Oliver Wheeler II (1748-1833)

5GGF Oliver Wheeler II apparently was born and grew up at the homestead at 250 Acton Street (“OW” on the map). On 3 March 1773, aged 24, he married his neighbor Hepzibah Munroe, aged 21. Billerica’s Vital Records specify that the marriage was solemnized “in Acton.” She had grown up in the home of her father Nathan Munroe (“NM” on the map), about a mile from the Wheeler place. They had Abi and Louis, their first daughter and first son, “in Acton” -- no doubt at or near the family homestead -- and then moved around 1778 to Hillsborough, New Hampshire, where they had ten more kids, including our 4GGF Oliver III. Here are Oliver II’s autograph and his gravestone in Hillsborough.

It is apparently this “Oliver Wheeler of Acton” (aged 26 on April 19, 1775), not his father Oliver I (then 54), who is listed among the Minute Men in Concord’s Muster Lists¹. He is clearly enrolled as “Oliver Wheeler, Junior” in Joseph Robbins’ company of Acton militia. “The sword of Oliver Wheeler of Acton, worn by him April 19, 1775,” was on display in Concord at the centennial observances in 1875, in which President U. S. Grant took part.