08/24/2026
Captain Thomas Loring is the final Patriot Ancestor honored in this special installment of our "Our Members, Our Patriots" series, which highlights the family lineage of our Chaplain, Barbara Knisell.
Captain Thomas Loring never had to explain to his neighbors why Plympton, Massachusetts mattered to him. He was born there on April 25, 1718, when the town itself was barely a decade old — split off from Plymouth in 1707 as its quiet "western parish" — and by every record found, he never left it. Seventy-seven years and one revolution later, on June 28, 1795, he died there too, in the same small town that had known him his entire life.
That kind of steady, rooted belonging is easy to overlook in history — until the moment it's tested. On April 19, 1775, word of Lexington and Concord swept across Massachusetts town by town, farmhouse by farmhouse, carried by post riders under the Committee of Safety's call to arms. Thomas Loring wasn't a young man chasing glory that day. He was a captain just days shy of his 57th birthday — old enough to be everyone else's elder, old enough that he could have reasonably stayed home — and he answered anyway, leading his neighbors out the door.
DAR's own record credits him with exactly this: militia service, Lexington Alarm, documented in Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War, Vol. 9.
He didn't lead strangers. Serving as sergeant under him was a fellow Plympton man, Ezekiel Loring, 24 years his junior — a young sergeant taking orders from a captain who had likely known him his whole life, in a town small enough that everyone did. Whether the two Lorings shared blood as well as a surname hasn't been confirmed by any record found so far, and this piece is careful not to claim it.
But it doesn't need to, to be a warm detail: an older captain and his younger sergeant, marching out together on the same alarm day in 1775 — and, as it turns out, resting together still. Find a Grave records show both men were eventually buried in the very same place, Plympton's Hillcrest Cemetery, a burying ground already old when they were born, in continuous use since 1706.
There's something quietly moving in that image: two Plympton men, a generation apart, standing together the day their town was called to answer, and lying together still, in the same small patch of New England ground, two and a half centuries on.
Captain Thomas Loring is the third of three Patriots whose service now stands behind Barbara Knisell's DAR membership — and there's a fitting symmetry in a Chapter Chaplain's lineage running through a man remembered not for seeking a fight, but for showing up for his neighbors, at an age when most would have stayed by the fire, and for as long as his town needed him to.
