On Sunday, March 1, the Needham History Center will present a talk by Gloria Greis - "Needham in the Lexington Alarm." The talk will be at 1:00 pm at the Needham History Center, 1147 Central Avenue. It is free and open to the public. For more information, see https://needhamhistory.org/needham1775/.
On Saturday, April 4 at 9:00 am, Needham1775 has organized a walk to Arlington, from Townsend Green to Jason Russell's Farm, replicating the route that the militia took on April 19, 1775. The walk is approximately 12 miles. If you are interested in joining, information and registration can be found at needham1775.org.
Near the end of his long life, the Rev. Samuel West wrote a memoir about his life, his schooling, and his career in the ministry. Rev. West was the First Parish's second minister, succeeding the Rev. Jonathan Townsend in 1764, and serving for 24 years, until he left Needham in 1788. The memoir is extraordinary for its honesty about his own successes and failures, and for the candid window that it opens on the life of Needham in the mid-18th century. The Harvard-educated West was not best pleased with his farmer-parishioners, whoin his opinion were "extremely rude and uncultivated," managed their farmland poorly, and had a tendency to excessive drink. Having settled in, however, he came to realize that they were not so bad as he feared, admitting that "I was treated with great kindness by the people in general."
Rev. West was minister during the years that led up to the Revolutionary War, and between his memoir and the town records, we have a decent view of Needham's path to revolution.
In the early 1770s, the British government began passing numerous restrictive Acts to limit the commerce and governance of the Colonies, in the hope that these restraints would dampen their increasingly rebellious behavior. On December 4, 1773 (two weeks before the Boston Tea Party), Needham Town Meeting took up the question of the Tea Act and of electing its own Committee of Correspondence to "join with the Committee of Correspondence of the Town of Boston relating to the importation of Tea." The Committees of Correspondence were formed throughout the Colonies as a means for dissenters (later, revolutionaries) to communicate and organize. The December 1773 warrant article "pass'd in the negative" - that is, it was voted down. With the exception of firebrands like Eleazer Kingsbury, Needham wanted no part in the rebellious doings of their troublesome Boston neighbors.
By mid-1774, however, this attitude had begun to change. As the Intolerable Acts became more restrictive, Needhamites became increasingly restive. As Rev. West noted, "Nothing but ye most impolitic conduct in Britain could have produced that reverse in ye general spirit which now discovered itself... Every week and almost every day produced something new either to manifest or increase ye irritation of ye people..." By 1775, Needham was all-in - Town Meeting had voted to not only create a Committee of Correspondence, with Capt. Robert Smith as their representative; but it had also elected Eleazer Kingsbury as its representative to the anti-royal Provincial Congress.
The Alarm came to Needham in the morning of April 19, 1775, from several sources. A rider ("a man on horseback without any hat on") rode through West Needham and gave the alarm at Bullard's Tavern, which was on the main route toward Natick (now Route 135; the tavern was near where the main gate to Wellesley College is now located). A British deserter, headed for Sherborn, rode into Needham over Kendrick's Bridge (now Kendrick Street) and passed on the information in East Needham that the British were on the move. And Nero Benson, a black man (from his name, probably a freed slave), sounded his trumpet and gave the alarm as he rode through South Natick (at the time, also part of Needham).
Rev. West was worried, and he was right to be. Every Massachusetts town had militia companies for defense, and they were required to train weekly to be in readiness. In reality, however, their training consisted of scant copies of an old British training manual supplemented by whatever practical knowledge they could gain from men who had served in the French and Indian War about 20 years before. Their weapons were miscellaneous, and because of the cost and scarcity of powder, their practice did not often include the necessary skills of loading and shooting their temperamental muskets. West knew that they were not ready to fight the British, the strongest and best-trained army in the world. He also feared that a failed battle would lead to harsh reprisals, and the British would escalate to more violent measures than taxes to repress rebellion.
Nevertheless, 185 Needham men - nearly every able-bodied male over the age of 16 - assembled to march. Rev. West's memoir provides Needham's only first-hand account of that day:
"The news reached us about nine o'clock AM. The east [militia] company in Needham met at my house, as part of the military stores were deposited [actually, hidden from the British] with me, they there supplied themselves, and by ten O'clock all marched for the place of action with as much spirit and resolution as the most zealous friends of the cause could have wished for.
"We could easily trace the march of troops from the smoke that rose over them, and could hear from my house the report of the cannon and the Platoons fired by the British. The Needham company was soon on the ground, but unhappily being ignorant of what are called flank-guards they inserted themselves between them and the main body of the British troops. In consequence of which they suffered more severely than their Neighbors who kept to a greater distance. Never did I know a more anxious day than this... I considered it no more than the beginning of sorrows and a prelude to infinitely more distressing scenes which we expected would follow. We even anticipated the enemy enraged as they were at our doors and in our houses acting over all the horrors which usually attend the progress of a victorious exasperated army especially in civil wars like this...
"In the evening we had intelligence that several of the Needham inhabitants were among the slain, and in the morning it was confirmed that five had fallen in the action and several others had been wounded. It is remarkable that the five who fell all of them had families, and several of them very numerous families so that there were about forty widows and fatherless children made in consequence of their death. I visited these families immediately, and with a sympathetic sense of their affliction I gave to some the first intelligence they had of the dreadful event, the death of a Husband and a Parent."
End of Part 1.
In Part 2 (March 19) I will outline the route taken to Menotomy, the bloody battle at Jason Russell's farm, the Needham men who fought and died, and the road back home.
