Jabez Marble

Biography

1755–1843

Jabez Marble and his twin brother Oliver were born at Stow, northwest of Boston in Massachusetts, on September 15, 1755, sons of Asa Marble and Hannah Wheeler. The close connection between the brothers carried into their Revolutionary service. In a statement reproduced by Ezra Stearns, Jabez explained that Oliver became ill before completing an enlistment, and that he took his brother’s place and continued answering to Oliver’s name. The arrangement helps explain why a service record under one brother’s name may conceal the work of both.

Stearns preserves two inconsistent chronologies for that service. The more detailed account, presented as Jabez’s own statement, describes duty around Boston ending in March 1777. It then follows him from Stow to Providence in May 1777, and onward to Greenwich for coastal defense. In another enlistment beginning in August 1780, Jabez served at Butt’s Hill in Rhode Island, where his work included building a fort. These details reveal military life as marching, guarding, and sustained construction work as well as the possibility of combat.

He married Mary Salter on November 29, 1780. They initially lived in Stow, then moved to Ashburnham; Stearns’s family register dates that move to 1789. There Jabez farmed land formerly occupied by Mary’s father, Samuel Salter. Their household included ten recorded children, among them the twins Lydia and Lois, born in February 1792. That September their daughter Hannah died.

Jabez lived long enough to be listed among Ashburnham’s Revolutionary pensioners in 1840. He died on December 23, 1843, aged eighty-eight. The town history also records a cannonball he had brought home from his military service, preserved afterward within the family—a physical reminder of a youth very different from his long farming life.

The burial listing associates Jabez Marble with Meetinghouse Hill Cemetery, Ashburnham, Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States.