Nathan Hale Homestead: The Spy Who Never Came Home

The farmhouse on this property in Coventry was completed in seventeen seventy-six, the same year its most famous family member was hanged by the British as a spy. Nathan Hale never lived here. But this is where his family was, and it is where his memory has been kept.

Hale was born in Coventry in seventeen fifty-five, one of twelve children of a prosperous farmer. He graduated Yale at eighteen and was teaching school in Connecticut when the war broke out. He joined the Continental Army in July of seventeen seventy-five. A year later, with Washington's forces having been pushed off Long Island and the British in control of most of New York City, General Washington put out an urgent request for volunteers to cross behind enemy lines and report on British troop positions.

Hale volunteered. He was twenty-one years old and had no training as a spy. He crossed Long Island Sound and made his way into British-held New York in disguise, posing as a Dutch schoolteacher. He gathered information for several weeks. On September twenty-first, seventeen seventy-six, he was captured, possibly identified by a Loyalist cousin, though the details remain unclear. Physical evidence including sketches of British fortifications was found on his person. He was taken to British headquarters and interrogated by General Howe, who ordered his execution without trial.

Hale was hanged the following morning, September twenty-second. He was denied a Bible and a minister. A British officer who witnessed the execution wrote that he spoke with great composure and resolution at the end. The words attributed to him, I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country, appear in no contemporary document and may be a paraphrase of a line from a popular play of the era. What is certain is that he died calmly, and that his death became one of the defining stories of the Revolution.

His father Richard built this house the year Nathan died. Connecticut Landmarks now operates the homestead as a museum, preserving both the Hale family furnishings and the story of a young schoolteacher who made the worst, and most consequential, volunteer decision of the war.