“They fought as suits the English breed”?

Today the grave of the two British soldiers killed at Concord’s North Bridge (and part of one soldier killed in Lincoln) is in Minute Man National Historical Park. The town of Concord began the process of preserving it, so it’s well marked. There are regular ceremonies to remember those men.

Among the markers is one engraved with lines that James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) wrote after seeing the site and published in The Anti-Slavery Standard in March 1849.

The full poem has more to say about Americans than British, and reflects Lowell’s ideas of race, historical progress, and his own New England heritage:

LINES
Suggested by the Graves of Two English Soldiers on Concord Battle-ground.

The same good blood that now refills
The dotard Orient’s shrunken veins,
The same whose vigor westward thrills,
Bursting Nevada’s silver chains,
Poured here upon the April grass,
Freckled with red the herbage new;
On reeled the battle’s trampling mass,
Back to the ash the bluebird flew.

Poured here in vain;—that sturdy blood
Was meant to make the earth more green,
But in a higher, gentler mood
Than broke this April noon serene;
Two graves are here: to mark the place,
At head and foot, an unhewn stone,
O’er which the herald lichens trace
The blazon of Oblivion.

These men were brave enough, and true
To the hired soldier’s bull-dog creed;
What brought them here they never knew,
They fought as suits the English breed:
They came three thousand miles, and died,
To keep the Past upon its throne;
Unheard, beyond the ocean tide,
Their English mother made her moan.

The turf that covers them no thrill
Sends up to fire the heart and brain;
No stronger purpose nerves the will,
No hope renews its youth again:
From farm to farm the Concord glides,
And trails my fancy with its flow;
O’erhead the balanced hen-hawk slides,
Twinned in the river’s heaven below.

But go, whose Bay State bosom stirs,
Proud of thy birth and neighbor’s right,
Where sleep the heroic villagers
Borne red and stiff from Concord fight;
Thought Reuben, snatching down his gun,
Or Seth, as ebbed the life away,
What earthquake rifts would shoot and run
World-wide from that short April fray?

What then? With heart and hand they wrought,
According to their village light;
’T was for the Future that they fought,
Their rustic faith in what was right.
Upon earth’s tragic stage they burst
Unsummoned, in the humble sock;
Theirs the fifth act; the curtain first
Rose long ago on Charles’s block.

Their graves have voices: if they threw
Dice charged with fates beyond their ken,
Yet to their instincts they were true,
And had the genius to be men.
Fine privilege of Freedom’s host,
Of even foot-soldiers for the Right!—
For centuries dead, ye are not lost,
Your graves send courage forth, and might.

How Many British Soldiers Are Buried beside the North Bridge?

How many British soldiers are buried beside the North Bridge in Concord?

On some night late in 1891, George R. Brooks and other local worthies took a cranium given up by the Worcester Society of Antiquity and interred it in the patch of ground beside the bridge long marked as the grave of two redcoats.

In doing so, they believed they were restoring one of two skulls that had been removed from that grave decades before.

That would have left slightly less than two British soldiers buried there.

Those men were convinced that the phrenologist Walton Felch had dug up those skulls with the permission of the Concord selectmen back around 1840, shortly after the town had erected its obelisk monument to the fighting on 19 Apr 1775.

They were also convinced that the skull they had failed to return was damaged, based on a series of musts:

• If the two skulls were unearthed in Concord, they must have come from the grave beside the North Bridge because that was the only grave of British soldiers in town with two bodies.
• If the skulls came from the grave at the North Bridge, they must have belonged to the soldiers killed at that bridge, including the one Ammi White hit in the head with a hatchet.
• If one of those skulls came from a man killed by a hatchet blow to the head, that skull must have shown severe damage.

And thus, even though no one reported actually seeing a damaged second skull in the latter half of the 1800s, people became convinced that it was “demoralized.”

But what if the initial premise of that logical chain was wrong? Because that’s what the evidence from ante-bellum Concord says.

First of all, in 1840 schoolboy Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., went to hear the phrenologist Walton Felch at the Concord Lyceum. Right afterward, Edmund wrote in his diary that the man had the top part of the skull of a British soldier with a bullet hole through it, and that cranium had been “dug up in Lincoln,” not Concord.

Second, in 1850 Henry David Thoreau spoke with William Wheeler, who described seeing Felch dig up two skulls years before in an “almost unused graveyard in Lincoln.” Wheeler’s description of a bullet hole through one cranium matched young Edmund’s.

Third, in 1836 the town of Concord chose to erect its monument near where two soldiers had been shot and buried. Lots of people paid attention to that spot, including the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other town leaders. There was also a contingent in Concord who had wanted the monument built elsewhere. The selectmen couldn’t have authorized opening the soldiers’ graves without people in town knowing, and at least some of them criticizing the idea. There would have been no secrets.

In contrast, Lincoln had had a lot more British soldiers to bury back in April 1775. So many that local men simply carted those bodies to the town burying-ground and placed them in a single grave in the paupers’ section. By the 1830s that old cemetery was largely ignored. Lincoln didn’t put up any marker for those bodies until 1884. In sum, few people in Lincoln probably cared whether those bodies were disturbed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Lincoln’s town records from the late 1830s show the selectmen granting Felch permission to explore the cemetery. And I wouldn’t be surprised if those records say nothing about Felch’s request; the selectmen may not have cared enough to take formal action. Unlike in Concord, how to treat the remains of British soldiers in Lincoln wasn’t a monumental decision.

In the following years Felch described his skulls as those of soldiers killed in the “Battle of Concord.” Some listeners heard, or remembered, that as meaning the soldiers had died in the town of Concord. By the time Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave were asking his widow about the skulls, Felch wasn’t around to correct that idea. So those men and their Worcester Society of Antiquity colleagues understood the skulls as having come from Concord.

That mistaken belief led to museum labels and newspaper articles about the remaining skull from Concord—reportedly unearthed with the selectmen’s approval. Men from Concord started to whisper about how that reflected on them and their forefathers. They constructed the logical chain above. And ultimately we reach the moment in 1891 when Concord antiquarians were secretly digging in the dirt beside the North Bridge, not to investigate but to partially rectify a breach of etiquette from fifty years before.

But that wasn’t really necessary. The last time that skull had been in Concord, it was still healthy, even if its owner might have come under fire. That soldier didn’t die until a bullet pierced his brain in Lincoln. In 1891 the rest of that man’s body was still in Lincoln, and whatever remains of it is there now.

Buried in the grave beside Concord’s North Bridge are slightly more than two British soldiers.

“The skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge”

James H. Stark (1847–1919) was born in Britain and brought to Boston at the age of nine.

Stark became an American citizen but maintained ties with his native country, promoting immigration and friendly relations.

Like Isaiah Thomas, the Rev. Albert Tyler, Daniel Seagrave, and other men who took up studying and preserving history without a college education, Stark started out in the printing business. In his case, he mastered the new technology of electrotyping and ran the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston.

In the late 1800s Stark published several guides to the British West Indies illustrated with photographs by himself and others.

He also published books on local history through his firm: Illustrated History of Boston Harbor (1880) and Antique Views of ye Towne of Boston (1882) both reproduced many historic images of the town.

Stark might have made the biggest splash with his thick book The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution, published in 1910. Coming at the end of the Colonial Revival, he challenged the accepted American view of the Loyalists as aristocrats and traitors, highlighting their complaints of being mistreated. For this, critics charged that Stark was a historical muckraker and a controversialist, and indeed he probably was.

Among the stories Stark examined was the tale of the two British soldiers’ skulls dug up by a phrenologist. In doing so, however, he spread misinformation about that tale.

This chapter of the story started in 1908 with a man named Albert Webb coming from Worcester, England, to Worcester, Massachusetts, on a sister city project. On 31 March 1909, Webb wrote to the Boston Transcript suggesting that someone should place a larger marker near the North Bridge in Concord, commemorating the two British soldiers killed and buried nearby with some lines by James Russell Lowell.

The editor of the Transcript wrote a response endorsing the idea but also insisting that the grave had been maintained with “old New England reverence.”

Stark replied with a letter to the newspaper’s “Notes and Queries” department asking:

1. Can anyone give the names of the two British soldiers killed at Concord Bridge, or inform me it there were any papers taken from their bodies that would identify them? I have been informed that there were.

2. One of the soldiers was left wounded on the bridge; what was the name of the “young American that killed him with a hatchet”?

3. When did the selectmen of Concord give Professor Fowler permission to dig up the two bodies of the British soldiers and remove the skulls to be used for exhibition purposes?

The only response to the newspaper was: “before the alleged action of the selectmen excites the Concord people, they should insist upon his producing adequate evidence.”

But in The Loyalists of Massachusetts, Stark published this 12 April letter from Ellery B. Crane, librarian of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, as what he deemed adequate evidence:

Mr. Barton has handed your letter to me and I write to say that the skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge in Concord were once the property of this Society, we having purchased them of the Widow of Prof. Fowler, the phrenologist, who some years ago went about the country giving lectures and illustrating his subjects.

Prof. Fowler got permission to dig up those skulls from the Selectmen of Concord, and he carried them about with him and used them in his lecturing. After his death one of the members learned of them and we purchased the skulls and they were in our museum some time.

The late Senator [George F.] Hoar learning that we had them, came to know if we would be willing to return them to Concord that they might be put back in the ground from whence they were taken. As he seemed quite anxious about it, consent was given, and they were sent to Concord to be placed in their original resting place. Presume they are there at the present time.

This letter offers yet another version of our story, with two skulls returned to the grave in Concord. Otherwise, it accords with what Hoar wrote in his 1891 letter returning one skull, and with what people in Concord gossiped about according to an 1895 Boston Sunday Globe article.

But that account doesn’t match what the Rev. Albert Tyler wrote out for the Worcester Society of Antiquity in 1905, in a paper read to members by none other than Ellery B. Crane. Nor what Crane had told society members during an excursion to Concord in April 1906. Both of those accounts had recently been printed in the society’s Proceedings, presumably under Crane’s direction.

Nor does the belief that the Worcester Society of Antiquity owned two British soldiers’ skulls match the intermittent newspaper accounts in the late 1800s about its display of a single skull.

Furthermore, Stark and Crane got the name of the phrenologist wrong. Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1810–1896) were prominent proponents of that new science in the mid-1800s. (Lest we think of the Fowler brothers as total loons who did nothing for American society, they also quietly paid Walt Whitman’s costs for printing the second edition of Leaves of Grass.) But all other sources are clear that the phrenologist who lectured with British soldiers’ skulls was Walton Felch.

Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts was widely distributed. It’s useful on some points of genealogy and real estate, notoriously misleading on others, such as the engraving of Paul Revere as a bearded rider with a coonskin cap and a pistol. Stark’s book and Ellen P. Chase’s Beginnings of the American Revolution, also published in 1910, appear to be the first books to print the name of Ammi White as the young man who killed a wounded soldier at the North Bridge.

A thick book, especially one in lots of local libraries for genealogists to consult, is harder to ignore than a gossipy newspaper story. The Loyalists of Massachusetts turned the tale of Concord’s selectmen letting a phrenologist make off with the two soldiers’ skulls into a long-lasting part of the town’s local lore.

Even though that lore was based on a mistake.

TOMORROW: Back to the disinterment.

The Rumor of a “Demoralized” Skull

When Sen. George Frisbie Hoar sent the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s skull of a British soldier to friends in his home town of Concord, he also wrote about the other soldier’s skull that phrenologist Walton Felch had collected.

Once again I’m relying on the summary of Hoar’s 27 Nov 1891 letter to George M. Brooks in Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775: A Historiographical Study.

Hoar’s understanding was that:

In his letter to Mr. Brooks, Senator Hoar further explained that the skull was purchased from the widow of Walton Felch along with another skull. Both skulls were subsequently donated to the Worcester Antiquarian Society by the purchasers, a Mr. [Daniel] Seagrave and others. One of the skulls featured a bullet hole which passed through the head “from side to side”. The other skull, in the words of Mr. Seagrave, was much “demoralized”.

That term apparently meant “damaged,” with an overlay of disapproval.

Furthermore:

According to Hoar’s 1891 letter to Brooks, the “demoralized” skull passed into the hands of a Dr. Bates, who died without leaving a family. Apparently, Mr. Seagrave tried to locate the “demoralized” skull without success.

The Concord gossip published in the Boston Sunday Globe in 1895 offered a somewhat different story. According to this article, evidently based on conversations with people in Concord rather than documentary sources and not checked with men in Worcester, Seagrave and the phrenologist Felch (misspelled “Felt”) knew each other from “a lodge.” (Both men were Freemasons, but from different eras.) Seagrave bought both skulls from Felch’s widow, one showing bullet holes and the other “shattered as if with an axe.” Seagrave then gave the second skull “to a surgeon in Worcester,” and it got lost.

The Rev. Albert Tyler contradicted the major points of both Hoar’s private letter and the Globe article (which he’d probably seen) when he wrote out his own recollection for the Worcester Society of Antiquity in 1905. Tyler had been Seagrave’s business partner for years. Tyler was also, as he told it, a crucial actor in the effort to locate the soldiers’ skulls: he remembered seeing a phrenologist named Felch display those skulls, and he spotted Felch’s name decades later around 1875. But when he and Seagrave met the man’s widow, she had only one skull in her possession.

According to Tyler, Dr. Joseph N. Bates later disclosed that he had received that second skull from Felch back in 1872, when the phrenologist/hydrotherapist was dying. After Bates himself died in 1883, nobody could locate it. What’s more, Tyler never indicated that Seagrave nor anyone else saw that second skull in Bates’s custody, and Tyler wrote nothing about it being damaged. Hoar evidently believed that Daniel Seagrave had seen and helped to buy that skull, but by Tyler’s telling that was impossible.

Only three people left descriptions of seeing Felch with his skulls and casts:

• Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., in 1840 described the bullet hole through one cranium but wrote nothing about another skull being damaged.
• William Wheeler in 1850, as recorded by Henry David Thoreau, related how he “saw a bullet hole through & through one of the [two] skulls” when Felch dug them up, but said nothing about damage to the other.
• Albert Tyler in 1905, recalling a lecture he attended around 1840, wrote down no specific details about the skulls he saw.

Thus, there’s very little solid evidence that the second British soldier’s skull Felch owned was badly damaged. Regardless, the men of Concord convinced themselves that the Worcester Society of Antiquity or its members had at one point owned just such a “demoralized” artifact but then let it get away.

TOMORROW: A historical muckraker.

(The picture of Daniel Seagrave above was made by Travis Simpkins, a professional artist who specializes in, among other things, portraits of Freemasons.)

“Grave of British Soldiers Opened”

In the late 1800s, the Google Book Ngram Viewer shows, there was a spike in the use of the phrase “Old Concord.” That seems to be an effect of the Colonial Revival and nostalgia for pre-industrial America, including not only the Revolution but the “American Renaissance.” Margaret Sidney wrote a book with that title.

On 25 Aug 1895, the Boston Sunday Globe played off that newish trope with an anonymous article headlined “IN NEW CONCORD.”

The subheads were:

Only Pilgrims Preserve its Old Traditions.
“Immortals” Seem as Remote as Actors in Revolutionary Drama.
Grave of British Soldiers Opened—Changes Among Inhabitants.

The article was gossipy, not easy to follow unless one already knew a bit about Concord already. There were inside anecdotes about the Hoar family. After discussing the 1889 attempt to break into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave, the journalist segued to:

There was another and more successful violation of a grave in Concord a long time ago, the story of which has never been published, and which will be interesting to the recent visitors to the revolutionary sites there. . . .

Somewhat more than 50 years ago a phrenologist named Felt [sic] was lecturing upon his science in Concord. The story runs that he obtained permission from some authority to open and examine the soldiers’ grave, which he interpreted as a license to make what professional use he pleased of the remains therein.

At all events, Felt took the two skulls from the spot and carried them off, and as far as is known, nobody in Concord was any the wiser for nearly half a century!

Only five or six years since Mr George Tolman of the Concord historical society heard to his surprise that a skull marked as one of the British soldiers buried at Concord was in the museum of antiquities at Worcester.

Investigation showed that it was given by Mr Daniel Seagrave, a member of the society, and a worthy citizen of that town, still living. He had been a fellow-member of a lodge with Felt, and when the latter died at Natick [sic] many years ago he had assisted the widow with the funeral expenses, and had bought these two skulls, one of which was pierced with a musket shot and the other shattered as if with an axe. The shattered skull had been given to a surgeon in Worcester, and had been placed with other bones, so that it was not recognizable.

The other was courteously and promptly given up by the Worcester society, and was reverently restored to its resting place by Judge [George M.] Brooks, the president of the Concord antiquarian society.

As a verification of the story of the abstraction of the heads, which seemed perfectly coherent and plausible, it may be said that, though the other bones were distinctly seen, no traces of the skulls, the most enduring portion of the human skeleton, were found.

George Tolman (1836–1909) was secretary of the Concord Antiquarian Society and wrote many articles for that organization. Here’s a collection of his work and others catalogued under the title of one paper only. Though Tolman’s name didn’t come up in yesterday’s source, he may well have been involved in an effort to get the skull from Worcester.

Like George F. Hoar, Tolman appears to have been protective of his town’s reputation. This page shows him stating that a British soldier whom militiaman Amos Barrett described as “almost dead” was “quite dead a few moments later” without reporting that the change was brought about by a young local striking that wounded soldier’s head with a hatchet.

Whoever wrote the Boston Sunday Globe article wasn’t so reticent. In fact, that journalist didn’t just describe how a young man delivered “a coup de grace with an axe.” He or she was also, so far as I can tell, the first person to name that man in print as Ammi White.

The upshot of this article is that the secret reburial of the British soldier’s skull in 1891 was a matter of public record, or at least public gossip, in 1895.

TOMORROW: A “demoralized” skull?

(The photo above, courtesy of the New York Public Library and Lost New England, shows Concord’s North Bridge as it looked around 1885, before it was pared back to look like the bridge in the Amos Doolittle print.)

“The skull should be returned secretly to the grave”

For this part of the story of the British soldier’s skull I’m relying on Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775: A Historiographical Study, prepared for Minute Man National Historical Park and more widely published by Sinclair Street Publishing in 2011.

Sabin’s appendix, “The British Skull Controversy,” reviews a great deal of evidence. In this series I’m quoting additional sources, and my conclusion will be somewhat different.

In particular, Sabin summarized a 27 Nov 1891 letter from George Frisbie Hoar to George M. Brooks (1824–1893, shown here), president of the Concord Antiquarian Society. That organization operates the fine Concord Museum.

As I described yesterday, at that time Hoar was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, living in Worcester after growing up in Concord. He was a past president of the American Antiquarian Society. He had clout.

As for Brooks, he was a probate judge and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The two men also had a personal tie: Brooks’s half-sister Caroline had married Hoar’s older brother Ebenezer. In fact, all three of those men had served in the U.S. House, two at a time.

According to Sabin:

In his letter to Mr. Brooks, Senator Hoar stated that he was forwarding to Mr. Brooks a box containing a skull sent to him by the president of the Worcester Society of Antiquity. Senator Hoar went on to explain that the Worcester Society of Antiquity felt that the skull should be returned to the grave in Concord from which they believed it had been taken years before.

Other sources clarify that the Worcester Society of Antiquity came to that decision only under pressure from Hoar. He was a member but “never an active member.” The Rev. Albert Tyler wrote that the senator “interested himself” in the skull. In 1906 society librarian Ellery B. Crane said “the late Hon. George F. Hoar induced its return to the authorities at Concord,” and three years later wrote that Hoar asked “if we would be willing to return [the skulls] to Concord. . . . he seemed quite anxious about it.” And, as I said, Hoar had clout.

Sabin’s appendix continued:

Hoar sent the skull with the bullet hole through it to Mr. Brooks under the condition that the skull be restored to its burial place. In the closing paragraph of his letter to Brooks, Hoar expressed his belief that the skull should be returned secretly to the grave without public notice or newspaper coverage. He feared that if the newspapers learned of the skull business the subject would become a topic of ridicule.

In fact, I suspect avoiding ridicule was Hoar’s major motivation from the start. Not jokes about the current action but derision for the Concord selectmen and town leaders back in the 1830s—in other words, Hoar’s revered father and his friends.

What would people say if the public found out that, shortly after erecting a monument near the two soldiers’ grave, Concord had authorized a a quack scientist to dig up those bodies and go off with their skulls? How many thousands of people had visited that monument, including the President of the U.S. of A. in 1875, without being told the full story?

Sabin wrote:

According to the late Lincoln amateur archeologist, Roland Wells Robbins, Senator Hoar’s original 1891 letter to Mr. Brooks contained a notation at the bottom which said “Returned to the grave, December the fifth, 1891”. This notation was signed by E.R. Hoar [the senator’s brother] and Henry L. Shattuck.

However, the Concord Museum couldn’t locate that document for Sabin when he wrote, and the copy of the letter at Minute Man Park doesn’t show the note.

But let’s assume that detail is accurate. In December 1891, some of Concord’s leading men quietly dug into the soldiers’ grave near the Concord Monument, inserted the partial skull sent from Worcester, and covered it up. Nobody would ever know, right?

There were three problems with George F. Hoar’s plan for dealing with this skull. First, he was mistaken about many significant details, starting with what grave it had actually come from.

Second, the lack of public documentation produced a vacuum that sucked in even more misinformation.

And third, Concord’s cranial reinterment stayed out of the newspapers for less than four years.

TOMORROW: Cover blown.

“The most prominent addition made to the cabinet”

On 2 Feb 1877, the Boston Daily Advertiser took note of “an exhibition of antiquarian relics” temporarily open “in the rooms of the National History Society of Worcester.”

The article didn’t provide the name of the group that had organized the exhibit, the Worcester Society of Antiquity, which received its state charter that year.

All the objects on display were probably owned by members. Most were items on paper, including books, deeds, commissions, newspapers, and autographs unfortunately clipped out of documents of greater interest. 

The exhibit did include “Spurs worn by General [Artemas] Ward in the Revolutionary war.” And:

the skull of a British soldier from Concord, April 19, 1775.

The Worcester Natural History Society, founded in 1825 as the Worcester Lyceum of Natural History, went on to open the New England Science Center, now called the EcoTarium.

Meanwhile, the Worcester Society of Antiquity started renting its own space in the building of the Worcester National Bank for its meetings and growing collection. On 6 Apr 1881 the Worcester Evening Gazette reported on the group’s monthly gathering, saying:

The most prominent addition made to the cabinet was the skull of a British soldier, shot at Concord Bridge in the first fight of the Revolution. Two were killed and buried where they fell. In 1844 [sic], by permission of the Selectmen, the bodies were exhumed by a resident, whose widow, who is in reduced circumstances transferred the relic to the Society. The members made up quite a collection of money for the donor. The other skull is in possession of Dr. J. N. Bates of this city.

The soldier’s skull had actually been dug up before 1840 because Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., saw Walton Felch display it that year. Sewall also heard that the skull had been dug up in Lincoln, not Concord, and Henry David Thoreau recorded the circumstances later in his journal.

The 1881 article suggests that Daniel Seagraves had just formally donated the skull to the society. As discussed yesterday, Dr. Joseph N. Bates died in 1883, and no one could find the second skull among his effects.

Folks might uncover other newspaper mentions of the British soldier’s skull on display in Worcester in the late 1800s. These are the only two I came across. Notably, they show no squeamishness about displaying human remains.

After a generous gift from a member and some fundraising, the Worcester Society of Antiquity opened its own building on Salisbury Street in 1892. The organization became the Worcester Historical Society in 1919 and the Worcester Historical Museum in 1978. Ten years after that, it moved into its present building on Elm Street.

But the British soldier’s skull was never exhibited in those museums.

Some people didn’t like the thought of that British soldier’s skull being separated from his body.

TOMORROW: Back to Concord.

“A brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier”

At the end of yesterday’s post, the Worcester printers and antiquarians Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave confirmed with Nancy Felch that her late husband had lectured about phrenology.

That conversation happened in the mid-1870s, with the men asking about events about thirty-five years before. In the intervening years Walton Felch had been most active as a hydropathic physician (and amateur poet), but he had indeed been a phrenologist.

As related by Tyler in 1905, the two men pressed on to their real interest: Had Felch owned the skulls of two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775?

She answered “Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

She said she had them in possession, and they were packed away among other things useless to her at her old residence in Barre.

The thought of their value to the collection of this then young [Worcester] Society [of Antiquity] instantly occurred, and the writer [Tyler] asked her if she was willing to part with them. She replied that if we wanted them, we could have them in welcome.

So in due time a box containing the whole phrenological outfit was received at our office. . . .

We found in the collection only one of the two skulls—the absence of the other the widow could not explain.

Walton Felch’s phreonological material doesn’t appear on the inventory of his estate, which might reflect its low market value in 1872.

Though Tyler’s reminiscence was silent on this point, it seems clear that the antiquarians offered Nancy Felch some payment for those goods. A local newspaper article from 1881 said, “The members made up quite a collection of money for the donor,” she being “in reduced circumstances.” A Boston article from 1895, while getting several details wrong, stated that Daniel Seagrave “assisted the widow with the funeral expenses.” I suspect Seagrave bought the material, expecting to give the skull to the society when it had a place to keep it.

The widow Felch finally died in Barre in 1896. Her maiden name was Brigham; the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s proceedings credit Dr. F. K. and F. A. Brigham with donating “Pam[phlets], Papers, Hand-Bills and Plaster Casts belonging to the late Walton Felch, phrenologist” in 1897. That suggests she may not have located all her late husband’s phrenological material in the 1870s, but eventually the society got all that survived.

The society’s published record of its meeting on 5 June 1877 says:

Mr. Charles R. Johnson gave a brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier who was killed at the battle of Concord, April 19th, 1775, now in the possession of a member of this Society.

That sketch was not printed with the proceedings, and the member who possessed that relic was still anonymous.

Meanwhile, Tyler was still interested in the other skull. His story went on:

In a casual conversation with the late Dr. Joseph N. Bates [of Barre] there was another “happening.” He was a collector of antique things, and when the discovery of the skull was mentioned to him, and the loss of the other one, he smiled and said, “I have got that one; I attended Mr. Felch in his last sickness and he gave it to me!”

Dr. Bates died; his brother, Dr. George Bates, was his executor; inquiry was made of him concerning the second skull, but nothing ever came of it. It is probably lost beyond recovery.

Dr. Joseph N. Bates (1811–1883) appears above, courtesy of the Roster and Genealogies of the 15th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Back in 1840, Edmind Quincy Sewall, Jr., had described how one of the skulls ”was only the upper half of the head” displaying a “bullet hole.” He didn’t take note of the other at all. I suspect that it was intact and undistinguished, though I’ll note later statements to the contrary. If I’m right, the skull that Dr. Bates took looked like any other specimen of the cranium and was thus easily overlooked after he died.

TOMORROW: Getting to see the skull.

“The healing power of Mesmerism and Pure Water”

At the end of the year 1840, Walton Felch, “Teacher of the Science of PHRENOLOGY, otherwise known as the author of a new theory of language,” came to Worcester.

Felch’s advertisement in the Worcester Palladium, illustrated with a man’s profile, stated that he had “been employed, within the last 2 years, to deliver nearly 40 courses of from six to eight Lectures, before not less than 11 or 12,000 persons.”

He now offered the people of Worcester his expertise on:

Phrenology, and its Application
to Government, Education, Social Intercourse, the Philosophy of Language, and of Rhetoric, and the Moral, Intellectual, and Physical Improvement of Mankind.

And the first lecture in the Town Hall was absolutely free, if that’s how you wanted to spend the evening of 25 December.

In April 1842 Felch offered eight lectures on phrenology in Boston’s North End, followed by seven in the vestry of the Fifth Universalist Church. After that, notices of his talks stop appearing in newspapers.

Felch continued to show an interest in phrenology. In November 1851, he assisted another practitioner, Dr. Noyes Wheeler, in lectures in Boston and then served as “chairman” of a meeting of Wheeler’s friends voting him a commendation.

By that time, however, Walton Felch had moved on to some other forms of healing. The first sign of this appears in a curious stretch of newspaper items in 1847 that stars with the 26 March Barre Gazette report of a robbery of James H. Desper’s store of goods and silver worth about $112.

Two weeks later, the Barre Patriot reported that “Dr W. Felch” had helped to found the Barre Falls Lyceum for the “easterly part of town.” He became its president, and Desper was steward. (I can’t help but wonder if that was the result of some dispute within the Barre Lyceum.)

On 28 May the Barre Gazette ran a notice saying:

Veto! Veto!! Veto!!!!

I, JAMES H. DESPER of Barre, having lately heard a variety of Reports apparently designed to raise a public prejudice against Dr. W. Felch, and theredy [sic] hinder him from giving proofs of the healing power of Mesmerism and Pure Water as applied by himself;—1st, that he was turned out of my house; 2d, that he injured the health of my wife and others while boarding here;—3d, that he has been suspected of breaking open our store, &c. &c. I hereby give notice, and my wife sets her signature with mine, that all these reports are most villainous falsehoods; which character, we doubt not, is common to all the reports against the same individual. . . .

And the enemies of reform ought to know that persecution is very much like a kicking gun—there is only one thing certain about it—that is, the kicking over of the fool that fires it off.

“Pure Water” was a sign that Felch, now styling himself a physician, had adopted hydrotherapy as his principal field.

In 1850 the Water-Cure Journal and Herald of Reform reported that “Dr. W. Felch” had just opened the Green Mountain Water-Cure in North Adams. That year’s U.S. Census located Felch in Adams.

In 1854 both the Water-Cure Journal and William Garrison’s Liberator told readers that Dr. Felch was the physician at the new Cape Cod Water-Cure in Harwichport. “Ellen M. Smith, (a young lady of medical education,)” was his assistant, though elsewhere listed as a hydropathic physician herself.

To be sure, the Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser for 28 Jan 1854 said “Dr. W. FELCH, of Cambridge,” was lecturing every Sunday “on the Philosophy and Evidence of Ghost-seeing.” I can’t say for sure that was Walton Felch, but the 1855 state census and 1860 federal census found him and his second wife Nancy in Boston. His son Hiram had become a city official.

(I’m assuming Walton Felch was not the “W. Felch” quoted in advertisements for “Dr. Hill’s Cordial Balm of Syriacum” in 1855, stating he “had the misfortune to contract the veneral affection of the most aggravated character.” Mostly because this writer had nothing to say about his own medical knowledge.)

By 1870 Hiram Felch had moved out to Boxborough, and Walton and Nancy were back in the Coldbrook Springs part of Oakham.

In 1872, now over eighty years old, Felch made his will. He left his books to be divided equally among Nancy and three grown children and his real estate to be sold to support his widow.

Walton Felch died in Boxborough later that year, apparently visiting his son; his body was returned to “Coldbrook” for burial. That May, the Massachusetts Spy reported that the man’s estate included $700 in real estate and $300 in personal property.

TOMORROW: But what happened to the British soldiers’ skulls?

“Dug up–and took away two skulls”

In the summer of 1840, shortly after twelve-year-old Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., got to see part of a British soldier’s skull with a bullet hole through it, his teacher John Thoreau proposed marriage to his sister, Ellen Sewall.

The Rev. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., opposed that union. Then Edmund’s other teacher, Henry David Thoreau, proposed marriage to Ellen as well. And the Thoreau family drama built from there.

In the decade that followed, John Thoreau died of tetanus. Henry moved in with the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson, then moved out to a cabin in Walden Woods, then moved back in. He became a published author. He spent time in jail for protesting the Fugitive Slave Act by refusing to pay his taxes.

During those years, Henry David Thoreau kept a diary. In the late spring of 1850 he wrote this entry:

I visited a retired–now almost unused graveyard in Lincoln to-day where (5) British soldiers lie buried who fell on the 19th April ’75. Edmund Wheeler—grandfather of William—who lived in the old house now pulled down near the present—went over the next day & carted them to this ground—

A few years ago one Felch a Phrenologist by leave of the select men dug up–and took away two skulls

The skeletons were very large—probably those of grenadiers. Wm Wheeler who was present–told me this—He said that he had heard old Mr. Child, who lived opposite–say that when one soldier was shot he leaped right up his full length out of the ranks & fell dead. & he Wm Wheeler–saw a bullet hole through & through one of the skulls.

There were multiple families named Child in Lincoln around 1775, so it’s hard to identify which one gave that description of the dying redcoat to Wheeler.

The skull with the bullet hole was undoubtedly the same one that young Edmund Quincy Sewall had seen at the Concord Lyceum in 1840. The schoolboy had even recorded that it had come from Lincoln. Perhaps another of the skulls put out for the phrenologist was also from a regular’s body.

Concord had built a large monument near the gravesite of the first two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775. Those weren’t the only redcoats buried in that town, but those two bodies were the most significant because they showed the Americans effectively fighting back.

In contrast, more regulars had died on 19 April in Lincoln, but that town was less concerned about memorializing them. Some soldiers were buried near where they fell, or near the houses where they died days later. Those graves weren’t marked, even with “rough stones” as originally in Concord. It was up to men like William Wheeler to pass on the increasingly vague knowledge of where those bodies lay.

As for the British soldiers in the town burying-ground, Abram English Brown’s Beneath Old Roof-Trees (1896) would quote Mary Hartwell of Lincoln about the aftermath of the battle:

I could not sleep that night, for I knew there were British soldiers lying dead by the roadside; and when, on the following morning, we were somewhat calmed and rested, we gave attention to the burial of those whom their comrades had failed to take away.

The men hitched the oxen to the cart, and went down below the house, and gathered up the dead. As they returned with the team and the dead soldiers, my thoughts went out for the wives, parents, and children away across the Atlantic, who would never again see their loved ones; and I left the house, and taking my little children by the hand, I followed the rude hearse to the grave hastily made in the burial-ground.

I remember how cruel it seemed to put them into one large trench without any coffins. There was one in a brilliant uniform, whom I supposed to have been an officer. His hair was tied up in a cue.

In 1884 the town of Lincoln installed a marker in that cemetery stating simply:

FIVE
BRITISH SOLDIERS
SLAIN APRIL 19, 1775
WERE BURIED HERE

The approximate locations of other soldiers’ graves along the Battle Road in Lincoln have also been marked now.

But the diaries of Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., and Henry David Thoreau tell us that parts of the soldiers’ bodies were removed from the Lincoln burying-ground over forty years before the town marked the remains.

TOMORROW: To advance the cause of science.

“One of the skulls was that of a British soldier”

Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. (1828–1908), was the son of the Unitarian minister at Scituate. Both father and son bore the surnames of two of Massachusetts’s eminent families.

The Rev. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., had studied for the ministry with the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley in Concord. There he had met his wife, introduced by two members of the Thoreau family.

At the age of nine, Edmund started keeping a journal, on the advice of Bronson Alcott. He kept up this habit for his whole adult life but, as with John Quincy Adams, had trouble maintaining the momentum at first.

In the spring of 1840 Edmund started to attend a boarding school in Concord, living with his teachers: the brothers John and Henry David Thoreau. They reenergized his journal-keeping for that season.

The American Antiquarian Society has shared transcripts of Edmund’s childhood journals, including this entry from 1840:

April 1st. I had a nice sail on the river yesterday after school. Messrs John and Henry T[horeau]. rowed and Jesse [Harding] and I were passengers.

We went up the river against the wind and then sailed down to the monument where we got out with the intention of all embarking again, but Mr. J and Jesse being near the monument and Mr H. and I near the boat we jumped in and went across to the abutment of the former bridge on the opposite side.

I suppose that we should have come back for them if they had staid but they went off with the sail which we had left on the bank. Mr. H. rowed up the river a little way and got out. We had not the keys of the boat and should have been obliged to leave her without being securely fastened or have hauled her up on the shore if Joseph had not come down with the keys. He got two wet feet for his pains.

Three years after Concord had dedicated its monument to the 19 Apr 1775 fight, that obelisk and the nearby “abutment of the former bridge” were landmarks for boaters. But because there was no longer a bridge nearby, once the Thoreau brothers and their pupils disembarked on opposite sides they couldn’t easily get back together.

That same entry in Edmund’s diary reported:

We then went to the Lyceum expecting that a Phrenologist would lecture. His apparatus was there but the lecturer had not arrived. A man there set out his casts and several real skulls on the desk but immediately put them back again.

One of the skulls was that of a British soldier who fell in the Battle of Concord. It was dug up in Lincoln. It was only the upper half of the head. There was the bullet hole through which the ball which killed him had passed.

A Mr. Haskins lectured on Roger Williams the founder of Rhode Island—a description of his life. Bought 2 cents worth of burnt almonds going home.

In one busy spring day, young Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., had seen the gravesite of two British soldiers and the half the skull of a third. Plus, burnt almonds!

TOMORROW: A walk to Lincoln.

“About erecting a monument on the battle-ground”

In his 1835 History of the Town of Concord, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that the spot by the former North Bridge where two British soldiers lay buried “deserves to be marked by an ever-enduring monument,” not just two rough stones that only locals could recognize.

On 7 Dec 1835, the Boston Evening Transcript apparently reported that the town was running with that idea:

We learn from a friend who recently visited Old Concord, that the inhabitants of that town are about erecting a monument on the battle-ground, on the spot were the two first British soldiers fell and where they were buried, and where their grave-stones still are.

The land belonged to the reverend and venerable Dr. Thayer, now in his 83d year, and still continues in the ministry, who has given it to the town for that purpose.

I wrote “apparently” because the newspaper database I use includes only two of the four pages of that issue of the Evening Transcript, but other newspapers quoted that article the next day.

The 8 December Boston Courier also had the pleasure of pointing out, “For ‘Dr. Thayer,’ we presume the Transcript intended to say Dr. RIPLEY.” And indeed that evening’s Transcript acknowledged the error.

It was a curious mistake since at that point the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley (shown above) had been Concord’s preeminent clergymen longer than most people had been alive. He had succeeded the Rev. William Emerson in 1778 and was still watching over the town almost sixty years later.

The Evening Transcript’s brief report also left out how Concord had started to build a monument to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1825. But back then voters had chosen to locate that landmark in the town center rather than where any fighting had taken place. Some objected to the location, or to spending the money, and then a bonfire damaged the cornerstone.

Robert Gross lays out that drama in The Transcendentalists and Their World, so I don’t have to go over it here.

The upshot is that Concord finished building a monument out by the remains of the North Bridge in 1836. Its inscription was composed by a committee of local worthies including Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Rep. Samuel Hoar. It was dedicated in 1837; at that ceremony the public first heard Emerson’s phrase “the shot heard ’round the world.”

The three points I want to emphasize about the building of that monument are:

• The obelisk wasn’t just coincidentally where the two British soldiers were buried. It was located at that spot because those soldiers’ remains lay nearby.
• The creation of the monument attracted attention from Boston and neighboring towns. Concord’s leading citizens were involved. The Rev. Dr. Ripley, who lived till 1841, was especially interested.
• There were also people in Concord who had reasons to look askance at the new erection, and would have been happy to share embarrassing stories about it.

I’ll come back to those points in a few days.

TOMORROW: A day on the Concord River.

“Two rough stones mark the spot”

Back in 2013, Boston 1775 published a series of postings about the British soldiers killed at the North Bridge in Concord, and what happened to their bodies.

Based on reports from army officers, the royal authorities complained in print that a soldier left wounded at the bridge had been “scalped” and otherwise mutilated.

The Massachusetts Provincial Congress vigorously denied that charge. It published this deposition, taken down by justice of the peace Duncan Ingraham:

We, the subscribers, of lawful age, testify and say, that we buried the dead bodies of the King’s troops that were killed at the North-Bridge in Concord, on the nineteenth day of April, 1775, where the action first began, and that neither of those persons were scalped, nor their ears cut off, as has been represented.

Zechariah Brown,
Thomas Davis, jun.

Concord, May 11th, 1775.

Privately, however, militiamen who had been at the bridge deplored what they had seen. To begin with, that soldier had still been alive. Thomas Thorp of Acton recalled in 1835: “I saw him sitting up and wounded, as we had passed the bridge.” His killing “was a matter of horror to us all.”

In June 1775 the Rev. William Gordon acknowledged in print that “A young fellow…very barbarously broke his scull and let out his brains, with a small axe.” Gordon did not excuse that act, but he did insist it wasn’t scalping.

Still, Gordon’s source, the Rev. William Emerson of Concord, and other locals kept the young killer’s name secret. Charles Handley of Acton recalled: “The young man man who killed him told me, in 1807, that it had worried him very much; but that he thought he was doing right at the time.” It took more than a century before his name came out: Ammi White.

As for the dead soldiers, in 1827 the Concord minister Ezra Ripley wrote: “The two British soldiers killed at the bridge were buried near the spot where they fell, both in one grave. Two rough stones mark the spot where they were laid.”

In 1793 the town of Concord built a new bridge downstream. The span of the old bridge was dismantled, but some end portions remained. The pieces on the south side served as another landmark reminding locals where the two British men were buried.

TOMORROW: Erecting a monument.

“When forty-two countrymen Sure bid their friends adieu.”

Ezra Lunt and Henry-Walter Tinges printed the Essex Journal in Newburyport with the financial backing of Isaiah Thomas, who made a hasty move from Boston to Worcester in April 1775.

On 26 May, the Essex Journal published this verse in a section of the back page titled “The Parnassian Packet”:

A Funeral ELEGY, to the Immortal Memory of those Worthies, who were slain in the Battle of CONCORD, April 19, 1775.

AID me ye nine! my muse assist,
A sad tale to relate,
When such a number of brave men
Met their unhappy fate.
At Lexington they met their foe
Completely all equip’d,
Their guns and swords made glitt’ring show,
But their base scheme was nipp’d.
Americans, go drop a tear
Where your slain brethren lay!
O! mourn and sympathize for them!
O! weep this very day!
What shall we say to this loud call
From the Almighty sent;
It surely bids both great and small
Seek GOD’s face and repent.
Words can’t express the ghastly scene
That here presents to view,
When forty-two brave countrymen
Sure bid their friends adieu.
To think how awful it must seem,
To hear widows relent
Their husbands and their children
Who to the grave was sent.
The tender babes, nay those unborn,
O! dismal cruel death!
To snatch their fondest parents dear,
And leave them thus bereft.
O! Lexington, your loss is great!
Alas! too great to tell,
But justice bids me to relate
What to you has befell.
Ten of your hardy, bravest sons,
Some in their prime did fall;
May we no more hear noise of guns
To terrify us all.
Let’s not forget the Danvers race
So late in battle slain,
Their courage and their valor shown
Upon the crimson’d plain.
Sev’n of your youthful sprightly sons
In the fierce fight were slain,
O! may your loss be all made up,
And prove a lasting gain.
Cambridge and Medford’s loss is great,
Though not like Acton’s town,
Where three fierce military sons
Met their untimely doom.
Menotomy and Charlestown met
A sore and heavy stroke,
In losing five young brave townsmen
Who fell by tyrant’s yoke.
Unhappy Lynn and Beverly,
Your loss I do bemoan,
Five of your brave sons in dust doth lye,
Who late were in their bloom.
Bedford, Woburn, Sudbury, all,
Have suffer’d most severe,
You miss five of your choicest chore,
On them let’s drop a tear.
Concord your Captain’s fate rehearse,
His loss is felt severe,
Come, brethren, join with me in verse,
His mem’ry hence revere.
O ’Squire Gardiner’s death we feel,
And sympathizing mourn,
Let’s drop a tear when it we tell,
And view his hapless urn.
We sore regret poor Pierce’s death,
A stroke to Salem’s town,
Where tears did flow from ev’ry brow,
When the sad tidings come.
The groans of wounded, dying men,
Would melt the stoutest soul,
O! how it strikes thro’ ev’ry vein.
My flesh and blood runs cold.
May all prepare to meet their fate
At GOD’s tribunal bar,
And may war’s terrible alarm
For death us now prepare.
Your country calls you far and near,
America’s sons ’wake,
Your helmet, buckler, and your spear,
The LORD’s own arm now take
His shield will keep us from all harm,
Tho’ thousands gainst us rise,
His buckler we must sure put on,
If we would win the prize.

This tribute to the local men killed the previous month started with the town of Lexington, not just because redcoats had fired the first fatal shots there but because that town lost more men than any other.

Seven Danvers men were killed in and around Jason Russell’s house in Menotomy, so that town got the next mention—which the newspaper’s Essex County audience probably appreciated.

Eventually the poet got to individuals, naming a couple of men at the top of society—Capt. James Miles of Concord and Isaac Gardiner, Esq., of Brookline—and Benjamin Pierce of Salem, also killed at the Russell House. Other dead officers went unnamed, however.

Ezekiel Russell printed this poem at the bottom of his “Bloody Butchery of the British Troops” broadside, shown above. You can peruse that page more closely through the American Antiquarian Society, founded by Thomas.

The Russell broadside contained some errors (a missing “brave,” “young” became “your,” another “your” dropped out), suggesting that shop hastily copied the text out of the newspaper. I would have expected the transmission to go the other way: from the Russell print shop, which was known for publishing a young woman’s elegiac verses, to the Essex Journal.

That in turn suggests that Russell didn’t issue the “Bloody Butchery” broadside until more than a month after the battle. Maybe he needed that time to engrave all those coffins.

The Death of Daniel Thompson

Yesterday I quoted Maj. Loammi Baldwin’s diary noting the death of Woburn militiaman Daniel Thompson on 19 Apr 1775.

The published Woburn vital records say Daniel Thompson was born on 9 Mar 1734, making him forty-one years old at the Battle of Lexington and Concord (unless that’s an unlabeled Old Style date). He and his wife Phebe had three children, born 1761–1765.

According to a family history, The Memorial of James Thompson, of Charlestown, Mass., 1630-1642, and Woburn (1887), this was the story of Thompson’s death:

He was a man of ardent temperament, full of activity and enterprise. Previous to the Revolutionary war he was one of the guards of the royal governor [most likely the horse guard], and yet, in the troubles which preceded that event, he ever zealously espoused the cause of his native country.

On the morning of the 19th of April, 1775, hearing of the march of the British toward Concord, he mounted his horse and hurried to the north village, a mile distant, for the purpose of rousing his friends to oppose the march of the enemy. There is a tradition that of all the men he met only one hesitated, and when that one asked him if he were not too hasty and likely to expose himself to great danger, he instantly replied, “No! I tell you our tyrants are on their march to destroy our stores, and if no one else opposes them to-day, I will!” Immediately hurrying away to the scene of action, he boldly took his position and poured his fire into the ranks of the British.

On the retreat of the enemy, he took a station near the road. Stepping behind a barn to load, and then advancing round the corner of the building, he fired diagonally through the platoons of the enemy, so as to make every shot effectual.

A grenadier, who watched his movements, was so enraged that he ran around the corner of the barn and shot him dead on the spot, while he was in the act of reloading his gun. Tradition says that a well directed ball from another Woburn gun prevented the grenadier from ever rejoining his comrades.

I’m skeptical about that quotation, though the aggressive attitude seems to fit with going too close to the road and being cut down by a flanker. Abram English Brown’s Beneath Old Roof Trees (1896) added the comforting claim that one of Daniel Thompson’s own brothers killed that grenadier and brought his firelock back home to Woburn.

More certainly, we know that Thompson died within the borders of Lincoln. His body was brought back to Woburn. On 21 April there was a joint funeral with Asahel Porter, detained by the regulars in the early hours of the 19th and killed in the shooting on Lexington common.

Thompson’s gravestone appears above, courtesy of Find a Grave. It says:

Here lies Buried the Body of
Mr. DANIEL THOMPSON who was
slain in Concord Battle on ye. 19th.
of April 1775. Aged 40 Years.

Here Passenger confin’d reduc’d to dust,
lies what was once Religious wise & Just.
The cause he engaged did animate him high,
Namely Religion and dear Liberty.
Steady and warm in Liberties defence,
True to his Country, Loyal to his Prince.
Though in his Breast a Thirst for glory fir’d,
Courageous in his country’s cause expired.
Although he’s gone his name Embalmed shall be,
and had in Everlasting Memory.

The phrase about “Loyal to his Prince” suggests the Thompson family erected this stone in 1775 when most Americans still professed allegiance to King George III and saw themselves as fighting corrupt British ministers rather than the whole British constitutional system. If the Thompson family had had to wait another year for the stonecarving, the elegy would surely have praised Thompson’s loyalty to his country but not to his “Prince.”

Daniel and Phebe Thompson’s daughter, born in 1762 and also named Phebe, married Josiah Pierce in 1787 and settled in Maine. Josiah was a younger half-brother of Benjamin Thompson, who by then had moved from Woburn to Europe on his way to becoming Count Rumford.

A Busy Week in Boston in March 1774

Even before Lt. Gov. Andrew Oliver died on 3 Mar 1774, Gov. Thomas Hutchinson knew he had to postpone his trip to Britain.

Oliver would have taken over certain gubernatorial duties while Hutchinson was out of Massachusetts. But if both men were gone, the executive power would have devolved onto the Council.

That upper house of the Massachusetts General Court hadn’t become as radical as the lower house, but it was still dominated by Hutchinson’s opponents.

Among those opponents was John Hancock, who on 5 March delivered Boston’s annual oration commemorating the Boston Massacre. This was probably the most politically radical thing he ever did before July 1776.

On Monday, 7 March the house sent a long response to Hutchinson’s message, quoted yesterday, dismissing the effort to impeach Peter Oliver, chief justice and brother of the now late lieutenant governor.

Much of that response was written by Robert Treat Paine of Taunton, as shown by a rough draft in his papers. However, some touches are more political than legal and may have come from Samuel Adams. Most pointedly, the response quoted the phrase “an abridgment of what are called English liberties” from one of Hutchinson’s own leaked letters, which was kind of rubbing it in.

The assembly’s response concluded with yet another complaint about officials like Hutchinson and the Olivers misrepresenting the state of the province:

We assure ourselves, that were the nature of our grievances fully understood by our Sovereign, we should soon have reason to rejoice in the redress of them. But, if we must still be exposed to the continual false representations of persons who get themselves advanced to places of honour and profit by means of such false representations, and when we complain we cannot even be heard, we have yet the pleasure of contemplating, that posterity for whom we are now struggling will do us justice, by abhoring the memory of those men ”who owe their greatness to their country’s ruin.”

That last quotation came from Joseph Addison’s Cato.

On the evening of 7 March, men carried out the second Boston Tea Party, dumping twenty-nine crates of tea from the ship Fortune. Some traders had thought that Bostonians would accept that tea since it wasn’t owned by the East India Company. They didn’t.

The funeral for Lt. Gov. Oliver was on 8 March. Prominent members of his family didn’t feel safe attending, and it did not go smoothly.

Meanwhile, there was still a stalemate on impeachment as the legislative session neared a close. On 9 March the house resolved, “it must be presumed that the Governor’s refusing to take any Measures therein is, because he also receives his Support from the Crown.” That same day, Secretary Thomas Flucker brought in Gov. Hutchinson’s message proroguing the legislature until April.

As it turned out, there would be no April session. The impeachment effort was dead.

TOMORROW: In the courtroom.

Some Museum Programs for School Vacation Week

Some of greater Boston’s Revolutionary sites have announced special programming for next week, which is a public school vacation in Massachusetts.

Thanks to support from the Highland Street Foundation, the Paul Revere House in the North End will be free to visit on Tuesday, 20 February.

On the two days that follow, the site is offering a drop-in family activity called “Share Your Love of the Written Word,” inspired by vintage postcards from its collection. Participating is free with admission. Regular admission is $6 for adults, $5.50 for seniors and college students, $1.00 for children 5-17, and free for members and North End residents.

Nearby, the Old North Church and Historic Site is usually closed to the public during the winter, but it will be open 17–24 February from 11:00 A.M. (12:30 P.M. on Sunday) to 5:00 P.M. Admission tickets, which costs $5 per person, include a self-guided tour of the church’s sanctuary, the current exhibit, and answers from the education staff. For $5 more one can enjoy a self-guided tour of the historic crypt and an audio guide.

Outside the city, the Concord Museum is promising unspecified “special family activities” on Monday, Thursday, and Friday, according to its calendar. That week is also the last chance to see the museum’s exhibit “Interwoven: Women’s Lives Written in Thread.” On Friday, 23 February, educator and reenactor Michelle Gabrielson will present the work of quilting a petticoat.

The Lexington Historical Society’s historic taverns will host special programs for kids of different ages on “Lighting the Way” and “Science and Medicine” during the vacation week. For more details, including the registration cost, visit its events page.

Meeting Mary Vanderlight through Her Account Books

Hope (Power) Brown died in 1792 at the age of ninety. Her gravestone told visitors she was “The mother of Nicholas, Joseph, John, and Moses Brown.”

As Karen Wulf recently wrote at Commonplace, that left off Hope’s daughter, Mary (Brown) Vanderlight (1731–95).

“The Brown Brothers Had a Sister” shares what information survives about that member of the prominent Providence family:

She married David Vanderlight, a doctor and Dutch immigrant, in the early 1750s. Both her husband and their only child, a baby boy, died in February of 1755.

When she died in the spring of 1795, Mary Brown Vanderlight had been a widow for four decades, and lived on her own or with her mother. Like her mother, she remained a stalwart of the Baptist church that their forebears had helped found (though her brothers wandered to Quakerism and the Anglican church). Like her mother, she never remarried. Like her mother, she was the administrator of her husband’s estate, a complex job that came with significant legal and other practical responsibilities.

The main documentation for Vanderlight’s life is in account books—hers and other people’s. She started tracking her finances before her marriage, helped her husband manage his practice, and kept going as she had to support herself.

From the time David died, Mary continued the surviving account books. It looks like she also continued to serve patients at least by selling medicines but maybe also by practicing—or even teaching. As late as 1757 she was billing her neighbor Elisha Shearman for having trained his son in the “arts of apothicary.”

She also took up her husband’s role in the library [now the Providence Atheneum] and was listed as one of only two women among the nearly 150 “proprietors” who regularly paid to support—and use—it. . . .

She also kept investing. These investments included, according to a single notation in one of her brother’s accounts, helping to finance the infamous slaving voyage of the Sally.

Where did Mary Vanderlight learn to keep accounts? Wulf writes that she probably learned that skill from her mother, who for decades managed her own books and tracked who in the family owned what.

“Ye. uncommon size & penetration of his genius”

When the Locke family returned to Sherborn, after the Rev. Dr. Samuel Locke resigned as president of Harvard College (because he’d fathered a child with his housekeeper), they had a nice home waiting for them.

The Lockes owned a “large convenient Dwelling-House” situated “near the Northerly side of the Common on the road to Holliston” and “opposite the Meeting-House.”

The attached estate included “two Barnes, and other Out-Houses,” and ninety-two acres of land, including “Pasturage, Arable land, Meadow, &c with a large quantity of good Fruit Trees; as also a valuable Lot of Wood.”

There had been some hurt feelings when Locke had left Sherborn’s pulpit in 1769, but the congregation found a replacement within a year, with the college providing some settlement money. The townspeople didn’t seem to hold a grudge against Locke personally.

In fact, Locke’s neighbors continued to refer to him with the honorifics “Reverend” and “Doctor.” In March 1774 they voted to put him on the committee of correspondence, which after the war started became the committee of public safety.

To supplement his income, Locke prepared boys for Harvard, having them board at his house. One student, John Welles, recalled him as “the most learned man in America,” and “a perfect gentleman, dignified.”

The Continental Journal for 22 Jan 1778 reported: “Thursday morning last [i.e., 15 January] died suddenly of an apoplectic fit, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Lock of Sherburn.” According to John Goodwin Locke’s Book of the Lockes, “He died from the bursting of a blood-vessel, when aiding in driving some cattle from his field.” (Sherborn’s published town records say the date was 15 Jan 1777, but apparently someone forgot to start writing the new year. That error confused later people, like the person who carved the headstone shown above.)

Contemporaries glossed over Locke’s adultery. A neighbor wrote: “Some domestic troubles embittered the last years of his life, but he was never known to make a complaint, but bore them with Christian resignation.” His successor at Harvard, the Rev. Dr. Samuel Langdon, is credited with this eulogy:

In Memory of ye. Revd. Samuel Locke D. D. [sic]

As a Divine he was learned and judicious—In ye. pastoral relation vigilant and faithfull—as a christian devout & charitable—In his friendships firm & sincere—humane affable & benevolent in his disposition—in ye. conjugal & parental relations kind, & officious—ye. uncommon size & penetration of his genius—ye. extensiveness of his erudition—yt. fund of useful knowledge wh. he had acquired—ye. firmness & mildness of his temper & manners—his easiness of access & patient attention to others-join’d with his singular talents for government, procur’d him universal esteem, especially of ye. governers & students of Harvard College over wh. he PRESIDED four years with much reputation to himself & advantage to ye. public—after wh. he retired to ye. private walks of Life, entertaining & improving ye. more confined circle of his friends until his Death wh. was very sudden on ye. 15th: day of January 1778—aged 45.

For the president of a college Locke had embarrassed by having an affair to say he was in “conjugal & parental relations kind, & officious” suggests that some contemporaries shared John Andrews’s opinion that his wife had somehow driven him into the arms of his housekeeper. But Mary Locke left no account herself, and no one else commented on her.

Be that as it may, Locke left an estate worth over £3,600. The widow Locke continued to live in Sherborn and to raise their three children. There’s an advertisement for settling her estate in the 11 June 1789 Independent Chronicle.

Of Mary and Samuel Locke’s children, Samuel, Jr., became the local doctor. He married Hannah Cowden, and they had four daughters, one dying in infancy. He died in 1788, aged twenty-seven, thus probably before his mother.

In 1792 the Locke family farm was put up for sale. The sellers were the couple’s daughter Mary, the doctor’s widow Hannah, and Samuel Sanger, the same man who had administered the widow’s estate. It evidently did not sell because in 1794 the widow Hannah Locke advertised it again, now on her own.

Mary Locke the daughter died in 1796, aged thirty-three. The family historian wrote: “She had been an invalid for some years before she died.” He also stated: “She was a lady of considerable personal and mental attractions, and if we may judge from the wardrobe which she left, not inattentive to that personal adornment to which many of her sex are addicted.” That judgment seems to be based entirely on the number of gowns in her probate inventory.

The youngest sibling, John Locke, moved from Sherborn to Union, Maine, and then to “Northampton, where he died, as it is said, by drinking cold water when heated.” That death wasn’t so sudden, however, as to preclude seeking medical attention and writing a will. John Locke was only thirty-four years old, continuing the family tradition of dying young.

The Rev. Dr. Samuel Locke’s grave went unmarked for decades. A sexton found his skeleton in 1788 when he was burying the eldest son. By 1853 the former minister’s remains had been dug up and reinterred in a new town cemetery. At the time his skull was judged to show “those phrenological developments which indicate great mental powers.”

When the younger Mary Locke died in 1796, both the Sherborn town records and the local Moral and Political Telegraphe newspaper described her as the minister’s “only daughter,” making a point. According to Sibley’s Harvard Graduates, however, the child Samuel Locke fathered in 1773 was also a girl, named Rebecca Locke. Clifford K. Shipton wrote that “she became a well-known figure in Boston and Worcester,” but I haven’t unearthed any sign of her.