Hidden plaque is New Bedford’s only tribute to Grey’s Raid

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Nearly 19 years after I arrived in New Bedford, I was walking down County Street one day, near the intersection where St. Lawrence’s Church sits, and out of the corner of my eye I saw what looked like a public monument.

The stone memorial with a plaque affixed to it was in the front yard of one of those old mansions that line parts of the city’s broadest north-south thoroughfare. I remember at the time wondering why anyone would erect a public monument behind a fence on a private property.

Then I read the plaque: “In memory of Thomas Cook, Abram Russell, Diah Trafford. Citizens of Bedford Village who were killed Sept. 5, 1778 near this site during the War of the Revolution.”

I had a vague knowledge that there had been a Revolutionary War battle in New Bedford in which some colonists were killed. But I had the impression it was a small affair, a minor blip in the overall war that just happened to occur here. I had certainly never seen much in the way of public commemorations or other affairs that indicated the incident was a seminal event in New Bedford’s consciousness.

It certainly did not seem to me to be something on a par with the bloodshed and betrayal that took place here during King Philip’s War, the end of the big mills’ heyday during the 1928 New Bedford Textile Strike, or even the seemingly inauspicious 1838 and 1840 arrivals of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville in the city at the height of the Whaling Era.

How wrong I was.

Thomas Cook, Abram Russell and Diah Trafford were just the most tragic victims of a much larger British invasion of New Bedford that came to be known as Grey’s Raid. 

It’s a big, big deal in New Bedford history but is largely invisible compared to some of these other milestones that formed the city’s identity. 

During Grey’s Raid, thousands of British soldiers burned to the ground most of Bedford Village, which was later renamed New Bedford, as well as causing mayhem in Padanaram, then known as Akin’s Landing, the head of the Acushnet River, and the area around a local fort in Fairhaven that is now known as Fort Phoenix. The invasion by sea was as significant an event as any other to ever take place in Greater New Bedford and it was said to have taken decades for the town to fully recover.

Here is why it was so important to the American Revolution: Bedford Village during the war was the center of a fleet of privateers that were vital aides to the Continental Army. So determined were the British to destroy the only large port north of Chesapeake Bay not under their control that they landed no fewer than 4,500 to 5,000 troops in Clark’s Cove. That number was said to be 10 times the number of male inhabitants in all of Dartmouth at the time. Old Dartmouth in those days included what we today call New Bedford, Dartmouth, Fairhaven, Acushnet and Westport.

After landing at the Cove and camping near what later became the peninsula’s poor farm, the British marched up County Road, now County Street. Some of them turned right onto Union Street, then King’s Street, proceeded to march to the waterfront, and pretty much torched the entire fleet as well as the warehouses, maritime houses and other businesses that supported them. A separate group of British troops burned the revolutionary Akin family’s new would-be privateering ship and properties in Padanaram; other troops landed east of a fort on the site of present-day Fort Phoenix and destroyed both the fort and structures throughout the town.

But the big target of Grey Raid’s was the Bedford Village privateering fleet and the waterfront businesses that supported it.

“Here was property that contributed liberally to the support of the continental revolution,” Henry B. Worth told members of the Old Dartmouth Historical Society (now the Whaling Museum) in a 1909 address. Worth was reading from interviews with witnesses of Grey’s Raid done by society member Henry H. Crapo, who had painstakingly interviewed Grey’s Raid survivors toward the end of their lives, some 60 years after the event.

“Such active assistance to the rebellion was sometimes to be checked and a raid was planned as a military movement to reduce the opportunity for assistance,” said Worth. 

The British met little opposition, particularly on the New Bedford side of the Acushnet River. The muster rolls were said to show that many local men were away fighting at the recent Battle of Rhode Island over the British fort at Newport, and many others were Quakers or Loyalists who were disinclined to fight.

According to 19th-century local historian Leonard Bolles Ellis, the British burned some 70 privateers and additional whaling ships in Bedford Village and on the Fairhaven side of the river. That included eight large vessels, six armed vessels, scores of sloops and schooners. The invasionary force also set fire to 26 storehouses, assorted distilleries, taverns, rope works and other businesses. An estimated dozen or so private homes were consumed by fire on both sides of the water.

“The force was landed almost without opposition, and passing through the little town, the troops entirely destroyed it,” wrote Ellis.

“The lovely Acushnet, now so calm and peaceful, stretching away among the woody plains, was to be the scene of a conflagration absolutely consuming in its greed the prosperity, and well nigh the existence, of the town.”

The British finally met local resistance in Fairhaven, where Major Israel Fearing of the Continental Army gathered 140 Minutemen to push back on them, though how instrumental that resistance was in their leaving is a matter of debate among historians. 

But it was the New Bedford merchant fleet, the heart of the New England privateering fleet, that took decades to recover. Sunken ships were said to have littered the Acushnet River for years.

“What hapless despair must have taken possession of the people as they began to understand the extent of the disaster,” wrote Ellis in his 1892 “History of New Bedford and Vicinity.”

In addition to the three citizens killed at the intersection of North Street and County Road, where the plaque now sits in the front yard of what a few years ago became the Drayton House, a YWCA’s women’s rooming house, an officer of a Massachusetts state artillery company was killed at the Head of the Acushnet River. Lt. Jonathan (misnamed James in some histories) Metcalf and two other officers had led 80 state militiamen and one artillery piece down from Boston when they knew the British were coming. 

Metcalf was shot and died three days later, and some histories say an unknown man was killed when the British set off a gunpowder explosion at Fort Phoenix. 

There are also particularly gruesome details about how Cook, Russell, and Trafford died that perhaps illustrate that the British wanted to send a message to the local residents akin to modern-day terrorism.

As their troops marched up County, a Bedford Village man named John Gilbert said he warned two town residents that the King’s troops were coming and abreast of them. Under cover of darkness, those men fired upon the British from the west of the road and were said to have killed two British horsemen.

Shortly after, Cook, Russell and Trafford came up North Street toward County from the east, or the waterfront side. They were also armed and said to be fleeing to the woods west of the town, along with everybody else. The British shot them and then reportedly aggressively bayoneted them.

Cook was shot through the heart and died instantly. According to both Ellis and Worth, the British soldiers then cut Cook’s face to pieces with their sabers. Russell was shot through the leg, bowels and bladder and died at daylight. Trafford, also shot in the belly, died at 10 the next morning.

“The British advanced rapidly on them with charged bayonets. They begged for quarter, which was refused,” Gilbert told Henry Crapo in an interview when he was 75 years old.

It’s breathtaking even now to read these accounts. The British navy’s operation for all the world seemed like a campaign meant to beat the people of Bedford Village into submission. 

“The English expedition was arranged with all spectacular accompaniments calculated to inspire terror and subdue the inhabitants,” Worth told the members of the Dartmouth Historical Society.

Gen. John Andre, a member of the British invasionary force who kept a journal of the invasion, described the events a bit differently and in the most matter-of-fact of tones. He seems to have conflated the incidents at North and County streets with the one at the head of the Acushnet.

“Three or four men of the enemy were found bayoneted, one an officer. They had fired at the advance party and were not alert enough to get off,” he wrote.

It all must have been surreal for this rapidly growing whaling port.

After crossing over to Fairhaven at the head of the river, the British laid waste to much of the east side of the port before finally encountering Fearing’s Minutemen. They eventually got back on their boats and headed for Martha’s Vineyard to steal cattle and sheep as provisions for the fleet. 

I became so interested in the lack of awareness in most of the city about the sheer breadth and scope of Grey’s Raid, and the fact that the only monument is hidden away in this private yard, behind a black wrought iron fence and a row of bushes, that I set out to research how the Daughters of the American Revolution came to place their memorial there. 

What I found in the downtown library’s wonderful microfiche files was a May 25, 1927, edition of The New Bedford Evening Standard that showed the DAR didn’t actually place the monument where it exists today.

A photo of the members of the DAR shows that the plaque was not originally placed inside the yard behind the fence and bushes, but on a granite stone fence post at the front of the property, directly facing County Street. Those granite fence posts appear to be still there today in front of the house at 549 County.

So in 1927 the plaque on the street-facing post would have been easily visible to anyone walking by, though of course not so much to the few who drove by in a motor vehicle in those days. When and why the plaque was placed on a stone and moved inside the yard behind the fence, I do not know. Perhaps they did it because of vandalism; perhaps because they just wanted a plaque on a stone like so many other monuments around the city.

I’ve been in touch with the New Bedford Chapter of the DAR and they don’t know all that much about how the plaque got there. It was, after all, 99 years ago. Stacey DeMello, the current regent of the local DAR, says she intended to check out the monument to see if it should stay where it is. She suggested that the open parking lot of St. Lawrence Church might be a more visible spot, also at the intersection of County and North.

Beyond that, the present DAR members could not tell me much.

“I haven’t found anything on why DAR wanted to put up the monument,” said Marian Ryall, the historian for the New Bedford chapter.

Ryall, however, did find in her research that the plaque for Lieutenant Metcalf, where he is buried in the Acushnet cemetery, has the wrong first name. The New Bedford DAR’s project for the 250th anniversary of Grey’s Raid in 2028 is to change the name from “James” to the correct one of “Jonathan.”

That’s terrific. It’s always important to correct the historical record.

My question is this, however. What is the City of New Bedford’s project for 2028 for the 250th anniversary of Grey’s Raid?

Personally, I’d like to see that County Street monument moved to a more visible place. Where that would be, I don’t know. Nearby spots like the Octopus park, where there is a monument to a Portuguese-American Revolutionary War hero, Peter Francisco, might be a possibility. It’s two blocks away. The St. Lawrence parking lot, located at the County/North intersection as the YWCA building, might also work, if the church could spare a little space. It’s located on the other side of the same intersection where the plaque is presently located. 

I wish I could tell you what the YWCA says about all this, but for some reason, executive director Gail Fortes, who I’ve known for many years, is not returning my calls.

That may be because of the strong feelings that some members of the New Bedford Preservation Society have about the issue.

The group strongly opposes moving the monument, with President Mark P. Fuller stressing to me that it was placed at the site because it is close to where the three men fell. He also said it is on private property and said that the YWCA “has been convinced” that the monument should be better maintained. He contended the YWCA is unwilling to let it be moved.

The monument gained attention earlier this year after a caller to talk radio station WBSM complained that no one was maintaining it and some members of the City Council took up the issue. With the bushes and growth around it, it looked fairly untended, as it often has when I’ve walked by it over the years — though, to be fair, the upkeep of the stone and plaque looks a little better since the complaints. I recently noticed someone had placed a plastic flower box, of all things, in front of it on Memorial Day weekend.

“We understand the historical significance of the original event and would be in support of installing readable street signage or broadsides throughout the city marking locations of Grey’s movements here in New Bedford,” Fuller wrote in a statement to The Light.  

The city’s elected leadership seems more sympathetic to my view that we need to do a better job of making the Grey’s Raid monument more visible.

I have talked to both Mayor Jon Mitchell and City Council President Ryan Pereira about my research and how major an event the British raid actually was. They both say its 250th anniversary in 2028 would be perfect timing to do something to mark the importance of the event and make the history better known in the city.

“It’s an event that hasn’t gotten its due,” said Mitchell. “It’s incumbent on all of us to elevate the story so it’s properly appreciated.”

“I never knew this history about New Bedford,” said Pereira. “We don’t hear about how we were targeted by the British because of our privateers and our converted merchant ships and how well and how good we were doing at it.”

Pereira said Community Preservation funds might be a perfect way to move toward a second monument marking the overall significance of Grey’s Raid, or making the current plaque more visible either at its current or a different location. A trail of markers denoting where different events of the attack took place certainly makes sense too, as the Preservation Society has suggested.

The reality is this: Unbeknownst to the vast majority of city residents, New Bedford played a more significant role in the American Revolution than seems to have been realized in recent history. It was a major home port for the privateers and merchant ships who supported the American cause. The city and the region paid dearly for that support, having had its port, the heart of its economy, almost completely destroyed by fire. 

It’s time for New Bedford to find a way to bring this important history to its citizens and the tourists who come here, to the schoolchildren who grow up here. It’s important and it’s something to be proud of.

Jack Spillane is a New Bedford Light news and opinion columnist. You can reach him at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.

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