The 1777 March of the Saratoga Convention Army

Did part of the Convention Army pass through Westborough, Massachusetts, on their way to Cambridge after the surrender at Saratoga on October 17, 1777?  One primary source suggests that they did, as do several town histories written over one hundred years ago - but one hundred years or more after their 1777 march. The majority of the accounts of the 1777 march of the Convention Army track their progress through Middlesex County from Northborough to Marlborough , then Sudbury , Weston , Waltham, and Watertown, before arriving in Cambridge.  The journal of the 47th Regiment of Foot goes in a different direction on November 4th.  As seen in the image below, from a scanned copy of the journal on the website of the Huntington Library , its author left Worcester on November 4th, and marched twelve miles to what appears to be "West-bury" but most likely was "Westborough", Massachusetts, given the distance involved.  The following day they marched twenty miles to ...

When most of Lieutenant-General John Burgoyne's British and German troops who surrendered at Saratoga left Northborough, Massachusetts in November of 1777, they left Worcester County as well, and entered Middlesex County.  Middlesex County was one of the four original counties created in Massachusetts in 1643.  Several of its towns which the Convention Army would pass through or stop in on their 1777 march had been incorporated in the seventeenth century, including Charlestown (1630),  Watertown (1630), Cambridge (1636), Sudbury (1639), and Marlborough (1660). [1]   The German troops of the Convention Army marched through Middlesex County again in November of 1778, on their way to Virginia.  One wrote home about the differences between Germany and New England.  In describing their march, inspired perhaps by views like that pictured here of what is now the "Wayside Inn" in Sudbury, he noted:  "The troops marched through the towns of Cambridge, Wa...