Oliver Partridge

This article or section appears to have been copied and pasted from a source, possibly in violation of a copyright. Please edit this article to remove any non-free copyrighted content and attribute free content correctly. Follow the Guide to layout and the Manual of Style. Remove this template after editing.

This article may need to be wikified to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help by adding relevant internal links, or by improving the article's layout. (April 2009)

PARTRIDGE, OLIVER (1712-1792) Yale 1730 Born Hatfield, Massachusetts to a family of English colonial officers and magistrates. He was the only son of Colonel Edward Partridge, and grandson of Colonel Samuel Partridge, the region’s first senior military commander. Partridge’s commanding position among the River Gods or ruling families of Western New England is reflected in his ranking 2nd in his Yale class of 1730 at a time when Harvard and Yale graduates were ranked according to their family’s social position, rather than academic merit. Oliver’s uncle, Rev. Elisha Williams, of the numerous and influential Williams clan, was the head of Yale College during Partridge’s years reading law and surveying. Rector Williams would later host Thomas Jefferson at Yale when the future President came to view the College's scientific collections. In 1734 Partridge married Anna, the daughter of the Reverend William Williams (Harvard, 1705) of Weston and was appointed joint Clerk of the Court of Hampshire County; selectman of Hatfield almost every year from 1731 to 1774, and again in 1780 – 81; representative in the Massachusetts General Court 1741, 1761, and 1765-1767. From 1741 – 1743 he was High Sheriff of Hampshire County. In June 1744 at the outbreak of King George’s war, he was appointed to a committee of 3 by Massachusetts Governor William Shirley along with John Leonard and his cousin John Stoddard, to oversee the construction of a line of military forts along the western frontier of the Colonies to defend against the French. In 1754 he represented Massachusetts in the Albany Congress that ultimately passed Benjamin Franklin’s plan for colonial union. Upon his return to Massachusetts from New York he was commissioned a Colonel and succeeded his uncle Israel Williams in command of Britain’s western provincial forces. In 1765 he, alongside James Otis and Timothy Ruggles, again represented Massachusetts at the Stamp Act Congress in New York that re-iterated the rights of the English in America as equal to those of natural born Englishmen, and asserted the principal of no taxation without representation. While Partridge was a British loyalist and a Tory, as was common among the landed gentry, he reconciled himself to the inevitability of separation from the British Empire once it had become an accomplished fact, and resumed his legal duties as an American. Such was the respect in which he was held by his countrymen that his revolutionary neighbors did not dare molest his person or property during the revolutionary war (as frequently happened to British loyalists), and in 1780 and 1781 he was again appointed selectman for Hatfield. He died at Hadley. The tombstone of the Hon. Oliver Partridge, Esq. as he was known in contemporary accounts, records that - "His usefulness in church and state was early known to men; Blest with an active life, till late, and happy in his end."

Oliver Partridge is a member of the Dudley-Winthrop U.S. Political Family. He was a great grandson of Massachusetts Governor Simon Bradstreet, and great great grandson of Massachusetts Governor and Harvard founder Thomas Dudley.

Biographical Sketches of the Graduates of Yale College October, 1701 - May, 1745 by Franklin Bowditch Dexter M.A. New York Henry Holt & Co. 1885

The Line of Forts, Historical Archaeology on the Colonial Frontier of Massachusetts by Maichael Coe University Press of New England 2006

New England Outpost: War & Society in Colonial Deerfield by Richard Melvoin New York & London 1988

My Children's American Ancestry by Lucretia Lyman Ranney Published Privately 1959