William Prescott
Continental army soldier (1726-1795)
William Prescott (February 20, 1726 – October 13, 1795) was an American officer in the Revolutionary War best known for his service at the Battle of Bunker Hill.
Life
Prescott was born in Groton, Massachusetts to Benjamin Prescott (1696–1738) and Abigail Oliver Prescott (1697–1765). He married Abigail Hale (1733–1821) on April 13, 1758, and they had one child, who was named William Prescott Jr. William Prescott owned a house in Pepperell, Massachusetts, on what was later named Prescott Street. The town of his youth was then little more than a frontier settlement bordering upon Hollis, New Hampshire. In fact, the presence of hostile Indians was such a threat that many locals brought arms and ammunition with them while at work in their fields.
A prosperous farmer in his adult years, Prescott first gained military experience after joining the provincial militia during King George's War, where he served in the 1745 Siege of Louisbourg under William Pepperrell. Later, he served as a lieutenant in the Provincial troops which assisted in the removal of neutral French from Nova Scotia in 1755. After his return he married Miss Hale, as above, and was promoted to the office of captain. During the French and Indian War widened, he was acclaimed for his leadership of allied American forces in the Battle of Fort Beausejour.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Prescott” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.