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DiscoverMaineMagazine.com
Monmouth’s Revolutionary War Heritage The legacy of Henry Dearborn by Charles Francis
W
hat do the town of Monmouth, a little log hut on the Chaudiere River in Quebec, and the Battle of Monmouth have in common? The bond between them is Henry Dearborn, one of the great heroes of the Revolutionary War. Dearborn spent a great deal of his adult life in Monmouth. He spent a short period of time recuperating from fever, dehydration, and other maladies in the hut on the Chaudiere. At the Battle of Monmouth, the regiment that Dearborn led received a commendation from George Washington. Monmouth and the Battle of Monmouth have something very much in common. The former was named for the latter. Prior to its incorporation as the town of Monmouth on January 20, 1792, the township where Henry Dearborn chose to make his home had been known by a myriad of names — Freetown, Bloomingborough and Wales. Dearborn, of course, was a factor in naming the town after a battle that was one of the most significant in the Revolution.
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Henry Dearborn came to what would become Monmouth because of his family’s association with the Kennebec Proprietors. It was not the first time he had been in the area, however. He had been one of the eleven hundred volunteers who followed Benedict Arnold on his famous expedition up the Kennebec and Dead rivers, across the Height of Land, and down the Chaudiere River to Quebec City. That is how he came to lie, near death, in a hut on the Chaudiere in 1775. Henry Dearborn is one of the most fascinating figures in the early history of the United States and Maine. Lauded as a hero in the Revolution, he was viewed as incompetent in the War of 1812. He was the Secretary of War under Thomas Jefferson, but the Senate refused to consider his nomination for the same post by James Madison. Elected to Congress from what was then the District of Maine by a substantial popular vote, he incurred the wrath of settlers in the region for his support of the Kennebec Proprietors in the Malta War.
Henry Dearborn was born in Hampton, New Hampshire on February 23, 1751. While not of the Boston elite, the Dearborns were a substantial family going back five generations in New Hampshire, to Godfrey Dearborn, who came from England in 1639. Henry Dearborn prepared for a career in medicine and, beginning in 1772, practiced for some three years in Nottingham Square, New Hampshire, until the Battle of Lexington and Concord. Sensing that the signs of war were escalating, he raised a company of volunteers and, as their captain, led them to Massachusetts in time to take part in the Battle of Bunker Hill. There he fought as a captain in Colonel John Stark’s 1st New Hampshire Regiment on June 17, 1775. Subsequently, Dearborn volunteered for Arnold’s march to Quebec. It is, in part, thanks to Henry Dearborn that much is known about the trials and tribulations of Benedict Arnold’s men. His group toiled through an unseasonably cold and miserable fall along the Dead River to the high(cont. on page 50)
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