“Satisfied that he was intitled to a large allowance”

After listing more than £3,600 of property lost on Noddle’s Island in May and June of 1775, Henry Howell Williams presented that document to the Continental Congress’s agent in Boston and asked to be paid back.

That agent was Royal Flint (1754–1797), from Windham, Connecticut. A Yale graduate, he became a Connecticut paymaster in 1776 and eventually a Continental assistant commissary-general under Jeremiah Wadsworth. He had accompanied the army command to Valley Forge and Morristown, New Jersey. Flint was thus used to dealing with paperwork and property.

In 1786 the Congress appointed Flint to settle Continental accounts in New England, laying out procedures for him to follow. (In a possible conflict of interest, he was also starting to speculate in western lands, an enterprise that took up all of his time after 1790 and soon broke him.)

It appears that Williams approached Flint in 1786. Flint explained that his job was to settle outstanding bills with military contractors. Even if Williams’s livestock did ultimately benefit the army, he didn’t qualify. Instead, Flint advised Williams to ask for special consideration from the small Confederation bureaucracy.

On 1 Apr 1787 Williams got Flint to write that out in a certificate now shared by the Massachusetts Historical Society. Flint told the Congress, then meeting in New York:

soon after I entered upon the duties of my office as Commissioner for Settling public accounts in this State, the annexed claim was presented to me for allowance by Mr. Henry H. Williams.

As some part of it was for articles that were destroyed & which were productive of no advantage to the United States; and as none of it was Supported by regular vouchers, I suspended my determination upon it ’till I had obtained the best evidence that could be found.

The charges for the loss of Household furniture and whatever was received merely as damage could not be admitted at this Office; therefore I did not so critically investigate the proofs which were to establish that part of the Account. But that part of the claim which related to supplies of provision, or any other articles which were applied for the benefit of the United States, could be admitted, if the evidence of the fact was Satisfactory.

Under this idea, I suggested to Mr. Williams the propriety of stating in a Separate account such articles as were applied for the use of the Army; and to produce his evidence both with respect to the value & appropriation of them. From a great concurrence of testimony, he established the general fact, that his property was taken at the time & in the manner set forth in his memorial.

We also made it evident that the horses taken were turned into public Service; whether for this State or the United States, some of the witnisses were at a loss. The Honorable Moses Gill Esqr. & the late Major Genl. [Israel] Putnam informed me, they were actually applied for the United States. The number & value of the horses was not ascertained with any precision, but it was well proved that the horses were valuable & the number considerable.

It was proved to me that some Cattle & Sheep were slaughtered for the use of the Army, but the quantity was altogether uncertain.

Upon the whole, as this claim was for so large an amount, & the evidence in support of it not precise, I recommended to Mr. Williams to lay the affair before the Commissioners of the Treasury. I was however Satisfied that he was intitled to a large allowance & should have admitted that part of the account which related to articles appropriated to public use, with some deductions.

But the claimant preferred laying a memorial before the Honorable Congress under the expectation that the whole claim will be admitted. It must be Settled by general estimation. The nature of the transaction was Such as to exclude all possibility of accurate testimony. The evidence is satisfactory as far as it goes. It is perhaps as good as the nature of the case will admit.

That wasn’t a ringing endorsement, but Flint did say that Williams deserved some compensation.

That was enough for Henry Howell Williams, who submitted his request for the whole £3,600+ to the Congress.

TOMORROW: A confederated response.

(Israel Putnam was still alive in 1787, so “the late Major Genl. Putnam” must refer to his having retired from the army.)

“Ought to be paid by the United States”

To bolster his request for compensation after the Battle of Chelsea Creek, Noddle’s Island estate owner Henry Howell Williams assembled several documents, shared by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

One came from William Burbeck, who before the war had a job managing munitions in Castle William as well as helping to lead Boston’s militia artillery train.

I quoted Burbeck’s account last month. Because Williams took the risk of helping him get out of town, Burbeck was able to become second-in-command of Massachusetts’s artillery regiment.

As for Williams’s loyalty, Burbeck wrote:

it was Done at ye Risque of Every thing that is Dear And [he] informd. me that he was ready to save me or his Country in any thing that he Could

I know of but few men if Any in America that would have taken such Risques they being in his then situation (on an Island Surounded by men of war)—

Mr. Williams Complaynd. to me of the Ill treatment he Recd. from the Enemy that his family had been abused And his Interest taken from him & Recd. nothing therefor and that his situation was Dredfull, That he wished his Interest was off the Island and himself in the Country.

Burbeck signed that account (it’s not written in his handwriting) on 17 Apr 1776, just after the siege, as the Massachusetts legislature was moving to fortify Noddle’s Island. Obviously that document was meant to answer suspicions about Williams’s loyalty and willingness to provide provisions, even passively, to the British military the previous spring.

Williams also collected two statements signed by Moses Gill (shown above), prominent Patriot politician from the town of Princeton. One is dated 20 Mar 1786 and written in what looks like the same hand as the Burbeck statement. That document was composed for multiple people to sign, but only Gill did. It said:

in the year 1775 we were appointed by the Government A Committee of Supplies for the Army that when Genrl. [Israel] Putnam Removed the Stocks from Noddles Island, Among which were a Number of Horses which were Committed to our Care, And Upon Genrl. [George] Washington taken the Command of the Army they were with other Stores turnd. over to Colo. [Joseph] Trumbell the Continental Commissary Genrel at Cambridge

The other document signed by Gill isn’t dated, but it responds to an “account above”—probably meaning Williams’s inventory of lost property. As quoted yesterday, that accounting included “43 Elegant Horses...@ 30£.” The statement said:

I cannot with precision recollect the number, yet I believe the above amount is too high charged either with respect to the number or value of the horses.

And then the scribe inserted “not” in front of “too high.” I think that was the intended meaning all along, given the rest of the sentence, but that particular edit does raise eyebrows.

Williams also claimed to have lost “3 Cattle” and “220 Sheep.” Gill responded:

As to the Cattle & Sheep charged above, I have no personal knowledge in what manner they were applied, but I have no doubt they were used for the benefit of the American Army. as I was informed so by officers & others at that time

The bottom line for Gill:

Upon the whole, the account above charged is in my opinion just & ought to be paid by the United States.

Williams was already in discussions with a representative of the national government.

TOMORROW: A federal agent.

“The accomplishments of her mind”

On Friday, 18 August, the American Revolution Institute will host one of its “Lunch Bite” seminars, looking at a copy of Catharine Macaulay’s 1776 pamphlet An Address to the people of England, Scotland, and Ireland: on the Present Important Crisis of Affairs.

As the event description says, “Using events such as Parliament’s passing of the Stamp Act and the Boston Massacre, Macaulay’s pamphlet was written as an appeal to Great Britain to change its policies towards the colonies.”

Research Services Librarian Rachel Nellis will also discuss Macaulay’s life, including her connections to John and Abigail Adams and Mercy Warren.

Macaulay was well known as a Whig historian of Britain by the late 1760s. As a measure of her stature across the British Empire, she was the one woman designated to receive a copy of the town of Boston’s Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre report.

In the summer of 1770, the merchant Moses Gill told John Adams that Macaulay would be interested in a letter from him as the author of essays recently reprinted in London as A Dissertation on the Canon and the Feudal Law.

Adams got worked up about that prospect. He wrote a draft letter into his diary and “heavily corrected” it in many little ways before sending it off.

And then he didn’t hear anything back for months. In February 1771 a cousin of Abigail Adams named Isaac Smith, Jr., was visiting London. Smith wrote:

I have had the pleasure of meeting with Mrs. McAulay, at their house; who enquired of me with regard to you, and informed me, sir, that she should write to you, as soon as she had published a fifth Vol. which she has now in her hands.

She is not so much distinguished in company by the beauties of her person, as the accomplishments of her mind.

Macaulay didn’t get to her reply until 19 July, so she started with an apology: “A very laborious attention to the finishing the fifth vol of my history of England with a severe fever of five months duration the consequence of that attention has hitherto deprived me of the opportunity of answering your very polite letter…”

Macaulay praised Adams’s book (while getting the title wrong). She stated: “A correspondence with so worthy and ingenious a person as your self Sr will ever be prised by me as part of the happiness of my life.” And they did exchange a few letters before the outbreak of war.

Then, as I related back in January, the forty-seven-year-old widow Macaulay married William Graham, the twenty-one-year-old brother of her physician. How did that affect the Adamses’ impression of her? This seems like a good time to return to that storyline.

Meanwhile, the seminar about Macaulay’s 1776 pamphlet will take place online and at Anderson House in Washington, D.C., on Friday at 12:30 P.M. Register to attend either way through this page.

TOMORROW: The talk of Bath.

George on William Eustis in Roxbury, 23 Apr.

At the start of 1775, William Eustis was a twenty-one-year-old Harvard College graduate studying medicine with Dr. Joseph Warren.

The Rev. Dr. G. W. Porter’s 1887 profile of Eustis for the Lexington Historical Society relates his experiences at the start of the war:

On the 19th of April, 1775, while Mr. Eustis was a student with General Warren, an express arrived in Boston. The general mounted his horse, called Mr. Eustis, and said: “I am going to Lexington. You go round and take care of the patients.”

In making the visits, the youthful physician found everything in confusion. The patriots were continually coming to the house of Dr. Warren for news; and his own mind became so inspired with patriotic ardor that, having discharged his duties to the sick, he felt that his place was at the scene of conflict.

At mid-day… [Moses] Gill conveyed him to Lexington and Concord. The next day, Mr. Eustis returned to Cambridge. The American troops were fast assembling. The time of general and combined resistance to armed aggression had come. Regiments were formed. General Warren said to his youthful and patriotic pupil, “You must be surgeon of one of these regiments.”

His answer was: “I am too young. I expect that such men as you and Dr. [Benjamin] Church will be surgeons, and that we shall be mates [i.e., assistants].”

“We have more important affairs to attend to,” said the general; “and you have seen more practice than most of these gentlemen from the country.” Accordingly, Mr. Eustis was made surgeon.

William Eustis became the surgeon of Col. Richard Gridley’s artillery regiment, later Col. Henry Knox’s. He practiced medicine after the war but soon went into politics, serving in the U.S. House, in President James Madison’s cabinet, as minister to Holland, and for the last two years of his life as governor of Massachusetts.

Tamsen Evans George has just published a biography of the doctor and statesman, Allegiance: The Life and Times of William Eustis. On Saturday, 23 April, she will sell and sign copies of that book at the Shirley-Eustis House, the Roxbury mansion that Eustis owned from 1819 until his death in 1825. The event description says:

Eustis is a fascinating figure, he was both political insider—he knew everyone, and outsider—a Republican in Federalist Massachusetts. His personal charm, discretion and devotion to friends brought him notable, albeit thankless roles in a national government and eventually propelled him to the office of Governor of Massachusetts. Drawing extensively from his correspondence, Ms. George provides an insider’s view of some of the most momentous events in the founding of the United States.

This event is scheduled to start at 11:00 A.M. It will take place in the carriage house at 17 Rockford Street if it’s warm, in the mansion otherwise. The event is free, but seating is limited. To reserve a space, register through this link or call 617-442-2275. Masks are encouraged; after all, one wouldn’t want to catch a preventable disease at an event about a doctor.

“Tell her to make her cheese a little salter”

Yesterday I recounted how Moses Gill, lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, gave a large cheese to John Adams as he assumed the office of President.

Gill sent the cheese late in March 1793 and advised Adams, “it will be in eating the first weake in may.” Adams told his wife before she set out from Quincy to Philadelphia, “it will last till you come.”

For years Abigail Adams had overseen a dairy on the family farm. She knew about making cheese. And in that regard, as in almost everything else, she had high standards. So how did she react to Lt. Gov. Gill’s cheese?

There’s no more mention of that particular cheese in the Adams correspondence. By the end of May Abigail was writing back to Massachusetts to ask for more cheese—but not from Gill.

Instead, on 24 May Adams told her elder sister, Mary Cranch, back in Quincy:

I will thank you to get from the table Draw in the parlour some Annetto and give it to mrs Burrel, and tell her to make her cheese a little salter this Year. I sent some of her cheese to N York to Mrs [Abigail] smith and to mr [Charles] Adams which was greatly admired and I design to have her Cheese brought here.

when she has used up that other pray dr [Cotton] Tufts to supply her with some more, and I wish mrs French to do the Same to part of her Cheese, as I had Some very good cheese of hers last Year.

Abigail Adams definitely wanted more cheese from Massachusetts. But she was hungry for cheese from local suppliers she knew, and she had particular tastes. We don’t know what Abigail thought of the cheese Gill sent, but we know she didn’t ask for more.

After learning about this episode, I wondered if Gill told any newspapers about his gift. I found no coverage of this cheese in the Massachusetts press. It was a private favor between two gentlemen who had known each other for years.

That was quite a contrast to the next time someone from Massachusetts sent the President a large cheese. In January 1802, as described back here, the Rev. John Leland (1754-1841) of Cheshire presented Thomas Jefferson with a cheese to celebrate his becoming President the year before.

Cheshire was the exceptional Republican town in a Federalist county. Leland, leader of a Baptist congregation in a state with a Congregationalist establishment, supported Jefferson on the grounds of religious freedom.

Leland organized his community to produce a giant cheese for the new President. Their gift weighed 1,235 pounds—more than ten times the size of Gill’s cheese. Leland also made sure to tell the newspapers about that gift.

Jefferson, in turn, carefully paid for the cheese instead of accepting it as a perquisite of office. Even so, the Federalist press seized on this story, mixed in Jefferson's interest in recently discovered mammoth fossils, and harped on the President’s “mammoth cheese” for years.

Indeed, the cheese for President Jefferson was so famous that in 1837 another set of cheesemakers sent a giant cheese to President Andrew Jackson.

In 1940 the Sons of the American Revolution erected a monument to John Leland in Cheshire. It includes a bronze memorial plaque about him and a replica of the cider mill used to press the mammoth cheese.

In June of this year, the Cheshire Community Association unveiled a replica of the giant wheel of cheese itself.

“To day I have recd the Lt. Governors Cheese”

In 1797, Moses Gill (1734-1800, shown here in 1764) was the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. He was a Republican candidate for governor that spring, but came in a distant third after superior court justice Increase Sumner and attorney general James Sullivan. He handily retained the lieutenant governor’s office, though.

Gill was born in Charlestown and started his career as a merchant in Boston, but since 1767 he had lived the life of a country gentleman. Twice widowed and childless, Gill was the patriarchal squire of the town of Princeton and also the recent namesake of the town of Gill.

On 27 March, Lt. Gov. Gill wrote from Boston to the newly inaugurated second President of the United States, John Adams:

my Dear Sir.

By Capn. Constant Norton of the Schooner Jay you will receive a large Princeton Cheese, as by the inclosd. receipt, which you will Please to Accept from me, as a Small token of my affection and esteem; it is Packd in a Box and Divided, for the President of the United States, it will be in eating the first weake in may, And it woud be well to unpack it, and Keep it from the Sun in a Cold dry Cituation.

President Adams had received Gill’s letter only a week later and wrote home from Philadelphia to his wife, Abigail:

Lt Governor Gill has sent me one of his Princetown Cheeses, of such a Size as to require handspikes to manage it, according to Father Niles’s old Story.

“Father Niles” was what Adams called the Rev. Samuel Niles of Braintree, an acquaintance from decades before.

The President hadn’t actually seen the cheese yet, as his cordial thank-you letter to Gill the next day acknowledged:

Dear Sir

I have received your favor of the 27th of March and very Kindly thank you, for both the Letter and the generous Present of a Cheese from Princeton, I know very well the Value that is to be attached to Princeton and its inhabitants and Productions, Its Cheese in particular I know to be Excellent, and I shall prize it the higher for the place of its growth, I shall share it, and boast of it, and praise it and admire it as long as it lives,

I dare Say before I See it, that our America produces no thing Superior to it in its Kind your directions concerning it shall be observed

And Jonathan Sewall said Adams didn’t know how to flatter people.

Ten days later, the cheese finally arrived at the Presidential Mansion. John reported to Abigail on 14 April:

To day I have recd the Lt. Governors Cheese—like a charriot forewheel boxed up in Wood & Iron. it will last till you come.

According to the editors of the Adams Papers, presumably based on consulting the shipping papers, this wheel of cheese weighed 110 pounds. For comparison, Williams-Sonoma offers (for $3,000) a wheel of Parmesan cheese that was about the same weight before curing; it’s 18" across and 9" thick.

TOMORROW: Cheese for Abigail Adams.

“The birthday of our beloved President John Adams”

After the controversy over celebrating George Washington’s birthday in February 1798, President John Adams reconciled himself to such ceremonies. Indeed, we’re still celebrating the first President’s birthday today, in a way.

But Adams’s Federalist supporters also appear to have stepped up their efforts to celebrate his own birthday, so long as he was in office. (This whole series of postings started with me wondering whether the U.S. of A. celebrated President Adams’s birthday the way it celebrated President Washington’s, and before him King George’s. And the answer is yes, in a way.)

Balls and banquets weren’t to Adams’s taste, of course. The preferred method of honoring him, particularly during the Quasi-War of the late 1790s, became a militia parade. The Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette reported on a ceremony in Alexandria, Virginia, on 30 Oct 1798:

Tuesday last, being the anniversary of the birthday of our beloved President John Adams, was observed in this town with military honors. The uniform companies of Militia, and the company of Silver Grays, went through a variety of maneuvers and evolutions, under the command of George Deneale. After firing several rounds in evidence of their attachment to this good man, as well as to shew that they approbated his conduct towards the insidious French Directory, they retired in the evening with the utmost decorum and harmony.

Even then, however, Adams’s predecessor hovered over the ceremony. Martha Washington presented a banner (regrettably incomplete) to the company. On it, “The Golden Eagle of America has a portrait of General Washington suspended from its beak.”

And of course Washington’s birthday balls continued. On 20 February 1799, Abigail Adams wrote from Quincy:

I have received an invitation to the Ball in honour of Gen’ll. Washington but my health is so precarious, and sufferd such a Shock last Summer, that I am obliged to be very circumspect and cautious in all my movements. Thomas will go, and that will be sufficient.

Thomas was the couple’s son Thomas Boylston Adams. He liked balls. In fact, one day after he had arrived in Philadelphia following years in Europe, the President reported to his wife, “This Evening he goes with me to the Ball. I had rather spend it with him at home.”

But now President Adams knew what he had to do to maintain party unity. On 22 Feb 1799, Washington’s birthday, he wrote home to Abigail:

To night I must go to the Ball: where I Suppose I shall get a cold, and have to eat Gruel for Breakfast for a Week afterwards. This will be no Punishment.

Adams enjoyed gruel more than balls, it seems.

The picture above shows Boston’s celebration of the President’s birthday in October 1799: “The Boston troops, as reviewed on President Adams’s birth day on the Common by his Honr. Lieut. Governor [Moses] Gill & Major Genl. [Simon] Elliot, under the command of Brigadier Genl. [John] Winslow. Also a view of the new State House.” In fact, this is said to be the earliest printed picture of the new Massachusetts State House designed by Charles Bulfinch.

TOMORROW: Mrs. Rowson’s reprise.

Abigail Adams at a Birthday Ball in Boston

In February 1797, the U.S. of A. made plans to celebrate George Washington’s last birthday as President. Some parts of the country were also eager to celebrate the new President who would take office in March, John Adams.

On 17 February, Abigail Adams received an invitation to a banquet and ball in Boston, along with one for her niece Louisa Catherine Smith. The next day, Abigail asked her daughter Nabby to pick out a new dress cap, “a good one proper for me, not a Girlish one.”

“I presume yu will have a Splnded Birth Day,” Abigail wrote to John in Philadelphia; “there are preparations making in Boston to celebrate it. . . . the Note from the Managers requested me to honour them with my attendance, which they should esteem a particular favour, as it is the last publick honour they can Shew the President. thus circumstanced I have determined to attend.”

The ball took place at the Federal Street Theatre, converted into “a magnificent saloon; sumptuously decorated with tapestry hangings; elegantly illuminated with variegated lamps; and fancifully embellished with festoons of artificial flowers.”

Gov. Samuel Adams didn’t attend, and I doubt anyone expected him to; he’d already expressed his disapproval of Boston’s flowering post-independence social scene. Lt. Gov. Moses Gill was deputed to escort in Mrs. Adams at noon. She reported, “His Honours politeness led him to stay untill he had conducted & Seated me at the Supper table. he however escaped as soon after as he could.”

All in all, however, Abigail was pleased with the event:

I do the Managers but Justice when I say, I never saw an assembly conducted with so much order regularity & propriety, I had every reason to be pleased with the marked respect and attention Shewn me. col [Samuel] Bradford, who is really the Beau Nash of ceremonies even marshalld his company [of Cadets], and like the Garter King at Arms calld them over as they proceeded into the Grand Saloon, hung with the prostrate Pride, of the Nobility of France.

[James] Swan had furnishd them with a compleat set of Gobelin Tapresty, as the Ladies only could be Seated at Table with about 20 or 30 of the principle Gentlemen the rest were requested to retire to the Boxes untill the Ladies had Supped, when they left the Table & took their Seats in the Boxes whilst the Gentlemen Sup’d all was order and Decency about half after one, the company returnd to the Ball Room, and I retired with those who accompanied me to the Ball. most of the rest of company remaind untill 4 oclock. . . .

the Seat assignd to the Lady of the President Elect was Hung with Gobeline Tapestry, and in the center of the Room, conspicuous only for the hanging, on my Right the manager placed the Lady of Judge [John] Lowel. and on my Left the Lady of Judge [Increase] Sumner. Judge [Francis] Dana, but not his Lady was present, when I was conducted into the Ball Room the Band were orderd to play the President March.

the Toast were only 6 in Number. . . . every toast save one made the Saloon resound with an universal Clap and a united huza. that was the vice President Elect, I was sorry it was so cold and faint,

Despite the Adamses’ political differences with Thomas Jefferson, Abigail still considered him a personal friend. She didn’t make her break with him until 1804 when she read James Thomson Callender’s revelations of how Jefferson had orchestrated press attacks on her husband while assuring the couple he did no such thing.

One lady, Abigail said, didn’t have a good time at the ball, feeling “mortified & placed in the back ground. . . . how could she expect any thing else?” That was “Mrs [Dorothy] Scott,” the remarried widow of the late governor John Hancock, no longer wife of the state’s most acclaimed politician.

TOMORROW: What President Adams thought of the Philadelphia ceremonies.

“All the Province Stores Sent to Col James Barretts”

Sometime in the early spring of 1775, James Barrett of Concord, a Massachusetts Provincial Congress delegate and militia colonel, wrote down “An account of all the Province Stores Sent to Col James Barretts of Concord Partly in His Own Costody & Partly Elsewhere all under his Care.” That undated document is now at the American Antiquarian Society.

The top of the list begins with the most valuable, dangerous, and risky-to-be-caught-with items:

Two peices of Cannon Brought From Watertown to ye Town
Eight Peices of Cannon Brought to ye Town by Mr Harrington
Four Peices of Brass Cannon & Two Mortar from Col Robertsons

That last name should be Lemuel Robinson, proprietor of the Liberty Tree Tavern in Dorchester. Massachusetts Committee of Safety records confirm that Robinson had those four brass cannon and two mortars in his custody early in 1775.

Barrett was thus in possession of sixteen pieces of artillery, on top of the handful of cannon that Concord itself had bought and mounted. Such weaponry had no use other than warfare, and there was no other foe on the horizon but the royal government.

Barrett’s account also listed a great many other military supplies, including musket cartridges, musket balls, flints, gunpowder, entrenching tools, medical chests, tents and tent poles, dishes and spoons, and “Four Barrels of Oatmeal containing 20 Bushels.” He was helping to equip an army.

Barrett clearly didn’t expect this account to fall into the hands of royal agents since he listed the names of men who had sent him those illegal supplies, including:

• Jeremiah Lee of Marblehead (“thirtyfive half barrels of powder,” tents).
• Moses Gill of Princeton (tents, “axes & pick axes & hatchetts”).
• David Cheever of Charlestown (“Two Barrels of Musquit ball containing 2100 weight,” another “2900 of ball,” another “2000,” &c.).

All those gentlemen were members of the congress’s Committee on Supplies.

Barrett also kept notes of where he was storing different supplies: at the homes of his son James, Ethan Jones, Joshua Bonds, Willoughby Prescott, Abijah Brown, Thomas Hubbard, Ephraim Potter, James Chandler, Joseph Hosmer, Jonas Heywood, and so on. Again, Barrett seems to have felt that information was secure, almost twenty miles from Boston.

But Crown agents found out about those military supplies in March 1775. They gave Gen. Thomas Gage detailed information about where things were in Concord, including those four brass cannon. And on 19 April three companies of the king’s soldiers arrived at Barrett’s farm.

How all that came about, what happened next, and what mysteries remain will be the topics of my talk this Thursday, 29 September, at Minute Man National Historical Park: “Cannons in Concord, and Why the Regulars Came Looking.” That event will start at the park’s Lexington/Lincoln visitor center at 7:00 P.M., and I’ll be happy to sign copies of The Road to Concord afterward.

Bostonians from A to Z

The Boston Athenaeum has done a service to local historians by digitizing its collection of town directories, which includes publications from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.

John Norman published the first such directory in 1789 under the formal title of The Boston Directory. Containing, A List of the Merchants, Mechanics, Traders, and others of the Town of Boston; in Order to enable Strangers to find the Residence of any Person.

The booklet included a map of Boston and at the back listed the town’s public appointees, lawyers, doctors, and firefighters. The Massachusetts Bank was something new, founded in 1784, and the directory named its president and board. The directory did not have a list of selectmen or other elected officials, probably because their tenure was limited, nor of militia officers, though such lists had been a staple in pre-war almanacs.

Most of the small book was a listing of Boston inhabitants, starting with “ADAMS Samuel, Hon.”—i.e., the governor. Individuals and firms were listed almost alphabetically—i.e., all the people with surnames starting with A appeared in one section, but not in alphabetical order. The town hadn’t yet instituted street numbers as part of all addresses, so strangers looking for an individual usually still had to make their way to a particular street and ask around. Page 56, the last, is headed “OMISSIONS,” and includes people not sorted into the right sections such as “Gill Moses, Hon”—i.e., the lieutenant governor.

Though Norman proposed to publish a new edition annually, he doesn’t seem to have found enough demand since he never did another. John West issued one in 1796, choosing a biennial schedule. West’s directory was more comprehensive, or more businesspeople had come to town.

Both those early volumes were reprinted by the city of Boston as part of its turn-of-the-last-century publication of early town records, and those volumes have been on Google Books for a while. In addition, in the mid-1800s a genealogist named John Haven Dexter kept notes in a copy of the 1789 directory on what he’d learned about different individuals; the New England Historic Genealogical Society has transcribed and published that source. The Athenaeum’s choice to share page images of those and the many larger directories that followed provides a useful resource for historians and genealogists.

Among the folks I’ve looked up in those early Boston directories:

• The 1789 directory is one of the earliest pieces of evidence about Samuel “Rat-trap” Adams.
  
• The 1789 directory also listed Dr. John Pope as a cancer specialist; the 1800 listed his widow Hannah as “cancer doctor.”
• The 1798 directory included widow Sarah Russell among the town’s printers.
  
• Directories from 1796 and 1805 show former Salem newsboy Job Weedon shifting from printing to shopkeeping.