Where Did Jonathan Harrington, Jr., Die?

In 1775 this house facing Lexington common, shown courtesy of the Along the King’s Highway blog, was the home of Jonathan Harrington. There were three Jonathan Harringtons among the Lexington militiamen who turned out on 19 Apr 1775, and this is the one who was shot dead.

The plaque on the right side of the house façade explains the standard story of Harrington’s death: “Wounded on the common April 19 1775 [he] dragged himself to the door and died at his wife’s feet.” That story played a role in the discussion over preserving the house, as James M. Lindgren’s Preserving Historic New England describes.

That story took a while to get into print, however. Elias Phinney’s History of the Battle of Lexington (1825) quotes from a deposition of John Munroe dated 28 Dec 1824:

Isaac Muzzy, Jonathan Harrington, and my father, Robert Munroe, were found dead near the place where our line was formed. Samuel Hadley and John Brown were killed after they had gotten off the common.

Munroe’s recollection suggest Harrington died on the common close to where he had been standing in the ranks. The separate sentence about those “killed after they had gotten off the common” reinforces that impression. None of the eyewitnesses quoted in that book described Harrington dragging himself home.

In 1835, the famed orator Edward Everett came to Lexington to speak on the battle’s anniversary. Using Phinney and other, unspecified sources, Everett recounted the events of the day, including:

Robert Munroe was killed with Parker, Muzzy, and Jonathan Harrington, on or near the line, where the company was formed. . . .

Harrington’s was a cruel fate. He fell in front of his own house, on the north of the common. His wife, at the window, saw him fall, and then start up, the blood gushing from his breast. He stretched out his hands towards her, as if for assistance, and fell again. Rising once more on his hands and knees, he crawled across the road towards his dwelling. She ran to meet him at the door, but it was to see him expire at her feet.

So far as I can tell, this is the earliest description of Harrington crawling toward his wife and home. In February 1777, Ruth (Fiske) Harrington remarried a Boston man unhelpfully named John Smith, and I can’t trace her further. It’s possible that Everett heard this story somehow from her, or people who knew her. Note that he didn’t say Harrington actually got to his house: the wounded man “crawled across the road towards his dwelling.”

Frank Coburn’s The Battle of April 19, 1775 (1912) states that Harrington “fell near the barn, then standing in what is now Bedford Street.” For that statement, Coburn cited a manuscript setting down what Levi Harrington, an eyewitness to the battle, told his son in March 1846.

But nine years later, in The Battle on Lexington Common, April 19, 1775, Coburn spoke about Harrington thusly in the historical present:

He is mortally wounded on the northerly end of the Common. Across the road is his home. He struggles to reach it, falls, but with renewed effort rises and staggers to his own door-stone. His wife meets him there, and he dies in her arms.

So for that audience Ruth Harrington doesn’t just see her husband dying, but she holds him “in her arms” on their “own door-stone.” No citations this time.

In Paul Revere’s Ride (1994), David Hackett Fischer reported that the Levi Harrington manuscript is at the Lexington Historical Society. That book repeats the details of Coburn’s second telling, however, and adds another figure, saying Harrington’s death was witnessed not just by his wife but by his young son. It’s a very affecting story, one that stuck with me since I first read that book, but it seems to be one of those stories that keeps getting better with each retelling.

The Aftermath of Asahel Porter

Asahel Porter was killed in the confusion and rancor that followed the first shots at Lexington on 19 Apr 1775. He fell “close by the stone wall below [Rufus] Merriam’s garden, east of the Meeting house,” according to Levi Harrington, speaking in 1846.

In 1824, Amos Lock of Lexington recalled seeing Porter’s body. Amos and his brother Ebenezer had mustered with the militia, heard there weren’t any British regulars on the way after all, and headed home.

We had not proceeded far, before we heard a firing; upon which we immediately returned, coming up towards the easterly side of the common, where, under the cover of a wall, about twenty rods distant from the common, where the British then were, we found Asahel Porter, of Woburn, shot through the body;

upon which Ebenezer Lock took aim, and discharged his gun at the Britons, who were then but about twenty rods from us. We then fell back a short distance, and the enemy, soon after, commenced their march for Concord.

Elias Phinney published Lock’s deposition in his History of the Battle of Lexington, written to prove that the Lexington militiamen had fired back at the British.

In 1775, the Massachusetts authorities had wanted to emphasize victimhood, not resistance. They listed Porter among the provincial dead, and published little about Lexington men firing back. The earliest reports don’t present Porter’s death as an atrocity, as they do with some of the people killed later in the day.

There was a funeral for Porter and another Woburn casualty, Daniel Thompson, on 21 April. He was noted in the newspapers, though some rendered his first name as “Azel.”

In 1782, Asahel’s widow Abigail married Ephraim Peirce, who was a couple of years younger. He died in 1810. She lived until 1840, dying at age 84. A younger Asahel Porter settled in Reading, christened his oldest son Asahel, and thus carried the name into the new century.

On 21 Apr 1875, a Grand Army of the Republic post erected the first stone in Asahel Porter’s honor in Woburn’s cemetery. It was described as “a plain marble slab suitably inscribed.” And a century later, apparently, it had disappeared.

In 1975 a group called the Baldwin Historical Society erected a new stone, carved in a startling approximation of eighteenth-century style. I can find only a few traces of this society today, but I suspect it was named after Woburn’s Loammi Baldwin. That monument reads:

Although a Man of Peace
he was caught in a conflict
not of his choosing.
As a result he became
one of the first to die
for his New Country.

(Here’s a clearer photo on Flickr.)

COMING UP: What happened to Porter’s companion Josiah Richardson?