COLONEL MARK HOPKINS. 295 Judge of Probate for the county in 1775, but did not serve in that capacity. Before the commencement of hostilities with Great Britain he espoused the cause of the colonies, was a delegate from this town in the county convention of July, 1774, and one of the committee for drafting the patriotic resolutions adopted by that convention. With the breaking out of the war Mr. Hopkins became prominent as a member of the Committee of Safety, and influential in the conventions of committees which were then common in the county. In the important public affairs of that time he exerted a salutary influence in giving direction to the will of his townsmen, and was also active in organizing and rendering efficient the militia of which he was the Colonel. In the summer of 1776, Colonel Hopkins commanded a detachment of Berkshire militia at Peekskill, ordered out by General John Fellows, and later in the same year he served as Brigade Major under General Fellows. Whilst engaged in this service he was taken sick, and in a retreat of the Americans, suffered from exposure in being removed to a place of safety. By this exposure his illness was increased, and he died at White Plains, October 26, 1776, at the age of thirty-seven. By his death the town lost an influential and valued citizen, and the American cause one of its most ardent supporters. But for his untimely death, the talents of Colonel Hopkins, which are said to have been of a superior order, would doubtless have advanced him to stations of still higher honor and more distinguished usefulness. It is related that the Hon. Theodore Sedgwick, who had been a law student under Colonel Hopkins, and who was also with him at White Plains, was accustomed to say that if Hopkins had lived, he himself would never have attained the eminent position as jurist and statesman which he occupied. Colonel Hopkins married in 1765, Electa Sergeant, daughter of the Rev. John Sergeant, missionary to the Stockbridge Indians. At his decease he left a family of six children. His widow in her later years removed to Stockbridge, where she resided with her son Archi bald-father of President Hopkins of Williams college -and died there July 11, 1798. David Ingersoll, Junior, Esq. David Ingersoll, Junior, a native of Great Barrington, and son of David Ingersoll, one of the early settlers of the town, was born September 26, 1742. He was educated at Yale college, graduated in 1761, and was admitted to the bar in Berkshire, April, 1765. There is some reason for supposing that he lived for a time in Sheffield, but he was residing in Great Barrington and engaged in the practice of the law here as early as 1768. Mr. Ingersoll was appointed a Justice of the Peace in 1767, and in 1770 represented the towns of Sheffield, Great Barrington, and Egremont in the General Court. He was prominent in town affairs, and from the time of the settlement of the Rev. Gideon Bostwick, an active supporter of the Episcopal church. Before the Revolution he had attained some prominence as a lawyer and public man, and when the troubles between Great Britain and the colonies assumed a serious aspect he adhered to the British cause. In the spring of 1774 he was one of the "addressers" of Governor Hutchinson, which, with other causes, rendered him exceedingly unpopular with the patriots. At the time of the suppression of the King's court in the general uprising of the people-August, 1774—he was seized by Litchfield county men, carried to Connecticut and imprisoned. He was not, however, long kept in confinement, as he appears to have been in Boston on the 2d of September following, when he mortgaged his homestead-perhaps for the purpose of raising funds with which to leave the country—and soon after sailed for England, where he died in 1796. During his residence in Great Barrington, though not then married, he owned and occupied the house in which the Misses Kellogg (now deceased) lately resided. He was one of the number proscribed and banished by an act of the General Court in 1778; and his homestead---which is said to have been confiscated —was afterwards taken on executions obtained against him by his creditors. Mr. Ingersoll "married (in Eng COLONEL ELIJAH DWIGHT. 297 land) in 1783, Frances Rebecca Ryley, who survived him less than three months. He left two sons, Philip Ryley, who died in 1808, leaving issue, and Frederick Horton, who was living in 1853." (1) Colonel Elijah Dwight. Elijah Dwight, who was a son of General Joseph Dwight, was born at Brookfield, Mass., April 23, 1740, and appears to have lived there for some years after the removal of his father to this county. The first mention we find of him is in 1756, when at the age of sixteen, and a resident of Brookfield, he was the commissary of the hospital in his father's regiment at Fort William Henry on Lake George. But he came to reside in Great Barrington as early as 1761, when, at the first meeting of the Judges of the newly organized county of Berkshire, he was appointed Clerk of the Courts and Register of Probate for the county, which positions he held for the space of twenty years. In 1765, he was in business here as a merchant, having been licensed by the court to sell tea, coffee, and china ware, and after the Revolution he was engaged in trade with Captain Walter Pynchon, under the firm of Dwight & Pynchon. He was the clerk of the town from 1764 to 1770, and town treasurer from 1768 for several years, and again from 1782 to 1790. In the war of the Revolution, influenced by conscientious convictions, Colonel Dwight remained conservative and neutral, and while he did not co-operate with the majority of his townsmen in resistance to British rule, he refrained from opposing the measures which they adopted. But such was his integrity of character and honesty of purpose that he maintained, in a remarkable degree, the esteem of his townsmen, who, when the war was at an end, repeatedly honored him with substantial proofs of their confidence and regard by electing him many times to offices of honor and trust. In 1785, Colonel Dwight represented the town in the General Court, and was re elected representative the next year, but declined serving; he was (1) Sabine's Loyalists of the Revolution. again chosen to the same office in 1790-91 and '93, but in each of these years was also elected to the State Senate, of which body he was a member for eight years from 1786 to 1793 inclusive. In the convention of 1788, for ratifying the Constitution of the United States,. Colonel Dwight was the delegate from this town, and an earnest advocate of its adoption. He was one of the early Justices of the Peace of the county, having been appointed in September, 1765, and also one of the Judges of the Court of Common Pleas for seven or more years immediately preceding his decease. Colonel Dwight was a man of strict integrity, of amiable and mild disposition, with somewhat of the suavity of man-ner which characterized his father; but that he also possessed firmness and determination may be inferred from the fact that when-in 1786-a mob of insurgents. forced his three associate Judges to sign a paper agreeing to hold no more courts, they failed to coerce him into that measure. Whilst on a journey to Boston in 1794, he was taken sick and died at Brookfield-the place of his nativity-and was buried in the ancient burial ground at West Brookfield, where we copied the following inscription from his tomb-stone many years since : "The Hon Elijah Dwight, Esq., of Great Death is the crown of life Death wounds to cure. "" There is also a monument to the memory of Colonel Dwight and some of his children in the south burial ground in this town. The wife of Colonel Dwight was Anna Williams, daughter of Doctor Thomas Williams of Deerfield. She died at Deerfield at the age of sixty-six, in 1810. Of their children several died in infancy, and one only lived to years of maturity, to wit: Captain Joseph Hawley Dwight, who resided at Utica and at Oxford, N. Y. CHAPTER XX. CONSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL. 1774-1780. From 1774, when the authority of General Gage, the last British governor of Massachusetts was practically annulled by the Provincial Congress, to the adoption of the state constitution in 1780, no well founded form of government existed in the state. The Provincial Congresses of 1774-5, and after that, the Council, with the acquiescence of the people, exercised the powers of a provisional government. In this period the inhabitants of Berkshire held positions frequently at variance with and antagonistic to the established authority, relying more upon their county conventions— composed of delegates chosen by the respective townsfor the supervision of their civil affairs and the preservation of peace and good order, than upon the enactments of the General Assembly or the edicts of the council. But that Great Barrington, in this respect, was not always in full accord with some other towns of the county is apparent from her vote of forty to oneJanuary 13th, 1777-"to support the civil authority in this county, established in this state for the redressing of public wrongs," and by declining, at the same time, to unite with other towns in petitioning the Council not to issue commissions to the judges of the Court of Common Pleas until January 1st, 1778. Again August 25th, 1778, this town gave its unanimous assent to the proposition for admitting the sittings of the Court of Sessions in the county, and a majority in |