“The skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge”

James H. Stark (1847–1919) was born in Britain and brought to Boston at the age of nine.

Stark became an American citizen but maintained ties with his native country, promoting immigration and friendly relations.

Like Isaiah Thomas, the Rev. Albert Tyler, Daniel Seagrave, and other men who took up studying and preserving history without a college education, Stark started out in the printing business. In his case, he mastered the new technology of electrotyping and ran the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston.

In the late 1800s Stark published several guides to the British West Indies illustrated with photographs by himself and others.

He also published books on local history through his firm: Illustrated History of Boston Harbor (1880) and Antique Views of ye Towne of Boston (1882) both reproduced many historic images of the town.

Stark might have made the biggest splash with his thick book The Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the American Revolution, published in 1910. Coming at the end of the Colonial Revival, he challenged the accepted American view of the Loyalists as aristocrats and traitors, highlighting their complaints of being mistreated. For this, critics charged that Stark was a historical muckraker and a controversialist, and indeed he probably was.

Among the stories Stark examined was the tale of the two British soldiers’ skulls dug up by a phrenologist. In doing so, however, he spread misinformation about that tale.

This chapter of the story started in 1908 with a man named Albert Webb coming from Worcester, England, to Worcester, Massachusetts, on a sister city project. On 31 March 1909, Webb wrote to the Boston Transcript suggesting that someone should place a larger marker near the North Bridge in Concord, commemorating the two British soldiers killed and buried nearby with some lines by James Russell Lowell.

The editor of the Transcript wrote a response endorsing the idea but also insisting that the grave had been maintained with “old New England reverence.”

Stark replied with a letter to the newspaper’s “Notes and Queries” department asking:

1. Can anyone give the names of the two British soldiers killed at Concord Bridge, or inform me it there were any papers taken from their bodies that would identify them? I have been informed that there were.

2. One of the soldiers was left wounded on the bridge; what was the name of the “young American that killed him with a hatchet”?

3. When did the selectmen of Concord give Professor Fowler permission to dig up the two bodies of the British soldiers and remove the skulls to be used for exhibition purposes?

The only response to the newspaper was: “before the alleged action of the selectmen excites the Concord people, they should insist upon his producing adequate evidence.”

But in The Loyalists of Massachusetts, Stark published this 12 April letter from Ellery B. Crane, librarian of the Worcester Society of Antiquity, as what he deemed adequate evidence:

Mr. Barton has handed your letter to me and I write to say that the skulls of those two British Soldiers killed at the bridge in Concord were once the property of this Society, we having purchased them of the Widow of Prof. Fowler, the phrenologist, who some years ago went about the country giving lectures and illustrating his subjects.

Prof. Fowler got permission to dig up those skulls from the Selectmen of Concord, and he carried them about with him and used them in his lecturing. After his death one of the members learned of them and we purchased the skulls and they were in our museum some time.

The late Senator [George F.] Hoar learning that we had them, came to know if we would be willing to return them to Concord that they might be put back in the ground from whence they were taken. As he seemed quite anxious about it, consent was given, and they were sent to Concord to be placed in their original resting place. Presume they are there at the present time.

This letter offers yet another version of our story, with two skulls returned to the grave in Concord. Otherwise, it accords with what Hoar wrote in his 1891 letter returning one skull, and with what people in Concord gossiped about according to an 1895 Boston Sunday Globe article.

But that account doesn’t match what the Rev. Albert Tyler wrote out for the Worcester Society of Antiquity in 1905, in a paper read to members by none other than Ellery B. Crane. Nor what Crane had told society members during an excursion to Concord in April 1906. Both of those accounts had recently been printed in the society’s Proceedings, presumably under Crane’s direction.

Nor does the belief that the Worcester Society of Antiquity owned two British soldiers’ skulls match the intermittent newspaper accounts in the late 1800s about its display of a single skull.

Furthermore, Stark and Crane got the name of the phrenologist wrong. Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1810–1896) were prominent proponents of that new science in the mid-1800s. (Lest we think of the Fowler brothers as total loons who did nothing for American society, they also quietly paid Walt Whitman’s costs for printing the second edition of Leaves of Grass.) But all other sources are clear that the phrenologist who lectured with British soldiers’ skulls was Walton Felch.

Stark’s Loyalists of Massachusetts was widely distributed. It’s useful on some points of genealogy and real estate, notoriously misleading on others, such as the engraving of Paul Revere as a bearded rider with a coonskin cap and a pistol. Stark’s book and Ellen P. Chase’s Beginnings of the American Revolution, also published in 1910, appear to be the first books to print the name of Ammi White as the young man who killed a wounded soldier at the North Bridge.

A thick book, especially one in lots of local libraries for genealogists to consult, is harder to ignore than a gossipy newspaper story. The Loyalists of Massachusetts turned the tale of Concord’s selectmen letting a phrenologist make off with the two soldiers’ skulls into a long-lasting part of the town’s local lore.

Even though that lore was based on a mistake.

TOMORROW: Back to the disinterment.

The Rumor of a “Demoralized” Skull

When Sen. George Frisbie Hoar sent the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s skull of a British soldier to friends in his home town of Concord, he also wrote about the other soldier’s skull that phrenologist Walton Felch had collected.

Once again I’m relying on the summary of Hoar’s 27 Nov 1891 letter to George M. Brooks in Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775: A Historiographical Study.

Hoar’s understanding was that:

In his letter to Mr. Brooks, Senator Hoar further explained that the skull was purchased from the widow of Walton Felch along with another skull. Both skulls were subsequently donated to the Worcester Antiquarian Society by the purchasers, a Mr. [Daniel] Seagrave and others. One of the skulls featured a bullet hole which passed through the head “from side to side”. The other skull, in the words of Mr. Seagrave, was much “demoralized”.

That term apparently meant “damaged,” with an overlay of disapproval.

Furthermore:

According to Hoar’s 1891 letter to Brooks, the “demoralized” skull passed into the hands of a Dr. Bates, who died without leaving a family. Apparently, Mr. Seagrave tried to locate the “demoralized” skull without success.

The Concord gossip published in the Boston Sunday Globe in 1895 offered a somewhat different story. According to this article, evidently based on conversations with people in Concord rather than documentary sources and not checked with men in Worcester, Seagrave and the phrenologist Felch (misspelled “Felt”) knew each other from “a lodge.” (Both men were Freemasons, but from different eras.) Seagrave bought both skulls from Felch’s widow, one showing bullet holes and the other “shattered as if with an axe.” Seagrave then gave the second skull “to a surgeon in Worcester,” and it got lost.

The Rev. Albert Tyler contradicted the major points of both Hoar’s private letter and the Globe article (which he’d probably seen) when he wrote out his own recollection for the Worcester Society of Antiquity in 1905. Tyler had been Seagrave’s business partner for years. Tyler was also, as he told it, a crucial actor in the effort to locate the soldiers’ skulls: he remembered seeing a phrenologist named Felch display those skulls, and he spotted Felch’s name decades later around 1875. But when he and Seagrave met the man’s widow, she had only one skull in her possession.

According to Tyler, Dr. Joseph N. Bates later disclosed that he had received that second skull from Felch back in 1872, when the phrenologist/hydrotherapist was dying. After Bates himself died in 1883, nobody could locate it. What’s more, Tyler never indicated that Seagrave nor anyone else saw that second skull in Bates’s custody, and Tyler wrote nothing about it being damaged. Hoar evidently believed that Daniel Seagrave had seen and helped to buy that skull, but by Tyler’s telling that was impossible.

Only three people left descriptions of seeing Felch with his skulls and casts:

• Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., in 1840 described the bullet hole through one cranium but wrote nothing about another skull being damaged.
• William Wheeler in 1850, as recorded by Henry David Thoreau, related how he “saw a bullet hole through & through one of the [two] skulls” when Felch dug them up, but said nothing about damage to the other.
• Albert Tyler in 1905, recalling a lecture he attended around 1840, wrote down no specific details about the skulls he saw.

Thus, there’s very little solid evidence that the second British soldier’s skull Felch owned was badly damaged. Regardless, the men of Concord convinced themselves that the Worcester Society of Antiquity or its members had at one point owned just such a “demoralized” artifact but then let it get away.

TOMORROW: A historical muckraker.

(The picture of Daniel Seagrave above was made by Travis Simpkins, a professional artist who specializes in, among other things, portraits of Freemasons.)

“Grave of British Soldiers Opened”

In the late 1800s, the Google Book Ngram Viewer shows, there was a spike in the use of the phrase “Old Concord.” That seems to be an effect of the Colonial Revival and nostalgia for pre-industrial America, including not only the Revolution but the “American Renaissance.” Margaret Sidney wrote a book with that title.

On 25 Aug 1895, the Boston Sunday Globe played off that newish trope with an anonymous article headlined “IN NEW CONCORD.”

The subheads were:

Only Pilgrims Preserve its Old Traditions.
“Immortals” Seem as Remote as Actors in Revolutionary Drama.
Grave of British Soldiers Opened—Changes Among Inhabitants.

The article was gossipy, not easy to follow unless one already knew a bit about Concord already. There were inside anecdotes about the Hoar family. After discussing the 1889 attempt to break into Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave, the journalist segued to:

There was another and more successful violation of a grave in Concord a long time ago, the story of which has never been published, and which will be interesting to the recent visitors to the revolutionary sites there. . . .

Somewhat more than 50 years ago a phrenologist named Felt [sic] was lecturing upon his science in Concord. The story runs that he obtained permission from some authority to open and examine the soldiers’ grave, which he interpreted as a license to make what professional use he pleased of the remains therein.

At all events, Felt took the two skulls from the spot and carried them off, and as far as is known, nobody in Concord was any the wiser for nearly half a century!

Only five or six years since Mr George Tolman of the Concord historical society heard to his surprise that a skull marked as one of the British soldiers buried at Concord was in the museum of antiquities at Worcester.

Investigation showed that it was given by Mr Daniel Seagrave, a member of the society, and a worthy citizen of that town, still living. He had been a fellow-member of a lodge with Felt, and when the latter died at Natick [sic] many years ago he had assisted the widow with the funeral expenses, and had bought these two skulls, one of which was pierced with a musket shot and the other shattered as if with an axe. The shattered skull had been given to a surgeon in Worcester, and had been placed with other bones, so that it was not recognizable.

The other was courteously and promptly given up by the Worcester society, and was reverently restored to its resting place by Judge [George M.] Brooks, the president of the Concord antiquarian society.

As a verification of the story of the abstraction of the heads, which seemed perfectly coherent and plausible, it may be said that, though the other bones were distinctly seen, no traces of the skulls, the most enduring portion of the human skeleton, were found.

George Tolman (1836–1909) was secretary of the Concord Antiquarian Society and wrote many articles for that organization. Here’s a collection of his work and others catalogued under the title of one paper only. Though Tolman’s name didn’t come up in yesterday’s source, he may well have been involved in an effort to get the skull from Worcester.

Like George F. Hoar, Tolman appears to have been protective of his town’s reputation. This page shows him stating that a British soldier whom militiaman Amos Barrett described as “almost dead” was “quite dead a few moments later” without reporting that the change was brought about by a young local striking that wounded soldier’s head with a hatchet.

Whoever wrote the Boston Sunday Globe article wasn’t so reticent. In fact, that journalist didn’t just describe how a young man delivered “a coup de grace with an axe.” He or she was also, so far as I can tell, the first person to name that man in print as Ammi White.

The upshot of this article is that the secret reburial of the British soldier’s skull in 1891 was a matter of public record, or at least public gossip, in 1895.

TOMORROW: A “demoralized” skull?

(The photo above, courtesy of the New York Public Library and Lost New England, shows Concord’s North Bridge as it looked around 1885, before it was pared back to look like the bridge in the Amos Doolittle print.)

“The skull should be returned secretly to the grave”

For this part of the story of the British soldier’s skull I’m relying on Douglas Sabin’s April 19, 1775: A Historiographical Study, prepared for Minute Man National Historical Park and more widely published by Sinclair Street Publishing in 2011.

Sabin’s appendix, “The British Skull Controversy,” reviews a great deal of evidence. In this series I’m quoting additional sources, and my conclusion will be somewhat different.

In particular, Sabin summarized a 27 Nov 1891 letter from George Frisbie Hoar to George M. Brooks (1824–1893, shown here), president of the Concord Antiquarian Society. That organization operates the fine Concord Museum.

As I described yesterday, at that time Hoar was a U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, living in Worcester after growing up in Concord. He was a past president of the American Antiquarian Society. He had clout.

As for Brooks, he was a probate judge and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The two men also had a personal tie: Brooks’s half-sister Caroline had married Hoar’s older brother Ebenezer. In fact, all three of those men had served in the U.S. House, two at a time.

According to Sabin:

In his letter to Mr. Brooks, Senator Hoar stated that he was forwarding to Mr. Brooks a box containing a skull sent to him by the president of the Worcester Society of Antiquity. Senator Hoar went on to explain that the Worcester Society of Antiquity felt that the skull should be returned to the grave in Concord from which they believed it had been taken years before.

Other sources clarify that the Worcester Society of Antiquity came to that decision only under pressure from Hoar. He was a member but “never an active member.” The Rev. Albert Tyler wrote that the senator “interested himself” in the skull. In 1906 society librarian Ellery B. Crane said “the late Hon. George F. Hoar induced its return to the authorities at Concord,” and three years later wrote that Hoar asked “if we would be willing to return [the skulls] to Concord. . . . he seemed quite anxious about it.” And, as I said, Hoar had clout.

Sabin’s appendix continued:

Hoar sent the skull with the bullet hole through it to Mr. Brooks under the condition that the skull be restored to its burial place. In the closing paragraph of his letter to Brooks, Hoar expressed his belief that the skull should be returned secretly to the grave without public notice or newspaper coverage. He feared that if the newspapers learned of the skull business the subject would become a topic of ridicule.

In fact, I suspect avoiding ridicule was Hoar’s major motivation from the start. Not jokes about the current action but derision for the Concord selectmen and town leaders back in the 1830s—in other words, Hoar’s revered father and his friends.

What would people say if the public found out that, shortly after erecting a monument near the two soldiers’ grave, Concord had authorized a a quack scientist to dig up those bodies and go off with their skulls? How many thousands of people had visited that monument, including the President of the U.S. of A. in 1875, without being told the full story?

Sabin wrote:

According to the late Lincoln amateur archeologist, Roland Wells Robbins, Senator Hoar’s original 1891 letter to Mr. Brooks contained a notation at the bottom which said “Returned to the grave, December the fifth, 1891”. This notation was signed by E.R. Hoar [the senator’s brother] and Henry L. Shattuck.

However, the Concord Museum couldn’t locate that document for Sabin when he wrote, and the copy of the letter at Minute Man Park doesn’t show the note.

But let’s assume that detail is accurate. In December 1891, some of Concord’s leading men quietly dug into the soldiers’ grave near the Concord Monument, inserted the partial skull sent from Worcester, and covered it up. Nobody would ever know, right?

There were three problems with George F. Hoar’s plan for dealing with this skull. First, he was mistaken about many significant details, starting with what grave it had actually come from.

Second, the lack of public documentation produced a vacuum that sucked in even more misinformation.

And third, Concord’s cranial reinterment stayed out of the newspapers for less than four years.

TOMORROW: Cover blown.

G. F. Hoar and “stories of the Battle of Concord”

George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904, shown here) was born in Concord. His father, Samuel Hoar, represented the area in the U.S. Congress and contributed to the wording of the town’s monument at the North Bridge.

In his autobiography Hoar wrote fondly about growing up in Concord, and particularly about living reminders of the Revolutionary War:

Scattered about the church were the good gray heads of many survivors of the Revolution—the men who had been at the bridge on the 19th of April, and who made the first armed resistance to the British power. They were very striking and venerable figures, with their queues and knee-breeches and shoes with shining buckles. Men were more particular about their apparel in those days than we are now. They had great stateliness of behavior, and admitted of little familiarity.

They had heard John Buttrick’s order to fire, which marked the moment when our country was born. The order was given to British subjects. It was obeyed by American citizens. Among them was old Master [Thaddeus] Blood, who saw a ball strike the water when the British fired their first volley. I heard many of the old men tell their stories of the Battle of Concord, and of the capture of Burgoyne.

I lay down on the grass one summer afternoon, when old Amos Baker of Lincoln, who was in the Lincoln Company on the 19th of April, told me the whole story. He was very indignant at the claim that the Acton men marched first to attack the British because the others hesitated. He said, “It was because they had bagnets [bayonets]. The rest of us hadn’t no bagnets.”

One day a few years later, when I was in college, I walked up from Cambridge to Concord, through Lexington, and had a chat with old Jonathan Harrington by the roadside. He told me he was on the Common when the British Regulars fired upon the Lexington men.

He did not tell me then the story which he told afterward at the great celebration at Concord in 1850. He and Amos Baker were the only survivors who were there that day. He said he was a boy about fifteen years old on April 19, 1775. He was a fifer in the company. He had been up the greater part of the night helping get the stores out of the way of the British, who were expected, and went to bed about three o’clock, very tired and sleepy. His mother came and pounded with her fist on the door of his chamber, and said, “Git up, Jonathan! The Reg’lars are comin’ and somethin’ must be done!” . . .

A very curious and amusing incident is said, and I have no doubt truly, to have happened at this celebration. It shows how carefully the great orator, Edward Everett, looked out for the striking effects in his speech. He turned in the midst of his speech to the seat where Amos Baker and Jonathan Harrington sat, and addressed them. At once they both stood up, and Mr. Everett said, with fine dramatic effect, “Sit, venerable friends. It is for us to stand in your presence.”

After the proceedings were over, old Amos Baker was heard to say to somebody, “What do you suppose Squire Everett meant? He came to us before his speech and told us to stand up when he spoke to us, and when we stood up he told us to sit down.”

In Concord, George F. Hoar became lifelong friends with Henry David Thoreau. They met as schoolboys at different grades, and George later attended the Thoreau brothers’ Concord Academy for a while. It’s unclear whether he overlapped with Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr.

However, in an 1891 letter Hoar wrote that as a boy he attended a lecture in Concord where the speaker exhibited the skull of a British soldier killed in 1775. That could only have been Walton Felch at the town’s lyceum in the spring of 1840.

After the obligatory years at Harvard, George F. Hoar went into the law, establishing his practice in Worcester. Then he went into politics. He served in the Massachusetts General Court, then the U.S. Congress after the Civil War, and finally the U.S. Senate from 1877 to 1904.

Back home, Hoar helped found what became the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and served as president of the American Antiquarian Society. He also sat on boards of the Smithsonian Institute and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, so he didn’t have a complete aversion to museums holding human remains.

But Sen. Hoar didn’t like the idea of the Worcester Society of Antiquity holding that skull of a British soldier killed on 19 Apr 1775.

TOMORROW: A private arrangement.

“The most prominent addition made to the cabinet”

On 2 Feb 1877, the Boston Daily Advertiser took note of “an exhibition of antiquarian relics” temporarily open “in the rooms of the National History Society of Worcester.”

The article didn’t provide the name of the group that had organized the exhibit, the Worcester Society of Antiquity, which received its state charter that year.

All the objects on display were probably owned by members. Most were items on paper, including books, deeds, commissions, newspapers, and autographs unfortunately clipped out of documents of greater interest. 

The exhibit did include “Spurs worn by General [Artemas] Ward in the Revolutionary war.” And:

the skull of a British soldier from Concord, April 19, 1775.

The Worcester Natural History Society, founded in 1825 as the Worcester Lyceum of Natural History, went on to open the New England Science Center, now called the EcoTarium.

Meanwhile, the Worcester Society of Antiquity started renting its own space in the building of the Worcester National Bank for its meetings and growing collection. On 6 Apr 1881 the Worcester Evening Gazette reported on the group’s monthly gathering, saying:

The most prominent addition made to the cabinet was the skull of a British soldier, shot at Concord Bridge in the first fight of the Revolution. Two were killed and buried where they fell. In 1844 [sic], by permission of the Selectmen, the bodies were exhumed by a resident, whose widow, who is in reduced circumstances transferred the relic to the Society. The members made up quite a collection of money for the donor. The other skull is in possession of Dr. J. N. Bates of this city.

The soldier’s skull had actually been dug up before 1840 because Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., saw Walton Felch display it that year. Sewall also heard that the skull had been dug up in Lincoln, not Concord, and Henry David Thoreau recorded the circumstances later in his journal.

The 1881 article suggests that Daniel Seagraves had just formally donated the skull to the society. As discussed yesterday, Dr. Joseph N. Bates died in 1883, and no one could find the second skull among his effects.

Folks might uncover other newspaper mentions of the British soldier’s skull on display in Worcester in the late 1800s. These are the only two I came across. Notably, they show no squeamishness about displaying human remains.

After a generous gift from a member and some fundraising, the Worcester Society of Antiquity opened its own building on Salisbury Street in 1892. The organization became the Worcester Historical Society in 1919 and the Worcester Historical Museum in 1978. Ten years after that, it moved into its present building on Elm Street.

But the British soldier’s skull was never exhibited in those museums.

Some people didn’t like the thought of that British soldier’s skull being separated from his body.

TOMORROW: Back to Concord.

“A brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier”

At the end of yesterday’s post, the Worcester printers and antiquarians Albert Tyler and Daniel Seagrave confirmed with Nancy Felch that her late husband had lectured about phrenology.

That conversation happened in the mid-1870s, with the men asking about events about thirty-five years before. In the intervening years Walton Felch had been most active as a hydropathic physician (and amateur poet), but he had indeed been a phrenologist.

As related by Tyler in 1905, the two men pressed on to their real interest: Had Felch owned the skulls of two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775?

She answered “Yes.”

“Where are they now?”

She said she had them in possession, and they were packed away among other things useless to her at her old residence in Barre.

The thought of their value to the collection of this then young [Worcester] Society [of Antiquity] instantly occurred, and the writer [Tyler] asked her if she was willing to part with them. She replied that if we wanted them, we could have them in welcome.

So in due time a box containing the whole phrenological outfit was received at our office. . . .

We found in the collection only one of the two skulls—the absence of the other the widow could not explain.

Walton Felch’s phreonological material doesn’t appear on the inventory of his estate, which might reflect its low market value in 1872.

Though Tyler’s reminiscence was silent on this point, it seems clear that the antiquarians offered Nancy Felch some payment for those goods. A local newspaper article from 1881 said, “The members made up quite a collection of money for the donor,” she being “in reduced circumstances.” A Boston article from 1895, while getting several details wrong, stated that Daniel Seagrave “assisted the widow with the funeral expenses.” I suspect Seagrave bought the material, expecting to give the skull to the society when it had a place to keep it.

The widow Felch finally died in Barre in 1896. Her maiden name was Brigham; the Worcester Society of Antiquity’s proceedings credit Dr. F. K. and F. A. Brigham with donating “Pam[phlets], Papers, Hand-Bills and Plaster Casts belonging to the late Walton Felch, phrenologist” in 1897. That suggests she may not have located all her late husband’s phrenological material in the 1870s, but eventually the society got all that survived.

The society’s published record of its meeting on 5 June 1877 says:

Mr. Charles R. Johnson gave a brief historical sketch of the skull of a British Soldier who was killed at the battle of Concord, April 19th, 1775, now in the possession of a member of this Society.

That sketch was not printed with the proceedings, and the member who possessed that relic was still anonymous.

Meanwhile, Tyler was still interested in the other skull. His story went on:

In a casual conversation with the late Dr. Joseph N. Bates [of Barre] there was another “happening.” He was a collector of antique things, and when the discovery of the skull was mentioned to him, and the loss of the other one, he smiled and said, “I have got that one; I attended Mr. Felch in his last sickness and he gave it to me!”

Dr. Bates died; his brother, Dr. George Bates, was his executor; inquiry was made of him concerning the second skull, but nothing ever came of it. It is probably lost beyond recovery.

Dr. Joseph N. Bates (1811–1883) appears above, courtesy of the Roster and Genealogies of the 15th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry.

Back in 1840, Edmind Quincy Sewall, Jr., had described how one of the skulls ”was only the upper half of the head” displaying a “bullet hole.” He didn’t take note of the other at all. I suspect that it was intact and undistinguished, though I’ll note later statements to the contrary. If I’m right, the skull that Dr. Bates took looked like any other specimen of the cranium and was thus easily overlooked after he died.

TOMORROW: Getting to see the skull.

“Intensely interested in the history of the battles for independence”

Albert Tyler (1823–1913, shown here courtesy of the Cabinet Card Gallery) was born in Smithfield, Rhode Island. As a teenager he trained as a printer at the Massachusetts Spy in Worcester.

This was the newspaper that Isaiah Thomas co-founded in Boston, then moved to central Massachusetts just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

After coming of age, Tyler moved to the nearby town of Barre and printed the Barre Patriot for several years. Then in 1851 he left printing to be a Universalist minister.

Over the next ten years Tyler preached to three congregations, which might indicate that profession was not for him, but he kept the honorific “Reverend” nonetheless.

Tyler returned to Worcester and went into business with another former employee of the Massachusetts Spy (and Universalist), Daniel Seagrave (1831–1902). They bought the book and job printing operation of the Spy, staying in the same building.

In 1875 Tyler, Seagrave, and a grocery magnate named Samuel E. Staples (1822–1902) took the lead in founding the Worcester Society of Antiquity. Seagrave became its first secretary.

Thirty years later, on 6 June 1905, society secretary E. B. Crane read reminiscences from the Rev. Albert Tyler about “singular happenings” related to the building of the society’s collections. At the start of one anecdote the octogenarian recalled what appear to be the course of lectures Walton Felch offered at the end of 1840:

In 1839, in the old and original Worcester Town Hall, a traveling lecturer, Walter Felch by name, gave phrenological examinations in the day-time and lectured in the evening upon phrenology, then a popular topic. He exhibited the usual array of drawings, plaster casts and skulls in the delineation of his subject.

Among the latter were two skulls, which he said the Selectmen of Concord had permitted him to take from the graves of the British soldiers who fell in that first battle of the Revolution.

The writer was a boy of fifteen years of age, who, as a Spy printer boy, had a free pass to the lecture. He was intensely interested in the history of the battles for independence . . .

Nearly forty years passed away, the boy had become a man beyond middle age, and was one of the proprietors, under the business name of Tyler & Seagrave, of the office in which he had learned the trade. In editing and printing a historical work, we came across the name of “Walton Felch,” whose brief history was necessary to its completeness. After many inquiries we learned of the residence of his widow. We communicated with her, and she called at our office.

The boy, who remembered the skulls, was not so sure he remembered the name, and though the husband’s name seemed familiar, forty years had dimmed his recollection into uncertainty, but he ventured to ask the widow if her husband ever lectured on phrenology. She said he had in his younger days. The query then followed, “Did he have two skulls of British soldiers who fell at Concord?”

TOMORROW: Yes and no.

“The healing power of Mesmerism and Pure Water”

At the end of the year 1840, Walton Felch, “Teacher of the Science of PHRENOLOGY, otherwise known as the author of a new theory of language,” came to Worcester.

Felch’s advertisement in the Worcester Palladium, illustrated with a man’s profile, stated that he had “been employed, within the last 2 years, to deliver nearly 40 courses of from six to eight Lectures, before not less than 11 or 12,000 persons.”

He now offered the people of Worcester his expertise on:

Phrenology, and its Application
to Government, Education, Social Intercourse, the Philosophy of Language, and of Rhetoric, and the Moral, Intellectual, and Physical Improvement of Mankind.

And the first lecture in the Town Hall was absolutely free, if that’s how you wanted to spend the evening of 25 December.

In April 1842 Felch offered eight lectures on phrenology in Boston’s North End, followed by seven in the vestry of the Fifth Universalist Church. After that, notices of his talks stop appearing in newspapers.

Felch continued to show an interest in phrenology. In November 1851, he assisted another practitioner, Dr. Noyes Wheeler, in lectures in Boston and then served as “chairman” of a meeting of Wheeler’s friends voting him a commendation.

By that time, however, Walton Felch had moved on to some other forms of healing. The first sign of this appears in a curious stretch of newspaper items in 1847 that stars with the 26 March Barre Gazette report of a robbery of James H. Desper’s store of goods and silver worth about $112.

Two weeks later, the Barre Patriot reported that “Dr W. Felch” had helped to found the Barre Falls Lyceum for the “easterly part of town.” He became its president, and Desper was steward. (I can’t help but wonder if that was the result of some dispute within the Barre Lyceum.)

On 28 May the Barre Gazette ran a notice saying:

Veto! Veto!! Veto!!!!

I, JAMES H. DESPER of Barre, having lately heard a variety of Reports apparently designed to raise a public prejudice against Dr. W. Felch, and theredy [sic] hinder him from giving proofs of the healing power of Mesmerism and Pure Water as applied by himself;—1st, that he was turned out of my house; 2d, that he injured the health of my wife and others while boarding here;—3d, that he has been suspected of breaking open our store, &c. &c. I hereby give notice, and my wife sets her signature with mine, that all these reports are most villainous falsehoods; which character, we doubt not, is common to all the reports against the same individual. . . .

And the enemies of reform ought to know that persecution is very much like a kicking gun—there is only one thing certain about it—that is, the kicking over of the fool that fires it off.

“Pure Water” was a sign that Felch, now styling himself a physician, had adopted hydrotherapy as his principal field.

In 1850 the Water-Cure Journal and Herald of Reform reported that “Dr. W. Felch” had just opened the Green Mountain Water-Cure in North Adams. That year’s U.S. Census located Felch in Adams.

In 1854 both the Water-Cure Journal and William Garrison’s Liberator told readers that Dr. Felch was the physician at the new Cape Cod Water-Cure in Harwichport. “Ellen M. Smith, (a young lady of medical education,)” was his assistant, though elsewhere listed as a hydropathic physician herself.

To be sure, the Boston Semi-Weekly Advertiser for 28 Jan 1854 said “Dr. W. FELCH, of Cambridge,” was lecturing every Sunday “on the Philosophy and Evidence of Ghost-seeing.” I can’t say for sure that was Walton Felch, but the 1855 state census and 1860 federal census found him and his second wife Nancy in Boston. His son Hiram had become a city official.

(I’m assuming Walton Felch was not the “W. Felch” quoted in advertisements for “Dr. Hill’s Cordial Balm of Syriacum” in 1855, stating he “had the misfortune to contract the veneral affection of the most aggravated character.” Mostly because this writer had nothing to say about his own medical knowledge.)

By 1870 Hiram Felch had moved out to Boxborough, and Wanton and Nancy were back in the Coldbrook Springs part of Oakham.

In 1872, now over eighty years old, Felch made his will. He left his books to be divided equally among Nancy and three grown children and his real estate to be sold to support his widow.

Walton Felch died in Boxborough later that year, apparently visiting his son; his body was returned to “Coldbrook” for burial. That May, the Massachusetts Spy reported that the man’s estate included $700 in real estate and $300 in personal property.

TOMORROW: But what happened to the British soldiers’ skulls?

“The lecture room has been filled every evening”

In April 1840, Walton Felch brought his phrenological lectures to Concord.

As quoted back here, on 1 April twelve-year-old Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., went to the town’s Lyceum Hall expecting to hear Felch speak on phrenology. He saw a collection of skulls laid out on the lectern, including at least one skull of a British soldier killed in 1775.

But then those teaching aids were taken away, and Edmund heard another speaker instead. Two days later, he corrected what he’d written in his diary about Felch:

I said he had not come up from Boston. He had been engaged on the supposition that Mr Haskins would not come but as Mr H. did come he had to give place.

On that evening, 3 April, Edmund finally heard Felch deliver his talk on phrenology. The twelve-year-old judged it to be “pretty interesting.”

It looks like that lecture wasn’t officially part of the Concord Lyceum program, according to records kept by Edmund’s teacher Henry David Thoreau. Instead, those weekly lectures were on such topics as Roger Williams of Rhode Island and the Rev. Ralph Waldo Emerson on “The Present Age.” But Felch did apparently speak in Lyceum Hall.

On 18 April, the Yeoman’s Gazette of Concord took notice of Felch’s “course of lectures”:

The lecture room has been filled every evening, and we understand that his audience have generally expressed much gratification at the manner in which the subject has been treated. . . . We understand that the popular favor has been attested by numerous and increasing audiences.

The newspaper also praised the phrenologist for allowing anyone to attend, asking only “voluntary contribution.”

Of course, those lectures were marketing for Felch’s services. He quoted from his good reviews in a long advertisement in the 12 June Barre Gazette, closing with:

Mr. Felch will wait on individuals and families who may wish to avail themselves of his skill as an Experimental Phrenologist.

Weeks later, on 24 July, that local newspaper published a long article of “Mr. Felch’s Lectures on Phrenology.” The topic was no longer novel, it said, and, “The country has been deluged with lecturers, who…palm off the most miserable quackery and ignorance.” But Felch was different!

That his design is the collection of money, no one believes who knows him. He is imbued with a strong love of the subject, a full conviction of its truth and of its capacity to promote the welfare of mankind. He has studied well and deeply, and we doubt if even a few can be found in the country who are more intimately versed in the theory and details of the science.

However, this reviewer did have two criticisms. First, Felch went on for too long: “The shortness of the evenings at least should have cut short some of the reasonings and illustrations.” And while speaking of phrenology Felch indulged another of his hobby-horses:

Nor can we pass over what seems to us a faulty digression upon the subject of grammar. Mr. Felch is an enthusiast on this subject and is the author of a work touching it. . . . But we are unable to discover the connection which the lecturer supposes to exist between the two subjects, and could only feel a breakage when he passed on Monday evening from one to the other. Perhaps the lateness of the hour was an incentive to the feeling—but we trust yet that they will not be again chained fist and fist together.

Notably, I haven’t found any reviews from this period that criticized Felch for displaying human skulls, or for having British soldiers’ bodies dug up. Apparently people accepted those acts as necessary for science.

TOMORROW: The peregrinations of Walton Felch.

“Mr Felch is delivering a course of Phrenological Lectures”

Walton Felch was born in Royalston, Massachusetts, in 1790, youngest in a large family. Eventually his parents and some siblings moved to Vermont, forming the village of Felchville in Reading.

Walton Felch appears to have gone to work in one of Rhode Island’s early industrial mills as a teenager. Ambitious and eager for knowledge, he rose to management ranks. He then did something even more unusual, turning his experience into poetry.

In 1816 Felch published The Manufacturer’s Pocket-Piece, or, The Cotton-Mill Moralized: A Poem, with Illustrative Notes. The notes about how mills of this time really operated appear to have had more lasting value than the poetry.

Felch continued to write poetry his whole life. He composed verses on fire, the stars, his ancestors, and other topics. When he died, a big part of his legacy to his family was hundreds of unpublished poems.

The year before The Manufacturer’s Pocket-Piece appeared, Felch married Lydia Inman of Smithfield, Rhode Island. He was then listed as living in Attleboro, and the couple may soon have moved to Medway. Walton and Lydia had at least three children: Hiram (house builder and assessor who stayed in Massachusetts), Walton Cheever (trained as a printer, moved to California in the Gold Rush), and Sarah (married a man named Dunbar).

Walton Felch was living in Hubbardston in 1831 when he married again, to Mrs. Nancy Sullivan. By 1840 he was in the area of Oakham called Coldbrook Springs, and he was living there at the end of his life—but didn’t necessarily remain there the whole time.

Felch was certainly intellectually restive. He enjoyed the lyceum movement of the time, particularly the Barre Lyceum, right over the town line. He spoke there in 1834 on the subject of geology. The next year, he participated in a debate: “Does the strength of temptation lessen the turpitude of crime?” In 1837 he spoke on the costs and benefits of government-sponsored South Sea exploration.

One of Felch’s most consuming interests was grammar. In December 1834 he lectured on his “Architectural System of the English Grammar.” He then published A Comprehensive Grammar, Presenting Some New Views of the Structure of Language (1837) and Grammatical Primer: Comprising the Outlines of the Compositive System (1841). The Norfolk Democrat credited Felch with “a very amusing and instructive Lecture” on the topic in January 1840.

The Barre Gazette of 23 Feb 1838 signaled a new interest:

Oakham Lyceum Meets on Monday evening, the 26th inst. Lecture by Mr Felch on Phrenology.

Phrenology was a relatively new scientific pursuit—diagnosing people’s personalities, strengths, and deficits from the bumps on their skulls, usually as felt through through hair and skin. By the next year, Felch felt he had mastered it enough to publish A Phrenological Chart: And Table of Combinations.

On 15 Nov 1839 the Christian Freeman and Family Visitor of Waltham published this item:

Phrenological Lectures.

Mr Felch is delivering a course of Phrenological Lectures in Rumford Hall [shown above]. We perceive from letters in his possession, that he shares the confidence of Mr [George] Combe, and has given great satisfaction where he has lectured. He has not only read extensively on the science upon which he lectures, but is a close observer of mankind, and an original thinker. We were pleased and instructed by his lecture last Tuesday evening, which was the first of a course of six, to be delivered on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Admission 12 1-2 cents each evening.

That expertise seems to have been enough to persuade the selectmen of Lincoln to let Felch take the skulls of two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775 from the town’s old burying-ground. Indeed, according to Henry David Thoreau’s understanding, Felch actually had those skulls “dug up” particularly for his phrenological investigation.

TOMORROW: When Felch took his skulls to Concord.

“Dug up–and took away two skulls”

In the summer of 1840, shortly after twelve-year-old Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., got to see part of a British soldier’s skull with a bullet hole through it, his teacher John Thoreau proposed marriage to his sister, Ellen Sewall.

The Rev. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., opposed that union. Then Edmund’s other teacher, Henry David Thoreau, proposed marriage to Ellen as well. And the Thoreau family drama built from there.

In the decade that followed, John Thoreau died of tetanus. Henry moved in with the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson, then moved out to a cabin in Walden Woods, then moved back in. He became a published author. He spent time in jail for protesting the Fugitive Slave Act by refusing to pay his taxes.

During those years, Henry David Thoreau kept a diary. In the late spring of 1850 he wrote this entry:

I visited a retired–now almost unused graveyard in Lincoln to-day where (5) British soldiers lie buried who fell on the 19th April ’75. Edmund Wheeler—grandfather of William—who lived in the old house now pulled down near the present—went over the next day & carted them to this ground—

A few years ago one Felch a Phrenologist by leave of the select men dug up–and took away two skulls

The skeletons were very large—probably those of grenadiers. Wm Wheeler who was present–told me this—He said that he had heard old Mr. Child, who lived opposite–say that when one soldier was shot he leaped right up his full length out of the ranks & fell dead. & he Wm Wheeler–saw a bullet hole through & through one of the skulls.

There were multiple families named Child in Lincoln around 1775, so it’s hard to identify which one gave that description of the dying redcoat to Wheeler.

The skull with the bullet hole was undoubtedly the same one that young Edmund Quincy Sewall had seen at the Concord Lyceum in 1840. The schoolboy had even recorded that it had come from Lincoln. Perhaps another of the skulls put out for the phrenologist was also from a regular’s body.

Concord had built a large monument near the gravesite of the first two British soldiers killed on 19 Apr 1775. Those weren’t the only redcoats buried in that town, but those two bodies were the most significant because they showed the Americans effectively fighting back.

In contrast, more regulars had died on 19 April in Lincoln, but that town was less concerned about memorializing them. Some soldiers were buried near where they fell, or near the houses where they died days later. Those graves weren’t marked, even with “rough stones” as originally in Concord. It was up to men like William Wheeler to pass on the increasingly vague knowledge of where those bodies lay.

As for the British soldiers in the town burying-ground, Abram English Brown’s Beneath Old Roof-Trees (1896) would quote Mary Hartwell of Lincoln about the aftermath of the battle:

I could not sleep that night, for I knew there were British soldiers lying dead by the roadside; and when, on the following morning, we were somewhat calmed and rested, we gave attention to the burial of those whom their comrades had failed to take away.

The men hitched the oxen to the cart, and went down below the house, and gathered up the dead. As they returned with the team and the dead soldiers, my thoughts went out for the wives, parents, and children away across the Atlantic, who would never again see their loved ones; and I left the house, and taking my little children by the hand, I followed the rude hearse to the grave hastily made in the burial-ground.

I remember how cruel it seemed to put them into one large trench without any coffins. There was one in a brilliant uniform, whom I supposed to have been an officer. His hair was tied up in a cue.

In 1884 the town of Lincoln installed a marker in that cemetery stating simply:

FIVE
BRITISH SOLDIERS
SLAIN APRIL 19, 1775
WERE BURIED HERE

The approximate locations of other soldiers’ graves along the Battle Road in Lincoln have also been marked now.

But the diaries of Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., and Henry David Thoreau tell us that parts of the soldiers’ bodies were removed from the Lincoln burying-ground over forty years before the town marked the remains.

TOMORROW: To advance the cause of science.

“One of the skulls was that of a British soldier”

Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr. (1828–1908), was the son of the Unitarian minister at Scituate. Both father and son bore the surnames of two of Massachusetts’s eminent families.

The Rev. Edmund Quincy Sewall, Sr., had studied for the ministry with the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley in Concord. There he had met his wife, introduced by two members of the Thoreau family.

At the age of nine, Edmund started keeping a journal, on the advice of Bronson Alcott. He kept up this habit for his whole adult life but, as with John Quincy Adams, had trouble maintaining the momentum at first.

In the spring of 1840 Edmund started to attend a boarding school in Concord, living with his teachers: the brothers John and Henry David Thoreau. They reenergized his journal-keeping for that season.

The American Antiquarian Society has shared transcripts of Edmund’s childhood journals, including this entry from 1840:

April 1st. I had a nice sail on the river yesterday after school. Messrs John and Henry T[horeau]. rowed and Jesse [Harding] and I were passengers.

We went up the river against the wind and then sailed down to the monument where we got out with the intention of all embarking again, but Mr. J and Jesse being near the monument and Mr H. and I near the boat we jumped in and went across to the abutment of the former bridge on the opposite side.

I suppose that we should have come back for them if they had staid but they went off with the sail which we had left on the bank. Mr. H. rowed up the river a little way and got out. We had not the keys of the boat and should have been obliged to leave her without being securely fastened or have hauled her up on the shore if Joseph had not come down with the keys. He got two wet feet for his pains.

Three years after Concord had dedicated its monument to the 19 Apr 1775 fight, that obelisk and the nearby “abutment of the former bridge” were landmarks for boaters. But because there was no longer a bridge nearby, once the Thoreau brothers and their pupils disembarked on opposite sides they couldn’t easily get back together.

That same entry in Edmund’s diary reported:

We then went to the Lyceum expecting that a Phrenologist would lecture. His apparatus was there but the lecturer had not arrived. A man there set out his casts and several real skulls on the desk but immediately put them back again.

One of the skulls was that of a British soldier who fell in the Battle of Concord. It was dug up in Lincoln. It was only the upper half of the head. There was the bullet hole through which the ball which killed him had passed.

A Mr. Haskins lectured on Roger Williams the founder of Rhode Island—a description of his life. Bought 2 cents worth of burnt almonds going home.

In one busy spring day, young Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., had seen the gravesite of two British soldiers and the half the skull of a third. Plus, burnt almonds!

TOMORROW: A walk to Lincoln.

“About erecting a monument on the battle-ground”

In his 1835 History of the Town of Concord, Lemuel Shattuck wrote that the spot by the former North Bridge where two British soldiers lay buried “deserves to be marked by an ever-enduring monument,” not just two rough stones that only locals could recognize.

On 7 Dec 1835, the Boston Evening Transcript apparently reported that the town was running with that idea:

We learn from a friend who recently visited Old Concord, that the inhabitants of that town are about erecting a monument on the battle-ground, on the spot were the two first British soldiers fell and where they were buried, and where their grave-stones still are.

The land belonged to the reverend and venerable Dr. Thayer, now in his 83d year, and still continues in the ministry, who has given it to the town for that purpose.

I wrote “apparently” because the newspaper database I use includes only two of the four pages of that issue of the Evening Transcript, but other newspapers quoted that article the next day.

The 8 December Boston Courier also had the pleasure of pointing out, “For ‘Dr. Thayer,’ we presume the Transcript intended to say Dr. RIPLEY.” And indeed that evening’s Transcript acknowledged the error.

It was a curious mistake since at that point the Rev. Dr. Ezra Ripley (shown above) had been Concord’s preeminent clergymen longer than most people had been alive. He had succeeded the Rev. William Emerson in 1778 and was still watching over the town almost sixty years later.

The Evening Transcript’s brief report also left out how Concord had started to build a monument to the start of the Revolutionary War in 1825. But back then voters had chosen to locate that landmark in the town center rather than where any fighting had taken place. Some objected to the location, or to spending the money, and then a bonfire damaged the cornerstone.

Robert Gross lays out that drama in The Transcendentalists and Their World, so I don’t have to go over it here.

The upshot is that Concord finished building a monument out by the remains of the North Bridge in 1836. Its inscription was composed by a committee of local worthies including Ripley, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Rep. Samuel Hoar. It was dedicated in 1837; at that ceremony the public first heard Emerson’s phrase “the shot heard ’round the world.”

The three points I want to emphasize about the building of that monument are:

• The obelisk wasn’t just coincidentally where the two British soldiers were buried. It was located at that spot because those soldiers’ remains lay nearby.
• The creation of the monument attracted attention from Boston and neighboring towns. Concord’s leading citizens were involved. The Rev. Dr. Ripley, who lived till 1841, was especially interested.
• There were also people in Concord who had reasons to look askance at the new erection, and would have been happy to share embarrassing stories about it.

I’ll come back to those points in a few days.

TOMORROW: A day on the Concord River.