Commemorating the Suffolk Resolves in Milton, 31 Aug.

On 6 July 1774, sixty men from towns in Berkshire County met in Stockbridge as a county convention.

On the colony’s western end, that gathering was far from the royal governor’s troops, and also beyond the powerful Loyalists of the Connecticut River valley.

I don’t think those men had been elected by their towns, so this might have been a self-appointed group of activists. They endorsed the Solemn League and Covenant boycott, and they provided a model for a new form of resistance.

County conventions thus became another way to protest Parliament’s Coercive Acts. Like court closings, they moved from west to east, moving closer to Boston and the redcoats.

The Massachusetts Government Act arrived during that time, putting new restrictions on town meetings. But that law said nothing about county meetings because there hadn’t been any before.

On 16 August 1774, men from “Every Town & District in the County of Suffolk, Except Weymouth, Cohasset, Needham & Chelsea” met at Thomas Doty’s tavern in Stoughton. (That part of town later became Canton.) At that time Suffolk County included not only Boston but also all of modern Norfolk County extending to the Rhode Island border.

However, those men decided not to proceed formally “as Several Towns Had not Appointed Delegates for the Special Purpose of a County Meeting.” Instead, they issued a call for all towns to send such delegates to a meeting “at the House of Mr. Woodward Innholder in Dedham on Tuesday the Sixth day of September.”

The owner and likely manager of that inn was actually Richard Woodward’s wife, formerly Mrs. Deborah Ames. She had run the place as a widow from 1764 to 1772, and would run it again after she and Woodward divorced in 1784.

On 6 September, the Suffolk County delegates convened and named a large committee headed by Dr. Joseph Warren, one of the several Boston delegates, to write its resolutions. Warren was a practiced newspaper essayist, and he could also build on the resolutions adopted by Berkshire, Worcester, and Middlesex Counties.

On 9 September, the Suffolk County Convention met in Milton “at the house of Mr. Daniel Vose”—another tavern. The delegates unanimously approved the resolutions Dr. Warren had drafted.

Warren then had Paul Revere carry Suffolk County Resolutions to Samuel Adams and his other colleagues in Philadelphia. There the Continental Congress had been startled by the “Powder Alarm” scare, and its members no doubt welcomed Revere’s confirmation that Boston wasn’t in ashes and was still resisting. They endorsed the resolutions, elevating that document above the other Massachusetts county declarations.

Of the three taverns associated with the Suffolk County Convention, only the Vose house survives, albeit in a different place. It’s now headquarters of the Milton Historical Society and is called the Suffolk Resolves House. 

On Sunday, 31 August, the Milton Historical Society, the Massachusetts Freemasons, and the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation will commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Suffolk Resolves with guided tours of the Vose house, speakers, and reenactors. This event is scheduled to run from 9:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. Tickets are $10 per adult, $20 for a family of two adults and children under eighteen. Proceeds will benefit the Milton Historical Society.

“Inn-keeping was a favorite occupation”

Earlier this month, Dr. Sam Foreman shared a draft of the Suffolk Resolves, written mostly by Dr. Joseph Warren. That document is headed:

At a Convention of the Representative Comtees of the Several Towns & Districts of the County of Suffolk in the Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, on Tuesday the 6th day of Septemr 1774, at the House of Richard Woodward in Dedham,

The “House of Richard Woodward in Dedham” was a tavern at a major crossroads in the town, as shown in the map above from the Dedham Historical Register.

But does Richard Woodward deserve to have all the credit for hosting the Suffolk County Convention on that important day?

In the mid-1700s that tavern was owned by Dr. Nathaniel Ames, a physician and almanac-writer. He had won the property from relatives of his short-lived first wife in a long court battle. In 1740 he married Deborah Fisher, and they had five children, including boys named Nathaniel, Jr., and Fisher. Three of the five boys had gone or were going to Harvard when the doctor died in 1764. Deborah then became proprietor of the tavern.

Meanwhile, Richard Woodward’s wife had died in 1763, leaving him with sons of his own. The Woodwards and Ameses were both prominent Dedham families. In February 1772, eight years after the doctor’s death, Richard Woodward married Deborah Ames. A man named John Whiting wrote in his diary, “after a Long and Clost Siege, he took her.” That was how the tavern became “the House of Richard Woodward.”

In January 1773 Richard and Deborah Woodward carried on her first husband’s tradition by suing some of her relatives over an estate. Their lawyer was John Adams.

Shortly after Deborah Ames remarried, her son Nathaniel, by then a physician like his father, wrote in his diary: “Dick Woodward cuts a flash Bridegroom.” But soon his mentions of his new stepfather took a turn.

May 9 [1773]. Old Dick Woodward struck me with his saw.

May 12. Dick Woodward fined for striking me & bound to good Behavior.

On the flyleaf of a 1774 almanac:

Old Richard Woodward has declared that he will fleece our Estate as much as possible & accordingly Oct. 12 carried off several Loads of unthrashed Rye & carried off all the last years Corn & threatens to carry away the Hay out of the Barn In defiance of Law & Equity threatens to strip & waste as much as possible.

But Nathaniel fought back:

29 [Jan 1775]. Hay put into my Barn out of old Woodward’s way.

It was in that period that the Suffolk County Convention met at Woodward’s tavern—with Deborah Woodward probably doing a lot of the hosting. A Fisher family genealogy says of her:

She was a very shrewd and sensible woman, of a strong and singular cast of mind. She took a hearty interest in politics, and [in the early Federal period] hated the Jacobins devoutly. Inn-keeping was a favorite occupation with her, and she carried matters with a high hand.

Two items in the New-England Chronicle newspaper in February 1776, one an advertisement for two horses lost since “some time last September,” confirm that Richard Woodward was still officially keeping a public house in Dedham. But on 22 Mar 1784 the Independent Ledger referred to “the house of Mrs. Woodward, innholder in Dedham.”

What had happened to Richard? Over a century later Dr. Azel Ames wrote:

Deborah…had the bad taste and worst fortune to marry…one Richard Woodward, who succeeded, as there are only too many evidences, in making life miserable for her, himself and everyone else, until their separation.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found “too many evidences” of when that separation occurred, how legalized it was, or when Richard Woodward died. But by 1784 he was definitely out of the picture.

A biography of the two Dr. Nathaniel Ameses said Dedham’s oldest residents remembered Deborah Wooward’s tavern this way:

The room at the left of the entrance…was evidently the “tap room” in ancient times—the windows being screened on the inside with wooden shutters as would be proper—an heart-shaped opening being cut in each to admit the light. When the room was lighted at night, these “heart openings” were made more distinct, and “late-at-night” neighbors journeying homeward would remark, “See the light shine through Mrs. Woodward’s heart.”

Deborah Woodward continued to keep that inn, her sons living nearby as shown on the map above, until she died at the age of ninety-four. At that point the old building was torn down.