Embedded Files
Just around five hundred feet from the site of Samuel Whittemore’s attack stood another Menotomy Tavern, one owned by the Coopers. Benjamin and Rachel Cooper had remained at the tavern on the afternoon of April 19, 1775. They were joined by two older men, Jason Winship and Jabez Wyman. Winship and Wyman were drinking at the tavern, and though warned of the imminent danger, Wyman asked to finish their drinks.1 The British soldiers soon rushed into the tavern in their ongoing attempt to root out rebel enemies hidden within. Historian Frank Warren Coburn explains that these soldiers had been “lashed to a fury by the reception they had met along the road, particularly that of the last half mile.”2 Where only hours earlier a group of ineligible men gathered to plan the capture of the British supply wagon, here the British enacted a type of revenge.
A postcard in the Robbins Library collection shows Cooper's Tavern as it likely looked in 1775.
The soldiers entered the tavern, and “fired more than a hundred bullets into the house…” according to the deposition of Benjamin and Rachel Cooper.3 While the Coopers sought refuge in the cellar of the home, Wyman and Winship remained. Though both men were over the age of forty at the time, the British unleashed upon the two. The Coopers described the two men as being “barbarously and inhumanly murdered by them: being stabbed through in many places, their heads mauled, skulls broke, and their brains dashed out on the floor and walls of the house…”.4 It would appear that the men erroneously gauged their enemy’s true disdain for provincials by that point along the retreat. Though critiqued by some of their contemporaries, one of which wrote that Wyman had “died as a fool dieth,” the two men have largely been regarded as martyrs of the Patriot cause.5
The chaos and destruction wrought upon Cooper’s Tavern is well documented in the historical record, with initial reports collected in the journals of the Second Provincial Congress. While debate remains about how Winship and Wyman should truly be remembered, the incident of their deaths nonetheless serves as testimony to the brutality with which the British soldiers treated those they viewed as enemy rebels. The advanced age of the two men also lends support to the story of Samuel Whittemore, who had just moments earlier also faced the wrath of enraged soldiers. It is perhaps because of Whittemore’s actions, firing upon the soldiers, that the soldiers felt the need to attack and brutally murder two innocent and unarmed men. Marking the end point of the Battle of Menotomy, the tavern itself bore the scars of battle until it was torn down in the twentieth century. Today the site is occupied by a Starbucks at 327 Broadway, though a historical marker remains to remind those stopping by that a calm spring day was once disrupted by great destruction and violence.
A historical marker sits in front of the Starbucks on Broadway in Arlington.
Image Sources
Image Sources
Page Header Background:
Kevin McGrath, Cooper Tavern- Mass Ave & Medford Street, photograph, Arlington Historical Society, https://s3.amazonaws.com/pastperfectonline/images/museum_986/033/2007113-14.jpg.
Postcard:
Frank E. Hammond, Old Cooper Tavern, 1775, Arlington, Mass., postcard, Robbins Library, Digital Commonwealth, https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth:gh93hc053.
Historical Marker:
Bill Cooper, Cooper Tavern Marker, April 19, 2009, photograph. The Historical Marker Database, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=18137.
Footnotes
Footnotes
1. Benjamin Cutter and William R. Cutter, History of the Town of Arlington, Massachusetts. Formerly the Second Precinct in Cambridge or District of Menotomy, Afterward the Town of West Cambridge 1635-1879 (Boston, MA: David Claff & Son, 1880), 74-75.
2. Frank Warren Coburn, The Battle of April 19, 1775 in Lexington, Concord, Lincoln, Arlington, Cambridge, Somerville and Charlestown, Massachusetts (Lexington, MA: Frank Warren Coburn, 1912), 143.
3. “Narratives of the Excursion of the Kings’ Troops, April 19, 1775,” in The Journals of Each Provincial Congress of Massachusetts in 1774 and 1775, and of the Committee of Safety, ed. William Lincoln, (Boston, MA: Dutton and Wentworth, Printers to the State, 1838), 678.
4. “Narratives of the Excursion of the Kings’ Troops, April 19, 1775,” 678.
5. Reverend John Marrett to Reverend Isaiah Dunster, in History of the Town of Arlington, Massachusetts. Formerly the Second Precinct in Cambridge or District of Menotomy, Afterward the Town of West Cambridge 1635-1879, Benjamin Cutter and William R. Cutter (Boston, MA: David Claff & Son, 1880), 74-75.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse