According to legend, Prudence Wright was visiting her mother in Hollis, New Hampshire when she overheard a conspiratorial conversation between two loyalists: Benjamin Whiting and her brother Samuel Cummings. The pair intended to send Leonard Whiting with a message to the British in Boston, revealing the location of gunpowder kept by Patriot forces. As a fervid Patriot, Wright would not allow this to happen easily.

With her husband away fighting at Concord and Lexington, Wright gathered an assembly of thirty to forty local women later referred to as “Mrs. David Wright’s Guard” to form a militia and foil the loyalists’ plan. With Wright as captain and Sarah Hartwell Shattuck of Groton as her lieutenant, they gathered at Jewett’s Bridge over the Nashua River in Pepperell, Massachusetts. Wearing their husbands’ clothing and according to Butler’s History of the Town of Groton, “armed with muskets, pitchforks and other such weapons as they could find,” the women captured Whiting, confiscated the documents he was carrying and surrendered him to Groton’s Committee of Observation.

In a surprisingly egalitarian measure for the time, Wright and her guard were compensated for their military service. Pepperell’s town meeting minutes for March 19th, 1777, awarded the “Leonard Whiting Guard (so called)” a total of seven pounds, seventeen shillings, and sixpence for their service, purposefully obscuring their identities as women.

Commemorating its namesake and the militia women under her command, the Prudence Wright Memorial Stone is sited near the Nehemiah Jewett Bridge in Pepperell.

The memorial stone was one of several proposed by Pepperell’s Lunar Club to commemorate historical events in the town. In 1887 the club held an art exhibition to generate interest in the project and fund raise. This event attracted the attention of Sarah E. Pevear (Mrs. H.A. Pevear), Wright’s great granddaughter who summered in Shirley, MA. Civically engaged Pevear pledged support for the project and in November of 1889 the memorial stone was erected.

Its inscription reads:

NEAR THIS SPOT A PARTY
OF PATRIOTIC WOMEN, UNDER
THE LEADERSHIP OF MRS. DAVID
WRIGHT, OF PEPPERELL, IN
APRIL 1775, CAPTURED LEONARD
WHITING, A TORY WHO WAS
CARRYING TREASONABLE DESPATCHES
TO THE ENEMY AT BOSTON. HE
WAS TAKEN A PRISONER TO GROTON
AND THE DESPATCHES WERE SENT
TO THE COMMITTEE OF SAFETY
AT CAMBRIDGE.

Both Prudence and her husband continued to fight for independence throughout the war while raising 11 children. Prudence died in 1823. The Prudence Wright Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution was established 75 years later in 1898. In 1908 the Chapter marked Prudence’s burial site in Walton Cemetery with a marker which was recently restored.

Such was Wright’s acclaim that she was memorialized by poet Susan H. Wixon in the November 1899 issue of the American Monthly Magazine. Celebrating Wright’s endeavors, Wixon writes,

“…Their country’s honor, in an hour
Most serious and grave,
Was thus upheld with grace and power,
By women true and brave.
And on the scroll where heroes’ names
Appear in shining light,
With names our country proudly claims,
Gleams that of Prudence Wright.”

This story is featured in How We Remember: Monuments, Memorials & Markers in the Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area, part of our semiquincentennial initiative, Freedom’s Way 250, made possible with support from the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinnati and the National Park Service.