Researching Barrett's Farm and Widow Brown's Tavern.

Maybe it's jejeune to remark on the amazement one sometimes experiences when undertaking historical research, but I guess I'm not world-weary enough, world-weary as I am, not to get some excitement out of the things I find.

Presently, as I remarked in an earlier post, I'm in the process of writing about the experiences of Ensign Francis Grose in the battles of Lexington/Concord on 19 April, 1775. In the process of this battle the British soldiery battered on several house and tavern doors in their search for weapons, and later, out of anger and a desire for revenge, because one of their own had apparently been scalped, and had his ears and nose cut off after the skirmish at the North Bridge near Concord. ( He hadn't been scalped, whatever the British thought, nor had his ears been cut off, but he had been cleaved with a tomahawk by a young teen while he lay dying of his wounds on the Concord road.) Grose, who was fortunate enough to miss the battle at Lexington and the deadly clash on the North Bridge, through no fault of his own, had been sent to search the Barrett's Farm some miles out of Concord for weapons and ammunition. James Barrett was head of the Concord militia and Loyalist spies had reported his farm was one of the main storage depots for weapons in Concord.
There was much tantalising material about Barrett's Farm in the secondary sources, but I still didn't really have a good idea of what actually went on there until I came across a little gem of a book which had all the American first hand accounts of events at the farm and a good deal of Concord local tradition. (There is a British narrative by Ensign John De Berniere, but it didn't have much in it for this part of the Concord expedition; and its reliability is suspect in any case.) That little gem was Ellen Chase's The Beginnings of the American Revolution based on contemporary letters, diaries and other documents, compiled in the nineteenth century. It can be found at http://www.archive.org/details/beginningofam03chas The same work gave me quite a bit of information about how Grose's detachment behaved on their way back from Barett's Farm when they stopped at Widow Brown's Tavern a mile away from the North Bridge. Basically, with the encouragement of three of their officers they sat under a tree tippling. Because of young Francis Grose's propensity for the grog I like to think he was one of the officers who encouraged this moment of quiet relaxation. A thirteen year old boy who was in the tavern at the time, years later made a deposition about the soldiers' behaviour, and that is in Chase's little pamphlet in its entirety. The boy heard the musket fire at the North Bridge, but it seems none of the British did. Or if they did, they ignored it.
There are no pictures of Widow Brown's Tavern. From what I can work out it did not survive the ravages of time. However, there are a plethora of images of Barrett's Farm and you can get an idea of what the place looked like inside and and out here:
http://www.hmdb.org/marker.asp?marker=18064
Apparently his bedroom walls were painted a "Red Indian red."
The Barrett family had hid musket balls in barrels of feathers in their attic, ploughed kegs of powder, muskets and cannon into the fields near their house, hidden food meant for rebel soldiers on an ox-driven wagon in the swamp etc., if the local tradition is correct. And there is no reason to suppose it isn't in this instance. All that were found were some gun carriages in the barn. When the soldiers proceeded to set fire to them in the middle of the barn, Mrs. Barrett insisted they burn them out in the middle of the road, as they had promised they would preserve private property. [at this point the writer is tempted to be a socialist smart-alec about the radicalism of the American Revolution, but he refrains.] She fed the soldiers bread and milk after they had finished their searching, because "we are commanded to feed our enemy if he hunger", refused to dole out any spirits she may have had hidden away in a cupboard and told them they were giving her blood money when an officer tried to pay for the food. At 58, which was old for those days, she was quite a spirited ancient.
I reckon the whole story of Barrett's farm and the drinking session afterwards under the trees at Widow Brown's Tavern will be one of the many good stories in my chapter on Grose and the battles of Lexington/Concord.

History Minutiae: Lexington and Concord

Presently I'm deep in the throes of writing chapter 3 of my book on the Australian connection with the American Revolution and the War of American Independence. The chapter is about 20 year old Ensign Francis Grose (Commander of the New South Wales Corps in 1792 and Lieut. Governor of New South Wales from 1792). And in the process I've got bogged down (briefly) in some historical minutiae which by itself is vaguely purposeless, but for purposes of historical accuracy one sort of has to get right.

The first of these was the vexed question of how many officers and rank and file went on the Concord expedition. We know it was somewhere between 700 to 800 troops overall but I got this bug trying to work out exactly how many troops were in the detachment of the 52nd. Light Infantry (Grose's company) that went to Concord. Helpfully, David Hackett Fischer provided some records in the appendices of his excellent Paul Revere's Ride. According to one list which was partly drawn from pay rosters there were 2 officers and 35 other ranks in the 52nd. Light Infantry. But another list provided in Fischer's appendices which showed the Returns of of Strength of the British Army in Boston which did not include commissioned officers, sergeants or musicians showed that in April 1775 there were 299 soldiers fit to march, 30 unfit, and that the company was down 61 effectives. Finally, looking at British casualty figures a captain and 2 lieutenants were killed along the Battle Road, which, one might note is more than the total complement of officers supposed to be attached to the 52nd. according to the pay rosters. At this point, I just threw my hands up in the air, and gave up. (I hate numbers anyway, even if I do have to deal with them sometimes.)

The second piece of minutiae I became temporarily obsessed with was why was there such a negative and angry reaction from the Americans in the powder scares in late 1774, (which partly arose out of the fact that one of the things the British were out to destroy at Concord was gunpowder.) when the British confiscated American powder in Massachusetts. The answer to that one was easy enough to find. It was in one of the books I have here, Robert Harvey's A Few Bloody Noses. The main ingredient to gunpowder was saltpetre, mined in Bengal and exported to Europe. The Americans had to import all their gunpowder as they didn't have all the ingredients to make it. (And, from early December, 1774, importation of gunpowder into the thirteen rebellious colonies, but especially Massachusetts was prohibited.

The final piece of minutiae I got caught up with was - exactly where in Boston was the 52nd. Light Infantry stationed? This was actually of some significance for the paragraph I was currently working on as I wanted to know the time it took Grose's 52nd. Light Infantry to march from their quarters to Back Bay where the Concord expedition began. It could have been from near Back Bay, from the Long Wharf or from various other places. It turns out they were encamped on Beacon Hill only ten minutes march from their embarkation point, but they were probably one of the last regiments to reach the beach, because Lt. Frederick Mackenzie of the Royal Welch Fusiliers does not note their arrival at the beach.

And if you wondering what's happening to the chapter on Bunker Hill, discussed in an earlier post, I'll be starting on it after I've completed the research and have finished chapter 3.