The Pine Tree Riot, When a Sawmill Became a Revolution

The American Revolution gets its mythology from Boston Harbor and Lexington Green. But on a raw April morning in seventeen seventy-two, in the small town of Weare, New Hampshire, a band of colonists threw the first punches, and they were fighting over trees. For decades the British Crown had claimed the tallest white pines of New England for the Royal Navy.

Under the Broad Arrow Policy, any pine more than twelve inches in diameter growing outside private land was marked with a broad arrow blaze and reserved as a mast for a warship. The colonists, who needed those trees for lumber, found the law maddening, and largely ignored it. Governor John Wentworth began enforcing the law seriously around seventeen sixty-six.

In the spring of seventeen seventy-two, a deputy surveyor named John Sherman swept through the sawmills of southern New Hampshire looking for illegally cut pine. In Weare, Sheriff Benjamin Whiting and his deputy John Quigley found exactly what they were looking for. They arrested a mill operator named Ebenezer Mudgett and released him on bail.

That night, Mudgett and roughly twenty men made a plan. The next morning, April fourteenth, seventeen seventy-two, they descended on the inn where Whiting and Quigley were sleeping. They beat both men with wooden rods until they could barely stand, then put them on their horses and drove them out of town.

The crowd took care to give the horses the same treatment as the officers, a deliberate humiliation that left no question about who held authority in Weare that morning. Four judges heard the case the following September. The rioters pleaded guilty and were fined twenty shillings apiece, roughly the cost of a decent meal.

The Crown had blinked. Historians have argued ever since that the Pine Tree Riot planted a seed in the New Hampshire imagination: that British authority, however officially absolute, could be defied at small personal cost. The Boston Tea Party came the following year.

The revolution was thirteen months away from having a name.