1887 – Dudley and the Dead Soldier's Will

In June 1887 the Boston Globe told the strange story of Peter Avignon’s will — and Ezra C. Dudley, four years before he bought the Wardwell estate, stood at the center of it.

Avignon, a French-born shoemaker at Newton Lower Falls, enlisted in March 1864. Before marching south he had a will drawn up in Waltham, witnessed by Harley Ballard and “Ezra C. Dudley, a friend of Avignon’s” — and naming Dudley as executor. Five months later Avignon was dead: captured at the Battle of the Wilderness and lost in Andersonville prison, buried in “the common and nameless grave.”

Dudley “did not learn of the testator’s death until within the past 10 years,” the Globe reported, and advertising for heirs turned up no one — so the will was never probated. Then, more than twenty years on, Avignon’s son Oliver — raised in the State Almshouse at Tewksbury — came to light as the rightful heir. Because so much time had passed, it took a special resolve of the Massachusetts Senate to release the soldier’s accumulated bounty: $425 grown to $913.75 with interest, part of roughly $3,000 due the son. Both surviving witnesses, Ballard and Dudley, went before the Probate Court to prove their signatures.

The article closes with a line that fixes where Dudley was in 1887: “Ezra C. Dudley, the executor, now has his home on a cattle ranch in Texas, making trips North two or three times each year” — matching the Newton Graphic’s note that February that he was in the cattle business in the Texas Panhandle with his son Edward.

Boston Globe, June 22, 1887.