Breakfast at the Anthony House

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Places
Breakfast at the Anthony House

Blake Billings, Ph.D.
- The Seth Anthony House (built circa 1740)
  The oldest extant building on the monastery grounds has been known historically as the “Seth Anthony House.” It is situated on the northern side of Almy Hill, which has been alternately known as “Anthony Hill” or in monastic and school parlance, “Cross Hill.” In the summer of 1778, the inhabitants of the house found themselves to be in the center of a military conflict that came to be known as the Battle of Rhode Island. We have noted in a previous article in The Current that the farmhouse has a curious history of haunting, with the family of Francis Brady, assistant head of the school in the 1940’s, having dubbed it “Poltergeist Hollow.” It is said to have served amidst the battle as an ad hoc field hospital for the wounded and dying. We do know that it served as a temporary headquarters for both British and American generals in the summer of 1778, amidst the continued struggle for control of Aquidneck Island.
  A soldier of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment drawn by Jean-Baptiste Antoine DeVerger during the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. (Anne S. K. Brown Military Collection, Brown University)
  (allthingsliberty.com)
  This we hear from Seth Anthony himself, who offers us a glimpse into his own experience there during the conflict that would overtake his childhood home. Gloria Schmidt, a historian who has written much on the town of Portsmouth, recounts her discovery of a book published in the mid-19th century by Judge Benjamin Cowell, in which she stumbled upon Anthony’s report. The book, entitled "Spirit of '76 in Rhode Island: Sketches of the Efforts of the Government and People in the War of the Revolution," includes an eyewitness account on the Battle of Rhode Island by none other than Seth Anthony, whose name, as we have mentioned came to be attached to the 18th-century family farmhouse that remains tucked into the center of our monastery grounds. Mr. Anthony would have been in his early eighties at the time of his recounting of these childhood experience. Cowell writes: “In the summer of 1849, the writer [Cowell] reconnoitered the battle ground on Rhode Island to ascertain any interesting facts which might be within the recollection of any of the old inhabitants in the neighborhood; and in his researches, he called at the house of Mr. Seth Anthony, an aged ‘Friend’ who now lives on the farm where the battle took place, and always lived in the neighborhood. From him he gathered no little information, and from questions which the writer put to him he received a few days afterwards the following reply, which deserves a place in these sketches.” This “farm where the battle took place” is the same building ensconced within the monastic grounds, and it is fascinating to envision Cowell walking the grounds and entering the house – “reconnoitering” these fields 175 years ago and calling at the farmhouse to discuss things with the elderly Anthony.
  
  Even more fascinating, for us who now inhabit these grounds, is to hear the voice of Seth Anthony himself speaking of some of his personal experience of that battle occurring around his house when he was a young boy of “about twelve years of age.” Judge Cowell included in his book a letter sent to him by Mr. Anthony dated October 13, 1849. We present Anthony’s text here in full, which recounts a breakfast scene in his house featuring the American General Greene in his house and other memories of the battle:
  
  “Portsmouth, Oct 13, 1849. To Benjamin Cowell, Providence, Respected Friend, —In answer to thy questions I have to say, that I was about twelve years of age at the time of Sullivan’s expedition against the British, and lived with my father on the west road on the Island, about two and a half miles from Bristol Ferry, lived there all the time the British were in possession of the Island, and I have now, although eighty-two years of age, a distinct recollection of most of the events that took place, at least in our neighborhood. The battle on the 29th of August, 1778, took place on the farm on which I now live, which is a little to the westward of the house where my father lived; there had been skirmishing all day, but the principal fight was a little northward of “Anthony’s Hill.” (Note that we call it Almy’s Hill.) Before the American troops came on the island, the British had fortified Butt’s Hill, one of their Generals (Smith) quartered at my father’s house, the Hessians quartered in the Friends’ Meeting House on Quaker Hill. After General Sullivan came on, the enemy retreated towards Newport, and I recollect General Greene took up his quarters at my father’s house.
  General Nathanael Greene
  (John Trumbull; Yale Art Gallery)
  “When the enemy came back on the 29th, while Gen. Greene was eating his breakfast, our house-maid said to him, the British would have him; he observed very cooly “he would eat his breakfast first;” after he had done he went to his troops. During the day some Hessians entered our house, and plundered every thing they could,— they took my father’s silver knee-buckles; I saw one of them take hold of my father and demand his money and threatened his life, but he did not get it; my father had about two thousand dollars in gold and silver, but he had taken the precaution to bury it under an old stone wall. The Hessians also searched my mother’s pocket, turned it inside out, but there was no money in it. My father and mother were “Friends,” and we kept silence as to our political opinions. I remember Gen. Greene once observed that his mother was a Friend, and was opposed to his going into the army, but she said “if he would go, to be faithful.” There appeared to be fighting all day, sometimes one side would drive the other and then be obliged to retreat. But as far as I could judge, the main armies did not fight. It appears to me the events of that day will always be fresh in my recollection.
  
  I also remember the great storm some days before the battle, I never knew so severe a storm before; it lasted several days, and did a vast deal of damage. The day after the battle the Americans all left the Island. And I also do distinctly recollect that the day after the fighting the British determined to burn all the houses in our neighborhood, and would have done it if the Americans had not left the Island that night.- We had this information from the British Officers. (Signed). Seth Anthony”
  Photo of Cross Hill (Almy Hill) before present growth of trees (image: Jim Garman)
  The “great storm” to which Mr. Anthony refers was indeed significant to the Battle of Rhode Island, in the estimation of none other than George Washington himself, and may have extended the War of Independence substantially. In a letter to his brother John Augustine Washington, the head of the American forces indicates that the original intention in the Rhode Island conflict had been an American attack on Newport supported by an arriving French fleet. That fleet, impeded by the “great storm,” did not arrive in time to support the Americans, whose attack became transformed into a retreat from Aquidneck Island. Washington claims that, had the Americans been supported by arrival of the French fleet, Newport may well have been taken from the British, including the 6,000 soldiers stationed there, and a crippling blow dealt to the British efforts. He writes to his brother (September 23, 1778): “The whole may be summed up in a few words, and amounts to this: that an unfortunate storm (so it appeared, and yet ultimately it may have happened for the best,) and some measures taken in consequence of it by the French Admiral, perhaps unavoidably, blasted in one moment the fairest hopes that ever were conceived; and, from a moral certainty of success, rendered it a matter of rejoicing to get our own troops safe off the Island. If the garrison of that place, consisting of nearly six thousand men, had been captured, as there was, in appearance at least, a hundred to one in favor of it, it would have given the finishing blow to British pretensions of sovereignty over this country…”
  The Battle of Rhode Island serves as a kind of microcosm for a number of historical elements at work in the American Revolution. We have the engagement of the British and French fleets, as well as the supplementation of British forces by Hessian soldiers, many of whom ended up buried on the battlefield here. We also have the involvement in the battle of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, also known as the “Black Regiment” which was comprised in large part of former slaves whose freedom had been purchased by a pledge of joining the American armed forces, through to the end of the war. The 1st Rhode Island is said to have played a crucial role in enabling the successful retreat from the island in this battle. We have the reflections of George Washington himself on the significance of this battle. And amidst the eruption of this conflict, centered around what we now call Cross Hill, we can see Seth Anthony, nearly the age of one of our present Form III students, who found himself with a front-row seat as an American general ate his breakfast while preparing to face the British in battle.
  
  Blake Billings, editor of The Current, is a member of the Theology Department at Portsmouth Abbey School