Lieutenant William Boyd

Lieutenant William Boyd was born in Maryland, the son of William Boyd Sr. and Charity Talbot. His father was a Scotch Episcopalian who had settled in Washington County, Maryland, along the old Braddock Road near the Potomac River, and his mother was a descendant of George Talbot, a cousin to Lord Baltimore, connecting the Boyd family to one of Maryland's most prominent colonial dynasties. William Sr. was described by family historians as "a man of high spirits and sense of honor," who transmitted to his children "many independent characteristics." All of his sons served the Patriot cause during the Revolutionary War. One brother perished on a British prison ship in New York Harbor - one of the thousands of Americans who died in those wretched vessels during the Revolution. Another brother, Walter Boyd, served as a Lieutenant in the Continental Army and commanded Fort Frederick, a frontier post on the Potomac River between Williamsport and Hancock, Maryland. William himself served in the Maryland Militia during the Revolutionary War before his commission as a Lieutenant in the years that followed.

By 1791, William Boyd was living in Virginia and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the Virginia Battalion under Captain Lewis, as part of the 1st Regiment of Levies under Lieutenant Colonel William Darke. He joined General Arthur St. Clair's expedition into the Northwest Territory, a campaign plagued from the outset by poor training, inadequate supplies, and relentless desertions. The army that marched north from Fort Washington in the fall of 1791 was, by nearly every account, dangerously unprepared for what awaited it on the banks of the Wabash River.

On the morning of November 4, 1791, the Native American confederacy led by Little Turtle and Blue Jacket launched their devastating dawn attack on St. Clair's encampment. Lieutenant William Boyd was killed in the action, one of 39 officers who fell that day out of 52 engaged. A family history written nearly a century later recorded simply that he "survived and died - a Lieutenant in St. Clair's defeat after the war." He is buried in the mass grave beneath the battlefield monument at the center of Fort Recovery, Ohio, alongside so many of the men honored on this memorial.