Post-war and The Ohio Country
At the close of the war Gen. Tupper returned to his family at Chesterfield, and became a member of the Massachusetts Legislature. During 1786, Benjamin Tupper and Rufus Putnam founded the Ohio Company of Associates. During that year, Benjamin Tupper was appointed as surveyor for the state of Massachusetts for the surveying of the Seven Ranges in the Ohio Country. During 1787, he volunteered his services to Massachusetts militia Gen. William Shepard to assist in suppressing Shays' Rebellion; Gen. Tupper helped organize volunteers for the militia, and was with Gen Shepard defending the Springfield, Massachusetts armory when Shays attacked and was defeated.
During 1788, Benjamin Tupper and other pioneers of the Ohio Company of Associates arrived at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers to establish Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. In August 1788, he invented a screw propeller, positioned in the stern of a boat, and turned with a crank. Manasseh Cutler wrote about the propeller that "It succeeded to admiration, and I think it a very useful discovery." During September 1788, Benjamin Tupper and Rufus Putnam were the justices of the first civil court in the Northwest Territory. Benjamin Tupper was a prominent member of the pioneer settlement of Marietta. He was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati, and an original member of the American Union Lodge No. 1 of Freemasons at Marietta, along with several others including his son Anselm Tupper, William Stacy, and Rufus Putnam.
Benjamin Tupper's sons were Maj. Anselm Tupper, Gen. Edward W. Tupper, and Col. Benjamin Tupper, Jr. His daughters were Sophia, Minerva, and Roewena, who married Gov. Winthrop Sargent in the first marriage ceremony in the Northwest Territory. Another daughter, Huldah, died young.
Benjamin Tupper died in June 1792. A visitor to the Marietta settlement witnessed the funeral, and wrote that:
Gen. Tupper, who had died the day before, was buried on the 17th. In consideration of the four different offices which he held, firstly as General in the service of the United States in the late war; secondly as member of the Cincinnati order; thirdly as director of the Ohio Company; and fourthly as master among the Freemasons, therefore, because of these positions, great honors were shown his remains at the funeral.”
Benjamin Tupper is buried with many other Revolutionary War soldiers and pioneers at Mound Cemetery in Marietta.
Read more about this topic: Benjamin Tupper
Famous quotes containing the words post-war, ohio and/or country:
“Much of what Mr. Wallace calls his global thinking is, no matter how you slice it, still “globaloney.” Mr. Wallace’s warp of sense and his woof of nonsense is very tricky cloth out of which to cut the pattern of a post-war world.”
—Clare Boothe Luce (1903–1987)
“Heaven is not one of your fertile Ohio bottoms, you may depend on it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)