As America prepares for its 250th anniversary, CV Weekly will be working with the Daughters of the American Revolution – Don José Verdugo Chapter to gather information on those recognized by DAR as American patriots. 

The patriot ancestor of Monica Mills Homer is Captain John Trull. He was born in Billerica, Middlesex in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which was British Colonial America, on Feb. 5, 1737. He is her fifth great grandfather on her mother’s side.

The Trull family had lived in America for at least four or five generations before the war. Captain Trull’s farm of 200 acres overlooked the Merrimack River.  It included a grist and sawmill on Trull Brook in Tewksbury, Massachusetts and Captain Trull used one of his fields for training his company of Minutemen. On March 9, 1775, the town chose a committee to suppress disorder in the town but only six weeks later the Minutemen would face the British at Concord and beyond.  

According to the Tewksbury Historical Society, on April 19, 1775 at approximately 2 a.m., the farmers of Tewksbury, Concord and Lexington were roused by the messenger sent out by Paul Revere and William Dawes. They were warning the Middlesex farmers yelling, “The British are coming. The British are marching on Concord!”  

The British were coming to take the supply of arms and gunpowder that the Colony possessed and to try to arrest Samuel Adams (the man, not the beer) and John Hancock (the man, not the signature) who were staying in Concord at the time.  

One of their alarm messengers rode out and stopped on Stickney Hill at the house of Captain John Trull, the commander of the Tewksbury Minutemen Company. Hearing that cry, Captain Trull jumped from his bed and fired three shots from his bedroom window as a prearranged signal to rouse General Varnum across the Merrimack River in Dracut. After Trull heard the response fire, he mounted his horse and rode to the village.  

When he arrived, his Minutemen were ready. Placing himself at the head of the flank, it was soon on its way by the Billerica Road to Concord and on to Charlestown, joining other militiamen who were gathering to fight the British.  

Facing the British, the American commanders told their troops not to fire a shot until fired upon – but a shot rang out. Was that shot fired by the Rebels first or was it from the British? It is not certain. But it was the “shot heard round the world” at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

John Trull passed away on Oct. 5, 1797 in Massachusetts. Years later, the grandson of Captain Trull, Herbert Trull, would pass by the home of Eliphalet Manning, one of the Tewksbury Minutemen who served with Captain Trull. Mr. Manning would call out, “I fought with your grandfather from Concord to Charlestown. He would cry out to us as we sheltered ourselves behind the trees, ‘Stand trim, men or the rascals will shoot your elbows off.’”

Today, the farmland of Captain Trull that was once the training ground for his Minutemen and a place of farm and family is now a golf course. The Trull farmhouse on Stickney Hill survived until 1912 when the farmhouse burned down.  But a descendent, Bailey Trull, converted about 125 acres of the family farm into the Trull Brook Golf Course in 1963. The surviving original Trull barn became a temporary clubhouse. That land had been in the family for more than 200 years and 14 generations. The golf course is still there today.