Tracking Ebenezer Dumaresque

When Dr. Nathaniel Martyn “absconded” in 1770, leaving his wife and two children with her family, he left behind another child as well.

Three years earlier, the Boston Overseers of the Poor had indentured a boy named Ebenezer Dumaresque to Martyn. That contract was due to end when the boy came of age on 25 Nov 1781, meaning he was about to turn seven when he left Boston for the rural town of Harvard.

The Boston Overseers’ file on Ebenezer, visible at Digital Commonwealth, also includes this note: “Ebenr. Dumaresque bound to John Gleason of Woburn.” Gleason’s name doesn’t appear in the Overseers’ indentures ledger, published by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts; only Nathaniel Martyn’s does. I take that paper trail to mean that the Overseers got Ebenezer back from the Martyns and then sent him out again, adding the note in his file.

I’m guessing that the boy’s new master was the John Gleason who was born in Brookline in 1720 and married in Watertown in 1740. He and his wife had children in Woburn from 1747 to 1755, and he died there after 1786.

Dr. Martyn had probably brought Ebenezer out to help around the house in 1767 as his wife was busy raising their newborn daughter. The Gleasons, in contrast, were at the end of their period of having children and might have needed farm labor to replace grown sons. But we don’t have hard evidence one way or another.

The name Ebenezer was common in eighteenth-century New England—the tenth most common male given name according to Daniel Scott Smith’s study of records from Hingham. But the name Dumaresque was quite uncommon. As long as we can keep up with the creative ways locals misspelled that surname, we can follow Ebenezer’s trail through the war years.

Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors has several entries for Ebenezer Dumaresque (Dumarsque, Dumasque, Damasque, Demasque) from Western (now Warren) in Worcester County. All those entries indicate the soldier was born about 1760, as our Ebenezer was. All but one describe him as a little over five feet tall with a dark complexion and dark hair. (One anomalous entry says he was 5'10".)

According to those state records, Ebenezer Dumaresque first served six months in late 1780 in Lt. Col. John Brooks’s regiment, then reenlisted in the spring of 1781 for three years “for bounty paid said Dumaresque by John Patrick and others, in behalf of a class of the town of Western.” He spent most of that time at West Point in New York. On 11 Nov 1782 Pvt. Dumaresque was tried by regimental court-martial for being absent without leave, but his commander pardoned him.

As of the 1790 U.S. Census, “Ebenr. Dumask” headed a household in Palmer, Massachusetts. In addition to himself, the house contained a white male aged 16 or more, a white male under age 16, and two white females.

On 23 Apr 1818, Ebenezer Dumaresque applied for a pension from the federal government as a Revolutionary War veteran. He declared under oath that in early 1781 he had signed up for three years in the 7th Massachusetts Regiment. During his service “he was engaged in no battles.” When the army shrank ”after the Restoration of Peace,” he was shuffled into another unit “under the command of Majors Porter and Preston (he thinks there was no Colonel).”

At the very end of 1783, Dumaresque stated, he was “regularly discharged under the Hand of Major General [Henry] Knox at West Point.” He kept that paperwork for more than a quarter-century until around 1810 “when under an expectation of obtaining a Soldier’s bounty land he sent his discharge to the State of Ohio by an agent” and never saw it again.

By the time he applied for a pension, Dumaresque had left Massachusetts and was living in Kingsbury, New York. He couldn’t supply testimony from any neighbors confirming his military service. All he could send with his application was a short inventory of movable property and a description of his poor health, indications of poverty as the law then required for a pension.

However, Dumaresque’s federal file also contains a July 1819 note from Alden Bradford, secretary of the commonwealth of Massachusetts. It stated:

The records in this office, relating to revolutionary services, are not later than 1780—

But, happily, for you, the Govr, who commanded 7th Regt, has a list of his men, & has furnished a certificate which is herewith forwarded

Lt. Col. John Brooks (shown above) had become the governor of Massachusetts. He personally wrote out a statement certifying that Ebenezer Dumaresque had indeed served under him in the Continental Army from early 1781 to mid-1783.

Dumaresque received his pension. At some point he moved from Kingsbury to the nearby town of Queensbury. Federal records indicate that he continued to receive his money, and to head his own household, past the 1840 census, in the year he turned eighty.

The Mystery of Dr. Martyn

As I described yesterday, in the late 1760s Nathaniel Martyn held a respected position in rural Massachusetts society.

Youngest son of the minister at Northborough, he had become a physician and landowner in Harvard and married a young woman from Bolton. They had two young children. When they needed household help, the Harvard selectmen had assured Boston officials that Dr. Martyn was a suitable person to raise an orphan boy from the port town.

And then Dr. Martyn ran away. The Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of Westborough, who had seen Nathaniel Martyn grow up, wrote in his diary on 16 Aug 1770 that the physician had “absconded.” His wife had returned to her parents with the two little children.

When I read that in the excellent Ebenezer Parkman Project website, I hoped to find other sources that filled out the Martyn family’s story. Was there another woman? Another man? Money troubles? Religious conversion? Psychiatric difficulty? I’m sad to say that I haven’t found any further comment on why Dr. Martyn left his family.

I unearthed only two tenuous leads. In the 1921 book Northborough History, the Rev. Josiah Coleman Kent wrote that Nathaniel Martyn “resided for a time in Harvard, and later went south.” That could refer to the family’s move to Bolton, just south of Harvard, or it could refer to a longer journey. This statement came with no indication of its source, and of course Kent was publishing a century and a half after the event.

That statement is, however, consistent with the one other reference to a Dr. Nathaniel Martyn in North America that I’ve found after 1770. In 1775 Robert Hodge and Frederick Shober of New York published a collection of theological essays by the Rev. Dr. Hugh Knox, and the list of subscribers included Dr. Nathaniel Martyn of Hertford, North Carolina.

As for the family Martyn left behind, information about his wife Anna and son Nathaniel is sparse. But in 1790 his daughter, then twenty-three years old, married George Caryl from the Harvard College class of 1788. Caryl was like Pamela’s father in a couple of ways: youngest son of a town minister and trained in medicine, in his case under Dr. Samuel Willard of Uxbridge.

But unlike Nathaniel Martyn, Dr. George Caryl was firmly attached to his native soil. He brought his bride home to his father’s house in the part of Dedham that would become the town of Dover in 1836. Caryl was the only doctor in that district for a long time, and he also had patients in neighboring towns.

George and Pamela Caryl had nine children between 1797 and 1808, four surviving to adulthood. Inheriting the family homestead, Dr. Caryl lived and worked in Dover until 1829. His widow lived on until 1855.

The Caryl family house, shown above, is now owned by the Dover Historical Society.

TOMORROW: What about the orphan boy?

How Natty Martyn Grew Up

Last September, we got a passing glimpse of fifteen-year-old Natty Martyn, youngest son of the minister in Northborough in 1756.

Natty had a bad sore, and his family had begun to despair for him. The Rev. John Martyn took his son to Dr. Ebenezer Dexter in the neighboring town of Middleborough, and he recovered.

Natty Martyn’s father was a Harvard graduate, though he didn’t go into the ministry until fifteen years after graduating. In the early 1760s the family also hosted the retired Harvard Hebrew instructor Judah Monis, who had married Natty’s maternal aunt. But neither Natty nor his older brothers went to college.

Instead, Nathaniel Martyn became a physician, training in the field like most other country doctors of the time. He set up a practice in the town of Harvard, where his father had been the first town clerk and filled other offices in the 1730s. The doctor was assigned “ye Sixth Seat Below” at the Harvard meetinghouse.

On 23 Dec 1765, the twenty-four-year-old Dr. Martyn married twenty-year-old Anna Townsend of Bolton. Their first child, named Michael after one of his paternal uncles, arrived in September, but died within two weeks.

In his diary for 16 June 1767, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman of Westborough recorded that he “rode by the way of Dr. Martyns to see him—and the fine Farms at Still River Corner.” Martyn had bought the large farmhouse built in 1749 by Moses Haskell. The Massachusetts Historical Commission called this property “One of Still River’s earliest and largest farms.” The house still stands on Still River Road, as shown above, though altered considerably for use as a Benedictine chapel.

When Parkman visited, Anna Martyn was expecting another child. The couple had two before the end of the decade:

• Pamela, born 24 Aug 1767.
• Nathaniel, baptized 13 Aug 1769.

There was at least one other member of the household. In May 1767, the selectmen of Harvard signed a printed form for Boston’s Overseers of the Poor certifying that Dr. Nathaniel Martyn was “a Man of sober Life and Conversation; and in such Circumstances, that we can recommend him as a fit Person to bind an Apprentice to.” On 19 November, those officials indentured a boy named Ebenezer Dumaresque to the doctor. Ebenezer was to come of age on 25 Nov 1781, meaning he was six years old when he moved out to Harvard, most likely to work as a household servant.

Sometime in 1769, it appears from real estate records, Dr. Martyn sold his property in Harvard to Peter Green, a younger physician from the Harvard class of 1766. The Martyn family moved to Bolton, Anna’s home town.

On 16 Aug 1770, the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman wrote in his diary:

Dined at Mr. Harringtons, who acquainted me with the proceedings at Bolton and with Mr. Goss’s present Case under Confinement to his Bed, by Lameness. N.B. Dr. Wait has the Care of him. The brief Story of Dr. Wait. Called at Mr. Josh. Townsends by reason of what has occurred lately relative to Dr. Nat. Martyn, who has lately absconded. His wife and two Children at Mr. Townsends.

Anna Martyn was back home in her father’s house. And Dr. Nathaniel Martyn was nowhere to be found.

TOMORROW: Can this marriage be saved?

Dr. Ebenezer Dexter Practicing Medicine in Marlborough

Ebenezer Dexter was born in 1729, son of the Rev. Samuel Dexter of Dedham.

Ebenezer chose to go into medicine, and after marrying Lydia Woods, daughter of a selectman in Marlborough, he set up his practice in that town. In 1754, the year of their marriage, Ebenezer was twenty-five and Lydia was eighteen.

We can glimpse Dr. Dexter at work in the diary of the Rev. Ebenezer Parkman in nearby Westborough. That minister is shown here, and his diary is fully transcribed and annotated at this website.

Westborough’s northern precinct, which would eventually split off as Northborough [stay with me here], had its own meeting and minister, the Rev. John Martyn. On 13 Aug 1756, Parkman wrote about his colleague’s fifteen-year-old son Nathaniel being ill:

Sarah and Suse undertake to go to Mr. Martyn’s: they return at Eve Well. They tell me Natty Martyn, tis feared, grows bad.

Twelve days later, the father traveled to see Dr. Dexter:

Mr. Martyn has carryed down his Son Natty, to Marlborough to Dr. Dexter’s, who gives great Encouragement concerning the Sore, that he Shall effect the Cure of it.

And indeed, almost a year later Parkman mentioned the son again, apparently healthy: “Natty Martyn brought a Letter from Leominster.” Nathaniel Martyn survived and eventually became a doctor himself.

(The trouble in Leominster was that the Rev. John Rogers had turned into an Arminian, or what a later generation would call a Unitarian. This required a council of other ministers and eventually an approval to allow the Leominster congregation to split. But I digress.)

Dr. Ebenezer and Lydia Dexter had four sons between 1755 and 1762: William, Samuel, John, and Jason Haven, the last named after the minister who had succeeded the doctor’s father in Dedham. Dexter also served Marlborough as the town clerk starting in 1768.

But in May 1769, Dr. Dexter, still only thirty-nine years old, fell seriously ill.

TOMORROW: Opening for a young doctor.