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The Man Huntington Loved to Hate

Loyalist Benjamin Thompson tried to keep the town under his boot

By George DeWan | Staff Writer

If a Gallup Poll had been taken in Huntington in the winter of 1782-83, Benjamin Thompson would have been the unanimous choice for the most despicable man in town.

There is no question that Thompson -- later known as Count Rumford -- made his mark on Huntington's history, for his ghost lingers like an incubus among the time-worn gravestones in the Old Burying Ground on East Main Street. But his short and violent tenure in this bastion of rebel sentiment was a circumstance notable more for its curiosity than for its impact on the Revolutionary War, which was zero.

Here was a remarkable young man of 29, a Loyalist New Englander charged with keeping Huntington under his boot for the British occupiers. He was a future Bavarian count and a scientific genius who, in only a few months, managed to rub raw the festering wounds of American-British hostility. The reason none of Thompson's actions was necessary to the outcome of the war was that the British had long since given up, and its official end was merely a formality.

Thompson knew all this, but he persisted in his pigheaded goal of bringing Huntington to its knees.

Well before he got to this stage in his life, however, Thompson showed signs of scientific brilliance combined with an appalling sense of interpersonal relations. He had a knack of ingratiating himself with men of power but was completely without sensitivity to his peers and his inferiors. Born in Woburn, Mass., in 1753, he displayed an early aptitude for matters of science, and at age 18 he began the study of medicine. A year later he married a wealthy widow 14 years his senior, a marriage that would last only three years. But that marriage connection, and the fact that he looked handsome mounted on a horse, got him named a major in the New Hampshire militia.

Soon after George Washington took command of the Continental Army in 1775, Thompson applied for a regular commission, but was rejected, apparently because he was blackballed by his fellow officers from New Hampshire, who found him quite disagreeable. So he turned, without compunction, to the British, who were glad to have him, and he, them. Thompson went to London, and returned in 1781 as a lieutenant colonel in the British Army. The following March he saw some insignificant action in South Carolina. In September, 1782, with a provisional peace agreement about to be signed between the British and the Americans, Thompson was assigned to move his Loyalist regiment, the Kings American Dragoons, to winter quarters in Huntington.

The outrage was soon to come. On Dec. 5, 1782, the following item appeared in a Fishkill, N.Y., newspaper:

The enemy are fortifying Huntington. They have pitched on a burying yard and have dug up graves and gravestones, to the great grief of the people there, who, when they remonstrated against the proceeding, received nothing but abuse.

This is the building project for which Thompson has earned the everlasting contempt of Huntingtonians. With no intent other than to gratify a malignant disposition, as one early historian put it, Thompson built a fort -- Fort Golgotha, he called it, displaying the wit that often made him insufferable -- in the center of the public burying ground. Gravestones were torn up and used to build ovens to bake bread for the troops. Historian Nathaniel Prime wrote in 1845 that he had talked with old men who were there at the time, and they had ``seen the loaves of bread drawn out of these ovens, with the reversed inscriptions of the tombstones of their friends on the lower crusts.''

Prime's father, Ebenezer, had been pastor of the Old First Church until he died in 1779, and Thompson placed Prime's tombstone in front of his tent, so that he could ``tread on the old rebel'' when coming and going. To provide lumber for the men's barracks, Prime's church was torn down, and then Thompson moved into the parsonage.

Having made himself persona non grata in less than seven months, Thompson at age 30 left Huntington and sailed for England on April 11. Although that ended the Huntington portion of his story, Thompson's remarkable life as a scientist was really just beginning.

On his return to England, Thompson was knighted by King George III. He then set out on a tour of Europe, where he so impressed the Bavarians that they made him minister of war, minister of police and grand chamberlain of the court. He was also named a count of the Holy Roman Empire, choosing the title Count von Rumford (after the old name of Concord, N.H., where his former wife was from -- which is a bit hard to understand, since he had separated from a woman whom he never wanted to see again, and, in fact, never did). In his 11 years in Bavaria he improved the living conditions of the army, abolished beggary by putting all the mendicants to work on public projects and laid out a beautiful park in Munich called the English Garden.

Thompson also continued his scientific experiments. He invented a kitchen range for army cooks. He invented a drip coffee maker. He improved the understanding of gunpowder, and made advances in the understanding of the effect of friction on heat. He lived his later years -- he would die at Auteuil, near Paris, at 61 in 1814 -- in England and France, absorbed in his scientific studies and writing scientific papers.

While in France, Thompson married Marie Lavoisier, the widow of the famous chemist, Antoine Lavoisier. That marriage, slightly less unhappy as the first, lasted only seven years, because, as one writer put it, he loved flowers and tranquillity, she loved dinner parties and entertainments. Marie should have known him in Huntington.