Joel Guild Serves His Country Once Again

Joel Guild (1763-1842)

Shays’ Rebellion was an armed uprising that took place primarily in western Massachusetts in 1787. Protesting the government’s efforts to collect what they deemed to be unjust taxes, American Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shay and his followers marched on the federal armory in Springfield in 1787 in an unsuccessful attempt to seize weapons stored there and overthrow the government. According to early local historian Francis Tinker, although the insurrection “caused not a ripple here,” twelve men from the village of South Dedham enlisted to take up arms and march “to protect the Courts and disperse the deluded followers of Shays.”

Among those volunteers was Joel Guild, himself a veteran of the Revolutionary War as a very young man. The son of Capt. Aaron Guild and his second wife, Anna Coney Guild, Joel Guild was born on January 20, 1763. Two years after Shays’ Rebellion, he married Hannah Weatherbee on January 4, 1789; the couple had nine children. Guild became a blacksmith in South Dedham and died on January 14, 1842. His wife, Hannah, whose grave is next to his (plot #200), died on December 11, 1842.