Farmington Protests Intolerable Acts

Thomas Hutchinson
Portrait by Edward Truman, 1741
Loyalist Governor of Massachusetts

The town was one of the first in the Colonies to respond to the British blockade of Boston harbor in 1774. A crowd of 1,000 gathered in Farmington for the reading of a bill condemning the closing of the harbor, calling it “arbitrary and tyrannical” and “unjust, illegal and oppressive.” An effigy of the Tory governor of Massachusetts was then carried through the town, tarred and feathered, and set on fire. Later in 1774, Farmington supported an agreement by the First Continental Congress to ban British imports and exports.1774