Revolution
One Hopkinton man's part in that larger story survives in unusual, if secondhand, detail. John Dickman was born in the town around 1749 or 1750, and in 1849, long after his death in 1833, his son-in-law Colonel Artemas Fay set down what Dickman had told him of his own war years, in a letter written to the Harvard historian John Gorham Palfrey. By Fay's account, Dickman stood in Wilson's Lane in Boston when British soldiers fired on the crowd during the Massacre. He later worked as a produce seller between Roxbury and Boston, and in that trade smuggled fourteen stands of arms out of the occupied city hidden beneath his baskets, along with a barrel of gunpowder ferried across to Cambridge by an enslaved boatman in his uncle's household. He marched to Bunker Hill from Hopkinton at the war's outbreak, helped make the fascines used in the fortification of Dorchester Heights, and spent three months on duty near Point Judith, Rhode Island, watching for British foraging parties. Fay's letter also places Dickman among those who threw the tea into Boston Harbor on the night of December 16, 1773. Dickman himself never wrote of it directly, bound like the other participants by a vow of silence until death, and Fay's account rests on inference from how closely his father-in-law recalled the details rather than on Dickman's own written word. In August of 2023, researchers from the Boston Tea Party Museum found the case persuasive enough to place a marker at Dickman's grave in Hopkinton's Evergreen Cemetery.
A third figure born in Hopkinton in these same years followed a stranger road still. Richard Potter was born around 1783, the son of an enslaved woman named Dinah, who worked in the household of Sir Charles Frankland on his Hopkinton estate, and an unacknowledged white father. He learned to read at the Hopkinton district school, then went to sea as a boy, picked up rope-dancing and tightrope-walking in Europe, and apprenticed himself to a touring Scottish magician and ventriloquist. By 1811 he was performing under his own name. Within a few years Potter was drawing crowds across New England and Canada, and he became, by most accounts, the first American-born magician to achieve national fame and the first Black celebrity in the United States, a free man decades before emancipation, watched by paying audiences as he swallowed molten lead, danced on eggs without breaking them, and threw his voice across a room. He settled eventually in New Hampshire, at a farm he called Potter Place. He asked to be buried standing upright, and when he died in 1835, he was. Hopkinton, the town of his birth, plays no further part in his story after his boyhood, but that boyhood itself, a child born into slavery on a Hopkinton estate who became one of the most famous performers in the country, is as much a part of the town's early years as any soldier's story.
What survives, in the end, is a famous dinner the town chose to remember, a Hopkinton man's likely place aboard the ships in Boston Harbor and his documented service at Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights, a farm laborer born here who left as a young man and returned to American memory as the reluctant face of a rebellion, a population figure that belongs to a later century than the one it is often mistaken for, and a patient ledger of births and marriages and deaths that never once stopped writing. The town's tradition is honored as a tradition. And the quiet record of ordinary lives, which is in truth the deepest record any town keeps of itself, carries the years when the louder history stayed quiet.