Saddlebag

Object Name:

Saddlebag

Object ID:

2024.035.01

Place of Origin:

Concord, NH

Date:

circa 1777

Description:

Saddlebags. Believed to be used by Col. Gordon Hutchins (1733-1815) of Concord, New Hampshire during the Revolutionary War. Leather saddlebags with two pouches on either end of a leather strip. Each pouch has three leather and metal clasps.

Material:

Leather
Metal

Dimensions:

W-13 L-37 D-5 inches

Provenance:

Gordon Hutchins (1733-1815) moved from Harvard, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire in 1772 with his wife Dorothy (1737-1777), daughter Bethiah (1765-1835), and sons Levi (1761-1855) and Abel (1763-1853). Gordon was a merchant, but in 1775 following the battles of Lexington and Concord, he went to Exeter and secured a commission as a captain and returned to raise a company of men. Levi joined as a fifer. Gordon's company served within Colonel John Stark's regiment, and fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. Gordon prevented his son from directly participating in the battle. In September 1775 Levi, as he recalled in his autobiography, left his father's company for "Captain Lewis' Company, in Colonel Varnum's Regiment, under General Greene" (p.27). His unit went from Massachusetts to New York, where it fought in the Battle of Long Island (August 27, 1776), and Levi evacuated to Manhattan with his fellow soldiers after the Americans lost the fight. After fulfilling his year of service, he left the army in September 1776 and returned to Concord. Gordon, meanwhile, was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 1776, serving in Colonel Nahum Baldwin's regiment. He fought at the Battle of White Plains on October 28, 1776. By March 1777 now Colonel Hutchins was elected as a Concord representative to the New Hampshire Provincial Congress in Exeter. In mid-August 1777 Hutchins rushed back to Concord from Exeter to help assemble companies of men to fight under General John Stark at what became the Battle of Bennington on August 16, 1777. However, Hutchins's company arrived after the battle.

Gordon and Levi shared one more wartime experience in 1779. Levi wrote to his father from Pembroke on July 10, 1779, asking for permission to join him on a naval expedition. The letter includes the line "I send you, by Mr. Wait, your saddle-bags," which demonstrates that Gordon did own and use saddlebags during the war. Levi joined his father aboard the privateer Hector, part of a forty-four vessel American naval armada that sailed from the Boston area up to the Penobscot River in July 1779 to try and prevent British forces from occupying that area of the coast. The Penobscot Expedition was a disaster for the Americans, as British vessels chased them upriver and the Hutchins and the rest of the American crews abandoned and burned their vessels between August 14 and 16. Gordon and Levi then returned overland to New Hampshire. Evidently done with military service, Gordon married Lucy Lund in 1780 and the couple had nine children. In the following decades Gordon Hutchins and his family lived in Pembroke, Coventry, Haverhill, Rumney, and finally Concord, where he died in 1815 at the age of eighty-two. His last home was at the corner of Green and Centre streets, in the northwest corner of the property now owned by the New Hampshire Historical Society.

The saddlebags were at some point transferred to the family of Amos Abbott (1754-1834) and displayed in the family home at 382 North State Street, Concord, NH from the 19th century until the house was sold in 2005.

Credit Line:

Gift of Robert Henry Dole on behalf of the James Abbott Family

People:

Hutchins, Gordon (1733-1815)