The household’s persistent financial difficulties are documented in ways that give a ground-level picture of life on the Gannett farm: the pension petitions describing her disability and poverty, the 1806 letter to Revere asking to borrow money, the family’s ongoing reliance on the teaching and weaving income she could generate.
Benjamin Gannett outlived his wife by ten years, dying in 1837. He petitioned Congress for survivor benefits after her death. A committee approved the payment. He died before receiving it.
His son — their son — served as an officer in the War of 1812, which is noted in at least one account as a thread that connects Deborah Sampson Gannett’s military service to the next generation of American armed conflict.
## Death and the Immediate Record
Deborah Sampson Gannett died on April 29, 1827, in Sharon, Massachusetts. She was sixty-six years old by some accounts, sixty-seven by others, a discrepancy that reflects the loose precision of vital records in her era.
The death was attributed, in accounts contemporary to the event, to yellow fever. Yellow fever was a periodic presence in New England communities in the early nineteenth century, and the death at sixty-six or sixty-seven, following decades of chronic disability from the leg wound and the general physical toll of a life of manual labor and limited healthcare, was not unusual in the context of her time and circumstances.
She was buried in Sharon. A monument was eventually erected over her grave.
The immediate aftermath included Benjamin Gannett’s petition to Congress for the survivor’s pension. The petition was approved in principle — a committee recognized the claim — but the actual payment was not made before his death in 1837. This outcome is a small but representative example of how the institutional recognition of her service consistently arrived slightly too late or slightly too small to materially transform the circumstances it was intended to address.