In the late summer of 1776, a New York grocer named John Arthur encountered an unusual mounted party on a Westchester road. Roughly thirty women from Sing Sing, Tarrytown, and Wicker’s Creek were riding toward his house near New Castle. Alerted to his presence and wares, the women sought to extract the Bohea stores he possessed. According to the later McDonald Papers, Arthur realized their purpose, deliberately sent them in the wrong direction, and raced home to prepare his household for what followed. His wife, relatives, and an enslaved African woman barricaded the lower floor with furniture. When the women finally arrived, they carried tongs, pokers, spits, broomsticks, and other household implements transformed into improvised weapons. Their leader, Elizabeth Orser, was remembered as a woman of ‘undaunted resolution.’[1]
The confrontation almost ended in violence, as the women demanded a box of tea on a promise of later payment. The Arthurs were adamant that payment be made immediately and after an exchange shouted between the women outside and the family inside, Mrs. Arthur offered a settlement. If the crowd withdrew, her husband would later provide the tea. Importantly, the papers cites Elizabeth Orser as being the final arbiter of this bargain and, according to the account, the attacking party of women were subsequently ‘furnished with a large quantity of the much beloved bohea’ sufficient to supply their households through the winter.[2]
A second Westchester tradition, preserved in an 1850 interview with Talman Orser, describes a different kind of confrontation. ‘At the beginning of the war,’ an Irish tea peddler named James Dunlap traveled along the Albany Turnpike approximately three miles above the old church on the North River. Fifteen to twenty women lay in wait for him, attacked, and compelled him to sell tea for Continental currency. Talman identified the leader as Sarah Orser, wife of Albert Orser. The surviving interview ends abruptly after noting that the women “got as much as they wanted for the present.”[3] These two episodes, both rooted in the extended Orser family network, offer an unusually concentrated view of how women in Revolutionary Westchester moved from household consumers to public regulators of the wartime marketplace.[4]
The principal evidence for both events come from the McDonald Papers, a collection that is simultaneously indispensable and difficult. John M. Macdonald, a lawyer and amateur historian, compiled roughly 407 interviews between 1844 and 1851, producing more than 1,100 manuscript pages devoted largely to Revolutionary life in Westchester and the surrounding Neutral Ground. His interviewees were elderly residents who had either lived through the war or inherited detailed family traditions about it. Macdonald’s original manuscripts were later lost, but they had been copied by John English; those transcriptions ultimately became the foundation of the collection preserved by the Westchester County Historical Society.[5]
Join the Conversation
VIP members get the ability to comment on articles.