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Date: 6/29/2023
HAMPDEN — On the afternoon of June 25, three dozen town officials, dignitaries and residents of Hampden stood in front of a tombstone in Old Hampden Cemetery to honor Robert Sessions for his part in the once “treasonous” event that helped launch the American Revolution.
Dec. 16 marks the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, when roughly 150 men, dressed as Native Americans, women and Catholic priests, crept aboard three ships docked in Boston Harbor and threw crates of tea from the East India Company, partially owned by King George III of Great Britain, into the water. Celebrating the anniversary of this act of defiance, one of the first major events leading to the Revolution, markers are being placed at the gravesites of individuals known to have taken part in the event.
Sessions, who was a 21-year-old laborer living in Boston at the time, is one of the few participants who told his own story in a publication. He was featured in the book, “The American Revolutionaries: A History in Their Own Words 1750-1800.” In his account, Sessions heard that people were throwing tea into the harbor and went there to join those already on board. He spoke about the silence with which the colonists worked to destroy the tea, as it was a treasonous defiance of the king.
After that night, which was not known as the Boston Tea Party until several years later, Sessions fought in the Revolution, becoming a lieutenant, before marrying and returning to his hometown of Pomfret, Connecticut, and later becoming a farmer in Hampden, then South Wilbraham. Sessions went on to serve as a justice of the peace, town moderator, town clerk, town treasurer and state representative in the Massachusetts Legislature, before his death in 1836.
Board of Selectmen Chair John Flynn said that Sessions referred to himself as a volunteer at the Boston Tea Party. Flynn said Sessions embodied “the spirit of volunteerism.” He also noted that Sessions part in the historical event reinforces the fact that “history is all around.”
Veteran Service Officer Jared Sasen agreed, saying Hampden is “rich with history” and exemplifies the “profound connection we share with the past.”
State Rep. Brian Ashe said the word “patriot now gets thrown around a little loosely,” but Sessions personified the term. “It’s not easy to get up and go against the grain when you don’t know what the repercussions are,” Ashe said of Sessions’s actions that December night.
State Sen. Jake Oliviera said Sessions was the second person whose grave he had witnessed being marked for their part in the Boston Tea Party. Sessions’s marker was the 126th that had been placed leading up to the anniversary of what Evan O’Brien, creative manager of the Boston Tea Party Ships & Museum called, “the event that came to define a nation.”
For more information on the Boston Tea Party and the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, visit BostonTeaParty250.com, Revolution250.org or bostonteapartyship.com.