Joel & Hannah Guild: Witnesses to the American Revolution

                                                                                                                      Lot 201, 200

Joel Guild (1763-1842)

Hannah Weatherbee Guild (1766-1842)

Joel Guild was born on January 20, 1763. He was the son of Capt. Aaron Guild and his second wife, Anna Coney Guild. As a very young man, Joel was a volunteer in the Revolutionary War. Shortly thereafter, he was called again to halt an armed insurrection known as Shays’ Rebellion.

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 Shays 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.”

Two years after Shays’ Rebellion, Joel Guild married Hannah Weatherbee on January 4, 1789. Hannah Weatherbee, born on May 13, 1766, was the daughter of Benjamin and Susannah Weatherbee of Walpole.  

Joel and Hannah had a house near what later became Ink Mill property in South Dedham and had nine children: Clarissa, Reuben, Joel Jr., Abner, Benjamin, Horace, Hannah, Louisa, and Warren.

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Site of Guild Home on Pleasant St. on 1853 map and image of the site as it appears today.

Guild became a blacksmith in the village. He died on January 14, 1842, just shy of his birthday. His widow, Hannah Weatherbee Guild, died on December 11, 1842 of heart disease.