régime, following the “bone diet” of the barn, soon reduced them to the verge of starvation. These poor Continentals had little or no money with which to purchase favors and they were soon in a very bad way. The British profited by this situation to try to get the Americans to renounce the Patriot cause and enlist in the British army. A guinea a head was offered to each British soldier who would induce a rebel to join their cause. The English guard was well fed and it was very tantalizing to our New Milford men to see the burly Englishmen enjoying their abundant repasts. Necessity is the mother of invention, however, and our men soon formed a plan to obtain some of the much coveted food. The cooking for the guard was done in the room occupied by them and a limited amount of provisions was, from time to time, brought there. Late one afternoon, a half-barrel of mess pork was brought in and opened for use, and left standing under the charge of the sentry for the night. This was our boys’ opportunity and, as soon as the other prisoners were sound asleep, they very quietly raised one of the logs in their floor space and scooped out a little hole in the sand underneath. A place having been thus prepared for their expected booty, they then proceeded to get the much desired pork. The night was so dark that a man could not be recognized at any distance and this was much in their favor. Roger Blaisdell quietly approached the sentry and, explaining that he was tired of starving, asked to be told where he could go to enlist in the British army, adding that he did not dare to come when the other prisoners were awake. The sentry, overjoyed at the prospect of the guinea, and fearing that, if he let the man go, some other would secure the much-coveted prize, told Blaisdell to walk up and down his beat with him until he should be relieved, when he would take him to the officer of the day. Accordingly, they paced up and down the sentry’s beat until, when a good opportunity occurred at the point farthest from the quarters of the guard, Blaisdell hit his companion a blow behind the ear which would have felled an ox and which knocked the sentry senseless. The men, who were on the watch, rushed to the pork barrel, scooped out an armful of pork each, quickly deposited it in the hole that they had prepared, replaced the plank, and dropped down upon it, snoring to beat a bass drum. Of course an alarm was raised and the prisoners were turned out, but the sentry was too much shaken up by the blow to be able to tell much about the matter. The loss of the pork was not discovered that night, if at all, so there was nothing to direct attention to the men, and they escaped detection. Each night, while the other prisoners were sleeping, the enterprising twelve would quietly raise the plank and have a meal of raw salt pork. In after days, those of the group who survived the prison experiences (particularly Sergeant David Buell) used to refer to their prison pork as the sweetest food that they had ever eaten, and for years the standing toast at their reunions was, “To Roger Blaisdell’s pork barrel.”
Within the last few months I have compared my recollections with those of other descendants of these men and have found that the traditions of these events agree so nearly as to warrant the belief that there was much truth in the stories told by the old veterans.
After being confined for a number of weeks in the sugar house, the prisoners were taken to the prison ship Dutton. Two hundred of them were transported to Milford and put ashore there. Twenty were dead before the vessel arrived and twenty more died very soon after. All the forty are buried in the graveyard of that place. Of the twelve men of New Milford, tradition narrates the return of only four, Roger Blaisdell, David Buell, William Drinkwater and Lyman Noble. Through friends in Milford, they were able to secure a horse, and thus worked their way back to New Milford, reaching there about March, 1777. This group was eliminated from Captain Isaac Bostwick’s company and did no further service until their companions came home from the successful fields of Trenton and Princeton. Shortly after the fall of Fort Washington, the regiment containing Captain Bostwick’s company was ordered to Philadelphia. It was with Washington at Germantown before the army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge. Its term of service was to expire December 20, 1776. But Washington was then planning the move which ended in the crossing of the Delaware at Trenton, and many of its members remained in service, at his personal request, for a six weeks’ campaign.
Most of the men of Captain Bostwick’s company were with Washington and crossed the Delaware on the twenty-fifth of December, 1776, and, on the early morning of that day, they were in the battle of Trenton, where they assisted in the capture of the Hessian regiment. They were engaged in the succeeding battle at Princeton, January 3, 1777, and were finally discharged on the first of February, 1777, when they returned to New Milford.
Captain Bostwick appeared as a leader in the Danbury alarm. With him was John Terrell and David Buell, who had so far recovered from his prison experiences as to join his old companions on that occasion. Roger Blaisdell does not appear, but Bill Drinkwater does. With them was a New Milford man who had been in Captain Couch’s first company, one Ruben Phillips. Ruben Phillips was a colored man, living in New Milford, who had evidently been the cook in Captain Bostwick’s company. The descendants of Ruben Phillips were living, in my time, in the little house where the road goes up Chicken Hill toward Bridgewater, and this family knew that their ancestor had been in the Revolution with my grandfather. A descendant of this Phillips, Chester Phillips by name, volunteered in the Twenty-ninth Connecticut Infantry in the War of the Rebellion and was killed in front of Petersburg, Virginia. Truly the Revolutionary blood of New Milford was as good in the black man as in the white.
The group from Captain Bostwick’s company were engaged four days in the Danbury alarm. The following story regarding this little band is extant: The British had commenced their retreat from Danbury by way of Ridgefield and these men were following them up very earnestly, pressing close upon a grenadier regiment which was the rear guard of the British force. John Terrell, William Noble, Bill Drinkwater and David Buell rushed together up one side of the famous rock in Ridgefield, while the grenadiers were still on the other side. One of them (which one I do not know), showing himself imprudently, was shot by the British grenadiers. Of the truth of this story I have never been able to learn. It is firmly believed in and about Ridgefield and also in New Milford. There is a plate on the rock, I think, commemorating the death of one of the company.
A number of men from New Milford were in the company of Captain Daniel Pendleton of Watertown, which belonged to the regiment of Colonel Judthon Baldwin, a regiment of artificers that served under the direction of the Quarter-Master-General as a Construction Corps. This regiment was in all the engagements of the war except those about Boston and those of the northern army above Albany, in more engagements, in fact, than any other body of Connecticut troops. In 1780, when General Green took command of the Southern Department, he requested that Captain Pendleton’s company be sent to him. The company joined him, as requested, and was the only body of Connecticut men that served south of Virginia. It was on duty there until the disbanding of the army in November, 1783.
This was the only considerable group of men that went as a body from New Milford after the first two companies; perhaps it might be called the third company. The enlistments were for short periods and the changes were quite frequent, until 1778 and 1779, when enlistments began to be made for three years or the war.
New Milford is credited on the Connecticut War Records and the Connecticut Historical Society’s rolls with two hundred and eighty-five men in the war, many of whom served two and three, and some even four terms of enlistment.
While these soldiers of the Revolution were in the field doing military duty, their fathers and brothers were at home laboring for their support; not so easy a task when it is remembered that in the first three years of the war the Colony of Connecticut paid for the maintenance and equipment of her troops in the field, for the damage to her people in the British raids of Danbury and Norwalk, the immense sum of £516,606. During the last four years of the war the Continental Congress fixed Connecticut’s share of the expenses of the war at $1,800,000 a year. At times the tax rates were three shillings on the pound. The eight years of the war were years of toil and suffering to those on the sterile hill-farms, where the striving and stress were about as great as in the midst of the dangers of the battle-field. Indeed, much of the war had come to these farmers’ very doors, for the Tories of Squash Hollow and the Quakers of Quaker Hill and Straits Mountain had not proved themselves exactly the men of peace that they
