A Selection of Weekend Events

Local historical sites are offering a variety of special programs this weekend for families wishing to share more Revolutionary history with visitors or just get out of the house.

At Historic Deerfield, these culinary presentations are included with regular museum admission.

Saturday, 27 November, 9:30 to 11:00 A.M. and 12:30 to 4:00 P.M.
Hearth Cooking
See cooks prepare traditional Thanksgiving dishes over a warm open hearth. Learn about the history of harvest celebrations and the evolution of the American Thanksgiving holiday.

Saturday and Sunday, 27–28 November, 12:00 noon to 4:30 P.M.
Seek No Further: Heritage Apple Time
Apples were dried for winter keeping, pressed for cider, and covered with cloves to make decorative, aromatic objects known as pomanders. Visit the History Workshop to sample some unique apple varieties, including Westfield’s Seek No Further from the museum village’s rare tree.

The Paul Revere House in Boston’s North End has its period rooms decorated to reflect winter usage in the 17th and 18th centuries. This weekend and in December there will be author signings, free with museum admission.

Sunday, 28 November, 1:30 to 3:30 P.M.
Ben Edwards, One April in Boston
The Boston tour guide, educator, and perambulator will sign his children’s book following a boy who was a contemporary of Paul Revere (as well as a future in-law and Edwards’s ancestor).

Saturday, 11 December, 1:30 to 3:30 P.M.
Robert Martello, Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn
Prof. Martello of the Olin College of Engineering will autograph this fine study of Paul Revere as an early American industrialist and manufacturer.

During both signings David Neiman will play seasonal music on the hammered dulcimer in the Revere Room of the Visitor Center.

Finally, this is the last weekend in 2021 to visit the Lexington Historical Society’s Hancock-Clarke House and Munroe Tavern, though its Buckman Tavern will continue to be open on winter weekends. The opening hours are—

Saturday and Sunday, 27–28 November

• Buckman Tavern: 9:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
• Hancock-Clarke House: 10:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M.
• Munroe Tavern: 12:00 noon to 4:00 P.M.

Maj. Moses Ashley’s Line of Battle Restored

Historic Deerfield just announced that it had conserved a line of battle for Gen. George Washington’s Continental forces drawn up around 1780.

Maj. Moses Ashley (1749-1791) of Westfield was a Yale graduate who joined the fight as a lieutenant in April 1775. In May 1780 he wrote to his commander-in-chief from “the Highlands” in New York asking about a promotion from captain to major. Washington replied that he had to ask his state government.

Heitman’s Register of Officers of the Continental Army says Ashley was major of the 5th Massachusetts Regiment from January 1780 on, so he got his promotion—and got it backdated.

At some point, Maj. Ashley used his time to draw up a contingency plan for a large battle that might happen along the Hudson River. He sketched in each regiment with the name of its colonel and its accompanying cannon. He drew dragoons at the top, as shown above. On the other side he wrote in a decorative hand:

Moses Ashley Esq.
Major Brigade to the 2d
Massachusetts Brigade
in Service United States of
America

Historic Deerfield acquired the Ashley document at auction three years ago. Having been folded for many years, the paper was creased and split, and one segment was lost.

Paper Conservator Rebecca Johnston of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center reconnected the pieces, reduced the staining, and stabilized the document for the future. Her work was supported by the Massachusetts Society of Cincinnati, of which Maj. Ashley was an original member.

Historic Deerfield will display this document with care to preserve it. A full-size facsimile will be available for researchers at the Society of Cincinnati Library in Washington, D.C. There are also detailed images of the document here, though that site might need its security certificate updated.

The Continental Officers Inoculated in May 1776

On 24 May 1776, Dr. Isaac Foster of the Continental Army discovered that Dr. Azor Betts had inoculated four officers against smallpox, and also against Gen. George Washington’s orders.

Those men were identified in the commander’s papers as “Lt Colonel Moulton, Capt. Parks, Doctor Hart and Lieut. Brown.”

It might be no surprise those all appear to be Massachusetts officers. Not only did Massachusetts supply the bulk of the Continental Army in early 1776, but its officers still tended to follow their own counsel.

Lt. Col. Johnson Moulton (d. 1793) came from York in the district of Maine. He gained the rank of captain during the French and Indian War, and on 21 Apr 1775 he led a militia company south toward Boston. When he and those men returned home after four days, Moulton discovered that James Scamman had already started to recruit a regiment from the area, which proceeded to the siege of Boston.

In May, Moulton presented Gen. Artemas Ward with a letter from some neighbors suggesting he should be colonel and Scamman his second-in-command. Instead, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress went with Col. Scamman and Lt. Col. Moulton. Then Scamman behaved embarrassingly at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Though acquitted of the charge of “backwardness,” he left the Continental Army at the end of the year.

Moulton remained with the army, but he also remained a lieutenant colonel, assigned to the 7th Continental Regiment under Col. William Prescott. Immediately after the British evacuated Boston, Washington ordered that regiment to head to New York and start fortifying the city. On 7 April they were assigned to build breastworks on Governor’s Island.

(There was another lieutenant colonel named Moulton in the New York campaign: Stephen Moulton of Stafford, Connecticut, captured at White Plains. But in May he was representing his town in the Connecticut assembly, so he couldn’t have been getting inoculated in New York.)

Warham Parks (1752–1801) of Westfield and the Harvard College class of 1773 was a captain in Col. Ebenezer Learned’s 3d Continental Regiment. He became a major in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment at the start of 1777.

After being wounded at the Battle of Saratoga, Parks resigned his commission the following March. Washington personally asked him to remain, but he replied, “I am bound in Conciense & honor to Resign my Small Command to those who have health of Body & firmness of mind Sufficient to Carry them through the hardship and dangers of a Soldiers Life.”

Parks returned to his home town, married, and started to win elected and appointed offices. In 1782 he became the brigadier general of the Hampshire County militia and also presided over the court-martial that Col. Paul Revere requested after the Penobscot expedition. His second wife was a daughter of Nathaniel Gorham, president of the Continental Congress in 1786. Parks’s grave marker appears above.

Dr. John Hart (1751–1836) was born in Ipswich and moved to Maine for medical training and his early practice. He became surgeon in Col. Prescott’s regiment in May 1775 and served in that and other Continental regiments until June 1784. After the war he settled in Reading, served in the state senate, and was active in the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati.

(Again, it’s possible this patient was Dr. Josiah Hart of Connecticut instead, but the surgeon in Prescott’s regiment seems more likely.)

As for “Lieut. Brown,” that man is impossible to identify with certainty. As of January 1776 Prescott’s regiment contained:

• 1st Lt. Benjamin Brown (1745–1821) of Myrifield (later incorporated as Rowe), who later became a captain and served until July 1779.
• 1st Lt. Joshua Brown (1742-1817) of Stow, a veteran of the last war and another captain until mid-1779.
• 2nd Lt. Samuel Brown (1752-1819) of Concord. (Not be confused with Lt. Samuel Brown [1749-1828] of Acton, who was a prisoner at Québec at this time.)

What does identifying those men tell us about their choice to inoculate? First, most of them (or all, if the lieutenant was Benjamin Brown) came from parts of Massachusetts remote from Boston. They were thus less likely to have been exposed to smallpox or had a chance to be inoculated against it.

Second, these were officers, not enlisted men. One was a second-in-command of a regiment. Another was a doctor himself. They had all reenlisted in the Continental Army and would continue to serve on many campaigns. They were clearly committed to the cause. There’s little doubt they sought inoculation so as to be more useful for the army, not less.

Third, none of these four men died from the inoculation. At the end of June they were healthier than before.

Finally, and perhaps most important, there’s no record that these men were punished for convincing Dr. Betts to inoculate them. Some were promoted in the next couple of years. Gen. Washington even asked one to remain in the army. Even though they had disobeyed the commander-in-chief’s order, the commander-in-chief appears to have forgiven them.

TOMORROW: Who took the blame.

Henry Knox “after about three hours perseverance”

Here’s a link to the podcast recording of my conversation with Bradley Jay of WBZ last month about Col. Henry Knox and his mission to Lake Champlain to obtain more cannon for the Continental siege lines.

And here’s a timely question about Knox: Was 12 Jan 1776 the last day that he kept his diary of his mission to bring back cannon from the Lake Champlain forts?

The diary pages are visible on the Massachusetts Historical Society’s website. The last entries (pages 24-26) show Knox dealing with the Berkshire Mountains:

10th [January] reach’d [No 1,?] after have Climb’d mountains from which we might almost have seen all the Kingdoms of the Earth —

11th [January] went 12 miles thro’ the Green Woods to Blanford

It appear’d to me almost a miracle that people with heavy loads should be able to get up & down such Hills as Are here with any thing of heavy loads —

11th at Blanford we overtook the first division who had tarried here untill we came up—and refus’d going any further On accott that there were no snow beyond five or six miles further in which space there was the tremendous Glasgow or Westfield mountain to go down—but after about three hours perseverance & hiring two teams of oxen—they agreed to go

On the next page are a couple of receipts, the second apparently about those “two teams of oxen” that Knox hired:

Blanford Jany. 13. 1776—
Recd of Henry Knox eighteen shillings Lawful money for Carrying a Cannon weighing 24.3 p from this Town to Westfield being 11 Miles —

Solomon Brown

It looks to me like Knox arrived in Blandford on the 11th, catching up with men and horses he’d sent ahead. That evening or the 12th, he learned that those teamsters didn’t want to proceed because the lack of snow on the ground meant the road would be rough. In addition, they faced the steep slopes now in the town of Russell.

Knox overcame that problem with “three hours” of arguing plus two ox teams from Solomon Brown (1737-1786), a war veteran and a committee member for Blandford. Brown’s gravestone appears here at Find a Grave. I’m guessing that took place on 12 January, Knox remained in Blandford awaiting another set of men, and Brown returned to sign the receipt on 13 January.

And there are no more dated entries in that notebook.

TOMORROW: Blandford in the eighteenth century.

The Stamp Act as a Marriage Tax

Genealogists, historians of marriage, and other experts might correct me on this, but in provincial Massachusetts a new couple didn’t obtain a certificate of marriage.

Rather, they got a certificate of their intention to marry from their town clerk, who certified that the engagement had been announced from the pulpit for the requisite fifteen days (three Sundays) beforehand.

Then they could take that paper to the minister or justice of the peace (ministers seem to have become the default choice by the eighteenth century) for the actual marriage.

I looked for examples of certificates of intent to marry from eighteenth-century Massachusetts, and the closest I got, courtesy of Access Genealogy, was the example above from 1806. But hey, it’s signed by William Cooper, who was Boston’s town clerk from 1761 to 1809. So he would have signed the equivalent document in the 1760s.

[To folks at the Massachusetts Historical Society: If my notes are correct, the Willard (Knox) Papers contain the certificate that Cooper filled out for Henry Knox and Lucy Flucker on June 23, 1774. That might make a nice Object of the Month.]

I did find a number of transcriptions from town clerks’ records, showing they didn’t all follow the same linguistic formula in noting down who planned to marry in their towns. Here’s an example from Stoughton:

The Intention of Marriage Betwen Mr. Ezra Morse of Stoughton & Mrs. Susanna Guild of Walpole Entred April ye 13th 1765

From Dover:

October 1st 1786. The intention of marriage between Mr David Fuller Jr of the District of Dover and Miss Sally Gay of Dedham is this day entered with me and a certificate given that the said intention of marriage hath been made public agreeable to law

Joseph Haven District Clerk

The text of a certificate from Westfield:

This may certify that the Intention of Marriage between Mr. Zenas Noble, of Washington, and Mrs. Margaret Granger, of Westfield, hath been published in the manner the Law directs; and their names entered with me fourteen Days previous to the Date.

Westfield, Oct. 24th, 1791
Attt. P. WHITNEY, Town-Clerk.

Some clerks noted when couples registered their intention but never came to pick up their certificates, and were therefore not supposed to have gotten married.

The text of the Stamp Act makes no explicit mention of marriage, but it includes this clause:

For every skin or piece of vellum or parchment, or sheet or piece of paper, on which shall be ingrossed, written, or printed, any appeal, writ of error, writ of dower, Ad quod damnum, certiorari, statute merchant, statute staple, attestation, or certificate, by any officer, or exemplification of any record or proceeding in any court whatsoever within the said colonies and plantations (except appeals, writs of error, certiorari, attestations, certificates, and exemplifications, for or relating to the removal of any proceedings from before a single justice of the peace) a stamp duty of ten shillings.

Evidently the term “certificate, by any officer,” covered certificates of intent to marry. As a result, the Stamp Act put a ten-shilling tax on the legal act of marrying.

TOMORROW: Tax avoidance in 1765.

“Our armament here was a great curiosity.”

A couple of Boston 1775 readers have asked me whether Col. Henry Knox took any precautions to hide the artillery he moved from New York to eastern Massachusetts in 1775-76. Did he guard against Loyalists or British spies watching those cannon?

I’ve seen no indication in Knox’s or Gen. George Washington’s papers that they worried about secrecy on this mission. At that time the American cause was very popular in the New England and northern New York countryside. Few people had experienced serious deprivations from the war, the British forces were almost all confined to Boston and Québec, and drastic steps like declaring independence and allying with the French Empire were off in the future.

Furthermore, western Massachusetts was especially radical. The farmers there had been the first in the province to close their courts in 1774 to protest the Massachusetts Government Act, and they kept them closed through the whole war. Local friends of the Crown had decamped for Boston or were keeping quiet.

Even if Loyalists did see the cannon on the move, it’s unclear what they could have done with that information. They would have had to carry the news through the winter landscape and across the siege lines into Boston, or up to Québec, or perhaps to Newport. The British garrison in Boston was already holding out against some cannon; would more old guns really make a difference?

Young teamster John P. Becker’s reminiscence indicates that, far from keeping their cargo secret, Knox’s men welcomed attention in the towns along the way. About Albany, for example, Becker recalled: “Our appearance excited the attention of the Burghers.”

And in Westfield:

We then reached Westfield, Massachusetts, and were much amused with what seemed the quaintness and honest simplicity of the people. Our armament here was a great curiosity. We found that very few, even among the oldest inhabitants, had ever seen a cannon. They were never tired of examining our desperate “big shooting irons,” and guessing how many tons they weighed; others of the scientific order, were measuring the dimensions of their muzzles, and the circumference at the breach. The handles, as they styled the trunnions, were reckoned rather too short, but they considered on the whole, that the guns must be pretty nice things at a long shot.

We were great gainers by this curiosity, for while they were employed in remarking upon our guns, we were, with equal pleasure, discussing the qualities of their cider and whiskey. These were generously brought out in great profusion, saying they would be darned, if it was not their treat.

One old mortar, well known during the revolution, as the old sow, and which not many years since, was the subject of eulogy on the floor of our own Legislature, by no less a personage than Gen. [Erastus] Root, was actually fired several times by the people of Westfield, for the novel pleasure of listening to its deep toned thunders.

Col. Knox was surrounded by visitors at the inn that evening. And the introductions that took place gave to his acquaintance, hosts of militia officers of every rank and degree. Every man seemed to be an officer. What a pity, said Colonel Knox to some of us who stood near him, what a pity it is that our soldiers are not as numerous as our officers.

That sounds like Knox, but it doesn’t sound like he was trying to keep stuff quiet.

As for Becker’s memory of the “old sow,” he might have mixed up a big mortar that Knox brought east with the big mortar of that nickname that Gen. Richard Montgomery was using in the invasion of Canada at the same time. Or there might have been two “old sows.”

TOMORROW: Col. Knox and Gen. Washington.

[The photograph above shows the Henry Knox Trail monument in the center of Westfield (look on the lower right side). The big stately building was a post office but is now a restaurant. The photograph, by Henry W. Ohlhous, comes courtesy of the Historical Marker Database.]