Who was Peleg Wadsworth?

Peleg Wadsworth (May 6, 1748 – July 18, 1829) was an American officer during the American Revolutionary War and a Congressman from the District of Maine. He was also grandfather of noted American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Wadsworth was born in Duxbury, Massachusetts, to Peleg and Susanna (Sampson) Wadsworth. He graduated from Harvard College with an A.B. (1769) and an A.M. (1772), and taught school for several years in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with his former classmate Alexander Scammel. There he met Elizabeth Bartlett (1753 to 1825), whom he married in 1772. The Wadsworths lived in Kingston, Massachusetts, until 1775, when Wadsworth recruited a company of minutemen, of which he was chosen captain. His company marched to battle April 20, 1775, in response to the alarm of April 19, 1775, and the Battle of Lexington and Concord on that day.

Wadsworth served as aide to Gen. Artemas Ward in March 1776, and as an engineer under Gen. John Thomas in 1776, assisting in laying out the defenses of Roxbury, Massachusetts. He was present at the Battle of Long Island on August 1, 1776. He was made brigadier general of militia in 1777 and Adjutant General of Massachusetts in 1778.

Wadsworth's finest military engagement was in one of the worst American military defeats of the war. In 1779 he served as second in command to Paul Revere over a force sent to attack the British at Castine, Maine, in the so-called Penobscot Expedition. This engagement resulted in the destruction of most of the American vessels involved. Wadsworth organized and led the only successful part of the expedition—the retreat. Revere and Commodore Dudley Saltonstall, Commander of the Fleet, faced court-martial charges for their roles in the debacle.

In March 1780, Peleg was given command of all the troops raised for the defense of the Province of Maine. On February 17, 1781, British soldiers overran his headquarters in Thomaston, Maine. Wadsworth was captured and imprisoned in Fort George at Bagaduce (Castine), but he and fellow prisoner Maj. Benjamin Burton eventually escaped by cutting a hole in the ceiling of their jail and crawling out along the joists. Wadsworth then returned to his family in Plymouth, where he remained until the war's end.

In April 1784 Wadsworth returned to Maine, purchased 1.5 acres (6,000 m²) of land on Back Street (now Congress Street in Portland, Maine), engaged in surveying, and opened a store in early 1785. There he also built a house, now the historic Wadsworth-Longfellow House. He headed the committee that organized the first convention to discuss independence for Maine from Massachusetts, held in January 1786. He and his wife had ten children, one of whom later gave birth to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Although he continued to live in Portland, in 1790 he received 7500 acres from the state in what became the town of Hiram, Maine, settled his son Charles there in 1795, and in 1800 built Wadsworth Hall there for his retirement.

In 1792 Wadsworth was chosen a presidential elector and a member of the Massachusetts Senate, and from 1793-1807 was the first representative in Congress from the region of Massachusetts that later became Maine. In January 1807 he moved to Hiram where incorporated the township (February 27, 1807) and served as selectman, treasurer and magistrate. For the remainder of his life devoted himself to farming and local concerns. He died in Hiram on July 18, 1829, and is buried in the family cemetery at Wadsworth Hall.