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Barak Smith and the Revolution

On the morning of April 19, 1775, nineteen-year-old Barak Smith (1755–1828) was out in the fields of Dover, Massachusetts, working the ground for spring planting. He was the youngest of seven children. Like many “spare” sons in large colonial families, his parents had hired him out to work a relative’s farm. He lived and worked with his maternal uncle, Daniel Chickering. Dover sat just south of Boston, in a county known for its heated revolutionary politics, and the town had its own active Sons of Liberty chapter.

Riders came through Dover that morning with the news. Seven hundred British regulars were marching on Concord to seize the gunpowder and munitions stored there. Massachusetts law required every able-bodied man between sixteen and sixty to serve in the local militia. Several times a year they gathered to drill. Now Barak’s captain called up the company. Barak took up his gun and went.

Sixty-six men from Dover marched that day. Across the region, militia from other towns were marching too, all of them converging on Lexington and Concord to meet a British force much larger than their own. Barak’s company covered the eighteen miles to Concord in under four hours. They arrived to find the fighting already over, but they still had grim work to do. Brigadier General William Heath ordered the Dover company to gather and bury the dead the next morning, April 20th. Barak spent his first day of the war burying those who hadn’t made it.

Seven years later, Barak married Abigail “Nabby” Battle, daughter of his militia captain Ebenezer Battle. Barak later settled in Wilmington, Vermont, where he died at the age of seventy-three. He was one of the ordinary men who answered the alarm the day the Revolution began. [289 words]

Nathan Smith (1753–1824), older brother of militia man Barak Smith, is said to have served in the Revolutionary War as well. The testimony comes from Nathan’s own son, Augustus Smith (1792–1886), who recalled in a statement given late in his life: “My father’s name was Nathan, and resided in Massachusetts, and in the fore part of the Revolutionary War he served as a soldier. He afterwards removed to Vermont.” No record has ever been found to verify it. There are simply too many Nathan Smiths from Massachusetts.

Sources

Details of Barak Smith’s service, the Dover militia, his marriage to Abigail Battle, and his later life draw on Clarance Maris Smith’s research and on Frank Smith’s Narrative History: A History of Dover, Massachusetts (1897) — available here. General Heath’s order to the Dover company to bury the dead is documented in his Memoirs of Major-General Heath (1798), available at the Internet Archive and the Library of Congress. Augustus Smith’s account of his father Nathan’s Revolutionary War service appears in his own statement in Erasmus Briggs, History of the Original Town of Concord (1883) — available here.