By Jane Sciacca
Rev250 Committee
Less than two months after the first Revolutionary War battle on April 19, men from Sudbury (now Wayland and Sudbury) again set down their farming tools to respond to the call to arms. One hundred and four men, 46 from the less populous east side, which would become Wayland, stood against the King’s troops at the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown on June 17, 1775.
Much had changed since Gen. Thomas Gage, the military governor, sent his soldiers to seize arms and supplies from nearby Concord. Then Gage had only 4,000 British troops in Boston, but by June that number had swelled to over 10,000 along with three top generals. These additional troops and their loyalist supporters strained the boundaries of Boston, at that time a peninsula connected to the mainland by a narrow neck prone to flooding. A foothold in Charlestown, across the Charles River on a hill overlooking Boston, provided added security against an invasion of colonial militia and minute men.
Bunker Hill, the highest point in Charlestown, served that purpose, but for some reason still debated, the colonial forces occupied Breed’s Hill, which was lower than Bunker Hill but nearer to the North End of Boston. The colonial forces under the command of Col. William Prescott, including the men from Sudbury, fought valiantly, but in the end, the British troops took the hill and the colonial forces had to retreat after they ran out of gunpowder.
For the British soldiers, it was a pyrrhic victory with over 1,000 men killed to take one hill. Those losses were not sustainable for subsequent confrontations and the British troops in Boston made no further attempt to secure high ground on the mainland. The Sudbury men who fought under Col. Prescott proved that they had the will to fight against tyranny and were in it for the long haul. By the spring of 1776, the British forces left Boston to pursue the war elsewhere.
Most of the men from the east (Wayland) side of Sudbury, including the first two Black enlistees from Sudbury, fought under Captain Thaddeus Russell, ancestor of the Russell’s Garden Center family. Capt. Russell, a Sudbury native, had already distinguished himself in the French and Indian Wars, and on April 19, 1775, as a lieutenant in Nathaniel Cudworth’s East Side company of minute men. At Bunker Hill, Capt. Russell and his men, according to Palmer True’s biographies of the Revolutionary War, “endured heavy fighting throughout the day.” In addition to Russell, eight other veterans of his company are also buried in North Cemetery including David Smith, son of the captain of the East Side militia, who enlisted at the age of 15. He played the fife during the Battle of Bunker Hill. According to Palmer True, “Thaddeus and his company remained as part of the army besieging Boston for the rest of the year.”
Sciacca is author of Enslavement in the Puritan Village.
