Earliest Surviving Town Warrants

A little background information:  What is a Warrant?


In the New England Town Meeting system, the Selectmen of a community would issue a warrant requiring all men who were qualified to vote in the Town to assemble at the Meeting House on a specified date and time to attend to the business of the town.  The warrant was posted by the Town Constable to "warn" the voters that their presence would be required.  Wilton usually had two Constables, each of whom was charged with getting the word out.  Each warrant contained the date, time and place of the meeting (usually the Meeting House in the Center), as well as a list of articles the voters would be asked to consider.  The example at right is a warrant issued on May 15th, 1775.  Note that the Warrant is headed "Province of New Hampshire" -- the first shots of the American Revolution had just been fired on the common in Lexington Massachusetts, less than a month before.  The second article of the Warrant is an authorization to send delegates to a County Congress in Amherst, one of the many Revolutionary bodies springing up all through the Colonies in defiance of British authority.


And yet, despite the fact that the authorities might well consider this act of defiance to the Crown treasonous, all the legal niceties are still observed -- the Warrant is "Given under our Hands and Seal this Fifteenth Day of May A.D. 1775 in the Fifteenth year of George The Third"





At left is the back side of a Warrant issued in 1782, signed by Constable Jonathan Parkhurst, which is his acknowledgement to the Selectmen that he has fulfilled his duty and warned all the voters in his district of the upcoming meeting.  Beneath that is the notation, probably by the Town Clerk, that the warrant has been officially recorded













The Following are further examples of some of the early Town Warrants.  They are PDF Files, which you can view if you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer.  If you don't already have it, you can download it for free Here

Warrant of 21 March 1775

Warrant of 20 December 1781

Warrant of 22 February 1782

Warrant of 19 March 1787

Warrant of 23 May 1791

Warrant of 19 November 1794


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