After the Williamsburg Powder Alarm, several of the town’s boys organized themselves into a company of volunteers. They elected Henry Nicholson, who was about 14 years old, their captain. Eager to arm themselves, they broke into the powder magazine on June 3, 1775 and triggered a shotgun rigged to fire on any intruders. Three of the boys were injured and the outrage prompted Lord Dunmore to finally flee the capital.


The Williamsburg Boys’ Company returned to the magazine, retrieved about 50 blue-painted Indian trade muskets, and began training in their use. Robert Greenhow remembered in 1833 that they dressed themselves “in military garb—that is to say with hunting shirts, trousers, bucktails, cockades and ‘Liberty or Death’ suspended to their breasts as their motto.”

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Three boys were injured breaking into the powder magazine in June, 1775.

With war brewing and Williamsburg under threat, volunteer companies from all over Virginia began to converge on the town, making camp near the College of William & Mary. Greenhow bragged “that they could and did perform all the evolutions of manual exercise far better than the soldiers who were daily arriving from the adjacent counties.”


“Captain Nicholson” later received a real commission in Major John Nelson’s Regiment of Virginia State Cavalry, which served on the state establishment from 1779 to 1782. According to Greenhow, when Cornwallis moved to Yorktown, Nicholson was among the American officers who “were in the habit of occasionally visiting their female acquaintances” there and “that they would frequently stay until the sound of Tarleton's bugle – a little before day, told them it was necessary to be off.”

GABRIEL NEVILLE is the author of The Last Men Standing: The 8th Virginia Regiment in the American Revolution.


Art: Trade rifle image courtesy of Clay Smith.