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Revolutionary war

Seven Fun Facts About New England Taxes

There isn’t much that’s fun about taxes, but we thought we’d try to find something. So we found seven fun — well, maybe just fun-ish — fact about taxes.

We do think it’s at least interesting that Rhode Islanders didn’t have to pay taxes for 40 years. And it’s fun to find out what kind of a job Sam Adams did as tax collector, or what Mainers did when the federal government actually returned money to them.

Here, then, are seven fun facts about taxes.

1. When Printing Money Meant No Taxes

Rhode Island enjoyed a 40-year holiday from taxes starting in 1710 when the General Assembly cranked out money on the printing press.

Here’s how it worked: The colony had a number of land banks, which loaned paper money for mortgages on land. The loans generated interest, which the colony’s government used to pay for its operations.

The value of the paper money often declined, which made it easier for landholders to repay their debts. Rhode Island’s supply of paper money also gave the colonists a medium of exchange. The arrangement made practically everyone happy – except for merchants in London, who had to accept the colonists’ depreciated money to pay off their debts.

When the merchants weren’t happy, Parliament wasn’t happy. In 1751, Parliament passed the Currency Act, making it illegal for Rhode Island’s General Assembly to issue any more bills of credit not backed by taxes. By the middle of 1754, Rhode Island neared insolvency, and Rhode Island towns began collecting taxes.

2. Sam Adams, Tax Collector?

Sam Adams had a job as tax collector, and he was lousy at it. Adams had inherited his father’s malt business, but it failed. In 1756 he ran for and won the post of Boston’s tax collector to support his family. But Bostonians didn’t really want to pay their taxes, and Sam Adams didn’t really want to collect them.

Sam Adams

Then a smallpox epidemic broke out in 1764, forcing many people in Boston to close their businesses. Sam Adams was inclined to overlook tax payments from people who suffered financial reverses. His laxity made him popular among Boston’s working class, but caused him trouble. As tax collector, he was liable for uncollected taxes.

By 1765, Sam Adams owed £8,000, and Boston came close to bankruptcy. Adams sued people for nonpayment of taxes, but still came up short. His friends ended up paying most of the deficit, and Boston Town Meeting made up the rest.

3. ‘Less Real and more Ideal’

In order to pay off its Revolutionary War debt, Massachusetts raised taxes to a level four times that before the war. The people of Greenwich, Mass., complained, “Our Grievances Were Less Real and more Ideal then they are Now.“

Greenwich, Mass.

Greenwich would actually have more to complain about in 1938, when the commonwealth flooded it for the Quabbin Reservoir.

4. High Hopes for a Tax Refund

In a once exciting but now forgotten episode in U.S. tax history, the federal government ran a surplus of about $30 million in 1836. Revolutionary War debt had been paid off by the sale of public lands in 1836. What to do with the money generated fierce arguments, of course, but in the end Congress decided to give most of the money back to the states. Each state could do with it what it wanted.

As state lawmakers debated about what to do with their share, ‘high hopes were awakened in all children who were out of pocket-money.

Maine, a state for only 17 years, decided to give the money back to the taxpayers. Every resident – including children — received about $2 from the state of Maine. A Deer Isle farmer’s wife named Salome Sellers decided to buy a pair of candlesticks with her money. She lived to be 108 years old, and was the last person born in the 18th century to die in the 19th. Her house is now a museum and displays the candlesticks.

Salome Sellers and one of her candlesticks

5. A Literary Solution to Taxes

New Hampshire in 1821 tried to raise money for a public university by taxing the capital stock of banks. Seven years later the state abandoned the plan as the tax didn’t raise nearly enough money.

Instead, New Hampshire established the Literary Fund, which it divided every year among the towns. The money was to be spent for the
“support and maintenance of common free schools or other purposes of education.” The Town of Peterborough decided to spend it on a municipal library.

Taxes on banks helped pay for Peterborough’s library.

6. Vermont Declares War To Raise Taxes

Vermont declared war on Germany three months before the United States did so it could give its GIs a raise. In anticipation of hostilities, the United States had reinstituted the draft in 1940. Over the course of the war, 50,000 Vermonters were drafted or enlisted, close to 14 percent of the state’s population. Enlisted men earned an average base pay of about $70 a month, which put a financial strain on many young military families.

On Sept. 16, 1941, Vermont’s lawmakers voted a $10-a-month bonus to the draftees and enlisted men.

Montpelier

But under Vermont’s constitution, they would have had to vote for a new tax in peacetime in order to appropriate the funds. They could vote a bonus, however, during a time of armed conflict.

Fortunately for Vermont draftees and their families, President Roosevelt had on Sept. 11, 1941 ordered the U.S. Navy to shoot first if it encountered German warships entering U.S. waters. Vermont’s lawmakers used that as an excuse to declare war on Nazi Germany – and give a bonus to Vermonters in the military.

7. Connecticut’s 42-Day Income Tax

Connecticut had an income tax for 42 days, and then it didn’t. In 1971, the state had accumulated a debt of a quarter of a billion dollars. Lawmakers struggled with how to get back into the black. Since Connecticut had the highest per-capita income in the country, the General Assembly decided on an income tax – in a late-night budget session at the end of June. The income tax was to take effect in October.

Connecticut State Capitol

The public reacted fast and furiously, though. So a special session of the General Assembly repealed the income tax on Aug. 12, 42 days after passing it. Instead, they increased sales taxes and raised tuition at the University of Connecticut.

Twenty years later, the General Assembly approved another income tax, which survives to this day.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of state capitol: By jglazer75 – Connecticut State Capitol, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2574147

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Seven Fun Continental Army Facts

Certain Continental Army facts are implanted in the minds of U.S. schoolchildren at a young age: How patriot farmers dropped their plows and picked up their muskets to fight. How soldiers suffered during the harsh winter at Valley Forge. How Washington took command of the Continental Army on July 3, 1775. Or how the British wore red and the patriots wore blue-and-buff uniforms.

But other, little-known Continental Army facts tell us more about the real American Revolution than the U.S. textbook – and certainly the Hollywood — version.

For example, officers had a code of etiquette, even if they fought on opposite sides. After George Washington’s defeat at the Battle of Germantown, he returned British general William Howe’s dog to him. The fox terrier had strayed into the patriots’ camp, and he had Howe’s name on his collar. Washington sent the pup back with a nice note, probably written by his aide-de-camp, Alexander Hamilton. (Read it here.)

So here, then, are seven Continental Army facts that you may not have known.

1. Continental Army, 10% Black

Black soldiers made up as much as a tenth of the Continental Army. In 1775, the New England states enlisted 200 black soldiers, but Washington put an end to that practice. A Pennsylvania captain explained why. He wrote that African-American soldiers ‘had a ‘disagreeable, degrading effect’ on the army.

However, the Continental Army had such a shortage of men that Washington gave in. He said the New England states could recruit the enslaved, promise them freedom and pay their masters. Rhode Island started its own black regiment, but with white officers. A French officer called them ‘merry, confident, sturdy,’ and ‘the most neatly dressed, the best under arms, and the most precise in its maneuvers.’

This image illustrates two Continental Army facts: A Rhode Island regiment soldier on the far left, a soldier in rifle dress second from right.

2. Second Thoughts

One-fifth of the Army deserted. After the initial excitement of the shot heard ‘round the world, the merchants and farmers who eagerly signed up began to realize that military life wasn’t for them. At first, soldiers enlisted for one year, which meant Washington had to rebuild his army every winter. By 1777, the states began to draft soldiers for three-year-terms.

Those who couldn’t get out of the draft tended to be men on the fringes of society: apprentices, transients, beggars, drunks, indentured immigrants, even loyalists who preferred the Continental Army to the continental prison. But many couldn’t or wouldn’t endure the danger, low pay, hunger, disease, cold and fatigue. So they deserted. Some even mutinied.

3. Rations Included Beer

Soldiers got beer or spirits as part of their daily rations. Every day they were also supposed to receive a pound of bread, a pound of beef and/or pork, a pint of milk, a gill of peas or beans and six ounces of butter. One day a week they had salt fish instead of meat and a pint of vinegar to ward off scurvy.

That, at least, was what they got in theory. In practice, the food had often turned rancid. Soldiers frequently went without bread or meat. Even more frequently, they lacked vinegar and vegetables. The meat diet, wrote Washington, ‘untempered by vegetables or vinegar, or by any kind of drink but water, and eating indifferent bread … are to be ascribed the many putrid diseases incident to the army.’

4. Intolerable Smells

Soldiers could get whipped for failing to use the privy. When they arrived at Valley Forge, some men relieved themselves wherever they felt like it. They left the carcasses of horses to rot where they fell. Washington, concerned about disease and disgusted by ‘intolerable smells,’ ordered five lashes for anyone who did not use ‘a proper Necessary.’ He also ordered two windows cut in every hut to let in fresh air.

Continental Army Fact: You could get whipped for failing to use the privy.

5. Rifle Dress

Those blue-and-buff uniforms didn’t arrive until later in the war, and then only a few states had those colors. In the early days, Washington suggested the ‘rifle dress.’ It included a fringed hunting shirt (a long loose coat usually made of homespun) and long pants with gaiters or leggings dyed the color of a dry leaf. The soldier topped off his rifle dress with a round dark hat turned up once or three times with a cockade or sprig of green. He also had a white belt for the cartouche box and a black cloth around the neck.

Washington liked the rifle dress because of its practicality and because it scared the British soldiers, who thought only sharpshooters wore it. “It is a dress which is justly supposed to carry no small terror to the enemy, who think every such person a complete marksman,” wrote Washington.

6. Remember the Ladies

One of the little-known Continental Army facts is that women were part of it. And not just a few women, like Deborah Sampson, who dressed up as men and served. Thousands of women followed their husbands and boyfriends in the Continental Army. So did loyalist women.

Known as camp followers, the armies couldn’t function without them. They did laundry, they tended cattle, they cared for the sick and they guarded baggage. In many ways the army treated them as soldiers. Like soldiers, they could be punished for misbehavior, they received rations and they were ordered what to do.

In 1778, for example, British Gen. Henry Clinton ordered “The Women of the Army are constantly to march upon the flanks of the Baggage of their respective Corps.”

7. POWs

More patriots died in British prisons than in battle. A total of 6,800 died in action, while another 6,100 were wounded. But 20,000 were taken prisoner, and of those as many as 12,000 died while prisoners.

With thanks to ‘American Revolution: A Continental History‘ by Alan Taylor for some of our Continental Army facts. This story was updated in 2022.

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An 1839 Romance Novel Rescues Seth Warner From Obscurity

Green Mountain Boy Seth Warner might have been a forgotten Revolutionary War hero had he not appeared in an 1839 romance novel. The story had it all: heaving bosoms, manly countenances, hardy sons of liberty, deadly strife and shocking racist descriptions of Indians.

Seth Warner for decades was the unsung hero of the Battle of Bennington, rescuing New Hampshire’s John Stark from a rout. He also led a successful rearguard action at the Battle of Hubbardton.

Stark got all the plaudits for Bennington (actually fought in Walloomsac, N.Y.). But then, 52 years later, New England’s best-known novelist wrote a popular adventure story featuring the noble, brave and handsome Charles Warrington – Seth Warner. “Warrington” fights gallantly at the Battle of Hubbardton and gets the girl, aka the “rosebud in the wilderness.”

The author, Daniel Pierce Thompson, not only rescued Seth Warner from obscurity, he stamped the Green Mountain Boys on the national consciousness. He also probably taught Danielle Steele a few tricks.

General Stark at the Battle of Bennington (NYPL). No Green Mountain Boy in the picture.

Battle of Bennington

At the Battle of Bennington on Aug. 16, 1777, John Stark’s patriots routed a detachment of soldiers fighting under British Gen. John Burgoyne. After the redcoats retreated, the patriots’ discipline broke down. The men scavenged for valuables among the captured and killed troops. Some laid down and rested, while other tended to the wounded.

But then a second detachment of Burgoyne’s troops arrived and began to pummel the patriots. Stark came close to calling for retreat when Seth Warner arrived with 350 fresh troops and supposedly said, “Stand to it, my lads; you shall have help immediately.”

Bennington helped turned the tide of war. Casualties convinced the Indians to abandon the British. They also contributed to Burgoyne’s loss at Saratoga, which convinced the French to join the patriot war effort.

Stark won renown as the hero of the Battle of Bennington, and people in New Hampshire can still quote his words at Bennington, “”There are your enemies, the Red Coats and the Tories. They are ours, or this night Molly Stark sleeps a widow!” (They also remember Stark’s other famous quote, “Live Free or Die!”)

Decades after the Battle of Bennington, several prominent Vermont writers thought Seth Warner deserved more credit for saving the day. Daniel Pierce Thompson belonged to that group. And so he wrote a romance novel, The Green Mountain Boys.

You can still buy the book!

Fictional Seth Warner

The author introduces Seth Warner as Charles Warrington, in the full bloom of vigorous manhood. He opens the novel as a Green Mountain Boy captain, evading the Yorkers who seize the property of settlers with grants from New Hampshire.

The “maliciously smiling” Yorkers declare Warrington an outlaw, “poltroon,” “audacious scoundrel” and “bold rascal.: ‘Warrington’ at the same time cautions, “the storm of a new war is gathering over us.” (That would be the American Revolution.)

There’s a girl, of course – a “rosebud in the wilderness.: Warner/Warrington, though, can’t yet storm the citadel of her womanhood because there’s a”‘hedge about her too high for his leaping.”

The Green Mountain Boy roams the woods one day when he stumbles across “a young lady of the most interesting exterior” attempting to escape a rude fellow who grasped her garment.”

“Back, ruffian, back!” exclaims Warrington. “Unhand the lady, or you die on the spot!”

One can only imagine Seth Warner rolling over in his grave.

Green Mountain Boy

In the novel, traitors leer, maidens blush, rapiers deliver finishing blows and redcoats retreat like scampering satans. Indians fare poorly; the good ones are still savages or red scamps, the enemies are hell-hounds.

The author skips over the Battle of Bennington, but pours on the purple in describing the Battle of Hubbardton.

Statue of Seth Warner

Observers gaze in “silent awe” upon the “grand and thrilling spectacle.” The maidens, of course, watch with heaving bosoms as the Green Mountain Boys “unflinchingly engage in deadly strife” with the “gorgeous and disciplined bands of their outnumbering foes.” The “fires of a thousand death-tubes blaze fiercely.”

The British bring reinforcements, though, and in stilted language one observer says, “There is no hope, then, that our troops can long withstand this fresh and formidable onset.”

One of the characters asks if a colonel died in battle by saying, “Has that noble fellow then indeed been added to the honored catalogue of martyrs in our glorious cause?” (“Did he die?” would have served the purpose just as well.)

Seth Warner Gets Deathless Laurels

Daniel Pierce Thompson skips the Battle of Bennington, perhaps because the novel approached 400 pages. So when “nature was again enrobing herself in the leafy glories of summer,” he quickly summarizes the battle. It “immortalized the name of the Roman Stark” and “covered the Green Mountain Boys with deathless laurels.”

Warner/Warrington gets the girl in the end. At their wedding he wears his lace-trimmed uniform, she is “richly and tastefully dressed” in an array of spotless white. They utter their vows in tender pathos. Then the ultimate Green Mountain Boy, Ethan Allen. Two more Green Mountain Boys marry their blushing maidens. Then they all presumably live happily ever after.

You can read the whole book here.

Daniel Pierce Thompson

His action and adventure stories sold well into the 1900s, but Daniel Pierce Thompson had day jobs as well. A Montpelier lawyer, he also held a number of political posts including probate judge and secretary of state. He cofounded the Vermont Historical Society and joined the Republican Party early in its life.

Daniel Pierce Thompson

Thompson was famous in New England for his novels through the 1840s and 1850s until Nathaniel Hawthorne eclipsed him. He died in 1868. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was descended from him.

This story updated in 2022.

Images: Statue of Seth Warner By Jkb24 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61464961.

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Israel Potter, Revolutionary POW, Hobnobs in Europe With a King and 2 Founding Fathers

Israel Potter, a Revolutionary War POW, spent 50 years in exile in England, where he met King George III, Benjamin Franklin and a founding father imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Israel Potter

The British had captured Potter shortly after the Battle of Bunker Hill and took him to England aboard a prison ship.

After returning home in 1825, he published his amazing story, which sold for 28 cents throughout New England. He wrote it to persuade Congress to grant him a pension in his old age.

Herman Melville then picked up the story and wrote a fictionalized version of it, adding encounters with Ethan Allen and John Paul Jones.

In his book, Israel Potter wrote he couldn’t return home because he couldn’t afford the voyage for the wife he married in England or their children. The story made some sense: the U.S. government did pay for prisoners of war. But historians have uncovered another reason for Israel Potter’s long stay in England, one he conveniently left out: He probably spied for the British.

Israel Potter

He claimed he was born in Cranston, R.I., on Aug. 1, 1744, to reputable parents who loved and indulged him – until he turned 18. He then fell in love with a neighbor’s daughter, but his parents forbade him from seeing her. So he ran away from home.

Israel Potter spent the next few years clearing land in Northern New Hampshire, working as a surveyor, hunting, trapping and trading with Indians. After nearly three years he returned home to his parents, who had given him up for dead. They still refused to let him marry the girl he loved, so he again ran away – this time to sea.

But the ship burned, and Israel Potter, a castaway, signed on to two whaling voyages. When he returned to Rhode Island he got a job with a farmer in Coventry in 1774 and enlisted in the local militia.

When he learned of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, he marched with his regiment to Boston. There he immediately went to work digging breastworks for the Battle of Bunker Hill. During the battle he fought valiantly and received a musket ball in his hip and one in his ankle.

Meeting the King

King George III

He then volunteered to crew aboard the Washington, a tragic mistake that ruined his life. The ship was to patrol Boston Harbor, preventing British ships from bringing supplies to the besieged soldiers. But the British quickly captured the Washington, and Israel Potter ended up in a floating prison in Portsmouth.

He escaped, and ultimately managed to find work with Englishmen sympathetic to the American cause. Then his tale grows completely implausible: He got a job with Princess Amelia, sister of King George III, for three months. Following that, he went to work for King George at Kew Garden. One day he was gravelling a walk when he was

unexpectedly accosted by his Majesty: who, with much apparent good nature, enquired of me of what country I was– “an American born, may it please your majesty, was my reply (taking off my hat, which he requested me instantly to replace on my head) — “ah! (continued he with a smile) an American, a stubborn, a very stubborn people indeed! — and what brought you to this country, and how long have you been here!” “The fate of war, your Majesty–I was brought to this country a prisoner about eleven months since,” –and thinking this a favourable opportunity to acquaint him with a few of my grievances, I briefly stated to him how much I had been harrassed by the soldiers–“while here employed they will not trouble you,” was the only reply he made, and passed on.

Potter concluded the king was less tyrannical and more open-minded to the Americans than he had heard in the colonies. His sympathetic portrayal of King George suggests something else: he had, by then, shifted his loyalties to the British.

Unpacking the Lies

Two centuries later, David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsa grew obsessed with the story of Israel Potter. They found his publisher, Henry Trumbull, had a reputation in his day as a prolific literary liar. Trumbull once published a narrative with 22 chronological errors on a single page.

And so the two men sought to uncover the truth about Israel Potter. They found, first of all, he was not born of reputable parents on Aug. 1, 1744. He was born in 1754, the illegitimate son of Amey Ralph. Eventually the Potter family, prominent Quakers, adopted him, perhaps because Mr. Potter was his real father.

Other, early parts of his tale ring true. Surveying did take place in northern New Hampshire when he claimed he had done that work. He probably told the truth about the ship that burned. But if he had taken the whaling voyages he said he took, he would have returned in 1777 – well after the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Kulcsa and Chacko found another problem with his tale of Bunker Hill: No Rhode Island regiments fought in the battle. Not one. They chalked it up as a complete fabrication.

The British did capture the Washington, though Israel Potter left out one important detail: the crew had mutinied on its first voyage. And he probably did end up on a floating prison in Portsmouth, England.

But what of his encounter with King George? Probably another lie.

Meeting Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (detail) 1767

“Curiously, when Potter’s memoir grows most impossible, it becomes, in a hectic sense, most true,” wrote Kulcsa and Chacko.

Israel Potter wrote that he began to think about surrender when he got a message from Squire Woodcock, an English radical sympathetic to the American cause. He went to see him and found two other Yankee sympathizers: John Horne Tooke and James Bridges. They asked him to go to Paris for them, secretly. They gave him a letter to take to Benjamin Franklin in the false heel of a boot.

Israel Potter did visit Benjamin Franklin, who saved the letter he brought. But the letter wasn’t what Potter said it was. He claimed it represented the views of various British ministers.

The letter, wrote Chacko and Kulcsa, was no more than an introduction and an attempt by certain parties to establish a surreptitious contact with the American commissioner. It certainly didn’t come from radical English gentlemen, as it was written in an unintelligible hand and filled with misspellings.

Franklin dismissed the letter as a clumsy attempt to spy on him. At the bottom of it he wrote,

“Israel Potters, pretended Letter from some Gentm. in England.”

Franklin gave Israel Potter money to return home to Rhode Island – but he stayed in England.

Henry Laurens

Another odd event suggests Israel Potter had worked on behalf of the British until the American Revolution ended: His visit to Henry Laurens in 1781.

Laurens had been vice president of South Carolina and president of the Continental Congress. The British captured him at sea and kept him under close watch in the Tower of London. “No one was permitted to visit him without a warrant from one of the three secretaries of state,” wrote Chacko and Kulcsa. But Israel Potter paid him a visit.

Why? The British wanted to persuade Laurens to defect. He didn’t, though Israel Potter may have had a hand in their efforts. Laurens wrote of a visit by a young man named ‘Bradfille,’ who offered to help him and asked him many questions. His guards later told him ‘Bradfille’ – perhaps Israel Potter – was a British spy.

Israel Potter lived in relative comfort in London until 1783, when the war ended – and the British, presumably, no longer had any use for him.

His life then spiraled downward into poverty and wretchedness. He worked as a coachman, then a brickmaker, then a chair mender and, finally, a rag picker. He married a poor but respectable woman, who gave him 10 children. He buried seven of them under the age of five, two before the age of 20. Then he buried his wife.

That part of his story is probably true, concluded Chacko and Kulcsa. A writer interviewed Israel Potter around 1819 and described him as a scavenger.

Home At Last

Finally he and his surviving son Thomas went to the American consul in London – probably because he learned Congress had agreed to fund pensions for Revolutionary War veterans. Israel Potter was so weak and ill he had to crawl up the steps. The consul cheerfully agreed to help him. On April 5, 1822, he set sail for his native land.

Israel Potter hoped an inheritance awaited him in Cranston. It didn’t. His brothers had sold all his father’s property and divided the proceeds among themselves.

In hopes of getting a pension from Congress, he wrote, or rather dictated to Henry Trumbull, The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter.

Congress didn’t believe his story either, and denied him his pension. He spent the rest of his days eking out a meager living repairing chairs in Rhode Island. He probably died in 1826, his gravesite unknown.

With thanks to Chacko, David, and Alexander Kulcsa. “Israel Potter: Genesis of a Legend.” The William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 3 (1984): 365-89. doi:10.2307/1922730. This story updated in 2022.

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The Telegraph Hills of Massachusetts

Along the east coast of Massachusetts stretching from Boston to Martha’s Vineyard lies a series of Telegraph Hills. So named around 1801, they once belonged to a communication system likened to a mechanical internet.

Starting in 1801, a semaphore system carried messages 75 miles in 10 minutes between Edgartown and Boston. Operators were stationed in towers on top of the telegraph hills so signals could be transmitted. Their purpose: to communicate news and instructions between ship owners and ship captains.

Today, telegraph hills stand in Edgartown, Woods Hole, Sandwich, Plymouth, Duxbury, Hull, Provincetown and South Boston, all in Massachusetts. The only other telegraph hill in New England is in East Pittston, Maine.

Practically no evidence – written or physical — exists of the mechanical internet on top of Massachusetts’ telegraph hills. Except, of course, for the name.

Telegraph Hills

A 19th-century demonstration of a semaphore

In 1792, a French inventor named Claude Chappe invented a semaphore system to relay messages faster than post riders could. It included a tower within sight of another tower. On top of the tower were movable shutters – also called blades or paddles. An operator could move them into different positions to represent different letters of the alphabet.

When an operator in the tower saw the semaphore move on the neighboring hill, he would pick up the message and then send it to the next relay tower. The French used the system along the coast to warn of the approach of British warships.

Napoleonic semaphore line

The system spread from France, and in 1801 Jonathan Grout built an optical telegraph system on the telegraph hills between Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard and Dorchester Heights in Boston. Grout was the son of a Revolutionary veteran who had served in the first U.S. Congress from Bristol County, Massachusetts.

He used the system to transmit shipping news. For example, if a ship owner knew that cargo from the East Indies would fetch a higher price in Philadelphia than Boston, he could tell his captain via semaphore to head south. That way, the ship would avoid the dangerous and time-consuming voyage around Cape Cod.

The system had drawbacks. For example, it didn’t work at night. Grout attracted few customers, and shut the operation down in 1807. The telegraph hills remain, however.

The idea wasn’t horrible. In 1822, John Rowe set up a similar system in Boston Harbor. It worked for about 30 years. By the 1850s, however, Samuel Morse had patented his electric telegraph, which overtook the mechanical internet.

Telegraph Hills Today

https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/telegraph-hills-hull-mass..jpg

The water tower on Telegraph Hill in Hull, Mass.

Since Grout closed his semaphore business, people have used telegraph hills for other purposes. Plymouth, for example, built a fire tower on its Telegraph Hill in the 1940s, but later moved it. Sandwich still has a fire tower on its Telegraph Hill, now part of the Discovery Hill conservation land. The Town of Hull built a real telegraph tower in the 19^th century, and then a concrete water storage tank in the 20th.

Atop Telegraph Hill in Dorchester Heights

And in Dorchester Heights, Telegraph Hill is the site of Thomas Park. In the center of the park stands the Dorchester Heights Monument. It commemorates the fortification of the hill during the Revolutionary War, which drove the British from Boston.

Images: Telegraph Hill in Hull, Mass., By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9916565. Dorchester Heights Monument By Jameslwoodward – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8371073. Napoleonic semaphore line By The drawing is signed "Keith Thomas" in lower right corner – Retrieved June 11, 2014 from Radio News magazine, Ziff-Davis Publishing Co., Inc., New York, Vol. 32, No. 5, November 1944, p. 71 archived on http://www.americanradiohistory.com/, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39352497. Map of Telegraph Hills By Nzeemin – This PNG graphic was created with Inkscape ., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22797044.

With thanks to Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England By Christopher J. Lenney. This story was updated in 2022.

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Revolutionary War Veterans Reminisce (And Get Their Pictures Taken)

During the Civil War, a Connecticut minister named E. B. Hillard went on a quest to collect the reminiscences of the Revolutionary War veterans still alive. They had fought as teenagers and lived a century or more, into the age of photography.

So Hillard traveled to their homes, nearly all west of their birthplaces, interviewed them and took pictures of them and their houses. He compiled them into a book called The Last Men of the Revolution, published in Hartford in 1864.

Few photos of Revolutionary war veterans ever existed, and few survived. Edward Everett, the Massachusetts statesman, so prized Hillard’s work that he wrote a letter to thank the publisher on the day he died. The book, he wrote, “was all that can be expected.”

The Revolutionary War Veterans

Lemuel Cook, the last of the Revolutionary War veterans

Lemuel Cook was born in Plymouth, Conn., on Sept. 10, 1759. He signed up at 16 and served in the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons, which patrolled Southern Connecticut and New York. They fought Loyalist cowboys, marauders who stole cattle and sold it to the British.

He first smelled gunpowder during a retreat in West Chester, N.Y. “Lem, what do you think of gunpowder?” said another soldier. “Smell good to you?”

Cook almost lost his life during his first sentry duty at Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. While standing guard, a cowboy came out of a barn and fired at him, so he moved away. Then another man came out and fired, missing him. A third, however, emerged from the barn and sent a ball into his hat.

The noise aroused the camp, and the Americans, aided by the French, captured the enemy in the barn. One had the cheek to say that three of them each bet a crown they could kill Lemuel Cook.

Cook pulled his pistol and said, “”If I’ve been a mark to you for money, I’ll take my turn now. So, deliver your money or your life!”

The cowboy handed over four crowns, and the other two gave him three more.

Baron von Steuben personally selected Cook for the march to Yorktown because of his good-looking horse. Cook remembered little fighting at Yorktown, and that Washington told them not to laugh at the British.

When Lemuel Cook died on May 20, 1866 at the age of 106, he was the last of the Revolutionary War veterans to receive a pension. He had lived long enough to marry, father 10 children and see the end of the Civil War.

Samuel Downing

Revolutionary War veteran Samuel Downing

Samuel Downing joined the war effort for his own freedom.

He was born in Newburyport, Mass., on Nov. 31, 1761. As a small boy his parents left him alone at home, and a man from Antrim, N.H., came along and told him he’d teach him to make spinning wheels. He also promised to educate the boy and give him a suit of clothes. Downing went along with him and quickly regretted his choice. All he did was split spokes and make wheels.

He escaped by enlisting in the New Hampshire Line, a Continental Army infantry regiment. The line was stationed in the Mohawk Valley under Benedict Arnold.

“A bloody fellow he was,” said Downing. “He didn’t care for nothing; he’d ride right in. It was ‘Come on, boys!’ ’twasn’t ‘Go, boys!’ He was as brave a man as ever lived.”

Downing fought in the Battle of Saratoga, and thought Arnold should have received Gen. Burgoyne’s sword of surrender. Instead, Gen. Horatio Gates got it.

“Gates was an ‘old granny’ looking fellow,” Downing said. “When Burgoyne came up to surrender his sword, he said to Gates, ‘Are you a general? You look more like a granny than you do like a ‘general.’ ‘I be a granny,’ said Gates, ‘and I’ve delivered you of ten thousand men to-day’.”

Downing marched to Yorktown, where he saw Washington every day in Virginia. “We loved him,” he said, describing him as a nice man who never smiled.

After the war, Samuel Downing married, had 13 children and built his own house in Edinburgh, N.Y. On his hundredth birthday he chopped down a hemlock tree five feet in circumference. The town held a celebration to honor one of the last living Revolutionary War veterans, and the tree was made into canes and other wooden mementoes for sale.

Daniel Waldo

The Rev. Daniel Waldo

The Rev. E.B. Hillard found Daniel Waldo in Saratoga, N.Y., near death and unable to speak after he’d fallen down a flight of stairs.

So Hillard told Waldo’s story himself. He was born Sept. 10, 1762, in Windham, Conn. At 16 he was drafted as a soldier for a month in New London. Then he enlisted for another eight months. While stationed in Greenwich, Conn., the British took him prisoner in March 1779.They took him to New York City and confined him for two months in a Sugar House used as a prison.

The British prisons were abysmal, dirty and disease-ridden. More Americans died in British prisons than in battle. But Waldo survived, winning his release after two months.

After he returned home he decided to study for the ministry and entered Yale. At the age of 96, the U.S. House of Representatives voted him as their chaplain. He died July 30, 1864.

William Hutchings

William Hutchings, one of the last Revolutionary War veterans.

Another of the Revolutionary War veterans who served only a short time was William Hutchings. Born in 1764 in York, Maine (then Massachusetts), his family moved to land near Castine, Maine, where his father built a log cabin.

The British were building a fort in Castine, and young William helped them carry logs. He also carried back information to the patriots. The British soldiers called him a ‘damned little rebel,’ though they allowed him access to the fort.

His father, Charles, had to flee after shooting a British soldier. He took his family to Newcastle for the rest of the war.

William enlisted in the Massachusetts militia at 15. He only saw fighting at the siege of Castine during the disastrous Penobscot Expedition. The British took him prisoner, but let him go because of his youth.

He built a house in Penobscot, Maine, married, had 16 children and died on May 2, 1866, 18 days before Lemuel Cook. He is buried in Penobscot, Maine.

To read the Rev. Hillard’s complete book about the Revolutionary War veterans, click here. This story was updated in 2022.

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