… That Abner Wheeler, one of Lincoln’s earliest housewrights, earned an embarrassing reputation on April 19, 1775?
In 1775, Abner Wheeler was 29 years old, married to Elizabeth Hunt, and the father of two daughters and a son. (Eventually, he and Elizabeth would have nine children.) Although Abner’s family lived just over the northern border of Lincoln, in Concord, Abner was already doing occasional carpentry jobs for the town of Lincoln. In 1786, Abner would purchase a farm in Lincoln on Virginia Road, and over the years he transformed the farmhouse into one of the largest residences in Lincoln. Working with his son Asa, Abner gained a wide reputation in Lincoln, Concord, and Bedford for his craftsmanship in building and reconstructing homes.
But even as Abner’s reputation grew, his neighbors remembered this story about him on the day the American Revolution began. Abner was in the militia, and he was supposed to turn out with his musket whenever there was an alarm. On April 19, 1775, Dr. Samuel Prescott brought warning to north Lincoln that the British were headed to Concord. According to the story, a Black woman in the Hartwell household—probably Violet, Ephraim Hartwell’s enslaved servant—was then sent west along the Bay Road toward Abner’s house, to spread the alarm. What she found was remembered in Lincoln even a century later:
“Mr. Abner Wheeler used often brag of what he would do if the British came, but the old colored woman on her way to give warning, found him hiding in the woods.”
Abner subsequently did brief military service, during the Siege of Boston in 1775 and at Fort Ticonderoga in 1776. Neither stint involved a clash with British soldiers.
Abner Wheeler’s neighbors apparently forgave him. In 1808, he was elected to Lincoln’s first town-wide school committee.
Donald L. Hafner
The Lincoln Historical Society
September 2020