Patriotism & Scandal in Southborough! A Post for Patriot’s Day

By Sally Watters

When Michael asked me to take a more active role in writing for this website, I knew I had big shoes to fill. With Patriots Day approaching my plan was to try to learn something about the Revolutionary War veterans who are buried in the Old Burial Ground. In a sense, I wanted to try to put a little flesh on their bones so they would be more than just names. It seemed appropriate to start with the three men from Southborough who had died during the Revolutionary War.

I decided to begin with Jesse Amsden. It is difficult to find a great deal of information about someone who has been dead for almost 250 years. As I began to do research, I discovered that not only had the Amsden family lost the family patriarch, but that four of his sons also joined in the fight for American independence. The family paid a high price for its patriotism. Sadly, I also discovered that preying on the elderly, defrauding the government and government red tape are nothing new. What started as a project to try to learn about Jesse Amsden ended up as the story of five Revolutionary War veterans from the Amsden family. And I have not even gotten to the other two Southborough men who died during the war or the dozens of other Southborough veterans of the Revolutionary War who deserve attention.

Jesse Amsden

Jesse Amsden was born in 1729, the youngest of John and Hannah Howe Amsden’s thirteen children. Jesse was the only one of the thirteen children born in Southborough. His eight brothers and four sisters were all born in Marlborough.  The family had not moved, but town lines had when, in 1727, the Stony Brook region of Marlborough was granted permission by the General Court of Massachusetts to form the new Town of Southborough. Jesse’s father John was among the men who had petitioned the state asking that Stony Brook be allowed to separate from Marlborough. John served as a selectman in the newly established town and was a deacon of the church. In 1748, Jesse married Southborough resident Bette Ball with whom he had seven sons and five daughters. When hostilities broke out with England, it did not take Jesse long to become involved.  He served as a Private in Captain Ezekiel Knowlton’s Company of Colonel Nicholas Dike’s Massachusetts Infantry Regiment at Dorchester Heights from December 15th 1776 until March 1st 1777.

In May of 1777, shortly before his 48th birthday, Jesse was recruited by Captain Aaron Haynes of Sudbury to enlist in the Continental Army. He was paid a bounty of $20 for enlisting. Jesse was assigned to Captain Haynes Company in the 13th Massachusetts Regiment/6th Continental Regiment under the command of Colonel Edward Wigglesworth. Jesse joined the regiment in July of 1777. Although several of his children were adults at the time of his departure for the Continental Army, his wife Bette was left with seven children at home who ranged in age from 16 to 2. The $20 bounty had probably been an enticing incentive to help with family expenses. Six months after joining the regiment, Jesse died on January 9th, 1778 at Valley Forge. The cause of death was listed as sickness. Jesse was most likely buried in one of the towns near Valley Forge where the sick soldiers were sent. He is not buried in Southborough. His widow Bette seems to disappear from the record books after his death, but several of his children can be tracked.

Jonas and Ephraim Amsden

Four of Jesse’s sons also joined the military during the Revolutionary War. His oldest son Jonas answered the Lexington Alarm of April 19th, 1775. He was a Drummer for Captain Elijah Bellow’s militia company which served for sixteen days. Ephraim, Jesse and Bette’s next son, also answered the Lexington Alarm as a Private in Captain Josiah Fay’s Company which served for five days. Shortly after that service, Ephraim, then a Corporal in Captain Fay’s Company in the regiment commanded by Colonel Jonathan Ward, served from August 1st through October 7th, 1775 at Dorchester Heights.  Ephraim, who died in 1819, is buried in an unmarked grave in the Old Burial Ground (OBG). His widow Martha died in 1834 and is also buried in an unmarked grave in the OBG. Jonas Amsden and his wife Hannah moved to Mason, NH after the war and are not buried in the Southborough.

John and Silas Amsden

In March 1781, two of Jesse and Bette’s sons, 18-year-old John and 17-year-old Silas, enlisted in the Continental Army. Silas was described as being 5 feet 11 inches tall with a light complexion. Silas was a Private in Captain John Nutting’s Company in Colonel Job Cushing’s 2nd Massachusetts Regiment. He was discharged in September 1783 after being injured when a load of wood that he was transporting for the garrison at West Point ran over his leg. His knee never healed correctly, leaving him disabled.  In April of 1793, Silas Amsden began receiving a pension of $60 a year because of his disability. Silas married Sarah Hemenway of Framingham. In 1797, Silas died in Framingham at the age of 33. The settlement of his estate shows that he was heavily in debt when he died. His creditors were awarded 4 cents on the dollar. Silas is not buried in the OBG. In 1797, the same year that Silas died, his brother John named his newborn son Silas.

John Amsden, described as 5 feet 7 inches tall and of fair complexion, served in Captain Elnathan Haskell’s Company in the regiment commanded by Colonel William Shepard’s. At least part of his service was spent working for the Quartermaster General obtaining supplies. in January 1784 he was discharged by General Henry Knox in New York with the rank of Sargent. Shortly after returning to Southborough, he married Lovisa Bellows. Like his brother Silas, John did not prosper after the war. John and Lovisa had eight children, only three of whom reached adulthood.

In 1819, John applied for a veteran’s service pension stating in his affidavit that he was disabled. He also stated that his three children were sickly and incapable of doing more than light work. An inventory of his possessions at that time showed he owned only three acres of land and had very few personal possessions. He was granted a pension, but after his death in 1827, his widow Lovisa had no means of support. By 1834, both Lovisa and her oldest son, John, had been admitted to the Southborough poorhouse.

The Struggle for a Widow’s Pension

When Congress passed a law in 1836 making the widows of Revolutionary War veterans eligible for pensions, a local man, Larkin Newton, stepped up to help Lovisa apply for a pension. In 1817, early in his career, Larkin Newton had been the school master for the west school district of Southborough. He angered some parents when he severely whipped two students.  As a result of the whippings, a special town meeting was called and Mr. Newton was warned to limit his use of physical punishment. The following school year he had moved to the center school district in Southborough where he faced continued concern about his harsh disciplinary methods. He gave up teaching the next year.

From 1837 until his death in 1840, Larkin Newton served as an overseer of the poorhouse. In that position, he was very aware of the poverty faced by Lovisa Amsden and her son John, volunteering to help Lovisa with her application for a widow’s pension. Larkin Newton began to assemble the necessary documents but ran into a problem when no record of John and Lovisa’s marriage could be found. Under the Pension Act of 1836, the widow had to have been married to the veteran while he was still in the military. Larkin Newton submitted statements from several people, including Lovisa’s 85-year-old sister Lucretia Wood of Sherborn, that they were aware of John and Lovisa’s marriage and thought it had taken place in 1782. The pension was approved and by March 1840 the government had sent a total of $720 (about $22,000 today) which included back payments. The very trusting, nearly blind and illiterate Lovisa had placed her X on several documents when requested to do so by Larkin Newton.

A second Pension Act was passed in 1838 allowing pensions for widows who had married a veteran by 1794.  Lovisa maintained that she and John had been married in 1784 just after John was discharged from the military, thereby making her eligible for a pension under the 1838 act. Larkin Newton, who had died in September 1840, had told her that under the Pension Act of 1836 she was not eligible to receive a pension. It took several years before people realized that Lovisa had been defrauded by Mr. Newton.  Lydia Bellows of Shrewsbury, John’s sister, asked Elijah Clark, a Justice of the Peace who worked to help obtain pensions, to help her brother’s widow Lovisa get a pension.

When Clark corresponded with the War Department, he was shocked to learn that she had already received a pension under the Pension Act of 1836. Lovisa was also surprised. She maintained that she had never received any money from a pension. As documents were assembled and reviewed, people began to suspect that Larkin Newton had forged a number of the documents including one from the Southborough Town Clerk listing the births of Lovisa’s nine children. Her oldest child was listed as Jonathan, born in 1783. The only problem was that Jonathan was a figment of Larkin Newton’s imagination, created in an attempt to show that John and Lovisa had been married before John left the military. In reality, John and Lovisa had only eight children, the oldest of whom was William, born in 1785. Numerous statements from such leading Southborough citizens as Swain Parker, Sullivan Fay and Joel Burnett were sent to the government attesting to the good character of Lovisa, and opining that she would never have tried to defraud the government. Joel Burnett, the town clerk in 1843, sent a statement to the War Department that several old documents dating between 1779 and 1789, had been found in a hitherto misplaced chest.

Among the documents was a paper showing the intentions of marriage for John and Lovisa dated July 1784. That helped establish their marriage, but at the same time created a problem. The government demanded the money that had already been distributed be returned because it had been granted under the Pension Act of 1836 under which she was ineligible. That act required the widow to have been married to the veteran while he was in the military and John and Lovisa’s marriage had taken place after he was discharged.   Lovisa’s champions pointed out that whereas she had not been eligible under the Pension Act of 1836, she was eligible under the Pension Act of 1838 so would have received the money anyway.

The government had stopped payments in 1840 when Larkin Newton died so was no longer sending in the necessary paperwork. Lovisa’s supporters thought that at the very least, Lovisa should receive payments from 1840 forward.  Lovisa Amsden died in 1846 still a resident in the town poorhouse, without ever receiving any of the widow’s pension to which she was entitled. Her only surviving child, John, attempted to collect the money to which his mother had been entitled. The dispute was still under advisement in 1851, but it appears that the matter was never resolved. John and Lovisa’s son John died in the town poorhouse in 1863. John, the Revolutionary War veteran, and his widow Lovisa are buried in unmarked graves in the Old Burial Ground as are several of their children.

The story of Larkin Newton’s teaching is found in Fences of Stone by Nick Noble.

 

 

A New Very Old Map

Click anywhere on the map to enlarge and explore.

 

As we’ve been sorting through the Society’s collections,  duplicates keep appearing again and again, and one of most notorious repeat offenders was the map above, an 1831 version drawn by Southborough’s own Larkin Newton, whose mathematical schoolbooks are coincidentally part of our holdings. But the funny thing was, all the examples I found were poor photo-copies. So into the recycling here, into the recycling there. But where, oh where was the original? As the end of the bulk sorting loomed, I became a bit panicked. Had we lost an 1831 map somewhere amidst the hundreds of cardboard boxes?

It turns out we had not,  because we never had the original in the first place. (Whew!) In fact, the map forms part of the Massachusetts State Archives, and our bad copies were just that, copies. However the folks in Boston were kind enough to supply a digital version, which we have substantially cleaned up and enhanced for your viewing. For the very first time it is presented here, online.

Of the many fascinating things about this map, the tree indications are perhaps the most strange to modern eyes. Living in today’s Southborough crowded with woods and houses, it seems almost impossible to imagine the vast open spaces that this map indicates, but open they were. By the 1830s, Massachusetts had been largely deforested through settlement and agriculture, and trees for timber and heating were becoming increasingly hard to find. Thus, the wooded crests of the hills shown on the map were carefully tended as woodlots, and wood ashes, critical to the soap-making process, were a highly guarded commodity. According to this map, you could have stood in front of Pilgrim Church (or better yet, climbed its steeple) and seen for miles around. And it’s true, as this very early (1850s) photograph attests:

A view looking southeast from the steeple of Pilgrim church, 1850s

If you’ve ever been in the southern part of England and looked down from those gentle hills upon the magical patchwork of villages and farms, then you know what Southborough of the period must have been like, and why it was called “the most English of all New England towns.”

Unfortunately, due to poor planning and developer-biased zoning, most of these wonderful agricultural vistas were largely lost by the 1980s, and the incredible reforestation that has occurred has closed in the remainder. But there are still a few places you can catch a hint of these once glorious views, at the Breakneck Hill and Chestnut Hill Farm Conservation lands, for example. And if these inspire you — and how can they not — we hope you will stand with the Southborough Historical Society as well as the Historical Commission as we work to ensure that all remaining agricultural parcels that come out of 61A protection get a Town Meeting vote before being sold. We just lost another 30-acre parcel this past winter as 135 Deerfoot was sold to developer Brendan Homes, which has since applied for permission to demolish the historic 1870 house and barn.   Result: more houses, more traffic, higher taxes, another lost vista.

When are we going to say: Enough is enough?

 

 

On the Indian Trail, Literally

Indian Trails of the 17th and 18th centuries

In preparation for expanding the Native American presence at the Museum, I’ve been reading a wonderful book Indian New England before the Mayflower and I came across a very interesting map: “A compilation of certain recorded northern New England Indian trails and villages of the 17th and 18th centuries.” Something about this looked really familiar, so using one of the online map overlay services, I decided to place the Indian trail map over the modern road grid in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Wow!

Now I have long known that Main Street and Cordaville Roads in Southborough follow Indian trails, but I didn’t realize so did most of our existing major highways. It’s like the Roman roads in Italy!

Some examples from a cursory review:

Rt 1A its entire length
Rt 2 west of Worcester to the NY border
Rt 3 all the way to the Cape, and from Lowell to Nashua NH
Rt 6A entire length
Rts 7 and 8 (in western Mass) their entire length
Rt 10 from Vermont to Connecticut
Rt. 16 between Webster and Watertown
Rt 20 its entire length
Rt 30 most of its length
Rt 44 entire length
Rt 84 to Hartford and New York
Rt 91 through Springfield
Rt 95 all the way to NYC
Rts 110 and 117 majority of route
Rt 126/135­ between Hopkinton and Wayland

I am sure there are others. Take a minute and explore for yourself; just click on any map below to expand.  (Or, you can try the slider version of the map, HERE, using the slider in the upper right hand corner labeled “Indian Map” CAREFUL: IT GETS ADDICTIVE)

I suppose in many ways this should have been self-intuitive, as foot paths became cart-paths that became roads that became highways. But somehow, in our European bias, I think many of us (including me) always imagined the first Pilgrims hacking their way through virgin woodland, creating those paths. But the reality is that the Pilgrims and their successors had stepped into a land that had been tended, cultivated and very much altered by Native Americans for thousands of years. The cleared planting fields were already there, as were the fishing camps and weirs, the tended hunting grounds, even the settlement places. But most fatally for the Indian, the well marked land routes were there too, leading the Europeans ever westward with relative ease — to the eventual doom of their civilization.

Something to think about next time you are stuck in traffic…

Indian Trails with Modern Towns. The circles indicate documented Indian settlements
Indian Trails Superimposed on Modern Roadways
Modern Map