by Robert Aberg and Elizabeth Weeks
Special to The Grafton News –
This is a lost and found story.
It was a stormy night in 1938. Hurricane winds howled and rain flooded the streets. There was a crash and an oak tree that once stood for three centuries had fallen, uprooted by the storm. A bronze tablet affixed to the tree— noting Grafton’s response to news of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775—vanished.
The tree stood next to a local tavern and meeting house, which was a natural gathering spot. In the early 1830s, owner Philip Wing moved the tavern and built the house that stands today at 12 Oak Street, currently the home of David and Kathleen Underhill.
Grafton’s Old Oak Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution commemorated the town’s first American soldiers by casting a bronze tablet in 1914, which read: “Under this tree before the old tavern patriots of the community gathered to pledge their services to the cause of American Independence. This tablet placed by the Old Oak Chapter Daughters of the American Revolution June 14 1914”
The March 1918 issue of “Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine” established why the tree became significant: “At the alarm from Lexington, 1775, citizens gathered under this tree and at the call, every seventh man was drawn. The war continued, and again under this same tree, every fifth man was marked for his country’s service.”
Patriots’ Day is observed statewide each year to remember this battle.
But only 24 years since the dedication, the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 blew through Grafton and uprooted the mighty oak—and much of the town along with it. The tree’s tablet was thought to be lost forever.
Then in February, 2016 a worker from Renaud HVAC & Controls spotted it in the Grafton Public Library during routine boiler maintenance. “The tablet was not packed away, just sitting in storage in an area [a worker] cleaning the HVAC would have been walking through,” said Library Director Beth Gallaway. “When [Grafton Historical Society Treasurer David] Therrien stopped by for another purpose, it seemed the perfect opportunity to show it to him and offer it.”
Therrien, coincidentally, had just heard a talk by the society’s Curator Joe Schilke about historic trees in Massachusetts, which this particular story about the tree’s lost tablet was presented. Therrien said he was at the library on other business when Gallaway asked him if he knew anything about a heavy old plaque that had been in their basement for years. He took one look and identified it at once. Mystery solved.
The plaque will be on display May 14 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. during Grafton History Day which will be held on the Common, before it is permanently housed at the Historical Society’s museum in the Grafton Town House.
For additional information, call the Grafton Historical Society at 508-839-0000 or visit graftonhistoricalsociety.org.
From “Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine,” March, 1918.
“The patriarch tree, which in its third century still commemorates the American Revolution, stands on Oak Street in the centre of the town in front of the residence of Mr. Frederick L. Farnum, on the estate formerly owned by Mr. Henry Wing, and before him by his father, Philip Wing, Esq. Somewhat back from the village road is the house upon the site of what was known as the Half Way House, one of those old-time taverns so frequent in the days when the stage coach was practically the only means of travel in New England.
The good landlord’s welcome made the tavern most popular in this section and here the village people often gathered for the forming of public opinion and interchange with passing travellers. By the wayside directly in front of the house still stands a white oak tree whose branches arch the highway and reach almost to the house.
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