Meet America’s oldest revolutionaries
Captain Samuel Whittemore may have been the oldest senior revolutionary, but he wasn’t the only one.
Militia were called upon during the war to support the army on occasion, but usually for a limited time. Except in cases of emergency, senior colonists wouldn’t have been involved in the fighting. But, as they showed on April 19, 1775, they could hold their own when they had to.
After that first battle, the colonies began organizing armies to fight the British. These included mostly younger men, as the older men had families and farms to take care of back home, according to J. L. Bell, proprietor of the Boston 1775 blog.
Josiah Haynes, an 80-year-old church deacon (whether or not he was older than Whittemore depends on the account), insisted on marching with the Sudbury minutemen to Concord. Upon seeing the British there, according to Arthur B. Tourtellot in Lexington and Concord, he urged his captain to order the attack.
“If you don’t go and drive them British from that bridge, I shall call you a coward,’’ he said.
Shot while reloading his musket, Haynes was the oldest person to be killed that day.
James Miller, 65, set up at the bottom of Prospect Hill in what is now Somerville with another minuteman, waiting for the British to approach and then firing on them “to deadly effect,’’ according to Frank Warren Coburn’s The Battle of April 19, 1775.
Understandably perturbed by the attack, the British soldiers ran at the two men.
“Come on, Miller, we’ve got to go,’’ said the other man.
“I am too old to run,’’ Miller replied.
He was killed in a hail of British bullets. A stone tablet paying tribute to his aversion to exercise marks the spot where he fell, which is now 197 Washington Street.
Also read: The (almost) last stand of Samuel Whittemore
Across from Whittemore’s (almost) last stand is a marker commemorating the “Old Men of Menotomy.’’ These men—who Samuel Abbot Smith idenfitied as Jason and Joe Belknap, James Budge, Israel Mead, Ammi Cutter, David Lamson and six “others’’—were not old by modern standards. Cutter, for instance, was just 42. But they were old enough to be exempt from calls to join local militias.
When a convoy of weapons fell behind the troops marching up Massachusetts Avenue, the “old men’’ took action. They armed themselves, hid behind a stone wall in front of a church, and waited, Smith wrote. As the convoy approached, they jumped up and aimed their weapons, ordering the convoy’s surrender.
Instead, the British tried to run for it. The old men fired on the convoy, killing several horses and one or two soldiers. The remaining soldiers surrendered. The British never got the supplies.
As the British made their way back through Menotomy on their retreat, Cutter, fresh from capturing the convoy, went to the house of Jason Russell to warn him to leave. Russell’s wife and children took off, but Russell, 59 years old, refused, according to Arlington Historical Society museum administrator Sara Lundberg.
“An Englishman’s house is his castle!’’ he famously declared.
And so he and about a dozen militia shot at the retreating British from behind the stone wall in Russell’s front yard. They ran for the “castle’’ when the flank guard approached, but Russell never made it: He was shot on his doorstep and bayoneted. When his wife returned, she found bodies — including her husband’s — piled in her kitchen, and bullet holes in the walls.
Russell’s castle still stands, now owned by the Arlington Historical Society. The bullet holes are still there.
Photos: A look at the many faces of the American flag:
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