Colonel Sidney M. Hedges (1844-1924) was elected to The Lambs in 1902 as an Army/Navy Member. At the time, the Club admitted many men to the organization with military ties. Col. Hedges was a Bostonian who for many years was a member of the state militia–forerunner of the National Guard-and a colonel in the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts.
Colonel Hedges was born in St. Louis, Missouri, September 27, 1844, and educated in public schools in Missouri and Ohio. For many years he resided in Cincinnati before relocating to Chicago, and then Boston. He formed an insurance company with Walter Hodges, Hedges & Hodges, that lasted until 1913.
In June 1879 he set up an office selling life insurance in Boston and resided in Brookline with his growing family. He joined the state militia and served as paymaster in the First Battalion, Light Artillery. He became a member of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts in October 1882. The company was held in such regard that 171 members travelled to London to meet their British Army parent company, the Honourable Artillery Company of London. Col. Hedges was among the command invited to Windsor Castle to meet Queen Victoria. The organization kept up a relationship which continued into the Great War.
Col. Hedges was closely identified with the militia for twenty years. He was well-known locally and among military and fraternal societies. He was a Mason, and a member of the Algonquin, Roxbury, and Temple private clubs. With his wife, Anna M. Vinton Hedges, they had four children.
Only a month before his passing, about forty friends gave an eightieth birthday banquet in his honor at the Parker House in Boston. He was remembered as a large and friendly figure, “Sid” Hedges, called “a familiar type of Bostonian.” He was said to be “always companionable.”
Col. Hedges died Oct. 24, 1924, at the Riverbank Court Hotel, in Cambridge. He was eighty. He is interred in the family plot in Forest Hills Cemetery and Crematory, Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
–Researched and written by Shepherd Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, 2025.