Focus on Melrose: Phineas Upham

As we approach Memorial Day, we will profile some of the Melrosians who have died in warfare. We begin with the first recorded military casualty of a person residing on Melrose soil: Lieutenant Phineas Upham, who died in 1676 while fighting in King Philip’s War.

Upham’s family settled in Melrose in what would become the Upham Street neighborhood around 1648, when he was about 12 years old. In 1658 he married Ruth Wood, with whom he had seven children, among them the Phineas Upham who would have the Upham House built in 1703.

These were years when relations between British settler-colonists and Native peoples were largely peaceful, but tense. Native tribes had been decimated by disease, whereas the British thrived, multiplied, and constantly encroached on Native lands. In June of 1675, for reasons too complicated to explain here, the Wampanoag leader Metacomet, alias King Philip, led his people to take arms against Plymouth Colony. This local conflict quickly spiraled out of control, involving every European and Native government in Southern New England, and would be fought with atrocious ferocity. By the time the war was over, one in twenty people in New England had been killed.

On December 19th, Upham served as an officer in the Great Swamp Fight in Rhode Island, a surprise night attack by the British and their Native allies against the Narragansett tribe. It was bitterly cold and the fighting was fierce. In the end the British set fire to the Narragansett settlement, forcing the women and children of the tribe out into the frozen swamp. Several hundred died from injuries, burns, and freezing to death. The Narragansetts had long been the most powerful tribe in the region, but they never recovered from the losses they suffered that night.

Upham himself received an injury in that fight which would prove fatal. He lingered for ten months, finally dying in October of 1676. He left behind Ruth and seven young children. Three centuries later, his many descendants erected the monument you see here at Bell Rock Cemetery to replace a broken gravestone that once sat next to his wife’s. The stone of his father, John, who outlived him, is nearby.