Walter Carpenter: All-American Boy
Written on Independence Day, July 4, 2008
By
Marie E. Velardi
The Carpenter family in America (or to be more accurate, Carpenter families, as there are numerous different lines) has been heavily researched going back to the early 1600s. Unfortunately, our ancestor Walter Carpenter of Shrub Oak, Yorktown NY (born 1766/68; died 1848) is not known to American Carpenter genealogists. The reason, as suggested by one of their number, is that Walter may have been born in England. This theory seems sound enough and is even supported by some published evidence, i.e., a biographical abstract of Walter's son, John Wilson Carpenter, which includes the statement "his paternal ancestors were from the north of England." 1.
Regardless, by the time Walter was a teenager, he was living in Hanover town (now Yorktown) in upper Westchester County. The following events, told in the Biographical History of Westchester County, New York, are undated, but we're going to place them circa 1779-1781, at the very point in the American Revolution when tensions between the people of Walter's town and the British Army were at their height.2
Walter was 11-15 years old at the time and, English born or not, he was no friend of the British Army.
"Walter Carpenter, who was a boy during the Revolution, was an eye-witness of a skirmish between two parties of the different armies. The red-coats were occupying a house near the present Yorktown line, when the Americans came up to the house and quietly surrounded it. A musket was then discharged, when the British rushed out and were captured. On another occasion and in the same vicinity the boy Carpenter saw a British horseman galloping rapidly through the fields, as if pursued. He dropped his pistol and Carpenter secured it and shot the man. Upon examination it was found the buttons on his coat were gold pieces covered with gilt lace." 3
The story doesn't say if the horseman died of the gunshot or if Walter kept the gold coins. We'll just have to leave it to our imaginations.
After the War, Hanover was divided into the present-day towns of Somers and Yorktown, the latter name commemorating Washington's victory over the British Army at Yorktown, Virginia. In 1792 Walter married Mary Requa, a member of one of the most fiercely patriotic families of Westchester County. The Requas were descendants of Huguenots (French Protestants) who fled to colonial New York in the late 1600s to escape dire religious persecution in France. Mary's older brother, father and grandfather all joined the War of American Independence -- as did Walter Carpenter, in his own way.
Mary Requa Carpenter died in April 1812, leaving Walter a widower with an infant daughter, among other children. The following year, he married Ann Summerbell, the English-born daughter of a neighbor, Nicholas Summerbell. Their ten children, including our direct ancestor Mary Ann Carpenter (1814-1869), who became the wife of Leonard Smith, were all born and bred in the United States and probably never saw themselves as anything but 100 percent red-white-and-blue-blooded Americans.
1 Biographical History of Westchester County, New York. Volume I. Chicago, IL: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1899, p. 740-741
2 No major battles were waged in Westchester during the American Revolution -- it was officially neutral territory -- but there were numerous skirmishes and incidents. In June 1779, British horsemen burned down the Yorktown Presbyterian Church and two of its outer buildings, which had served as headquarters of the local militia and the center of "incorrigible" patriotic activity in the town. One townsperson died and the local clergyman was forced to flee for his life to Connecticut. In May 1781, British troops killed three American officers who were sleeping at the Davenport Inn in Yorktown, immediately after which they killed 13-14 African-American and Native American soldiers assigned to guard nearby Pine's Bridge, and captured about 100 others of the same regiment. This event is known as The Battle of Pine's Bridge. In between these two incidents, the town was by plagued by foraging British soldiers who confiscated their food and goods. However, Weschesterites scored one major victory in September 1780 when they captured Benedict Arnold's accomplice, Major John André, thus learning (and foiling) Arnold's plan to surrender West Point to the British. André spent a night in Yorktown under guard before being led to the gallows. Read more about Yorktown NY in the American Revolution at www.yorktownhistory.org
3 Biographical History of Westchester County, New York. Volume I, p. 476.
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