Nearly every house in Marblehead that predates 1775 was the home of a serviceman in America’s Revolutionary War. An estimated 300 houses still survive, even if modified by later generations, out of perhaps 525 or so that existed as the war began, when Marblehead was apparently still the sixth most populous metropolis in British North...
On his 27th birthday in May 1776 (May 19th), Captain James Mugford became an early Revolutionary War hero and martyr, killed in combat by the British in retaliation for his having audaciously and fortuitously captured a 300-ton British supply ship a day or two before. It’s a sad but fascinating story! – as his...
The Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, up above Charlestown, just north of Boston, early in the war, is famous for several reasons. The battle, the Revolutionary War’s first major combat involving cannons, was a loss for the Americans, but the British suffered a high number of casualties. One of the American revolution’s...
John Glover is justly the most famous and celebrated of Marblehead’s hundreds of Revolutionary servicemen due to his capable and resolute leadership of his intrepid and unflinching Continental Army regiment during the war’s first year and a half, through December 1776, while he was a Colonel. Although the numbers of his soldiers were somewhat in...
Captain Nicholson Broughton earned honor as the first commodore of the United States Navy. But he first gained fame as captain of the even more famous schooner Hannah, the “first” official privateer vessel sent out from Marblehead / Beverly waters under a commission from George Washington in service of his Continental Army, on September 2,...
Many men from Marblehead fought in the American Revolution. Most were part of the 14th Continental, known as Glover’s regiment. There were also captains and sailors in Washington’s crucial privateer fleet. Rebels who fought back in other ways, such as serving on Committees and attending the early Continental Congress, were also part of the story....
