Thomas Oliver (Lieutenant Governor)

Thomas Oliver (January 5, 1733 - November 20, 1815 in Bristol, England) was the last Royal Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts.

Biography

He was graduated from Harvard College in 1753, and resided at 33 Elmwood Avenue, Cambridge, which he purchased in 1766. He took little part in public affairs until, upon the death of Andrew Oliver, he was appointed by the King at the suggestion of Thomas Hutchinson, who believed him to be a brother of Andrew Oliver.

A mob of four thousand angry citizens forced him to resign on September 2, 1774. He fled to Boston, remaining there for a year. When the British troops sailed to Halifax in March 1776, Oliver went with them, going on to England. He was proscribed under the Massachusetts Banishment Act in 1778, and his estate confiscated. Afterwards the Continental Army used his house, known as Elmwood, as a hospital. It was then sold at auction, becoming first the property of Arthur Cabot, then of Elbridge Gerry, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and vice-president under James Madison, and then Rev. Charles Lowell, who passed it on to his son, poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell.

References

*Paige, Lucius R. (1877). History of Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1630-1877. Boston: H.O. Houghton and Company.