MORGAN, JOHN R. (1731-1787). Private, 1st Regiment of Minutemen, Suffolk County Militia; signer of the 1775 Huntington Articles of Association. John Morgan was born in 1731 and was the husband of Abiah “Abigail” Rogers, who was born in 1733 in New York. They married on January 16, 1751, in Huntington, New York and were the parents of three children, all born in Huntington: Ebenezer, born in 1751; Rebecca, born 1758; and James Morgan, born 1763. Records of the First Presbyterian Church of Huntington, Long Island, 1723-1779, show that Ebenezer was baptized on May 4, 1755, Rebecca on July 30, 1758, and James on July 3, 1763.
Abigail died on March 30, 1769, at the age of 36, according to the inscription on her headstone at Huntington’s Old Burying Ground. Per her husband’s headstone there, their son Ebenezer died off the coast of Africa in 1770 at age 19.
A John R. Morgan is listed as a signer of the 1775 Huntington Articles of Association. He may well be the subject of this biography. On May 8, 1775, 403 men, most of them Huntington residents (a few were from Islip), “shocked by the bloody Scene” that had occurred just weeks before at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, where patriot Minutemen and British regulars had engaged in a bloody armed struggle, put their signatures on Huntington’s Articles of Association. Only 37 Huntington residents, either Loyalists or those wanting to stay out of the fray, refused to sign. The Articles noted that the signers affirmed their “Love to our Country,” agreed “to whatever Measures may be recommended by the Continental Congress; or resolved upon by our Provincial Convention, for the Purpose of preserving our Constitution, and opposition to the Execution of the several arbitrary, and oppressive Acts of the British Parliament,” and prayed for “a Reconciliation between Great-Britain and America.” The actions of these associators were seen by both patriots and the British as a step towards rebellion. The fact that these men signed these Articles, placing themselves in danger of British retaliation, including imprisonment, seizure of their property, and exile from Long Island, is proof of their patriotic service.
As shown in New York in the Revolution as Colony and State, Vol. I, A Compilation of Documents and Records from the Office of the State Comptroller (1904), a John Morgan was an enlisted man in the First Regiment of Minutemen of the Suffolk County Militia. With respect to John Morgan from Huntington, according to Frederic Gregory Mather in The Refugees of 1776 from Long Island to Connecticut (1913), at page 474, he probably also served in the military in Connecticut.
John and Abigail’s daughter, Rebecca, died in 1780 at age 22, and is interred in the Old Burying Ground in Huntington, as inscribed on her father’s headstone. She had been the wife of Abraham Legate who enlisted in the Fifth Regiment, New York Line of the Continental Army in 1776 and was taken prisoner at Fort Montgomery in 1777. By the end of the Revolutionary War, he held the rank of lieutenant.
John Morgan is interred in the Old Burying Ground; his original brownstone gravestone marks the location. Josephine Frost, in her Cemetery Inscriptions from Huntington, Long Island, New York (1911) records this inscription on a gravestone there: “In Memory of John Morgan who departed this life Aug. 10, 1787, in the 56th year of his age.” All three of his children, as well as Abigail, his wife, are also interred in the Old Burying Ground, including their youngest son, James, who died in 1845.
