Meghan Kenny, SVNA Home Assistance and Litchfield County Home Assistance.
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That the “shot heard ‘round the world” would be fired in the early spring of 1775 was guaranteed three months earlier by two directives from secretary of state Lord Dartmouth.
Although today we honor the battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775 as the commencement of the Revolutionary War, we should recognize that the timing of the war’s onset was almost inevitable, as was its location, near Boston, epicenter of American resistance since the Tea Party of December 1773.
As the readers of prior columns know, the British reaction to the Tea Party was a series of Draconian measures, in particular to punish Massachusetts and the port of Boston. These strictures, in turn, gave reason for the First Continental Congress, held in Philadelphia in August-September 1774, which instituted a broad boycott of British goods and began militia preparations in hundreds of towns. When the boycott started to hurt British shipping, King George III and Parliament decreed additional tough measures. General Thomas Gage, head of all British forces in the colonies, pleaded with London for 20,000 soldiers, but the powers that be decided that number couldn’t be spared and sent far fewer.
That the “shot heard ‘round the world” would be fired in the early spring of 1775 was guaranteed three months earlier by two directives from secretary of state Lord Dartmouth.
The first instructed all provincial governors to prevent Americans from becoming delegates to the Second Continental Congress. The second tasked Gage with arresting and imprisoning all former delegates to the First Congress and likely delegates to the Second, and to seize powder, rifles, etc., that might be used in a rebellion.
By late March, due to bureaucratic and weather delays, these directives still had not arrived in America. Yet hordes of Tory colonists had by then fled the countryside to Boston for the protection of British soldiers from their neighbors’ growing animosity. Under their impetus, British troops tarred and feathered a local farmer/patriot, parading him through town in a cart while a band played and soldiers sang, “Yankee Doodle come to town/ For to buy a firelock;/ We will tar and feather him/ and so we will John Hancock.”
The wealthiest man in Massachusetts and the head of Boston’s safety committee and the colony’s provincial congress, Hancock was busy buying medicines and ammunition enough for an army of 15,000. However, his provincial colleagues thought him a bit trigger-happy and so passed an edict that Hancock was not to summon the militias unless and until Gage and 500 men “shall march out of the Town of Boston, with Artillery and Baggage.”
Hancock and John Adams, understanding that Gage would likely try to arrest them, left early for the Second Continental Congress, and kept moving around in Massachusetts to avoid detection. Readying to leave town, Hancock ordered his safety committee to steal four mounted cannon from the British, which they did.
In early April, Gage’s spies reported Hancock and Adams hiding in Lexington, and that the patriot arsenal was hidden in Concord. On April 14, the letters from London to Gage finally arrived and he sprang into action, sending out two forces, one to Concord to destroy the armaments and another to Lexington to arrest Adams and Hancock.
But the patriots also had spies and operatives, knowledgeable ones who understood the implication of small boatloads of soldiers debarking from moored men-of-war, and columns of Redcoats marching toward a muster point on Boston Common. Among these operatives was silversmith Paul Revere.
At ten o’clock on Tuesday evening, April 18th, Dr. Joseph Warren – the leader of the safety committee in Hancock’s absence — sent for Revere and asked him to ride to Lexington to warn Hancock and Adams that Gage was coming.
Revere did. Hancock, on receiving the news, sent messages to gather militias to counter Gage’s troops. The bell of Lexington’s main church pealed all night, and its alarm, and similar ones in nearby towns, alerted militias from as far away as Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, so that on the 19th of April, when the British arrived in Lexington and Concord (and Hancock and Adams hid in the fields to avoid capture) trained and armed Americans were out in force to meet them, and to take casualties, but to win the day and begin the American Revolution.
Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written many books, including three about the Revolutionary Era.
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Turning Back the Pages
Apr 16, 2025
125 years ago — April 1900
SALISBURY — The Morse-Keefer Cycle Co. have closed a portion of their works for an indefinite period.
William Conklin has moved his market to the Plummer building. W.F. Juppenlatz will enlarge his store by removing the partition between the barber shop and the room formerly occupied by Mr. Conklin.
Norfolk is to have a woman superintendent of the town farm, Mrs. Thomas Carroll who will take charge of the farm the coming year.
The old Blazing Star Lodge, No. 74, F. & A.M. of Cornwall Bridge is to be resuscitated, and the Grand Lodge officers will reinstitute it April 9th. The old lodge charter was granted in 1825, and was revoked in 1838. Since that time there has been no Masonic organization in the town.
We are pleased to note that Mrs. Lockwood’s condition is so much improved as to enable her to sit up for a few hours each day.
One of our property owners has blood in his eye. Instead of walking on the sidewalk he says people are determined to walk on his lawn, thus killing the grass. The man is kicking; he has a right to kick and kick hard. The sidewalks are made to use and should be made so that people CAN walk on them. However this man has provided a good dry walk and he thinks that ought to be sufficient.
LAKEVILLE — Capt. William Bartle is having a severe tussle with the grip.
The other night an amusing circumstance occurred at the depot. It seems one of our local Polanders expected a friend from the old country, so he went to the station to meet the last train. The train came and with it the man. Being unable to speak or understand English, he did not start to get out of the train quickly enough and it started up. The man on the platform was frantic, and in his excitement he rushed after the train, yelling “like sixty”; his legs flew; his coat tails stood out straight; his arms waved like a windmill, but the train didn’t pay the least attention and the last seen of him he was chasing around the curve and may be running yet for all we know.
100 years ago — April 1925
Robert Flint of Yale visited his grandfather, W.P. Everts, over Sunday.
SALISBURY — Benedict Carley, 11 years old, son of the late Harry Carley of this place, was drowned in the Blackberry river at East Canaan on Sunday afternoon. The boy was apparently riding his bicycle near the river and was thrown into the water when the bicycle struck some obstruction. He leaves his mother, Catherine Carley, and a brother, George, 14 years old.
State police, assisted by deputy sheriffs and constables, scoured the woods in Kent Tuesday morning seeking William Smith of Hartford, and Alfred Beebe of Great Barrington, who late Saturday afternoon again escaped from the county jail at Litchfield. The pair are supposed to have broken into the New Haven railroad’s freight-house at Cornwall Bridge during the night, where cases of eatables were broken open and a quantity of goods stolen. Smith has escaped from the Litchfield jail twice and Beebe three times, all in a short period. The two men were captured shortly before noon, while they were sleeping in the woods about a mile south of North Kent.
TACONIC — Frederick Hunt broke his collar bone last week while playing at school.
LIME ROCK — Mrs. Peck is entertaining an out of town friend this week.
Grandma Lorch returned to Lime Rock from Cornwall, where she has been for several weeks.
TACONIC — Joseph Pickert Jr. had the misfortune to cut his foot with an axe on Friday afternoon, severing the tendon of the great toe. Dr. Peterson repaired the damage with four stitches and Joseph is now about on crutches.
One of our local Boy Scouts, Rexford Baldwin, rode from Hartford Sunday on his bicycle. He left Hartford at 10 a.m. and arrived in Lakeville at 5 p.m.
Mr. H.P. Sharp, formerly of the Pine Plains Register, has assumed the ownership of the Harlem Valley Times of Amenia. He is retaining Editor J.D. O’Brien and the Times force. The Journal extends fraternal good wishes to Mr. Sharp and his able assistants.
Messrs. F.E. Bartholomew, A.E. Bauman and Chester Thurston, representing Lakeville Hose Co., were in New Jersey on Tuesday and Wednesday to witness demonstrations of different chemical trucks possible for use of the local company.
M.G. Fenn and Elester Patchen were down among the clams at New Haven last Sunday and some of the clams were down among Fenn and Patchen before the day was over.
Again there is too much speed being used by auto drivers through our Main Street. Why not give the kiddies and elderly people a little chance even if it takes about two minutes longer to pass through. Mr. State Policeman it is time to be on the job and nip this practice in the bud.
50 years ago — April 1975
Five years after its inception, the dream of Fred Gevalt III of Lakeville, to build and fly his own airplane, has come true. Mr. Gevalt piloted his single-engine seaplane, a Volmer Sportsman amphibian, on its maiden flight on March 16. To date the young pilot has more than 13 hours in flight time in his seaplane.
Lakeville and Falls Village firemen fought a stubborn brush fire late Saturday afternoon that burned over several hundred acres of forest land on the southern slope of Prospect Mountain in Salisbury before the fire was extinguished. Firemen had to bushwhack their way into the site from Sugar Hill Road in Amesville carrying 70-pound water tanks on their backs. The flames, which started in the valley, burned all the way to the ridgeline at the top of the 1461-foot mountain and destroyed mainly leaves, needles and underbrush.
Three Canaan men were arrested last Wednesday for the theft of emergency radio equipment from the Canaan Fire Department on March 16. The radio equipment was returned two days after the theft, left on the hood of Canaan Fire Chief Allyn Gatti’s auto. The men were each charged with third-degree burglary and second-degree larceny.
Ginny Lloyd of Salisbury has purchased The Polka Dot dress shop in Sheffield. Miss Lloyd, who formerly owned Pandora’s Box gift shop in Lakeville, has sold that establishment and is moving its stock to the Sheffield location. After three years of selling gifts, she wanted to expand her operations to include ladies’ apparel, but had no room for such items in her Lakeville location.
25 years ago — April 2000
Just when we thought we’d seen the last of Old Man Winter, he delivered a snow storm and anywhere from 4 to 12 inches of white fluff in the region. What on seasonably warm Saturday had been blooming daffodils were unseasonably buried blooms Sunday.
Tibetan monks from the Gaden Jangtse Monastery in Mundgod in south-central India spent a week of activities at the Salisbury School, including creating a Green Tara Sand mandala by dropping grains of colored sand to form patterns. Near the end of the week the mandala was dismantled and the monks led a procession of students, teachers and townspeople to Lake Washinee where the grains of sand were ceremoniously scattered.
SALISBURY — Rita Delgado won’t be getting breakfast in bed on Mother’s Day. More likely, she’ll be eating cold danish and drinking coffee from a styrofoam cup in a charter bus headed for Washington D.C. Mrs. Delgado will be on her way to join the Million Mom March on the nation’s capital, hopefully in the company of 45 or more others from the Northwest Corner who want tighter gun control laws. “The [Second Amendment] right to bear arms didn’t mean going to school with a semiautomatic or a Saturday night special,” she said.
SHARON — As of Tuesday, West Woods #1 joined Modley, Herb, Bowne, Butter and Cole roads as a scenic town road. After weighing the comments from about a dozen and a half residents at a public hearing April 7, the Board of Selectmen voted Tuesday to designate the unpaved the 3.4-mile long portion of West Woods Road #1 as scenic.
Brian O’Hara has brought honor and recognition to Kent. The 13-year-old eighth-grader at Kent Center School came in second in the state Geography Bee April 7, at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain.
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Hands off Greenland
Apr 16, 2025
Despite the unequivocal statements of the existing and former Prime Ministers of both Greenland and Denmark that Greenland is not for sale, Trump continues to issue his imperialistic assertions that, one way or another, he will take Greenland.
Growing up in the world of New York real estate, Donald Trump developed early on an appreciation for size and a special fondness for bigness. He would estimate the crowd size at his rallies as twice as large as they actually were. He told everyone that his Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue was many stories taller than it actually was. He had an architectural firm design what would have been the world’s tallest building for New York harbor (not built). Surely, some of Trump’s fascination with Russia stems from it being by far the world’s largest country. Even his proposed Wall along the Mexican border, while shorter than the Great Wall of China, which he greatly admires, would have been a giant.
Greenland, the largest island in the world, has for more than 300 years been a territory of Denmark and since 1979 has enjoyed Home Rule with foreign affairs being the main area of government still controlled by Denmark. The overall population is only 57,000 and its capitol, Nuuk has not quite 10,000 residents. Over 85% of the population is Inuit with the remainder European, mostly Danish. Modern industry is only beginning to dominate employment situation and is still less significant than fishing. Agriculture is but a tiny segment of the economy — it’s just too cold, and trees and shrubs are few and far between. The name “Greenland” was bestowed by the Viking explorer Erik the Red to attract residents to this very sparsely vegetated land.
Trump was quick to express his desire to own Greenland. He and his “experts” have been trying to make the case that American control of Greenland would be a vital component of US and world security interests and they have implied that China or Russia will take it over if we don’t. But the American military has had an Air Force base on the island since 1949, expanding it from time to time as it deemed necessary,
The idea that the US needs to ‘take” Greenland, as Trump puts it, is without merit, a bogus excuse to cover the actual reasons he wants it. Just as in Ukraine where Trump’s shakedown of Zelensky to acquire much of the country’s subterranean mineral wealth, Trump’s advisors have told him that buried beneath Greenland’s miles of ice-covered landscape are a treasure trove of precious rare minerals just waiting for America to uncover them. Actually we don’t really know since the ice cover is so deep and little subterranean exploration has taken place.
Trump recently sent Vice President Vance and his wife on what was billed as a pleasure trip to Greenland but they were given such a chilly reception with sign-wielding protesters standing in the streets that they had to travel instead to the US-controlled Pituffik military base 110 miles away from the capitol, Nuuk. While he spoke in a friendlier tone of voice than his boss, Vance managed to offend nearly all the Greenlanders who heard him or later read his comments. He also insulted Denmark saying that
“Our message to Denmark is very simple, you have not done a good job by the people of Greenland. . ”
However, as former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt recently told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, the US as part of NATO previously had a much greater military presence than it does now “There is nothing”, she said” “stopping the United States from ramping up its military presence in Greenland again without needing to take over the whole territory; there is a treaty from 1951 where it is very clear that the Americans have huge access to Greenland,” she said to Zakaria, noting that at one point during the height of the Cold War, there were 16 military bases on Greenland. There’s nothing stopping the Americans from getting more engaged militarily in Greenland, having more bases, if that’s what they want.”
Despite the unequivocal statements of the existing and former Prime Ministers of both Greenland and Denmark that Greenland is not for sale, Trump continues to issue his imperialistic assertions that, one way or another, he will take Greenland.
Standing with the coalition leaders of Greenland’s government, current Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reasserted her country’s desire to cooperate with the US in strengthening Standing with the coalition leaders of Greenland’s government, current Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen reasserted her country’s desire to cooperate with the US in strengthening Greenland’s defense but she insisted that Greenland was not for sale and that ”you cannot annex another country, not even with an argument about international security.”
Should Trump feel that his control over the American people is not strong enough to risk war with NATO to get his way, he may try to get his benefactor, Musk to try to buy the citizens of Greenland offering a generous payout to each Greenlander to vote for selling their country. But would the Greenlanders go along? I don’t think so. And would Denmark? Doubtful. As for military action (war), would Congress and the Supreme Court go along? And what about the American people? Let’s hope good sense prevails.
Architect and landscape designer Mac Gordon lives in Lakeville.
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