Militia Training Ground Marker

Dedicated by the Wayside Inn Chapter of the DAR on November 1, 1914, a weathered stone marker on Old County Road in Sudbury identifies the area where the town’s militia once held drills. The stone, reportedly from a wall built by a Revolutionary War soldier, was moved from the field of Walker Farm on Goodman’s Hill Road in South Sudbury.

Its engraved text reads:
1720
TRAINING FIELD
SANDY HILL PLAIN
GOVERNMENT STORE HOUSES
WERE NEAR BY.

ERECTED BY
WAYSIDE INN CHAPTER
D.A.R.
1914

“Training Field Hill” was a space for drills as early as 1720, and served as the venue for at least one militia muster. Around the time of the Revolution, there were several government storehouses nearby on Sandy Hill, which held critical war munitions.

In his late-nineteenth-century history of the town, Alfred S. Hudson noted that he had a chance to inspect one of these storehouses before it was moved and converted into a stable. He characterized the structure as “a very low building, perhaps forty by thirty feet, with a broad sloping roof. It was without partitions, and formerly had a very wide barn-like door in front.” Now that the original architecture is long gone, his brief description is perhaps the best extant evidence for how the storehouses may have looked during the Revolution.