston, Parkman had to visit the Piper family again. On Sunday, 10 Mar 1776, he wrote:

At Even went to see Mrs. Piper, newly brought to bed, and is very low; prayed with her in her Distresses.

The next day, Parkman added, “She is in a dangerous state.” And on Tuesday:

Capt. Wheelock early, Suddenly, hastily calls me to Visit Mrs. Piper as being near her End. I rode speedily (before Breakfast — nay before Family Prayer), found her groaning as in very great Distress. Prayed with her, Commending her Case to God, most gracious and compassionate. . . .

Mrs. Piper dyed about noon, about 42 and an half.

The funeral was on Thursday, 14 March. The minister noted, “her Father Whitcomb and one of her Brothers were there.”

The Parkman diary thus contains some clues to the Piper family history. The mention of “Father Whitcomb” might indicate Mary Piper’s surname at birth. There were Mary Whitcombs born in Bolton and its parent town, Lancaster, in the 1730s. However, none was born in 1733 and thus “about 42 and an half” in 1776. It’s also possible that “Father Whitcomb” was a stepfather.

In addition, Parkman’s record confirms that this Mary Piper died in 1776. John Piper remarried the next year to a woman from Templeton named Mary White. That means there were two wives named Mary Piper having John’s children in quick succession, and some genealogies don’t recognize they were separate women.

Back to Calvin Piper: As he reached his late teens, he had a new stepmother. Did that push him to leave the house? Or did he want some adventure, or just need money? Whatever the combination of reasons, on 1 July 1780 Calvin enlisted among the “men raised to reinforce the Continental Army for the term of 6 months.” When he reported to the camp at Springfield, Calvin was recorded as seventeen years old, 5'4" tall, with a ruddy complexion.

Pvt. Piper served a little more than five months at West Point, New York, before being discharged. He liked the experience enough to reenlist the following June. By now he was an inch taller and had been trained as a tanner, perhaps in a family shop. This time there was a dispute about whether he was counted in the quota for Lancaster or Templeton—not that it mattered to him. Piper agreed to serve three years, but the war ended before that term was up.

The twenty-year-old veteran moved to Norridgewock in the district of Maine. In April 1785 he married Zeriah Parker there. Five years later, however, Mrs. Zeriah Piper remarried, indicating that Calvin Piper had died in his late twenties—about fifteen years after he escaped having a hole drilled in his skull.

Looking for Elijah Houghton

Yesterday the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum decorated the grave of Elijah Houghton (1739-1819) of Harvard, Massachusetts, with a medallion indicating that he participated in the Boston Tea Party.

This event, shown here, was part of the museum’s campaign to mark all the graves of people known to have participated in the Boston Tea Party.

My immediate reaction when I read that news was, of course, what evidence shows that Elijah Houghton participated in the Boston Tea Party?

In the first three decades of the 1800s, newspapers in Boston and elsewhere mentioned men’s connections to the destruction of the tea after they died—usually not before.

Benjamin Bussey Thacher included a collected list of tea destroyers at the back of his 1835 book Traits of the Tea Party. I shared that list and analyzed it back at Boston 1775’s first Tea Party anniversary.

In 1884, Francis S. Drake wrote Tea Leaves, profiling all the Tea Partiers he could identify based on previous reports and family traditions, which were often flimsy or even outright unreliable.

And Elijah Houghton’s name doesn’t appear in any of those sources.

I found a report that Elijah Houghton’s name surfaced in a supplement that the Boston Globe published in 1973, two hundred years after the Tea Party. I don’t know what evidence that publication pointed to.

The contemporaneous record tells us that Elijah Houghton was born in the town of Harvard on 2 June 1739, son of Thomas and Mariah Houghton. The following month, his father had him baptized across the town line in Lancaster.

On 9 June 1766, soon after turning twenty-seven, Elijah Houghton married Mercy Whitney in Harvard. They had their first child, Thomas, a little more than seven months later. Ten more children are named in the town’s baptismal records: Elijah, Jr. (born in 1769), Abraham (1771), Moriah (1772), Mercy (1774), second Abraham (1777), Elisabeth (1779), Hannah (1781), Allice (1784), second Hannah (1786), and Sally (1788).

There’s no question that Elijah Houghton marched out of Harvard during the Lexington Alarm of April 1775. He served five days in Capt. Joseph Fairbanks’s militia company.

As for later in the war, there were multiple men named Elijah (or Elisha) Houghton enlisting from Massachusetts over the years, including one from neighboring Lancaster and two who lived long enough to apply for pensions. None of those Elijah Houghtons was linked to Harvard. And given the way Mercy Houghton kept having children at regular intervals, her husband probably wasn’t away from home for long.

When Elijah Houghton died in his home town in 1819, the local records identified him as “Elijah, s. of Thomas and Meriah, July 20, 1819, a. 80 y. 1 m. 18 d.” and as a Revolutionary War soldier. Mercy had died two years before.

Does it seem likely that Elijah Houghton participated in the Tea Party? That would mean a thirty-four-year-old farmer from Harvard, father of three children under age six, traveled forty miles and inserted himself into the Boston Whigs’ top-secret operation. I’d need to see strong evidence to believe that. Perhaps it’s out there, but I haven’t come across any sign of it.

The list of participants on the Tea Party Ships and Museum’s website doesn’t offer details about Houghton or when and why he was included. The institution appears to be casting a very wide net to ensure no possible Tea Party participants are left out before the event’s Sestercentennial.

TOMORROW: Or do we mean Elisha Horton?

Francis Akley, Continental Ranger

When I started to focus on Joseph Akley, I also introduced his brothers: Francis, one year older, and Thomas, John, Samuel, and William, from three to seventeen years younger.

Samuel and William were so much younger, in fact, that Joseph never lived in the same household with them, being indentured out before he was born. (Joseph and William both grew up in Boston, so they might have known each other at least.)

The Boston Overseers of the Poor sent the other five brothers to new masters all over the province, as far west as Springfield and as far north as Topsham, Maine.

Those Akleys were young men and teenagers during the Revolutionary War. In 1775 only Joseph had married and started a family. Francis, Thomas, and John came of age before or during the war, meaning their apprenticeships ran out. They had no doubt built some personal ties in the communities where they grew up, but they didn’t have any relatives or property.

In sum, those Akley brothers were just the sort of young men the Continental Army was looking for. Just the sort of young men that towns were happy to grant a little bonus money and send off to fill draft quotas.

Indeed, all four of those Akley brothers joined the army, and, remarkably, all four survived long enough to apply for pensions in the early 1800s. By that time they had scattered across the northeastern U.S. of A. None of their applications described their family background or life in Boston before enlisting, but they stated their ages and the towns from which they enlisted, confirming that these are the right guys.

Francis Akley, Jr., baptized on 19 May 1751, was indentured to a cooper in Lancaster. After turning twenty-one in 1772 he moved to Guilford in what would be Vermont. In January 1777 he enlisted under Lt. David Goodnough in “an independant corpse of rangers mostly from New Hamps. at Tyconderoga commanded by Major [Benjamin] Whitcomb—and Capt. [George] Aldrich Company.”

Aldrich’s company fought in the Battle of Bennington on 16 Aug 1777. The only event Akley specifically recalled, however, was being “at the taking of Burgoyne” after Saratoga. He said he was discharged at Haverhill, New Hampshire, “I think in 1783.” Whitcomb’s Rangers actually disbanded at the start of 1781.

Francis Akley applied for a pension while living in Halifax, Vermont, in 1819. The following year he testified that he was seventy years old and his property consisted of “two Pigs—1 Jacknife & 1 old Pocketbook.” At that time, the law required veterans to show need before receiving any support.

The federal government granted Akley a pension. In 1829 he moved to Connecticut, and then in 1838 back to Vermont. Akley appeared on the U.S. government’s pension list in 1840, the year he turned eighty-nine.

The Vermont Mercury for 26 Mar 1841, published in Woodstock, carried a notice from the men commissioned to settle “Francis Akley’s Estate,” he being “represented insolvent.” They invited creditors to meet “at the dwelling-house of Lyman Akley in Plymouth,” most likely a descendant the veteran had been living with at the end of his long life.

TOMORROW: More Akley brothers’ service.

(The drawing above comes from the website of the reenacted Whitcomb’s Rangers and shows a soldier like Francis Akley.)

“The Road to Concord” Runs through Lancaster, 6 Feb.

Soon after the “Powder Alarm” of 2 September 1774, Massachusetts towns began to look into their military resources. Among those towns was Lancaster, in the center of the province.

It might seem surprising that a farm town of only 328 families and 1,999 people (in 1765) would need military resources. Lancaster didn’t even have a police force. But the colonial militia system spread out the responsibility for defending society with arms. And Gen. Thomas Gage’s seizure of gunpowder in Charlestown (though within his legal powers as royal governor) made New England Whigs want to strengthen their militia to fend off further moves.

On 5 September, the Lancaster town meeting voted to “raise fifty pounds, for to buy ammunition with, to be a town stock.” Later that month the town decided to “buy one field piece for the use of the town.” On 28 September, at the same meeting in which the townspeople agreed to send a delegate to the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, they raised their cannon order to “two field pieces instead of one.” And when Yankees agreed to spend money, they were serious.

By December, those guns must have arrived because Lancaster authorized a further expenditure: “to buy 5 hundred wt. of ball suitable for the field pieces.” Along with some Worcester County neighbors, the town was preparing to go to war. Lancaster was thus part of the movement I explore in The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War.

I’ll tell stories from that book and answer questions about how I came to write it on Monday, 6 February, at the Thayer Memorial Library at 717 Main Street in Lancaster. That event is scheduled to start at 6:30 P.M. It’s sponsored by the Seven Bridge Writers’ Collaborative speakers series, free to anyone who wants to attend.

“You will have bloody work to-day”

Yet another version of the Abijah Willard–William Prescott anecdote I’ve been discussing appeared in The Prescott Memorial, a genealogy published in 1870 by William Prescott, M.D.

That book quoted manuscript material from “Dr. Oliver Prescott, Jr., who was a nephew of Colonel William Prescott, and intimate in his family”; he had heard Col. Prescott often “relate a variety of anecdotes and incidents in his experience while in the army,” which he subsequently wrote down. In 1870, those pages were owned by “Miss Harriet Prescott of Cambridge, Mass.”

This version of the tale goes:

On the morning of the battle [of Bunker Hill], Governor [Thomas] Gage, the British commander, viewed the American works from an elevated position in Boston (Copp’s Hill), and called upon the tory refugees to see if they knew the commanding officer.

Abijah Willard, a mandamus counsellor, whose wife was a sister to Colonel Prescott, having viewed the works with the glass, informed Gage that he knew the commander well, “It is my brother-in-law, Prescott.”

“Will he fight?” asked Gage.

“Yes,” replied Willard, “that man will fight h—l, and if his men are like him you will have bloody work to-day.”

Each version of the story quotes Willard’s reply differently, though all three replies convey the same warning about Prescott’s bellicosity.

So what can we conclude? It seems certain that young men in the Prescott family heard this story as they grew up. They had no written source, and consequently the stories diverged before the mid-1800s. Nevertheless, all three versions contain the same core elements: Uncle Abijah Willard, Gen. Gage, Col. Prescott in the redoubt, the question “Will he fight?”

But there’s a question I’ve learned to ask about all early stories of British officials during the siege of Boston: How could Americans have known? Given that there was a, you know, war going on, how could the Prescott family have learned about Willard’s conversation with Gage?

Paul Lockhart describes the difficulty of Willard recognizing Prescott at the distance from Charlestown to Boston, and it would be even harder for Prescott to have heard Willard. Furthermore, as described in his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Willard evacuated in 1776, worked as a commissary for the British army, and settled in New Brunswick after the war. So even if he had remained friends with Prescott up until the war began, he wasn’t around to pass on this story.

After Willard died in 1789, his third wife, the former Mary McKown, came back to Massachusetts until her own death in 1807. As for Willard’s surviving children:

• daughter Elizabeth Wales also returned and died in Lancaster in 1822. Family historian Joseph Willard described her as “a very bright, intelligent lady, full of vivacity and conversation.”
• daughter Anna Goodhue became the wife of a U.S. senator (shown above) and died in Lancaster in 1858. Joseph Willard also had nice things to say about her, though he didn’t describe her as a conversationalist.
• son Samuel might never have left Lancaster, and lived there well into the 1800s.

That leaves the possibility that Abijah Willard’s widow or children heard the story from him and later passed it on to Col. Prescott or his family. Or maybe they took some statement Willard made about Prescott always being ready to fight and attached it to a very dramatic moment. It seems significant that the Prescott boys grew up believing that the tale involved Willard, not just any Loyalist.

Nevertheless, if Willard couldn’t have recognized Prescott at that distance, then the tale is a myth. Alas.