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Cape Cod’s Elmer Crowell, the First and Best Decoy Maker

In 1900, an Elmer Crowell decoy sold for $2. In 2007, an Elmer Crowell decoy sold for $1.13 million. And so did a second one.

What started out as a side hustle for the Cape Cod carver turned into a full-time job and worldwide fame. From a converted chicken coop that smelled like cedar wood shavings and oil paint, he made decoys now displayed in museums throughout North America and Europe. Collectors consider Elmer Crowell the father of decorative wood carving. Many consider him the best.

Elmer Crowell

“There was really no one in the world doing what he was doing,” Ted Harmon told Cape Cod Life in 2016. Others followed, and during a golden age of decoy carving Massachusetts produced some of the best and most prolific decoy carvers in the world.

“He was decades ahead of everyone else,” said Harmon, a collector and owner of the Decoys Unlimited auction house in Barnstable, Mass.

Elmer Crowell

He was born during the Civil War, on Dec. 5, 1862, in East Harwich, Mass., to a family of mariners and cranberry farmers. His father bought him a shotgun at age 12. He set up a duck blind on family property by 716-acre Long Pond. Then he immersed himself in hunting.

Cover illustration from Puck magazine.

He used both live and wooden decoys to attract birds from the great flocks that migrated along the Atlantic flyway and paused on Cape Cod’s waters. At 14, he began carving his own wooden decoys.

He found he could do what he loved and augment his wages from cranberry farming. Restaurants then had a strong appetite for wild fowl. In 1889, for example, one Chicago menu offered, blue-wing teal, pheasant, wild goose, quail, prairie chicken, sage hen, blackbirds, plover, partridge, two kinds of snipe, three kinds of grouse and four kinds of duck. A popular menu item was the reed bird, one of four to six small birds plucked and served on a skewer.

Elmer Crowell and the Three Bears

But hunting also became popular among well-heeled sportsmen along the Eastern Seaboard. The once-excellent railroad system out of Boston made it easy to reach coastal marshes, ponds and beaches. The railroads also carried gamebirds to the urban restaurants and markets.

Cape Cod attracted men like Daniel Webster and Grover Cleveland, who often hunted and fished there. Three affluent gentlemen who called themselves the Three Bears hunted together on Long Pond played a big role in the life of Elmer Crowell. They were G. Herbert Windeler, U.S. Golf Association president; Loring Underwood, landscape architect and gentleman photographer; and Charles Ashley Hardy, a stockbroker who built a hunting lodge called the Chatham Bars Inn, now a Historic America Hotel.

The Three Bears realized Elmer Crowell was outgunning them on Long Pond. They recognized his skill at handling live decoys, and they hired him to run their hunting camp. They then came to realize his extraordinary carving and painting skills, according to Kate Beckerman in Antiques and the Arts Weekly.

Hardy in particular fell in love with Elmer Crowell’s decoys, and he asked him to carve decorative birds: a Hudsonian curlew, a common snipe and a pair of bobwhite quail. Later, Hardy would help set up Crowell’s studio in an old chicken coop.

Elmer Crowell outside his shop.

Crowell sold his cheapest, utilitarian model for 25 cents. He also offered a “challenge,” or middle-level grade, for $1. His top-grade decoys sold for $2 – or maybe a bucket of quahogs. Some he gave as gifts.

Along the way Crowell married a Harwich neighbor, Laura Linwood Doane. They had one son, Cleon, who later took up carving with his father.

Phillips

Another wealthy hunting client, Dr. John C. Phillips, had a profound impact on Elmer Crowell’s life. Phillips, grandnephew of abolitionist Wendell Phillips, wrote more than 200 books and articles about ornithology, zoology and wildlife conservation.

In 1900, Phillips persuaded Crowell to leave Cape Cod and manage his hunting camp (designed by Frederick Law Olmsted) on Wenham Lake on Boston’s North Shore. Crowell then ran Phillips’ gunning stand on Oldham Pond in Pembroke, Mass. In his spare time, he carved and painted decoys, which Phillips and his rich hunting friends prized. Though Crowell only worked for Phillips for 10 years, the doctor bought decoys from him until his death in 1938.

An Elmer Crowell canvasback duck (miniature), from the Centerville Historical Society collection.

Another important Brahmin customer was Harry Vinton Long, Nathaniel Bowditch’s son-in-law. A stockbroker and director of the Museum of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, Long owned a home in Cohasset, Mass., that offered spectacular birdwatching and hunting.

Long, an avid birdwatcher who collected Americana, naturally prized Elmer Crowell’s decoys. He bought some of Crowell’s finest work, and he spread the word among his rich friends about the man he considered a national treasure.

One duck hunter kept his Elmer Crowell yellowlegs in a velvet bag when he didn’t deploy it on the marsh.

Migratory Bird Act

But Elmer Crowell saw the writing on the wall – or, rather, in the state and federal governments. They had started to crack down on the market gunners who supplied restaurants with wildfowl. The market gunners took down hundreds of birds at a time, thousands in a day. By the end of the 19th century, gunners had driven to extinction Labrador ducks, great auks, passenger pigeons, Carolina parakeets and heath hens.

Labrador ducks, now extinct

Conservationists pressured lawmakers to ban hunting migratory birds, and lawmakers responded. In 1918, Congress passed the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which made it a crime to hunt, kill or sell a migratory bird or its parts. They also banned the use of live decoys to attract birds.

“The shooting was great,” Crowell later recalled. “But we could not sell them in the markets, as the law cut it out. Soon the law cut out the live decoys, and that was the end of good shooting there.”

The Songless Aviary

In 1912, 50-year-old Elmer Crowell set up shop in East Harwich and began carving decoys full time, six days a week. Hardy helped him acquire more tools and convert an old chicken coop into a workshop.

He called it his songless aviary.

Crowell became consumed with capturing the exact likeness of a species, and he made dozens of different kinds of ducks, geese, shorebirds, songbirds and miniatures. He made plovers, sandpipers, curlews, yellowlegs, warblers, woodpeckers, robins, bluebirds, blackbirds and catbirds.

Ironically, he advertised his wares with a decoy on a post in front of his driveway. It was a hooded merganser. one of the few birds he didn’t get quite right, according to John S. Dumont, the son of a client who studied woodcarving with him.

His great-granddaughter’s best friend, Juell Buckwold, recalled her frequent visits to the old man with the chubby face and the bright blue eyes.

Elmer Crowell with a miniature

She remembered a cheery gentleman in too-short black pants with wood shavings at his feet. Crowell sat and whittled as men hung around his workshop and talked about decays. He was always willing to share what he was doing, his love for bird and how he carved, she said. He would hand children a knife and let them try it for themselves.

His son, Cleon, carved along with him. Together, father and son also did carpentry, remodeling houses and making weathervanes.

Miniature knot from the Centerville Historical Society collection.

Crowell carved miniatures, as well. He sold songbirds and shorebirds in sets of 25 or individually. In 1930, he sold such a set for $100. In 2020, a set with his business card and a list of the birds on his stationery sold for $108,000.

Decoy Collecting Becomes a Thing

Elmer Crowell’s fame grew among wealthy decoy collectors. He sold his decoys to Henry Ford, Pierre S. du Pont, James Storrow, Massachusetts Gov. Leverett Saltonstall, the royals in England and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

Rheumatism forced Elmer Crowell to retire in 1943, and Cleon took over. Elmer died on Jan. 1, 1952 at the age of 89. He had carved an estimated 15,000 decoys in his lifetime, 9,000 of which are believed to survive in museums and private collections.

“There is no question that he carved some of the finest shorebird decoys known,” writes By John M. Levinson, Somers G. Headley in Shorebirds: The Birds, the Hunters, the Decoys.

By the 1950s, decoy collecting had spread beyond wealthy sportsmen and Cape Cod tourists. An Iowan named Harold Sorenson began publishing a magazine called The Decoy Collector’s Guide. Then in 1967, Richard Bourne of Hyannis held the first ever auction of wildfowl decoys. The auctions proved popular, setting benchmark prices, and soon expanded to three a year.

Elmer Crowell, Record Setter

Crowell decoys routinely fetch six-figure prices, and his were the first to reach seven figures. His decoys set a record in 2007, just before the financial crash, with a pintail drake and Canada goose that sold for $1.13 million.

In 2022, a pair of working canvasback duck decoys, made around 1920, brought $102,000 at a Copley Fine Art’s auction.

After his death in 1952, the barn started to decay. Several Cape Codders established the A.E. Crowell American Bird Decoy Foundation. One member took apart the barn in 2008, marked all the boards and stored it in a storage container in Sandwich. The Foundation raised money and found a new home for the songless aviary, now under the auspices of the Harwich Historical Society

The songless aviary is now located at 80 Parallel Street, Harwich, Mass. With thanks to the Harwich Historical Society.

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Chopmist Hill, Rhode Island’s Secret Listening Post in WWII

Just before Pearl Harbor, Chopmist Hill in Scituate, R.I., was the center of the world. That’s what the Federal Communications Commission discovered in 1941. The hill’s geographic and atmospheric conditions were extremely favorable for radio reception, and its receivers could grab wireless signals from much of the globe.

With America on the verge of joining a global war, this was good news, especially for the FCC’s hardworking Radio Intelligence Division (RID). Chopmist Hill would become the most productive listening post for the men of this little-known civilian agency. Their work helped clinch victory for the United States and her allies.

The Radio Intelligence Division worked out of large, but hidden, radio listening posts – not only on Chopmist Hill but along the east and west coasts. These patrolmen of the ether prevented German intelligence from establishing a single wireless connection in the United States. They also discouraged Japanese agents from setting up U.S. radio links. They knew the FCC would nab them as soon as they went on the air, according to the Radio Intelligence Division’s director, George Sterling.

The Radio Intelligence Division also guided more than 600 lost airplanes to safety. They intercepted enemy agents’ secret transmissions to their bases and submarines. They even discovered a secret German weather station in Greenland, enabling the US Coast Guard to destroy it. Amazingly, from stateside, RID aided Philippine guerrilla operations.

And in the end, a Radio Intelligence Division outpost spent 37 hours establishing communications between the Japanese command and Gen. Douglas MacArthur. That set the stage for the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri.

A listening post with equipment similar to that used on Chopmist HIll.

Chopmist Hill Gets Ears

Chopmist Hill first came to the FCC’s attention before the United State entered the war. Thomas B. Cave, an RID technician, had to find the best spot for a listening post to detect illegal private and commercial radio transmissions.

Cave had already settled on a spot in Greenville, R.I., when he discovered Chopmist Hill in Scituate. He found conditions there strangely ideal for receiving radio traffic from a large portion of the globe. Beyond its value for simple rule enforcement, Chopmist Hill served as the perfect global listening post as war loomed. Cave moved his operations there in March 1941.

Cave had discovered a quirk of nature up on 731-foot-tall Chopmist Hill. Line-of-sight mobile communications and low-frequency signals meant to travel just a few hundred miles bounced off the atmosphere and straight down to Chopmist Hill.

But setting up a top-secret listening post was no small matter.

Cave leased a 14-room farmhouse surrounded by 183 acres for his 40-member team. Fences and armed guards bordered the complex, which had its own blockhouse, barracks and generator. No one could approach or enter without a state police escort.

Like the 11 other primary listening posts, Chopmist Hill had state-of-the-art receiving and recording equipment manned by highly trained operators.

Outdoors, the station bristled with poles and wires, more than 16 miles of them. It had rhombic antennas, wires strung on poles in the shape of a rhombus, or diamond. And it had four-pronged Adcock radio direction finders, which rotated to get a geographical fix on the source of a shortwave signal.

A satellite view of the Chopmist HIll area today, image courtesy Google Maps.

Nine Feet Under

The poles, set nine feet in the ground, didn’t poke up above the tree line and attract attention.

To improve reception, Cave called the local utility company, Narragansett Electric, to send out foreman Charlie Weinert to move the antenna poles. Sometimes a pole had to move just a few feet. Cave later said, “Weinert thought I was clean crazy.”

So effective was the secrecy on Chopmist Hill that the listening post’s very existence was revealed to the public only after the end of hostilities.

But when the government finally declassified the station, Cave told Weinert, “Every time you moved those poles you were following Rommel as he was backing up across North Africa.”

Weinert reportedly shot back, “Why, if I had known that, I’d have dug poles all the way to Cairo.”

Chopmist, Up and Running

Cave claimed Chopmist Hill could zero in on the location of any radio transmission within 15 minutes. Skeptical army brass tested Cave’s assertions, secretly setting up an impromptu station and transmitting a signal. It took Cave and his crew seven minutes to notice the signal and identify its source as the Pentagon.

The Chopmist Hill post could receive radio transmissions from Europe, Africa, the Caribbean, and South America. Cave later said it could even pick up tank-to-tank transmissions from German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps in North Africa. Chopmist Hill forwarded those messages to the British commander in the area, Gen. Bernard Montgomery.

RID chief George Sterling later said he often wondered if everyone at Chopmist Hill would get home safely.

“If the enemy had known how we were recording messages sent between agents right in Germany, they would have eliminated the Scituate Station and everyone in it, provided they could.”

Chopmist Hill could listen in on General Rommel’s Panzer Division.

The Airwave Harvest

At Chopmist and elsewhere, much of what the RID intercepted was encrypted or in non-English languages. These messages were recorded and forwarded to the Signal Security Agency in Washington, D.C., for deciphering or translation. How some transmissions got deciphered—specifically, messages encrypted with Nazi Germany’s top-secret Enigma code—remains a mystery.

“Was there a twin Ultra machine [British military intelligence’s ultra-secret decryption computer] in Washington to which Scituate fed…?” asks Paul Eno, author of the 2005 book Rhode Island: A Genial History. “If not, how were secret interceptions in the secret German code translated?” The answer may have to wait until declassification of the RID’s wartime files in 2049.

One of the seemingly mundane tasks assigned to the Chopmist Hill unit was to home in on German weather reports from Central Europe. Chopmist forwarded them to the British bomber command. Once the United States joined the war, it sent them to U.S. Army Air Forces commands based in England. The reports were essential for planning air raids over Axis targets.

Ferreting Out Spies

One of Chopmist Hill’s tasks was to find radio spies. The problem of espionage had become apparent in Central and Latin America as early as 1940. That October, the RID station in Tampa, Florida, picked up maritime radio signals and narrowed them down to small vessels of the Gough Brothers line, operating out of British Honduras. Further investigation suggested these vessels were carrying fuel to German U-boats in the Gulf of Mexico and passing information to them.

A sting operation snared a total of 20 men, including principal owner George Gough. But the persistent problem of Axis espionage in Latin America led the FCC to help ferret out radio spies.

The FCC then sent some of its top monitoring officers south of the border. They succeeded everywhere except Argentina, officially neutral in the war. Spies pushed out of other South American countries found a safe base in Argentina, where even commercial radio transmitters were sending vital information to Axis Japan, Italy and Germany. The RID men tried to shut down enemy radio transmissions there, but the Argentine government became so hostile that the FCC withdrew the agents for their own safety.

Chopmist Hill To The Rescue

In addition to spying and counterspying, Chopmist Hill saved Allied lives.

Once, when a USO plane carrying American actress Kay Francis got lost, the Chopmist Hill listening post came to the rescue. It picked up the pilot’s radio transmissions, pinpointed his location and guided him to safety.

Chopmist Hill saved the life of Kay Francis, pictured here with Mitzi Mayfair.

The station also saved many American lives aboard the British ocean liner Queen Mary. She then ferried U.S. troops to fight in Europe. While the ship docked in Rio de Janeiro for fuel and supplies in March 1942, local German spies somehow learned her future course and alerted their superiors. Fortunately, operators on Chopmist Hill intercepted the message. The Queen Mary’s captain changed course, avoiding the wolf pack of German U-boats lying in wait and saving the lives of some 14,000 GIs on board.

On yet another occasion, a place carrying wounded men home to the States from Europe crash-landed in Canada’s far-northern Labrador province, so close to the magnetic North Pole that getting an accurate fix on the plane’s exact location was difficult. But the Chopmist Hill team did it, and rescue operations got underway. Even then it took three months to get all the plane’s passengers to safety.

Listening to Japan

Chopmist managed to pick up Japanese radio traffic before the December 1941 raid on Pearl Harbor, according to RID chief George Sterling.

The Rhode Island site also detected signals from radio transmitters on incendiary balloon bombs the Japanese had launched into the jet stream to float across the Pacific and explode in America and Canada.

Each bomb-laden, hydrogen-filled balloon emitted a tracking signal so the Japanese could follow its progress. The Chopmist Hill listeners forwarded balloons’ locations to West Coast fighter squadrons, which attempted to intercept and shoot down the floating bombs before they did any harm.

Most of the fighters’ efforts were in vain. They managed to shoot down less than 20 of the more than 9,000 launched. Fortunately, few of the balloons that reached inland North America exploded. One did kill a pregnant woman and five children on a Sunday school outing in Oregon.

The Queen Mary as she looked in World War II.

Chopmist Hill Revealed

Soon after the war, the FCC gave Thomas Cave permission to grant an interview to the Providence Journal. He could reveal the Chopmist Hill station’s existence, its purpose and some of its wartime successes.

The FCC maintained a station there until 1950 with a skeleton crew to fulfill the original purpose of catching unlicensed radio transmitters. Rhode Island’s Civil Preparedness Division then took over the facility as its headquarters.

In 1965 the hilltop site reverted into private hands. One Frederick Leeder purchased it at auction in 1968; by then, a scant five acres of the original 183 remained. As Leeder learned about the property’s history, he and others tried in vain to get the site listed on the National Register of Historic Places. However, the FCC equipment had been removed, so the site did not meet the criterion of substantial conformity to how it looked during its period of historic activity.

Why isn’t Chopmist Hill spiked with surveillance antennas today? The answer is simple: change. The rural, backcountry location has grown immensely since 1945. Houses, factories and other buildings interfere with radio reception. The feats performed there in the past cannot be replicated.

In an interview shortly before his death, Cave told Eno, “It was not the receptivity of the location, but the advanced secret radio equipment used there that made Chopmist Hill’s place in history.” He added, “Though reception was remarkably good, it was 99 percent knowhow that created such a success between 1941 and 1945.”

Maybe. In 2049, perhaps we’ll know the whole story of Chopmist Hill, the FCC’s Radio Intelligence Division and their role in winning World War II.

The Radio Intelligence Division by the Numbers

To intercept enemy transmissions and prevent America’s airwaves from leaking secrets to the enemy, the agency eventually established 12 primary monitoring stations, 60 substations, and 90 mobile units in the U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. At its peak, the Radio Intelligence Division employed 893 people.

The RID had mobile units, too—automobiles crammed with radio equipment,. Each had a surveillance man at its controls. These could follow up on a received signal, getting closer to pinpoint its source. The units relied on single-loop antennas, simple receivers based on a circle of wire or other conductive material.

For even closer investigation, the agency developed a handheld unit called the Snifter. This device was so sensitive that a radioman could detect not just the building but the room from which a signal was emanating.

On average, the radio intelligence men pinpointed, or fixed, more than 800 locations each month. It was quite an accomplishment, considering that each fix required operators to collect 6,000 bearings. But the intensive effort paid off.

Images: Queen Mary By derivative work: Altair78 (talk)Queen Mary forecastle.jpg: :Altair78 – Queen Mary forecastle.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5144133.

This story was updated in 2023.

Leo Caisse, the author of this story, passed away in 2020. He published the book, The Civilian Conservation Corps: A Guide to Their Works in Rhode Island. He has also published a number of historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. Leo earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

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Elizabeth Poole, the Puritan Who Founded Taunton, Mass.

Elizabeth Poole left the comforts of her family manor house in England to join the Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony.

Plaque depicting Elizabeth Poole

She was 48, unmarried, rich and well-connected. Her family had come to England with William the Conqueror. King James I knighted her father, and Queen Elizabeth I knighted her maternal grandfather, Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer.

John Winthrop called Elizabeth, a devout Puritan, “a gentlewoman, an ancient maid.”

Elizabeth then decided she wanted to convert Native Americans to Christianity. She would become the first woman to found a town in the Americas.

Foundress of Taunton. Courtesy Boston Public Library.

Elizabeth Poole

Elizabeth Poole left England on April 22, 1637 on the Speedwell with two friends, 14 servants, goods and 20 tons of salt for preserving fish. She also brought a Geneva Bible, which remained in her family for three centuries.

A sister and a brother, William, also migrated to Plymouth Colony. William and his family had probably already arrived when Elizabeth got there. Another sister married the Rev. Nicholas Street, one of the first ministers in Taunton.

Soon after she arrived, Elizabeth Poole bought a large tract of land in a settlement called Cohanett from Massasoit. A few Pilgrims had already settled there.

Winthrop wrote that she “endured much hardship, and lost much cattle.”

By the beginning of 1639, there were seven freemen in the settlement, probably with their families and servants and possibly others.

The ancestral home of Elizabeth Poole

On March 3, 1639, Taunton was incorporated as a town. Within four years, 54 men between the age of 16 and 64 living in Taunton. A meetinghouse, the First Parish Church, was built on Church Green in 1640. In 1652, Elizabeth helped found an ironworks, one of the first in North America, on the Two Mile River.

Piety, Liberality, Sanctity of Manners

Elizabeth Poole died at the age of 65. She is buried in Taunton, and her gravestone reads:

Here rest the remains of Elizabeth Poole, a native of Old England, of good family, friends and prospects, all which she left in the prime of her life, to enjoy the religion of her conscience, in this distant wilderness; a great proprietor of the township of Taunton, a chief promoter of its settlement, and its incorporation in 1639-40; about which time she settled near this spot, and having employed the opportunity of her virgin state in piety, liberality, and sanctity of manners, died May 21, 1664, aged 65.

The Bible went back to her family, whose descendants of lived in the Shute-Barton Manor House until 2009. Then it became a National Trust property.

In 1950, the family sold her Bible to a collector from Northern Ireland. It was then scheduled to be auctioned on Jan. 10, 2023, in Belfast.

According to the auctioneer, “The Bible, because of its historic importance, is expected to attract much attention and is valued at between £5000-10,000. ”

This story last updated in 2023.

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Tobias Gilmore Wins Freedom From Slavery Fighting for the Colonies

Tobias Gilmore, an African-American soldier in the American Revolution, left a legacy that includes a cannon left to the Town of Taunton, Mass., and some very surprised descendants.

Glover’s Regiment crossing the Delaware with Gen. Washington

He came to America as a slave and then earned his freedom by serving in the Continental Army for five years. Local lore links him and his cannon to George Washington, which he fired 14 times on the Fourth of July. Thirteen shots went off for the original colonies and one for Washington.

He was born sometime around 1745 in coastal West Africa. The son of a chieftain, he was named Shibodee Turry Wurry. In about 1757, slave traders kidnapped him while he gathered coconuts.

The slavers shackled him below deck on the slave ship Dove, bound for Virginia. A storm battered the vessel, so the slave traders changed course for Rhode Island. There they auctioned off some of the captives as slaves to pay for repairs to their ship.

A Raynham, Mass., a sea captain named John Gilmore purchased Shibodee Turry Wurry. He then gave him a new name: Tobias Gilmore.

Private Tobias Gilmore

As the Revolution approached, patriotic rhetoric about securing the natural and inalienable right of liberty no doubt inspired Tobias Gilmore.

Continental soldiers at Yorktowns; on the left, an African American soldier of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment

Continental soldiers at Yorktown; on the left, an African American soldier of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment

When war did break out, each colony had to supply a quota of troops for the Continental Army. New England regiments recruited slaves by promising them their freedom. Massachusetts sent 1,535 African-American soldiers to the Continental Army, while the other New England colonies sent 2,278. Historians count 9,000 black Patriot soldiers, including the Army and Navy, state militias, privateers, wagoneers, servants and spies.

African Americans, in fact, made up about a fifth of the Continental Army. By the Siege of Yorktown, an officer in a French regiment estimated that one-quarter of the northern army was African American.

African Americans joined the British cause as well, but in far fewer numbers.

The Taunton Flag, adopted by the people of Taunton in 1774

Tobias Gilmore began his military service on Dec. 8, 1776, as a private in Capt. Jonathan Shaw’s company, part of Col. George Williams’s Regiment.

Gilmore fought three tours of duty and saw action in the Battle of Fort Ticonderoga. He was at the Battle of Monmouth, Battle of Forts Clinton and Montgomery, Battle of White Plains and West Point. He also suffered through the Continental Army’s winter encampment at Valley Forge.

According to local lore, Toby Gilmore rose through the ranks to bodyguard or servant to George Washington. That can’t be proved or disproved. Some claim the painting Washington Crossing the Delaware pictures him as the African-American soldier, but probably not.

Freedom

Tobias Gilmore received his discharge in December 1781 and returned to Raynham a free man. He had won his freedom during his first enlistment – which lasted eight days. He married Rosanna Hack, and they had eight children: Toby Jr., Nancy, Delia, Timothy, Esquire, Selina, Rosina and Seabury. Toby senior went to work for his former master, and then he and his wife set up a housekeeping business.

Gilmore bought land in Raynham confiscated from a Loyalist and auctioned off. People liked Toby so much that few bid against him.

He was a frugal businessman and built a house in Raynham about 1784. It still stands. He then built a second house in 1798 bigger than his former master’s.

At some point he obtained a cannon. He told the story that Washington gave it to him.

The cannon, nicknamed Old Toby, served with him in the Raynham militia to help put down Shay’s Rebellion. The Old Colony Historical Society noted in 1879 that Tobias Gilmore gave “Old Toby” to the town. Gilmore,

…the colored revolutionary veteran ancestor of the colored villagers in North Raynham, well known as industrious and worthy citizens. It was given by Tobias to the citizens of Taunton for firing sallies on Washington’s birthdays and Fourth of July, or revert to his descendants.

Tobias Gilmore died April 19, 1812 at age 70. He lies buried at the Hall and Dean Burial Ground in Raynham.

Family Detective

In 1921, the Taunton Daily Gazette noted the passing of Caroline Gilmore, Tobias Gilmore’s last living descendant.

Ninety years later, Miloh Pasto came to the Old Colony Historical Society to research her 3^rd great-grandmother, Elmira Sullivan. She turned out to be Tobias Gilmore’s great-granddaughter. Further research then revealed Gilmore had at least 100 living descendants through his daughter Delia and her husband, Thomas Davis.

One of those descendants was a surprised North Carolina firefighter named Chaz Moore. Moore, a Sturbridge, Mass., native, learned in 2012 of his revolutionary roots. North Carolina’s Sons of the American Revolution then inducted him as the first black member.

“Growing up, I wasn’t even certain that African-Americans even fought in the Revolutionary War,” Moore told the Associated Press in 2012. “It’s not something that’s talked about. Then to say, ‘Well, yeah, they did, and you’re a direct descendant of one’ was unbelievable, humbling. I had to redefine patriotism for myself.”

The cannon today resides at Old Colony Historical Society. So do Tobias Gilmore’s mitre, rundlet and other personal effects.

This story was updated in 2023.

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