Rubbing Shoulders With America’s Colonial Aristocracy
Timothy Dexter was born in 1747 in Malden, Massachusetts, into a family of Irish descent and modest means. So modest, that young Timothy received little education as he grew up. At age eight, his education came to an end, and he was indentured as a servant in a nearby farm. When he turned fourteen, he headed to Charlestown to become apprenticed as a leather worker. At the end of his apprenticeship, when he was twenty, he met and married a widow, nine years older than himself and with four children. She was rich. Dexter moved into her home in one of the posher parts of Charlestown, and she helped him set up shop in her basement, where he sold leather trousers, gloves, and hides.
Dexter’s new neighbors included the likes of John Hancock, then governor of Massachusetts, and Thomas Russel, one of Colonial’s America’s richest men. Such blue bloods, America’s de facto aristocracy, did not take kindly to an uneducated and barely literate man who’d married into money. They treated him as an uncouth upstart, which infuriated him. He determined to prove that he was their equal. He noticed that upper class gentlemen often held public office, and decided to secure one for himself. So he badgered nearby Malden for an office. Eventually, after dozens of petitions, they made up a BS position of “Informer of Deer” to get him off their backs. Like the title said, the job was to inform the authorities if deer were spotted in Malden – even though town records indicate that no deer had been seen in a generation.
