William Eaton

Biography

On July 4, 1820, William Eaton of Wells, on the coast of southern Maine, appeared in the York County pension proceedings as a sixty-four-year-old Revolutionary veteran. His statement identified him as a sergeant in Captain Daniel Wheelwright’s company of Colonel B. Tupper’s Massachusetts regiment. He had first made a pension declaration in April 1818.

A published Eaton family chart supplies another part of his service: garrison duty at Fort George in Captain Nathan Watkins’s company of Colonel Edmund Phinney’s regiment. The chart identifies his wife as Abigail Littlefield and places both his birth in 1756 and his death in 1841 at Wells. These details distinguish him from other Revolutionary soldiers named William Eaton.

The pension abstract also describes his later household. Abigail was sixty; their daughter Lydia was thirty-three, son Andrew twenty-two and daughter Nancy eighteen. The compiler explains that these lists include relatives living with the applicant, rather than every child of the marriage.

William’s application was marked “Reversed” in the 1820 proceedings. The entry does not establish continuous pension payments. An accompanying note places him at Wells in 1835.

His surviving record joins military service to a named family household in later life. It gives a more precise picture than the title “Revolutionary pensioner” alone: a former sergeant, still at Wells decades after the war, whose claim underwent an adverse review.