New Hampshire’s Revolutionary claims to fame

By MARY CARTER
Eagle Times Correspondent
NEWPORT, NH — Two separate NH state historical markers share similar avows.

Marker number 106, located in Newport, tells that longtime resident Joel McGregor was believed to be the last surviving NH soldier of the Revolutionary War. Marker 178 boasts that Antrim, NH soldier Samuel Downing was, for a good length of time, the last recorded pensioner in America’s battle for freedom.

So, which locale deserves the prize?

McGregor was born in Enfield, CT, on Nov. 22, 1760. Downing was born in Newburyport, MA, also in November. He claimed his birth year was 1761, but it could have been 1763 as his baptism was dated Dec. 1, 1764.

Samuel Downing

A young Downing was outside playing marbles with a group of boys, when a stranger asked if any of them were interested in learning the art of spinning-wheel making. Downing claimed he was. The stranger told Downing to meet him later that afternoon at Greenleaf’s Tavern. Downing did and, essentially, ran away from home.

Traveling to Haverhill, MA, then Londonderry, NH, and on to their final destination, Downing found Antrim to be a lonely place. In an 1860s interview, Downing confessed, “I was homesick; so, I went into the woods and sat down on a hemlock log, and cried it out.”

Downing apprenticed for six years with spinning-wheel maker Thomas Aiken and his wife. As for Downing’s poor parents, they’d figured he fell off a dock and drowned.

When the war against Great Britain broke out, Downing bolted to Hopkinton, NH, to enlist. Downing was turned away for being too small. After pleading with the enlisting officer, Downing was on his way to Charlestown, NH, with a hopeful letter of recommendation.

He joined the 2nd NH Regiment and described Gen. Benedict Arnold as “a stern-looking man, but kind to his soldiers.” Gen. Gates, on the other hand, was a “granny-looking fellow.” While ransacking the Mohawk Valley estate of British official Sir William Johnson, Downing swore he saw the old man’s ghost in the hall.

Following the war, Downing returned to Antrim. “Too big,” he said, “for the Aikens to whip.” Marrying a local girl, Downing started a 110-acre farm. In 1794, he sold his Antrim property “for a trifle” and moved to Edinburgh, NY, where Downing lived out his final years, dying in February of 1867.

Joel McGregor

Less is known about Joel McGregor.

As Eagle Times owner Jay Lucas related in his July 6, 2023, article, “The Spirit of ’76 Lives On!,” McGregor was an eight-month prisoner of war in the Livingston Sugar House in NYC. In the Nov. 20, 2017, episode of “Chronicle,” host Fritz Wetherbee explained that, because of a shortage of holding spaces, sugar warehouses made fine prisons because of their “thick walls and small windows.”

McGregor enlisted in 1777 at the age of 17 and his imprisonment ended on Jan. 1, 1779, when the king’s troops couldn’t find enough food for their own men, never mind hundreds of prisoners. So many of McGregor’s comrades died of disease and starvation.

McGregor settled in North Newport, NH, becoming a blacksmith. He died on Oct. 31, 1861, three weeks short of his 101st birthday.

What long lives these men had. Downing possessed an impressive claim all his own. The first presidential vote he ever cast was for George Washington. His last was for Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps, McGregor could say he did the same.