Loving Sister,—These will inform you that I am very well at present, and have been so ever since I came from home, and I hope you and all my friends enjoy the same state of health.
We have been up to Ticonderoga and took almost four hundred prisoners of the British Army, and relieved one hundred of our men that were prisoners there.
Our army have come from Ticonderoga down as far as Pawlet, about sixty miles, and expect to march to Stillwater very soon. So no more at present.
I remain, Your Loving Brother,
Jonathan Stevens.
Pawlet, October ye 1st, 1777.
Jonathan married Susannah Bragg, December 15, 1773, and raised thirteen children,—Jonathan, Susannah, James, Dolly, Jeremy, Hannah, Isaac, Nathaniel, Dolly, Moses, Sarah, Oliver, and William.
He united the business of a currier and tanner to his ancestral pursuit of farming, and achieved the modest independence he so well merited. The house that he occupied for many years stood on the old road that passed along the western border of the Cochichewick meadows, that were long since flooded and converted into a lake, the extension of the Great Pond, for the water supply of the woolen mills of his son Nathaniel, and the cellar is still visible on the west side of the road, some three hundred yards from its junction with the road from the village of North Andover to the mills. He afterwards built one of those large, square, substantial mansions, once common in New England, on the crest of the high ground east of the village, and commanding noble views of the hamlet, the Great Pond, and the Cochichewick valley and the mills. This house was unfortunately destroyed by fire in 1876.
Jonathan Stevens purchased, for sixpence an acre, a large tract of land in Maine, which he divided into three farms, and bestowed upon his sons Jonathan, James, and Isaac. They settled, and named the place Andover, after their native town, and the descendants of the two former still reside there.
Jonathan Stevens was a tall, large man of fresh, ruddy complexion and fine appearance. He was fond of relating the incidents of the battle of Bunker Hill, and used to recount the tale to his children and grandchildren every Fourth of July,—how Putnam went along the line and commanded them not to fire until they could see the whites of the Redcoats’ eyes; and how Abbot, the strongest man in town, bore a wounded comrade off the field on his back. On the anniversary of the battle he invariably invited his comrades in the fight to his house, and entertained them with New England rum and hearty, old-fashioned hospitality, while the veterans fought the battle o’er again. He sat among the veterans of the battle at Webster’s magnificent oration in dedication of the Bunker Hill monument. On his eighty-fourth birthday he worked with his men in the hay field, keeping up with the best all day, and suffered no ill effect from the unwonted exertion. He died April 13, 1834, at the age of eighty-seven. In 1799 he gave the tract of land upon which was erected Franklin Academy, on the hill north of the meeting-house.
Jonathan’s brother James, Captain James’s other son, also served in the Revolutionary war, and left a diary of the siege of Boston, recently discovered in the garret of an old mansion in Andover, which opens like an epic:—