[Before we wrap up our blog series for the week, just a quick note that I will be in New London, Connecticut, TOMORROW, June 30th at 2 PM for the grand opening of the exhibit I wrote and drew for the Nathan Hale School House! I'll be giving a presentation on writing historical narratives as a means of education, as well as showing behind the scenes sketches and stories from the exhibit.]
This is Part 3 of a series of guest blog posts by Dr. Samuel Forman. Part 1 was about Warren’s fiance Mercy Scollay’s attempt to care for his children after his death, and Part 2 addressed the fates of Warren’s four children.
In this last post, Dr. Forman covers the fates of Joseph Warren’s three brothers: Samuel, Ebenezer, and Dr. John Warren.
Read Sam Forman's book to learn much more about the Warrens!
A few words are in order about Dr. Joseph Warren’s surviving siblings. Brother “Jack” John Warren (1751-1815) carried on the family name by way of many children, as well as a medical dynasty through eight generations and the current day. Jack was founding professor at Harvard Medical School in 1782. A successful physician in Boston, he was plagued by financial worries for supporting his huge natural and adopted family. These concerns abated later in life as his medical practice flourished, a hefty inheritance came by way of his wife’s Rhode Island Collins family, land investments succeeded, and the Roxbury farm eventually increased in value.
His first child, brilliant and eccentric surgeon and anatomist Dr. John Collins Warren (1778–1856) was a nephew of Joseph Warren, and Dr. John Warren’s most distinguished offspring in medical circles. John Collins Warren co-founded the Massachusetts General Hospital and the influential New England Journal of Medicine, in addition to overseeing one of the largest fortunes in mid-19th century Massachusetts. He is credited as introducing painless ether general anesthesia into surgical practice along with some innovative colleagues in 1846.
I think I'll wait until Dr. John comes back. Scratch that, I'll wait for Dr. John Collins, thank you.
That would have come in handy for Dr. John’s expectant amputee in 1776, who – if he were lucky – had little more than a dose of laudanum, a shot of rum, and a bullet to bite on. John Collins Warren is the one who had photographs of Joseph Warren’s skull taken in the 1850s, from which Lora Innes recently induced nightmares in unwitting Dreamers.
What was John Collins Warren thinking when he photographed his famous uncle's skull? "This will look great on the family Christmas Cards"?
Joseph Warren’s brother Samuel (1743-1805) is recorded in family lore as having been very shy. He never married. He kept the family Roxbury farm going with his mother, no mean feat as it was astride the Continental Army entrenchments blocking the main road into Boston during the Siege. Most of the Warren Russet apple trees were cut down at this time. Samuel died just two years after mother Mary Stevens Warren. The family farm was inherited by Dr. John Warren, who rented it out to tenants until the property became valuable and was subdivided into house lots. That was in the 1840s, when the City of Boston grew by leaps and bounds.
Brother Ebenezer (1748-1824) did pretty well as an attorney. He moved to Foxboro in Southeast Massachusetts, from which he achieved a solid regional reputation. In a family including over-achieving brothers Drs. Joseph and Jack, Eben “only” was an elected representative to the state convention reviewing the proposed U.S. Constitution. Finishing that work on February 6, 1788, Massachusetts became the sixth state to ratify the foundational document. John Hancock presided. Surely Joseph Warren would have been there, had he survived. We imagine that Eben uttered a huge sigh of relief, following so much sacrifice and service among Warren men, women, and children, in helping to bring things so far. But much work and many issues remained to achieve ‘a more perfect union.’ Among them – the Bill of Rights amendments, the Civil War, and issues we hear about in the news today.
Thank you so much, Dr. Forman for taking the time to write the fantastic articles for us! Give him a Hip, Hip, Huzzah, everyone.
Come back next Wednesday for Dreamer updates as usual!
Sam, hopefully today’s update won’t be quiiiiite so controversial.
Thank you so much for this blog series! As is evident by the response, the Dreamers have loved them!
We appreciate you sharing your Warren expertise with all these hungry minds.
Gosh, you’re welcome. Even if you are the secret quarterback of Team Mary/Eben/Jack.
Thank you Sam for the blogs! I have enjoyed them! Now I need to go and read them all at one time again. :) I hope you will come and write a blog again for us.
Thank you, Sam, for telling us about the Warren clan. I’ve enjoyed the blog series this week a lot.
Agreed–thank you for sharing some Warren history with us!! And chickens *solemn nod*.
Who knows? “Plot chickens” may become as popular as “tea cozies” and the name “Betsy”!
Lol! Yeah, I like the way this little “Dreamer community” is like that :). Glad to be a part of it!
Hmmm… what kind of plot would result from a plot chicken falling in love with a plot bunny? XD
It depends….are the blog gremlins involved in some way?
Ummm… yes! Yes, they’re the ministers at the wedding XD
:D
Huzzah, Sam! And thank you!
And Lora, I love your captions under the pictures. You obviously stay up way past your bedtime and get punchy, like I do.
Agreed. <3 the captions, especially the one with Joseph's skull.
Huzzah!!!! :D You’re the greatest Sam! This has been better than fan-art filler by FAR! :) I only wish I’d learned to love history like this when I was much younger…
So, Samuel got up to 62…..hell, that’s a good age for now, never mind back then. Plus, he kept the farm going long enough to bring us all the warren russets we know and love! Yay!
Sounds like Eben ended up fighting a whole ‘nother kind of battle…..and I can’t help but imagine Joseph going, “I missed that? Yeah, I’ll stick with not having to deal with that mess…” (he would be winking and joking of course, but still…)
And John…… damn, but you had a lot of kids, boy! I have to ask, though….why was JC so eccentric?
Good question and perhaps unanswerable. Why are you so darned funny with incentive captions and endlessly amused by tea cozies? Why is Lora so insistent that Team Mary/Eben/Jack are the best, when they are so patently wrong? We can only speculate in John Collins Warren’s case. I guess, from his writings, that he started with an overtly sensitive nature, disappointed in love at an early age. Experiences as a resurrectionist and as a surgeon in the age prior to anesthesia somehow resulted in his doing a lot of good in the world, but also in a weird fascination with the morbid and the macabre. He had a fully articulated mastodon skeleton – then the biggest and most complete in the world – set up in his living room!
I think I’m liking this guy…lol
Oh, yeah! A mastodon skeleton? Now that’s MY kind of interior decoration! Gotta love that.
For Dreamers in the NYC vicinity: That mastodon is now a prized display at the Museum of Natural History, where it has resided since 1925. It is labelled (drum roll) ‘The Warren Mastodon.’
The Warren mastodon…? O__O
So… We know where the next Dreamer meet up will take place now, right?
………
DO NOT DENY THE TEA COZIES! THE TEA COZIES ARE THE TRUTH! BAHHHHHHH!!!!
*hides in a corner while cuddling Tammy’s keyboard*
The blog gremlins and the plot chickens pledge their full support!
All hail the Tea Cozies!
*buffalo bill style happy face*
Also, that is totally a commission.
…The Daleks will have the final say.
Thanks for the posts Dr. Sam!!! I loved reading them very much!
Huzzah to Dr. Sam! The fellow’s a veritable sage. A SAGE, I tell you!
No, I’m NOT referring to the Sage plant!
He’s a plant!? TRAITOR!!!
I know…lol
@Brent: :O Dr. Sam’s a WHAT? Gad, you can’t trust ANYBODY these days!
I have appreciated the visit during Lora’s ‘vacation.’ Thank you for the nice words over this past week from @Amber, @Cheryl, @Julie, @Half Moon, @Susan, @Faith, and @Pura.
Inquiring Dreamers have taken us all over the map. @Tamesin and @Caera have a lascivious interest in feather beds Dr. Jack sold to George Washington.
When we showed a picture that may well be Miss Mercy Scollay (solving a 250 year old mystery thereby), did we hear @David, @Albone, @Scott M, @Piratecaptain26, and @Brent hearts’ going pitter-patter? Drama queen Bea and bad-girl Elizabeth Loring take note: the good girls can get the Joseph Warren’s of the world by being… good girls and woman, and their authentic selves.
@Tamesin is seriously considering writing Mercy Scollay’s story. If she does, we will be her first readers!
@Colette Copeland introduced plot chickens, and still claims it is all a mistake. More on that in separate comment! And let’s not forget plot bunnies and monkeys.
@Brent comically summed up the dilemma of Joseph Warren’s orphans in his Monty Python-esque Joseph Warren riding off into the sunset, declaring instructions that his family intentionally misinterprets.
@Lora invented Team Mercy versus Team Mary/Eben/Jack, which oddly reflects the painful reality of the situation.
What can one say? Dreamers!
@Colette Copeland, inventor of plot chickens, stubbornly maintains that it is all an innocent mistake. Here is why this really tickles me and is so peculiarly appropriate to The Dreamer: ‘Plot chickens vs. plot thickens’ is a malapropism (Lora take note – 11 letters), a character’s unintended and comical substitution of one word for another. It was popularized in a big way by the character Mrs. Malaprop, who spouted them incessantly (11 letters) in Oliver Goldsmith’s comedy of manners The Rivals. Wikipedia, not often the most reliable of sources, in this case has a nice explanation of malapropisms and English comedies of manners. The play was first performed on the London stage in January 1775. Mrs. Malaprop and the play were comic sensations. It is very likely that Generals Burgoyne (a playwright himself), and maybe Howe and Clinton, saw and enjoyed the play before departing England to harass the Americans at Bunker Hill and the rest of the Revolutionary War.
This is not simply a quirk of English literary history. The Rivals and Sheridan’s 1773 She Stoops to Conquer are comedies of manners, the grandaddies of current British sitcoms. The plays are still funny and actively performed on the commercial stage in both America and England.
So Colette, if you make pretend that “plot chickens” were intended as a show-off, multi-leveled joke rather than a keyboard error, and you get an A+ in English Lit as a result, we will all understand.
Hope you have a blast at the exhibit opening. Looking forward to hearing all about it!
These blogs have been AWESOME!!!! Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us all! I’m now tempted to get a history minor. (My family of historians would be so proud).
Whoa I missed this one. Sweet! :D
And…Dr. John Collins Warren?!?!?! Why did I never make that connection? Stupid Me!
Thanks, Doc! These blogs have been so interesting. I hope you’ll get blog again soon! :D
You guys are crazy! :)
I love reading your guys’ comments! It makes my day.
I have an ancestor named Nycenia Warren, that family legend says was a niece of Dr. Joseph Warren who died at Bunker Hill. Her father was said to be a Thomas Warren. Did any of Dr. Joseph Warren’s brothers have a child or grandchild named Thomas? Nycenia Warren was born about 1790 in Poughkeepsie, NY. Her father Thomas was born about 1764 in Rhinebeck, NY, if what I’ve found online is correct. I have found Nycenia Warren in an 1850 census record on ancestry.com, but I have not been able to find her father.
Thanks for any help and info.
Elizabeth Jeffery
There is a genealogy of Warren book you can buy on Amazon that will help you with the extended family. And though Dr. Forman is the one to definitively answer this question if he sees it, I think the answer is no.
None of Warren’s brothers were named Thomas, nor were they living/ born in New York. They were all born in Roxbury, MA and were younger than him. None of his brothers had children in the 1760′s.
Samuel had no children, Ebenezer’s settled north (Maine) and John lived in MA. The dates and names don’t match up so far as I can tell for a direct connection like you suggest.
Thanks for the reply and hint to go look for that book on Amazon. I know that at times family legends are wrong, or half right, but it would be nice to know if it’s true or not.