Joseph Richards — 1000 mile trek for Americas Freedom
Compiled by Wendy Kay Smith
Honoring our ancestor’s service in the 250th Anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence
This year we celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and I want to honor and recognize our ancestors who were involved in the Revolutionary War.
On April 19, 1775, the first shots of the Revolutionary War were fired in Lexington and Concord, just 15–20 miles from Framingham, Massachusetts, where Joseph Richards and his family lived. Joseph was just 13 years old when the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776.1 Just five months later, on December 1, Joseph enlisted for the first of what would become six enlistments in the Revolutionary War.
Enlistment 1 & 2 — Dorchester Heights (December 1776 – April 1777)
Joseph’s first enlistment came on December 1, 1776, when he was just thirteen years old. He joined Captain Carrington’s company under Colonel Dyke’s regiment and marched to Dorchester Heights, the same high ground overlooking Boston Harbor where, just nine months earlier, Washington’s cannons had forced the British fleet out of the city for good. Joseph’s job now was to help hold what had already been won, standing watch through a New England winter, three months that stretched into four when his unit was ordered to remain past its original term. When that time was finally up, Joseph didn’t go home. He simply re-enlisted on the spot, for one more month, in the same company, at the same post. He received no written discharge for either stint, just a verbal release from his officers and a long walk back to Framingham, with nothing in his pocket to prove where he’d been.2 No muster card remains showing his service.3
Enlistment 3 — East Greenwich, Rhode Island (Late November 1777 – March 1778)
By November of 1777, fourteen-year-old Joseph was back in uniform, this time marching some fifty-five miles to East Greenwich, Rhode Island, to join Captain Burbank’s company, with one Perry believed to command the regiment. His job was to guard the shoreline of Narragansett Bay against a British raid that could come at any hour from occupied Newport, just a few miles across the water. This is the one enlistment that exists nowhere but in Joseph’s own memory — no muster roll, no pay record, nothing survives in any archive to confirm it happened.4 And yet fifty-five years later, standing before a judge, Joseph could still recall his lieutenant and ensign by name, Eames and Leland, from three months that left no other trace anywhere in the historical record.5
Enlistment 4 — The Hudson Highlands (June 1778 – February 1779)
This was Joseph’s longest and hardest enlistment. At fifteen, he enlisted as a fifer, not a private this time, but a musician, carrying a small wooden flute instead of a musket, in Captain Caleb Moulton’s company, Colonel Thomas Poor’s regiment.6 The march alone covered roughly 175 miles, down through Worcester and Connecticut to the Hudson River, where Joseph helped fortify the river passes and stood the long watch at West Point. He marched to White Plains once, when word came that the British were advancing from New York, but they turned back before a shot was fired, and Joseph’s war continued to be one of waiting rather than fighting. When he was finally discharged eight months and fourteen days later, in February of 1779, his journey home took eleven days and covered two hundred and twenty miles, on foot, in winter.7
Enlistment 5 — Claverack, New York (October–November 1779)
By the fall of 1779, sixteen-year-old Joseph and his family had moved to Hopkinton. He enlisted under Captain Amasa Cranston, Colonel Samuel Denny’s regiment, and marched roughly 155 miles north through Worcester and Springfield to Claverack, New York, then on to a post six miles beyond Albany.8 The regiment had been raised to serve three months, but Joseph’s service ended after barely more than one — the record doesn’t say why.
Enlistment 6 — The Alarm to Rhode Island (March 1781)
Joseph’s sixth and final enlistment came on an alarm. In March of 1781, seventeen years old, word reached Hopkinton that Rhode Island needed defending again, and Joseph’s company, under Captain Staples Chamberlin, Colonel Dean’s regiment, marched to meet the threat by order of His Excellency John Hancock.9 It was authorized as a forty-day expedition, but Joseph’s part in it lasted just eleven days, including three days and sixty miles spent walking home. He was discharged on March 14, 1781, and as far as any record shows, he never enlisted again. Notably, this enlistment — though the most thoroughly documented of all six in the official pay records — is the one Joseph himself omitted entirely when he gave his sworn pension testimony fifty-one years later, a reminder of how incomplete even firsthand memory can be.10
Pension Record
When Congress passed the Pension Act of 1832, it granted full pay for life to veterans who had served at least two years in the Continental Line, state troops, militia, or as naval or marine officers — and partial, prorated pay to those who had served less than two years but at least six months.11 Joseph’s roughly year-and-a-half of cumulative service placed him in this second tier. He was seventy years old when his pension was finally granted, and he received $20.66 a month for the rest of his life.12
Bounty Land
Federal bounty land was reserved for veterans of the Continental Line who served at least three years continuously; militia service, however extensive, did not qualify.13 Since Joseph’s six enlistments were all served in the Massachusetts Militia and totaled only about a year and a half, he never qualified for any bounty land grant.
Conclusion
Joseph Richards walked nearly a thousand miles over those six enlistments — to Dorchester Heights, to Rhode Island twice, to the Hudson Highlands, to Claverack and back — on foot, mostly as a boy not yet out of his teens. According to family tradition handed down through his descendants, there were stretches when he and the men around him marched for days at a time without food, and it took a lasting toll on his health.14 He was never wounded. He was never in a single named battle. When the pension form asked what battles he’d been engaged in, seventy-year-old Joseph answered with one word: “None.” And yet six separate times, as a boy of thirteen and then a young man of seventeen, he put down whatever he was doing in Framingham or Hopkinton and went back. Six times, he came home again with nothing in his pocket to prove where he’d been, no written discharge, ever, in his entire service.
Endnotes
- Joseph Richards (Berkshire County, Massachusetts), pension application no. S.L. 21448, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Application Files, 1800–1900; Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Record Group 15; National Archives, Washington, D.C.; digital images, Fold3 (fold3.com : accessed June 2026).
- Richards pension no. S.L. 21448, declaration of October 3, 1832.
- Richards pension no. S.L. 21448, “Brief in the Case of Joseph Richards,” question 7.
- Richards pension no. S.L. 21448, declaration of October 3, 1832; “Brief in the Case of Joseph Richards,” question 7.
- Richards pension no. S.L. 21448, declaration of October 3, 1832.
- Massachusetts. Adjutant General’s Office. Massachusetts Muster and Pay Rolls, vol. 48, p. 409, Capt. Caleb Moulton’s Co., Col. Thomas Poor’s Regt., pay roll for June 1778; Compiled Service Records of Soldiers Who Served in the American Army during the Revolutionary War, National Archives Microfilm Publication M881, Record Group 93; digital images, Fold3 (fold3.com : accessed June 2026).
- Richards pension no. S.L. 21448, declaration of October 3, 1832.
- Massachusetts. Adjutant General’s Office. Massachusetts Muster and Pay Rolls, vol. 17, p. 226, Capt. Amasa Cranston’s Co., Col. Samuel Denny’s Regt.; “Massachusetts, Military Records, 1767–1833,” image group no. 007843864, FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed June 2026).
- Massachusetts. Adjutant General’s Office. Muster and pay roll, Capt. Staples Chamberlin’s Co., Col. Dean’s Regt., enlisted March 7, 1781; “Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Index Cards to Muster Rolls, 1775–1783,” FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed June 2026).
- Richards pension no. S.L. 21448, declaration of October 3, 1832, describes this sixth enlistment under “Capt. Chamberlain” but states a service length inconsistent with the muster and pay roll (Chamberlin/Dean), 1781, which records eleven days; the discrepancy likely reflects the fallibility of memory fifty-one years after the fact rather than an omission.
- U.S. Statutes at Large, 22d Cong., 1st sess., chap. 126 (June 7, 1832), 4 Stat. 529.
- “Ledgers of Payments, 1818–1872, to U.S. Pensioners under Acts of 1818 through 1858,” vol. G, p. 143, entry for Joseph Richards; Record Group 217; National Archives Microfilm Publication T718; digital images, image group no. 007196950, FamilySearch (familysearch.org : accessed June 2026).
- Journals of the Continental Congress, September 16, 1776; subsequent federal bounty-land legislation, 1788 et seq., U.S. Statutes at Large.
- Riley C. Richards (Mrs.), “Our Richards Family” (paper presented at the Richards Family Reunion, 1971); reprinted in J. Grant Stevenson, comp., Richards Family History, vol. 1 (n.p.: privately printed, 1977), 1.