Waterville’s Asa Redington One of George Washington’s honor guard

from 2020 Western Maine

Norway’s George Beal The enlisted man’s general

Waterville’s Asa Redington

One of George Washington’s honor guard

by Jeff Stern A s a member of General George Washington’s elite Honor Guard in the Revolutionary War, Asa Redington, American patriot and Waterville pioneer, met the father of our country several times.

Near the end of the war, while Asa rested in a Princeton, New Jersey, infirmary recovering from smallpox, General Washington made his way through the crowded hall. Washington was so appreciative of Redington’s gallantry in battle that he ordered his personal physician to care for the stricken soldier.

After Asa got back on his feet, he and a fellow Honor Guard member were busy cleaning Washington’s Princeton headquarters. The General offered the men a drink. In his memoirs, Redington

notes, Washington delivered “a bottle of excellent spirits, which proved very acceptable.”

You’d think close brushes with the already legendary leader of the Continental Army might go to a young soldier’s head. Not so with Asa Redington. In his typically self-effacing, eloquent prose, he writes, “I mention these trifling circumstances merely to show that the Commander-In-Chief of the American Army was above that false pride which too often accompanies men invested with rank and power.”

In fact, in all his memoirs, Asa never mentions the Honor Guard outright, only once alluding to it obliquely, as if

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serving on it wasn’t a big deal. It was, though. This elite unit, also referred to as Washington’s “Life Guard” or the “Commander-In-Chief’s Guard,” consisted of forty-five men who represented the cream of the crop of the Continental Army. They guarded General Washington’s life, his family, property, and personal records as he traveled about after hostilities ceased. Only soldiers of the highest moral character and crisp appearance were chosen.

Asa served in the Honor Guard from June through December of 1783 at which time he was discharged from the Continental Army. He made his way back to his native New England. Asa went on to build a sawmill on the Kennebec River in Winslow (now Waterville). The house he built for his family was one of Waterville’s first permanent residences.

But all that was to come later. Asa’s early years were chaotic. He was born in Boxford, Massachusetts on Decem

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ber 22, 1761. Asa’s father died at sea in a shipping accident when the boy was eight years old. Asa’s mother didn’t have the means to care for her six children, so they were split up and shuttled off to relatives. (She kept a seventh child that was born after her husband’s death.)

Asa moved from family to family, arriving finally on the farm of his Uncle Moses Putnam in Wilton, New Hampshire. Asa was fifteen. With all this moving about the country, there was no time for schooling.

About farm life, Asa wrote, “I had to labor very hard and beyond my strength, [and] was half-starved for food and clothing.”

Perhaps the rigors of life on the farm prepared him for the deprivations of war. In June of 1778 Asa signed up for a one-year hitch — the first of three enlistments. He joined Colonel Peabody’s Regiment in New Hampshire, which in turn augmented the Army of Providence commanded by General Sullivan.

That summer Asa studied war at Providence College. Then orders came to attack the British in Rhode Island. The Americans crossed to Howland’s Island, and the fierce battle was joined. “Lieutenant Dearborn, belonging to my company, had his head carried away by a cannonball and fell dead at my feet,” Asa writes, “and a young man, a messmate of mine by the name of Hastings had his leg carried away by one of these missiles of destruction.” Asa himself nearly perished when a cannonball struck the ground close by. To the astonishment of the men around him, he picked himself off the ground and resumed his place in the ranks.

The plan was for French ships to provide support, but a fierce storm crippled the fleet, and it wasn’t able to come to the Americans’ aid. Under the cover of darkness, the army retreated from Howland’s Island. Asa served (cont. on page 42)

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the remainder of his first enlistment in scouting parties, frequently seeing intense action.

Asa returned to Wilton in July of 1780. He wasn’t out of the army for long, re-enlisting in March of 1781. The wage was forty dollars a month. As an added incentive to join, enlistees were promised twenty head of cattle upon their return. This time the recruits marched to West Point, where they joined the infantry under Colonel Alex Scammel, four hundred men strong.

“We were put under a severe discipline, maneuvering both day and night,” Asa wrote. Colonel Scammel stood nearly seven feet tall and was a strict taskmaster who abided nothing short of perfection during his troops’ drills. The infantry rowed down the Hudson River to New Jersey where they engaged the British at Kingsbridge. The British launched a ferocious counterattack. In the face of this onslaught, the Amer- (cont. from page 41) icans retreated so fast they couldn’t retrieve the dead and dying. Certainly the remaining Americans would be cut down if not for the sudden, almost magical appearance of the French Cavalry. The British aborted their charge. “I felt quite relieved at this unexpected turn of good luck, having given up all as lost,” Asa notes in his memoirs.

From New Jersey, the battle-weary troops continued to Annapolis, Maryland, and then south to Yorktown, Virginia. Rations were lean. The soldiers somehow marched staggering distances on meager amounts of gristly meat and mealy bread. At Yorktown they set to work digging breastworks. Day after day, 24 hours a day, they dug trenches. During one brief respite, Asa laid down in the grass to steal some sleep. A British cannonball passed so close to where he lay that, like a great gust of wind, it threw back his blanket. Asa decided he’d better get back to the trenches.

Shelling was heavy from both sides but after a three-week siege, British General Lord Charles Cornwallis surrendered. Cornwallis’ seven thousand men represented nearly twenty-five percent of the British troops in the colonies. Yorktown was the climactic battle of the Revolutionary War. The British still held key ports like New York City and Charleston, South Carolina, and sporadic fighting continued, but in the wake of the decisive defeat at Yorktown, the British decided the war was no longer winnable and entered treaty negotiations.

Asa toured the horrific destruction in Yorktown that was wrought by the American bombardment. Then he and many other soldiers marched north. Asa was ill with smallpox, but he was fortunate. Many others died from the highly contagious scourge.

Asa was in New York in 1783 when

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the Treaty of Paris was signed and the Revolutionary War officially ended. That’s when he was selected for General Washington’s Honor Guard. He marched to Washington’s headquarters in Princeton where he served the remainder of his time in the Honor Guard. Of his Revolutionary War experience, Asa wrote, “I am no friend to war, but pray that peace may reign on the earth.” He made his way back to New Hampshire.

Along with his brother Thomas, Asa took a schooner up the Kennebec River to Vassalboro. Asa taught school for six months. His employers, Esquire John and Captain N. Getchell, were satisfied with his performance as a teacher, “though I was far from being qualified for the purpose. This shows the low state of learning in this region at that period in 1784-85.”

Asa lumbered, fished, and farmed during the remainder of the 1780s, all

the while keeping his eye on settling on land near the Kennebec. That’s not the only thing he had his eye on. In September of 1788, Asa wed Mary Getchell.

Four years later, Asa, with the assistance of Captain Getchell, built a sawmill at the foot of Ticonic Falls on the Kennebec River. This was the first sawmill in the area. Soon after, he built a house. In November of 1793 Asa’s family moved in. Asa’s house, three other homes, and the sawmill comprised the original settlement that grew to become Waterville. Asa was Waterville’s first selectperson, and he helped found the First Baptist Church there.

Asa and Mary raised six sons and three daughters. Mary died suddenly on December 12, 1804. Her passing deeply affected Asa. “This was to me a dreadful stroke,” he writes, “and falling so suddenly upon me, the mind was unprepared to meet it…” Asa found consolation in his faith.

In 1806 Asa married Hannah Hobby, a Portland widow. She had two children, a boy and a girl from her first marriage. Asa built a large, elegant home for his son William on Silver Street in 1814 that, today, houses the Waterville Historical Society. The house, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, faithfully preserves furnishings and antiques from that era.

Asa died in 1845, outliving Hannah by twelve years. Asa is buried beneath what today is Monument Park in Waterville, across from the library. There once was a cemetery at this spot, but the exact location of his grave isn’t known.

Before his death, Asa requested that his body never be moved. Not too far from his unmarked grave, a stone obelisk stands in St. Francis Catholic Cemetery to honor this selfless American hero.