Asa Pollard

Asa Pollard was born in Billerica on November 15, 1735, a son of John Pollard and his first wife Mary Stearns, daughter of Isaac Stearns. His grandfather Thomas Pollard had settled near the fordway over the Concord River at the north end of town, and Asa's home was there. His mother died when he was two; among his brothers was Solomon Pollard, whose house next to the site of the Howe School served as a tavern during the Revolution.

He saw service long before 1775. Hazen's lists of Billerica soldiers drawn from the Massachusetts Archives place him in the army operating against Crown Point in 1755 and 1756 and again in the campaigns toward Crown Point and Lake Champlain in 1758 and 1759.

On May 8, 1775, after the fighting at Lexington and Concord, he enlisted again. On June 17 the Billerica company, under Lieutenant Jonathan Stickney in the regiment of its former captain, Colonel Ebenezer Bridge, served in the redoubt under Prescott on Breed's Hill. There Asa Pollard was struck by a cannon ball fired from a British ship in the harbor, and he is remembered as the first American soldier killed in the Battle of Bunker Hill. He was 39, and he was buried on the field. Accounts of his death disagree in the details, and his pay record, which runs to June 21, has led some historians to question the exact date, but his place in the story of the battle was fixed early. Hazen opened his account of Billerica in the Revolution with it: "the first soldier who fell at Bunker Hill was Asa Pollard, one of her sons."

Billerica honored him when it built its new graded schoolhouse on Andover Road at the Centre, completed in the spring of 1892 and named the Pollard School. A proposal in 1936 to rename it for Dr. Maurice A. Buck came to nothing, and the building served the town's children for more than eighty years. A marker in Billerica also points out his birthplace and home.

References

1. Asa Pollard (Wikipedia)
2. Asa Pollard: Casualty on Bunker's Hill, Boston 1775 (J. L. Bell, 2008)
3. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), Genealogical Register p. 113, POLLARD family #3
4. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), p. 226, The Revolution
5. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), p. 238, The Revolution (Battle of Bunker Hill)
6. Hazen, History of Billerica (1883), p. 149, List of Soldiers in the Public Service (French wars)
7. School Committee and Superintendent Reports, 1892 (Pollard School)
8. MACRIS BIL.35, Pollard School, Andover Rd