It’s amazing the stories that can be found when you dig deep into Knox County history.
While I knew the county had a number of Revolutionary War veterans, it was exciting to discover one who was an eyewitness to and participant in some of Gen. George Washington’s most ingenious maneuvers.
We know of these events from a remarkable document filed in Knox County Court on May 31, 1834. At that time, Pleasant Township resident Cary McClelland was 80 years old and had decided to make a claim for the army pension due to him as a veteran of the Revolutionary War.
McClelland had been born in Ireland in 1753 and came to the American Colonies sometime during his youth.
The young man lived near Bushtown, Maryland, when the revolt for independence from the British broke out in 1775. No such town is shown on maps today, but based on references to other towns McClelland mentions, it was evidently in Harford County, Maryland, the northeastern-most county in Maryland.
In April of 1776, McClelland walked into Trap’s Tavern to enlist with the Pennsylvania Militia, which was rallying troops there as Bushtown apparently sat near the colonial border with Pennsylvania. McClelland became a private in Capt. John Marshall’s company, which rendezvoused with others to become part of Col. Walter Stewart’s 2nd Pennsylvania Regiment.
After some big marches and small actions, the company ended up in the New York colony, where they participated in the Battle of Long Island, which took place where today’s New York City borough of Brooklyn sits.
In the battle — the largest of the Revolutionary War — McClelland’s regiment became surrounded by British soldiers and were ordered to fight their way out, which they did, losing 1,000 men in the process, according to McClelland’s sworn statement. The American forces retreated to New York City, where they remained for a few weeks.
McClelland was on the march again in October when he fought in the Battle of White Plains. From there the regiment marched into New Jersey, camping outside Trenton, where the British installed the Hessian mercenaries who had come from Germany to fight — for a fee — for the British.
The night before Christmas, Gen. Washington famously crossed the icy and treacherous Delaware River, allowing his forces to surprise and seize the Hessians early Christmas morning, when they were unprepared for an attack. McClelland was part of that legendary sneak attack carried out by a force of only 2,400 soldiers.
He was an eyewitness a few days later when Washington gave orders to Gen. Hugh Mercer to lead an attachment of men to attack the small crew of British guards at Princeton. McClelland marched with that detachment, which successfully seized Princeton and the British army’s baggage detail.
Unfortunately, Gen. Mercer was wounded during the action and did not survive the battle. Washington later pulled back to Philadelphia, and when the British advanced on that city, the Americans retreated to the notorious winter encampment of Valley Forge, where the troops endured bitter weather, lack of equipment, rampant illness, and near-starvation conditions.
Some heroic stories of the war detail soldiers who stayed with the fight for the duration, but that’s not Cary McClelland’s tale. After surviving the privations of Valley Forge, McClelland evidently decided that he had contributed enough to the independence effort. When his commission expired in April of 1778, he went home.
After the war, he married and moved to Green County, Pennsylvania, where he fathered 19 children with two wives. In old age, he followed one of his children, Cary McClelland, Jr., to Knox County, where the son owned property near Martinsburg. The father either lived with his son’s family or somewhere nearby.
The U.S. government only belatedly got around to taking care of its veterans from the revolution in 1832, 50 years after the war ended. McClelland was one of the veterans who signed up for a pension, dictating his service record, or at least as much of it as he could recall.
The document literally has spots where the clerk of courts simply wrote that the claimant could not remember the names of some of the officers he served under, or in some cases the names of towns his company passed through.
Comparison with the historical record shows that what McClelland did recall was correct, and there were surviving records of his service.
Therefore, he was granted a pension of $70 per year. If that sounds underwhelming, it is. Even adjusted for inflation (today’s value is less than $2,500), that was a pittance for the service rendered.
It was, however, a step up from the previous total lack of any pension at all, and perhaps it helped sustain McClelland, who lived to a ripe old age of 92 before he passed away in 1846. He was buried in the Bell Church Cemetery, in south central Knox County, between Utica and Martinsburg.
If it weren’t for Cary McClelland’s pension claim made in the Mount Vernon courthouse in 1834, this eyewitness view to momentous historical events would have been lost.
