William Tompson

Born	1724-09-16 Billerica, MA
Died	1806-09-02
Select Board
In Office	1765 - 1769 1772 - 1781
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1777 - 1777
Preceded by	William Stickney
Succeeded by	William Stickney
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1787 - 1787
Preceded by	Edward Farmer
Succeeded by	Edward Farmer
Deacon of the First Parish
In Office	1797 - 1806

William Tompson was born in Billerica on September 16, 1724, the only surviving son of Benjamin Tompson and Alice Kidder and a grandson of Ensign Joseph Tompson, the town's first schoolmaster. Hazen thought he may have been the "William Thompson" on the rolls of the 1745 expedition against Louisburg. On his father's death in 1753 he inherited the family homestead southeast of the village, at the end of what is now Tufts Lane. On October 27, 1757 he married Sarah White, daughter of William White of Haverhill and sister of the wife of Rev. John Chandler. Their daughter Sarah, born in 1758, married Dr. Isaac Hurd in 1778; a second daughter, Elizabeth, lived only a few months in 1759.

Tompson was a selectman from 1765 to 1768 and from 1772 to 1780, thirteen years in all, and Hazen counted him "one of the foremost citizens in all the debates and measures of the period of the Revolution." On June 6, 1774 the town named him to its Committee of Correspondence, and in December 1774 to the Committee of Inspection appointed "to see that the Resolves of the Continental, and Provincial, Congress, be adhered to." In March 1775 Colonel Tompson was one of the three officers before whom the town's new company of minute-men was to pass muster, and the historian Richard Frothingham wrote that the Billerica men who joined the attack on the British column at Merriam's Corner on April 19 came "under the command of Colonel William Tompson."

In 1776 Colonel Tompson sat on the town's Committee of Correspondence, Inspection and Safety, and on May 23 the town voted "to send another Representative this year" and chose him. In October 1776 he joined Rev. Henry Cumings, Joshua Abbot, Dr. Timothy Danforth and Captain Josiah Bowers on the committee that drafted the town's vote on forming a new government for the state. On January 23, 1778 the town accepted the Articles of Confederation and instructed "Col. Wm. Tompson, our Representative" to help forward them to Congress. He served again as representative in 1787, the one year in that period when Edward Farmer did not, and early in 1788 he was Billerica's delegate to the convention at which Massachusetts ratified the Constitution of the United States.

In later life he became a deacon of the church. When the pews of the new meeting-house were sold on December 8, 1797, "Deacon Wm. Tompson" paid $133.50 for pew number 9, next in number to Deacon Joshua Abbot's. In his will, made on April 11, 1797, "William Tompson of Billerica ... Esqr." provided for his wife Sarah, gave legacies to his son-in-law Dr. Isaac Hurd and his eldest grandson, William Tompson Hurd, and divided the rest of his estate among his five Hurd grandchildren, naming Dr. Hurd and Jonathan Bowers, Esq. his executors. He died in 1806, and the will was proved at Concord on October 7 of that year. His homestead, surveyed after his death at 149 acres, passed to the Hurd family and was long remembered as "the homestead place of William Thompson"; it later became the Jones Farm on Tufts Lane.

William Tompson

William Tompson

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