Person:Reuben Melvin (3)

BIOGRAPHY: Palmer Groups John Melvin of Charlestown and Concord, Mass., and his Descendants. Mr. Lowell Mason Palmer of New York Miss Emily Wilder Leavitt. Boston Press of David Clapp & Son 1901 - 1905 Page 311 - 312 Reuben Melvin, son of Jacob (Captain David, John) and Esther (Parlin) Melvin, was born in Concord, November 12, 1760. His home was in one of the finest towns in western Massachusetts, the birth place and long time residence of the poet, William Cullen Bryant. This town, Commington, lies in the river valley with great hills sent off from the Green Mountain range rolling up on every side of the cup-like hollow in which the village houses stand. To a visitor in the gorgeous month of October, the lovely town shows one gleam of golden-green splender with the thick woods of tall maple trees dressed in their richest coloring, shedding their brilliant leaves so lavishly that the air is full of them as they poise like birds, or drift in whirls down on the fields and hills and roads, changing them to a mass of burning gold, while through the air is sifted that golden dust that bewitches the senses. All along the river bed, the grasses swing in changing tints heated to intense live by the low slanting sunbeams shining through the thinning leafage, the long arrows tempered by the late season. From this beautiful home, Reuben Melvin marched when he was but a lad of seventeen, in Captain Nathan Harwod's company, under Colonel Dickeinson, on the Alarm at Bennington as far as Manchester to join the forces under Colonel Warner; there he served from July 19 to July 31, 1777. On August 17, 1777, he again enlisted in Captain Willard's company, in a Hampshire, Mass., regiment and served until August 22, 1777. This seems to mark the end of his military life. As, in 1787, he was appointed, at a town meeting in Cummington, as a surveyor of the town highways, to which office he was again elected in 1788. He was one of the town surveyors of lumber in 1801, 1802, 1804. The last town tax paid by him was in 1825. Reuben Melvin married, in Cummington; the ceremony being performed by the Rev. Joseph Spaulding, on December 20, 1790, Achsah Smith of Worthington, the adjoining town. She was a daughter of Enos and Kezia (Browne) Smith, who was born in Providence, Rhode Island, October 15, 1766. Later her parents removed to Butternuts, in the northern part of New York state.