Samuel Whiting II

Born	1758-12-12 Billerica, MA
Died	1843-02-28 Billerica, MA
Deacon of the First Parish
In Office	1798 - 1840
Select Board
In Office	1816 - 1821
Town Clerk
In Office	1816 - 1821
Preceded by	Jeremiah Farmer
Succeeded by	Marshall Preston
Representative to the General Court
In Office	1822 - 1823

Samuel Whiting (1758-1843), usually called Deacon Whiting, was a Revolutionary soldier, surveyor and teacher who served the First Church as deacon for more than forty years. He was born in Billerica on December 12, 1758, a son of Samuel Whiting and Sarah Stevens and a grandson of Deacon Samuel Whiting, of the family of the town's first minister. His father died in 1769, when he was ten, and his mother later married Jonathan Hill. He lived south of Charnstaffe Lane, west of the brook, opposite the place where his ancestor the first pastor had lived.

In 1776 he was drafted into the army and served about eight months as a private and sergeant and as clerk of his company, and Hazen's list of Billerica's Revolutionary soldiers also credits him with service in 1777, when a Billerica company marched to reinforce the army facing Burgoyne. His grandson, Dr. John S. Whiting, remembered his stories of the Battle of Stillwater and the taking of Burgoyne, and that when asked whether he had ever shot a redcoat he answered solemnly, "I hope not."

How he got his education no one knew, but he was well versed in mathematics and calculated eclipses. When Ebenezer Pemberton opened his academy in Billerica at the end of the 1790s, Whiting became his assistant; John Farmer, writing in 1816, calls him the academy's teacher of mathematics, and one of the pupils, Thomas G. Cary, recalled at the town's bicentennial in 1855 "that brave old soldier of the Revolution and servant of God, Deacon Whiting," who taught a handwriting he had practised making out army rolls "with benumbed fingers on the drum-head." Like his ancestor Jonathan Danforth he was a surveyor, and many of his plans of Billerica farms were preserved in the county records. He drew the Plan of Billerica of November 1794 that the town sent to the Commonwealth for the state map, and in 1806 he surveyed William Tompson's homestead at the Jones Farmhouse at 149 acres. Farmer also took down from him, from memory, lines of an old poem on Jonathan Danforth, and he was one of the trustees of the Billerica Academy founded in 1820.

On January 22, 1789 he married Rachel Rogers, a daughter of Samuel Rogers. Their children were Harriet, born October 20, 1789, still unmarried in 1840, whom her nephew remembered as always the first called to watch with the sick; the twins Anna and Catherine, born October 13, 1792, of whom Anna married Henry Baldwin and Catherine died in 1816; Augustus, born March 2, 1795, who graduated from Harvard in 1816, took his medical degree in 1820 and practised in Charlestown; and Mary Ann, born May 25, 1801, who married George P. Elliott. Rachel died on June 28, 1836. He was chosen Town Clerk in March 1816 and held the office through 1820, sitting on the Select Board in the same five years, and he represented the town in the General Court in 1822 and 1823.

He was a deacon of the First Church from about 1798, and Farmer's list of 1816 names him among the living deacons. His grandson, who lived with him in 1840, described him at 82 still locking up the house twice every Sunday to drive to meeting in his one-horse chaise, a man of medium height and venerable look with his white hair tied in a queue with black silk ribbon, "living a simple and blameless life, and doing kindness wherever it was in his power." That winter, as his grandson recalled it, he resigned the deaconship. When a Mr. Preston moved a vote of thanks for his forty years of duty, during which he had not missed a single service, he objected that it was "unusual and improper," and the motion was withdrawn. He died in Billerica on February 28, 1843, aged 84 (the town record gives March 1), and his gravestone calls him "Deacon of the first Church in Billerica 43 years."

Samuel Whiting II

Samuel Whiting II

References