For Warren County’s namesake, Dr. Joseph Warren, there’s no way to know for sure.

His life ended at the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, drawing to a close 10 years of resistance activities against the British Crown.

Author Christian Di Spigna, who has been researching Warren for 20 years and spoke at the Warren County Historical Society’s annual meeting on Tuesday night at the courthouse, has an idea.

“I think Warren would have been just as important in the post-Revolutionary era as the pre-Revolutionary era,” he said.

Times Observer photo by Josh Cotton A piece of Warren’s medical ledger detailing his care for Christopher Monk who had been wounded during what we now know as the Boston Massacre.

But getting to know Warren the man proved difficult.

“There isn’t a long paper trail on Warren,” Di Spigna said. “In recent years things that have been published on Warren (have tended) to be more fictional. Before there was Washington, there was Dr. Warren.”

Warren himself destroyed many of his papers in advance of Lexington and Concord while two 1800s house fires destroyed more Warren artifacts.

Steeped in Freemasonry and Harvard graduate, Warren was trained as a doctor by Dr. James Lloyd.

“This really is Warren’s first mentor,” Di Spigna said, explaining that the apprenticeship also was where he learned how to be a gentleman.

His work during a smallpox outbreak, he explained, boosted his reputation and placed him in a unique place politically.

“Warren has a good on each side of the political divide,” he said, with patients both Patriot and Loyalist. That’s “why he becomes an attractive figure to both groups…. He’s building this reputation as being generous and helping people.”

But he solidly fell on the Patriot side.

“His fingers are all over” the Boston Tea Party, Di Spigna said. “He helped plan it.”

=The Suffolk Resolves, a “declaration of rights and grievances that Warren drafts” were read in the first Continental Congress “and all adopt it unanimously. (It’s) amazing how similar the language is to the Declaration of Independence.”

Warren was shot in the head and killed instantly at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

“His body is mutilated, bayoneted repeatedly,” he explained and stripped.

He was “catapulted to this martyr status” in the wake of his death but “no one remembers 10 years of resistance activities.”

Di Spigna pointed out the irony of Warren’s memory focusing on his death as a “fighting general from this one afternoon” in spite of years spent saving lives.

“You see him being mentioned with men” like Washington before falling into a degree of obscurity in the mid-1800s. “You have to remember how young Warren is,” killed just days after his 34th birthday.

What if Warren had lived? “Think about how easy Warren could have made that transition to George Washington.”

For Di Spigna, the 20-year journey that culminated in the 2018 publishing of his book “Founding Martyr: The Life and Death of Dr. Joseph Warren, the American Revolution’s Lost Hero” started with the discovery of an 1835 book on Warren and the question “How come no one ever wrote about this guy…. I consider him a founding grandfather.

He’s now also the executive director of the Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation, aimed at resurrecting his legacy and celebrating his life.

Di Spigna said the foundation will be offering a $500 scholarship for a student from Warren County as part of that effort.