The sacrifices of our townsfolk during wartime are evidenced in our cemeteries, where an impressive amount of markers identifying veterans flank a multitude of gravestones. Currently, many men and women from our town are serving in the military, a commitment that dates from the French and Indian War.
Connecticut sent five thousand men to fight in the French and Indian War, from 1754 to 1763, and though our town wasn’t incorporated until 1786, according to Susan Jewett Griggs’ Folklore and Firesides, Windham “furnished seven companies”, and two of these were from our parish, Windham’s Second Society. Hampton’s troop of cavalry, under Captain John Howard, included fifteen men, and under Captain Durkee’s Company, twelve were enlisted.
Mostly what locals recall of that era is the story of “The Frogs of Windham”, for which the town is famed. There are several different versions of the “The Frog Fight”, or “The Frog Fright”. According to legend, a deafening sound awakened Windham villagers one night, and fearing enemy attack, scouts were sent to investigate. All accounts concur that at dawn, hundreds, if not thousands, of dead bull frogs were found in a Windham pond. Historical records verify that there was a drought the summer of 1758, and that the frogs were probably in search of water. Whether the bull frogs fell victim to the scouts’ muskets, fought with one another, or were diseased is unknown. But the frog became Windham’s mascot, and the folktale, Windham’s most famous.
Similarly, the story most remembered from the American Revolution is “The House the Women Built”, the tale of the intrepid and determined Sarah Hammond, who decided to build a home for herself and her fiancé, Uriel Mosley, when he was called to service, enlisting many other women for the raising. The couple were married on September 15, 1788, and lived in the house, which still stands sturdily today, for half a century.
There was much notable involvement in the War for Independence. According to Griggs, “Captain Ebenezer Mosley led a company to Bunker Hill”, Captain James Stedman “was at the battles of White Plains and Harlem Plains, marched with Washington in his retreat through New Jersey, crossed the Delaware with him, and suffered the bitter winter at Valley Forge”, and Lieutenant Calvin Munn “was with Lafayette in Virginia, and was at the evacuation of Yorktown, and the taking of Cornwallis”. There were seventeen Fullers from our village on the muster roll, including Abijah, who served under General Israel Putnam, and “had charge of throwing up the earthworks the night before the battle of Bunker Hill.” Hampton, or the Second Society of Windham at the time, sent many soldiers to war. In Discovering Hampton, Janice Trecker wrote “Some idea of the number drawn from villages such as ours…can be seen in the fact that at the fifty year celebration in 1826, no fewer than forty-two revolutionary veterans were still alive, and hearty enough to squeeze into their old uniforms for the celebratory parade.”
Trecker writes of the Civil War that Luther J. Burnham was the first Hampton recruit in April of 1861. Twenty-seven men followed him that year and twenty-one in 1862, “a fair percentage from a town of only 937 people”. She writes of those who returned home ”wounded and disabled”, and others who never returned, the stone in their family’s plot inscribed with ‘buried where he fell’. Hampton has a primary source in the letters of Sergeant George Hammond, who fought under General McClellan’s Union Army. Starting in April 19, 1863, he penned detailed missives while “the misquitoes hummed around (his) head”, conceding “we would be really lonesome without them”. His letters include information on rations, “the Rebs”, marching orders, “good news from Vicksburg”, dysentery, and the “mercy of the all supreme power”.
The memorial stone at the town’s center, dedicated on July 4, 1920, lists the names of 47 veterans of World War I. According to the memories relayed in Alison Davis’ Hampton Remembers, the American Legion Post was initiated a few years later, and sponsored the Memorial Day Commemorations. At that time, it was more of a Community Day: a parade with a Brass Band and a Ladies Band, both with resident musicians, intramural races between the various one-room school houses, picnic lunches and concerts. It was estimated that 98 percent of Hampton’s inhabitants attended.
After World War II, the American Legion Post #106 was named for Leslie Jewett, Hampton’s only son lost in the war, one of the first to storm Omaha Beach at Normandy on June 6, 1944, and one of the 47 veterans of World War II, born and raised here, whose names are engraved on the Memorial Stone at Town Hall. His story has been the subject of a number of Memorial Day Addresses, including 2023, when the passing of Clarence Thornton and Tom Gaines, the last two veterans of World War II prompted us to commemorate those who served in the war with their own words, recorded in letters, newspaper clippings, and speeches, and read by their sons and daughters and grandchildren: Clarence Thornton’s most memorable moment of running into his brother, who needed bullets, and emptying his own gun and “giving them all to him”; Richard Schenk’s story of building a pontoon bridge across the Moselle River, of soldiers replacing those killed by enemy shellfire, their bodies floating down the river, a scene “repeated over and over until the bridge reached the other shore”; Bob Jones’ description of his capture and imprisonment at Stahlig Luf, in a 12 X 12 cell with 24 men for ten months, though “sometimes you thought you’d be there forever”; Wendell Davis’ accounts of a “pile of dead men, stacked like cord wood, waiting for the graves registration unit to clip their dog tags before burial…the stench of rotting flesh on a tropical beach…a young sailor sewed up in a length of new white canvas, slipped gently over the side… voices always full of hope, dreams of the future, plans, full of excitement, voices of young Americans, ‘when I get home’”; Ernie Loew’s letter relaying the liberation of a concentration camp, “of dead bodies…all over the place, piled up head to feet…two hundred of them lay there, unburied, simply starved to death”; and Tom Gaines, who was stationed at Pearl Harbor, and simply spoke of the importance of peace.
The Memorial Stone at Town Hall also lists those who left their homes here in Hampton to serve during the Korean War. Last year’s Memorial Day Address shared the stories of these veterans, collected from previous interviews, Memorial Day speeches, and those living still among us. We were honored to have one, George Miller, as our first speaker. Many of our Korean War veterans were stationed elsewhere — Germany, Greenland, France, Japan, Puerto Rico, the North Pole, on the seas transporting cargo from Norfolk, Virginia to Portsmouth, England and to Casablanca, and in the air, engaged in an airborne rendezvous to refuel planes transporting atomic bombs from the United States to the Sahara Desert.
One of our veterans, Gordon Hanson, shared his experiences serving two years on the front lines, where it was so dark one could cross enemy lines and not even know it, and where he dispelled the warning that the front lines were the worst with the words: “those guys really took care of each other.” He ended one of the three Memorial Day Addresses he delivered with the reminder: “The collective breadth and depth of our experiences, the sheer weight of the collective number of experiences assembled here together, provide the most powerful and enduring memorial. So before you leave, turn around and thank your friends and neighbors for being here, for remembering, for making this truly a Memorial Day”.
After our tributes to the veterans of World War II and of Korea, it only follows that we honor our Vietnam veterans this year. As we have for the last two Memorial Day Addresses, we’ll share their stories. They were not as easy to collect. The Vietnam veterans really didn’t talk of their experiences for a very long time. It wasn’t just the veterans though who didn’t speak of the war, no one really did. Unlike World War II, when the town published a newspaper reporting on all of the men and women who were serving, there was no special publication. Couched in political controversy, there was no memorial stone, no ”Welcome Home” dinner, no “Welcome Home” parade. I had already researched and written an article for “Our Rural Heritage” titled “On the Home Front” which chronicled all the war efforts and support for our troops during those prior wars. And then realized — that won’t do this year.
In 1995 Art Osborne, a veteran of World War II, delivered the Memorial Day Address. “I still remember being part of the war in Europe, the struggles, the mud and cold, the fearfulness, the longing for home, my buddies being brought in wounded and dying, not ever knowing what was coming next,” he wrote. “And then the good news, Japan had surrendered! Our ship was turned around and put into Newport News, Virginia. What a welcome we received! All over the country people were rejoicing. How I wish that our boys coming back from Vietnam could have received a welcome like we had.” Our nation failed miserably in giving the soldiers returning from Vietnam the recognition they deserved.
Much as the music fueled the anti-war sentiment, art, eventually, instructed us: books like The Things They Carried, Ken Burns’ documentary series: The Vietnam War, movies, such as Platoon, and performances as in Born on the Fourth of July. Our country started the process of trying to comprehend what we couldn’t possibly; and we learned, and grew, and repented.
And some of the soldiers started to talk. Decades after the war ended, two of our town’s Vietnam War veterans delivered Memorial Day Addresses, four veterans granted the Gazette interviews for the series “Those Who Serve”, and one veteran even published an important memoir. Our front page this month pays tribute to a Vietnam War veteran who spoke little of his experiences there, yet taught us commitment and courage on his return, when he continued to give unfailingly of himself for the rest of his life.
This year the nation commemorates the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Across the country, in large cities and small towns like ours, we express gratitude for those who served, apologies for the belated recognition, and publicly proclaim, at long last, a collective and sincere “thank you” on Memorial Day, when the presence of each and every one of us assembled shall “provide the most powerful and enduring memorial.”
Dayna McDermott