Col. Mark Hopkins

From The Official Website of the River-Hopkins and Saemann-Nickel and related families:

http://josfamilyhistory.com/htm/hopkins/hopkins-john-3.htm

Colonel Mark Hopkins (1739-1776), the youngest brother, was left fatherless at the age of 10 but was eventually fitted for Yale College and ended up at the bar for the first session of the Berkshire (Massachusetts) Court in 1761. He was the first of almost everything at Great Barrington, Mass.; i.e., Town Clerk, County Treasurer, Registrar of Deeds, also a Selectman at his death in 1776. Also King’s Attorney and a representative to the General Court in 1773 and 1774.

Before the commencement of hostilities with Great Britain, he espoused the cause of the Colonies, was a delegate in the county convention held at Stockbridge in July 1774, and one of the committee that drafted the patriotic resolutions adopted by the convention. This was the first of the county conventions that assembled in Massachusetts to consider the encroachments of Great Britain, and the resolutions adopted by the committee of which Mark Hopkins was a member struck the keynote of loyalty to the King, but of devotion to the maintenance fo the rights of the Colonies which influenced subsequent conventions and led to the Revolution.

With the breaking out of the war, Mark became prominent as a member of the Committee of Safety, influential in the committees, and was also active in organizing the First Regiment of Berkshire County Militia, of which he was the Colonel under commission dated 30 August 1775. In 1776, commanding a detachment of Berkshire militia as Brigade Major, he was taken sick, and in a retreat of the Americans, suffered from exposure in being removed to a place of safety, which so increased his illness that it terminated fatally at White Plains, New York on 26 Oct 1776 – two days before the battle at that place.

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