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Discover the Hidden History All Around You

You wouldn’t want to see one of New England’s historic buildings, landscapes or icons without knowing about its hidden past, would you?

New England has plenty of landmarks with obvious history, from taverns and meetinghouses to mill yards and monuments. But New England is even more drenched in history than you might imagine.

That road you take to work might have once been trod by French soldiers during the Revolutionary War. A child might have gone to the gallows by that statue you just passed. A world-famous architect, now forgotten, might have designed that pretty church you saw.

The New England Historical Society has regularly posted a feature listing six such noteworthy items, hidden or otherwise. Each New England state gets one. The Six Oldest Houses. Six Mysterious Stone Structures. Six Landmark Signs. Six Irish Landmarks. You get the picture.

New England’s Hidden Past

Now, New England Historical Society authors Dan and Leslie Landrigan have compiled 60 lists of six landmarks into a book called, New England’s Hidden Past: 360 Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Misunderstood Landmarks. If you travel anywhere in New England, this would be a handy book to have around. Looking for a scenic drive for some leaf-peeping in fall? You could take an old Indian trail. Fascinated by the Underground Railroad? Here are six stops.

Trying to find one of each hidden landmark in each New England state can be tricky, especially when Vermont and Rhode Island are so small. But a list of revolutionary forts takes you to the top of Mount Independence in Orwell, Vt., for one of the largest, least disturbed revolutionary sites in America. A list of places where gallows once stood takes you to the spot on a Rhode Island sidewalk where 26 pirates met their maker – all in one day.

New England’s Hidden Past takes readers to the grave sites of revolutionary heroines, Loyalist houses, stagecoach stops, historic department stores, ghost towns and Little Italys. Anyone who loves New England history will love this book.

Order it here and you’ll help local bookstores and the New England Historical Society.

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When Massachusetts Abolished the State Police

In 1875, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts abolished the state police department. It was only 10 years old, the first state police force in the country, but Massachusetts had had enough.

Attitudes toward a centralized police force were very different in the 19^th century than they are now. Americans generally preferred a vigilant citizenry rather than a standing army to control disorder and crime. They distrusted powerful authorities, especially in rural areas.

And in Massachusetts, they didn’t like the state police seizing their booze.

Some of Massachusetts’ first state police officers: John Gilman, Charles Hair and William King.

The Constabulary

On May 16, 1865, Gov. John Andrew signed a bill into law creating the Massachusetts State Constabulary. By then the temperance movement had taken hold in Massachusetts, but people brazenly flouted the laws governing alcohol. And so that first state police force had as its mission the enforcement of the alcohol laws, as well as suppressing gambling and houses of prostitution.

Up until then, cities and towns left crime control up to local constabularies and police. The state had little to do with the local police and the local courts.

But local constables tended to be part-time, unsalaried officials who served for a year. They didn’t get paid much, but did get rewarded for making arrests, serving warrants and producing witnesses. Constables often had to collect taxes, which made the officeholder unpopular and the office undesirable. As a result, inexperienced men who wanted to avoid trouble got the job, but they tended not to keep it for long.

Private crime-fighting associations filled the gaps left open by the amateur constables. Property owners formed such associations to prevent theft and pursue horse thieves. Banks formed them to go after counterfeiters and temperance organizations formed them to rampage against rum.

During the 19^th century, New England had at least 72 protective societies — like the Worcester Association for the Protection of Fruit or the Pownal Association to Counteract and Detect Horse Thieves and Robbers — in more than 100 towns.

state-police-society-for-the-mutual-aid-against-thieves

The Worcester society for the mutual aid against thieves at work.

The State Police

But times were changing. In 1855, Massachusetts passed a version of Maine’s dry law, which banned alcohol — except for medicinal, mechanical or manufacturing purposes. It was honored more in the breach than in the observance.

So shortly after the Civil War, Massachusetts established the state constabulary to crack down on purveyors of alcohol. Andrew appointed Gen. William Sterling King, shot 21 times at the Battle of Antietam, to head the first state police force in the United States.

Over the next 10 years, about 360 state police constables served an average of 2-1/2 years. Most had fought in the Civil War. They came from all walks of life and from all over the globe.

Booze Busters

The state constabulary got off to a fairly good start. They had to protect attendees at the Methodists’ annual meeting in Wesleyan Grove on the Martha’s Vineyard Camp Ground in August 1865. Five constables received the assignment and won praise for their performance.

Martha’s Vineyard Campground Tabernacle in the Wesleyan Grove, Oak Bluffs

But they also began to shut grog shops, saloons and rum mills. During the first six months of their existence, they won convictions for 1,404 liquor sellers. Many more liquor dealers agreed to cease operations, but they anticipated (correctly) the Legislature would repeal prohibition.

They also started to seize large quantities of alcohol. In December, 1869, for example, Deputy Constable Amasa H. Tolman was involved in the seizure of 80 gallons of ale and three-and-a-half gallons of spirits in Boston.

They didn’t win many friends, though, for grabbing people’s booze.

Someone shot at Constable William McKay from a wooded area in North Adams because he seized so much liquor. McKay once confiscated 60 barrels of beer and stored them in his barn, butthen someone tried to blow up the building with nitroglycerin.

Adding to the unpopularity of the state police was the shooting death of a brick-thrower in Westfield, Mass., in 1867. The constables had raided a gambling den, which started a riot, and a constable shot a rioter about to throw a brick at him. When the rioter died, the sheriff arrested the constable, but he was not prosecuted.

In 1870, the Legislature cut the state police budget, and 72 constables were suspended from duty. Many of the laid-off constables agreed to work for half pay.

Local Sovereignty

For the first decade of its existence, in fact, the Massachusetts General Court repeatedly tried and failed to abolish the state police. It wasn’t just the controversy over liquor seizures and prosecutions, though. People did not want a police force controlled by a powerful centralized government.

On May 18, 1874, the Boston Post wrote an editorial against the state police.

The whole system of a State Police is extraneous to the spirit of true local sovereignty. That a power from without should be imposed upon the people … is fatal to the soundness of the theory from which such a police force draws its life.

Ten years after the state police force began, the Legislature abolished it. They replaced the booze-busting constables with a small detective force and charged it with quelling riots and helping prosecutors find evidence. Then in 1879 lawmakers abolished the detectives and replaced them with ‘district police.’ Two men in each district had only limited duties.

It wasn’t until 1921 that the Massachusetts state police force began to take its current shape. That year, the Legislature enlarged the agency to 50 officers stationed in barracks across the state. Their job: to enforce the law in rural areas that didn’t have adequate police forces.

With thanks to State Police in the United States: A Socio-historical Analysis by H. Kenneth Bechtel; Stop, Thief! Private Protective Societies in Nineteenth-Century New England, by Ann-Marie Szymanski in The New England Quarterly; and The First To Serve by Ronald J. Guilmette. Images: Wesleyan Grove By LisaHendricks – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2847459.7. This story was updated in 2023.

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James Somerset, the Boston Runaway Who Ended Slavery in England

In 1771, James Somerset languished in an English prison ship that would soon set sail for Jamaica. From there, he would be sold to a sugar plantation owner who would probably work him to death well before he reached old age.

But he had friends in England, and they went to court asking for a writ of habeas corpus. And so the prison ship captain dutifully took James Somerset to the Court of King’s Bench, where a judge would decide whether he had been legally imprisoned.

He hadn’t. And the judge’s decision in Stewart v. Somerset would end slavery in England, at least in the public’s mind. It sent American Southerners into the patriot camp, fearing that England would take away their slaves. And it inspired enslaved men and women to sue for their freedom in the northern colonies.

Granville Sharp

James Somerset

A Boston customs collector named Charles Stewart bought James Somerset from a Virginia plantation owner. He brought him to England in 1769, but James Somerset escaped. Stewart caught up with him, however, and had him incarcerated on the prison ship Ann and Mary.

But James Somerset had been baptized a Christian in England, and his three godparents went to court to set him free. England’s leading abolitionist, Granville Sharp, assembled a team of five lawyers to defend James Somerset. Frederick Douglass would later quote one of those lawyers, an Irishman named John Philpot Stewart.

The lawyers argued that no law authorized slavery in England.

Stewart’s lawyers argued that property rights took precedence over human rights. Plus, they pointed to the danger of freeing all 15,000 enslaved black people in England.

Lord Mansfield, who ruled in favor of James Somerset

Air Too Pure

In 1772, Lord Mansfield, the chief justice, ruled on the case. He decided that slavery had no basis in natural law or in English law. He found slavery so odious, he wrote, that it required Parliament to pass a law to legitimize it.

The state of slavery is of such a nature that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political, but only by positive law [statute]… Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from the decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged

Lord Mansfield’s decision did not include a quotation often attributed to him: “This air is too pure for a slave to breathe in.”

Shock Waves

Slavery did persist in England, however, for another six decades after the ruling. James Somerset, though, had set in motion a series of actions that would ultimately end slavery in England. And his legal victory persuaded the English public at large that no man was a slave on English soil.

In the American colonies, of course, it would take a Civil War to end slavery.

During the run-up to the American Revolution, the colonial newspapers reported extensively on Stewart v. Somerset. The case created a sensation, especially in the South. Plantation owners realized that Parliament could not only tax them without representing them, it could free their slaves.

The Massachusetts General Court in 1771 had actually drafted a bill to emancipate the slaves, but the patriot leaders killed it. James Warren explained it “would have a bad effect on the union of the colonies.”

James Warren by John Singleton Copley

Selfish Colonials

Historian Alan Taylor argues that James Somerset’s victory persuaded many African Americans to take the Loyalist side in the looming revolution.

“Many enslaved men and women began to look to the king as a potential liberator,” Taylor wrote. African-American preachers preached the king ‘was about to alter the World and set the Negroes Free.’ The selfish colonials had blocked his wishes.

Elizabeth Freeman played an important role in ending the slave trade.

Some colonies did take the battle for liberty to include more than just white men. Vermont abolished slavery in 1777, and Pennsylvania followed in 1780, Massachusetts in 1783 and Connecticut in 1784.

In Massachusetts, two enslaved servants followed James Somerset’s example and filed freedom suits. Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker both won their cases, effectively ending slavery in Massachusetts.

James Somerset presumably died in England – a free man.

With thanks to American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor. This story was updated in 2023.

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Rhode Island’s Little Annapolis: The PT Boat Training Center at Melville

During World War II, Rhode Island residents could hear the roar of PT boat engines from Narragansett Bay all day and see tracer bullets fired over the ocean at night.

They could watch the PT boats racing around either in formation or practicing maneuvers. Perhaps Richard Nixon saw them from the Quonset Point Naval air station while he trained there in 1942. Perhaps George H.W. Bush had an aerial view of the little boats while training at the Charlestown Naval Air Station. And maybe they caught a glimpse of John F. Kennedy racing around the bay, leaving a rooster tail in his wake.

Birth of the PT Boat

The Navy had recognized early in the war that it needed small, high-speed, heavily armed gunboats to use among the hundreds of small islands in the Pacific. From that insight came the Patrol Torpedo boat, known as the PT boat. You may have seen PT boats in motion pictures such as They Were Expendable and PT 109 or the comedy TV show, McHale’s Navy.

Nearly all of the 14,000 PT boat officers and men trained at the small navy base on Narragansett Bay in the village of Melville, a part of Portsmouth, R.I. The Navy didn’t just train its men there, but developed PT boat policies and tactics as well.

Not many histories of these small bases have been written. Melville, however, graduated a disproportionate number of extremely successful men. In addition to a president of the Unite States, Melville graduated a U.S. Supreme Court justice, three movie stars, five U.S. ambassadors, four NFL coaches, six top corporate executives and a U.S. attorney general – to name a few.

This is their story.

Devil Boats

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, has published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He has a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lives in East Providence, R.I.

PT boat logo

The base was formally known as the Motor Torpedo Boat Squadrons Training Center (MTBSTC). The Japanese called them Devil Boats, and the Navy fondly called them the Mosquito Fleet, after their logo. The Secretary of the Navy signed an order establishing the PT boat fleet on Feb. 17, 1942.

In the beginning, a Massachusetts firm began construction on the small base. But then the Navy largely turned it over to the Rhode Island companies of Gilbane, Coleman and Collins. When all was said and done, there would be 59 buildings and 150 Quonset Huts (a Rhode Island invention). These buildings and huts would house classrooms, mess halls, warehouses, machine shops, living quarters and more — everything you’d find in a large Navy base.

The builders literally built a boat basin for the PT boats out of a swamp. It was staffed full time by 57 officers and 280 enlisted men. Motorists could see it from the Mt. Hope Bridge, which connects Bristol and Portsmouth.

Alongside the PT boat training unit was the Motor Torpedo Boat Repair Training Unit (MTBRTU). This unit had a staff of 30 officers and 950 enlisted men. Here they trained on maintaining the three 1500-horsepower Packard engines on a PT boat either in dock or the field. On the other side of the base was the Naval Fuel and Net Depot – a good location because those Packard engines gobbled up huge amounts of high-octane fuel.

Melville also had the advantage of having the Navy’s Newport Torpedo Station on Goat Island down the road from it. The torpedo station could provide training duds, sometimes live, for the torpedo boats to practice with. It also supplied experimental torpedoes to try out and a seven-mile torpedo range running north from the torpedo station up Narragansett Bay toward Prudence Island.

Mount Hope Bridge

Specht Tech

The Navy organized the PT boats into 44 squadrons, generally comprised of 12 boats. All told, the Navy commissioned over 650 PT boats by the end of the war.

The men nicknamed the squadrons ‘RON’, from the last three letters of ‘squadron,’ and added their number. RON 4 began operations at the Newport Navy Base on Jan. 13, 1942. It later moved to the crowded Melville base and remained in operation for the duration of the war. RON 4 patrolled the Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts coastline. Thus Narragansett Bay provided a safe haven for training and experimentation.

Lt. William C. Specht, soon promoted to lieutenant commander, was tapped to serve as Melville’s first commander in March 1942. He also ran the repair and fuel depots. Specht oversaw the construction of the base as well as the development of its curriculum. Navy men assigned to the course at Melville joked they attended “Specht Tech.”

Lt. jg. John F. Kennedy in PT 109

Plenty Tough

The PT boats were built mostly by the Higgins Company in New Orleans and the ELCO Company, a division of Electric Boat, the submarine builder. They had to measure at least 77 feet long in order to carry and launch Mark 8 torpedoes. They also carried twin 50-caliber machine guns. Some of the PT boats had 20 mm cannons.

The crewmen did their gunnery training at the Anti-Aircraft Center at Price’s Neck on Newport’s Ocean Drive. George Donovan, now 92, remembers them practicing at night. Along with his brother and cousins, he watched from his grandmother’s bedroom window, which faced Ocean Drive. They were fascinated and mesmerized watching countless tracer bullets fired out over the ocean at practice targets towed by small airplanes. These trainees used live ammunition, and occasionally they strayed off target and accidently shot down the tow plane.

The men trained in their PT boats on Narragansett Bay and in the ocean between Block Island and Martha’s Vineyard, 10 miles south of Newport. People said the rooster tail and the roar of the engines was most impressive the first time you heard and saw them. These boats could travel between 40-45 miles an hour at full throttle and were physically demanding to operate. So demanding they sometimes said that “PT” meant the men had to be ‘plenty tough.’

A PT boat underway near Midway

Accidents Happen

Occasionally, things went wrong.

Whenever the torpedo station was going to launch a test torpedo along its seven-mile range off Gould Island, it blew a very loud warning whistle. But one day in 1942 the commander of PT 122 did not hear the whistle, understandable over the roar of three Packard engines. He strayed into the test range and was nearly sunk by a test torpedo.

On another occasion that same year, PT 59 launched a torpedo in error. It traveled an estimated seven miles and struck the cargo ship USS Capella, anchored off Jamestown, and it began to sink. The quick-thinking skipper used his powerful engines to push the Capella to shallow water and thus save her from sinking. She was later repaired and put back into service. However, the entire incident was kept secret until the 1970’s.

Then in 1943, another PT boat launched a torpedo that went off course and sank a freighter anchored off the Quonset Point Naval Air Station.

And while patrolling Rhode Island coastal waters, PT 200 struck an unknown submerged object and sank.

Melville Today

Soon after the end of World War II, the Navy decommissioned the Melville Training Center and dismantled it. All that remains today are a couple of buildings and a plaque to commemorate what once was there. A busy marina operates in the PT boat cove.

When I was a youngster in the early 1960s, my friends and I used to play on an abandoned PT boat, which had been stripped of its armament and beached on the shore of what is now Hanley’s Beach, on Jacobs Point along the river in Warren, R.I. It had apparently crashed into something submerged because it had a large hole in its hull. We could enter the PT boat through the hole and play around, imagining what once might have taken place aboard her.

According to the Warren Preservation Society, what remained of the PT boat burned to the ground about 1970. All that’s left is some iron from what once must have been her engines.

Today there are precious few PT boats remaining, perhaps 10 in the world. Two fully restored boats can be seen on display at Battleship Cove in Fall River, Mass. If you want to experience what they were really like, take a trip to New Orleans and the National WW II Museum where they have fully restored the PT 305 to fully operating condition. You can even take a 45-minute ride on it in Lake Ponchartrain.

As noted previously, about 14,000 people went through the Melville Training Station out of about 12 million men and women who served in the armed forces during the war. What seems to me remarkable, and far out of proportion to its size, is the number notable men who served there.

The PT boat in Battleship Cove

Melville Alumni

Here is an incomplete listing:

Anthony Akers, U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand

Paul Austin, Chairman of the Board, Coca Cola

Howard Baker, U.S. Senator from Tennessee, chief of staff to President Reagan, U.S. Ambassador to Japan

William C. Battle, President of Field Crest Mills, U.S. Ambassador to Australia

Charles A. Black, husband of Shirley Temple and aquaculture pioneer

John D. Bulkeley, Navy Vice Admiral and one of the most decorated men in military history, including the Medal of Honor; skippered PT boat that took Gen. Douglas MacArthur out of the Philippines

Michael Burke, CBS Sports executive and President of the New York Yankees

John Clagett, author of 19 books

Bernard A. Crimmins, All-American football player, Notre Dame 1941; college football coach`

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., part of the invasion of Southern France, organized the Beach Jumpers, movie actor

Paul B. (Red) Fay, Undersecretary of the Navy, author

John Harllee, Chairman, Federal Maritime Commission

Michael J. Holovak, All-American football player, Boston College, 1942; college football coach and NFL team executive

John F. Kennedy, U.S. President

Joe Kuharich, college football coach and head coach NFL teams

Elgar Laux, Vice Chairman, Chrysler Corp.

Walter Lemm, head coach Houston Oilers and St. Louis Cardinals

Henry Loeb, Mayor of Memphis, Tenn.

Carl Maddox, Athletic Director, Louisiana State University

Clinton McClain, player, New York Giants

Torbert MacDonald, U.S. Representative from Massachusetts

John N. Mitchell, U.S. Attorney General

Robert Montgomery, actor, President of the Screen Actors Guild

James Madden Newberry, founder of PT Boats, Inc.

Jack B. Olson, Lieutenant Governor of Wisconsin, U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas

Paul T. Rennell, Vice President, Pan American World Airways

Don Rickles, actor and comedian

Raymond P. Shafer, Governor of Pennsylvania

Preston L. Sutphen, Sr., President of Electric Boat, builder of PT boats

Harold Thorkilsen, President and CEO, Ocean Spray Cranberries, Inc.

Malcolm Troon, U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Israel and the Soviet Union

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, millionaire

George Vanderbilt, millionaire

Byron White, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

End Notes

Leo Caisse, the author of this story about the 1916 U-boat visit, passed away in 2020. He published 10 historical articles, including Ears On the World in America in World War II Magazine, October, 2017. He earned a B.A. and M.A. in American History from Providence College and he lived in East Providence, R.I.

Images: PT Boat at Battleship Cove By Wikimaster97commons – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3846572; John F. Kennedy in PT 109 courtesy the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. This story was updated in 2023.

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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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Loyalists and Patriots: Mary Munro Sent Packing to Canada During the Revolution

During the American Revolution, Vermont was a battleground that pitted loyalists and patriots against each other, not just on the battlefield but in quiet communities like Shaftsbury.

Shaftsbury was the home of John and Mary Munro, a prosperous loyalist couple with at least seven children. They had moved from New York in 1767 and built an estate called Fowlis on land disputed by New York and New Hampshire.

John left Mary and seven children on the property while he went off to fight the American Revolution — on the British side. Patriots constantly harassed Mary. After they won the Battle of Saratoga, Mary fled through the wilderness to Canada. Though she survived and lived for another 38 years, she never fully recovered from her ordeal.

Loyalist John Munro

John Munro

John Munro, born in Scotland to a family of modest means, came to the colonies in 1756 as a Highland soldier. Stationed in Albany, he fought in the French and Indian war. For his service he received from New York a grant of land in Vermont, and he rose to wealth and local distinction. He may have had help from his wife, born Mary Brouwer, the daughter of a prominent Dutch couple in Schenectady, N.Y.

Appointed sheriff and chief magistrate in Shaftsbury, John Munro tried to enforce the land claims granted by New York. Unfortunately, those conflicted with the claims granted by New Hampshire.

John Munro tangled with the Green Mountain Boys over the disputed territory. He famously captured Remember Baker, a cousin of Ethan Allen, but the Green Mountain Boys rescued Baker from prison. One legend has it that Seth Warner struck Munro on the head with his sword, but Munro’s thick hair and skull broke Warner’s weapon.

Then as revolution loomed, fighting between the ‘Yorkers’ and the Green Mountain Boys evolved into fighting between loyalists and patriots.

Loyalists and Patriots

Loyalists get short shrift in American history books. But as historian W.S. MacNutt, wrote in an essay, The Loyalists: A Sympathetic View, “To the Loyalists the Revolution was the antithesis of modernity and freedom, a conspiracy of reckless and designing men to raise themselves from adversity to affluence, from public disfavor to high prominence.”

The New Hampshire grantees no doubt had designs on John Munro’s land, which included a manor house, 100 tenants, grain and lumber mills, a nail factory, an ashery and a pottery. Loyalists and patriots viewed each other with contempt.

When the Revolution broke out, Munro joined the 48^th Regiment of Foot, leaving Mary and the children behind. He recruited his own tenants and neighbors, and he spent his own money and farm stores to provision his troops. John Munro probably went off to war thinking the well-trained, well-equipped British Army would prevail over the patriots.

But as MacNutt noted, “To the amazement of many the conspiracy succeeded.”

In 1776, the patriots seized John Munro and imprisoned him in an Albany jail for 18 months. They sentenced him to hang, but he escaped to Canada in 1777.

Mary Munro

In the summer of 1777, the loyalists and patriots had both failed to gain military advantage. The French had not yet decided to join the patriots. Gen. John Burgoyne had taken command of the British forces and, stationed in Quebec, came up with an ambitious plan to end the war. He would lead his army south and cut New England off from the rest of the colonies. That, he believed, would make it easier to end the rebellion.

Meanwhile, the Vermont patriots seized the Munro estate and kept Mary and her children captive. They could stay in the house and keep two milk cows for the children, but otherwise they had little to eat. Mary sent an undated letter to her husband describing her dire straits.

“I am in a poor state of health and very much distresst. I must leave my house in a very short time, and God knows where I shall get a place to lay my head,” she wrote. “My own relations are my greatest enemies … The mills they have had a long time in their possession, likewise all your tenants’ lands and houses.’

Then in the fall of 1777, the patriots defeated Burgoyne during two battles in Saratoga, N.Y., just 35 miles from Shaftsbury. Burgoyne surrendered his army and, in the war’s turning point, the French decided to give the patriots military support.

Loyalists and patriots: Burgoyne surrenders at Saratoga.

On the Run

Mary and her children had to flee. John Munro got permission for her to move to Canada, and she sold some silver plate she’d hidden to pay for the trip.

First she went to Schenectady, where her family (presumably patriots) refused to help her. Then she traveled toward Lake George to join other loyalists on their way to Canada. They decided to lighten their load by getting rid of their food and most of their clothes.

The Munros’ eldest daughter, Christiana, in 1795, years after the conflict between loyalists and patriots.

When they arrived at Lake George, they had to wait in the woods for six days, almost perishing of cold and hunger. Then three other families arrived, and together they persuaded the commanding officer at Fort Edward to give them a boat and a flag. A party of Indians discovered them and chased after them.

Mary and her children were ‘very sickly the whole winter’ after they arrived in Quebec. John Munro declared the children recovered. But, he wrote, “Mrs. Munro never will.”

Twenty years after her ordeal, her youngest son William wrote to his father. “For Gods sake keep a good store of nourishment in the house which is the only thing you can have to comfort you and my poor ailing Mother who has suffered so much for us all.”

Mary Munro outlived her husband by 15 years, however. They both died in Canada, he in 1800, she in 1815.

This story last updated in 2022.

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