“And on the scroll where heroes’ names Appear in shining light;
With names our country proudly claims, Gleams that of Prudence Wright.”
—Susan H. Wixton, “Prudence Wright,” The American Monthly Magazine, November, 1899

According to legend, Prudence Cummings 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, Prudence Cummings Wright would not allow this to happen easily.

Wright gathered an assembly of thirty to forty local women known 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. 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 two men they believed to be spies and confiscated the documents they were carrying.

Commemorating its namesake and the militiawomen under her command, the Prudence Wright Memorial Stone is sited near the Nemiah Jewett Bridge in Pepperell, Massachusetts.

The memorial stone was one of several proposed by Pepperell’s Lunar Club to commemorate historical events in the town. In 1887 they held an art exhibition to generate interest in the project and raise funding. This attracted the attention of Sarah E. Peaver (Mrs. H.A. Peaver), Wright’s great granddaughter who summered in Shirley, Massachusetts and, with her husband, was active in civic affairs. She pledged her support 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 dispatches
to the enemy at Boston. He
was taken a prisoner to Groton
and the dispatches 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. In 1898, The Prudence Wright Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was named in her honor.

This story is featured in How We Remember, part of our semiquincentennial initiative Revolutionary Stories: The Enduring Legacies of the American Revolution in the Freedom’s Way National Heritage Area.