Ephraim Russell

Biography

1750–1814

Ephraim Russell was born in Littleton, northwest of Boston in Massachusetts, on August 31, 1750, the son of John Russell and Abigail Hildreth. By the Revolutionary period, his life was connected with nearby Stow. The town’s published history names an Ephraim Russell as a sergeant in Captain Silas Taylor’s company, in Colonel Jonathan Reed’s regiment, which marched on September 22, 1777. The history places that company in the campaign leading to Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, in what is now eastern New York.

Ephraim married Eunice Mirick of Princeton on January 24, 1792. He was forty-one and she thirty-two. Their son John was born at Stow on August 23, 1794; the town record identifies his parents as Ephraim and Eunice. Eunice died in August 1800, shortly before John’s sixth birthday, leaving Ephraim a widower with a young son.

He remained associated with Stow, where he died in October 1814. His story brings together the wartime service of a young Massachusetts man and the later establishment of a family in the community from which he had marched.