Who Was Abraham Wood?

A number of people know that the house at 97 Main St. in Northborough was the
home of Captain Samuel Wood, captain of the Northborough Mintemen, who on April 19, 1776, marched off for what turned out for most of them to be temporary revolutionary duty. His younger brother Abraham was clerk of the unit and drummer. Today he is better known nationally than Samuel.

Abraham was best known in Northborough as a fuller. A fulling mill used water power to perform such operations as compressing, shrinking, dyeing, and otherwise finishing fabric to make durable cloth for clothing. That meant that Abraham’s mill was nearby, on the Assabet River, the main source of industrial power in Northborough. At this time it is very likely that Abraham lived in his brother’s Main Street house. Twenty-three years old, he was already married and the father of two children, one of whom had died at the age of two. He and his wife Lydia would have eleven more children. He returned to fulling after his brief military duty and continued at his trade until 1804, when he died.

Why, then, is he better known than his older brother, whose name decorates a plate on the front of the house?

Abraham was also a composer. If you are connected to the Internet, you can observe that there are thousands of sites relating to him. If you visit theWikipedia site, you can hear two of his short compositions, “Marlborough” and “Worcester.” (He also made one on Northborough.) He was an important composer in both a religious and patriotic sense.

He set psalms to music, for instance, and he celebrated his young nation’s victory with A Hymn on Peace. Not published until 1784, the song was sold by Wood in Northborough, according to an advertisement in the Boston Independent Chronicle on May 6, 1784, though composed somewhat earlier.

A Hymn of Peace was also sold by another important American composer of the day, William Billings, in Boston. Surprisingly, Northborough had not one but two composers among its approximately 600 citizens in the late eighteenth century.

The other was Nathaniel Billings. Although it has not been established that Nathaniel was related to the more important William, it seems as though there might have been a connection. Nathaniel, incidentally, was a member of a Northborough family suspected of treason during the Revolution because they were British loyalists. Perhaps Wood and Nathaniel Billings disagreed on politics, but it seems likely that the latter, sixteen years younger, must have learned something about music from Northborough’s fuller.

It is difficult to imagine any other town in Massachusetts, or in the nation, for that matter, that contributed more to music than Northborough in those early decades of the history of the United States.