Azor Orne

Who was Azor Orne?

Azor Orne, sometimes spelled Azore, was a colonial American merchant, politician and patriot. In the years preceding the American Revolution, Orne built a controversial hospital to quarantine and help smallpox sufferers, became a militia colonel, and was a founding member of the Massachusetts Bay colony's committee of safety. As a scion of a powerful Marblehead, Massachusetts merchant family, Orne lent money to the continental cause but was never repaid. Orne was appointed major general of the wartime militia, and after the revolution, he signed his state's constitution and was one of those who approved the national constitution.