Intelligence of the marching of the British towards Lexington, on the 19th of April, 1775, reached the lower part of Danvers about nine o’clock that morning.  With a rapidity that is perfectly marvellous, when we consider the distances from each other over which the inhabitants were scattered, five companies, fully organized and equipped,—­each of them containing men of the village,—­rushed to the field in time to meet the retreating enemy at West Cambridge.  It was a rally and a march without precedent, and never yet surpassed.  The day was extremely sultry for the season; and the distance traversed by many of the men from the village, before they got into that fight, could not have been less than twenty miles.  Seven belonging to Danvers companies were killed, and others wounded.  A larger offering was made that day at the baptismal sacrifice to American liberty by Danvers than by any other town except Lexington; and no town represented in the scene was more remote.  Of the men who fell on this occasion, the following appear to have been of the village:  Samuel Cook, Benjamin Daland, and Perley Putnam,—­the last a descendant of John.  Their bodies were brought home, and buried with appropriate honors; two companies from Salem, and military detachments from Newburyport, Amesbury, and Salisbury participating in the ceremonies, and giving the soldier’s tribute to their glory, by volleys over their closing graves.

Moses Porter, when eighteen years of age, attracted attention by his heroic courage and indomitable pluck at Bunker Hill.  He was in an artillery company, and would not quit his gun when almost every other man had fallen.  His country never allowed him to quit it afterwards.  From that day, he bore a commission in the army of the United States.  He was retained on every peace establishment, always in the artillery, and at the head of that arm of the service for a great length of time, and until the day of his death.  He was in the battle of Brandywine, and wounded in a subsequent fight on the banks of the Delaware.  He was with Wayne in his campaign against the Western Indians, and won his share of the glory that crowned it in the final bloody and decisive conflict.  He was at the head of the artillery when the war of 1812 took place, in active service on the Niagara frontier, and on the 10th of September, 1813, brevetted “for distinguished services.”  He commanded at Norfolk, in Virginia, in 1814, and received great credit for the ability and vigilance with which he held that most vital point of the coast defence.  At successive periods after the war, he was at the head of each of the geographical military divisions of the country.  He died at Cambridge, Mass., in 1822, while in command of the Eastern Department, near the scene of his youthful glory, forty-seven years before.  No man who fought at Bunker Hill remained so long a soldier of the United States.  No man had so extended a record, and it was bright with honor from the beginning to the end.  His pre-eminent reputation, as a disciplinarian and artillerist of the highest class, was uniformly maintained.  He added to the sterner qualities required by professional duty a polished urbanity of manners, and a dignified and commanding aspect and bearing.  His ashes rest beneath the sod of his ancestral acres in Salem Village.