New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
A grave injustice
Mary Clap Wooster stood up to the British, aided the Revolution, died poor. Now her monument, once in disrepair, has been fixed
NEW HAVEN — Mary Clap Wooster, daughter of a Yale College president and wife of a Revolutionary War general, died in poverty after her property was stolen by British troops.
But history has been kind to her. While her husband, Maj. Gen. David Wooster, is buried in Danbury, where he was mortally wounded fighting invading British troops, she has an impressive monument in Grove Street Cemetery, next to table monuments for her father and stepmother, and is the namesake of the Mary Clap Wooster Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, founded in 1893.
But Mary Wooster’s monument had fallen into disrepair — two of four marble balls holding up an urn had been replaced with bricks. So on the chapter’s 125th anniversary last year, the members determined to restore and clean Wooster’s grave. The gravestone will be rededicated June 22.
“I said, ‘We have to repair this,’” said Sandra Lynch, covice regent and treasurer of the chapter. “All I could see was someone coming with a branch or something and pushing the top off.”
Mary Wooster, who had supplied the Colonial troops using her own funds, was jailed for a time and died in poverty. Wooster Square and Wooster Street, where the couple lived as neighbors of Benedict Arnold, are named for her husband.
When the British arrived at her home on July 5, 1779, during their invasion of New Haven, they spared Mary Wooster’s life, but “all the papers were destroyed,” said Tina Vermette of Stratford, chaplain of the DAR chapter. “They really devastated her home and property. The consequence was at the end of the war, when widows were allowed to appeal for some kind of compensation, she had no proof. All the papers had been stolen. … She just stood up to them, but what could she do? … She never recovered any of her resources.”
“She would have to prove that she was actually married to this man,” said Sandra Nuhn of North Haven, recording secretary. The DAR members are still researching who paid for the gravestone. “The question is — we don’t have an answer — who paid for this monument?” Nuhn said.
Mary Clap Wooster had little to rely on. Her son, Thomas, was lost at sea. She also had three daughters, each named Mary, two of whom died in infancy. “There is a story, however, that she did ask the Masons” for help, because her husband organized the first lodge of Freemasons in Connecticut, Hiram Lodge No. 1 in New Haven, Nuhn said. “Supposedly they did give her a cord of wood,” but there is no record of that. “It’s a story that’s been handed down,” Nuhn said.
Mary Wooster died June 1, 1807, at 78 years old. In 1955, the