This pewter medal, 45 mm. in diameter, was offered for sale on eBay and sold on April 21, 2001. I do not know the date of issue of the coin, but since it was issued by the Franklin Mint I suspect that it is fairly recent.

Mary Clap Wooster medal

In the July 5, 1779 raid on New Haven, Tryon's troops specifically targeted the home of Mary Clap Wooster. She was the widow of Major General David Wooster, who had been killed two years earlier, and the daughter of Thomas Clap, who had been president of Yale College.

After throwing her furniture into the street and destroying it, they made off with two trunks containing the records of both her husband and her father. Two nights later the British fleet was anchored off Fairfield, which they had attacked after leaving New Haven. Three whale boats of people passed by the fleet and sailed through a little ocean of papers not far from the British ships. They picked up some of them and discovered that they included papers of General Wooster, of Mr. Clap, and of Yale College. Correspondence ensued between Ezra Stiles, who was then President of Yale, and General Tryon, but apparently none of the papers other than those picked up by the colonists in the whale boats survived.

The lost papers included many of the early records of Yale College as well as accounts and personal papers important to the Woosters. All the General's accounts that showed the amounts that he had advanced to maintain the troops during and after the Canadian campaign were lost. Without these records his widow was unable to receive compensation from the Continental Congress or the Assembly of Connecticut. In her later years she lived in poverty and had to appeal to the legislature for relief. It is claimed also that the papers included genealogical research on the Wooster ancestors in England that the General had carried out while in England in the period after he had commanded a cartel ship taking the French prisoners home, following the fall of Louisburg in 1745.

Mary Clap Wooster was born in Windham, April 25, 1729, and died in New Haven, June 6, 1807, at the age of seventy-eight. She was buried near her father in New Haven according to Blake in his Chronicles of the New Haven Green.


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