Larry Johnson to Salisbury Historical Society
Apr 30, 2017
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am a descendant of Moses and Sarah Fellows. They lie buried in an old cemetery in your town. Moses was a Revolutionary War hero and lived to a ripe old age, as did his wife. In 1886 there was an obelisk erected and dedicated to his memory “in the southwest corner of the cemetery at the South Road village in Salisbury, N.H.” which I had the good fortune of visiting with my daughter in 1978. It took some effort to find it, since the cemetery at that time was closed and had been somewhat overgrown with vegetation. My daughter and I did a happy little dance when we found the monument.
In 1902 another ancestor of mine wrote in considerable detail about Moses Fellows in a detailed genealogy that must have entailed gathering text from historical documents still extant at the time. He wrote it on a typewriter (which must have been a new invention then), and fortunately his account survives. There is fascinating lore to be found there, and you can download Fellow Family
Here is a summary and some excerpts regarding Moses, whose biography reads like a history of the Revolutionary War itself:
At age 19 Moses enlisted in the Continental Army on May 10, 1775 for eight months service in Capt. Isaac Baldwin’s company. He fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775 in Col. John Stark’s regiment (known as the Connecticut Regiment), “stationed at the rail fence extending their line down to Mystic River. Their ammunition was very limited, only twelve rounds to each man. Orders were issued all along the lines not to fire until the whites of their eyes and then aim at their waistbands. Thus they waited the approach of the British regulars on the morning of June 17th 1775. During the battle Cap’t Baldwin was mortally wounded and borne from the field by two men from Hillsborough, viz. McNeil and Andrews. A ball fired by the British cut off the end of his power horn. With his last charge of power having no ball he fired his ramrod and killed one of the British.”
Then Moses Fellows served in a campaign into Canada that was led by General Benedict Arnold. In the wilderness the soldiers soon found themselves exhausted and lacking for food. Moses survived by killing a partridge. Others ate their moccasins and a dog. On December 13, 1775, they reached Quebec and engaged the British. Moses was one of 60 men under Capt. Morgan who “went to within twenty rods of the palace gate, and discharged a mortar five times at the city. They (the enemy) fired upon them with double headed shot.” That was the last battle before they retreated.
Smallpox broke out among the troops. “About the middle of Jan. 1776, Gen. Arnold’s men that were not taken prisoner left for Montreal.” At that point Moses’ enlistment was up and he went to Fort Chantely in Canada, where he enlisted a second time. That ended after four weeks. On his way home, there occurred this delightful “yankee trick”:
“He and his comrade, John Bowen, and others started for home on foot, thru the new country. Yankee tricks cropped out occasionally. One day a man killed a partridge and another killed a crow and they skinned them both and put the partridge’s skin on the crow’s body and sold the false partridge at the first tavern they came to for some rum.”
In April 1777 he enlisted for a third time, for three years, along with 10 others in Salisbury who are named in this document. They fought in the battle of Fort Ticonderoga before retreating from Gen. Burgoyne. Then he was in the Battle of Block House. On Aug. 16, 1777, he fought in the Battle of Bennington. And on it goes, there are more details about a number of battles until Moses winds up in Valley Forge on December 11, 1777. There is a vivid description over a couple of pages about the deprivations suffered by the troops there.
Then on June 27, 1778, he fought in the Battle of Monmouth. “During the battle he captured a British soldier with a horse, conducted him to the rear, delivered him to the proper authorities, and later succeeded in selling the horse for forty dollars.”
In August 1779 he fought an army of Indians and Tories at Tioga, New York (7 miles from present day Elmira, NY) under Gen. Sullivan, where the enemy was routed. Sullivan’s army then went on a path of destruction trough Indian and Tory settlements. They destroyed Indian villages all along the Genesee River and in the town of Genesee itself.
Then Sullivan’s army settled in for the winter at Morristown, NJ, “where they suffered much more than they did at Valley Forge.”
Moses Fellows was discharged as an Orderly Sergeant at West Point on April 20, 1780. The equipment he brought home with him from the war is described in detail and was still in the family’s possession in 1902.
In 1780 he enlisted for a fourth time but was not sent to the front.
In November 1781 he “appears on the town record among a list of soldiers enlisting for three months service.” He enlisted a total of five times.
“In afterlife when his old comrades visited him to talk over times and to drink of his ‘good cider’ it was ’Sergeant Fellows,’ but his neighbors knew him better as ‘Uncle Mose.’”
On March 29, 1832, he was given a pension by Congress, No. 3670, “to commence Mar. 4th 1831. He drew one hundred dollars annually.”
He is buried “in the southwest corner of the cemetery at the South Road village in Salisbury, N.H.”
“On the 5th day of July 1886, forty years after his interment, his descendants by contributions erected a granite monument over his remains the inscriptions on which read as follows:
“Moses Fellows
” Died Jan 39th 1846. Aged 90 Yrs. 5 months and 21 days.
A soldier in the Revolution. He fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill
and during the war was Sergt. of a company from this vicinity under Gen.
Stark, at the Battles of Bennings and Saratoga.”
This family history also has this account of Moses’s father:
John Fellows, born in Salisbury, N.H., April 27, 1720, died there in 1812. He enlisted in the militia assembled in Kingston, N.H. in September of 1755 as one of “three months men” and was stationed in Salisbury “to protect the inhabitants from the Indians.” He was a signatory in 1776 to the Articles of Association sent out by Congress on March 16, 1768. He had been in the British army at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 when General Wolf defeated the French. In 1777 he enlisted in Capt. Ebenezer Webster’s company of Salisbury, N.H. and fought at the Battle of Bennington on August 16, 1777 in Col. Stickney’s regiment.
I trust this genealogy as prepared by John Little in 1902 will be of interest to your Historical Society.