Browse Themes (1 total)

Communities throughout western Massachusetts united to resist the British government in the years leading up to and during the Revolution. Townspeople formed committees, drilled minutemen companies, gathered supplies and raised money for the war effort. These same activities also divided towns and even families. For staunch loyalists like the Stoddard family of Northampton, the Revolution was “more like a civil war" and little Solomon Stoddard was bullied daily for being “the son of a tory” as he walked to school. Patriots celebrated the arrival in Deerfield of a Liberty Pole in 1774 while a young physician recorded in his personal journal just who sawed it in half under cover of night.  Longmeadow men convinced that their long-time neighbor Samuel Colton was guilty of price gouging broke into Colton’s store to seize his inventory of sugar and West Indies rum. African American and Native American residents encountered daily the glaring contradictions of calls to resist tyranny in a society that condoned and supported chattel slavery.